Russia and Reform E-Book

Bernard Pares

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1066

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Beginning with a rather impressionistic but distinctly readable sketch of the rise and advance of Russia from the earliest times, Mr. Pares, with the emancipation of the serfs, enters into a detailed study which is really worthy of comparison with Mackenzie Wallace's great book. Like Wallace, Mr. Pares evidently knows his Russia thoroughly, and his Russian in every walk of life. The geographical and economic aspects of the country, the governmental system, the educational facilities, the home life of the noble and the peasant, the literature that has been produced and the men who have produced it -- all this and much more is expounded by him in a way that is equally interesting and authoritative. He gives a brief sketch of the history of Russian institutions up to the late 19th century and of the social conditions in the country generally from 1904 down to the assembling of the second Duma. He brings out more clearly than most writers have done the contrast between the ideals of the educated class and the great mass of the people. He is hopeful for the steady progress of reform, though he thinks it may be slow, and notes that the Government is missing many opportunities that will not recur, and that day by day the intelligence of the individual is outstripping more and more the measure of responsibility allowed to him by the authorities, whose prestige, he says, is being recklessly squandered.

Leseprobe

Russia and Reform

BERNARD PARES

Russia and Reform, Bernard Pares

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849662875

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

PREFACE.1

PART I.-TSAR, CHURCH AND PEOPLE.4

CHAPTER I. A HISTORICAL SKETCH.4

I. RUSSIA AND THE EAST.4

II. — RUSSIA AND THE WEST.15

III. — RUSSIA AND THE WESTERN IDEAS.26

CHAPTER II. REFORM AND REACTION. (1854—1904.)40

CHAPTER III. THE CLASS SYSTEM.72

CHAPTER IV. THE CHURCH.102

CHAPTER V. ADMINISTRATION AND OFFICIALS.123

PART II. THE "INTELLIGENCE."143

CHAPTER VI. ORIGINS OF THE "INTELLIGENCE."143

CHAPTER VII. THE LITERATURE.174

CHAPTER VIII. THE PRESS AND THE CENSORSHIP.207

CHAPTER IX. LIVES OF THE INTELLIGENTS. THE REVOLUTIONARIES.243

PART III.-BRIDGING THE GAP.271

CHAPTER X. LAW AND THE ADMINISTRATION.271

CHAPTER XI. THE ZEMSTVA AND TOWN COUNCILS.289

CHAPTER XII. THE PROGRESS OF THE PEASANTS.330

CHAPTER XIII. THE PEASANT IN TOWN –– FACTORY LIFE.355

PART IV.385

CHAPTER XIV. A SKETCH OF  THE LIBERATION MOVEMENT.385

PREFACE.

IN this book I try to summarise the chief things which Englishmen ought to know, if they wish to form an intelligent judgment of what is now taking place in Russia. We have arrived at one of the most critical turning-points in Russian history, but present events are the crisis of a long and dramatic story. Without an acquaintance with the beginning of the chapter which is now in progress, we cannot hope to understand the end.

The chief political differences in Russia are themselves the result of a great moral conflict between the instincts of two schools. Of course there are many kinds of Slavophils and also many kinds of Westernisers, and there is hardly any Russian of the one creed who has not in him the elements of the other; but the main difference is so important, that I have made it the foundation of the plan of this book. I have not tried to write a history of modern Russia; but I have sketched the chief features of her development as a people and as a State, and have tried to catch the significance of the main points at issue between the Government and the people. In the first part, I deal chiefly with the Slavophil tradition, which is summed up in the three words, " Tsar, Church, and People; " only I naturally put the people first, because they were there first. In the second part, I trace the origins and the gradual growth of what is called in Russia " the Intelligence," that is, the educated class. Next, I study those many changes in Russian life which resulted from the reforms of Alexander II., and which tended to show that the gap between the old instincts and the new intelligent consciousness was gradually being bridged over. Lastly, I give a sketch of the present movement for liberation, of many of the chief events of which I was an eye-witness. I carry the story up to the elections for the second Duma.

As yet no full statement of fact can be made on most of these subjects; but, even if all the details are not accessible, it is essential for the understanding of Russia that we should try to form our power of judgment, by putting into what seems their proper proportion the different elements of the story. This process has to submit itself to a hard test. Our conclusions are constantly being confirmed or refuted by events themselves; and, in the course of several years, I, like my Russian friends, have had to modify my estimate time after time, before I could believe that the general statement which I should make would square with the details of fact, and would commend itself as consequent and reasonable to men of various views in Russia.

It is quite impossible for any one man to make an adequate study of all the chief aspects of Russian life. It has rather been my object to suggest to future students some of the many important and fascinating questions which demand special study. The history, the literature, the geography, the economy, of Russia might each absorb the interest of a number of genuine students. Russia has for a long time been almost the chief factor of our foreign policy; her Imperial importance challenges our attention; her industrial future cannot be a matter of indifference to us.

The difficulties of a political study of Russia are very great. The abnormal bias of the Government against all publicity has long made it very difficult for Russian writers to deal adequately and objectively even with some of the most innocent statistics. There also exists amongst the educated class a spirit of antagonism to the Government which often diminishes the value, not only of such publications as may have evaded the censorship, but even of the most simple statement of fact made in private conversation. I have therefore found it necessary to sometimes confine myself to that which I could see for myself or learn at first hand from those persons who were best qualified to inform me on a given point, checking their statements by what I was able to gather from others. This, of course, meant that I had to select certain typical districts for investigation. The answers to my questions were recorded as soon as possible after I received them. I also had many talks with the chief leaders of the different political parties, and it may be assumed that, in the latter part of the book, I am often summarising the statements made to me by the persons chiefly concerned. For the accuracy of my reports, however, I must myself take all responsibility. I am aware that many errors of detail must have crept in; but I took the greatest pains to make sure that I was not misunderstanding my informants on any point of major importance.

