Chapter 6 / Pre-1917 Politics and Culture

              The myth that the old Russia was a political, cultural, and social wasteland.

       Pursuing the comparison between the Russias before and after the 1917 upheaval, let us look first at the administration of justice under the tsars.

       The Okhrana (security police) and Siberia were the lurid and justly detested symbols of persecution of political dissent and revolutionary opposition by the Romanoff autocracy. They have been used, for fifty years now, to explain if not to justify Soviet purges, forced labor, mass executions, and genocide.

       The ratio between the old and the Soviet terrors, however, is roughly that between a pimple and a cancer. The Okhrana employed some five thousand full-time official agents and a few 'thousand part-time spies and informers. Its communist successors, from the Cheka and the GPU to the present organization, have had as many as two million operatives, their own uniformed secret-police armies for purely internal use and millions of hidden informers.

       In extent, political persecution under the tsars was not small—it only seems strangely small today because we have become accustomed to counting political victims in millions. Statistics in this area were not concealed in the old Russia as they have been under the Soviets. The shock of surprise as one examines them is therefore a measure of the enormities of the Red Terror rather than a proof of past benevolence.

       The decade of 1906-1916 was sufficiently blood-soaked for its time. Andrei Vishinsky, long Stalin's chief administrator of Soviet "justice," was not likely to underestimate anything in favor of the old regime.' (91) Yet according to his own figures there were in 1913 only 32,000 convicts at hard labor (katorga) in Russia, including ordinary criminals. They could all have been accommodated in one of the larger Soviet forced-labor camps; and this was at the peak of the reaction that followed the 1905 revolution. About 25,000 were sentenced to Siberia and other exile regions in the first ten years of the century and 27,000 more between 1911 and 1916.

       Those who today justify tsarist political terror by reference to the Red Terror are in no better moral position than Kremlin apologists who excuse Red outrages by invoking outrages in the past. Their comparative dimensions and ruthlessness are the crux of the confrontation. Realism demands, moreover, that two vital truths be underlined.

       But even political trials were public and reported accurately in the press. Evidence was examined by men who took their judicial robes very seriously. The most successful and respected lawyers did not hesitate to defend "the accused, from regicides down; many of them, in fact, (among them Alexander Kerensky) built national reputations and popularity upon spirited defense of revolutionaries.

       Far from confessing to lies in the Soviet manner of the future, the accused proudly admitted the truth if they were guilty and turned the courtrooms into forums to arouse the masses. Under the guise of defense arguments, their lawyers unbosomed themselves of eloquent indictments of the government and social evils—propaganda that appeared in the press as privileged matter and often was circulated in huge editions in pamphlet form. Not one of the obscenities of judicial practice in the Soviet period—torture, the hostage system, the mock public trial—can be equated with specifically Russian practices. Some of these methods, in fact, were common in West European states long after their eradication in Russia.

       Under the law of 1864, the prosecutors not only had the right to stop a trial if they were convinced of the defendant's innocence, it was their legal duty to do so. Far from sharing the guilt of the accused as in Soviet practice, relatives could not be compelled to testify. In the 1880's, George Kennan (great-uncle of his namesake, the former American ambassador to Moscow) made his historic-investigation of the Siberian exile system, and published his findings in two fat volumes. Not only was he permitted to visit any prisons and exile places he chose, but St. Petersburg gave him full cooperation. He returned to the United States to condemn what he had seen with unflagging passion. Yet he acknowledged that "the number of political offenders is much smaller than it is generally supposed to be." He estimated the yearly score of political exile, between 1879 and 1884, at 150. The totals increased rapidly after the turn of the century and in particular after 1905. (93)

       The most extreme estimates came from Prince Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist philosopher, in his efforts to awaken the conscience of mankind. Writing in London in 1909, he gave the number of all inmates in Russian prisons as 181,000 and the number of exiles as 74,000 plus some 30,000 more then believed to be in process of transportation. The totals covered offenders of all categories, with ordinary prisoners constituting a majority of convicts and "politicals" a majority of exiles.

