Russia's State of Mind

DESPITE Russia’s recent successes in Volhynia and the Bukowina, the magnitude of her military problem should not be disregarded. Beside her present gains the expulsion of the Teutonic armies from Poland, Lithuania and Courland, to say nothing of invasions of Eastern Germany, would entail sacrifices taxing to the uttermost even her enormous latent strength. If her recuperated powers prove insufficient for the task, the autumn will disclose the disheartening prospect of a continuing stalemate, with the Teutons still firmly planted on Russian soil.

Again, it must not be forgotten that, during the greater part of the war, Germany’s best efforts have been directed, not against Russia, but toward the West. It is, however, quite conceivable that the very success of Russia’s present offensive may radically alter this state of things. Ever since the beginning of the war a powerful section of German thought, headed by Paul Rohrbach and other influential publicists, has maintained that Russia, not England, was Germany’s arch-enemy. The prodigious recuperative power implied in Russia’s ability to undertake her present offensive after last summer’s shattering defeats may impel Germany to concentrate all her energies against the Eastern foe even at the cost of a sustained defensive in the West. In that case the ensuing months would witness a terrific Teutonic ‘drive launched at Russia’s very heart. Of course, this drive might fail. But, on the other hand, it might not fail. Before the blast of Teutonic massed artillery the present Russian lines might wither like those on the Dunajec and Vistula a year ago, and through the ragged gaps the seething Teutonic tide pour still deeper into the Empire.

In either of these disheartening contingencies, what would the real Russia do? I say ‘the real Russia,’ because it is not at all conterminous with the political entity entitled the Russian Empire. The Empire is a huge land-block stretching from Posen to the Pacific and peopled by 170 million souls. The real Russia is the 70 millions of the ‘Great Russian’ race, centred in the plains of Moscow, but throwing out sprays and tentacles of flesh and blood to almost every part of the vast Muscovite dominions. This is the cement of Empire. This is Russia’s heart. This is ‘Holy Russia,’ whose fanatic faith and dogged pertinacity has swelled a petty princedom on the banks of the Moskva into an imperium covering one seventh of the entire land-surface of the globe. How would this Russia meet the test? Would it make its peace with the Teutonic victor? Or would it, acting on the recent boast of a Russian ‘Nationalist’ leader, ‘fight to the Urals — and beyond’?

That will probably depend in great measure upon the reply to another question: How does Russia regard the German? Does it consider a compromise-peace possible, or does it see in the present war a supreme struggle which must be fought out at all hazards to the death?

The answer to this query is not an easy one. The salient characteristics of Russian life and thought are their extreme complexity, their glaring antitheses. Even if we exclude from our purview all consideration of the nonRussian elements, the stream of genuine Russian opinion is vexed by many cross-currents tending in radically divergent directions. Certain Russian circles have never approved of the war with the Teutonic Powers and are ready now for peace. Other elements, while to-day in favor of continuing the war, would accept a not too unfavorable peace if a crisis such as we have foreshadowed should come to pass. Still other elements see in the German the arch-enemy with whom no compromise is possible. Let us analyze these several elements and appraise their respective strength. We shall then be able to form some idea of how Russia would act in an hour of peril.

Strange though it may appear in view of the colossal struggle now raging between the two Empires, there are several strong currents of Russian opinion which are distinctly Germanophile. The Court, much of the nobility, bureaucracy and army, and most of Russian ‘ big business ' have disapproved the war from the start and are working for a reconciliation with Germany at the earliest possible moment. Taken together, these Germanophile forces form a very powerful combination.

The Court alone is a factor of great importance. Half a century ago its attitude might well have been decisive; and though the rapid growth of nationalist feeling in Russia has undermined its old preponderance, its power is still great, especially with the present Tsar, a rather weak man much swayed by personal influences. Nearly all those closest to Nicholas II are pro-Germans. His wife, a Hessian princess, makes no secret of her strong sympathies for her countrymen, and his mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, is of much the same mind. The ‘tone’ of Russian Court life is given by the proud and masterful Baltic Province German nobility, a notable example of this class being the leading Court functionary, Baron Fredericks, Minister of the Household and aide-de-camp to the Emperor. This highly influential personage has never made any secret of his pro-Germanism. Another tower of strength in the pro-German cause is the aged Countess Ignatieva. This remarkable old lady has long held the leading salon at the Russian Court, and her power has been greatly enhanced of late by the progress of her famous protégé, the mystic monk Rasputin. A sort of twentieth-century Cagliostro, Rasputin has gained enormous influence over many high personages, notably over the Empress. All in all, it is safe to say that Nicholas II lives in a pronouncedly Germanophile atmosphere — a fact which, in certain contingencies, might be of capital importance.

