Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

For some years these ascetic devotees might be found in every corner of broad Russia, working as shoemakers or joiners most of them (why these were the favourite trades does not appear), or as hawkers of images or tea, or, perhaps, like Prince Krapotkin, as painters. Some of them went as horse-dealers, from a dreamy idea that the horses might prove useful in the day of revolution. They all belonged to one or other of the secret societies which, as we have seen, began to spring up about 1863, and grew numerous in the next ten or fifteen years. None of these societies, however, was of any great importance. Professor Thun mentions four varieties of them. First, the Malikowsy, a handful of apparently harmless and amiable enthusiasts—a kind of Russian Quakers—who believed in one Malikov, and called themselves "God-men," because they held every man had a "divine spark" in him, and was therefore every other man's equal and brother. Second, the Bakunists, who adopted Bakunin's programme of "deeds," but did not, till 1875, think of putting it to practice. Third, the Lavrists, who sent the money to print Lavroff's newspaper in Zurich, the En Avant, and who seem to have gradually imbibed German socialism to the extent of thinking the Russian commune a reactionary and decaying institution not worth stirring a finger to preserve, and who called for the nationalization of land and capital. And fourth,—much the most important society,—the Tchaikowskists, founded in 1869 by one Tchaikowski, who is now a teacher in London, but was then a student at St. Petersburg. Prince Krapotkin belonged to this society, and so did Sophia Perowskaia. It was at first a convivial and mutual improvement club, but from discussing forbidden subjects and circulating among its members forbidden books it grew into natural antagonism to Government, and became a focus of revolutionary agitation. Most of the 193 socialists who were tried in 1874-7 belonged to it, and that protracted trial killed the society and put an end to the mission "into the people."

Government had marked the new propaganda with great jealousy. In Russia, no propaganda among the peasants can remain unobserved. When a stranger arrives at a Russian village, he is immediately the common talk, whatever he says passes from mouth to mouth, and he may even be invited to state his views publicly in the mir. A mission conducted under these conditions soon attracted the notice of the authorities, who, in 1874, discovered it in thirty-seven different provinces of Russia, and arrested as many as 774 of the propagandists. Some of these were at once banished administratively to Siberia, and of the rest, 193 were, four years afterwards, brought up for trial and condemned. With these apprehensions the nihilist movement collapsed for the moment. Thun states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy, hoping in this way to be able, unobserved, eventually to leaven the whole lump. The other plan they now resorted to was an approach to the tactics of Bakunin, and in the very year, 1876, in which that old revolutionist died, they began a series of socialist demonstrations at Odessa, Kasan, and elsewhere, which made a little local sensation at the time. This was the very opposite kind of tactics to the cautious system of colonization that was pursued simultaneously with it, but there is always in revolutionary organization only a step between reticence and rashness. Open demonstrations like those practised at that period were simply suicidal folly in Russia, where the forces of the Government were so immeasurably superior to the forces of the demonstrationists.

In 1878 they changed tactics again, inaugurating that system of terrorism by which they are best known in the West, and which has given them a name there at which the world turns pale. The determination to adopt this system of tactics sprang from an accidental circumstance. The day after the trial of the 193 ended, one of their comrades, the young woman Vera Sassulitch, called on General Trepoff, the head of the St. Petersburg police, on pretence of business, and while he was reading her papers, shot him with a revolver, flung her weapon on the ground, and allowed herself to be quietly arrested; and when she was brought up for trial, pled justification on the ground that her act was merely retaliation on the General for having subjected a friend of hers, a young medical student, to a brutal and causeless flogging while in prison on a political charge. The court having acquitted her, she was received by the public with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and it was this remarkable public sympathy that made the revolutionaries terrorists. They resolved to take up V. Sassulitch's idea of retaliation, and apply it on a great scale. The whole public of Russia was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do, a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the political and constitutional liberty which was still denied to the Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a constitution rose again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to the autocratic régime. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay, not in their numbers—which he admits to have been few—but in the general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without trial; and in the case of the 193, whose trial was just over, the few who had been acquitted were nevertheless denied their liberty by the Czar, and banished administratively to Siberia after all; so that while Russian society was clamouring on public grounds for the downfall of the autocratic system, the revolutionists, for revenge, determined upon the death of the autocrat himself. The various secret societies had united into a single body, called first the "Troglodytes," and then "Land and Liberty," for the better prosecution of the nihilist colonization scheme; but in 1879 they broke again into two parties, one of which, the Will of the People party, adopted terrorism as its exclusive business for the time, issued, through its famous executive committee, sentences of death on the Czar and the State officials; and after making ten attempts on high officials, five of them fatal, and four attempts on the Czar himself, finally succeeded in their fifth on the 13th of March, 1881. With this party the political side of their programme overshadowed the socialistic, and their first demand from the new Czar was for a constitution.

