CHAPTER XV ENTER POBIEDONOSTSEFF

The romance of the Romanoffs has now passed the phase of comparative dulness which set in with the conversion of the dynasty from its license of personal conduct, and has entered upon its final stage of mingled melodrama and tragedy. The Russian people is awakening to a consciousness that what some call an autocracy by divine right is a foreign intrusion into the life of the Slavs, an infringement of the rights of man. Three ways of meeting the crisis were open to the new Emperor, Alexander III. He might grant the full constitutional liberty that had now been won in every civilisation of the world except China; he might follow the course traced by Melikoff and prolong the life of the dynasty; he might prefer to extinguish every demand and insist upon an unadulterated autocracy. Alexander III chose, with such modifications as his vacillations allowed, the third course.

He was the second son of Alexander II. The eldest son had died in 1865 of consumption, but Alexander was a man of exceptionally strong constitution. There is a tradition that he could take a horse-shoe in his mighty hand and bend it until the points touched. Such a youth would make a fine soldier, and as a soldier he was trained. He was cool, courageous (as he showed on various occasions), regular in life, sincerely religious, and very little cultivated. When his brother died, he had to be prepared for the business of ruling a very unruly Empire. But he was now twenty years old, dull in intellect, and altogether indisposed to acquire the varied culture which his future required. One of his tutors was the famous Pobiedonostseff: who was not at that time a pronounced reactionary, but his office prepared the way for power in his reactionary days. It is said that his wife, the Princess Dagmar of Denmark, induced him to prepare more carefully for the throne; but that seems to be a legend of the court. All that men knew about him was that he liked soldiering and music and patronised historical research, and thought that there were far too many Germans in Russia.

On this last feature some built a faint hope. Germany was now an Empire, and the “League of the Three Emperors” (Germany, Austria and Russia) boded no good for democracy. Bismarck encouraged both the policy of repression in Russia and the policy of aggression abroad because he did not wish to see Russia develop her mighty resources. On the other hand, Alexander was a soldier, a man steeped in the Romanoff tradition of a divine autocracy and entirely out of sympathy with humanitarian or progressive ideas. The only question was whether from policy he would follow the lead of Melikoff. When the oath of allegiance was taken he announced, ambiguously, that he would walk in the steps of his father. Which set of steps? Melikoff showed him the draft of a pseudo-constitution initialled by the late Tsar. “There will be no change,” he said. But men were uncertain. The fearful end of his father must have embittered him. The rebels were, of course, drastically punished. Eight hundred more arrests were made. Sophia Perovskaia, the wonderful woman of those bloody days, and four others were executed. There is a grounded suspicion that they were first tortured. Another woman was condemned, but she was pregnant, and her sentence was changed to exile.

It is thought by many that an injudicious step taken by the revolutionaries helped to fix the Tsar’s plan. They somehow got into his hands a long letter or manifesto, in which, while pleading for reform, they very plainly held a sword over his head; and their demands were not at all moderate. I doubt if Alexander III ever hesitated. His strong and narrow mind and soldierly attitude disposed him to “enforce discipline.” Pobiedonostseff was soon at his side. He was Procurator of the Holy Synod (since the preceding year). When Melikoff’s scheme was brought forward for discussion he bitterly opposed it, and predicted that it would ruin Russia. He was now a Russophile of the narrowest and most fanatical description. Alexander leaned to that side. The German Emperor had, he said, warned his father against making any concessions to constitutionalism. The “Holy League”—a fanatical Russophile society led by the Grand Duke Vladimir—pressed for coercion.

Out of the struggle there emerged at last (on April 29th) the new Tsar’s message to his people. It was probably written by Pobiedonostseff. In it Alexander firmly contended that the autocracy was of divine origin, and he would protect it against all encroachments. But the reforms granted by his father would not be withdrawn. Education, popular councils, municipal institutions, and so on, were to be maintained. The people were to be admitted to some share in the management of the Empire’s affairs. That was to be the note of the new reign: something more moderate than Pobiedonostseff and less “advanced” than Melikoff.