As to the Russian bureaucracy, army, and diplomatic service, we should remember that they were all artificial creations of Peter the Great — Western importations so against the old Russian spirit that for a long time they could be worked and manned only by Western Europeans. And, since most of these Westerners were Germans, Teutonic traditions and personnel have remained persistently in evidence. A glance at the Russian civil and army lists will show the striking proportion of German names. It is true that the genuine Russian nobility has long since become reconciled to Westernism and now fills the bulk of Russian official posts, but these newcomers have done little to change the professional tone since they themselves have become converts to the traditional spirit of the service.

Right here we should carefully avoid the error so persistently fostered by the Anglo-French press to the effect that the pro-Germanism so prominent in Russian official life is the fruit of mere ancestral prejudice or vulgar treason. To accept this dictum would be to miss the whole point of the situation. If the pro-Germanism of Russian officialdom were restricted to ‘hyphenates’ and Judases, it would signify merely a narrow cabal of traitors doomed to be swept away by the first breath of national feeling. As a matter of fact, however, the overwhelming majority of these Germanophile officials are loyal Russians, zealous for their country’s welfare and resolved to do their duty. At the same time, they consider their present duty an unfortunate necessity because they regard the war as a grave error. They believe that the whole trend of Russian policy these last few years, with its aggressive attitude in the near East and its undisguised hostility to Austria and Germany, has been a great mistake. In these men’s eyes both the domestic and foreign policy of Russia requires a friendly understanding with the Teutonic Empires to the West. Internally, such an understanding with her conservative neighbors would be Russia’s best safeguard against a radical revolution which might plunge the backward, polyglot Empire into hopeless chaos and disintegration. Externally, Austro-German friendship would permit Russia to concentrate her energies on what these men believe to be the Empire’s true field of action — Asia. The outcome of the Russo-Japanese War has merely confirmed them in their belief, for Russia can patently no longer play two rôles at the same time, but must free her hands in the West if she is to make head against the awakening East.

Such is the school of thought typified by statesmen like Baron Rosen and the late Count Witte, and by soldiers like the present Russian commander-inchief General Kuropatkin, who, only a year before the outbreak of the present war, was openly championing the abandonment of Balkan entanglements and a reconcentration in the Far East. Whatever one may or may not think of the soundness of their arguments, it is perfectly clear that one is here dealing, not with a mere traitorous cabal, but with a sober, well-pondered political philosophy reposing on patriotic considerations.

The best proof of the inherent strength of this school of thought is the fact that its adherents are by no means confined to official circles, but are found throughout the conservative upper and middle classes and are actually predominant in the financial and industrial worlds. The bloody memories of 1905 make the spectre of a ‘ Red ’ revolution a perpetual nightmare to Russian conservatives. As to Russian ‘ big business,’ the leading financiers and the great industrial magnates are hearty supporters of the ‘Asiatic school’ of foreign policy. Russia’s industries are recent growths, created by Count Witte’s protective system and dependent upon high tariff walls for continued existence. Furthermore, the Russian home market is still too backward to absorb even their present output. In order to ensure its present prosperity and future development, therefore, Russian industry feels that it must secure fresh protected markets and believes that such markets are to be gained only by acquiring new protectorates or ‘spheres of influence’ in Asia. Once such Asiatic fields are safely inside the Muscovite tariff wall Russian industrial magnates see priceless markets for their output, while Russian finance sees limitless profits in government contracts and concessions for the development of vast untouched natural resources. It is easy to realize the anger of Russian ‘ big business ’ before the spectacle of national energies lavished on a Western war which an understanding with Germany would have conserved for the conquest of the fabulous East.