The other party—the party of the Black Division—is an agrarian party, living on the growing discontent of the peasantry, and nursing their cry for what in Russia is known as the Black Division. It is an old belief among the Russian people that when the land possessed at any time by the communes should become too small for the increasing population of the communes, there would be a new division of all the land of the country, including, of course, the great estates now owned by the noblesse, so that every inhabitant might be once more accommodated with his proper share of the soil. This great secular redistribution is the black division, and it belongs as naturally to the Russian peasants' system of agrarian ideas as the little local and periodical divisions that take place within the communes themselves. The Black Division section of the revolutionists are terrorist in their methods like the other section, but they care nothing about a constitution, which they say is only a demand of the bourgeoisie, but of no interest or good to the peasant at all. They have the old aversion to centralized government, which we have seen to be almost the tradition of Russian revolutionists; they are all for strengthening the communes, and for a light federal connection; and of all phases of the Russian revolutionary movement under the reign of the present Czar theirs is the most important, because it is founding itself on real and deepening rural discontent, and becoming substantially a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes.

I have already referred to the astonishing growth of a Russian proletariat since the Emancipation Act. Professor Janson, an eminent Russian statistician, calculated that as many as a fourth of the people of St. Petersburg—229,000 out of 876,000—got public relief in the year 1884. Stepniak, in his recent work on the Russian peasantry, asserts that a third of the rural population, or 20,000,000 souls in all, are in the condition of absolute proletarians, and his account of the situation is entirely supported by the descriptions of a competent and unprejudiced German economist, Professor Alphonse Thun, who speaks partly from the results of official inquiries instituted by the Russian Government into the subject, and partly from his own personal observation during a continuous residence of two years in the country. As the subject is of importance to the student of socialistic institutions as well as of the nihilist movement, I shall make no apology for devoting some observations to its explanation.

In the first place, though it has never been well understood in Western Europe, some ten per cent. of the Russian rural population have no legal claim to a share of the land at all; these are old men who are past working, widows with children too young to be able to work, and men who at the time of the Emancipation were personal servants of the great landowners, and consequently not members of any village commune. Men of this last class may reside in a village, and may keep a shop or practise a trade there; but not being born villagers, they possess no right to participate in the distribution of the village land. They are as much outside the communistic system as the nobles or the foreign residents. Russian citizenship alone is not enough to give a right to the land; local birth in a commune is also an essential pre-requisite, and ability to work is another. A family gets one share for every able-bodied member it contains; the share is therefore called a "soul" of land; and although between one distribution and another the widow may still retain the "soul" that belonged to her husband, and hire a hand to work it, yet on the next redistribution she must give it up unless she has a son who in the meantime has grown to man's estate. The landless widow and orphan must have been an occasional incident of the Russian village system from all times; but the incursion of dismissed domestic menials with no birthright in the commune has arisen only in recent years, when, in consequence of a conspiracy of causes, so many of the nobility have been obliged to reduce their establishments.

