Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of Russia

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So by the Treaty of Berlin England had acquired the island of Cyprus,
and had compelled Russia, after immense sacrifice of blood and
treasure, to relinquish her own gains and to subscribe to the line of
policy which she desired. A costly and victorious war had been
nullified by a single diplomatic battle at Berlin.

The pride of Russia was deeply wounded. It was openly said that the
Congress was an outrage upon Russian sensibilities--that "Russian
diplomacy was more destructive than Nihilism."

Emperor Alexander had reached the meridian of his popularity in those
days of promised reforms, before the Polish insurrection came to chill
the currents of his soul. For a long time the people would not believe
he really intended to disappoint their hope; but when one reform after
another was recalled, when one severe measure after another was
enacted, and when he surrounded himself with conservative advisers and
influences, it was at last recognized that the single beneficent act
history would have to record in this reign would be that one act of
1861. And now his prestige was dimmed and his popularity still more
diminished by such a signal diplomatic defeat at Berlin.

CHAPTER XXV

ALEXANDER II. ASSASSINATED--NIHILISM

The emancipation had been a disappointment to its promoters and to the
serfs themselves. It was an appalling fact that year after year the
death-rate had alarmingly increased, and its cause was--starvation. In
lands the richest in the world, tilled by a people with a passion for
agriculture, there was not enough bread! The reasons for this are too
complex to be stated here, but a few may have brief mention. The
allotment of land bestowed upon each liberated serf was too small to
enable him to live and to pay his taxes, unless the harvests were
always good and he was always employed. He need not live, but his
taxes must be paid. It required three days' work out of each week to
do that; and if he had not the money when the dreaded day arrived, the
tax-collector might sell his corn, his cattle, his farming implements,
and his house. But reducing whole communities to beggary was not wise,
so a better way was discovered, and one which entailed no disastrous
economic results. He was flogged. The time selected for this settling
of accounts was when the busy season was over; and Stepniak tells us it
was not an unusual thing for more than one thousand peasants in the
winter--in a single commune--to be seen awaiting their turn to have
their taxes "flogged out." Of course, before this was endured all
means had been exhausted for raising the required amount. Usury, that
surest road to ruin, and the one offering the least resistance, was the
one ordinarily followed. Thus was created that destructive class
called _Koulaks_, or _Mir-eaters_, who, while they fattened upon the
necessities of the peasantry, also demoralized the state by creating a
wealthy and powerful class whom it would not do to offend, and whose
abominable and nefarious interests must not be interfered with.

Then another sort of bondage was discovered, one very nearly
approaching to serfdom. Wealthy proprietors would make loans to
distressed communes or to individuals, the interest of the money to be
paid by the peasants in a stipulated number of days' work every week
until the original amount was returned. Sometimes, by a clause in the
contract increasing the amount in case of failure to pay at a certain
time, the original debt, together with the accruing interest, would be
four or five times doubled. And if, as was probable, the principal
never was returned, the peasant worked on year after year gratuitously,
in the helpless, hopeless bondage of debt. Nor were these the worst of
their miseries, for there were the _Tchinovniks_--or government
officials--who could mete out any punishment they pleased, could order
a whole community to be flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a
military force or even lend it to private individuals for the
subjugation of refractory peasants.

And this was what they had been waiting and hoping for, for two
centuries and a half! But with touching loyalty not one of them
thought of blaming the Tsar. Their "Little Father," if he only knew
about it, would make everything right. It was the nobility, the wicked
nobility, that had brought all this misery upon them and cheated them
out of their happiness! They hated the nobility for stealing from them
their freedom and their land; and the nobility hated them for not being
prosperous and happy, and for bringing famine and misery into the
state, which had been so kind and had emancipated them.

As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds
in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems
they presented. In a land in which the associative principle was
indigenous, _Socialism_ was a natural and inevitable growth. Then,
exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by
the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into
existence that word of dire significance in Russia--_Nihilism_, and
following quickly upon that, its logical sequence--_Anarchism_, which,
if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.

