Part 18

Plans for provincial assemblies as a further extension of local home rule had been under consideration since 1859. On January 1, 1864, an Imperial Ukase was promulgated instituting Semstvos in thirty-three governments. To this assembly, proprietor and peasant, rich and poor, elected their representatives. Each Semstvo was to appoint its own executive to carry out the laws it decreed.

The jurisdiction of this assembly, though confined to local and non-political matters, was wide. Rates, streets, convocations, posts, sanitary measures, famine-relief, fire-insurance, schools, agricultural improvement, all land, house, and factory taxes (those upon imperial as well as those upon private domains), were given into the Semstvo control. It was granted partial powers over various other minor matters. It exercised practically all the economic and social functions of local governmental activity save what fell to the Mirs. It was welcomed as an epoch-making institution. The liberal press of the period hailed it as a living guidon of the upward way, as the blessed daylight of a constitutional government.

So indeed it might have become. In the new Emperor’s mind there germinated a whole peaceful revolution. He had plans for new courts of justice, reorganization of the army, reform of the civil administration, and popular representative government, with an elected national chamber.

But in the midst of his reforms broke out the Polish insurrection. The Czar had granted to the Poles elective councils in each district of government and in the chief cities; he had appointed a Pole his Minister of Public Instruction, and had made many concessions to their old language. Iron and blood crushed out the insurrection, but it had brought to the great Czar Liberator the conviction that liberty spelled disunion for Russia, and this belief was never to be dispelled.

Upon the Semstvo assemblies, no longer uplifted by the old generous enthusiasm of the sovereign, pressed little by little the dead weight of executive officialdom. One by one their functions were lopped away. More and more the selection of delegates was transferred to the administrative officials. The marshals of noblesse became chairmen, the governors vetoing overlords. Before the death of Alexander II, his once-cherished creations had lapsed from independent state legislatures into anomalous, semi-advisory councils, discussing roads, land-taxes, agriculture, and schools, and controlled by the land-owning nobles and the governors. Semstvo and Mir and Assemblies of the Noblesse became ornamental trimmings to the colossal edifice of the bureaucracy.

The assembling of all the functions of government into the hands of the executive became again the guiding principle of this system. “The Council of State,” whose office was that of discussing the budget and law-making proposals, was the simulacrum of a parliament. The Senate, which gave decision on special points appealed from the lower courts, and whose promulgation of all enactments was the hall-mark of their legality, was a form of supreme court. But both hung from above rather than rested on a substructure. They were substantially cut off from popular influences, their function was secondary action following origin in the executive bureaus. The Imperial Autocrat, deriving his right from Divinity alone, exercised, in addition to his executive functions and his duties as supreme commander of the armed forces of the State, those powers which by a segregation of functions would have fallen to the legislative bodies and the judiciary. In this, the ten ministries were his main agencies.

Under this system, legislation was inaugurated through the presentation of a project to the Czar by one of his ministers, or by outside petition, or perhaps by the imperial wish.

The proposed enactment, if the Czar ordered it to be further examined, was referred usually to an Imperial Commission of Study. Debates followed in the Advisory Council of State, and the completed bill, as framed by this body, was signed by the Emperor and became a ukase, to be formally promulgated by the Senate and enrolled as part of the law of the land. Interpretations of law were made by the Ministers, which none might gainsay. Thus was the legislative function absolute.

In the provinces the three functions of government were equally centralized. A governor (almost invariably a general or an admiral) through his subordinate executive officers duplicated in microcosm the system of the capital. The dependent Semstvo was his Council of State, the dependent judges composed his Senate, the dependent Semski Natschalniki, his executive ministers. Into his bureaus came the details of provincial government save such matters as the villagers settled in their own Mirs. The troops of the district were at his call, the gendarmerie under his orders carried out the judicial arrests and the drumhead condemnations that sent so many thousands along the road to Siberia.

