CHAPTER XVI
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
THE following pages were written in Moscow nine years ago under the direct impression of the Civil War which shook the Russian Empire to its very foundations. Such was the elemental violence of the political hurricane that every European publicist predicted the imminent fall of Russian Tzardom. From a close examination of the situation and from a systematic calculation of the political forces at work, I was driven to adopt quite a different conclusion. I confidently predicted that nothing would happen. Nothing did happen. Tzardom weathered the storm. The Government was stronger after the war than before. The revolution proved abortive.
The revolution collapsed. But it was easy to foresee that the revolutionary forces would only be driven back to gather strength for another and a more determined onslaught. The great Italian thinker, Vico, the father of the modern philosophy of history, tells us that human history is only a succession of corsi and ricorsi—of periodical recurrences—that mankind moves in a spiral, each successive generation, reverting to the point from which it started, but each time starting afresh on a higher level. Contemporary Russian history strikingly illustrates this theory of "recurrences." The internal political situation in Russia after the European War will be substantially the same as that which existed after the Russo-Japanese War. All the difficulties which confronted the Government in 1906 will still confront the Government in 1916. Nearly all the reforms which demanded a solution then still demand a solution to-day. The land question is still largely unsolved. Decentralization and Home Rule are wanted as urgently as ever. Finland and Poland still demand autonomy. An independent judicature, an independent Church, an independent Press, are still pious desiderata. Armenians and Jews are still suffering from shocking disabilities and still require protection against organized massacre.
The only difference between the political situation in 1906 and the situation to-day is this, that the demands for reform will be far more pressing, and that the reforms themselves have come much more nearer maturity. It will be far more difficult to refuse satisfaction after a great democratic and national conflict. As I have attempted to prove in the course of this book, a great national war in Russia has always acted as a Revolutionary force in the political development of Russia. It seems, therefore, a safe prediction that the Russian Empire after this war will undergo a more far-reaching transformation than at any other period since Peter the Great. The only doubtful point is whether the Government will take a bold initiative as Alexander II did in the sixties, or whether reform will come as the result of a social upheaval as happened in 1906.
Whatever the immediate future may have in store for the Russian people, I have no hesitation as to the policy which ought to be followed on the morrow of the war, nor is there a single paragraph in the following pages which I would be prepared to alter. The forecasts which I made then I still confidently make to-day. The remedies which I propounded then I propound still more emphatically to-day. More firmly than ever do I believe that salvation will not come through a perennial and sterile conflict between two irreconcilable hostile forces, between a powerless Executive and an all-powerful Revolutionary Convention. Rather will salvation come through the systematic co-operation between a strong Executive and an Assembly of wise, moderate, practical and patriotic representatives ready to meet the Government half-way in the path of necessary reforms. More firmly than ever do I believe that salvation will come not primarily through a centralized Parliament superimposed upon a centralized bureaucracy, but through the releasing of new political forces, through the establishment of Autonomous Provinces and Independent Nationalities, and especially through the releasing of the spiritual forces, through the creation of Independent Churches. More firmly than ever do I believe that an unconditional concession of religious liberty, an honest application of the Edict of Toleration of 1905, must be the antecedent of political liberty.
Russian reformers are too much inclined to believe in the servile imitation of the British Parliamentary régime, in the adoption of the British Party System. The trouble is that whereas there are only three Parties in the British House of Commons there are twenty conflicting Parties in the Russian Duma, and it will readily be conceded that even an ideal British Parliament could not work very smoothly under such conditions. If the Russian Reformers must be guided by British precedents, let them be inspired by the wonderful example of the British Empire, which is not a centralized Empire, but a world-wide federation of self-governing communities, and where the Crown is but the visible symbol of political unity, the arbiter of all nationalities, the rallying centre of Imperial loyalty. It is only through the Russian Empire being converted into such a federation of free communities, it is only through deliberately renouncing national and racial antagonism, through repudiating religious intolerance, that the Russian people will work out their own destinies.