       In the entire reign of Alexander II, from 1855 to 1881, there was only one execution; a man named Karakozov was hanged for an attempt on the monarch's life. In the following twenty-seven years, which saw the emergence of the bomb as a political weapon, 114 were put to death, an average of about four a year. Not until 1906 did the annual toll of the hangman begin to run into hundreds, with a record of 1,139 in the first post-revolution year of 1906. It then fell off to 73 in 1911 and 126 in 1912. A few hundred more should probably be added for prisoners killed while "trying to escape" and not reckoned in the formal statistics.

       These are the hard figures - behind the impassioned protests the world over, and especially in Russia itself. This was the notorious White Terror which made the world shudder, and led Count Leo Tolstoy to write his famous / Cannot Be Silent. It is no slur on the noble emotions of the time to remark that the whole White Terror did not equal in sheer volume a month of the Red' Terror.

       The treatment of political prisoners was mild, almost idyllic, as against their fate under communism. They were rarely placed together with criminals and enjoyed an array of special privileges. For many a Russian, exile was a time of intensive reading, writing, and even revolutionary agitation. It was in Siberia that Lenin wrote his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, one of a libraryful of anti-regime tracts composed by others in the enforced isolation and leisure.

       The exiles were usually joined by their families and lived a relatively normal life despite harsh surroundings. They were in unlimited correspondence with friends and political comrades in Russia and abroad. (94) Those who had money or received help from outside—committees to aid Russian political prisoners collected funds throughout the liberal world—often went in for hunting, fishing, and other sports. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were all ardent huntsmen in their exile years.

       Reading today the memoirs of exiles during the monarchy is an interesting experience, against the knowledge of Soviet concentration-camp purgatories. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, recounting their routine in Siberia, might be talking of a middle-class winter vacation. One of her letters to a relative does have a tragic note: the maid has just walked out on her, Mrs. Lenin reports, and she has been obliged to do her own housework!

       The common people in Russia never confounded political prisoners with criminals and usually held them in high esteem. Russians avoided words like "convict" in talking of political offenders, referring to them as "unfortunates" or even, among the educated, as "passion-bearers"—a term earlier applied to religious mystics who withdrew from the workaday world.

       Escape was ridiculously easy. The political fugitive readily found helping hands, food, hiding places. There were no official efforts, as in the Soviet era, to smear opponents of the established order as "wreckers," "enemies of the people," and "mad dogs." Both the official and the popular attitudes scarcely fit into the picture of a benighted Asiatic despotism.

• Labor Camps Then and Now

       Only a relative few of the "politicals" drew sentences at hard labor in prison camps (katorga), the nearest equivalent to the Soviet concentration camps, with their tens of millions of inmates in the aggregate. Numbers aside, how did the respective ordeals compare?

       The best known description of life in katorga was given to the world by Dostoievsky in Notes from the House of the Dead, which appeared in 1862. Exactly one hundred years later, in 1962, the first description inside Russia of a Soviet forced-labor camp, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, began serial publication in Novy Mir, a Moscow literary journal. (95) It later appeared as a book entitled, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in a small edition in the USSR and in large editions in translations abroad.

       The two novels, a hundred years apart, provide a remarkable study of similarities and differences. Dr. Mihajlo Mihailov, the young Yugoslav professor, has analyzed these in an article published in the Zagreb Forum in 1964. Both authors are great artists and both wrote from long personal experiences as prisoners. "Compared with twentieth-century conditions," Mihailov found, many aspects of "'the worst Siberian prison camp' of the nineteenth century seem idyllic." Both books "in effect describe the attempt to turn human beings into slaves," he attests, but the brutal pressures "have been incomparably greater in the twentieth century than they were in the nineteenth."

       One after another, he compares elements of katorga a hundred years ago—food, labor, punishments, relations with the outer world, etc.—with Soviet practices. Without exception Dostoievsky's House of the Dead was less horrifying than its counterpart in Stalin's years. The former camp had thirty inmates, the latter had four hundred. The tsarist camp was surrounded by a "palisade," the Soviet camp by barbed wire, searchlights mounted on watchtowers, and trained dogs. The food was bad a century ago, but the chronic hunger that figures in the Soviet novel was no part of the prison regime under the tsars. The prisoners a hundred years ago maintained contact with their families and were allowed occasional visitors. In their non-working time they could read, play games, work at hobby crafts.

