A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

“Many Englishmen would gladly shoot Mr. Bernard Shaw for the same offence,” said the landlord, “but they have not the courage of their convictions.”

“What you call freedom,” said the professor, “is precisely the opposite of freedom. It is lawlessness. Your neighbour can kill you with impunity. Where does your freedom come in the matter? What freedom is there in not being allowed to read a foreign newspaper unless it is expurgated, or in being sent to Siberia for disapproving of the methods of Government officials?”

“The people who were sent to Siberia,” said the landlord, “were those who wished to overturn the existing form of government, under which the ordinary individual enjoyed peculiar liberty. And even here how mildly the Government acted! Really remarkable agitators like Tolstoi were left alone. The English acted more drastically, and hounded Byron and Shelley from the country. But when it is a question of expressing their convictions they would never throw a bomb; they cannot go further than throwing a herring at Mr. Balfour. The fact is that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and they have the shopkeeper’s aversion from a mess in the shop.”

“If that means having shopmen,” said the professor, “such as Chatham, Fox, Burke, Gladstone, Bright, and Morley, I wish we were also a nation of shopkeepers. If a nation’s destinies are controlled by men like Alexeiev and Bezobrassov it does not seem to me to make it less like a shop, only the shop is managed on dishonest principles.”

“The greatest of all English thinkers,” answered the landlord, “was a dishonest official, Lord Bacon; her greatest soldier a general who peculated, the Duke of Marlborough. The man who made England’s prestige dwindle to its lowest depth was Gladstone.”

“We cannot reach a lower depth than that to which the Bureaucracy has brought us,” said the student.

“As a remedy you want liberal demagogues,” said the landlord. “What we want is not a change of kind, but of quality; not a Liberal Cabinet and a Liberal autocrat, but a capable Cabinet and a capable autocrat; and, therefore, I support the revolutionaries, in the hope that out of the ruins and ashes of what they will destroy the phœnix may arise.”

“And we,” said the student, “can do without phœnixes, which we regard as a doubtful blessing; on the other hand, what we want, and what we are determined to get, are laws, not manifestoes—laws guaranteeing the elementary rights of liberty and equality; and these we are determined to attain, even at the sacrifice of the peculiar liberty, equality, and fraternity which you say we enjoy; even if the ultimate result be that the Emperor ceases to call us Bratzi (little brothers) and the theatres are closed on Sunday.”

St. Petersburg, February 4th.

To-day I had a long conversation with X, one of the most enlightened Liberals in the service of the Russian Government. He said that the action of the Government in proclaiming the Manifesto of October 17th could only be compared to the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Revolution before any constitution was defined. The Manifesto had proclaimed in Russia principles unknown in that country, and the fact remained, although it was sometimes overlooked, that it was the Government and not a National Assembly which had taken the momentous step. Whatever circumstances may have provoked this step, it is none the less true that Count Witte by taking it retained the control over the general situation, and still retains it in spite of all appearances to the contrary. This was a merit not recognised by his detractors, who are now universal. Then he went on to say that the source of the trouble and confusion now was that the Manifesto formed the programme and the basis of a Constitution; it was not a Constitution in itself (since it had been conferred by an Autocrat and could be taken back again); this fact had been slow in dawning on the people, unused to abstract political discussion, and most people, probably the majority, considered the Manifesto to be equivalent to an established Constitution. The trouble is, he added, that some of the most intelligent of the moderate Liberals of the upper classes do not know what a Constitution is. If the Manifesto had been immediately followed by a Constitution, the questions which at the present time were giving rise to heated debate would never have been raised. They would have been settled before they were discussed by the public. As it was the Manifesto contained a collection of principles which all parties sought to interpret and to exploit to their own advantage. The reactionary party sees in the preservation of the word “Autocrat” the key of the situation. He added that though his party was not large, and had lost a great deal of its influence, none the less it possessed a deep root in the Conservative element in Russia. Count Witte, he said, is supposed, and rightly, to interpret the word “Autocrat” historically, and to substitute for the word “Limited” that of “Independent” (International). He then spoke of the Octobrists, the party of the 17th of October. He said that they showed conciliatory tendencies, which although obviously well meaning in times of Revolution, made for weakness. They avoid the question of title and that of the oath of the sovereign, and declare themselves satisfied with the clear and precise act guaranteeing the oath on the part of the successor to the throne; and they remain content with the Manifesto as far as the actual sovereign is concerned. The Radical parties take no interest in this question, the Social Democrats take even less, since they look to Revolution and to Revolution only for the ultimate decision of the destiny of their country. There are two other questions, he continued, which up to the present have been scarcely mentioned, nor is there much hope that the Government will have the courage to face them unaided. One is that of the relations among the different nations of which the Russian Empire is composed, the other is the Agrarian question. This last question is not a constitutional or a legislative question. The power of the autocrat, while it existed, could alone have solved it. The autocratic power exists no longer now in fact, although its place has not yet been taken by a definite new régime. He said that among the mass of conflicting conjectures and rumours with regard to the future, two important things were clear: (1) that the Government was determined to retain in its hands the power to give a Constitution; (2) that it was determined to grant a Constitution and to proceed to the elections. He said it was impossible to say more at the present; everything depended on the nature of the future Assembly, and whether it would be possible for the Moderate elements to exercise any preponderating influence. Up to now they had been widely divergent and discordant among themselves. If their efforts to gain a solid majority were successful, the greatest danger would be over; if not, the Revolution was in its infancy, for if the Moderates were to fail, the two extreme parties would be left face to face, as different from one another as possible, yet both at one for different reasons in their uncompromising opposition to all temperate and constitutional reform. He said he made no allusion to the various risings and repressions, because these events exercised, in reality, only an indirect influence on the progress of the ideas he had mentioned, sometimes by facilitating their spread, and sometimes by impeding it. It had neither produced nor stopped them. There were two parallel and different currents of events now in progress in Russia. One forced itself on the attention, the other was exceedingly difficult to trace. For that reason it was futile to discuss exclusively the progress of revolutionary feeling and the ultimate success of repressive measures.