The historical inquiry before us is not one of purely academic interest. It is one of supreme practical importance. The political condition of Russia to-day is very like the political condition of France in 1789. To the Russian Revolutionists, the French Revolution is not a dead and distant past, it is a living present; it continues, and it will continue for a generation to come, to exert a subtle and profound influence which it is impossible to overrate. Even as the leaders of the French Revolution were haunted by the memories of ancient Rome, and by the heroes of Plutarch, the Russian Revolutionists are obsessed and possessed by the tragic events of 1789, and the heroes of the Terror. These events and these men are to them a permanent source of inspiration. Every psychologist and sociologist who has investigated the power of hypnotic suggestion and the laws of imitation will realize the enormous significance of the fact, all the more so because the Russian Revolution must be to some extent a purely artificial revolution and not a spontaneous outburst of elemental forces. Nearly all the leaders belonged to the intellectual classes, to what is characteristically called in Russia the "Intelliguenz." And these leaders have been brought up on the theories of 1789, they have been fed on the "Immortal Principles." They appear to me like students who are repeating to themselves lessons vaguely understood, or like actors who want to rehearse the same tragic parts over again. They would like to persuade the world that the Russian people are engaged in the same struggle for freedom and equality, and that their triumph would inaugurate a new era for Russia and for mankind. They insist that the one event is as inevitable as the other, that resistance is equally futile, that any form of opposition will only make the ultimate triumph more decisive and more bloody, and that Russia is doomed to travel the same road as the France of 1789—from Despotism through Terror, towards Liberty.
We saw in 1905 the scenes familiar to every student of history, the same passions, the same demagogues, the same spirit of optimism; we listened with the same grim irony to the same debates on the abolition of the death penalty on the very eve of a life-and-death struggle in which the same philanthropists threatened us that rivers of blood must flow. And did we not seem to hear the ring of the same historical words? How many revolutionists must have repeated on the dissolution of the first Duma the words of Mirabeau: Nous sommes ici par la Volonté du peuple et nous n'en sortirons que par la force des bayonnettes! How many of them were nerving themselves to action with the dictum of Danton: De l'Audace, et encore de l'audace et toujours de l'audace! How many of them challenged their enemies with the Frenchman's outburst: Jetons leur en défi une tete de roi! And how many Conservatives did repeat the pathetic lamentation: O Liberté. que de crimes sont commis en ton nom!
It must, therefore, be a subject of the most absorbing interest closely to investigate how far the analogies are real or misleading, and whether we may infer and expect similar conclusions from similar causes and similar antecedents; whether history is actually repeating itself and will give us a rehearsal, on a larger scene, of the tragedy which was enacted a hundred and twenty years ago.
I. Analogies Between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution
But it must be understood that the question before us is not merely whether there are certain broad and general resemblances between the two situations. Such broad analogies are only what one would naturally expect. All revolutionary outbursts, like the catastrophes of elemental nature, have some common features, because human nature in such emergencies remains the same in all times and in all climes. Everywhere, whether in Athens, in Rome, or in London, we find at work the same forces, the same motives disguised under different principles. Everywhere the people are used as tools and dupes in a movement which succeeds only through them, but not always with benefit to them. Sic vos non vobis. Everywhere we witness the same plot unfolding in the same manner: first an effete and corrupt Despotism—then Anarchy and Terror, and finally a Military Dictatorship: Cæsar or Medici, Cromwell or Napoleon.
It is not such broad human analogies which we are investigating. It must be obvious to the most superficial observer that there are between the two situations analogies much more special, much more unexpected, much more striking. Indeed so striking do they seem, that the Russian Revolution of 1905 may verily appear at first sight as a second edition, alas, not always corrected nor improved, but only expanded—of the Revolution of 1789!
(a) In both countries do we find at work the same political causes, the same political evolution. The reforms of Peter the Great seem copied from the administrative reforms of Louis XIV, with Provincial Governors taking the place of the French Intendants, with a mock aristocracy, only on court parade not on active duty. We find the same arbitrary autocracy, the same absentee landlords, the same corrupt bureaucracy, the same all-absorbing centralization killing all local initiative.
(b) In both countries we are struck with the same sudden paralysis of the executive power, the same wavering and divided counsels, the same court intrigues, the same good intentions, the same absence of a man strong enough to control the destructive forces.
