Part 10 (1/2)
As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems they presented. In a land in which the a.s.sociative principle was indigenous, _Socialism_ was a natural and inevitable growth. Then, exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into existence that word of dire significance in Russia--_Nihilism_, and following quickly upon that, its logical sequence--_Anarchism_, which, if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.
It was Turguenief who first applied the ancient term ”Nihilist” to a certain cla.s.s of radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of society, like that of the eighteenth-century philosophers in France, was based upon a negation of the principle of authority. All inst.i.tutions, social and political, however disguised, were tyrannies, and must go.
In the newly awakened Russian mind, this first a.s.sumed the mild form of a demand for the removal of _legislative_ tyranny, by a system of gradual reforms. This had failed--now the demand had become a mandate.
The people _must_ have relief. The Tsar was the one person who could bestow it, and if he would not do so voluntarily, he must be compelled to grant it. No one man had the right to wreck the happiness of millions of human beings. If the authority was centralized, so was the responsibility. Alexander's entire reign had been a curse--and emanc.i.p.ation was a delusion and a lie. He must yield or perish. This vicious and degenerate organization had its center in a highly educated middle cla.s.s, where men with nineteenth-century intelligence and aspirations were in frenzied revolt against methods suited to the time of the Khans. The inspiring motive was not love of the people, but hatred of their oppressors. Appeals to the peasantry brought small response, but the movement was eagerly joined by men and women from the highest ranks in Russia.
Secret societies and organizations were everywhere at work, recruited by misguided enthusiasts, and by human suffering from all cla.s.ses.
Wherever there were hearts bruised and bleeding from official cruelty, in whatever ranks, there the terrible propaganda found sympathizers, if not a home; men--and still more, women--from the highest families in the n.o.bility secretly pledging themselves to the movement, until Russian society was honeycombed with conspiracy extending even to the household of the Tsar. Proclamations were secretly issued calling upon the peasantry to arise. In spite of the vigilance of the police, similar invitations to all the Russian people were posted in conspicuous places--”We are tired of famine, tired of having our sons perish upon the gallows, in the mines, or in exile. Russia demands liberty; and if she cannot have liberty--she will have vengeance!”
Such was the tenor of the threats which made the life of Emperor Alexander a miserable one after 1870. He had done what not one of his predecessors had been willing to do. He had, in the face of the bitterest opposition, bestowed the gift of freedom upon 23,000,000 human beings. In his heart he believed he deserved the good-will and the grat.i.tude of his subjects. How gladly would he have ruled over a happy empire! But what could he do? He had absolute power to make his people miserable--but none to make them happy. It was not his fault that he occupied a throne which could only be made secure by a policy of stern repression. It was not his fault that he ruled through a system so elementary, so crude, so utterly inadequate, that to administer justice was an impossibility. Nor was it his fault that he had inherited autocratic instincts from a long line of ancestors. In other words, it was not his fault that he was the Tsar of Russia!
The grim shadow of a.s.sa.s.sination pursued him wherever he went. In 1879 the imperial train was destroyed by mines placed beneath the tracks.
In 1880 the imperial apartments in ”the Winterhof” were partially wrecked by similar means. Seventeen men marched stolidly to the gallows, regretting nothing except the failure of their crime; and hundreds more who were implicated in the plot were sent into perpetual exile in Siberia. The hand never relaxed--nor was the Const.i.tution demanded by these atrocious means granted.
On the 13th of March, 1881, while the Emperor was driving, a bomb was thrown beneath his carriage. He stepped out of the wreck unhurt. Then as he approached the a.s.sa.s.sin, who had been seized by the police, another was thrown. Alexander fell to the ground, exclaiming, ”Help me!” Terribly mutilated, but conscious, the dying Emperor was carried into his palace, and there in a few hours he expired.
In the splendid obsequies of the Tsar, nothing was more touching than the placing of a wreath upon his bier by a deputation of peasants. It can be best described in their own words. The Emperor was lying in the Cathedral wrapped in a robe of ermine, beneath a canopy of gold and silver cloth lined with ermine. ”At last we were inside the church,”
says the narrative. ”We all dropped on our knees and sobbed, our tears flowing like a stream. Oh, what grief! We rose from our knees, again we knelt, and again we sobbed. This did we three times, our hearts breaking beside the coffin of our benefactor. There are no words to express it. And what honor was done us! The General took our wreath, and placed it straightway upon the breast of our Little Father. Our peasants' wreath laid on his heart, his martyr breast--as we were in all his life nearest to his heart! Seeing this we burst again into tears. Then the General let us kiss his hand--and there he lay, our Tsar-martyr, with a calm, loving expression on his face--as if he, our Little Father, had fallen asleep.”