The average English reader has had but few opportunities of gaining even an elementary knowledge of Russia. It is therefore a country in which the less scrupulous of journalists are peculiarly at home. There are correspondents, occupying highly responsible positions, who have confessed to me that they cannot speak or understand Russian. These men are at the mercy of their interpreters, who are in some cases revolutionary propagandists. One correspondent, according to his own account, wrote his Russian news in London, using a handbook of Russian telegraph stations in order to avoid dating a despatch from a place where no such station existed. Of course, by no means all of our correspondents are of this kind. For instance, Dr. E. J. Dillon, Mr. Maurice Baring, Mr. H. W. Williams, Mr. V. E. Marsden, and Mr. J. McGowan all know the country and the language well, and can speak with authority on political events; and this list of names is, of course, not exhaustive. But there has been enough bad work, and it has been widely enough circulated, to popularise the most wrong-headed conceptions of the country and people. For this reason, a writer on Russia has to begin by creating an atmosphere for his reader; and I have preferred to do this by making much of my book, especially in the two last parts, something like a transcript of selected statements of Russians themselves. This must be my excuse for the number of repetitions; it seemed that a statement already reported acquired a new value when applied to a fresh district or repeated by a person of a different class or of opposite political views. Much, too, of what I have quoted is meant to be illustrative rather of the speaker than of the subject about which he is talking.

I should fill several pages if I recorded the names of all the Russians who have helped me in my study. No Englishman who knows anything about Russia will need to be told that I received throughout and, almost without exception, from everyone far more active co-operation than I had any right to ask for; and the ideal of hospitality in Russia is broader and deeper than any that I have met with elsewhere. I am indebted to those officials who secured for me the permission of the Government to see all that I wanted to see, to those Governors and local officials who everywhere facilitated my investigations, to the Heads of all those institutions which I had occasion to visit, and to the many private persons who gave me unstinted help. I am specially indebted for assistance and personal kindness to Mr. M. Alpheraki, Mr. A. Bashmakoff, Mr. S. Syromatnikoff, Professor P. Vinogradoff, Professor S. Muromtseff, Mr. I. Petrunkyevich, Professor P. Milyukoff, Mr. N. Astroff, Mr. M. Margulies, and Mr. A. Aladin; and I have also to acknowledge much help from Mr. V. Issoyeff, Mr. V. Yanchevetsky, and Mr. A. Fedorovich, and also from my colleagues, Mr. H. W. Williams and Mr. S. N. Harper. Mr. E. A. Dixon most kindly assisted me in the reading of the proofs and offered many useful suggestions. He also undertook the compilation of the index.

March 1, 1907.

PART I.-TSAR, CHURCH AND PEOPLE.

CHAPTER I. A HISTORICAL SKETCH.

I. RUSSIA AND THE EAST.

IT is the map of Russia that gives us the first and the most informing suggestions as to the destinies of the Russian people. Herodotus, who visited the northern shores of the Black Sea, tells us that the inhabitants of these shores lead that kind of life which has been marked out for them by the character of their country, and his words stand in the forefront of the great " History of Russia " by Solovyeff.

Russia is a land of difficulties; she lies between Europe and Asia, and is not sharply divided from either; if anything, the line of marshes which once separated her from Europe was the more definite boundary. Asia and Europe are terms of which the historical significance is more important than the political. The word Europe implies a certain kind of civilisation, a mass of moral traditions, at one time covering only the Greek world and now extending far beyond the oceans. Europe has grown larger and larger; her growth was a victory of civilisation; but from time to time, when the vitality of the peoples entrusted with her mission was not equal to the task of conquest, the expansion of the civilised world proceeded on lines of far greater difficulty. The enervated peoples of this world were attacked in their turn by invaders from outside. The great nursery from which the invading peoples came was, by the nature of things, Asia. Discontent with a poor soil or with a hard life drove whole tribes and nations afield, and some vague instinct made them seek the road which would bring them into those happier lands which were the nests of civilisation. It was the same instinct that urged the great tribes of the interior towards the seas. At such a period all that we call Europe would seem for the time to be submerged; but the new invaders of the Pale, after their first work of destruction, gradually came more and more closely under the influence of the traditions which they had disturbed; and, bringing a new vitality into a worn-out world, they themselves became in turn the adherents and extenders of civilisation. In this great and often-repeated struggle between East and West, Russia was by her very position marked out for a field of battle. Here the conflict took the most vast and momentous dimensions. Yet Russia was far more than a simple stage in a line of march. If she had been only that, she would probably have disappeared from the map. But the Russian people had a strong character of their own. In no part of the world is the instinct of brotherhood and solidarity more developed; they clung by instinct to their national and moral independence. It was this that saved them from their dangers, and the very length of their sufferings and of their training qualified them for a great future.

" By lasting out the strokes of fate,

In trials long they learned to feel

Their inborn strength: as hammers weight

Will splinter glass but temper steel."

In the north the soil is poor; the excellent black land of the south lay mostly outside the Russian Empire until the eighteenth century. In fact, this black land was a source of constant danger to Russia; it produced crops without much labour, and was therefore the favourite high road of invaders from Asia. Yet, if the fruitful south could be joined to the wooded north, the two would prove to be only complementary to each other. Till then Russia had to live in a state of flux; her triumph, to be effective, had to be complete.

The climate immobilises the labourer for a great part of the year. The violent spring and autumn break up the roads and cause regular interruptions in the sequence of work. Yet the very similarity of climate all over these vast plains suggested the political unity which was to come.

There were always the greatest potentialities in the rivers of Russia. The chief of them flow eastward and southward, and these were therefore the lines along which Russian history would naturally travel. In the Volga and the Kama, Russia possessed a direct road to Siberia, and the lower Volga connected her with Central Asia. The Dnyepr directed her towards Constantinople.

A poor soil and a hard climate meant a thin population — plenty of land, but few hands to work it. This helps to explain why estates came to be reckoned, not by the number of acres, but by the number of " souls." Later the peasants, the real property, came to be fastened to the soil.

