The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 4
IV. The New Industrialism, and the Dawn of the Revolutionary Movement.
Industrialism is a new factor in Russian life, an importation from Western Europe that had its origin about the end of the nineteenth century; and with the industrial invasion of Russia came the mammonised ideals and values of Commercialism with all their potentialities for strife. In the words of Mr. Stephen Graham: "Intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariat are all products of the same family; they are westernised Russians; books, commerce, industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilization have not civilized Russians, they have de-civilized them. But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fragment of the nation."
Between the forties and the sixties, and fostered by the same new forces (i.e., mammonism and industrialism) there set in a revolutionary movement which went by the name of Nihilism, of which Tchernishefski, the novelist, was the leader, and Dobrolinboff, a writer, Micailoff, a professor, Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin, Sophia Perovskaia, a pupil of Dobrolinboff, who like Kropotkin belonged to the higher nobility of Russia, and a host of other neuro-pathic "intellectuals," and Anarchists, such as Hertzen and Ogareff, who published their propaganda from London, were henchmen.
By 1862 the movement had spread with marvellous rapidity among the morbid and neurotic elements of the literary and student classes, who were as concerned in their anarchical principles to prove their contempt of all control by growing their hair long, neglecting their persons and by an utter chaos and lack of any order in their sexual and matrimonial relations, as they were to promote bloodshed and revolution among the working populations of the towns. In spite of the extensive propaganda campaign in the towns and villages, in spite of the growing inefficiency of an effete bureaucracy tending always to assimilate the ideas and values of Western "Liberalism-cum-Commercialism," they met with little or no response from the agricultural masses, who indeed have small liking for either anarchy or communism—least of all when they have tasted either!
All this, of course, is well known history, but the complete collapse of the Nihilist movement after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881, when for a brief spell a better and stronger administrative awoke from the former reign of lethargy and incompetence, serves to illustrate the facts so often ignored, which have an equal bearing upon the Revolutionary movement of 1905 and upon the situation to day.
(1) The Revolutionary movement in Russia is a foreign exotic growth, flourishing and subsisting not only upon the ideas of Western Socialism and Liberalism, but indispensably upon the factory systems introduced into an agricultural community by foreign capitalists. It should be remembered that the Russian Liberal party first made overtures to the Revolutionaries in order to form an alliance with them in 1878.
(2) That the movement found its native recruits not among the peasantry, and only to a relatively small extent among the newly manufactured proletariat, but predominantly among the more or less decadent anarchistic specimens of the upper classes, and among the young peasants, taken away from their rural occupations on the land, who received University Education from the Liberal Government of Alexander II., a book education divorced from moral teaching, which is least conducive to employment when completed. A system similar to the one of giving Indian "baboos" English University Education and no opening afterwards, and little chance of turning it to any better use in their own country than in editing revolutionary and seditious papers.
(3) That the firmness, or it might even be tyranny, of the governments was directed against the alien anarchist and the Jew, and that when these classes were excluded the peasantry were contented and happy for the reason that it was the Jew, who, in a country ill-equipped with a native middle-class when he did penetrate into the rural communities, became the banker, usurer, shopkeeper and middleman, and ground the faces of the poor.
(4) That it was not the tyranny of the Russian governments, nor the supposed discontent of the masses which caused them to fall, but their weakness, growing incompetence and the sinister machinations of Jews and international doctrinaires, which finally culminated in their collapse under the appalling strain of the War. In other words, it fell, not because it was autocratic, an autocracy at least implies an autocrat with a will and a purpose, but because it had long ceased to be autocratic, and was merely weak, incompetent, and lacking in policy, will and purpose.