(c) In both countries we find the same intellectual and spiritual antecedents, and just as in France all through the eighteenth century, so in Russia all through the nineteenth, the political revolution has been preceded and partly caused by a philosophical revolution. In both countries we witness a shaking of religious beliefs by the leaders of thought, a criticism of all existing institutions. In both cases we are confronted with the same striking contradiction between political despotism and spiritual anarchy, we see the same gathering of positive and negative electricities, bound to end in the same explosion. Almost every epoch-making writing of Voltaire and Montesquieu, of Diderot and Rousseau, has its counterpart in Russian literature. For Russian literature in the nineteenth century is not a purely artistic or contemplative literature. Each masterpiece has its political tendencies, is written with a purpose. Already, sixty years ago, the "Revizor" of Gogol was a blow dealt at bureaucracy. His "Dead Souls," as well as Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches," are an attack on serfdom. Turgenev's novel, "Fathers and Sons," is an analysis of nihilism. Dostoevsky's "The House of the Dead" is a revelation of the horrors of Siberian convict life. And to take the work of the two men, who in both countries have had the most magnetic influence—would it be possible to imagine a writer more like Rousseau than Tolstoy? No doubt Tolstoy is by far the more consistent thinker, the stronger personality, the nobler character, and the more creative and more original artist, indeed the most original artist the world has seen since Shakespeare; but apart from these personal characteristics, the work of the two men presents the most extraordinary similarity, and the influence of the one on the other is obvious and openly admitted by Tolstoy himself. In both we find the same extreme doctrines preached with the same earnestness and passionateness, the same subjective individualism, the same unexpected interpretation of Christianity, the same Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, the same attack on a Temporal Church in the name of an Eternal Gospel, the same attacks on society and civilization, the same optimism and appeal to the original goodness of man, the same return to Nature, to the Simple Life. And although Tolstoy's consistent anarchism prevents him from accepting the principles of Rousseau's Social Contract, these principles have found universal favour with the Russian Revolutionists.
And both in France and in Russia, the party of revolution seems to hold the field unchallenged. Just as the Gallican Church was silent after the golden age of Bossuet and Fénelon, even so the Russian Church has not produced, in the hour of need, one single great thinker, one single statesman. The only theological thinker Russia has produced in the nineteenth century, Vladimir Soloviov, so far from defending the Orthodox Church, preaches the reunion with Roman Catholicism.
(d) But not only do we find in both countries the same intellectual antecedents, with the same humanitarian creed, with the same radical uncompromising spirit, the same absence of the historical sense, the same belief in the regeneration of mankind, the same attitude to the Church and to positive Christianity, so different from the attitude of the English Puritan and Scottish Covenanters—but in Russia, as in France, the impulse has come from abroad. The Anglomania of the French thinkers is paralleled by the Cosmopolitanism of the Russian writers. Whilst Russian imaginative literature is supremely original, political literature is almost entirely borrowed from the West. The great Slavophile writers, Samarine, Aksakov, Chomiakov, Danilevski, have found little hearing. Even Tolstoy was repudiated since he expressed his disbelief in Western Parliamentary Institutions. The only doctrines that find favour are imported from England, France, and especially Germany. The present political philosophy in Russia is an olla podrida, a discordant pot pourri of Spencer, Buckle, Rousseau, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. The destructive thought of the whole world is made tributary to the Russian revolution.
(e) In both countries the revolution finds its chief supporters in the upper classes. Mirabeau, La Rochefoucauld, La Fayette, Lameth, Noailles, the Duke of Orleans, have found their successors in the three Princes Troubetzkoy, in Prince Dolgoroukov, in Prince Lvov, in Count Heyden. The aristocracy join the movement partly from dilettantism, partly from generous convictions, partly from ambition. They have been ruined by luxury, and by the emancipation of the serfs. They have been ousted from high places by the bureaucracy. They would like to play a part in the new régime. They hope that whilst leading the revolutionary forces they may be able to control them, but being generally absentee landlords they have lost touch with the people; being imbued not with the national spirit, but with foreign theories, they have forfeited their confidence.
(f) In Russia as well as in France we find the same financial and economic distress, the same agrarian fermentation. In both countries the peasantry form the backbone of the population, and their condition is lamentable. We all know the lurid picture in La Bruyère of the "wild beasts in human form." We have all read the gloomy accounts of Tolstoy, and the "power of darkness" in Russian villages. The peasant in 1905 was the silent pathetic chorus in the tragedy, at first keeping in the background whilst aristocrats and journalists fill the foreground. He is the dumb inarticulate actor whom nobody understands, whom hitherto everybody has neglected, but in whose name every one now claims to speak, whose interests every one claims to defend, because all feel that on him depends the ultimate success or failure of the revolution.