In the placing of these proconsuls and their sustaining soldiery was applied the Roman rule, “Divide et impera.” The head officials of the provinces were from distant parts,--the Governor of Warsaw from Tiflis, the Governor of Odessa from Samara, the Governor of the Amur from the Baltic. The Orthodox Cossacks of the Don were in force among the troubled Poles and Jews of the western governments; the drafts from the peasantry of Little Russia garrisoned Tiflis and Turkestan, and Siberian regiments watched the Austrian frontier. Even the popes sent to petty village congregations were generally of far-off origin.

Though power was thus alienated from the people, the bureaucracy, by other agencies rooted deep in human nature, had twined itself around the daily life of society.

Every ambitious man in his profession, as he succeeded, was marked for promotion. Not only to office-holders and soldiers, but to everybody, throughout the whole social fabric, were “chins” or graded ranks given. Here for example is a selection from one of the lists of the Czar’s Christmas announcements:--

Appointed members of the Council of State: Privy Councilor Kabylinski, and Von Kaufman, Senator, Minister of Public Instruction, President of the Supreme Court.

Decorated with the St. Stanislaus Order, First Class: Major-General Hippolyt Grigerasch, Director of the Department of Physics and Electro-technology at the Nicholas Engineer Academy and School.

Decorated with the St. Vladimir Order of the Third Class: Major-General Michael Hahnenfeldt, on the staff of his Imperial Highness the Supreme Commander of Guards in the St. Petersburg Military District.

Valentin Magorski, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Chief of the Veterinary Staff.

Alexander Pomeranzev, Professor of Architecture.

Dimitri Sassiyadke, Governor of Radom.

Michael Mardarjev, Censor of Foreign Papers and Journals.

Advanced to the ranking Chin of actual State Councilor, hereditary “honorable citizen” Constantine Popov, founder and director of the Tea Emporiums.

Raised into hereditary “honorable citizenship” of the 3d gild, the Archangel merchant Emil Brautigam.

Given personal “honorable citizenship,” Vladimir Ritimoun, Proprietor of the Wollner Typographical Establishment; Karl Volter, Captain of the steamer _Emperor Nicholas II_, of the Riga Navigation Co.

When a professor from his books was called up before the highest provincial dignitary to have pinned on his lapel for honorable service to the Empire the Order of St. Stanislaus, it was hard for him not to have a warm sentiment for those who had so signally recognized his talents. When on the document which recorded the promotion of a royal prince to a colonelcy was enrolled the name of a tradesman; when a neighboring doctor was raised his step in civil rank, each felt the touchstone. All who had served well in their respective positions might hope to be on the honor list, and this was the most effective tribute to the weakness, the worth, and the ambition of human nature.

In Russia, as in France under Napoleon’s iron yoke, there was a welcome to every sort of ability, and its elevation to posts of the highest trust. The aristocracy sought for was one of power, not that of a small birth-caste. A fundamental democracy ran through society. Save for a few of the Guards regiments, the army was officered by poor men. The Cossacks’ officers were chosen from among their own people and were state-trained. In the knapsack of every soldier was Skobelov’s baton; in the desk of every chinovnik, Witte’s portfolio.

So stood the bureaucratic edifice, complete in itself. Here and there a popular embellishment was added, perhaps to strengthen, often to conceal; but in grim reality it formed no part of the structure. Thus the Russian Empire finished out the nineteenth century. With the twentieth the system had come to trial for its stewardship.

In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given, wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing.

It is again a credit that the governmental attitude to the industrial classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily. Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’ board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”

The other side of the ledger is, however, not without weighty items. While no system of government can legislate prosperity, the public welfare is rightfully the first test, as it should be the first consideration, of an administration. Despite her immense territories, her vast mineral deposits, her fertile soils, her navigable rivers, her abundant timber, all the natural sources of national wealth, Russia is very poor. The peasants have more than doubled in number since the allotment of communal fields that followed the emancipation, and they are in general want. Vast stretches, whole provinces, are subject to periodic famine. Millions of the people are constantly on the brink of starvation. Manufacturing is, as a rule, desultory, undeveloped, and, in general, unprofitable.

The per-capita wealth of Russia is estimated at but two hundred and seventy-five dollars, as compared to Germany’s seven hundred dollars, France’s eleven hundred and twenty dollars, and England’s twelve hundred and thirty-five dollars. The savings-bank deposits reported for all Russia average but $2.75 per man, while in France they average $20.82, in England $15.00, and in Austria $15.68.

