A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

“I do not pretend to be a prophet or a philosopher,” answered the man of business, “but I note certain facts; one of these is this, that ever since October I have been told by your friends that Count Witte’s position is untenable, and his resignation a question of hours. It has not come about yet. He still retains the direction of affairs. Should we meet in five years’ time I will discuss Count Witte’s policy with you. At present we are too near to it.”

“And it too far from us,” said the student.

Towards the end of this conversation, a man who belonged to no party came into the room and overheard the talk. When they had finished talking he said: “As to Witte, the question seems to me to lie in this: is he acting consciously and with foresight or is he merely making the best of chance? We are all praying for a genius to appear in Russia. But, when geniuses do come, nobody ever recognises the fact until it is too late and they are dead. If Witte is acting consciously then he is a genius indeed. If he has foreseen all along what would happen, and, in a few years’ time, is President of the Federation of Russian United States, having decentralised what he has so capably centralised, then I think he will be one of the greatest men who have ever lived; but, if he is merely acting as the occasion presents itself, I do not rate him higher than a Boulanger with a head for figures.”

“In any case,” said the Zemstvo representative, “he will provide glorious food for discussion for the future historian, and even at present the world would be a duller and greyer place without this enigmatical chameleon.”

St. Petersburg, February 17th.

I have frequently heard the opinion expressed that the Russian Revolution can inspire nothing but disgust owing to the fact that it has produced no great men, and to its lack of big, stirring epic events, in contradistinction to the French Revolution, which was so rich in all these things. It is, therefore, interesting to note what impression the events of the French Revolution produced on impartial foreign contemporary opinion.

We derive one definite impression of the French Revolution by reading Carlyle, or Mignet, or Taine; but the foreign contemporaries who were not themselves mingled in the tragic events received a very different and far more fragmentary series of impressions. Horace Walpole, in his letters, gives us interesting glimpses into the contemporary opinion of the period. At the time of the storming of the Bastille he wrote as follows: “If the Bastille conquers, still is it impossible, considering the general spirit in the country, and the numerous fortified places in France, but some may be seized by the dissidents, and whole provinces be torn from the Crown? On the other hand, if the King prevails, what heavy despotism will the États, by their want of temper and moderation, have drawn on their country! They might have obtained many capital points, and removed great oppression. No French monarch will ever summon États again if this moment has been thrown away.” It is interesting to note how doubtful he considers the success of the revolutionaries to be. Again, he adds in the same letter: “One hears of no genius on either side, nor do symptoms of any appear. There will, perhaps; such times and tempests bring forth, at least bring out, great men. I do not take the Duke of Orleans or Mirabeau to be built “du bois dont on les fait”; no, nor M. Necker. He may be a great traitor if he made the confusion designedly; but it is a woful evasion if the promised financier slips into a black politician.” A criticism similar to that passed on Necker I have myself heard applied to Count Witte on several occasions in St. Petersburg.

In July, 1790, he again returns to the charge: “Franklin and Washington were great men. None have appeared yet in France, and Necker has only returned to make a wretched figure.... Why, then, does he stay?” This is the question which the Russ, the anti-Governmental newspaper, is asking every day in like terms about Count Witte. In August, 1790, he says about the French: “They have settled nothing like a Constitution; on the contrary, they seem to protract everything but violence as much as they can in order to keep their louis a day.” This might be applied not without appositeness to certain of the Bureaucrats here. In September, 1791, Horace Walpole is even more pessimistic. He thinks that twenty thousand men could march from one end of France to the other. But he apprehends the possibility of enthusiasm turning to courage against a foreign enemy. What he disbelieves in is a set of “military noble lads, pedantic academicians, curates of villages, and country advocates amidst the utmost confusion and altercation amongst themselves” composing a system of government that would set four and twenty millions of people free. “This, too,” he adds, “without one great man amongst them. If they had had, as Mirabeau seemed to promise to be—but as we know that he was, too, a consummate villain, there would soon have been an end of their vision of liberty. And so there will be still, unless, after a civil war, they split into small kingdoms or commonwealths. A little nation may be free.... Millions cannot be so; because, the greater the number of men that are one people, the more vices, the more abuses there are, that will either require or furnish pretexts for restraints.” It is plain from the above quotations that whatever contemporary foreign writers thought of the French Revolution there was one thing which they did not think, and that was that the prominent actors in it were big men; or that the whole movement was anything but disgusting and futile.

Later, in 1793, Horace Walpole’s horror and disgust, as was natural, knew no bounds. He thinks, moreover, that the proceedings of the French Republicans had wounded the cause of liberty and shaken it for centuries. Now the popular atmosphere of legend that has grown up round the Revolution takes as its keynote a phrase of Victor Hugo’s: “Les hommes de 1793 étaient des géants.” In Russia we have not got so far as 1793. We are still at the beginning of 1789, and it is quite possible that the future Carlyle who writes the history of this period will say the men of 1905 were giants. The Duma will give opportunities for popular tribunes, and apart from and in contradistinction to great orators or tribunes, it may be doubted whether revolutions, while they are going on, ever produce great men. The great men come afterwards.

But when people point to the seemingly effectual repression that is now taking place here, and ask how it is possible for the Revolution to continue, they forget that there is a difference—a small but vastly important difference—between the present state of affairs and the period of the late M. Plehve’s régime. The difference consists in the fact that before the general strike and the October Manifesto, before even the taking of Port Arthur, Prince Mirsky opened a little window in the tight-closed room of Russian politics by relaxing the stringent Press regulations and letting loose public opinion. The light came in like a flood, and nothing can now drive it out. Repression when public opinion was crushed was a very different thing from repression when every case of it is reported in detail in the newspapers, as now happens. For people can say what they like about the unreality or the non-existence of the liberty of the Press; one has only to buy the Radical newspapers to be convinced that if the Press is not free it is certainly more explicit and more unrestrained in its violence than the Press of any other European country, and some of the comic satirical newspapers might have Marat for editor.