Of course, all these feelings are today held down by the war-party personified by the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaievitch and the ‘Panslavists’ of the ‘Western school.’ But, though momentarily silenced, the dissidents are by no means convinced, and if fresh disasters should swing public opinion against Nationalist policy, the partisans of Asiatic expansion and a correlative German entente might play a decisive rôle. What their rôle would be is patent from recent utterances of their leaders. A good example is the speech made by M. Maklahoff (Minister of the Interior at the beginning of the war) before the congress of the‘Right’ (Conservative Party) at Nijni Novgorod in December, 1915. M. Maklahoff boldly declared amid loud applause, ‘ I am quite at a loss to understand why Russia ever went to war with Germany. Both states depend upon each other, and their historical development shows that they must live in close friendly relations.’

All this proves that there are powerful elements in Russia which are opposed to the Empire’s present policy and which would work strongly for a reversal of that policy if it should be further discredited by fresh military disasters. At the same time, Russian public opinion is so complex that there is most emphatically another side to the question. And this ‘other side’ is decidedly anti-German — part of it so fanatically anti-German that it seems willing to fight to the death rather than compromise with the Teutonic ‘archenemy.’ How the relative strengths of the two thought-currents compare is the important problem for the immediate future.

Anglo-French publicists are prone to descant upon the ‘ two Russias ’: ‘ Reactionary Russia’ and ‘Liberal Russia’ — the one pro-German, the other proAlly. Unluckily, this does not go deep enough. The truth is that there are three Russias: Old Russia, Actual Russia, and Revolutionary Russia. It is of Actual Russia that we have just been speaking. Political heirs of Peter the Great, believers in the general principles underlying the present order of things, the champions of Actual Russia desire to see their country develop along the lines laid down by Peter and his immediate successors — a strong government, Westernizing its subjects and using this Westernism as the instrument of Asiatic expansion. For the reasons above sketched, this Russia must be either Germanophile or at least desirous of a frank understanding with Germany.

But the other two Russias are antiGerman, albeit for very different reasons. Revolutionary Russia need not detain us long. We are well acquainted with its aspirations, which involve the overthrow of the existing régime and its replacement by an order of things similar to that prevailing in the most liberal nations of the West, albeit the demands of the extreme revolutionary wings would imply a state of affairs little short of anarchy. Naturally, all Russian radical circles hail the present alliance with England and France as the harbinger of their own triumph. They are anti-German for two reasons: (1) because the German element in Russia is the stanchest supporter of the present dispensation; (2) because an entente with the conservative Teutonic Empires would be the strongest bulwark against a violent revolution.

Revolutionary Russia naturally bulks large in our eyes. And yet we should not overestimate its strength. The abortive movement of 1905 dealt it a blow from which it has never recovered. Its stronghold is, of course, the ‘Intelligentsia’ or educated radicals. But in 1905 this Intelligentsia displayed a doctrinaire ignorance of Russian national consciousness, a factious incapacity for constructive leadership, and a sinister indulgence toward the forces of anarchy and disruption, which disgusted moderates of all classes and horrified the intensely pious, patriotic peasantry. Since 1905 the Revolutionists have ceased to be the dynamic, driving force in Russian public life. That rôle has more and more passed to the apostles of ‘Old Russia’; to the hotgospelers of Russian ‘Nationalism.’

Everyone knows how Peter the Great literally dragged Russia out of her Asiatic-Byzantine chrysalis by the hair of her head and set her protesting feet in the path toward Western civilization. But what is not generally known is the fact that this forced conversion has never been completed. The Russian upper classes, it is true, were soon Westernized after a fashion, but they thereby merely dug a gulf between themselves and the vast peasant mass which clung with fanatical obstinacy to Old Russian ideals, thereby preserving ‘untouched against the future’ those stores of crude national feeling’ about which a Liberal thinker like Paul Miliukov expresses such frank apprehension. Thus Old Russia lived on, submerged but indomitable.