The degree of administrative responsibility for this condition is of course not to be definitely laid down. Much manifestly is due to natural conditions, national character, and historic handicaps; and some of the resultants would be the same under any administrative policy. Russia in her great area has had a sparse population. She has not, like her sister nations, and preëminently America, been able to lay the rest of the world under teeming contribution to her citizenship. She has had only her natural increase, and no such record as that of the United States has been possible. The Slav is not commercial, but agricultural. He has remained poor, and has had relatively very small resources to devote to what have proved our two greatest developing forces--internal improvement and education.

It is, however, a matter directly involved in government that, with this low standard of national living, there is the correlated fact of extremely high national expenditure. An immense budget of two billion roubles, ordinary expenditure, is annually met, which the war-loans raised to a total, for some years, of over three billions.

It is the general belief that a large part of the public funds is frittered away in needless waste, with multitudes of idling clerks and sinecure officials. Granting the benefit of doubt, assuming that the Administration’s corruption and inefficiency are exaggerated, and supposing that the public money is in the main honestly and productively spent, it is still a very serious question if any public service rendered by the agents of Government can correspond to or justify the immense burden of taxation heaped upon a people whose economic distress is so terrible.

The weight of the tax-levy crushing the peasants, whose improvident habits aggravate their want, is, for most, unescapable unless they follow the emigrant’s road to Siberia. The rate-gatherer can take anything the mujik has, save his last coat, his last horse, his seed-grain for next year. He is, with fateful frequency, forced to hire himself out to whoever will use his services, and this during the brief summer season which is so supremely essential if he is to attend to his own crops and fields. One landowner relates that he has seen paid an average of five roubles ($2.50) a month for farm-laborers, including men, women, and children, during June, July, and August.

Under the old system the method of rate-levy on the “souls” in a family weighed inequitably. Census revision was delayed in one instance, personally related, by over twenty-three years. A family taxed, twenty-three years before, on a father, four brothers, and two adult sons,--seven souls,--was still assessed for seven males, whether the family had increased to twenty, or been reduced to one. Each member of the household was responsible for the total.

It is related that whole families in Samara, reduced by the fearful cholera epidemic of some years back from scores of men to a dozen or ten, had to leave their home-country for Siberia to escape the load of their dead brothers.

Discussing the economic loss of the years of military service, one of the country nobles related an incident. He told of ordering the dead leaves and branches cleared out of his lake. Ordinarily, he said, he did not go near the work or let the peasants come near his château, for there was a good deal of class-hostility where he lives. But he was interested in the lake because the branches were killing some specially cherished fish, so he went down through the woods and was surprised to see nobody working. All the men were crowded round a peasant whom he had cited as an example of those who, though unlettered, had great capacity. This man had served seven years in the navy and could neither read nor write, a commentary upon what the service training was. He was declaiming on politics, and the squire stepped behind a tree, for the peasant spoke musically and well. The man was telling about his naval service: “Seven years on the boats I have been, brothers, and every three months I got ninety kopecks to buy a string for the crucifix and to cut my hair. I had no money for tobacco, none to send home to my wife in all this time, and I came home without a kopeck. Seven years of my life I have given to the Czar. What has he given me? What has he given you?” The landowner stepped from behind the tree and faced the group of startled peasants. “You have heard, your honor? Well it is true, it is true!”

The measure which under existing land-conditions would most directly raise the standard of life is the improvement of the mediæval agricultural system, and this depends upon the intelligence of the people at large. Scientific farming needs technical knowledge, yet of the great sums collected, a very small portion goes to education. The Nation spends for it but forty-three million roubles, the Semstvos but twenty million roubles, or together one eighth of the military budget.

A tedious, inefficient course in Slavonic, with the prayer-books as text, a smattering of modern Russian, sometimes mathematics as far as multiplication and division,--this is the state education of the privileged few of the peasants’ children. Whatever small amount of real knowledge is gained is quickly submerged in the ocean of ignorance at home. The percentage of illiteracy is very great. The record gives Switzerland five, Germany seven, Great Britain ten, France fifteen, Russia eighty-four.

