Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which is still so greatly misunderstood in England. It was not the uprising of an oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive. All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the pogrom, and Siberia for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying, the "Marseillaise" on their lips, with the fortitude of Christian martyrs. But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress, which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each other's language; it is a renewal of the Titanic contest, which was decided in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between the mediaeval and the modern world. To the modern mind no period is so difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is another word for process, of success which implies perpetual change, in either case of "getting on" somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how; our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural, has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion, if we have one, a matter of "progressive revelation." We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present. He lived in the presence of perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays. Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate; nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was still confined to a few towns. Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.
[Footnote 1: This, of course, by no means implies that she is behind the West, or that she is of necessity bound to pass through the same process of development. The problem of modern Russia is not to imitate the West but to discover some way of coming to terms with Western ideals without surrendering her own.]
Will she continue to maintain this attitude? "The Russian peasant," says Mr. Maurice Baring, "as long as he tills the ground will never abandon his religion or the observance of it…. Because the religion of the peasant is the working hypothesis taught him by life; and by his observance of it he follows what he conceives to be the dictates of common sense consecrated by immemorial custom." The crucial point of this passage is the conditional clause: "as long as he tills the ground." Of course, Russia, the granary of Europe, must always be predominantly an agricultural country; yet she is at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by intelligentsia. Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up Russia will become, according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of The Russian Year-Book, "without a doubt the richest Empire the world has ever seen." Attracted by her vast mining possibilities, by her enormous virgin forests, by her practically unlimited capacity for grain-production, the capital of Europe is knocking at the doors of Russia. Factories are rising, mines being started all over the country. Russia is about to be exploited by European business enterprise, just as America and Africa have been. The world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people as potential cheap labour. Thus within the last few years something analogous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into existence in Russia. We may catch a glimpse of what these new classes are like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called Changing Russia. He writes:
"The Russian bourgeois is of this sort; he wants to know the price of everything. Of things which are independent of price he knows nothing, or, if he knows of them, he sneers at them and hates them. Talk to him of religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of woman, and show that you understand anything about her unsexually; talk to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for money—and the bourgeois is uneasy…. Instead of opera, the gramophone; instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature, the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of modern English life…. It may be thought that there is little harm in the commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not so bad as not to be on the way to something better. But that would be a mistake; if once the Russian nation becomes thoroughly perverted, it will be the most treacherous, most vile, most dangerous in Europe. For the perverted Russian all is possible; it is indeed his favourite maxim, borrowed, he thinks, from Nietzsche, that 'all is permitted,' and by 'all' he means all abomination, all fearful and unheard-of bestiality, all cruelty, all falsity, all debauch…. Selfish as it is possible to be, crass, heavy, ugly, unfaithful in marriage, unclean, impure, incapable apparently of understanding the good and the true in their neighbours and in life—such is the Russian bourgeois."
Mr. Graham's picture of the new proletariat in the Ural mines is an equally horrible one:
"Gold mining is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man are made viler. If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauchery…. The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand pounds, it is rather difficult to know how to spend it. His ideal of happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him lies in that…. Mias is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone. It is situated in a most lovely hollow among the hills, and, seen from the distance, it is one of the most beautiful villages of North Russia; but seen from within, it is a veritable inferno."
Mr. Graham writes as a poet rather than as an economist or a sociologist, but there is no doubt a grave danger to Russia in a sudden adoption of industrial life.
Intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariate are all products of the same forces, all belong to the same family; they are westernised Russians; they have passed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century at one stride, and the violent transition has cut them completely adrift from tradition and from all moral and religious standards; books, commerce, and industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilisation, have not civilised such Russians, they have de-civilised them. But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fraction of the nation; and there are happily signs that the dangers of an exotic culture are being realised even by the intelligentsia themselves. Since the failure of the revolution there has been a remarkable revival of interest among Russian thinkers in the native institutions, habits, and even the religion of the country; and it may be that in time there will emerge from this chaos of ideals a culture and a civilisation which will "make the best of both worlds" by adopting Western methods without surrendering an inch of the nation's spiritual territory, above which floats the standard of religion, simplicity, and brotherly love. The present war, terrible as it is, may do something towards bringing this about, for the Russian people, faced by a common danger and united in a common purpose, are now of one mind and one heart, in a way that they have not been since a century ago Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Moscow.
And let this be said: if Russia should ever cease to be Russia, if she ever loses those grand national characteristics which make her so different from the West, and therefore so difficult for us Westerns to understand, the world as a whole will be infinitely the poorer for that loss. We need Russia even more than Russia needs us; for, while we have grasped the trappings, she possesses the real spirit of democracy. Of the three democratic ideals, proclaimed by France in 1789, the mystical trinity: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, how much has yet been realised by the peoples of the West? And Russia is in the way of realising them all! Fraternity and equality are, as we have seen, the distinctive features of her national spirit and social structure, and, if her liberty is as yet imperfect on the political side, it is far more complete than ours on the side of moral tolerance and respect for the sanctity of human personality. After all, the reason why Russia has not got complete political freedom is because, as a nation, she has hitherto taken no interest in politics; for the first time in 1905 she discovered the use of political action, and she got out of it a solution of the agrarian distress and a representative assembly; when she wants more liberty in this direction, she will have no difficulty in securing it.
§4. The Subject Nationalities.—It may fairly be objected at this point that while Russia may possess these excellent qualities, she has consistently refused to allow liberty to other peoples, to the Jews, for example, the Poles, and the Finns. It is necessary therefore to say something on the matter of Russia's subject nationalities before bringing these remarks to a conclusion.