Melikoff resigned, and his place as Minister of the Interior was taken by General Ignatieff, a man of moderate conservative views, or a man who at least felt the need of concessions. On the one hand he looked with criminal toleration upon the massacres of the Jews which now broke out all over Russia. On the other he advised the Tsar that large reforms were needed. The peasants were assisted in paying off the crippling annual interest on their “emancipation.” Popular councils were set up in Poland, Siberia, and the Baltic provinces, which had not hitherto had them. Above all he devised, and imposed upon the Tsar, a feeble pretence of a national parliament. Members of the provincial councils—“informed men,” as they were diplomatically called—were gathered into a deliberating assembly at St. Petersburg, and it was through them that the reforms were gradually drafted. There was an improvement in the harsh manner of collecting the taxes, and the burden was shifted a little more on to the shoulders of the wealthy. Ranks were opened for the peasants.

The conservatives stormed the Tsar with protests against these dangerous concessions, and in the spring of 1882 General Ignatieff was forced to retire. His place was taken by Count Dmitri Tolstoi, one of the men of the last reign whom liberals hated above all others. He had been the Minister of Education during the late Tsar’s drastic restriction of the schools and universities. He and Pobiedonostseff and a few other rabid Slavophiles now closed round Alexander III and dictated the policy of his reign. That policy was one of, at home, unswerving, unscrupulous, unmerciful Russification; that is to say, complete obliteration of all criticism of the autocracy in native Russia and all religious or racial characters in the subject-provinces of alien race or religion. Abroad, the policy was naturally Pan-Slav, aggressive, imperialistic; but here the Emperor and his limited resources curbed the fanatics, so that the reign passed without a war. Russia was orientated for the final struggle in the next reign. For the reign of Alexander we need only glance at the various branches of the machinery of despotism which was created for the defence of the Romanoffs.

Education was the great source of evil, but in a world where education was now adopted as an elementary principle of civilisation it was no longer possible to return to the absolute illiteracy of the Middle Ages. A compromise was found in the easy distinction between sound and unsound education. The figures of educational progress during the reign of Alexander III are at first sight impressive. In 1877 the eight universities had had 5629 students: in 1886 the number had arisen to 14,000. In the same period the number of high schools rose from 200 to about a thousand: the number of elementary schools from 25,077 to 35,517. There were now, in all, more than two million pupils in the elementary schools of the Empire. It should be added that the population of the Empire was now 113,000,000; that most of the schools were founded, independently of St. Petersburg, by the zealous Zemstvos; and that very many of them were mere huts or sheds with ludicrously incompetent teachers.

Count Tolstoi, having been for sixteen years Minister of Education, controlled this department in the interest of the Slavophiles and imperialists. Pobiedonostseff, indeed, wanted to have all the elementary schools put under the control of the Holy Synod, or under the clergy. I have said little about the Russian Church during this period for a reason which will be understood. It was a mere docile instrument of the dynasty. Its ordinary priests were rough, ignorant men, little superior to the peasants themselves. Its higher clergy murmured not one single syllable at the cruelty, just as they had murmured none at the earlier vices, of the Romanoffs.

The Zemstvos, however, in most cases refused to hand over their schools, and the secular part of the government had neither the funds to devote to the work nor the wish to have serious trouble with the Zemstvos. We shall see that they found it easier to capture the Zemstvos themselves and control their action. The Holy Synod also began the policy of creating religious schools in opposition to those of the Zemstvos, and securing imperial favour for these nurseries of docility. The high schools were re-modelled, and were now forbidden by law to admit the children of the poorer types of workers. Some technical improvements were made in them, but the general effect was to reduce the stimulating influence of the education. The universities were more drastically controlled. No students’ societies were permitted, and the curriculum was carefully purged. Inspectors were attached to them, and the grant of scholarships was made to depend upon the reports of these spies of orthodoxy. There were serious riots of the students in 1882 and 1887, but the energy of the reactionary officials gradually drove professors into silence or exile and pupils into subjection.

