In the following dialogue I have tried to formulate the views of those who have no sympathy with the Liberal movement in Russia:—
“I would prefer to hold my tongue,” said the cosmopolitan philosopher who had just arrived at St. Petersburg, when he was asked for his opinion on the political situation. “I do not want to have chairs thrown at my head.”
“We never throw chairs,” said the ex-official. “Either bombs or nothing. But before you say it I know what you are going to say. There are two classes of people in the world: Liberals and Conservatives, if you like, and there is also a third class. The third class consists of what I call recalcitrant Liberals; they become Conservative not because they are Conservative by nature but because they dislike Liberals and enjoy disagreeing with them; but say what you think and confirm the truth of my diagnosis.” “I will,” said the philosopher, “only don’t throw chairs at my head. All that is going on in Europe at present seems to me to be contained in the formula: Liberty is the tyranny of the rabble. The equation may work itself out more or less quickly, but it is bound to triumph. And as intelligent people favour liberty I have gone over to the side of the idiots. They produced an opéra-bouffe in 1870, I think, called ‘Le trône d’Écosse, ou la difficulté de s’asseoir dessus.’ The title was pleasing, but the figure of the King of Scotland was more delightful still. He was, I will not say troubled, for it did not inconvenience him in the least, but let us say characterised, by softening of the brain in an advanced stage, and whatever might be going on he quietly slept through it, only waking up now and then to exclaim emphatically ‘Pas de concessions!’ I entirely sympathise with him. I feel exactly like the King of Scotland, and I don’t care a straw whether I am right or wrong. Right or wrong concerns our judging faculty, which is a poor affair at its best, if it concerns anything at all. Siding in practice with one party or another concerns our passions, our habits, our tastes, and our private interests. If we have privileges we are there to defend them and not to bother, like clergymen and professors, whether they are right or wrong. We may be beaten; at least let us be beaten fighting. Vive la réaction!” “That is a point of view I can understand,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “but let us ask our friend (he pointed to the ex-official) who, although often accused by his friends of having regicide principles, has never been insulted by being called a Liberal, whether he feels like that with regard to Russia now.” “Yes,” answered the philosopher, “please tell me if you think my formula applies to the present situation, and whether you agree?” “Let me start by saying that I entirely agree with your formula,” said the ex-official; “at least I did until a fortnight ago, when I realised (I was staying at the Savoy Hotel in London) that I had become (like Kips at the Grand Hotel) a Socialist. My conversion, however, is so recent and I have spent so many years in deriding Socialism that I can, without any difficulty, speak from my ancient standpoint. Well, I think your formula, with which I so deeply sympathise, is not applicable to Russia at present. At least it is applicable, if you choose to apply it, but it is as far removed from what I feel as the diametrically opposed view of the English Liberal Press. I do not regard the existing struggle as being one between aristocratic and democratic principles. It is the struggle between one half of the middle class, the Mandarins, with the Government and the higher Mandarins at their head, and the other half, the professors, the doctors, the lawyers. Above this struggle the aristocracy floats as a nebulous mist, like the gods when they returned to the Twilight of Valhalla, and beneath it the proletariate and the peasantry have been roused from their slumbers by the noise of the fight. My point of view is very simple. I believe, as a statesman once said, that the Russian Government is an autocracy tempered by assassination. I hope that the professors will, with the help of the peasantry and the proletariate, create a big enough disturbance to destroy the existing Government and prepare the way for a real autocracy. Then, and not until then, I shall cry ‘Vive la réaction!’ According to you I ought to die fighting for my higher Mandarins; but you admit it is only a question of one’s passions; well, my passions are turned against them. I hate them. Of course I would have fought for Louis XVIII. or Charles II.; but I should have drawn the line at Charles X., and I should have been rewarded by the result of the subsequent revolution.” “I don’t think you either of you realise,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “that just as the battle of Valmy (which didn’t seem very important to contemporaries except to Goethe, who realised what had happened in a flash) was the beginning of a new age, so was the universal strike here in October last the beginning of another. I think all your talk about autocrats, &c., is amusing, but so very old-fashioned. I don’t think there will ever be such things—again.”
“But there are such things,” said the ex-official. “Mr. Balfour ruled England far more despotically than the most unlimited autocrat.”