It was Turguenief who first applied the ancient term "Nihilist" to a
certain class of radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of society,
like that of the eighteenth-century philosophers in France, was based
upon a negation of the principle of authority. All institutions,
social and political, however disguised, were tyrannies, and must go.
In the newly awakened Russian mind, this first assumed the mild form of
a demand for the removal of _legislative_ tyranny, by a system of
gradual reforms. This had failed--now the demand had become a mandate.
The people _must_ have relief. The Tsar was the one person who could
bestow it, and if he would not do so voluntarily, he must be compelled
to grant it. No one man had the right to wreck the happiness of
millions of human beings. If the authority was centralized, so was the
responsibility. Alexander's entire reign had been a curse--and
emancipation was a delusion and a lie. He must yield or perish. This
vicious and degenerate organization had its center in a highly educated
middle class, where men with nineteenth-century intelligence and
aspirations were in frenzied revolt against methods suited to the time
of the Khans. The inspiring motive was not love of the people, but
hatred of their oppressors. Appeals to the peasantry brought small
response, but the movement was eagerly joined by men and women from the
highest ranks in Russia.

Secret societies and organizations were everywhere at work, recruited
by misguided enthusiasts, and by human suffering from all classes.
Wherever there were hearts bruised and bleeding from official cruelty,
in whatever ranks, there the terrible propaganda found sympathizers, if
not a home; men--and still more, women--from the highest families in
the nobility secretly pledging themselves to the movement, until
Russian society was honeycombed with conspiracy extending even to the
household of the Tsar. Proclamations were secretly issued calling upon
the peasantry to arise. In spite of the vigilance of the police,
similar invitations to all the Russian people were posted in
conspicuous places--"We are tired of famine, tired of having our sons
perish upon the gallows, in the mines, or in exile. Russia demands
liberty; and if she cannot have liberty--she will have vengeance!"

Such was the tenor of the threats which made the life of Emperor
Alexander a miserable one after 1870. He had done what not one of his
predecessors had been willing to do. He had, in the face of the
bitterest opposition, bestowed the gift of freedom upon 23,000,000
human beings. In his heart he believed he deserved the good-will and
the gratitude of his subjects. How gladly would he have ruled over a
happy empire! But what could he do? He had absolute power to make his
people miserable--but none to make them happy. It was not his fault
that he occupied a throne which could only be made secure by a policy
of stern repression. It was not his fault that he ruled through a
system so elementary, so crude, so utterly inadequate, that to
administer justice was an impossibility. Nor was it his fault that he
had inherited autocratic instincts from a long line of ancestors. In
other words, it was not his fault that he was the Tsar of Russia!

The grim shadow of assassination pursued him wherever he went. In 1879
the imperial train was destroyed by mines placed beneath the tracks.
In 1880 the imperial apartments in "the Winterhof" were partially
wrecked by similar means. Seventeen men marched stolidly to the
gallows, regretting nothing except the failure of their crime; and
hundreds more who were implicated in the plot were sent into perpetual
exile in Siberia. The hand never relaxed--nor was the Constitution
demanded by these atrocious means granted.

On the 13th of March, 1881, while the Emperor was driving, a bomb was
thrown beneath his carriage. He stepped out of the wreck unhurt. Then
as he approached the assassin, who had been seized by the police,
another was thrown. Alexander fell to the ground, exclaiming, "Help
me!" Terribly mutilated, but conscious, the dying Emperor was carried
into his palace, and there in a few hours he expired.

In the splendid obsequies of the Tsar, nothing was more touching than
the placing of a wreath upon his bier by a deputation of peasants. It
can be best described in their own words. The Emperor was lying in the
Cathedral wrapped in a robe of ermine, beneath a canopy of gold and
silver cloth lined with ermine. "At last we were inside the church,"
says the narrative. "We all dropped on our knees and sobbed, our tears
flowing like a stream. Oh, what grief! We rose from our knees, again
we knelt, and again we sobbed. This did we three times, our hearts
breaking beside the coffin of our benefactor. There are no words to
express it. And what honor was done us! The General took our wreath,
and placed it straightway upon the breast of our Little Father. Our
peasants' wreath laid on his heart, his martyr breast--as we were in
all his life nearest to his heart! Seeing this we burst again into
tears. Then the General let us kiss his hand--and there he lay, our
Tsar-martyr, with a calm, loving expression on his face--as if he, our
Little Father, had fallen asleep."