The Slavs do not seem adapted by nature for these conditions. They are a people of feeling and fancy, reminding one of the Kelts, but more permanent in their moods, more serious and earnest in them, and therefore less quick of recovery. Feeling, by itself, seems a poor weapon to meet the tedious and recurring difficulties of Russia. No Slav race, except one, has made much out of its existence as a nation, and that one is a blend. Russia, at the beginning of its history, was largely peopled by tribes of more directly Asiatic origin, stolid and persevering Finns; these blended with Slavs to form the Great Russians, who are at once the most eastern of Slavs and the most successful. The Little Russians are more lively and less stable; the White Russians have less vigour and enterprise. It is the Great Russians who have made Russian history; they have been adapted, almost against nature and by long habit, to the character of the country in which they live, but the contrast between them and it is still visible enough. The happy instinctive character of clever children, so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal. Yet often, at the very bottom of all, persists the steadiness of patient purpose: only without hurry — which seems to be useless under the prevailing conditions — and without any captious blaming of Providence, which is thought to be absurd. In Russia one has no right to expect that everything should run smoothly.

There are certain instincts which run all through Russian history; in every country where they exist together, they are sure to make a great people.

First, there is the instinct of order. The turbulent Slavs of Lake Ilmen knew what they needed. " Our land is great and rich," they said to the Varanger chiefs, " but order there is none; come and rule over us." So began the Russian Empire, a thousand years ago, and over and over again since then Russia has invited education from abroad — now from Constantinople, now from Italy and Germany, now from Holland and England, now from France, but always from what was for her the West. Her relations with the West were always curiously two-fold. The doors were either locked fast against attack or thrown wide open for instruction.

The new " grand principality " thus established wore from the first an air of empire, the empire of the rivers, that is, of the roads. Its ambition at once answered to the great oneness of the country: Kieff was soon added to Novgorod, and Constantinople was attacked for the first time. Yet in the presence of such great unconquered distances — of forest, plain and marsh — local government was the first need, and it seemed inevitable that the country should be divided into little kindred States. Not many years before we had had seven kingdoms in little England alone. But Russia had leaped at once to the great principle. By a curious plan she kept her hold on it. The reigning family was large, and Russia was ruled by a multitude of brothers and cousins. The eldest was the senior and was Grand Prince in Kieff. When he died, each prince " went up one," so that the ruler of Novgorod in the north might at any time become the prince of the frontier capital in the south. Thus the principle of family unity and allegiance preserved the unity of interests in the Empire. We see, at the same time, the beginnings of a governing caste.

Russia, as always militant against great dangers, has had many frontier capitals; the capital has had the post of honour closest to the enemy — Moscow as against the Tartars, St. Petersburg as against the Swedes. Someday, perhaps, Constantinople will be another such. The point is chosen or chooses itself, less as the centre of the nation than as the concentration of the national energy and purpose.

Each prince had round him an army of liege companions, the beginnings of the aristocracy. They gave him service and he gave them land; but they held it as his gift, and the coming of a new prince meant the gathering of a new band of Boyars. Thus the aristocracy could not easily become independent of State service.

The second great instinct is faith in Christianity and championship of it. Russia became Christian by the choice of her prince, Vladimir. He felt the insufficiency of his old gods, sent to inquire into other religions, and picked that which pleased — him best. He chose the Orthodoxy of Constantinople, possibly because of its sense of awe and for the reverence to imperial authority which it taught. He did not beg his baptism: he conquered it by defeating the Greeks; and it was the exercise of his will which converted his subjects.

Thus early began a direct connection with Constantinople, which has never ceased. Russia got from thence not only Greek Christianity, Greek sacred books and Greek saints, but also a tradition, which came to be her greatest honour and responsibility when the invasion of the Turks made her the chief champion of the faith against the East.

The Greek missionaries and their Russian followers were real educators of Russia. By their austerity and absolute abnegation of worldly interests, they shone as indeed lights in a dark place. Nothing is more simple reading and in the highest sense moral than their story. One feels at once what the Christian tradition of the West might have been without that intrusion of political ambitions which mars the Papacy. These monks were, for Russia, rather a constant standard of effort, a tradition of a better world worth trying for— a tradition which has never been wholly or even generally lost. The instinct of reverence for that real sanctity which illumined their lives passed as a permanent inheritance into princes and people. In reading Vladimir Monomach's testament, we almost seem to recognise our own. King Alfred. There has hardly been one Russian Tsar who did not pay his tribute to religion, whether by pretence of observance or, as far more often, by real reverence and piety. Amongst the people there are and always have been men and women who, without seeking any kind of ordination and without ever thinking of separating themselves from the national Church, have set themselves to do some difficult exploit for their special salvation. Such persons ordinarily court no attention. One may go barefooted and wear heavy chains beneath his clothes. The Russian word for such exploits may be translated as " moving onwards." It is a gospel of effort. Many will walk extraordinary distances to collect money for the beautifying of a village church, and sums so collected are practically never known to go astray.

All the highest offices in the Church can only be held by monks. Thus the missionary character of the Church as a whole is preserved, and its leaders are less likely to compromise with what I have heard described from an English pulpit as "our legitimate comforts." Yet the Church is by no means separated from the married morality of the country: the country priests, who must marry before their appointment, set the best example in this matter. The Church is in very close touch both with the Government and with the people; it is probably the best link between the two. On the other hand, a comparison with the clergy of the West has always shown up the backwardness of Russia in instruction and in culture.

The third great principle of Russian history is the life and labour of the Russian people. Here again there are long halts in front of stubborn difficulties — difficulties so great, that all the first vigorous attempts to turn the flank of them prove futile. But the great salvation of Russia is her strong family unity; there is unquestionably something great, living and self-existent in her, or there would have been no struggle at all. This great army, always and before all things insisting on remaining an army, moves by the rule of the pace of the slowest, and thus, as nothing short of complete conquest can be contemplated, there are long periods when victory seems to be altogether impossible; the baffled forces make leisurely and uncertain essays on this side or on that, or else sit down in despair in front of their enemy. The position, the character of the country imposed this solidarity on the Russian people; they were always surrounded by great common dangers; a Russian could not sink, so to speak, into the interests of private life, after the manner of the Germans, and content himself with assuring, by limited and detailed effort, his own personal well-being. Public life, of their Church and of their nation, was a necessity to them; for otherwise even the rude beginnings of their individual prosperity would be swept away.

What makes the story of Russia so fascinating is this — that, taken as a whole, she was always only just a little more than equal to her immense difficulties. It was the constant versatile inexhaustible vitality of the people, always fresh in fancy, but always broken to patience, that made success possible. It is this varied mass of humour, good-hearted patience and quaint resource which has given the body to Russian history.

