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Page 78
Such is the view presented by recent French and English writers who have
made the condition of Russia a subject of minute investigation. Mr.
Noble deals more in generalizations than in details, and sets forth a
theory which it is difficult to reconcile with the facts and conclusions
derived from other sources. According to him, Russia is, and has been
from the first establishment of the imperial rule, in a state of chronic
revolt. This revolt is "the protest of eighty millions of people against
their continued employment as a barrier in the path of peaceful human
progress and national development." "It is not the educated classes
alone, but the masses,--peasant and artisan, land-owner and student,--of
whose aspirations, at least, it may be said, as it was said of the
earliest and freest Russians, '_Neminem ferant imperatorem_.'"
Before the rise of the empire "the Russians lived as freemen and happy."
They "enjoyed what, in a political sense, we are fairly entitled to
regard as the golden age of their national existence." The _vech�_,
or popular assembly, "was from a picturesque point of view the grandest,
from an administrative point of view the simplest, and from a moral
point of view the most equitable form of government ever devised by
man." The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at all
periods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol,
or separation of the "Old Believers" from the Orthodox Church, and in
the resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great: "in the
one as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority and
all that it represented." It is admitted that "among the peasants the
revolt must long remain in its passive stage.... Yet year by year,
partly owing to educational processes, partly owing to propaganda, even
the peasants are being won over to the growing battalions of
discontent." The autocracy is "doomed." "The forces that undermine it
are cumulative and relentless." Its "true policy is to spread its
dissolution--after the manner of certain financial operations--over a
number of years." "The method of the change is really not of importance.
The vital matter is that the reform shall at once concede and
practically apply the principle of popular self-government, granting at
the same time the fullest rights of free speech and public assembly."
Finally, "the Tsar and his advisers" are bidden to "beware," since "the
spectacle of this frightfully unequal struggle ... is not lost upon
Europe, or even upon America."
The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus
rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with
the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little
attention he may have given to those of Russia in particular. The
institutions of Russia differ fundamentally from those of other European
states. But the difference lies in historical conditions and
development, not in the principles underlying all human society. No
people has ever had a permanent government of its own resting solely or
chiefly on force. Wherever autocracy has acquired a firm footing, it has
done so by suppressing anarchy, establishing order and authority, and
securing national unity and independence. Nowhere has it fulfilled these
conditions more completely than in Russia. It grew up when the country
was lying prostrate under the Tartar domination, and it supplied the
impulse and the means by which that yoke was thrown off. It absorbed
petty principalities, extinguished their conflicting ambitions, and
consolidated their resources; checked the migrations of a nomad
population, and brought discordant races under a common rule; repelled
invasions to which, in its earlier disintegrated condition, the nation
must have succumbed, and built up an empire hardly less remarkable for
its cohesion and its strength than for the vastness of its territory. In
a word, it performed, more rapidly and thoroughly, the same work which
was accomplished by monarchy between the eighth and the fifteenth
century in Western Europe. If its methods were more analogous to those
of Eastern despotisms than of European sovereignties, if its excesses
were unrestrained and its power uncurbed, this is only saying that
Russia, instead of sharing in the heritage of Roman civilization and in
the mutual intercourse and common discipline through which the Western
communities were developed, was cut off from association with its more
fortunate kindred and subjected to influences from which they were, for
the most part, exempt. To hold up the crude democracy and turbulent
assemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that the
Russian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifully
organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute
monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without
encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose
distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to
treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex
system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no
existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent
revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or
difficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance,"--all this
strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as
a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the
eighteenth-century _philosophes_ had not yet been dissipated by the
French Revolution.
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