If anything had been needed to make the name Nihilism forever odious,
it was this deed. If anything were required to reveal the bald
wickedness of the creed of Nihilism, it was supplied by this aimless
sacrifice of the one sovereign who had bestowed a colossal reform upon
Russia. They had killed him, and had then marched unflinchingly to the
gallows--and that was all--leaving others bound by solemn oaths to
bring the same fate upon his successor. The whole energy of the
organization was centered in secreting dynamite, awaiting a favorable
moment for its explosion, then dying like martyrs, leaving others
pledged to repeat the same horror--and so _ad infinitum_. In their
detestation of one crime they committed a worse one. They conspired
against the life of civilization--as if it were not better to be ruled
by despots than assassins, as if a bad government were not better than
none!

The existence of Nihilism may be explained, though not extenuated. Can
anyone estimate the effect upon a single human being to have known that
a father, brother, son, sister, or wife has perished under the knout?
Could such a person ever again be capable of reasoning calmly or sanely
upon "political reforms"? If there were any slumbering tiger-instincts
in this half-Asiatic people, was not this enough to awaken them? There
were many who had suffered this, and there were thousands more who at
that very time had friends, lovers, relatives, those dearer to them
than life, who were enduring day by day the tortures of exile, subject
to the brutal punishments of irresponsible officials. It was this
which had converted hundreds of the nobility into conspirators--this
which had made Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of one of the highest
officials in the land, give the signal for the murder of the Emperor,
and then, scorning mercy, insist that she should have the privilege of
dying upon the gallows with the rest.

But tiger-instincts, whatever their cause, must be extinguished. They
cannot coexist with civilization. Human society as constituted to-day
can recognize no excuse for them. It forbids them--and the Nihilist is
the Ishmael of the nineteenth century.

The world was not surprised, and perhaps not even displeased, when
Alexander III. showed a dogged determination not to be coerced into
reforms by the assassination of his father nor threats of his own. His
coronation, long deferred by the tragedy which threatened to attend it,
finally took place with great splendor at Moscow in 1883. He then
withdrew to his palace at Gatschina, where he remained practically a
prisoner. Embittered by the recollection of the fate of his father,
who had died in his arms, and haunted by conspiracies for the
destruction of himself and his family, he was probably the least happy
man in his empire. His every act was a protest against the spirit of
reform. The privileges so graciously bestowed upon the Grand Duchy of
Finland by Alexander I. were for the first time invaded. Literature
and the press were placed under rigorous censorship. The _Zemstvo_,
his father's gift of local self-government to the liberated serfs, was
practically withdrawn by placing that body under the control of the
nobility.

[Illustration: The Coronation of the Czar Alexander III., 1883. The
Emperor crowning the Empress at the Church of the Assumption. From a
drawing by Edwin B. Child.]

It was a stern, joyless reign, without one act intended to make glad
the hearts of the people. The depressing conditions in which he lived
gradually undermined the health of the Emperor. He was carried in
dying condition to Livadia, and there, surrounded by his wife and his
children, he expired November 1, 1894.

CHAPTER XXVI

FINLAND--HAGUE TRIBUNAL--POLITICAL CONDITIONS

When Nicholas II., the gentle-faced young son of Alexander, came to the
throne there were hopes that a new era for Russia was about to
commence. There has been nothing yet to justify that hope. The
austere policy pursued by his father has not been changed. The recent
decree which has brought grief and dismay into Finland is not the act
of a liberal sovereign! A forcible Russification of that state has
been ordered, and the press in Finland has been prohibited from
censuring the _ukase_ which has brought despair to the hearts and homes
of the people. The Russian language has been made obligatory in the
university of Helsingfors and in the schools, together with other
severe measures pointing unmistakably to a purpose of effacing the
Finnish nationality--a nationality, too, which has never by disloyalty
or insurrection merited the fate of Poland.