       Mihajlov writes about a column of convicts, in the House of the Dead, passing through a small Siberian town: "The prisoners talk and joke, tease one another, while passersby stop and give them alms. In Solzhenitsyn's book there is no question of giving them alms, since in the camps of Stalin's day it was generally impossible to enter into direct contact with their inmates."

       In the 1860's the prisoners "did no work on Sundays, celebrated Christmas and Easter for several days on end, and those celebrating their name-day were also freed from work. (96) The Jew, Isai Fomich, is assured by law of his right not to work on the Sabbath, a right of which he naturally makes good use. Moslems have the same privilege. The prisoners amuse themselves by rearing domestic animals— the billy-goat Vaska and geese. We further learn that the prisoners 'arrange a theater' on holidays, and occasionally were even allowed to come into contact with women."

       Camp existence under communism has been a hundred times more hellish than in the Dostoievsky camp. This is apparent not only in the Soviet novel, which in general understates the hellishness, but in a score or more of the detailed accounts by ex-prisoners published abroad through the years.

       Those who seek alibis for the Soviets rummage through Russian history and pick up what they need from Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Nicholas I. They normally slur over the decades immediately before the revolution. But the pre-1917 generation saw an enormous amount of political and social progress, which the communists, far from continuing, reversed and destroyed.

       The 1905 uprising began with a general strike, mutinies of sailors, seizures of big estates by land-hungry peasants. It was definitely a revolution from below. The modern constitution and pledges of reform granted by the frightened dynasty were in direct response to pressures from the people. The constitution was whittled away and the pledges were in large measure repudiated in the later reaction. Had they been kept, the nation would have enjoyed political liberties not too far removed from those under other constitutional monarchies. And despite the reaction, the twelve years between the two revolutions provided a substantial base for peaceful democratic evolution.

       The electoral and franchise laws were stacked in favor of the upper and propertied classes, but the democratic parties taken together held an overwhelming majority of the Duma (parliament) seats. Though its powers were continually restricted, the Duma was far from impotent. It retained enough control of the purse strings to obtain concessions from the government and occasionally to force out unpopular ministers. (97) And it was a powerful forum. Its debates—not merely critical of the status quo, but often boldly revolutionary—were published as a matter of right by the leading newspapers. Lenin in Switzerland wrote speeches delivered by his Bolshevik deputies, which then appeared in leading newspapers.

       The press, to be sure, was not free in the British and American sense. But all the liberal factions had legal papers and periodicals of their own, and even the extreme parties managed to express their views in print. While most liberal papers nourished, few of their reactionary competitors could subsist without government subsidies. A number of brilliant satiric journals needled the authorities mercilessly. In 1912—called "the high point of the darkest reaction"—a Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, was established in St. Petersburg, edited by Viacheslav Molotov.

       By the time 1917 rolled around, the Russian people had behind them a tradition of a hundred years of revolutionary thought and action. A political institution that served as a school in self-rule was the zemstvo or local and provincial administration, though its democratic character has too often been exaggerated. Elected by the tax-paying population, the zemstvos were on the whole controlled by the propertied gentry. But they became more and more imbued with a liberal and progressive spirit, so that the central authorities came to look upon them as hotbeds of subversion. Half a century of zemstvo effort produced notable results in material improvements: medical aid, roads, home crafts, mutual life and fire insurance, etc. At the same time it fostered impulses to self-government and mutual help.

       Another important social school was the mir or peasant commune, an institution of ancient Russian vintage. Although that too has been overplayed by foreign historians, it did have a good deal in common with the New England town meeting. The heads of all peasant households in a village voted and argued as equals in deciding common problems and settling local disputes. (98)

       On the economic side, the mir was a collective enterprise; but in contrast with the socialized Marxist society, it was highly personalized, voluntary, and respectful of individual preferences. Its members had the right, usually by a two-thirds vote, to disband common cultivation of the land in favor of other systems. It was precisely this voluntary element which led Herzen, Kropotkin, and the Social Revolutionary party to reject conventional socialist doctrine in favor of agrarian socialism deriving from the mir.