The great distances of Russia, comparatively unpeopled, called for civilisation, especially to eastwards; and we have to understand that, from the very first, the Russians were a colonising people, especially on that side; I have already mentioned the eastward direction of the rivers. The story is one of the great unwritten narratives of battles against the land. The Russians, like others of the more Eastern peoples, easily change their habitations; often enough the stress of events has obliged them to do so. The Slavs followed the Germans when the Germans were driven westwards into the old Roman Empire. The first Russian Empire was itself little more than a road, consisting of that great waterway which ran from the Baltic to Constantinople. The Russians, as born travellers, were indeed, from the very first, born borrowers, — in a sense born to cosmopolitanism. They took their ruling race from the Baltic and their system of Church and State from Constantinople. At first, not so very much more than the through roads were in the hands of the Government, as is still the case in many parts of Siberia. But the stream of Russian energy went on flowing, and the wilderness was conquered step by step.

There were great centres which the reigning family held less tightly than others. This, amidst the constant changes of princes, was inevitable. Novgorod was a great town living on travel and trade, and therefore full of the spirit of enterprise. It was only the " second seat," and the rough energy of its people made this seat undesirable for princes. It was left almost to govern itself, and generally made its own bargain with its rulers. In many cases, in the virile language of the annalists, it " saluted them and showed them the way out." Such towns supply the needed tradition of town self-government in the history of the Russian people.

The family system of joint-government proved to be only a first sketch of a plan, not suited to meet great dangers. The princes got to quarrelling about their respective appanages, and their enmities were brutal and hereditary. Just at this time descended upon Russia one of those avalanches which seem to wipe out the past. The Tartars came ravaging through Russia; hardly one important town escaped. When Russia had buried her countless dead, she found herself under a foreign yoke.

This domination lasted for more than two hundred years. For a long time, it seemed to be hopelessly and permanently invincible by the sheer weight of numbers. It was sheer numbers that had made the conquest; there had been no lack of chivalry or of noble deaths on the Russian side, nor did Russia now lie easy under the yoke. At least one glorious premature attempt at liberation was made by the united people under Demetrius of the Don; but his great victory was followed almost immediately by the taking and sacking of his capital. The load of physical force was too heavy, and it lay on Russia too long.

This domination was alien, unprofitable, and miserable. The Tartars founded nothing of themselves. They were greedy and hateful oppressors. The Russians were themselves inevitably degraded by the unclean connection. Despair came to be almost an instinct with them.

Yet in reality their hold on life never showed itself more clearly than now. The old easy days of the reckless princes were gone; there remained the possibility of building up a new system by tension -and effort; the political instinct became more of a general necessity. In this work the Church was to the fore. Holy men, such as the hermit Sergius, still held up the standard of aloofness from an evil world; they also broke new ground for Russia by colonising and conquering more of the wilderness.

The places made sacred by their labours became the fastnesses of national spirit, even of national defiance. Sergius blessed Demetrius before his campaign, and even sent two of his young monks to fight for Russia. In the Church, there was unity of authority before it existed in the State; the Metropolitans chose this time for moving their seat to the new centre of Russian life, Moscow, and did everything to secure for Moscow a national dictatorship against the national danger.

We have to understand that this new tradition of dictatorship was inevitable and to be desired. I do not discuss whether a nation must save its independence before it can develop its corporate life; I assume that it must. We ourselves may have been able, during long intervals, to think that our own independence could never be really endangered, and may have almost ceased to think of ourselves as militant personalities engaged in a struggle for life; but this is the gospel of the undisturbed, and is at variance with the ordinary laws of life. We can afford to be generous and impersonal so long as we are seated on the wealth of the world. The Russian had his back arched on the ground and had to wrestle.

It was under such conditions that the Russian autocracy was developed. In time of war, though we may all be of different opinions as to detail, and though any one of us may be right, we must have a general: otherwise the enemy will march round and over us, whilst we are still discussing on the principle of " one man, one vote," and whilst the last and perhaps deciding member of "the public" is still being educated up to just the right opinion. It is not without reason that emperor means general.

This dictatorship was distinctively national. The Church had to save itself, so had the nation; and both were really represented by the Grand Princes of Moscow. Moscow grew up as the incarnate tradition of this dictatorship.

The details of the policy of Moscow were various and often much more than questionable; there runs all through it the sense of self-interest and self-preservation. The beginnings of it are all found in a previous attempt by a prince of Suzdal; these methods were consistently followed up by Moscow, and became a tradition.

First the prince must secure peace and power. He is careful with money, and thus becomes more rich than the neighbouring Russian princes. He avoids all hopeless defiance of the lordship of the suzerain Tartar. But the Tartars are lazy in peace-time, and govern Russia by a deputy — by a Russian. The rich prince of Moscow outbids his brother princes and secures this office. As deputy for the Tartars, he often quarrels with his Russian neighbours, and has the help of the Tartars to conquer them. These Tartars see that his government brings in to them more money than they could themselves extort, and they are beginning to quarrel amongst themselves, and see no more. The success of Moscow attracts population; people, in these plains, change their homes easily. Boyars desert their failing masters; it is their ancient right to do so. Peasants come to live in rich and peaceful Muscovy. But, in Russia, the land gets its chief value from the number of its inhabitants. Thus Moscow establishes a kind of economic predominance over her rivals.

Moscow has opportunities of position. She is between the three waterways, running eastward, westward, and northward. She stands between the forests of the north and the good soil of the south. She is herself neither north nor south, and must make a bid for the unity of all Russia.

All this the Church was quick to see. The Metropolitan came to live at Moscow; the Grand Prince became his " eldest son " and protector.

Moscow still did everything to avoid direct collision with the Tartars; she fought their battles and acted as their executioner. The worst things that have been said against diplomacy as an art were sometimes true of the diplomacy of Moscow.