The press was in 1882 controlled by “temporary rules,” which proved to have a long duration. If a journal had, after three warnings, incurred suspension, it must, at the expiration of the term, henceforward submit a copy of the next day’s issue to the censors before eleven at night. This effectively silenced the majority of the liberal periodicals, and eviscerated the others. When some tried to evade the gag by using language of a veiled or ambiguous character, a junta of four Ministers was empowered to suppress any periodical which seemed to them to have a mischievous tendency. By these and other means progressive literature was extinguished. The few revolutionaries continued, of course, to establish private presses, which were constantly detected and the workers sent to Siberia or the mines, but the work of political education was generally suspended.

The political scheme which had been set up was similarly “revised.” The Zemstvos were, as I said, stubborn. Even the nobles were jealous of their local powers, and at first antagonistic to the new regime. Large numbers of them were won by stories of dangerous tendencies amongst the peasantry. It is said that in their attacks upon the Jews the people had said: “We will make our breakfast of the Jews, our dinner of the landowners, and our supper of the priests.” Priests and nobles fell into line with the ministers. In 1889 and 1890 the nobles were given a preponderating influence over the other representatives in the Zemstvos. They became little more than assemblies of loyal land-owners, open to the direct influence of the government. The Mir was similarly enfeebled, and lost its popular representative value.

The judicial system was correspondingly modified. Public executions were abandoned, in the spirit of the age, and some other improvements were introduced. But the general scheme set up by Alexander II had been too grossly ignored in the later years of that monarch, and it was now modified by decree. The jury-system was reduced; the justices of the peace abolished. Petty cases fell back to the reorganised Zemstvos.

The financial system, on the other hand, remained for many years under the control of an enlightened minister, Bunge, and was greatly improved. Finance was in any case a department into which it was profitable to admit modern science. The coinage was improved, and more banks were established. Home-industry was fostered, and the great extension of the Empire in Asia opened new markets. Railways were multiplied, and in 1891 the Grand Duke Nicholas opened the terminal station of the proposed Trans-Siberian railway at Vladivostock. Russia had already made commercial treaties with Korea and Japan. We will return presently to this dangerous extension of Russian ambition.

Most important and characteristic of all was the process of Russification in which all these engines of reaction were combined. One can understand the fascination of the Slavophile dream as it was formed in the mind of honest conservatives. Every concession made in the western democracies and limited monarchies had led to further demands. Napoleon III had lost his throne. The Papacy had lost its temporal power. William I and Bismarck were struggling against a portentous growth of Socialism. France was rapidly shedding its religion. Even in England the republican movement was at that time (the eighties) strong, and lower depths of radicalism were disclosed every decade. Liberalism, either in religion or politics, was evidently a slope; you could not remain long elsewhere than at the top or the bottom. So Russia must be made thoroughly, homogeneously autocratic and religious. In spite of the well-known facts of Russian history the Church agreed warmly with the Romanoffs that the autocracy was divinely appointed. If all could be made docile to the Church, the autocracy would have an easier task.

So began the process of Russification which passed with the brutality of a steam-roller over every sect or fragment of the nation that was not Russian in creed and dynastic in politics. The Jews formed the gravest problem. Long experience had shown that no power on earth could erase the religious and racial peculiarities of the Jew, yet there were nearly five million Jews in the Russian Empire. Their intelligence and skill in trade were but additional grievances. There were, even then, parts of Russia in which the Jews showed that, under proper treatment, they were as capable as any of settling upon the soil, but as a rule they avoided agriculture. The slightest relaxation of pressure allowed them to pour into a city or even a district, and as traders and money-lenders they soon had the poor and thriftless Russians in their power. Hence, in great measure, the readiness of the people to rise against them, which was gradually exploited rather than checked from St. Petersburg.

