In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is generally used to designate those members of the middle class who belong to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers, journalists, and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole middle class, from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But when Russians speak of it they generally mean the middle class, excluding officials. Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-headed revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the actors, the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These people have for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s “Essays on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years ago); in teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them; and at the slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they have been placed under police surveillance and often been subjected to gross indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now? The average man and woman of the Russian middle class is incomparably better educated than the average English man or woman of the same class. They are saturated with the foreign classics. They often speak two languages besides Russian; and they are conversant with modern thought in the various European countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When one sees the average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance and his want of education in comparison with these people. I have constantly, both here and in Manchuria, found to my shame that I knew nothing of English history in comparison with the Russians I met. The reason is very simple: they are taught at school things which will be useful to them. Every one is given a general foundation of knowledge. I do not believe the average Englishman to be more stupid than the average foreigner, but he is not educated. A man may go through a public school and even a university in England and come out at the end ludicrously ignorant of everything except the classical books he was obliged to “get up,” and at our public schools, with a few brilliant exceptions, the education of the average boy amounts to this: that he does not learn Latin and Greek, and he certainly learns nothing else. I never heard English history mentioned at Eton, and all the English history I know I learnt in the nursery. The average Russian boy knows far more about English history than the average English boy, let alone European history; and a cultivated Russian of the middle class is saturated with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, John Morley, Buckle, and Carlyle; whereas Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley are treated as Russian classics. Only yesterday I travelled with a man who, although he could not speak English, was intimately conversant with our whole literature, and told me that the whole generation to which he belonged had been taught to find their intellectual food in England and not in France and Germany. “How is it,” he asked me, “that we Russians who live on English thought, and admire and respect you as a nation far more than other nations, have been so long at loggerheads with you politically?” I said that I thought the reason was that, although the cultivated and the average educated Russian knows our literature well, the nation as a whole does not know us, and we do not know Russia at all—for most intelligent Englishmen are ludicrously ignorant of Russia. Besides this, the bureaucratic régime has acted like a barrier between the two countries and fostered and fed on the misunderstanding.
As far as politics are concerned things have moved on. Some weeks ago it was possible to believe that the Government had been wantonly hampered in its well-intentioned efforts, now it is only too plain that by their acts they are doing their best to justify the violence of the revolutionaries. The “Proisvol” (arbitrariness) continues on an extensive scale. People in Moscow are arrested every day and without discrimination. Influential people do not dare to inscribe their names on the lists of the Constitutional Democratic Party for fear of being arrested. The police have unlimited powers, and all the methods of the old régime are flourishing once more. I do not believe, as is sure to be objected, that the action of the revolutionaries has rendered this necessary. I do not believe that the best way to fight revolution is by lawless and arbitrary repression. Lastly, and most important, it is not the immorality or the illegality of the methods that I find reprehensible, but their stupidity and ineffectiveness. If all this repression were the iron working of one great central mind, which ruthlessly imposed its will on the nation, breaking down all obstacles and restoring order, it would be excusable. But it is not. I do not believe the Government is responsible for what happens in Moscow; and in Moscow itself the various authorities shift the responsibility on to each other. It is the old story of the bureaucratic system—no responsibility and no individual efficiency, but a happy-go-lucky, drifting, and blind incompetence, striking where it should not strike, being lenient too late, and never foreseeing what is under its very nose. When one comes to think, it is not surprising, considering that the instruments with which Count Witte has to deal are of the old regulation bureaucratic pattern. How, for instance, can the Minister of the Interior, M. Durnovo, be expected to adopt any other methods than those which are ingrained in him? It is as if the Liberals persuaded Mr. Chamberlain to speak at a public meeting and then expressed surprise at finding that he was in favour of Tariff Reform. When some of the revolutionaries were summarily executed after the recent troubles in Moscow, a sentence of Tacitus came back to me which is peculiarly applicable to the old Russian bureaucratic methods: “Interfectis Varrone consule designate et Petronio Turpiliano consulari ... inauditi atque indefensi tamquam innocentes perierunt” (Varro and Turpilianus were executed without trial and defence, so that they might just as well have been innocent).
The whole system of arresting doctors and professors, prohibiting newspapers and plays, censoring books and songs, is now, whatever may have been its effect in the past, childishly futile. Moreover, even this is blunderingly done. The harmless newspapers are suppressed and more violent ones appear. But the point is the futility of it all; as soon as a serious newspaper is stopped it reappears on the next day under another name. Each repressed satirical newspaper (and these journals are often exceedingly scurrilous) finds a successor. It is not as if the revolutionaries were the result of the newspapers; it is the newspapers which are the reflection of the revolutionaries; and until you can repress every revolutionary the spirit which finds its vent in these organs will exist. To repress the Liberal spirit altogether it will be necessary to suppress nearly all the thinking population of Russia. The only hope is that all this is, after all, only temporary, and that the meeting of the Duma will put an end to this riot of lawlessness and inefficiency. One competent man like Count Witte is not enough to deal with things which are happening all over the country in so large a place as Russia, and he is bound to trust himself to minor authorities—and these in many cases prove themselves unfit for their task. “Why are they chosen?” it may be asked. The answer is: “Who else is there to choose until the whole pack of cards is thoroughly reshuffled or rather destroyed, and a new pack, men chosen by the Duma, is adopted?”
“But,” it is objected, “however much you reshuffle the cards, the pack will be the same.” This is true; but one radical change would make all the difference in the world, and that would be the introduction of the system of responsibility. Whenever there has been in a Russian town a governor who had declared his firm intention of holding his subordinates responsible for their acts, and has put such a declaration into practice, things have always gone well. There was for years a chief of the police at Moscow, who was just such a man. The trouble is now, that however good a subordinate official may be, there is no guarantee that he may not be removed at any minute owing to the passing whim of those who are above.
CHAPTER X
CURRENT IDEAS IN ST. PETERSBURG
St. Petersburg, January 27th.
People are now saying that the revolutionary movement in Russia has suffered a complete defeat. I do not share this point of view; my reason is not based upon prophetic discernment into the future, but on what has happened in the past.
If we are in the presence of a stream and note the beginnings of its turbulent course, and then observe that it has met with the obstacle of a dam and burst through that obstacle, and that this occurrence has been repeated six times, with the result that every time the dam has been burst the stream has gathered in strength, when this dam is made a seventh time we are justified in concluding that as the dam is the same in kind as it was before, and the stream also, the stream will break through it a seventh time, although every time the dam was made the onlookers made the observation that the progress of the stream was definitively impeded. Now this is precisely what has happened with regard to the Russian revolutionary movement up to the present time. And we are now witnessing an act of a drama which began in 1895.
The course of events was like this: When the Emperor Nicholas II. came to the Throne a deputation of the Zemstva were told that their moderate demands for the beginning of reform were senseless dreams. Upon these words the first dam was built, and it took the form of universal repression.
In December, 1904, the ukase, embodying the nullified projects of Prince Mirsky, was immediately followed by a threatening Manifesto, and a second dam was made. This dam, however, was ineffectual, and it was followed by the rising of the workmen of the 9th of January, and when this meeting was dispersed by the troops, and a third dam constructed, people said—and among them people who lived here and ought to have known better—that the Russian revolution was over. February 18th saw the publication of the two contradictory Manifestoes and the Boulygin project, and during this time the dam took the shape of the Trepoff dictatorship, which, as General Trepoff is a competent man, proved to be for the time being more effectual than the obstacles which had hitherto been employed.