If anything had been needed to make the name Nihilism forever odious, it was this deed. If anything were required to reveal the bald wickedness of the creed of Nihilism, it was supplied by this aimless sacrifice of the one sovereign who had bestowed a colossal reform upon Russia. They had killed him, and had then marched unflinchingly to the gallows--and that was all--leaving others bound by solemn oaths to bring the same fate upon his successor. The whole energy of the organization was centered in secreting dynamite, awaiting a favorable moment for its explosion, then dying like martyrs, leaving others pledged to repeat the same horror--and so _ad infinitum_. In their detestation of one crime they committed a worse one. They conspired against the life of civilization--as if it were not better to be ruled by despots than a.s.sa.s.sins, as if a bad government were not better than none!
The existence of Nihilism may be explained, though not extenuated. Can anyone estimate the effect upon a single human being to have known that a father, brother, son, sister, or wife has perished under the knout?
Could such a person ever again be capable of reasoning calmly or sanely upon ”political reforms”? If there were any slumbering tiger-instincts in this half-Asiatic people, was not this enough to awaken them? There were many who had suffered this, and there were thousands more who at that very time had friends, lovers, relatives, those dearer to them than life, who were enduring day by day the tortures of exile, subject to the brutal punishments of irresponsible officials. It was this which had converted hundreds of the n.o.bility into conspirators--this which had made Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of one of the highest officials in the land, give the signal for the murder of the Emperor, and then, scorning mercy, insist that she should have the privilege of dying upon the gallows with the rest.
But tiger-instincts, whatever their cause, must be extinguished. They cannot coexist with civilization. Human society as const.i.tuted to-day can recognize no excuse for them. It forbids them--and the Nihilist is the Ishmael of the nineteenth century.
The world was not surprised, and perhaps not even displeased, when Alexander III. showed a dogged determination not to be coerced into reforms by the a.s.sa.s.sination of his father nor threats of his own. His coronation, long deferred by the tragedy which threatened to attend it, finally took place with great splendor at Moscow in 1883. He then withdrew to his palace at Gatschina, where he remained practically a prisoner. Embittered by the recollection of the fate of his father, who had died in his arms, and haunted by conspiracies for the destruction of himself and his family, he was probably the least happy man in his empire. His every act was a protest against the spirit of reform. The privileges so graciously bestowed upon the Grand Duchy of Finland by Alexander I. were for the first time invaded. Literature and the press were placed under rigorous censors.h.i.+p. The _Zemstvo_, his father's gift of local self-government to the liberated serfs, was practically withdrawn by placing that body under the control of the n.o.bility.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Coronation of the Czar Alexander III., 1883. The Emperor crowning the Empress at the Church of the a.s.sumption. From a drawing by Edwin B. Child.]
It was a stern, joyless reign, without one act intended to make glad the hearts of the people. The depressing conditions in which he lived gradually undermined the health of the Emperor. He was carried in dying condition to Livadia, and there, surrounded by his wife and his children, he expired November 1, 1894.
CHAPTER XXVI
FINLAND--HAGUE TRIBUNAL--POLITICAL CONDITIONS
When Nicholas II., the gentle-faced young son of Alexander, came to the throne there were hopes that a new era for Russia was about to commence. There has been nothing yet to justify that hope. The austere policy pursued by his father has not been changed. The recent decree which has brought grief and dismay into Finland is not the act of a liberal sovereign! A forcible Russification of that state has been ordered, and the press in Finland has been prohibited from censuring the _ukase_ which has brought despair to the hearts and homes of the people. The Russian language has been made obligatory in the university of Helsingfors and in the schools, together with other severe measures pointing unmistakably to a purpose of effacing the Finnish nationality--a nationality, too, which has never by disloyalty or insurrection merited the fate of Poland.
But if this has struck a discordant note, the invitation to a Conference of the Nations with a view to a general disarmament has been one of thrilling and unexpected sweetness and harmony. Whether the Peace Congress at The Hague (1899) does or does not arrive at important immediate results, its existence is one of the most significant facts of modern times. It is the first step on the way to that millennial era of universal peace toward which a perfected Christian civilization must eventually lead us, and it remained for an autocratic Tsar of Russia to sound the call and to be the leader in this movement.
