Chapter 12

Long before the meeting of the first Duma the freedom manifesto had become a dead letter; and in July, 1906, when Mr. Makarof, the Associate Minister of the Interior, was called before the Duma to explain the inconsistency between the "inflexible will" of the Czar, as expressed in the freedom manifesto, and the policy of the administration, as shown in a long series of arbitrary and oppressive acts of violence, he coolly said that while the freedom manifesto "laid down the fundamental principles of civil liberty in a general way," it had no real force, because it did not specifically repeal the laws relating to the subject that were already on the statute-books. He admitted that governors-general were still arresting without warrant, exiling without trial, suppressing newspapers without a hearing, and dispersing public meetings by an arbitrary exercise of discretionary power; but he maintained that in so doing they were only obeying imperial ukases which antedated the freedom manifesto and which that document had not abrogated. In all provinces, he said, where martial law had been declared, or where it might in future be declared, governors and governors-general were not bound by the academic statement of general principles in the October manifesto, but were free to exercise discretionary power under the provisions of certain earlier decrees relating to "reinforced and extraordinary defense." These decrees, until repealed, were the law of the land, and they authorized and sanctioned every administrative measure to which the interpellations related, freedom manifestos to the contrary notwithstanding.[30]

The Czar's abandonment of the principles set forth in the freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, put an end to what Mr. Milyukov has called "the ascending phase" of the Russian liberal movement. Count Witte, who had persuaded the Czar to sign the manifesto, was forced to retire from the Cabinet, and the new government, taking courage from the apparent loyalty of the army and the successful suppression of sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in various parts of the empire, returned gradually to the old policy of ruling by means of "administrative process," under the sanction of "exceptional" or "temporary" laws.

In July, 1906, when P. A. Stolypin was appointed Prime Minister, and when the first Duma was dissolved in order to prevent it from issuing an address to the people, the government abandoned even the pretense of acting in conformity with the principles laid down in the freedom manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic coöperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might, perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them depends.

Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people. Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967 were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33] One might have expected the government to do something for the relief of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr. Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two, Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police surveillance; and two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]

If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner, instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet, this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the condition of the peasants as follows:

"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a condition in which they have no assured means of support."

Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to them at all, it merely suspended or suppressed the newspapers for "manifesting a prejudicial tendency," or punished the committees for "presenting the condition of the people in too unfavorable a light."

A fair measure, perhaps, of the economic condition of a country is the earning capacity of its inhabitants, and, tried by this test, Russia stands far below the other civilized states of the world. According to a report made by S. N. Prokopovich to the Free Economic Society of St. Petersburg on May 2, 1907, the average annual income of the population per capita, in the United States and in various parts of Europe, is as follows:[35]

Country Average income per capita

United States $173.00 England 136.50 France 116.50 Germany 92.00 Servia and Bulgaria 50.50 Russia 31.50

It thus appears that the average American family earns nearly six times as much as the average Russian family, and that even in such comparatively backward and undeveloped parts of Europe as Servia and Bulgaria the average income of the population per capita is nearly twice that of Russia.

Another test of the economic condition of a country is its rate of mortality, taken in connection with the provision that it makes for the medical care and relief of its people. The death-rate of Russia--37.3 per thousand--is higher than that of any other civilized state, and, according to a report made by Dr. A. Shingaref to the Piragof Medical Congress in Moscow in May, 1907, the health of the population is more neglected than in any other country in Europe. The figures by which he proved this are as follows:[36]

Great Britain has one doctor to every 1,100 persons France " " " " " 1,800 " Belgium " " " " " 1,850 " Norway " " " " " 1,900 " Prussia " " " " " 2,000 " Austria " " " " " 2,400 " Italy " " " " " 2,500 " Hungary " " " " " 3,400 " Russia " " " " " 7,930 "

In connection with this report it may be noted that while Russia has only one physician to eight thousand people, there is one policeman to every nine hundred and one soldier to every one hundred and twelve.

This lack of physicians in Russia is mainly due to the extreme poverty of the mass of the people and their absolute inability to pay for medical attendance and care. With an earning capacity of only $31.50 per capita, or $189.00 per annum for a family of six, and with taxes that cut deeply into even this small revenue, the Russians cannot afford doctors. Shelter, food, and clothing they must have; but medical attendance is a luxury that may be dispensed with.