       There is a superficial resemblance, of course, between "the methods of the communists and tsarist practices. But the same family resemblance holds true for all oppressive systems. Bolshevism could just as convincingly be traced as deriving from Prussian autocracy or the ancient Pharaohs. After all, the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships were close enough to the Bolshevik pattern without benefit of a tsarist background.

• Education Under Tsarism

       For over a century before the Bolsheviks appeared on the scene, Russia was famous for its great universities, which matched the world's best in quality. In 1913 it had more institutions of higher learning than England, France, or Germany. "Russian scholarship before the revolution reached the very highest standard," the late Sir Bernard Pares, British historian, wrote in 1942.

       Contradicting the fable that university education was only for the rich and well-born, he added that "the number of places filled by sons of the peasantry was far greater than anything that was dreamed of at Oxford or Cambridge before the present century." Under the law, in the last decades of the monarchy, 15 per cent of university students were on scholarships provided by the state; another 15 to 20 per cent were supported by private endowments. More than a third of the student body thus comprised young men and women too poor to pay their own tuition.

       The quality of education was not only incomparably higher than under the Soviets, but higher than in most other countries. A degree from a leading Russian university was greatly respected throughout the world. (99) Its essence was free inquiry—even in sociology, economics, and government—to the constant despair of the autocracy. None of the theories of social and political reform could be kept out of the curriculum, so that the institutions of higher learning became seedbeds of subversion and revolution. The Russian faculties were self-governing along democratic lines, and autonomous student organizations of every conceivable variety nourished despite all that a reactionary officialdom could do to frustrate them.

       The Russian intelligentsia (the very word is of Russian coinage) was a unique phenomenon, a sort of intellectual aristocracy enjoying more popular respect than the aristocracy of birth. Because of the handicaps imposed by the government, mental freedom—amounting at times to license—was exercised with a peculiar zest. "This intelligentsia," Helen Iswolsky wrote in Soul of Russia (1943), "was something more than a culture elite: it has been compared to a religious order, in that it was austere, ascetic, and disinterested. Its representatives were not content to preach their doctrines: they sought to apply them."

       Writers and thinkers, of course, had a hard time of it. But they were never frightened or silenced. What they could not say forthrightly they said elliptically, and their audiences understood them perfectly. New ideas from the outside world had free entry: the first translation of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, in 1872, was into Russian, fourteen years before it appeared in English, and it was freely available in Russian bookshops and libraries. Independent monthlies like Vyestnik Yevropy, and Russkoye Bogatstvo were outspoken and progressive.

       No, the old Russia was no more an intellectual than an economic Sahara. The best proof of this, in common sense, is in its towering achievements in letters, the arts, and science. These are implicit in names that have become part of the wealth of civilized mankind—names like Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Merezhkovsky, Bunin, Gorki, in literature; Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimski-Korsakov, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, in music; Kandinsky, Repin, and Roerich, in painting; Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, in theater; Mendeleyev and Butlerov, in chemistry; Mechnikov, in medicine; Pavlov, in psychology; Lobachevsky, in mathematics; Tugen Barovsky, in economics; Stuve, in astronomy; Herzen, Bakunin, Kro-potkin, and, yes, Lenin, in social theory. (100)

       The whole world drew inspiration from Russian literature, the Moscow Art Theater, Russian ballet. A vulgar Soviet boastfulness in recent years, claiming Russian priority for all inventions, from the safety pin to radio, has drawn the ridicule it deserves. This, however, should not obscure the truth that Russia did make vital contributions to science and invention, including early radio discoveries.

       A national culture of this scope could not have come to fruition in a wasteland. Its roots are in the genius of the Russian people. That the renaissance, started in the early 1800's, could have taken place at all was proof of the psychological freedom that thrived side by side with political tyranny and, in the final analysis, overshadowed that tyranny.