The first procedure of the reactionary ministers was to overlook the massacres which took place from the beginning of the rule of Alexander III. Presently, a series of “temporary rules” were issued against them. Even in the Pale of Settlement they were compelled to live in the towns and were forbidden to purchase real estate in the country. In 1888 they were ordered to go back to the place in which they had lived before the year 1882. About a million and a half of the Jews were affected by this rule, and the chaotic abandonment of their several businesses and properties cast large numbers of them into deep and undeserved poverty. Vast aggregations of them, growing at a prodigious rate on account of their high fertility, huddled together in the towns of the Pale, and lived in great privation. In 1891 a new application of the rules exiled and ruined seventeen thousand Jewish artisans of Moscow.
Tauride Palace/Session Chamber of the Duma

Still more stupid, and hardly less cruel, was the restriction upon the development of their ability. The civil service and the professions were closed against them. They might not, without special license, have a Christian servant, and notaries were forbidden to have Jewish clerks. Their zeal for education was similarly repressed. In the universities which were situated in the Pale Jewish students must not number more than a tenth of the whole. At other provincial universities they must not number more than five per cent.; at the metropolitan universities not more than two per cent. By these contemptuous repressive measures the ignorant people were prepared for the pogroms which would disgrace the reign of the last of the Romanoffs.

The Poles were the next most conspicuous victims of the Slavophile policy. We saw that Alexander II had ordered the extinction of their nationality, but a people with an acute memory of having been a great civilisation at a time when the Russians were a disorderly mass of semi-barbarians could not easily resign itself to obliteration. The religious tradition here coincided with the national, as in Ireland (the Poland of the west), and the priests generally fostered insurgence. Alexander’s ruthless ministers had but to apply more stringently the laws already in force against the Poles. From the University of Warsaw to the smallest elementary school the teaching was entirely Russianised. Even the Bank of Warsaw was suppressed, and Polish trade forced into a branch of the Russian bank. There was a futile rising in 1885, but four executions and two hundred arrests completed the work of “pacifying” the country, or eliminating from it every man of spirit and courage. Even Finland, which was still autonomous, had to complain to the Tsar of encroachments upon the liberties which his father had sworn to respect. In the other Baltic provinces the Russian roller was used as in Poland.

The dissenters and heretics of every kind in Russia itself were similarly treated. To the tenacious dissenters of the last century or two were now added sects like the Doukhobors and the followers of Tolstoi, and upon these the Tsar’s ministers fell with particular malevolence. Alexander was ignorant enough to believe quite sincerely in the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, but he knew that these new sects had more than a religious significance. Prayer-meetings were prohibited. Even children were separated in some cases from their parents and forced into the rigid Slavophile mould.

It will be understood, after this description of the machinery that was set up by Tolstoi and Pobiedonostseff, that the chronicle of revolt in the reign of Alexander II is comparatively slender. It is computed that by the end of the reign there were about a hundred thousand rebels in the jails, the mines, and the Siberian colonies, and to these one must add the graves of the bolder spirits and the large numbers of Russians who sought abroad the liberty that had died in Russia. Men still risked their lives in printing and disseminating the new ideas, but as the long reign wore on, and tyranny was still enthroned, the open spurts of defiance grew less in number. The revolutionaries and liberals felt that, if their race was not to be extinguished, as the reactionaries desired, the work must proceed in different form. We shall see in the next and final chapter how it proceeded until, after further bloody revolts against the intolerable tyranny, it succeeded in awakening the people and shaking the Romanoffs from their throne.

It remains to see how the Pan-Slav movement, the twin-brother of the Slavophile philosophy, also prepared the way for the next reign. We have seen how every expansion of Russia, every enlargement of its stupendous population and therefore ultimate resources, alarmed some other European Power. Russia now made new advances and opened the way for fresh conflicts. It had reached the eastern coast of Asia. Now it began its interference in Korea and attracted the attention of Japan. It spread south toward India and still further alarmed England. Journals of the imperialist school at St. Petersburg openly boasted that their armies were beating a path to the Indian Ocean, and it may be said in justification of England’s long distrust of Russia that the Romanoffs wholly encouraged this dream until an Asiatic Power proved to them that Asia was not the helpless world they had imagined. When the southern limit of Asiatic Russia was extended until it came, at certain points, within a hundred and forty miles of India, when Russian agents swarmed in Afghanistan, it was not unnatural that London should be nervous. Alexander III, however, took a keen personal interest in foreign affairs, and he succeeded in averting serious trouble with England.

