New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look forward and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is going on at St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here, save in the smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and various broken windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to tell one that anything unusual has occurred. The Government is said to be confident. Foreign loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is said, have been crushed and dispersed. Electioneering work is beginning; in fact, all is going as well as can be expected. That is one view—an optimistic view which I do not altogether share. In the first place, when people say that the Revolutionary Party or its leaders are a minority I would reply by quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country which is following an idea, are always made by the minority,” says Renan, immediately before the sentence I have quoted.
Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have affected the revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The numbers of the killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the important and real leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before this affair, which was, in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a number of boys and girls can, at the head of a mass of workmen, bring the garrison to distraction, take guns from the troops, and force the authorities to bombard the houses of the inhabitants without raising universal indignation, things must be fairly serious.
To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly untrue; for although they started the fighting, as soon as the authorities answered with artillery the common ordinary man in the street began in many cases to say that it was the fault of the Government and the authorities. Sympathy in Russia is always certain to be with the people who are shot, be they right or wrong.
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim-gun and they have not.”
That is, they argue, the motto of the authorities, and that is exactly the sentiment which arouses the indignation of the citizen. A cabman asked some one the other day when they were going to punish “him.” Who is “him”? he was asked. “Admiral Dubassov,” was the answer. “Surely the Emperor will punish him for shooting at the houses.” The energetic manner in which the rising was suppressed has, I am told, produced a good effect in Europe; doubtless energetic measures were not only necessary but imperative in the first instance; whether the continuation of them now is a mistake or not only the future can show. One fact, however, is certain, and that is that these measures are being conducted with the same arbitrariness which has characterised the action of the Russian police in the past, and are causing intense exasperation. There is a word in Russian, “Proisvol,” which means acting, like Wordsworth’s river, according to your “own sweet will,” unheedful of, and often in defiance of, the law. It is precisely this manner of acting which has brought about the revolution in Russia. It is against the “Proisvol” that all the educated classes and half the official class rebelled. And it is this very “Proisvol” against which the whole country rose on strike, which the Government promised should henceforth disappear, and which is at the present moment triumphantly installed once more as the ruling system.
Of course it may be objected that anarchy and lawless revolution can only be met by severe repression; but the question is: Must it be met by arbitrary and lawless repression? Hang the insurgents if you like, but why shoot a doctor who has got nothing to do with it before you know anything about him? To stop a newspaper like the Russkie Viedomosti, for instance, is an act of sheer “Proisvol,” the reason given being that it had subscription lists for workmen’s unions, which it denies, saying that the money was for the wounded. Here I point to my second text. All this repression seems to me utterly futile. The future, however, can show whether this is indeed so.
In the meantime election programmes are appearing. That of the Constitutional Democrats has come out, and is moderate in tone, although its clauses are extensive. It insists, among other things, on universal suffrage and an eight-hours’ day for the workmen. Here I would point to text 3. Everybody whom I have seen in Russia in any way connected with the working man is agreed in saying that an eight-hours’ day is an absolute impossibility. That a Russian workman’s eight hours means in reality about six hours. That no factory in Russia could exist on these terms. The Constitutional Democrats seem in this case to have omitted the factor of human egoism and interest.
One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally racing another!
Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly cheerful. There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties seem anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the Conservatives want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections. The Radicals say it will be packed by the Government; but I do not see how this is possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it proves “a Black Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call everything which is not Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said before, and as I cannot tire of saying, it is useless to blame these extreme parties for talking nonsense. They have been driven to this nonsense by the still greater want of sense on the part of the Government of Russia during the last twenty years, and in wanting to wipe out this system altogether they are, after all, in the right. Unfair they may be, hysterical, and absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the absurdity, extravagance, and violence of the Jacobins were only the logical result of the “Ancien Régime.” So it is here, although it is misleading to compare the present movement in Russia with the French Revolution.