In the next place, a communistic tenure which gives every new-comer a right to share in the land of his native village on an equal footing with those who are already in possession could hardly fail to lead to excessive subdivision, and in Russia at this moment scarce one family in a hundred has land enough to furnish its maintenance for half the year. The usual size of holding is ten acres, of which—cultivated as they are on the old three-field system—one third is always fallow, and the remainder, in consequence of the rude method of agriculture that prevails, yields only two, or at most three, returns of the seed. They have no pasture, because at the time of the emancipation they preferred to take out their whole claim in arable; and, having no pasture, they cannot keep cattle as they formerly did because they cannot get manure. According to the information of Professor Thun, in 1872 8 per cent. of the families had no cow, and 4 per cent. no horse; and Stepniak says the inventory of horses taken for military purposes in 1882 showed that one-fourth of the peasant families had then no horse. Russia is, in fact, a vast continent of crofters, practising primitive husbandry on mere "cat's-plots" of land, and depending for the greater part of their subsistence on some auxiliary trade. In one respect they have the advantage over our Scotch crofters; they practise, in many cases, skilled trades. Of course they work as ploughmen or fishermen when that sort of work is wanted, or they will hire a piece of waste land from a neighbouring owner and bring it into rude cultivation; but every variety of craft is to be found among them. They are weavers, hatters, cabinet-makers, workers in metals; they make shoes, or images, or candles, or musical instruments, or grindstones; they dress furs, they knit lace, they train singing-birds. According to the official inquiry, most of the goods of some of the best commercial houses of Moscow, trading in Parisian silk hats and Viennese furniture, are manufactured by these peasants in their rural villages. A curious and very remarkable characteristic is mentioned by Thun: not only has every Russian his bye-industry, but every village has a different bye-industry from its neighbour. One is a village of coopers—a very thriving trade, it appears; another a village of tailors—a declining one, in consequence of the competition of ready-made stuff from the towns; another—and there are several such—may be a village of beggars, with mendicity for their second staff; and another a village of seamen, going in a body in spring to the Baltic or the Volga, and leaving only their women and children to tend the farm till their return in the autumn. The Russians always work in artels whether at home or abroad, and to work in artels they must of course follow the same industry. Their individual earnings in their auxiliary occupations are comparatively good; they make three-fourths of their annual income from that source; but it seems every trade is now overcrowded, and there is some difficulty in obtaining constant employment.

Then the burdens of the peasantry are very heavy. In Russia the superior classes enjoy many exemptions from taxation, and the public revenue is taken mainly from the peasant classes. The annual redemption money they have to pay to the State for their land is a most serious obligation, and between one thing and another the burdens on the land in a vast number of cases exceed its net return very considerably. Professor Thun states, that in 2,009 cases of letting holdings which had occurred in the province of Moscow at the time he wrote, the average rent received was only 3 roubles 56 kopecks per "soul" (land-share), while the average taxation was 10 roubles 30 kopecks. Stepniak says that in the thirty-seven provinces of European Russia the class who were formerly State peasants pay in taxes of every description no less than 92.75 per cent. of the average net produce of their land; and that the class who were formerly serfs of private owners pay as much as 192.25 per cent. of the net produce of theirs. Landowning on these terms is manifestly a questionable privilege, and the moujik pays his land taxes as the Scotch crofter has sometimes to pay his rent, not out of the produce of his holding, but out of the wages of his auxiliary labour; but the Scotch crofter, under his system of individual tenure, has one great resource which is wanting to the other: he can always cut the knot of his troubles by throwing up his holding, if he chooses, and emigrating. To the Russian peasant emigration brings no relief. He is born a proprietor, and cannot escape the obligation of his position wherever he may go. He may try to let his ground—and in many cases he does—but, as we see, he cannot often get enough rent to meet the dues. He may leave his village, if he will, but his village liabilities travel with him wherever he may settle. He cannot obtain work anywhere in Russia without showing his pass from his own commune; and since, under the principle of joint liability that rules in the communistic system, the members of the commune who remain at home would have to pay the emigrant's arrears if he failed to pay them himself, they are not likely to renew the pass to a defaulter. The Russian peasants are thus nearly as much adstricti glebæ as they ever were; they are now under the power of the commune as completely as they were before under the power of their masters; and their difficulty is still how they can possibly obtain emancipation. Sometimes they will defy the commune, forego the advantage of a lawful pass, crowd the ranks of that large body in Russia who are known as the "illegal men," and sometimes, we are assured by Professor Thun, a whole village, every man and every family, will secretly disappear in a body and seek refuge from the tax-collector by settling in the steppes. The natural right of every man to the land is thus, in the principal country where any attempt is made to realize it, nothing but a harassing pecuniary debt.

Now this class of worse than landless emigrants—men who carry their land as a perpetual burden on their back from which they can get no respite—is already very numerous in Russia. Thun says there are millions of them. As far back as 1872, nearly half the town population of Moscow and more than a fifth of the population of the landward district were strangers, who were inscribed members of rural communes elsewhere; and in many purely country districts some 14 per cent. of the people have no houses because they are not living in the villages they belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma, etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was stated to be 300,000, of which 182,000 were peasant proprietors. This number is, however, far below the mark." But, as we learn from Stepniak, the bulk of the landless peasants, i.e. those who no longer cultivate their holdings, do not leave their native villages, but seek employment as hirelings in the village itself or in its neighbourhood, and wander as day labourers from one master to another. Their families continue to live in their old cottage in the village, and the father returns to it when out of employment.