Still more dangerous to the peace of the world was the ambition of the Pan-Slavs to overrun the Balkans. Our generation is familiar enough with the philosophy in the form of Pan-Germanism, and from this the mood of Russia in the days of Alexander III will be understood. The creed of the Pan-Slavs was a mixture of commercial greed, imperialistic ambition, the impulses of soldiers to use their weapons, and the desire of priests to enlarge their Church. As the little peoples of the Balkans were largely Slav—though the Bulgars are as much Asiatic as Slav, and the Rumans take more pride in their remote descent from the Romans—it was inevitable that, in spite of the jealous watchfulness of all the Great Powers of Europe, the new imperialists of St. Petersburg should push their work in the Balkans.

There is this almost single advantage in the reign of Alexander III that he distrusted Germany and did not allow his ambitious ministers to embroil the country in war. Bismarck would like to see Russia weakened, as it periodically was, by war, and there seemed to be every prospect of war over the Balkan peoples. Behind the specious plea of liberating Christians from the brutality of the Turk and conveying civilisation to the backward peoples of the Balkans there was at that time, as in our own days, a dual rivalry. Austria and the Papacy had an ambition which was directly opposed to the ambition of the statesmen and priests of St. Petersburg. The path to the Mediterranean and the commercial advantage of exploiting the Balkan peoples were not more eagerly sought by politicians and merchants than the religious allegiance of the independent Balkan Churches was sought by the Vatican and the Holy Synod.

Russia pushed its ambition in Bulgaria—Austria in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been entrusted to its “protection.” But the little Balkan peoples were now almost entirely awake to the designs of the ministers of Alexander III. The Tsar said on one occasion that the King of Montenegro was the only friend he had in Europe. The Serbs and Rumans drew nearer to Austria, the Bulgars began to resent the presence amongst them of so many officers of the Russian army and agents of the Russian Government. After the Bulgar revolution of 1885 there seemed to be grave prospect of a war between Austria and Russia. But Alexander was made sensible of the disgusting duplicity with which Bismarck tried to draw Russia into dangerous waters in the south, and he withdrew his officers from Bulgaria. He complained to the German Emperor of the procedure of the Chancellor, but he maintained the commercial alliance with Germany and the ostensibly friendly relations.

Out of this rivalry of interests and clash of intrigue, in which Alexander III acted with caution and shrewdness, there gradually emerged the set of alliances which would one day deluge Europe with blood. Germany and Austria made a common lot of their interests and drew together. Italy, jealous of the French support of the Papacy and won by the deceitful promises of Germany, joined them and formed the Triple Alliance. Russia could no longer remain isolated and Alexander III slowly and reluctantly overcame his imperial dislike of the French Republic. Little acts of mutual courtesy led up to the floating of a large loan in France in 1887. The financial link with Germany was almost severed. In the following year a Russian representative was appointed to the Vatican. In 1890 a large French fleet appeared at Cronstadt, and was boisterously welcomed. In 1893, the year before the death of Alexander, a commercial treaty with France was signed.

Thus in both domestic and foreign policy the reign of Alexander III was one of preparation for the final chapter of the romance of the Romanoffs. It created at home a machinery of despotism which would prove so heavy that it roused the very people whom it was designed to suppress. Abroad it entered upon imperialistic ventures which would lead to wars that would expose the disgusting growth of corruption under the shelter of the universal censorship. Alexander III died in 1894 (November 1st), and left to the last of his line a country which he had apparently pacified. He was honest in his creed of orthodoxy and autocracy, though we will not suppose that he was insensible of its profit to himself and his family; but he had not the intelligence to see that such an anachronism as his medi?val suppression of a people’s sentiments could not live in the atmosphere of the end of the nineteenth century.