When the noble Demetrius made his great attempt to shake off the yoke, he appeared, for the first time, to be rather the ruler of a nation than the chief of a coalition. His victory cost him so many of his best men that Russia was almost depleted of her captains of war. The time was not yet come; but this only proved the wisdom of Moscow's previous self-restraint, and at the same time the enterprise of Demetrius convinced everyone that Moscow was the true champion of Church and nation. The end of the foreign domination seemed to be in sight, especially as the dissensions of the Tartars were breaking them up into hostile kingdoms. In Russia, on the contrary, the minor princes, though never all at once deprived of all rights, were gradually relegated to the position first of " younger brothers " and then of " sons " and " dependents." The first and most strict limitation was that which debarred them from any direct political relations with the Tartars. By treaty they engaged themselves " not to know the Horde." It was a national need that dictated their dependence. Meanwhile, in each new treaty between Russian princes, the titles of the Grand Prince grew in dignity and pomp. From the first Russia had held to the family system of government. The greatness of Moscow depended on the personal leadership of an acknowledged father. On no subject has the Russian Government been at all times more tender than on what is called the " diminution " of this title.

A time of quarrels follows in Russia, but it shows up the completeness of the change. Almost the whole of a long reign is filled with civil wars; yet no one outside the Moscow dynasty makes a bid for supremacy; the question lies between the son and the brother of the last prince of Moscow. The old tradition of the brother's succession has, up to this point, prevailed. But the Church sees where the interests of order lie and strongly takes the side of the son.

Its protege, Basil, called the Sightless, was blinded by his cousin in the course of this struggle; yet he triumphed in the end and lived on to old age. His son, John the Great, a seldom seen but terrible figure, looms larger over Russia than any of his predecessors. The victory had been won; he was born to the fruits of it; all that he had to do was to reap these fruits. His pride rose to the measure of his position. The feel of his presence was communicated from the chief servants around him, all over his empire and beyond its frontiers. Everywhere was felt the impression of an anointed mysterious and irresistible purpose, choosing its own ways, conscious of its own power, resting on the vastness of the country and the number of its people, on the long patience and simple faith of the nation. It was as if somehow Russia lay couched beneath his throne.

This was a reign of great accomplishment in many fields, and the autocracy finally became a part of the hereditary instincts of the nation. Novgorod had been a centre of life and enterprise for all the north of Russia. She had broken new ground right up to the Urals. But the parties in the town had become so factious that sometimes whole days were spent in riot and fighting in the streets and on the bridge. Then, too, Novgorod fed herself by her trade, richly enough in times of peace, but only with difficulty when the Prince of Moscow cut off the supplies which came from the great " hinterland." The story of Novgorod's quarrels with Moscow was generally that of a famine and a submission. Novgorod was a purely Russian town, but in the times of division she had played the part of the " free lance," and had been able to set off one neighbouring prince against another. Half republic, half principality, she represented the free popular instinct in Russian history, but times and systems were become too strong for her. In despair she turned towards a foreign power, Lithuania, the enemy of Russia and of the Russian Church. Few stories will strike more fear than that of John's reduction of Novgorod; you never seem to see him or hear him till the end, but you often enough hear about him. Novgorod may be said to have been paralysed and stricken down by a well-grounded instinct of fatality. She fell by degrees, but finally. Autocracy was supreme in Russia.

It was in John's reign that the Tartar domination, long little more than nominal, quite faded away. The final credit is due, not to John, but to the Church and the people. It was a great ecclesiastic who by his pure religious patriotism and stinging reproaches practically compelled John to march against the Tartars. We have not many years to wait for the beginning of the long counter-stroke. When John's grandson took Kazan and celebrated his conquest amidst a general fervour of converting zeal, the first step was taken in that march which was to carry Russia to the shores of the Pacific.

Constantinople had fallen to the Turks. The Pope seems to have thought that as Russia had now no intact religious centre to look to for guidance, a little flattery might bring her into the fold of the Western Church. He planned a Russo-Greek marriage between John and the niece of the last Greek Emperor, who had fallen fighting on the walls of his capital. He cannot have known what instincts and what hopes he was flattering. The Russians had been dreaming of Constantinople since the Russian Empire began: the dream is woven into their most homely country poetry. They had flatly refused to accept the agreement of their representative at the Council of Florence to the union of the two Churches, and had chased him out in shame. Long before, Alexander Nevsky, replying to an offer of religious instruction from the West, had said, "We know quite as much about it as you do." John then accepted the Greek bride, and with her a new title to the championship of the Greek Church and the succession to its headship; and when the Papal legate seemed likely to introduce the Latin cross into Moscow, the Metropolitan said in plain terms to the Grand Prince, " My son, if he comes in with it at one gate, I, your father, go out at the other."

John's grandson, John the Terrible, turned autocracy into a definite system. It is largely to him that we owe fi, the tradition of a great host of officials. Yet it could not be said that the instinct of his people was all against him in this work.

John the Terrible was the pupil of his own terror before he taught terror to his nobles and even to his people. His was no coarse, brutal nature; his faults were those of a clever, quick sensibility. He fought a merciless battle for a principle which bad come to be identified with the person of the prince — namely, the unity of the nation. In this sense his work for Russia was more than valuable — it was necessary.

As a child-sovereign he saw the nobles lead the rabble into his palace and murder his friends. Treated with the utmost neglect in private, he yet noticed the respect paid to him on public occasions, and thus got to know that some virtue of tradition was in him. Wise and learned beyond his years and his people, he had the energy to strike a sudden blow for freedom. At the age of thirteen he seemed to have made himself absolute; but four years later the palace was again invaded and some of his blood relations were killed. The Government of the nobles was always worse in Russia than that of the one trained and titled autocrat. National feeling rallied to the bold boy, who returned to Moscow on his own terms and governed ably and well. But he could not now trust the nobles, and chose his ministers from the more obscure. While he was supposed to be dying he heard even these favourites dividing his succession. He did not die, and henceforth trusted only to agents who would depend absolutely upon him. He divided his subjects into those who were neutral, and those who were bound to him beyond all ties of family by a specially terrible oath. With the help of these last he crushed out all opposition in blood.