(g) In both countries the revolution begins with the same experiment of a centralized Parliament superimposed upon a centralized bureaucracy, doomed to end in failure, because it is without any root in the past, and cannot meet the needs of the people. And in both Parliaments we hear the same palaver, the same speeches, earnest yet hollow, sincere yet with the ring of rhetoric. In those long speeches of the first Duma on the abolition of the death penalty, do we not hear some echo of "Sea-green" Robespierre, who resigned his position as a judge because he could not muster the courage to inflict a death penalty, and who yet did not hesitate to send thousands of his opponents to the guillotine, and to wade to power through those same "rivers of blood" which his Russian imitators are prepared to cross!
(h) And do we not see the same strange contrast between the tragic magnitude of events, the immensity of the scene, and the mediocrity of the heroes? Even Michelet confesses to this mediocrity of the heroes of 1792. Speaking of the Club des Jacobins, he tells us "that collective action was far more powerful there than individual action, that the strongest, the most heroic individual, lost his advantages. In such associations, active mediocrity rises to importance, genius weighs very little."[1] Mirabeau is left without a successor, and even in his lifetime it is now historically proven that his real influence was very limited, and that his fiery speeches seldom turned the votes of the Constituent Assembly. Even so in Russia. The scene extends from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean. The issues at stake are tremendous. And yet the chief actors are ordinary human beings like ourselves, honest and inconsistent, clever and weak, themselves led by events instead of being born leaders and rulers of men. We are still waiting for the one great Russian statesman to appear.
(i) And finally, both revolutions were greeted by the unanimous applause of a sympathetic world. At the beginning of the French Revolution, not only poets like Wordsworth and Schiller, philosophers like Kant and Fichte, even practical statesmen hail the event as the beginning of a new era. The leader of the Liberal Party, Fox, indulges in the same declarations as his successor, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But in both cases the sympathy is equally hollow, because based on a complete ignorance of the real state of affairs. Very few Englishmen then knew the situation in France. And there were not in 1905 in Great Britain six publicists who had taken the trouble to study the Russian language and literature, who were able to read Russian newspapers, and who were able to investigate the situation at first hand. And therefore it happened in 1905 that, just as in 1792, sympathy speedily evaporated, and was followed by an equally unjustifiable outburst of hatred and contempt when these poor misguided "Tartars and barbarians" proved themselves unworthy of and unprepared for liberty, and happened to deceive the expectations of an enthusiastic world.
Few readers will be inclined to deny that the resemblances just indicated are most striking and most unexpected. And yet we have not altered the facts, we have not strained them, we have not even arranged them. Compared with its predecessor, the Russian Revolution of 1905 seems like one of those French plays which a resourceful stage manager adapts to the Russian stage. The names and places, the dresses and local colouring are alone changed. The characters are identical, and the plot is hurrying through the same thrilling episodes to the same dénouement. It seems as if we might accuse the Muse of History of plagiarizing herself, as if Fate had exhausted her possibilities, or as if she wanted to teach us the great moral lesson that mankind, untaught by the sufferings and the catastrophes of previous generations, shall be ever doomed to repeat the same blunders and the same crimes.
II. The Differences
Would it then be true that the Slav people, so powerful in their literature and in their imaginative art, so original in their temperament, as soon as they apply themselves to political action are only capable of fitful impulses, and unable to strike out a path of their own? Would it be true that 180,000,000 of Russia people are only to be like puppets in the hands of a few thousand bureaucrats or a few hundred agitators, who pull the wires, think out the plot and apportion the parts? And will the Russian people be doomed in a national emergency to borrow once more their reforms, their institutions, their whole machinery from their Western neighbours?
To this we might reply in the first place that the analogies we have noticed may be easily explained by the fact that the two nations possessed the same political organization—a combination of autocracy and centralized bureaucracy, that both nations have been largely agricultural, and that the intellectual classes have been imbued by the same principles. They may, perhaps, be further explained by some resemblances between the Slav temperament and the Celtic temperament, a certain impulsivness, an absence of self-control, and a predominance of the emotional qualities.