And Old Russia’s two leading ideas have always been a fanatical hatred of the West and an equally fanatical faith in the supreme excellence of ‘ Holy Russia,’ the ‘Third Rome,’ whose sacred destiny it is to convert and absorb the whole earth. This did not matter much in practical politics until the breath of the European ‘Romanticist’ movement reached Russia about the middle of the nineteenth century. One of this movement’s salient features was a chauvinistic nationalism. Accordingly, when the upper-class Russians took up this latest Western innovation, they became suddenly impressed with that older indigenous nationalism of which they had previously been ashamed. The paradoxical consequence was that a large section of Russian educated thought abjured its rather superficial Westernism and fervently embraced the old gospel with its hatred of the West and its boundless dreams of politico-religious dominion. The result has been modern Russian ‘Nationalism’— a peculiarly fanatical type of theocratic imperialism. Of course it has run an extensive thought-gamut, from Katkov and Aksakov down through Danilevski to Leontiev and Suvorin. But, after all, its basic concept has remained the same: ‘Holy Mother Russia ’ is divinely predestined to free and unite the whole Slav race, seat herself at Constantinople (‘New Rome’), and ultimately purge and absorb the ‘rotten West.’ This cardinal article of faith, common to ‘ Slavophils,’ ‘Panslavists,’ and ‘Neo-Panslavists ” alike, is best summed up in Pobiedonostsev’s famous dictum — ‘Russia is not a State: it is a World.’

It is only since the abortive Revolution of 1905, however, that Russian Nationalism has fairly come to power. The discrediting of Radicalism left the field open for the Nationalists, and they clinched their victory by one of the cleverest moves in modern history — the Stolypin Land Act of 1907. This measure replaced the communal landtenure of the Mir by individual peasant proprietorship. The law’s political results were incredibly more important than appears on its prosaic economic face. At one and the same stroke the peasant élite was made revolutionproof and a tremendous weapon was placed in the hands of Russian imperialism. The old Mirs had been painfully over-populated. The Stolypin Land Act took care to make the new holdings large enough to support their owners. The result was a huge surplus of landless peasants possessed by a consuming ‘earth-hunger.’ The Nationalists’ game was now easy. They had a limitless supply of eager colonists with which to ‘Russify’ any desired nonMuscovite areas within the Empire, and they could also fire the peasant masses for war at any moment through self-interest as well as fanaticism by promising foreign land as the spoils of victorious foreign campaigns. This is the domestic sheet-anchor on which ‘ Neo-Panslavist’ diplomacy has relied of late years in case its ‘ forward ’ policy in the Balkans and among the Austrian Slavs should culminate in war.

The Nationalists’ task was rendered still easier by the fact that peasant fanaticism was focused toward the exact quarter against which their foreign policy was trending. Old Russia has, as we have seen, always hated the West, but a general concept like this was too metaphysical to stir the average peasant mind to positive action. The matter had to be narrowed down to some concrete issue. Fortunately for the Nationalists, that was just what had happened. The Russian peasant has long since fashioned for himself an incarnation of the West. This incarnation is the ‘Niemetz’ — the German. The Russian mujik’s intense hatred of the German is thus explained. It is symbolic as well as personal.

The reason for this anti-Germanism is writ plain athwart Russia’s history. Before Peter the Great began his forcible conversion of Old Russia into a Western state, the Russian people, scattered far and wide over the immense area of the Empire, enjoyed a typical barbarian freedom. The government was, it is true, cruel and arbitrary, but it stood at such an immense distance from the average individual that he rarely felt it, and since it was thoroughly Muscovite in spirit it never interfered with those ideas and customs which the half-Oriental Russian held dearer than life. But Peter now brought in the typical bureaucratic eighteenthcentury state and proceeded to force it down his subjects’ throats. Every canon of Old Russian life was deliberately outraged — and outraged by foreigners at that, since Peter necessarily had to use foreigners as the sole efficient instruments of this Westernizing will.

Now, as it happened, most of these foreigners were Germans, especially after Peter’s conquest of the Baltic Provinces. The Baltic Province nobility gave Peter just the tool he had been looking for. A proud, masterful race descended from the German crusading Knights of the Sword, the Baltic Province nobles prided themselves on being ‘Kulturträger’ — ‘bearers of civilization.’ Accorded generous terms in their own land, they willingly recognized the Tsar as their feudal overlord, and with mediæval loyalty set themselves to do their suzerain’s bidding. Peter ordered them to civilize his barbarous subjects; accordingly, if hard heads and heavy hands could do the work, civilized they should be.