John conquered Kazan. The back of the Tartars was broken, and Astrakhan fell to him almost of itself. But " order " was the motto and the mission of Russia, and order was very hard to establish amongst the broken and disorderly masses of various races which different invasions had left stranded all down the banks of the Volga. Here there was no rival principle to fight against the Government, unless the instinct of untrammelled licence in the robber can be called a principle; and Russia's work was here a work of civilisation, that is, of turning the natural man into a member of a great community. In the forefront of this work stood the convents, which broke up new land, developed peace and trade, and spread a religion which we may make bold to call far superior to anything which it replaced. The great through -water way was necessary to Russia; yet caravans could never travel down it without very large escorts. Pioneers of the people were engaged in this work of advance more actively than the Government itself. It was by the victory of such pioneers that John received the submission of a part of Siberia. Russia had pushed forward to east and south, but a last relic of the Golden Horde, the separate kingdom of Crimea, still blocked her from the Black Sea, and kept the splendid black soil of the south in suspense of cultivation. The southern frontiers still had to be militant. They were held by the natural advance-guard of the Russian Church and people, the Cossacks. These men of adventure were in many ways like most of our colonists; they were those who had not lived in peace with the Government — those who wanted elbow-room; their numbers were recruited less by birth than by the accession of new wanderers, driven by Government severity in the van of the Government advance, but united generally by the ties of Russian blood and instincts, and almost always by devotion to the Orthodox Church. They were happy as living from raids on their natural enemies the Tartars and later, the Turks. John even made an attempt to break through to the Black Sea, but this plan was complicated by others; he was not strong enough for all-round success, and so all his various plans of advance, for the time, failed together.

To sum up: Russia had always with her the long and painful responsibility of being on the frontier between Europe and Asia. But then, too, she always had her own strong national existence, her family instinct of unity, her loyalty to her Church, of which she was become the champion. The East had imposed on her the necessity of a national dictatorship, but was already breaking up before her persistency. But, if she was to teach the East, she was also bound to learn from the West. This was the more difficult task of the two.

II. — RUSSIA AND THE WEST.

Along the south-eastern coast of the Baltic lived a group of tribes distantly akin to the Russians, and including the Prussians, Zhmuds, Courlanders, Lithuanians and Letts. The east coast of the Baltic, from the north of Finland to Revel, and including the district in which St. Petersburg now stands, was occupied by Finnish tribes, of which the southernmost were the Estonians. These blocked off Russia from the Western Seas.

The Letts and the Estonians are deeply hostile to each other by race and by instinct. Their animosity alone still serves as a natural frontier between them.

Upon these coasts descended Germans: traders, missionaries, and finally an Order of crusading knights, shortly followed by another such Order further westwards. These two Orders were later united. Germany was at this time hopelessly entangled with Italian affairs, and therefore still hopelessly divided; but this eastward movement was a natural advance, made by private enterprise in the cause of western civilisation.

These Germans founded great trading towns which joined the Hansa league; they, by the argument of the sword, converted the Letts and Estonians to Western Christianity; they built great castles for the control of these aliens, for only the towns were wholly theirs, not the country. They then set about quarrelling amongst themselves. Yet in arms, arts, and personal enterprise they were much superior to the Russians, with whom they were almost always at war. There was no natural geographical or racial frontier between them and Russia, for many Finnish tribes were subject to the Russians.

The Lithuanians, in their heathen forests, heard of the German successes, and got rid of their divisions just in time to make a desperate stroke for freedom and even for empire. They held off the Germans by war or intrigue, twice pretending to adopt Christianity in order to take away from the crusaders their reason for being there. They had four great rulers (the three last in succession), each of whom was cunning, unscrupulous, untiring, and able. By a counter-stroke of the energy which was originally aroused in them by their struggle with the Germans, they were able to conquer the White Russians and Little Russians, who lay to the south of them, and thus cut their way, not indeed to the Baltic, but to the Black Sea. Their subjects, then, were mostly foreigners, and the White Russian dialect was even their official language.

Meanwhile Russia was still struggling for her existence against the Tartars; and Moscow, without any other recognised claim than that of partial success, was bidding for the headship of Russia. One can imagine to what an extent the rise of Lithuania complicated the difficulties of Moscow. There were now two claimants for the headship, and Lithuania was the stronger of the two; she had also advantages of position, for she was not equally exposed to the violence of the Tartars; she was better placed for learning from the West those arts of organisation which might increase her strength as a State, and she was able to prevent the teachers of these arts from getting through to Russia. The West, then, instead of coming in peace to civilise Russia, appeared to Moscow in the guise of a hostile power armed for conquest. Lithuania tried to split the religious unity of Russia by establishing a new Metropolitan at old Kyiv, the former Russian capital, which she had conquered. Yet everything was unreal in the Lithuanian claim; she was not really a Russian power. Kyiv was hers, but was not her capital or her centre of life.

Moscow was indeed the new centre of Russia, but she was new, and had to prove her claim by her vitality. There were many conflicts with Lithuania, who joined sometimes with the Tartars against her and sometimes with the smaller Russian States, such as Tver and Novgorod. There were comparatively few pitched battles, both sides being in more or less equal balance. This was to the profit of Moscow, who, as being of sounder substance, had everything to gain from time. But there was always the subtle war of intrigue, and the prescripts of each court were welcomed at the other. This meant that there were two Russias, and that Russian princes had their choice of service. They might easily prefer the looser master.

Yet both these countries, Muscovy and Lithuania, were peopled mainly by Russians, adherents of the Greek Church; and everything seemed to point to their ultimate union, when an artificial development, in keeping with the artificial character of Lithuania, diverted the course of history.

To westward, behind Lithuania, were the Poles. This people has been brilliantly described as a "nation on horseback "; the description applies only to the ruling classes of Poland, for they alone politically constituted the nation. While Russia was still centred round her western capital, Kyiv, and before the Tartars and Lithuanians had cut her connection with the West, Russians and Poles had often been in contact of alliance or war. At that time somewhat similar political conditions prevailed in both countries; in language and in blood they were closely enough allied, but there was this fateful difference — that Eastern Christianity was part of the very soul of Russian nationality, and that the Poles took their civilisation and their religion from Western Europe.