But if this has struck a discordant note, the invitation to a
Conference of the Nations with a view to a general disarmament has been
one of thrilling and unexpected sweetness and harmony. Whether the
Peace Congress at The Hague (1899) does or does not arrive at important
immediate results, its existence is one of the most significant facts
of modern times. It is the first step on the way to that millennial
era of universal peace toward which a perfected Christian civilization
must eventually lead us, and it remained for an autocratic Tsar of
Russia to sound the call and to be the leader in this movement.

At the death-bed of his father, Nicholas was betrothed to a princess of
the House of Hesse, whose mother was Princess Alice, daughter of Queen
Victoria. Upon her marriage this Anglo-German princess was compelled
to make a public renunciation of her own faith, and to accept that of
her imperial consort--the orthodox faith of Russia. The personal
traits of the Emperor seem so exemplary that, if he fails to meet the
heroic needs of the hour, the world is disposed not to reproach him,
but rather to feel pity for the young ruler who has had thrust upon him
such an insoluble problem. His character recalls somewhat that of his
great-uncle Alexander I. We see the same vague aspiration after grand
ideals, and the same despotic methods in dealing with things in the
concrete. No general amnesty attended his coronation, no act of
clemency has been extended to political exiles. Men and women whose
hairs have whitened in Siberia have not been recalled--not one thing
done to lighten the awful load of anguish in his empire. It may have
been unreasonable to have looked for reforms; but certainly it was not
too much to expect mercy!

What one man could reform Russia? Who could reform a volcano? There
are frightful energies beneath that adamantine surface--energies which
have been confined by a rude, imperfectly organized system of force; a
chain-work of abuses roughly welded together as occasion required. It
is a system created by emergencies,--improvised, not grown,--in which
to remove a single abuse endangers the whole. When the imprisoned
forces tried to escape at one spot, more force was applied and more
bands and more rivets brutally held them down, and were then retained
as a necessary part of the whole.

On the surface is absolutism in glittering completeness, and beneath
that--chaos. Lying at the bottom of that chaos is the great mass of
Slavonic people undeveloped as children--an embryonic
civilization--utterly helpless and utterly miserable. In the mass
lying above that exists the mind of Russia--through which course
streams of unduly developed intelligence in fierce revolt against the
omnipresence of misery. And still above that is the shining, enameled
surface rivaling that of any other nation in splendor. The Emperor may
say with a semblance of truth _l'etat c'est moi_, but although he may
combine in himself all the functions, judicial, legislative, and
executive, no channels have been supplied, no finely organized system
provided for conveying that triple stream to the extremities. The
living currents at the top have never reached the mass at the
bottom--that despised but necessary soil in which the prosperity of the
Empire is rooted. There has been no vital interchange between the
separated elements, which have been in contact, but not in union. And
Russia is as heterogeneous in condition as it is in elements. It has
accepted ready-made the methods of Greek, of Tatar, and of European;
but has assimilated none of them; and Russian civilization, with its
amazing quality, its bewildering variety of achievement in art,
literature, diplomacy, and in every field, is not a natural
development, but a monstrosity. The genius intended for a whole people
seems to have been crowded into a few narrow channels. Where have men
written with such tragic intensity? Where has there been music
suggesting such depths of sadness and of human passion? And who has
ever told upon canvas the story of the battlefield with such energy and
with such thrilling reality, as has Verestchagin?

The youngest among the civilizations, and herself still only partially
civilized, Russia is one of the most--if not the most--important factor
in the world-problem to-day, and the one with which the future seems
most seriously involved. She has only just commenced to draw upon her
vast stores of energy; energies which were accumulating during the ages
when the other nations were lavishly spending theirs. How will this
colossal force be used in the future? Moving silently and irresistibly
toward the East, and guided by a subtle and far-reaching policy, who
can foresee what will be the end, and what the ultimate destiny of the
Empire which had its beginning in a small Slavonic State upon the
Dnieper, and which, until a little more than a century ago, was too
much of a barbarian to be admitted into the fraternity of European
States.

