The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted, the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking buffonade, and the “Mighty Ham,” whose coming was predicted a few years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly. Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of despair, decay, and demoralization. A thick fog of nihilism, not the Nihilism of Turgenyev’s times, but nihilism in its direct negative meaning, enwraps the martyred land of the Czar, and one can hardly discern a bright spot on the cloudy horizon.
In the past year the “cloudy horizon” has slightly brightened. Grave symptoms have appeared in the seemingly calm atmosphere which suggested Vereshchagin’s All is Quiet on Shipka. Notwithstanding the strict censorship of dispatches one could easily discern from the news items that the volcano has not been extinguished yet. True, the orgy of the reactionary forces has not abated; freedom of spoken and written word is still a myth; the majority of the Douma is “a trillion times blacker than black”—to use a Bodenheimesque figure; the revolutionary organizations are dragging a pitiful existence in the underground, and the average citizen is still seeking safety from the cossack’s knout in phlegmatic splein. Yet signs of gratifying unrest have been manifestly displayed of late in various camps of the Empire. The rapidly developing capitalistic class has come to realize the deadening effect of the bureaucratic regime on industry and commerce, and resolutions have been passed at numerous conventions of manufacturers, bankers, and other big business-men, condemning the stifling policy of the archaic government. The tragicomedy of the Beilis process which revealed the puerile helplessness of the rotten State justice, has united all cultured Russia in a tremendous protest against the existing order; lawyers, journalists, physicians, artists, teachers, and men of other liberal professions, signed fiery resolutions whose leit-motif was Chekhov’s sad verdict—“Such life is impossible!” The unrest among the army, and particularly among the navy, has had a great symptomatic significance. Multitudinous arrests among soldiers and sailors, sporadic trials of revolutionary military organizations, frequent transportations and transfers of regiments and vessels, declaration of martial law in some important ports,—such have been the albatrosses of the oncoming storm. After the crash of the proletarian uprising of 1905 the remnants of the revolutionists have concentrated all their forces against the stanchest citadel of Czardom—the army and the navy, justly considering that only a military coup d’état could change things in present day Russia. The situation became definitely threatening last July, during the visit of President Poincaré, when the Russian proletariat, defying all manners and bon ton towards “allied France,” suddenly and unexpectedly marred the display of friendly demonstrations by an epidemic outburst of general strikes in St. Petersburg (or must we, by order of Nicolas II., say—Petrograd?) and in other metropolises.
Amidst these pregnant preludes burst out the war bomb. For the tottering absolutism it came most timely as the saving trump. Whether we believe the press informations about the mad wave of patriotism overflowing Russia or not, there can be no doubt that in view of the threatening national catastrophy internal differences will lose their keenness and will give way to easily drummed-up imperial solidarity, as far as the average citizens are concerned. The uncompromising revolutionists will hardly have a considerable following, especially when we consider the fact that the Czar has been showing surprising tact and foresight of late by granting concessions to his subjects and lavishly extending tempting promises to the oppressed nationalities. The constantly humiliated and insulted citizen; the empoverished overtaxed moujik; the flogged workingman; the bleeding, robbed, deprived-of-rights Pole, Finn, Armenian, Caucasian, Jew, Lithuanian, Little-Russian,—all these elements that make up the abstraction “Russia” would have to possess a great deal of optimism in order to take seriously the spasmodic ejaculations of the drowning “Little Father” who has beaten the world’s record as a perjurer. Yet one need not be a specialist in mass psychology to predict the success of Nicholas’s bait. We may further prophesy that, whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will emerge purged and electrified, stirred and volcanized. Surely, “such life,” pre-war life, will be “impossible.”
The Silver Ship
Skipwith Cannéll
A silver ship with silken sail
Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,
Swift to an island leper pale
Where dead hands furled the silken sail.
Then to the island bore they me,