One of the principal causes of the impoverishment of the agricultural peasants in Russia is the insufficiency of their farm allotments. When the serfs were emancipated about forty-five years ago, they were not given land enough to make them completely independent of the landed proprietors, for the reason that the latter had to have laborers to cultivate their estates, and it was only in the emancipated class that such laborers could be found. Since that time the peasant population has nearly doubled, and an allotment that was originally too small adequately to support one family now has to support two. This increasing pressure of the growing population upon the land might have been met, perhaps, as it has been met in Japan, by intensive cultivation; but such cultivation presupposes education, intelligence, and adoption of improved agricultural methods; and the Russian government never has been willing to give its peasant class even the elementary instruction that would enable it to read and thus to acquire modern agricultural knowledge. In 1897, more than thirty years after the emancipation, the Russian percentage of illiteracy was still seventy-nine, and on January 1, 1905, only forty-two per cent. of the children of school age were attending school, as compared with ninety-five per cent, in Japan.[37] Intensive cultivation, moreover, involves high fertilization and the use of modern agricultural implements. The Russian peasants do not own live stock enough to supply them with the quantity of manure that intensive cultivation would require,--millions of them have no farm-animals at all,--and, with their earning capacity of only $31.50 a year per capita, they cannot afford to buy modern plows and improved agricultural machinery. If there were diversified industries in Russia, the agricultural peasants who are unable to maintain themselves on their insufficient allotments might find work to do in mills or factories; but Russia is not a manufacturing country, and her industrial establishments furnish only two per cent. of her population with employment.

Unable to get a living from their small and comparatively unproductive farms, and equally unable to find work elsewhere, the peasants clamor loudly for more land; and when, as the result of a bad harvest, their situation becomes intolerable, they are seized with a sort of berserker madness and break out into fierce bread riots, which frequently end in regular campaigns of pillage and arson. In 1905 they attacked and plundered the estates of more than two thousand landed proprietors and inflicted upon the latter a loss of more than $15,000,000. The disorder extended to one hundred and sixty-one districts and covered thirty-seven per cent. of the area of European Russia.

Such alarming evidences of wide-spread distress and discontent naturally forced the agrarian question upon the attention not only of the government but of the people's representatives in parliament. The Constitutional Democrats in the first Duma proposed to obtain more land for the common people by following the example set by Alexander II. when he emancipated the serfs, namely, by expropriating in part, and at a fixed price, the estates of the nobility, and selling the land thus acquired to the peasants upon terms of deferred payment extending over a long time. The government of Nicholas II., however, would not listen to this proposition, and the Stolypin ministry is now trying to satisfy the urgent need of the peasants by selling to them land that belongs to the state or the crown; by making it easier for them to buy land through the Peasants' Bank; and by facilitating emigration to Siberia, where there is supposed to be land enough for all. None of these measures, however, seems likely to afford more than partial and temporary relief. Most of the state and crown land in European Russia is not suitable for cultivation, or it is situated in northern provinces where agriculture is unprofitable on account of extremely unfavorable climatic conditions. According to Professor Maxim Kovalefski, the crown lands of European Russia comprise about 22,000,000 acres. Of the 4,933,000 acres that are arable and well located, 4,420,000 acres are already leased to the peasants upon terms that are quite as favorable as they could hope to obtain by purchase, and the remaining 513,000 acres would afford them no appreciable relief. In order to give them the same per capita allowance of land that they had at the time of the emancipation, it would be necessary to add about 121,000,000 acres to their present holdings, and no such amount of arable state or crown land is available.[38]

From the operations of the Peasants' Bank little more is to be expected. In the twenty years of its history it has bought about 17,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, but has disposed of only 3,600,000 acres to peasant communes. The rest it has sold to associations or land-speculating companies. The extreme need of the people, moreover, has so forced up the price of land in the black-soil belt as to make acquisition of it by the poorer class of peasants almost impossible. Between November 16, 1905, and August 31, 1906, the bank bought about 5,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, at an average price of $23.30 per acre, and resold it on bond and mortgage to individuals, companies, or peasant communes at an average rate of $24.44 per acre. Comparatively little of this land, however, went into the possession of the class that needed it most. The 4,997 peasant families in the district of Voronezh, who can make both ends meet only by limiting themselves to a per capita allowance of a pound and a third of rye flour a day, are not financially able to buy land at $24.44 per acre, and this is the economic condition of hundreds of thousands of families in the central provinces.[39]

Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior, openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to 1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901 and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In other words, more than half of the peasants who made a journey of fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]

If the government fails to relieve the land famine by selling its own land reserves, by making loans to the people through the Peasants' Bank, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, it will find itself threatened by two very serious dangers. On the one hand, the diminishing power of the peasants to pay taxes will ultimately affect the national revenue and impair the revenue of the state; and, on the other hand, the discontent and exasperation of the great class from which soldiers are drawn will sooner or later infect the army and lessen the power of the autocracy to enforce its authority. The government is now drafting about 460,000 recruits a year, and these conscripts not only share the feelings of the peasantry as a whole, but belong largely to the very class that has recently been in revolt. Tens of thousands of them either participated in or sympathized with the agrarian riots of 1905-6; and not a few of them, remembering how the troops were then sent against them, solemnly promised their fellow-villagers, when they joined the colors, that they would never fire upon their brothers, even if ordered to do so by the Czar himself. An army of this temper is a weapon that may become very dangerous to its wielders; and if the discontent and hostility of the peasants continue to increase with increasing impoverishment, and if the hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits carry their discontent and hostility into their barracks, the government may have to deal with mutinies and revolts much more serious than those of Cronstadt, Sveaborg, and the Crimea. Certain it is that an army is not likely to remain loyal when there is wide-spread disaffection in the population from which it is drawn; and in the present condition, temper, and attitude of the peasants we may find reasons enough for the "trouble to come" that Mr. Milyukov predicts.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Otherwise known as the "Black Hundreds." This reactionary and terroristic organization impudently pretended to represent the "true Russian people"; but in the election for the third Duma, when it had all the encouragement and help that the bureaucracy could give, it was able to send to the electoral colleges only 72 electors out of a total number of 5,160. It was composed mainly of the worst elements of the population, and derived all the power that it had from the support given to it by the bureaucracy and the police. Without such support it would have been stamped out of existence in a week by the liberals, revolutionists, and Jews, who were the chief objects of its attacks.

[28] This was the reply of the Czar to a telegram from the Union of True Russians thanking him for dissolving the second Duma and arresting fifty-five of its members on a charge of treason. Eight of these representatives of the people were afterward sentenced to five years of penal servitude, nine to four years of penal servitude, and ten to exile in Siberia as forced colonists. (_Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 216.)

When Mr. Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg after the delivery of his temperate and dispassionate address in New York, the handful of "true Russians" in the third Duma attacked him with violent and insulting abuse, and Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich, one of their most influential leaders, said to him in open session: "You are a poltroon and traitor, in whose face I would willingly spit!" Such is the spirit of the "true Russians" whom the Czar has asked to help him in bringing about "the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."

[29] The freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, begins with the words: "We lay upon Our Government the duty of executing Our inflexible will by giving to the people the foundations of civil liberty in the form of real inviolability of personal rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, and freedom of organized association."

[30] Stenographic report of the proceedings of the first Russian Duma, St. Petersburg, July 17, 1906. A large part of the Russian Empire has been under martial law ever since the assassination of Alexander II. In 1906 it was in force in sixty-four of the eighty-seven Russian provinces.

[31] Upon the shoulders of the peasants the whole framework of the Russian state rests. When the latest census was taken, in 1897, the peasants numbered 97,000,000 in a total population of 126,000,000. Since that time the population has increased to 141,000,000, and the relative proportion of peasants to other classes has grown larger rather than smaller. (Report of the Russian Statistical Department. St. Petersburg, August, 1905.)

[32] It is this part of the population that begins to suffer from lack of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof, Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in November, 1907. (_Nasha Zhizn_, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.)

[33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be printed in Russia.

[34] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, pp. 33, 34, Stuttgart, 1903.

[35] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg. June, 1907, p. 169.

[36] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, June, 1907, p. 124.

[37] Report of the Russian Statistical Department, 1905; and Report to the Council of Ministers on the state of schools, _Strana_, St. Petersburg, August 23, 1906.

[38] _Strana_, edited by Professor Maxim Kovalefski, St. Petersburg, October 7 and 10, 1906.

[39] _Tovarishch_, St. Petersburg, August 26, 1906.

[40] V. Polozof, in _Strana_, St. Petersburg, October 18, 1906.

"THE HEART KNOWETH"

BY CHARLOTTE WILSON