Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

Under these influences the energies of the nihilists took a different outlet than plotting. Instead of founding secret societies, they founded Sunday schools. For to their mind the first need of the time, above even political liberty, was popular education. As to liberty, the measure they practically enjoyed at the gracious pleasure of the Czar for the present contented them, inasmuch as it seemed an earnest of the better securities that were expected to follow; but they could not with any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby clothes to avoid any offensive superiority to their poorer neighbours, and they wore green spectacles to correct the even more intolerable inequality of personal beauty, for, as they were fond of saying, they had put off the old man and were now new men created again by Büchner and Feuerbach in the gospel of humanity; but with all their extravagances they carried on for some years a most active and no doubt useful work in the Sunday schools and reading circles which they rapidly established everywhere.

Although this movement fell eventually under the suspicion of the Government, as in despotic countries any movement will, it seems to have had no political, or what the authorities call "ill-intentioned" purpose. It was pervaded with patriotic and humanitarian feeling, and though no doubt many of the nihilists who took part in it held as extreme opinions in politics as they did in everything else, yet these opinions were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of the Contemporary magazine, and a political economist of some note in his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and revolutionary socialist. He belonged to a younger generation than Herzen and Bakunin, but, like them, he had been led to socialism through Hegel and Feuerbach, and he expounded his ideas in a famous romance entitled, "What is to be done?" which the Government allowed him to write, and even to publish, while in prison for sedition in 1862, though they suppressed the book sternly when they saw it beginning to make a sensation.

But although revolutionary and socialistic principles may have been very considerably entertained by the nihilists from the first, there was no practical revolutionary or socialistic organization before the emancipation of the serfs. Up till then nihilism may be said to have been a benignant growth, if I may use a medical expression, and it was that great historical measure that converted it into the malignant and deadly trouble which we best know. The Russian Radicals, including the socialists, were strongly disappointed with that measure from the outset, because they thought it inflicted serious injustice on the peasantry. It deprived them, they said, of much of the land they had hitherto enjoyed as a right, and which was necessary for their comfortable subsistence, while it imposed on them for what they got excessive dues which their holdings would never be able to bear; and so the first Land and Liberty League was founded in 1863. But it was not the peasants, or the peasants' friends—it was the small landed gentry who were the first to feel the effects of the Emancipation Act, and to raise the standard of revolt. The Act made a serious change in their fortunes. Although the landlords were allowed most liberal terms of compensation for the enforced emancipation of their serfs, few of them actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and, besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were 633 separate estates in 1861, before the emancipation, but only 422 in 1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for one of the professions, and had either to give up their studies altogether for want of means, or were put on shorter allowances, which was scarcely less annoying, and was indeed a great cause of revolutionary opinions at the universities. Many more of the sons of the gentry were in the army, and the pay of a Russian officer being extremely small, they had been accustomed to receive allowances from home, without which, indeed, they could hardly live; and now in the altered circumstances of the family these allowances were perforce suddenly stopped. Much of the revolutionary discontent that exists in the Russian army to such a serious extent that 200 arrests were made in March, 1885, and Government appointed a special commission of inquiry into the subject, has come from the source, and is practically a revolt against insufficient pay. But what happened at the universities and in the army happened in other departments of Russian life; the Emancipation Act had left on every shore some wreckage of the gentry, an upper-class and educated proletariat, whose distress might be due originally to their own improvidence or ignorance, but was undoubtedly first driven into an acute state by an act of Government, and therefore clamoured for vengeance on the Government that produced it.

The clamour of the victims of the Emancipation Act naturally woke up all the earlier discontents of the country. The Poles and the dissenting sects, with all their ancient wrongs, seem to have contributed but a small contingent to the nihilist ranks; but the Jews, subject to a barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members, and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though the Revolutionary Executive Committee has latterly issued a proclamation against the Jews, mainly on the ground of the extortion practised by Jewish money-lenders on the peasantry, there are still, as appears very abundantly from the nihilist trials of 1890, many Jews among the revolutionists.

Then there are thirteen millions of native heretics in Russia, sects of various sorts springing up like the early Quakers from the bosom of the people, and filled with a rude spirit of freedom and a tendency towards socialistic ideas in their condemnation of luxury and accumulation, their hatred of war and military government, and their belief in fraternity and mutual assistance. Some writers allege that these sects are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the freethinkers of the unlettered classes, however, and their ideas no doubt have some influence in preparing these classes for socialist principles. But there is another class very numerous in Russia, who are the natural allies of revolution—the "illegal men" who, for various reasons, go about on false passports, and are thus living in revolt already. And to all these diverse sources of disaffection must be added the aggravation arising at the moment from the tyrannical and arbitrary measures to which the Government resorted on the first outburst of complaints.

In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emancipation Act, Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen, for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his release.

It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining." And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:—

"I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed with balls and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view. You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of destruction, which you take for a creative passion; you crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for they would not follow me—they could not follow me!"

Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account.