       Sir Maurice Baring, writing before the Revolution, could attest: "There is no country in the world where the individual enjoys so great a measure of personal liberty, where the liberty de moeurs is so great as in Russia; where the individual man can do as he pleases with so little interference or criticism on the part of his neighbors, where there is so little moral censorship, where liberty of abstract thought or esthetic production is so great . . . ."

       The rapidity with which Russians assimilated the cultural idioms of Western Europe and reshaped them in their own image is in itself striking. The fact that the end-products were in turn absorbed by the West cancels out the exaggerations about Russia's Asiatic and Byzantine qualities. Where are the non-Russian Asiatic and Byzantine books, poems, symphonies, and scientific discoveries that fit so readily and completely into the modern mind?

       One of the major communist claims for credit—and well deserved—has been the substantial elimination of illiteracy. According to some Soviet figures, only 28 per cent of the population could read and write in the last years of the monarchy. More objective statistics put it at about 40 per cent for the whole country, and much higher for European Russia. (101) At best, however, retarded education at a mass level is a blot on the tsarist record.

       The law for compulsory schooling was not promulgated until 1910; it was introduced in stages and planned to become universal by 1922. The matter, however, is not merely one of quantity. In the old Russia literacy opened up far greater horizons of enlightenment than in the Soviet era, when the printed word is a jealously guarded monopoly of the state. In any case, if the process started in 1910 had not been cut short by the war and revolution, literacy would certainly have reached the West European level in the 1920's or 1930's.

       The central confusion, in appraising Russia, is the tendency to look upon a historical time-lag as if it were a quality in the nature of the people. Historical misfortunes, like the long subjection to the Mongols, are mistaken for attributes of the Russian character.

       Serfdom was one of the main effects of historic backsliding and, in turn, the chief cause of the long retardation. It was evolved only through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just when Western Europe was emerging from feudalism. But it differed from ordinary feudalism in one respect: it was never fully accepted by Russian society or the serfs themselves as a fixed and divinely sanctioned institution. Always it was regarded as something imposed from above by law that must eventually be repealed. Though it would last until 1861, until the day Abraham Lincoln assumed the Presidency in the United States, it was not admitted as a permanent way of life. In its heart, the nation never acknowledged serfdom as sacrosanct.

       To quote Baring again, as of 1914: "The peasants never, through nearly two centuries of slavery, lost sight of the fact that this legislation was merely a temporary makeshift, a stroke of opportunism. Moreover, they kept hold of the idea that the land was theirs; that the land belonged to the people who tilled it." Pushkin, the national poet, Dostoyevsky once pointed out, "was the first to understand that the Russian is no slave, in spite of century-old slavery." (102) The communists, who rehabilitated Pushkin after a period of suppression, have reason to ponder this. The telltale fact is that the value of the person was never discounted in Russia as it was in other feudal societies. A deep respect for the individual was the common denominator of Russian moral perceptions, from Saint Serguis of Radonezh to Count Leo Tolstoy.

       The glib statement that communism is a peculiarly Russian visitation rests, in the final analysis, on the accident that it first came to power in Russia. The postwar years have demonstrated that the affliction can be imposed no less successfully on Poles and Czechs, Germans and Chinese. A stronger case, indeed, can be made for the idea that Soviet communism is a negation of the Russian spirit—that Bolshevism is not a forward thrust into history but a recoil and retreat into long-outlived centuries.

       In the light of his subsequent love affair with Bolshevism, it is revealing to read a comment on Russia in 1915 by John Reed, future author of Ten Days that Shook the World. After a brief visit to the country during the war, he wrote: "Russian ideals are the most exhilarating, thought the freest, Russian art the most exuberant; Russian food and drink are to me the best, and the Russians themselves are, perhaps, the most interesting human beings that exist . . . . Everyone acts just as he feels like acting, and says just what he wants to."

       Millions of Russians, trapped by the communists they abhor, are mortified when they hear or read about "Russian atrocities," "Russian communism," "Russian attacks on Europe," and the like, when the reference is to Marxism, communism, and their derivatives as an international infection, originated in Western Europe. They reject the assumption that Bolshevism is a purely Russian disease.