“Yes, but that is the kind of thing which I believe is on the eve of disappearance,” said the man who belonged to no Party. “I believe, and of course the wish is not only father to the thought—but I wish hard in order that the thought may come true—I believe that we are on the eve of a social revolution, and that besides this Russia will split up into separate parts. I hope this will happen. Had I been an Englishman, I should have been a little Englander with a vengeance. I should like to go back to the Heptarchy. I admire the England of Shakespeare and Drake, which was little, more than the England of Kipling and Rhodes, which is big. I admire the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven more than the Germany of William II.—and whom? There is no one else to mention. The same with Russia. All that we have derived from ideals of expansion has ended in disaster. If we split up, who knows what the Duchy of Transbaikalia and the Kingdom of Kalouga, for instance, and the Republic of Morshansk may not produce?” “But,” said the philosopher, “what will happen if the power falls into the hands of angry demagogues of the Extreme Left? What if they behave as the Convention behaved, and, more reasonably, what if you have all the tyranny of a Convention and none of the terror? All the inconvenience and none of the excitement? In Russia you boast of the liberté de mœurs you enjoy; don’t you think you run a risk of losing it?” “It is true, of course,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “that we run a risk of losing it, but I have a great faith in the invincible plasticity of the Russian character. And liberty of manners seems to me to depend on national characteristics and not on national institutions. You can prove, of course, that liberty of manners and liberty of thought flourish abundantly under autocratic régimes such as those of Nero and Nicholas II., but does it necessarily follow that it cannot exist under lawful and disciplined administration? Ancient Greece and Modern England are two cases in point where personal liberty such as that which we enjoy in Russia is nonexistent. ‘Il ne faut pas l’oublier,’ says Renan, ‘Athènes avait bel et bien l’inquisition.’ As to Anglo-Saxon countries there is no more amusing spectacle in the world than that which is offered to us when a member of the Slav race seeks refuge in Anglo-Saxon countries burning with enthusiasm for the mothers of freedom. Witness Maxim Gorky’s arrival in America. He soon finds out that he is enclosed in a brick wall of prohibitions, and perhaps he thinks with regret of his native country, where, although he was not allowed to insult his Monarch at a public meeting, he could do exactly what he liked. The rigidity of conventions in England seems to me to arise from the English character, which is rigid and likes convention; but the Russian character is not rigid; it is pliant and draws no line anywhere. That is at once all its strength and all its weakness. Whatever gets the upper hand in Russia, be it a convention, a board of Socialists, or a committee of peasants, I am convinced of one thing, that the members of this Government will never dress for dinner when they feel disinclined or go to bed before they wish to do so.” “But,” said the philosopher, “if you possess personal liberty why bother about the rest? After all, free political institutions presuppose a certain amount of order and discipline. If you are without this order and discipline, and if you do not wish for the drawbacks of order and discipline, why do you make a fuss to get what can only exist by order and discipline?”
“If we had been properly governed,” said the ex-official, “nobody would have thought about it.”
“The two things are not incompatible,” said the man who belonged to no Party. “You can have free political institutions sufficiently ordered and disciplined, and you can also have personal liberty. If these two things have never been combined before, we will be the first people to combine them.”
St. Petersburg, June 19th.
On Sunday last I went by train to a place called Terrioki, in Finland, where a meeting was to be held by the Labour Party of the Duma. The train was crowded with people who looked more like holiday-makers than political supporters of the Extreme Left—so crowded that one had to stand up on the platform outside the carriage throughout the journey. It is of no consequence in Russia how many people there are in a train or what they do. In England there is an impressive warning in the railway carriages about being fined a sum not exceeding forty shillings. In Russia there is also a quantity of printed rules. The difference is this—in England, if you infringed the rules, something would be sure to happen. In Russia nobody pays the slightest attention to any rule and nothing happens. You are not fined a sum not exceeding forty shillings; on the other hand, a young man not long ago, owing to the habit he had acquired—a habit universally practised by passengers on the line—of jumping out of the train long before it had reached the station, slipped on the step, and was nearly killed. This is a small instance of what people mean when they allude to the personal liberty prevalent in Russia. It is also an explanation of the existence of the quantity of printed regulations you see in Russia. The authorities print a hundred rules in the hope that one of them may meet with attention. None of them commands attention. I will give another small instance. If a stranger to Europe came to Europe and to England and tried to get into the House of Commons without a ticket and without being acquainted with a member, he would find it, I think, impossible to obtain admittance. If he went to Russia he could, if he said nothing at all, walk into the Duma without the slightest difficulty. The whole secret of avoiding bothers in Russia is not to bother people who do not wish to be bothered. If you do what you wish to do quietly nobody interferes with you. If you ask you will probably be told it is impossible—it is in theory, but not in practice.
But to go back to the political meeting in Finland. After a journey of an hour and a quarter we arrived at Terrioki. The crowd leapt from the train and immediately unfurled red flags and sang the “Marseillaise.” The crowd occupied the second line, and a policeman observed that, as another train was coming in and would occupy that line, it would be advisable if they were to move on. “What, police even here in free Finland?” somebody cried. “The police are elected here by the people,” was the pacifying reply, and the crowd moved on, formed into a procession six abreast, and started marching to the gardens where the meeting was to be held, singing the “Marseillaise” and other songs all the way. The dust was so abundant that, after marching with the procession for some time, I took a cab and told the driver to take me to the meeting. We drove off at a brisk speed past innumerable wooden houses, villas, shops (where Finnish knives and English tobacco are sold) into a wood. After we had driven for twenty minutes I asked the driver if we still had far to go. He turned round and, smiling, said in pidgin-Russian (he was a Finn), “Me not know where you want go.” Then we turned back, and, after a long search and much questioning of passers-by, found the garden, into which one was admitted by ticket. (Here, again, any one could get in.) In a large grassy and green garden, shady with many trees, a kind of wooden semicircular proscenium had been erected, and in one part of it was a low and exiguous platform not more spacious than a table. On the proscenium the red flags were hung. In front of the table there were a few benches, but the greater part of the public stood and formed a large crowd. The inhabitants of the villas were here in large numbers; there were not many workmen, but a number of students and various other members of the “Intelligenzia”; young men with undisciplined hair and young ladies in large art nouveau hats and Reformkleider. (I wonder whether this last mentioned garment has penetrated to London.) M. Jilkin, the leader of the Labour Party in the Duma, took the chair.