In the second place we might reply that, striking though the analogies may appear, they are not fundamental, and do not justify us in drawing out any inferences for the future. So far, in Russia we have only seen the preliminary, the destructive period. Now, destruction is the same in all times and in all places. A building is pulled down very much in the same way in every country. Blasting and blowing up are universal processes, dynamite is cosmopolitan; it is only when a building rises above ground that the characteristics of national architecture begin to appear.
And, therefore, it is only when we begin to think of the possibilities of a constructive revolution in Russia that differences arise which are far more important than any analogies and which must entirely change our forecast of events.
(a) The Russian autocracy have not lost their prestige in the eyes of the peasantry. Whilst in France the peasants, oppressed and exploited by the Crown and the Church and the absentee landlords, joined the ranks of the revolutionists in almost every province except Brittany and the Vendée, in Russia the peasantry seem to have remained loyal to the existing régime. Now, if this fact be true, it is decisive—for the peasantry still form 85 per cent. of the population, and whatever preliminary success might be achieved by the revolutionists, the ultimate success would depend on the support of the moujik.
I have just stated that the peasantry seem to be loyal, for it is almost impossible to know the facts with absolute certainty: in the first place, because the peasants have not the same means of expressing their feelings as the intellectual classes; in the second place, because for any information we possess we almost exclusively depend on the revolutionists themselves who control the European Press, and with whom the wish is father both to the thought and to the deed. We, therefore, can only judge from inference and arrive at probabilities.
But in support of the probable loyalty of the moujik I would submit the following important considerations:
(1) Loyalty has been for generations a religious tradition, and almost an instinct with the Russian peasantry, and such instincts have a very tough life in them, especially in a slow, patient, passive being like the moujik. After the disaster to the Russian fleet in 1905, I visited many villages in every part of the Empire. The image of the Tsar was still hanging in every izba with the icons of the saints. The peasants remember the broad fact that Tsardom has ever been on their side, and that whilst they owe their servitude and the kriepostnoe pravo to the aristocracy, they are indebted for their freedom to the Tsar liberator (osvoboditel). There exists a popular proverb: do Boga visoko, do Tsaria dalioko! God is too high: The Tsar is too far! This proverb indicates the deep-seated belief of the peasant that if it were only possible to let the Tsar know his wishes and his wants relief would be soon at hand.
(2) The peasantry do not want a central Parliament, they are not susceptible to political metaphysics nor to "immortal principles" which would carry the French off their feet. If they have any desire for political liberty, it only extends to the management of their own affairs in their village communities and in the County Councils or Zemstvos, a measure of political liberty which, however imperfect, they already possess. But what the peasant wants above all is more land; he is clamouring for a drastic agrarian reform. Let the Tsar initiate such a reform, let him satisfy that craving, that hunger, let him offer his people a comprehensive scheme of land reform, and the peasant would rather receive his additional plot of land at the hands of the Tsar than at the hands of the aristocracy, whom he suspects, or of the "intellectuals," whose language he does not understand, or of the Jews, whom he abhors.
(3) So far, the peasants have given no unmistakable indication that their loyalty is shaken. No doubt the war has left a very deep impression, and I have myself witnessed in many parts of Russia heartrending scenes. In 1905 I saw thousands of families bidding farewell to young soldiers leaving for the Far East. But these disasters in the Far East have not been brought home to the Tsar himself. Such sporadic outbursts of discontent as have occurred in the army can be traced to the work of agitators, and have only affected those soldiers who have been bred or who have lived in large towns, and who therefore were already disloyal. Such agrarian riots as have taken place can be explained by the prevailing anarchy and by the temporary withdrawing of the strong hand of government. Such popular insurrections and wholesale massacres as have occurred have been directed not against the representatives of government, but against the Jews suspected of fomenting the revolution. I do not wish to enter into the very complicated question of settling the responsibility of these massacres; but the very fact of the accusation that the "black hundreds," the "tchornia sotnia," alone are made responsible, and that they have been able to organize massacres against hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of Jews—that fact is sufficient to prove how easy it would be to turn the popular passions against the revolutionists. Indeed, if the revolutionary spirit were spreading, and if famine were to be the result of anarchy, nothing would be easier than to make the peasants believe that it is the Jews and the landowners who are responsible for the evil, and that it is they who interfered with the good intentions of the Tsar: in which case there would not be one peasant insurrection like the Vendée, but twenty sporadic outbursts all over the Empire.[2]
(b) In 1789, the French Church—with its Court Abbés, with its Rohans and its Talleyrands—was utterly discredited. In Russia the Church seems to have retained its hold over the peasantry. The Russian people are, as I have shown, the most religious nation in the world, as one would expect from people on whom life has always pressed hard, and who must seek in their beliefs an opiate against their sufferings. Even irreligion in Russia retains all the earnestness, all the single-hearted devotion, all the mysticism, of a belief in the supernatural. Significantly enough, amongst the four classic novelists, three—Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—have ultimately been converted from scepticism and atheism to Christianity, and the fourth—Turgenev—only continued to adhere to positivism because he continued to live an exile in Germany and France. The only great philosophical thinker Russia has produced—Vladimir Soloviov—may be properly called a Christian Plato, and it is equally significant that the revolutionary leader who hitherto has had the strongest influence over the masses has been a priest. I am therefore not inclined to admit with the extreme Radicals, that the Church has ceased to be a national force. I have had myself opportunities of observing tens of thousands of Russian pilgrims at Jerusalem and at the great national shrines of Kieff and of Moscow, and in no other country have I met with such simple, pathetic, unwavering faith.