The "nation on horseback" had its strong national pride, not a pride in discipline and unity such as the hard tutorship of the Tartars was teaching to Moscow, but a pride in common liberties which were really liberties of licence, because exercised at the expense of the king on the one side and of a whole subject class on the other. While other nations developed themselves out of this primitive state, the Polish nobles succeeded in stereotyping it more and more as time went on. The king, in order to bolster himself up against the tyranny of the great nobles, accorded equal rights of licence to all the smaller gentry as well. The ties of race and language, of common privileges, of a narrow exclusive " society," could unite the Polish nobles for glorious national defence or perhaps for one campaign of attack; but national organisation was impossible. Cut off from its ballast — the infantry of the people — the nation on horseback played with history, much as our own full-blooded nobles did under the Lancastrians and Yorkists.

Thus their civilisation, though much in advance of that of the Russians, had something fictitious about it. There was not that foundation of work and character on which civilisation must be built. The religion came from over the frontier, not once for all, but by regular instalments; its influence was much too militant and political. The alphabet was Latin; the official tongue was Latin. The nobles wore better arms than the Russians, and knew more about war; but there was no middle class except foreigners, — Germans and Jews. The Jews came to manage nearly all the estates of the happy-go-lucky nobles, and that, too, on a system of quick profits for themselves. Thus there was not, in Poland, that back-bone which could sustain a long national struggle.

To a young girl, Hedwig, was left the heritage of the Polish throne. There was instituted the usual search for a political husband. The young lady, who had certainly given her heart already and perhaps her hand too, was anyhow looked upon as officially a spinster. The Polish nobles, and still more their Roman Catholic directors, were fascinated by a scheme that suggests the motto of Austria: " Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube." "Lucky Poland" was to annex, without a blow, to herself and to Latin Christendom the whole of Lithuania. Hedwig and the Polish crown were offered to Yagailo (Jagellon), Prince of Lithuania, on condition of the conversion of himself and his country. The bargain was carried out, Hedwig being persuaded to make a saint of herself by a repulsive marriage. The Lithuanians, the alien conquerors of White Russia, were themselves still in large part heathens. They were officially converted; the majority of their subjects, who were Orthodox Russians, found themselves handed over to a Roman Catholic power.

There is some evidence of a marriage between Hedwig and William of Austria. In this bargain both parties expected to gain without effort by a kind of trick, and so both sides were disappointed. Meanwhile, the Russia of Muscovy saw its difficulties infinitely increased. Lithuania still struggled for many years to assert her independence, but eventually fell into a close political union with Poland. Polish nobles secured important posts and great estates in Lithuania. The Orthodox peasants of White Russia learnt the habit of subjection. In spite of persecutions they held closely to their religion, and the Union later had to be completed by the religious bargain known as the " Unia," by which many of the Orthodox White Russians acknowledged the purely nominal headship of the Pope, and received in return a promise of toleration. The Polish settlers were aliens amongst their new peasants, and dealt with them chiefly through their agents, the Jews; some even mortgaged to the Jews the Orthodox churches of their peasants, so that the Jew could ask his own price when the keys were wanted to open the doors for Christian service. Muscovy was now the champion of Orthodoxy and of Russian nationality; but in her quarrels with Lithuania, the political weight of Poland was henceforth always against her.

John the Terrible had too many enemies to carry any of his plans of advance right through. He attacked the Germans of the Baltic and sought election to the throne of Poland. The rival eventually preferred to him was Bathory, an able general, who, on his election, made a coalition of all the enemies of Russia. John was foiled at every point. He had already met with many other disillusions, and was now fully earning the name which he bears in history. His eldest son he killed in a fit of anger, and the rest of his life was a round of alternate mortifications and excesses. His second son who succeeded him — a monk rather than a prince — died childless. His third son was murdered in childhood. The direct line of Rurik was extinct.

The murder of little Demetrius can be traced almost with certainty to the machinations of a Tartar-born lieutenant of John. This man, Boris Godunoff is the Richard III. of Russian history. Boris now got himself elected Tsar; but in a few years the rumour went about that Demetrius was still alive and about to march on his inheritance from the side of Poland. In Russia, where the great distances and the thinness of population favour ignorance, rumour has always been the most ordinary channel of news; and rumour is always hard to refute. It was never difficult for a Pretender living in one part of Russia to claim to be someone who was personally known only in some other part. It seems that a young monk had fled from Moscow to Lithuania; he entered the service of a Polish noble, and later, during a feigned illness, declared himself to be the rightful heir to Russia. Warlike nobles gathered round him, the Latin priests intrigued with him for the future conversion of Russia, King Sigismund gave his indirect support, and the false Demetrius marched on Moscow. Boris died at his approach. The Pretender was accepted as Tsar.

But no religious bargain was possible. In Russia the very merits of the Westerniser were counted as faults. Within a year he was surrounded in his palace by an angry crowd, driven to jump from one of the back windows, and dispatched where he fell. His body, we are told, was burnt, and the ashes fired from a cannon in the direction of Poland.

Moscow chose as Tsar an old noble, descended, by a side line, from Eurik. This Tsar Basil was broken and shifty. In more than one part of Russia rose a new false Demetrius, and the number of these Pretenders does not seem to have awakened any sense of humour. On the contrary, even the sane man would have taken the joke seriously; for you cannot laugh, when nearly every one has lost his senses. The real issue was obvious and serious enough. The natural forces of disorder which are in every man's heart had risen in a reaction against the tight hold of the old autocracy. The system seemed to be breaking up, and thousands of men were willing to fish in the troubled waters of chaos. The movement was directed against all government, and it certainly did nothing to recommend such movements to Russia for the future. All the painful efforts of the past to draw the country from its native disorder were now being squandered in a desperate licence, which raised every man's hand against his weaker neighbour. The wild riot centered round one of the Pretenders, a brigand chief who established himself at Tushino, near Moscow. The Moscow nobles intrigued with him. The various robber bands overran the country and made their own profit. The Polish chiefs with their bands of retainers were at the very heart of Russia, and their dubious and insincere king was preparing to lead in his army, with that cry for order which the Russians were later to carry into Poland. The Poles, then, had their chance first, but of the cause of order they were unworthy and inadequate champions; they had no home basis to stand upon and to act from.

