The meeting was opened by a man who laid stress on the necessity of a Constituent Assembly. The speeches succeeded one another. Students climbed up into the pine-trees and on the roof of the proscenium. Others lay on the grass behind the crowd. “Land and Liberty” was the burden of the speeches. There was nothing new or striking said. The hackneyed commonplaces were rolled out one after another. Indignation, threats, menaces, blood and thunder. And all the time the sun shone hotter and “all Nature looked smiling and gay.” The audience applauded, but no fierceness of invective, no torrent of rhetoric managed to make the meeting a serious one. Nature is stronger than speeches, and sunshine more potent than rant. It is true the audience were enjoying themselves; but they were enjoying the outing, and the speeches were an agreeable incidental accompaniment; they enjoyed the attacks on the powers that be, as the Bank-holiday maker enjoys Aunt Sally at the seaside. Some Finns spoke in Russian and Finnish, and then M. Aladin, the prominent member of the Duma, made a real speech. As he rose he met with an ovation. M. Aladin is of peasant extraction. He passed through the University in Russia, emigrated to London, was a dock labourer, a printer’s devil, a journalist, an electrical engineer, a teacher of Russian; he speaks French and German perfectly, and English so well that he speaks Russian with a London accent. M. Aladin has, as I have said, a great contempt for the methods of the Russian revolutionaries, and he expressed something of it on this occasion. He said that only people without any stuff in them would demand a Constituent Assembly. “You don’t demand a Constituent Assembly, you constitute it,” he said. “It was humiliating,” he continued, “that citizens of a big country like Russia should be obliged to come to Finland in order to speak their minds freely. It was time to cease being a people of slaves, and time to be a revolutionary people. The Russian people would never be free until they showed by their acts that they meant to be free.” M. Aladin speaks without any gesticulation. He is a dark, shortish man, with a small moustache and grey serious eyes, short hair, and a great command of incisive mordant language. His oratory is, as I have said before, English in style. On this occasion it was particularly nervous and pithy. He did not, however, succeed in turning that audience of holiday-makers into a revolutionary meeting. The inhabitants of the villas clapped. The young ladies in large hats chortled with delight. It was a glorious picnic; an ecstatic game of Aunt Sally. And when the interval came the public rushed to the restaurants. There was one on the sea-shore, with a military band playing. There was a beach and a pier and boats and bathers. Here was the true inwardness of the meeting. Many people remained on the beach for the rest of the afternoon. The Social Democrats who had been present were displeased with M. Aladin’s speech. Groups formed in the garden. People lay down on the grass, and political discussions were held by recumbent speakers. When they reached a certain pitch of excitement they knelt.
Two men attracted my attention by the heated argument in which they were engaged, kneeling opposite each other in a circle of recumbent listeners. Presently a bell rang and the meeting was resumed. I said to one of the arguers: “Why do you all quarrel so much? You are disunited, and there is only one Government.” He took me aside and explained his views. He was a tall, bearded, intelligent-looking man, a native of the Urals; he had been a soldier and an engineer, and had had to leave the country for his opinions. He had educated himself in France, Germany, and Belgium, and had attended a Labour Congress in London. He was a Social Democrat. He said this meeting was absurd. “You see the real workmen can’t come to a meeting like this; it’s too expensive. I was disappointed in Aladin’s speech. I think he is unfair in blaming us for being feeble compared with the French revolutionaries. The circumstances are different. We have the proletariate here, and that important fact makes a great difference.” I asked him if he thought there would be a social revolution in Russia. He said he thought Socialism must be adopted by all countries at the same moment. He thought that the Russian people were less capable of introducing it than any people. “When these people talk the poverty of their thought appals me,” he said. “And then the monotony of the tragic note—never a gleam of humour; never a touch of irony. Count Heyden is the only man in the Duma who shows any signs of it. Look at our Government, they lay themselves open to ridicule. By ridicule one can pulverise them; nobody thinks of doing it, and the strain of this long-drawn-out tragic emphasis is intolerable. Yes, I was disappointed in Aladin. But the first time I saw him I was convinced that he would play a part in the Russian Revolution. It is a good thing that such men should be. Gapon, however much we may blame him, played a great part.” I found he thoroughly disbelieved in the Cadets and believed only in the proletariate. Later on other speeches were made denouncing the Cadets and the foreign loan, and a resolution was passed repudiating it. The meeting went on till past seven o’clock, and then the mass of people returned to St. Petersburg, having thoroughly enjoyed their picnic.
I went to the Duma yesterday afternoon and heard some of the speeches of the much-abused Cadets. It was like listening to Mr. Asquith and Mr. Haldane after a dose of Hyde Park oratory. But because people appear to one to talk nonsense that is no proof that they will not get the upper hand. “Vous êtes des verbiageurs,” said the Duc de Biron to the revolutionary tribunal. They guillotined him nevertheless. And Danton said that Robespierre was not capable “de faire cuire un œuf.” Yet Robespierre played a part in the Revolution.
CHAPTER XXII
PRINCE URUSSOFF’S SPEECH
St. Petersburg, June 22nd.