At the death-bed of his father, Nicholas was betrothed to a princess of the House of Hesse, whose mother was Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. Upon her marriage this Anglo-German princess was compelled to make a public renunciation of her own faith, and to accept that of her imperial consort--the orthodox faith of Russia. The personal traits of the Emperor seem so exemplary that, if he fails to meet the heroic needs of the hour, the world is disposed not to reproach him, but rather to feel pity for the young ruler who has had thrust upon him such an insoluble problem. His character recalls somewhat that of his great-uncle Alexander I. We see the same vague aspiration after grand ideals, and the same despotic methods in dealing with things in the concrete. No general amnesty attended his coronation, no act of clemency has been extended to political exiles. Men and women whose hairs have whitened in Siberia have not been recalled--not one thing done to lighten the awful load of anguish in his empire. It may have been unreasonable to have looked for reforms; but certainly it was not too much to expect mercy!
What one man could reform Russia? Who could reform a volcano? There are frightful energies beneath that adamantine surface--energies which have been confined by a rude, imperfectly organized system of force; a chain-work of abuses roughly welded together as occasion required. It is a system created by emergencies,--improvised, not grown,--in which to remove a single abuse endangers the whole. When the imprisoned forces tried to escape at one spot, more force was applied and more bands and more rivets brutally held them down, and were then retained as a necessary part of the whole.
On the surface is absolutism in glittering completeness, and beneath that--chaos. Lying at the bottom of that chaos is the great ma.s.s of Slavonic people undeveloped as children--an embryonic civilization--utterly helpless and utterly miserable. In the ma.s.s lying above that exists the mind of Russia--through which course streams of unduly developed intelligence in fierce revolt against the omnipresence of misery. And still above that is the s.h.i.+ning, enameled surface rivaling that of any other nation in splendor. The Emperor may say with a semblance of truth _l'etat c'est moi_, but although he may combine in himself all the functions, judicial, legislative, and executive, no channels have been supplied, no finely organized system provided for conveying that triple stream to the extremities. The living currents at the top have never reached the ma.s.s at the bottom--that despised but necessary soil in which the prosperity of the Empire is rooted. There has been no vital interchange between the separated elements, which have been in contact, but not in union. And Russia is as heterogeneous in condition as it is in elements. It has accepted ready-made the methods of Greek, of Tatar, and of European; but has a.s.similated none of them; and Russian civilization, with its amazing quality, its bewildering variety of achievement in art, literature, diplomacy, and in every field, is not a natural development, but a monstrosity. The genius intended for a whole people seems to have been crowded into a few narrow channels. Where have men written with such tragic intensity? Where has there been music suggesting such depths of sadness and of human pa.s.sion? And who has ever told upon canvas the story of the battlefield with such energy and with such thrilling reality, as has Verestchagin?
The youngest among the civilizations, and herself still only partially civilized, Russia is one of the most--if not the most--important factor in the world-problem to-day, and the one with which the future seems most seriously involved. She has only just commenced to draw upon her vast stores of energy; energies which were acc.u.mulating during the ages when the other nations were lavishly spending theirs. How will this colossal force be used in the future? Moving silently and irresistibly toward the East, and guided by a subtle and far-reaching policy, who can foresee what will be the end, and what the ultimate destiny of the Empire which had its beginning in a small Slavonic State upon the Dnieper, and which, until a little more than a century ago, was too much of a barbarian to be admitted into the fraternity of European States.
The farthest removed from us in political ideals, Russia has in the various crises in our national life always been America's truest friend. When others apparently nearer have failed us, she has stood steadfastly by us. We can never forget it. Owning a large portion of the earth's surface, rich beyond calculation in all that makes for national wealth and prosperity, with a peasantry the most confiding, the most loyal, the most industrious in the world, with intellectual power and genius in abundant measure, and with pride of race and a patriotism profound and intense, what more does Russia need? Only three things--that cruelty be abandoned; that she be made a h.o.m.ogeneous nation; and that she be permitted to live under a government capable of administering justice to her people. These she must have and do. In the coming century there will be no place for barbarism. There will be something in the air which will make it impossible that a great part of a frozen continent shall be dedicated to the use of suffering human beings, kept there by the will of one man. There will be something in the air which will forbid cruelty and compel mercy and justice, and which will make men or nations feign those virtues if they have them not.