Even this danger was not the last of Russia's difficulties. Russia was always and justly feared by her Western neighbours, and their way of keeping her in check was always to push her back from those Western influences which might make her morally more their equal. The Germans of the Baltic had offered education only at the price of independence; more than that, they had in time of peace detained on their way the teachers of the Western arts whom Russia had called to her help. But the Crusading Orders decayed and died out; the Reformation made this district Protestant; and, when John the Terrible failed to break a way through to the Baltic, the old German territory became subject, part to the Poles and part to the Swedes.

The Swedes, from the time of their early conquest of Finland, had always been in contact with the Russians. They had led a Latin crusade into North Russia, and had been defeated on the Neva by the hero of the Russian church, Prince Alexander Nevsky. They now blocked Russia from the sea as Poland blocked her from the West, and in this time of confusion they even occupied for a time one of the most Russian of Russian towns, Novgorod the Great. The old Tsar Basil bought from them by concessions a dubious help; his brilliant nephew, Skopin, thus set free to face the Polish partisans, won a series of victories over them, but suddenly died. Some put down his death to the jealousy of his uncle; and it was not long before Tsar Basil was deposed and handed over to the Poles. Moscow seemed to have no other choice than that of either accepting the brigand of Tushino or making some kind of arrangement with the Poles. By the first alternative she would have legitimised disorder pure and simple, and her nobles closed with the second. But they tried to make their conditions: they chose as Tsar, not the Polish king, but the Polish crown prince, who had yet to secure his way to the Polish throne by election. Polish troops were now the garrison of Moscow.

But King Sigismund wanted to be Tsar himself; he also meant to use the occasion to conquer what he could of Russia for the absolute possession of Poland. He imprisoned the ambassadors sent to him, and continued to besiege Smolensk.

Russia had no Tsar of her own to save her. Her greater nobles seemed to be all corrupt and self-seeking. If she had wished to abandon the old autocratic system, she had but to sit still and watch it die. And yet she did exactly the opposite; she faced all sacrifices to re-establish the old national and religious dictatorship because she cared for it, because, after all, the sense of solidarity, of standing together, was the first and most valued instinct of the Russian people. And what was it that did this for Russia? Precisely that force which was so conspicuously lacking in Poland when her time of trouble came — the force of popular instinct as pervading the Russian Church and the humbler and steadier of the Russian people.

It is a story of thousands, such as history can hardly write and seldom attempts. There were "men of God," "men moving forwards," who came out of their life-long cells to say that at least they had still a Church and a country. Skopin had sought the blessings of such men before attempting what was apparently impossible. The true wounded of the nation, the robbed or maimed fugitives, driven by stress of violence from their daily work, were gathered and comforted by the simple and holy Dionysius and his monks of the Trinity Monastery. From this fastness of the Church and the nation, which had kept out the Pole Sapieha during sixteen months of siege, went forth letters to the Russian people, couched in the simplest and straightest language, and calling on all to forget their individual safety and to march on the enemies of Russia. Such letters arrived in distant Nizhny Novgorod. Minin, a butcher, took the lead there, and a general sacrifice of valuables was made to the holy cause.

The instinct of discipline sought a leader among the gentry and discovered the wounded but willing champion Pozharsky. The great national host rolled on Moscow. Even the disorderly Cossacks felt bound to help. The Polish garrison was driven to surrender before the slow Sigismund could relieve it; and, after solemnly humiliating themselves before their God, the deputies of all Russia, the often-cited historic National Assembly, chose for their Tsar, not any powerful intriguer, but a young lad whose only antecedents were those of a tradition of suffering patriotism, Michael Romanoff. A band of Poles marched to seize this lad on his country estate, but a peasant, Susanin, led them astray into the recesses of a wild marsh and gave his life to save his Tsar. The boy whom Susanin saved, the first of the Romanoffs, was to be the grandfather of Peter the Great.

In the reigns of Michael and his son Alexis, the Poles were pressed back until even Smolensk was recovered. Both these Tsars owed much to the counsels of great statesmen of the Church — Michael to his father, the Patriarch Philaret, one of the imprisoned ambassadors of Smolensk, and Alexis to his friend Nikon, a bold and masterful man, who forced Church Reform upon Russia. The Patriarchate had, significantly enough, been established just before the temporary failure of Tsardom and the lawless time of troubles; and we have seen what the Church did for the nation amidst the stress of national dangers. At this time Poland, the enemy of the Orthodox Church, pressed back on her foundations, which proved to be all weakness within, was now sinking further and further into anarchy; thus the barrier to education from the West was no longer so effective, and the old Russia began to beautify herself and to instruct herself, to be ready for the great Rernodeller who was to come. To the south there were hereditary conflicts between the Cossacks and the Turks, and the Cossacks themselves were drawn into the governmental life of Russia. To the east Russia descended the Volga by regular stages of evangelising, of colonising, and of fortifying, and the lawless robbers of the south-east rose in vain under Razin against the Tsar of Moscow.

A most important social development had been legalised during the reign of Feodor, the last of the direct line of Rurik. Bands of discontented men — ex-soldiers, escaped servants or monks, beggars and robbers — were almost a normal source of trouble in Russia. The battle which the Government was fighting was a battle for order, but its success had always been only gradual, especially amongst the sea of peoples in the south and east. We have seen that the Government had found it necessary to compromise with the restless spirits and to sanction their practical independence in frontier districts as in the case of the Cossacks, thus driving this current of militant energy in the direction where it found its desired conditions of life and could even act as a vigorous advance guard of Russia. But the evil, fed by every increase of severity in the Government, continued to be great in the interior. This evil was particularly ruinous to the smaller gentry. There was plenty of land, but much of it was of poor quality and required many hands to work it. Migration, as we know, was in the blood, the conditions and the habits of the people. We have seen how the boyars passed from one master to another. The same thing was happening in detail with agriculture. The same appeal of wealth and success induced peasants to leave the poor service of the smaller gentry, and to gather in masses around the richer landowners. This might well frighten the Government, and, in any case, it reduced almost to nothing the value of the land of the poorer gentry. But the Government was organised on the top of the society, and not independently of it; the smaller gentry held their land for service to the Tsars. They were the natural officers in what was almost the only armed force, the national militia, and their peasants were the soldiers whom they were expected to bring to the field. How could these gentry fulfil their obligations if they lost their peasants? They would have neither means nor men.