The loyalty to the Church is all the more amazing because the Church, as a body, has done little to deserve it. From my own observation in many Slav countries, in Bulgaria, in Serbia, as well as in Russia, the Orthodox Church is at present in a more degraded state than any other Christian Church. The hierarchy are ignorant, contemplative monks. The secular priesthood form a miserable caste, almost as uneducated as the peasants whom they are supposed to guide and to enlighten. All through the nineteenth century the intellectuals, with the exception of a few writers of the Slavophile group, have been on the side of the opposition, as I pointed out before. The Russian Church has not produced one theologian, one writer, one statesman.
But when we consider that the Church, notwithstanding her present degradation, has nevertheless not forfeited the confidence of the peasantry, it seems all the more reasonable to infer that her influence would be tremendous if she were to awaken from her present lethargy, if there were a revival of spiritual energy. And it seems equally reasonable to anticipate that such influence would be exerted on the side of the Government.
The Church might, no doubt, have a liberalizing tendency, she might insist on the carrying out of a programme of reform, she might act the part of umpire and peacemaker—but her influence would be on the whole a conservative one—as she herself would have to dread as much as the Government from the party of revolution.
I am convinced that the revolution is strong only because the Church is weak, and that the Church is weak only because she has been degraded into a Government department. Let the Government realize that there must be an independent constructive spiritual power to keep in check the destructive intellectual forces. Let the Government realize that it is its own interest to emancipate that spiritual power and it seems probable that a regenerative Russian Church will rally round the Government and use all her increased influence to secure the loyalty of the people.
(c) The French Revolution, like the English Revolution, was essentially a middle-class revolution. Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? Rien. Que doit-il être? Tout. Without a strong middle class, there can be no public opinion, and without the constant and jealous control of public opinion, there can be no successful liberal régime.
Now in Russia, no such middle class as yet exists. Russia is still an undifferentiated peasant State—without either bourgeoisie or aristocracy. Trade and industry are largely in the hands of Jews and foreigners, Germans, Belgians, and Armenians. The only educated class are the bureaucracy, and that fact partly explains why the bureaucracy, notwithstanding its corruption, continues to possess such powers. And it will retain such power as long as there is no other educated class to take its place.
So far, the revolution has been mainly an intellectual movement. It has proceeded not from the Third Estate, but from what Carlyle has called the "Fourth Estate." The revolution is really managed by a mere band of intellectuals, journalists, professors, advocates, and students. It depends for its moral support on public opinion in Europe, and for its material support on the army of industrial labourers in the large cities. Nothing is more interesting to the foreigner than to observe the extraordinary power wielded by these few thousands of "intellectuals" and young students, and nothing is more significant to an Englishman than the fact that whilst in Great Britain the universities are wholly conservative, in Russia they are wholly revolutionary.
(d) The French Revolution was a national movement. The Russian Revolution, besides being an intellectual movement, is also a nationalist movement. In other words the French nation, although distracted by civil dissensions, was a homogeneous unit, and it is this unity which made the revolution invincible. So much was this homogeneity the characteristic of France that it was one of the chief accusations against the Girondists that they were "federalists." The revolutionary wars were made in the name of the "Republic one and indivisible."
