The result of the absence of this hard and binding cement of prejudice and discipline is that it is very difficult to attain a standard of efficiency in matters where efficiency is indispensable. For instance, in war. In a regiment with which I lived for a time during the war there was a young officer who absolutely insisted on the maintenance of a high standard of efficiency. He insisted on his orders being carried out to the letter; his fellow-officers thought he was rather mad. One day we had arrived in a village, and one of the younger officers had ordered the horses to be put up in the yard facing the house in which we were to live. Presently the officer to whom I have alluded arrived, and ordered the horses to be taken out and put into a separate yard, as he considered the arrangement which he found on his arrival to be insanitary—which it was. He went away, and the younger officer did not dream of carrying out his order.
“What is the use?” he said, “the horses may just as well stay where they are.”
They considered this man to be indulging in an unnecessary pose, but he was not, according to our ideas, in the least a formalist or a lover of red tape; he merely insisted on what he considered to be an irreducible minimum of discipline, the result being that he was a square peg in a round hole. Moreover, when people committed, or commit (and this is true in any department of public life in Russia), a glaring offence, or leave undone an important part of their duty, it is very rare that they are dealt with drastically; they are generally threatened with punishment which ends in platonic censure. And this fact, combined with a bureaucratic system, has dangerous results, for the official often steps beyond the limits of his duty and takes upon himself to commit lawless acts, and to exercise unlawful and arbitrary functions, knowing perfectly well that he can do so with impunity, and that he will not be punished. And one of the proofs that a new era is now beginning in Russia is a series of phenomena never before witnessed, and which have occurred not long ago—namely, the punishment and dismissal of guilty officials, such as, for instance, that of Gurko, who was dismissed from his post in the Government for having been responsible for certain dishonest dealings in the matter of the Famine Relief.
Of course such indulgence, or rather the slackness resulting from it, is not universal. Otherwise the whole country would go to pieces. And yet so far from going to pieces, even through a revolution things jogged on somehow or other. For against every square yard of slackness there is generally a square inch of exceptional capacity, and a square foot of dogged efficiency, and thus the balance is restored. The incompetency of a Stoessel, and a host of others, is counterbalanced not only by the brilliant energy of a Kondratenko, but by the hard work of thousands of unknown men. And this is true throughout all public life in Russia. At the same time, the happy-go-lucky element, the feeling of “What does it matter?” of what they call nichevo, is the preponderating quality; and it is only so far counterbalanced by sterner qualities as to make the machine go on. This accounts also for the apparent weakness of the revolutionary element in Russia. The ranks of these people, which at one moment appear to be so formidable, at the next moment seem to have scattered to the four winds of heaven. They appear to give in and to accept, to submit and be resigned to fate. But there is nevertheless an undying passive resistance; and at the bottom of the Russian character, whether that character be employed in revolutionary or in other channels, there is an obstinate grit of resistance. Again, one is met in Russian history, from the days of Peter the Great down to the present day, with isolated instances of exceptional energy and of powers of organisation, such as Souvorov, Skobelieff, Kondratenko, Kilkov, and, to take a less known instance, Kroustalieff (who played a leading part in organising the working classes during the great strike in 1905).
The way in which troops were poured into Manchuria during the war across a single line, which was due to the brilliant organisation of Prince Kilkov, is in itself a signal instance of organisation and energy in the face of great material difficulties. The station at Liaoyang was during the war under the command of a man whose name I have forgotten, but who showed the same qualities of energy and resource. On the day Liaoyang was evacuated, and while the station was being shelled, he managed to get off every train safely, and to leave nothing behind. There were many such instances which are at present little known, to be set against the incompetence and mismanagement of which one hears so much.
It is perhaps this blend of opposite qualities, this mixture of softness and slackness and happy-go-lucky insouciance (all of which qualities make a thing as pliant as putty and as yielding as dough) with infinite capacity for taking pains, and the inspiring energy and undefeated patience in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, which makes the Russian character difficult to understand. You have, on the one hand, the man who bows his head before an obstacle and says that it does not after all matter very much; and, on the other hand, the man who with a few straws succeeds in making a great palace of bricks. Peter the Great was just such a man, and Souvorov and Kondratenko were the same in kind, although less in degree. And again, you have the third type, the man who, though utterly defeated, and apparently completely submissive, persists in resisting—the passive resister whose obstinacy is unlimited, and whose influence in matters such as the revolutionary propaganda is incalculable.
It has been constantly said that Russia is the land of paradoxes, and there is perhaps no greater paradox than the mixture in the Russian character of obstinacy and weakness, and the fact that the Russian is sometimes inclined to throw up the sponge instantly, while at others he becomes himself a tough sponge, which, although pulled this way and that, is never pulled to pieces. He is undefeated and indefatigable in spite of enormous odds, and thus we are confronted in Russian history with men as energetic as Peter the Great, and as slack as Alexeieff the Viceroy.
People talk of the waste of Providence in never making a ruby without a flaw, but is it not rather the result of an admirable economy, which never deals out a portion of coffee without a certain admixture of chicory?
FOOTNOTES:
[2] See Tagantseff, Russian Criminal Law.