HEN the troubled year 1906 ended, the shadow of reaction began to deepen over the Russian empire. One by one the granted liberties and promised reforms of the manifesto of October, 1905, were being revoked and recalled. Early in 1907 the second Duma met, struggled through a brief existence, and was dissolved by the magic word of the Czar. Discouragement then possessed the people—a sense of heartbreaking hopelessness. To the men and women who had borne the heat and burden of the struggle it seemed as if all the efforts and the sacrifices, the lives surrendered to the cause of liberalism and progress, had been in vain. The world at large passed hasty judgment: “The revolution has petered out.” The announcement that a new Duma would be convened in the late autumn of 1907 sounded hollow, for the new election laws, which disenfranchised millions of peasants, promises so completely to devitalize the results of the elections at the very outset, that the whole institution of parliamentarism seems reduced to a mere shell.
The results of my observations lead me to accept this period of stagnation and temporary inactivity as a matter of course, a natural phenomenon, consistent and compatible with the mighty struggle in which the Russian nation is now plunged.
At the beginning of this book I pointed out that the periods of great revolutions are seldom brief. M. Leroy-Beaulieu said to Tolstoi that Russia’s struggle might continue fifty years. Even that, it seems to me, is a comparatively short time for the working out of all the changes which Russia must undergo before she will be brought to the standard of modern civilization. The political phases of the situation are secondary to the vital social and economic changes which are working out. The ideas of a nation, as well as the customs of a great people and the forms of an ancient government, are all in the flux. Decades must necessarily elapse before such vast renovation is completed. And in the meantime the movement making for this renovation remains of world-wide importance, palpitating as it does with human interest, and involving as it does the concern of a substantial amount of the world’s commercial interest. France, Germany, Austria, England, and America all have business and commercial associations in Russia which are affected by the development or retardation of industrial and agricultural Russia. The intellectual influence of the philosophy of the revolution is equally universal, watched closely by Germany, and Austria, and France, and ultimately destined to touch the uttermost parts of the world. So was it in France—to a greater degree, perhaps, shall this be true of Russia.
Precisely as there cannot be mountains without valleys, or flow without ebb, so there cannot be revolution without counter-revolution, or progress without reaction.
In the manifesto of October, 1905, Czar Nicholas II said:
“We charge our government to carry out our inflexible will as follows:
“1. To establish an unshakable foundation of the civic liberties of the population, such as inviolability of the person, liberty of conscience, of speech, of meetings, and of unions....
“3. To lay as an unchangeable rule that no law can enter into force without the approval of the imperial Duma; and that the representatives of the people should be entitled to an effective control over the executive power....”
All the world knows how speedily every one of these glorious promises was swept aside. The “inflexible will” of the present Emperor of Russia is the most anarchistic influence in the world to-day. It submits to no discipline, it bows to no law, refuses to remember even through brief days most solemn pledges made to the Russian people before the world, and nonchalantly acquiesces in the careless breaking of even God’s laws. The government of Russia to-day rests not on law, or order, or right, but on might, militarism, and simon-pure terrorism.