It is argued that for the bulk of the population, under existing material conditions, schools are of small use. The lack, in the general poverty, of the very primary materials,--paper, pencils, books; of proper shoes and clothes; the unsuitableness of the houses of the peasants as places for the children to prepare their lessons in, with no spot to put their books or to do their tasks and with no available light--all these things strike at the very root of education. The population must be raised economically to the point where the elementals of existence are assured, before the incidental costs of schools can be met by the peasantry. However, there has been coming to Russia during the last generation, in a great wave, the kind of education that made the American West--the education of expansion, of the founding of towns, the planting of new industries, the building of new railroads, the opening of better navigation-routes, the enlistment of foreign capital; all the intelligence and enlightenment that attends a real industrial, commercial, and material quickening.

Beyond these social and economic factors a large count is set against the bureaucratic system for the conduct of administration. The suppression of personal liberty, of freedom of speech, the abuse of power by arbitrary officials, remorseless repression, ruthlessly carried out, racial oppression, frightful cruelty in the prisons and exile stations;--it is a terrible indictment that has been drawn. The close of the Japanese War opened a new “Smutnoe Vremya,” or time of trouble. Industrial wars, riots in Baku, uprisings in the Caucasus, seizure of cities by Social Democrats,--so went the disturbances throughout Russia, the white terror above grappling with the red terror beneath.

The situation which the forces of order were required to meet was extraordinary. The balance-wheel of the human mind, and all sense of proportion among classes of the people, seemed at times to be lost. Barbaric as the administration condemnations undoubtedly were, the individuals were not infrequently innocent only by curious standards. In a broad view one must confess that on both sides were rights and wrongs. The system, far more than individuals, was at fault. But while a system so linked to violence and oppression could not longer be suffered, the way out could not come through yielding to men in insurrection.

Salvation lay along the path that the Emperor opened. His rescript of October 17, 1905, proclaimed a National Duma.

The pregnant clauses in the summons to a national legislature were these:--

We direct the Government to carry out our inflexible will in the following manner:--

1. To grant the population the immutable foundation of civic liberty based on real inviolability of the person and freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association.

2. To call to participation in the Duma those classes of the population now completely deprived of electoral rights.

3. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can come into force without the approval of the State Duma.

The ebullition of sentiment that followed these decrees was extraordinary. All the bitterness and discontent that had weltered through the years of distress were metamorphosed into a glowing hope. Ambition and aspiration became a fervor. The delirium went electrically through all classes during the few following weeks of uncensored press and unfettered meetings. The educated were fed with every sort of essay upon what would be the result of the new order, and exhortation to keep spread the young wings for national ascension. Among the unlettered peasants, pictures circulated showing glorified cartoons of the risen Russia. One of the most widely distributed of these celebrated the Imperial Svoboda Manifesto. The genius of the Slav stood forth: one hand rested on a tablet marked “Zakon” (Law), the other unfurled a banner inscribed in blazing red letters, “Svoboda” (Liberty), below which followed freedom of speech, of forming associations, of holding meetings, of religion, the inviolability of the home, and amnesty for political prisoners. Peasants and workmen were grouped around, and above them stood an heroic figure representing the Duma which was to halo all national activity with law. The rising sun, illumining the Tauride Palace, cast its glow and glamour over the prophecy.

The ukase had gone forth to give the widest representation at the polls. The command was followed out in a system by which every class had its own deputies in the nominating colleges that elected the Duma members. Among the peasantry each _volost_ had two deputies; every thousand industrials had one, the nobility, the salaried clerks, the bourgeois in the cities, the Cossack stanitzas, the boards of trade, the universities, the Holy Synod, the aboriginal Buriat tribesmen,--each had special representation. Uninterfered with for the most part by officialdom, all Russia crowded to the polls, every man believing that his ideal was now, at last, on the eve of realization. The peasants who called for land, the workmen who wished for higher wages, the Intellectuals with their slogan of universal education, the submerged races with dreams of reborn nationalities, the ambitious with visions of power, the venal with hopes of plunder, each and all thought their hopes were to spring at once into the actual and the visual.