The speech made by Prince Urussoff last Friday in reply to the Minister of the Interior is generally considered here to be the most important utterance which has as yet been made within the walls of the Duma. Prince Urussoff occupied for a short period a post in the Ministry of the Interior during the late Ministry. His speech is not only important from the fact of its being authoritative, and because it throws a startlingly interesting light on some of the causes of the Jewish massacres, but also because it reveals the evil which is practically at the root of all the trouble in Russia.
“Representatives of the People,—I rise to submit to your consideration a few observations regarding the question put to the Ministry by the Duma and the answer to that question which we have just heard. I presume that we are considering the information respecting a printing-press concealed in the recesses of the Police Department, by which proclamations to the people are printed inciting them to civil war, not so much in the light of a fact which belongs to the past and interests us only so far as the responsibility of certain individuals is concerned, but rather in the light of an alarming question as to a possibility of the further participation of Government officials in the preparation of those sanguinary tragedies for which we have been notorious during a dismal epoch, and which, as the events of the last few days have shown, continue to occur, to the indignation of all those to whom human life and the fair fame of the Russian Empire are precious. Let me state at the outset that I do not for a moment doubt of the sincerity of the declaration made by the Minister of the Interior, and that the words which I wish to say to you are not directed against the Ministry.
“On the contrary, the whole significance, the whole interest, the whole importance of the question at issue lie precisely in the fact that massacres and civil strife, owing to the circumstances now obtaining, continue and will continue, quite independently of the action taken with regard to them by one Minister of the Interior or another, or by one Ministry or another. With regard to this point the declaration of the Minister of the Interior does not seem to me convincing, and I will now try to explain why, with this end in view, I must deal with the question of the massacres, and try to unravel and explain the part played in them by the printing-press which was the subject of our question.
“By a careful investigation of the massacres the enquirer is brought face to face with certain definite and isolated phenomena. First, the massacre is always preceded by reports of its preparation, accompanied by the issue of inflammatory proclamations, which are uniform both as regards subject-matter and style. Secondly, when the massacre occurs, the facts which are officially stated to be its cause invariably prove to be false. Thirdly, the action of those who take part in the massacre reveals a certain organisation, which deprives it of all accidental and elemental characteristics. Those who take part in the massacre act in the consciousness of some right, in the consciousness of impunity, and they only continue acting till this consciousness is shaken; when that moment arrives the massacre ceases swiftly and easily. Further, in the action of the police there is never any uniformity, and while certain police districts are devastated by the massacres under the eyes of a considerable constabulary force, others remain almost untouched owing to the protection of the police, who perform their duties conscientiously and energetically. Finally, when the massacre is over, arrests are made, and the authorities who examine the culprits cannot help having the impression that those who have been brought before them are less like criminals than ignorant people who have been deceived by some definite thing. Thus we feel that some kind of uniform and widely-planned organisation exists. Those who affirm that it is simply the doing of the Government, and think that the question is thereby settled, are mistaken, but they are not wholly mistaken; and the events of the past winter, which form the subject of our question, will help us to throw some light on these dark proceedings. In January, 1905, a great quantity of well-printed proclamations, which had been widely circulated in the chief centres of Southern and Western Russia, together with alarming complaints regarding the preparation of massacres in Vilna, Bielostok, Kieff, &c., came into the hands of some one who occupied a subordinate position in the Ministry of the Interior, and who was well known as an enemy of massacres (I am not speaking of myself).
“The massacre at Homel in January confirmed the fears which had been expressed, and spurred the above-mentioned individual to spare no efforts to prevent further massacres, which he succeeded in doing owing to the steps taken by the Prime Minister (Count Witte), who gradually succeeded in discovering the working of the hidden organisation. It was then that the following facts concerning the action of the massacre-mongers came to light. A group of persons, forming the active militia of our own ‘patriotic’ societies, working together with people closely related to a certain newspaper (The Moscow Gazette) started an active anti-revolutionary movement. Being ‘patriots’ in the sense recently defined by the member for Tver and ‘full Russians,’ they discovered the cause of the revolution to lie in the non-Russian races, in the inhabitants of the outlying districts, and among the Jews. They called on the Russian people, and especially the Russian soldiers, to grapple with the rebels, in ten thousands of proclamations of the most repulsive character. These proclamations were transmitted by members of the society to the place of action, and handed over there to their local allies, who in their turn distributed them with careful interpretations. The consequences, judged from the point of view of those who were trying to maintain central authority intact, were curious. The assistant of the Chief of Police (I take an ordinary example) distributes the proclamation without informing his chief. Or, for instance, the head of the first police station would be confided in, but not the head of the second. Special sums of money came into the possession of some of the subordinates of the Gendarmerie; certain obscure persons began to visit them; rumours circulated in the town of certain preparations; frightened people sought the Governor. The Governor reassured them, feeling, however, that the situation was far from reassuring. From the Ministry came telegrams about measures to be taken, and measures were often taken, but measures taken in this sense were far from inspiring universal confidence.