The farthest removed from us in political ideals, Russia has in the
various crises in our national life always been America's truest
friend. When others apparently nearer have failed us, she has stood
steadfastly by us. We can never forget it. Owning a large portion of
the earth's surface, rich beyond calculation in all that makes for
national wealth and prosperity, with a peasantry the most confiding,
the most loyal, the most industrious in the world, with intellectual
power and genius in abundant measure, and with pride of race and a
patriotism profound and intense, what more does Russia need? Only
three things--that cruelty be abandoned; that she be made a homogeneous
nation; and that she be permitted to live under a government capable of
administering justice to her people. These she must have and do. In
the coming century there will be no place for barbarism. There will be
something in the air which will make it impossible that a great part of
a frozen continent shall be dedicated to the use of suffering human
beings, kept there by the will of one man. There will be something in
the air which will forbid cruelty and compel mercy and justice, and
which will make men or nations feign those virtues if they have them
not.

The antagonism between England and Russia has a deeper significance
than appears on the surface. It is not the Eastern question, not the
control of Constantinople, not the obtaining of concessions from China
which is at stake. It is the question which of two principles shall
prevail. The one represented by a despotism in which the people have
no part, or the one represented by a system of government through which
the will of the people freely acts. There can be but one result in
such a conflict, one answer to such a question. The eternal purposes
are writ too large in the past to mistake them. And it is the ardent
hope of America that Russia--that Empire which has so generously
accorded us her friendship in our times of peril--may not by cataclysm
from within, but of her own volition, place herself fully in line with
the ideals of an advanced civilization.

SUPPLEMENT TO SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA

From Rurik to Nicholas III. the policy of Russia has been determined by
its thirst for the sea. Every great struggle in the life of this
colossal land-locked empire has had for its ultimate object the opening
of a door to the ocean, from which nature has ingeniously excluded it.
In the first centuries of its existence Rurik and his descendants were
incessantly hurling themselves against the door leading to the
Mediterranean. But the door would not yield. Then Ivan IV. and his
descendants, with no greater success, hammered at the door leading to
the West. The thirst growing with defeat became a national instinct.
When Peter the Great first looked out upon the sea, at Archangel, and
when he created that miniature navy upon the Black Sea, and when he
dragged his capital from "Holy Moscow" to the banks of the Neva,
planting it upon that submerged tract, he was impelled by the same
instinct which is to-day making history in the Far East.

It was in 1582 that Yermak, the Cossack robber and pirate, under
sentence of death, won a pardon from Ivan IV. ("the Terrible") in
exchange for Siberia--that unknown region stretching across the
Continent of Asia to the Pacific. Eight hundred Cossacks under the
daring outlaw had sufficed to drive the scattered Asiatic tribes before
them and to establish the sovereignty of Yermak, who then gladly
exchanged his prize with the "Orthodox Tsar" for his "traitorous head."

It was the tremendous energy of one man, Muraviev, which led to the
development of Eastern Siberia. Pathfinder and pioneer in the march
across the Asiatic continent, drawing settlers after him as he moved
along, he reached the mouth of the Amur river in 1846, and, at last,
the empire possessed a naval station upon the Pacific, which was named
Nikolaifsk, after the reigning Tsar, Nicholas I.

It was this Tsar, great-grandfather of Nicholas II., who, grimly
turning his back upon Western Europe, set the face of Russia toward the
East, reversing the direction which has always been the course of
empire. What had Russia to gain from alliances in the West? Her
future was in the East; and he intended to drive back the tide of
Europeanism which his predecessors had so industriously invited.
Russian youths were prohibited from being educated in Western
universities, and at the same time there was established at Canton a
school of instruction where they might learn the Chinese language and
the methods and spirit of Chinese civilization. It was a determined
purpose to Orientalize his empire. And violating all the traditions of
history, the flight of the Russian Eagle from that moment was toward
the rising, not the setting sun.

Muraviev, now Governor of the Eastern Provinces of Siberia, was
empowered to negotiate a treaty with China to determine the rights of
the two nations upon the river Amur, which separated Manchuria, the
northernmost province of China, from Russian Siberia. The treaty,
which was concluded in 1858, conceded the left bank of this river to
Russia.

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