Russia, on the contrary, is a huge heterogeneous mass, composed of irreconcilable elements. The centrifugal forces in a revolutionary crisis must always be stronger than the centripetal. And the aim of the Russian Revolution is not like the aim of the French, "La République une et indivisible," but the division and dissolution of the Empire. The different nationalist elements may combine for that end—nationl separation—an end perfectly legitimate from their point of view—but their interests and tendency are different, nay, contradictory. Once separation granted, there is great danger that the Catholic Pole may turn against the Polish Jew, the Tatar against the Armenian.
(e) The conjunction of events in 1789 and in 1906 is fundamentally different. It is this conjunction which made the movement in France so irresistible. Even at the eleventh hour the revolution in France might have been avoided. What made it inevitable was not any pre-existing "logic of events," but a combination of untoward circumstances: the religious war and the schism stirred up by a non-juring clergy, the class war stirred up by the aristocracy, the European war stirred up by the émigrés. Had there been neither religious schism, nor class war, nor European intervention—it is highly probable that a Reign of Terror would never have set in. Once this "conjunction" of events took place, terror was unavoidable, and what is even more important, as Taine himself, the most penetrating critic of the French Revolution, is compelled to admit, France could only be saved by a Reign of Terror.
Now, in Russia, the situation, the "conjunction" of events, is absolutely different.
In the first place there can be no religious schism, and therefore no religious war, which in France involved a life-and-death struggle, a war waged with all the fanaticism and horror of a crusade. In Russia the Church is a State department, not as in France, a state within the State: imperium in imperio. No religious passions will be stirred, for the hatred against the Jew is economic and racial, not religious.
In the second place, there can be no class war, for the simple reason that in Russia the aristocracy as a class has ceased to exist. A few noble families who have given up the principle of primogeniture, three hundred princes Obolenski, four hundred princes Troubetzkoy, five hundred princes Galitzin, most of whom are poor and have lost their landed property, do not form an Estate of the Empire.
And finally, there cannot be in Russia any foreign intervention. No doubt the Russian Revolution has its émigrés, its exiles, mostly journalists and Jews or Poles, who are stirring up European opinion against the Russian Government. But Europe will interfere neither for nor against the revolution. British statesmen may have expressed in 1905 their Platonic sympathies for the dissolved Duma. English newspapers may collect subscriptions or send the "moral" support of the British intellectuals to their brethren in Russia. But no democratic Burke will arise to preach the crusade of nations against kings, as Burke once arose to preach the crusade of kings against nations. The day of Holy Alliances has gone. The day of the solidarity and fraternity of nations is only just dawning. Russia, unlike France, must be left to work out her own doom or her own salvation.
III
There now only remains for us to sum up the chief conclusions to be drawn from a comparison between the situation in France in 1789 and the situation in Russia to-day. Not that I entertain much hope that those chiefly interested will give much heed to those lessons of history. Alas! in times of revolution, men are driven on by their prejudices and their passions, they are seldom guided by the light of reason or the teachings of experience. But this fact does not make it the less imperative for any one wielding a pen in Russia or elsewhere to proclaim such lessons, and to point out the only way to political and social salvation.
(1) The first and the most important lesson is this: the situations in the two cases are so fundamentally different, that no considerations as to the inevitableness of the one revolution permits us to draw an inference as to the inevitableness of the other. Even if it were assumed that the forces let loose by the French Revolution were beyond human control, the same could not be asserted of the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary forces are, no doubt, strong, but the Conservative forces are also formidable. It is not true that the less resistance is offered to the energies of destruction, the less bloody the revolution will be. It is not true that it is too late to prevent a catastrophe. No doubt it is so much easier to surrender one's will to the so-called "logic of events," to let the storm rage and pass, to "emigrate" like the French aristocracy, and to fly before danger, and if the catastrophe does break out, to make one man or one class the scapegoat of the national sins. But what we call fatality in such cases is nothing but the fatality of our own folly and of our own cowardice.
