A Short History of Russia

by Mary Platt Parmele

A treaty of peace was signed March 30, 1856. Russia renounced the claim of an exclusive protectorate over the Turkish provinces, yielded the free navigation of the Danube, left Turkey the Roumanian principalities, and, hardest of all, she lost the control of the Black Sea. Its waters were forbidden to men-of-war of all nations; no arsenals, military or maritime, to exist upon its shores. The fruits of Russian policy since Peter the Great were annihilated, and the work of two centuries of progress was canceled.

Who and what was to blame for these calamities? Why was it that the Russian army could successfully compete with Turks and Asiatics, and not with Europeans? The reason began to be obvious, even to stubborn Russian Conservatives. A nation, in order to compete in war in this age, must have a grasp upon the arts of peace. An army drawn from a civilized nation is a more effective instrument than one drawn from a barbarous one. The time had passed when there might be a few highly educated and subtle intelligences thinking for millions of people in brutish ignorance. The time had arrived when it must be recognized that Russia was not made for a few great and powerful people, for whom the rest, an undistinguishable mass, must toil and suffer. In other words, it must be a nation—and not a dynasty nourished by misery and supported by military force.

Men high in rank no longer flaunted their titles and insignia of office. They shrank from drawing attention to their share of responsibility in the great calamity, and listened almost humbly to the suggestions of liberal leaders, suggestions which, a few months ago, none dared whisper except behind closed doors. A new literature sprang into life, unrebuked, dealing with questions of state policy with a fearless freedom never before dreamed of. Conservative Russia had suddenly vanished under a universal conviction that the hope of their nation was in Liberalism.

The Emperor recalled from Siberia the exiles of the conspiracy of 1825, and also the Polish exiles of 1831. There was an honest effort made to reform the wretched judicial system and to adopt the methods which Western experience had found were the best. The obstructions to European influences were removed, and all joined hands in an effort to devise means of bringing the whole people up to a higher standard of intelligence and well-being. Russia was going to be regenerated. Men, in a rapture of enthusiasm and with tears, embraced each other on the streets. One wrote: "The heart trembles with joy. Russia is like a stranded ship which the captain and the crew are powerless to move; now there is to be a rising tide of national life which will raise and float it."

Such was the prevailing public sentiment in 1861, when Emperor Alexander affixed his name to the measure which was going to make it forever glorious—the emancipation of over twenty-three million human beings from serfdom. It would require another volume to tell even in outline the wrongs and sufferings of this class, upon whom at last rested the prosperity and even the life of the nation, who, absolutely subject to the will of one man, might at his pleasure be conscripted for military service for a term of from thirty to forty years, or at his displeasure might be sent to Siberia to work in the mines for life; and who, in no place or at no time, had protection from any form of cruelty which the greed of the proprietor imposed upon them. Selling the peasants without the land, unsanctioned by law, became sanctioned by custom, until finally its right was recognized by imperial ukases, so that serfdom, which in theory presented a mild exterior, was in practice and in fact a terrible and unmitigated form of human slavery.

Patriarchalism has a benignant sound—it is better than something that is worse! It is a step upward from a darker quagmire of human condition. When Peter the Great, with his terrible broom, swept all the free peasants into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and when he established the empire upon a chain of service to be rendered to the nobility by the peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in the social unit—the family. And while he was Europeanizing the surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment—an incongruity which in time must bring disorder, and compel radical and difficult reforms.

To remove a foundation stone is a delicate and difficult operation. It needed courage of no ordinary sort to break up this serfdom encrusted with tyrannies. It was a gigantic social experiment, the results of which none could foresee. Alexander's predecessors had thought and talked of it, but had not dared to try it. Now the time was ripe, and the man on the throne had the nerve required for its execution.

The means by which this revolution was effected may be briefly described in a sentence. The Crown purchased from the proprietors the land—with the peasants attached to it, and then bestowed the land upon the peasants with the condition that for forty-five years they should pay to the Crown six per cent. interest upon the amount paid by it for the land. It was the commune or mir which accepted the land and assumed the obligation and the duty of seeing that every individual paid his annual share of rental (or interest money) upon the land within his inclosure, which was supposed to be sufficient for his own maintenance and the payment of the government tax.

These simple people, who had been dreaming of emancipation for years, as a vague promise of relief from sorrow, heard with astonishment that now they were expected to pay for their land! Had it not always belonged to them? The Slavonic idea of ownership of land through labor was the only one of which they could conceive, and it had survived through all the centuries of serfdom, when they were accustomed to say: "We are yours, but the land is ours." Instead of twenty-five million people rejoicing with grateful hearts, there was a ferment of discontent and in some places uprisings—one peasant leader telling ten thousand who rose at his call that the Emancipation Law was a forgery, they were being deceived and not permitted to enjoy what the Tsar, their "Little Father," had intended for their happiness. But considering the intricate difficulties attending such a tremendous change in the social conditions, the emancipation was easily effected and the Russian peasants, by the survival of their old Patriarchal institutions, were at once provided with a complete system of local self-government in which the ancient Slavonic principle was unchanged. At the head of the commune or mir was the elder, a group of communes formed a Volost, and the head of the Volost was responsible for the peace and order of the community. To this was later added the Zemstvo a representative assembly of peasants, for the regulation of local matters.

Such a new reign of clemency awakened hope in Poland that it too might share these benefits. First it was a Constitution such as had been given to Hungary for which they prayed. Then, as Italy was emancipating herself, they grew bolder, and, incited by societies of Polish exiles, all over Europe, demanded more: that they be given independence. Again the hope of a Polo-Lithuanian alliance, and a recovery of the lost Polish provinces in the Ukraine, and the reestablishment of an independent kingdom of Poland, dared to assert itself, and to invite a more complete destruction.