The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

The financial system, on the other hand, remained for many years under the control of an enlightened minister, Bunge, and was greatly improved. Finance was in any case a department into which it was profitable to admit modern science. The coinage was improved, and more banks were established. Home-industry was fostered, and the great extension of the Empire in Asia opened new markets. Railways were multiplied, and in 1891 the Grand Duke Nicholas opened the terminal station of the proposed Trans-Siberian railway at Vladivostock. Russia had already made commercial treaties with Korea and Japan. We will return presently to this dangerous extension of Russian ambition.

Most important and characteristic of all was the process of Russification in which all these engines of reaction were combined. One can understand the fascination of the Slavophile dream as it was formed in the mind of honest conservatives. Every concession made in the western democracies and limited monarchies had led to further demands. Napoleon III had lost his throne. The Papacy had lost its temporal power. William I and Bismarck were struggling against a portentous growth of Socialism. France was rapidly shedding its religion. Even in England the republican movement was at that time (the eighties) strong, and lower depths of radicalism were disclosed every decade. Liberalism, either in religion or politics, was evidently a slope; you could not remain long elsewhere than at the top or the bottom. So Russia must be made thoroughly, homogeneously autocratic and religious. In spite of the well-known facts of Russian history the Church agreed warmly with the Romanoffs that the autocracy was divinely appointed. If all could be made docile to the Church, the autocracy would have an easier task.

So began the process of Russification which passed with the brutality of a steam-roller over every sect or fragment of the nation that was not Russian in creed and dynastic in politics. The Jews formed the gravest problem. Long experience had shown that no power on earth could erase the religious and racial peculiarities of the Jew, yet there were nearly five million Jews in the Russian Empire. Their intelligence and skill in trade were but additional grievances. There were, even then, parts of Russia in which the Jews showed that, under proper treatment, they were as capable as any of settling upon the soil, but as a rule they avoided agriculture. The slightest relaxation of pressure allowed them to pour into a city or even a district, and as traders and money-lenders they soon had the poor and thriftless Russians in their power. Hence, in great measure, the readiness of the people to rise against them, which was gradually exploited rather than checked from St. Petersburg.

The first procedure of the reactionary ministers was to overlook the massacres which took place from the beginning of the rule of Alexander III. Presently, a series of “temporary rules” were issued against them. Even in the Pale of Settlement they were compelled to live in the towns and were forbidden to purchase real estate in the country. In 1888 they were ordered to go back to the place in which they had lived before the year 1882. About a million and a half of the Jews were affected by this rule, and the chaotic abandonment of their several businesses and properties cast large numbers of them into deep and undeserved poverty. Vast aggregations of them, growing at a prodigious rate on account of their high fertility, huddled together in the towns of the Pale, and lived in great privation. In 1891 a new application of the rules exiled and ruined seventeen thousand Jewish artisans of Moscow.

Still more stupid, and hardly less cruel, was the restriction upon the development of their ability. The civil service and the professions were closed against them. They might not, without special license, have a Christian servant, and notaries were forbidden to have Jewish clerks. Their zeal for education was similarly repressed. In the universities which were situated in the Pale Jewish students must not number more than a tenth of the whole. At other provincial universities they must not number more than five per cent.; at the metropolitan universities not more than two per cent. By these contemptuous repressive measures the ignorant people were prepared for the pogroms which would disgrace the reign of the last of the Romanoffs.

The Poles were the next most conspicuous victims of the Slavophile policy. We saw that Alexander II had ordered the extinction of their nationality, but a people with an acute memory of having been a great civilisation at a time when the Russians were a disorderly mass of semi-barbarians could not easily resign itself to obliteration. The religious tradition here coincided with the national, as in Ireland (the Poland of the west), and the priests generally fostered insurgence. Alexander’s ruthless ministers had but to apply more stringently the laws already in force against the Poles. From the University of Warsaw to the smallest elementary school the teaching was entirely Russianised. Even the Bank of Warsaw was suppressed, and Polish trade forced into a branch of the Russian bank. There was a futile rising in 1885, but four executions and two hundred arrests completed the work of “pacifying” the country, or eliminating from it every man of spirit and courage. Even Finland, which was still autonomous, had to complain to the Tsar of encroachments upon the liberties which his father had sworn to respect. In the other Baltic provinces the Russian roller was used as in Poland.

The dissenters and heretics of every kind in Russia itself were similarly treated. To the tenacious dissenters of the last century or two were now added sects like the Doukhobors and the followers of Tolstoi, and upon these the Tsar’s ministers fell with particular malevolence. Alexander was ignorant enough to believe quite sincerely in the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, but he knew that these new sects had more than a religious significance. Prayer-meetings were prohibited. Even children were separated in some cases from their parents and forced into the rigid Slavophile mould.

It will be understood, after this description of the machinery that was set up by Tolstoi and Pobiedonostseff, that the chronicle of revolt in the reign of Alexander II is comparatively slender. It is computed that by the end of the reign there were about a hundred thousand rebels in the jails, the mines, and the Siberian colonies, and to these one must add the graves of the bolder spirits and the large numbers of Russians who sought abroad the liberty that had died in Russia. Men still risked their lives in printing and disseminating the new ideas, but as the long reign wore on, and tyranny was still enthroned, the open spurts of defiance grew less in number. The revolutionaries and liberals felt that, if their race was not to be extinguished, as the reactionaries desired, the work must proceed in different form. We shall see in the next and final chapter how it proceeded until, after further bloody revolts against the intolerable tyranny, it succeeded in awakening the people and shaking the Romanoffs from their throne.

It remains to see how the Pan-Slav movement, the twin-brother of the Slavophile philosophy, also prepared the way for the next reign. We have seen how every expansion of Russia, every enlargement of its stupendous population and therefore ultimate resources, alarmed some other European Power. Russia now made new advances and opened the way for fresh conflicts. It had reached the eastern coast of Asia. Now it began its interference in Korea and attracted the attention of Japan. It spread south toward India and still further alarmed England. Journals of the imperialist school at St. Petersburg openly boasted that their armies were beating a path to the Indian Ocean, and it may be said in justification of England’s long distrust of Russia that the Romanoffs wholly encouraged this dream until an Asiatic Power proved to them that Asia was not the helpless world they had imagined. When the southern limit of Asiatic Russia was extended until it came, at certain points, within a hundred and forty miles of India, when Russian agents swarmed in Afghanistan, it was not unnatural that London should be nervous. Alexander III, however, took a keen personal interest in foreign affairs, and he succeeded in averting serious trouble with England.