What made the Reign of Terror inevitable in France was not any mysterious "logic of events," but the criminal interference of European Governments, who assumed that the prostrate and bankrupt condition of France, distracted by a religious war and a civil war, gave them a splendid opportunity of invading the country and dictating their own terms. Russia has nothing to dread from her neighbours. So far the revolutionary movement has been nothing but a deliberate attempt on the part of a small minority to overturn the existing form of government, and to impose their own reforms by their own methods. But in that political duel, both parties retain the complete control and the full responsibility of events. If to-morrow the opposition chose to give up their systematic opposition to all government proposals, and if, on the other hand, the government gave unmistakable proofs that they are resolved to carry out a far-reaching programme of political and social reform—the present anarchy would cease at once, and a constructive revolution would at once be possible.
It is only if both the opposition and the government prove unequal to the great crisis, if they both refuse to come to terms—then, but only then, the fatal logic of events will begin to unfold its consequences: but fatality will not have been in the events themselves, but in the weakness and stupidity of a government incapable of steering the country through the tempest, and in the folly of an opposition which sacrificed the welfare of their country to their metaphysical theories, and to their personal feelings of hatred and revenge.
(2) The second conclusion which forces itself upon us is, that Russia cannot be saved mainly by a centralized parliament superimposed upon a centralized bureaucracy. If a centralized parliamentary régimé without any root or support in local self-government was premature in France and doomed to failure, how much more certain must such failure be in Russia! Russia does not possess as yet, though she may acquire in future, one of the essential conditions which make a parliamentary government of the approved British pattern possible. She has no independent aristocracy rooted in the soil, no independent Church, no middle class, no independent judicature. There is no united nation behind the parliament, there is no organized body of public opinion to check and control it, there are no free institutions to support it. It hangs in the air. No eloquent speeches can alter that fundamental fact.
(3) If there is one other lesson which the French Revolution teaches with irresistible persuasiveness, it is this: that a country confronted with the tremendous tasks of economic, political, social, and religious reorganization, exhausted by a colossal foreign war, and threatened by a no less ominous civil war, can only be saved by a strong government and a liberal despotism. No doubt, the tasks before Russia are very different from those which France had to solve, but they are even more Titanic. A sweeping measure of agrarian reform, and perhaps of land-nationalization, the regeneration of the peasantry, the regeneration of the Church, the establishment of decentralization and of local government, the granting of autonomy to Poland, the solution of the racial problems—and especially of the Jewish problem and of the Armenian problem—these are some of the tasks before the Russian Government of to-morrow. No government but one invested with plenary powers could ever attempt to grapple with such Herculean labours.
(4) Such a strong government could not be formed, as in France, with purely revolutionary elements. Even a Reign of Terror could not evolve it, and the above-quoted dictum of Joseph de Maistre does not apply to Russia. The materials of a strong government do not exist in the revolutionary party, nor the possibility of a strong policy, as the several sections of the party are divided, not on questions of principle, which might be compromised, but on differences of race and nationality, which will ever be conflicting. Unity of action seems impossible on any constructive programme. No single section of the revolutionary party could secure the support of the others, nor would it have sufficient power to absorb or control them.
(5) A strong administration can therefore be only established if all the moderate and liberal elements of the people loyally rally round the present government and if that government boldly initiates and consistently pursues a comprehensive programme of constructive reform. It is absurd to object that Tsardom and Bureaucracy once they had regained their strength would at once abuse it and would again start on a course of reaction. The recent history of Russia abundantly shows that such liberal despotism is possible in Russia. Forty years ago, Alexander II successfully carried through a succession of political, economic, and social reforms, the most gigantic perhaps that have ever been accomplished by one man. Is faciet cui prodest. Even if it had the power, autocracy henceforth has no interest to revert to its old ways. Neither the Tsar nor his advisers would again place themselves willingly in their unenviable position of 1905. The days of reaction are past, provided the Liberals play their cards well. The danger seems to me henceforth to lie almost as much in the direction of anarchy as in the direction of reaction. Autocracy would only try a return to the past, if all other issues were closed. But in that case, it would probably be the opposition by their uncompromising, purely negative, and destructive policy that would make the Terreur blanche a necessity and a liberal despotism an impossibility. It seems to me, therefore, that the obvious duty of every Liberal in Russia at the present critical juncture, and the only chance for a Liberal solution, lies in a loyal adhesion to, and co-operation with, the government. If neither the autocracy nor the opposition rose to a sense of the urgency of the danger, and to the immensity of the task to be accomplished, there then would only remain one alternative and one certainty: the infernal circles of anarchy and of red terrorism: facilis descensus Averni! Di hoc omen avertant.