This has always been the attitude of the Germans in Russia. The practical results of their activities have been farreaching. When we remember the purblind conservatism of Old Russia it is difficult to see how the country could have reached its present stage of Westernization in any other way. But the instruments of this progress earned thereby a growing legacy of hate. A minority of the Russian people, it is true (the so-called ‘Raskolniki’ or ‘Old Believers’), put the blame where it belonged, called Peter Antichrist, and endured every form of martyrdom rather than bow to the new dispensation. The bulk of the Russian people, however, continued to revere the Tsar and vented their spleen upon his foreign agents. The antagonism between the two races was constantly envenomed by profound incompatibility of temperament. Few sharper psychological contrasts can be found than that between the typical Muscovite and the typical German. The result has been that the two types have never fused. However long the German may be settled in Russia, he continues to feel himself a point of light in a night of barbarism. The irreconcilability of the two race-psychologies is best shown by the ' converted ’ Germans. In all such cases the convert leaps clean over into the Russian camp — and the race-gulf remains as unbridged as before. Thus the generations passed: the Germans continuing their Westernizing labors, the popular hatred of the Westernizers sinking ever deeper into the Russian soul.

Until recent times, however, all this had little practical effect. The popular hatred of the ‘Niemetz,’ like the popular nationalism, still glowed fiercely, but both glowed beneath thick ashes, and did not show. The Court was German, the Tsars’ wives were German, the Baltic Province nobles gave the tone to bureaucracy and army, and the upper classes were zealous converts of the West. Then came the Nationalist reaction of the mid-nineteenth century. The ‘Slavophils’ blew away the ashes and discovered the soul of Old Russia, still aflame. They warmed themselves at its ardent fires, and their hearts inevitably kindled to its burning hatred for the Teutonic ‘culture-bearers’ of the ‘ rotten West.’ A wave of anti-German feeling passed over Russia, soon intensified by the course of world-politics.

However deeply the Germans in Russia may have been disliked, no ill-will had as yet been felt against their Teutonic home-land. Indeed, there could be no rational cause for such ill-feeling so long as Germany remained a mere geographical expression. The Slavophils’ traditional foes were the Turk and the Habsburg at Vienna: the Turk, who barred ‘Holy Russia’ from her rightful seat in ‘New Rome’; the Habsburg, who detained the Western Slavs beneath his sceptre and kept Russia from the Slav brothers of the Balkan. But no sooner had Germany become a nation than she allied herself with the Habsburg, and presently befriended the Turk. The ‘Niemetz’ thus stood forth as Panslavism’s arch-enemy. Not until the German was broken could there be the faintest hope of realizing Old Russia’s grandiose dreams. Henceforth, ‘the road to Constantinople and Vienna ran through Berlin.’

The Russo-German break might have come much earlier than it did but for the change of Russian policy which occurred toward the close of the nineteenth century. Tsar Alexander III had been a Slavophil and a frank hater of Germans. But his successor, the present Tsar Nicholas II, was attracted by the arguments of the ‘Asiatic School,’ and turned his attention to the Far East. This of course implied an understanding with Germany and Austria, and a passive attitude in the Balkans. But the Far Eastern policy was discredited by the Russo-Japanese War, and when the ‘ Intelligentsia ’ was equally discredited by the 1905 Revolution, Panslav Nationalism came fully into its own. The result was what might have been expected — a drastic ‘forward’ policy in the Balkans and the Near East, thinly veiled incitements to the discontented Austrian Slavs, and a wave of antiGerman feeling within Russia itself more bitter than anything ever witnessed before. The anti-German violence of the Russian press during the last few years has been truly extraordinary, and the anti-German measures of the Russian government have been drastic in the extreme. On the very eve of the present war plans had been perfected for the rooting-out of the Baltic Province nobility, the citadel of Russian Germanism, by the expropriation of their estates under the Stolypin Land Act, and the subsequent Russianizing of the provinces by a wholesale colonization of Muscovite peasants.

Since the beginning of the war the Nationalist régime has taken every possible measure for the extirpation of Germanism throughout the Empire. Even the old German agricultural colonies planted by Catharine II in Southern Russia one hundred and fifty years ago have been broken up and the inhabitants shipped away by the hundred thousand to Siberia. In the cities the popular fury has vented itself in anti-German ‘ pogroms ’ as violent as those formerly waged against the Jews. In fact, the Jews have also been terrible sufferers because of their suspected German affiliations. Toward Germany itself the Nationalists have displayed the same implacable hostility as toward the Germans within the Russian Empire. The Nationalist press has called for a war to the knife until both Germany and Austria shall have been utterly smashed into disjointed fragments incapable of future resistance to the march of Russia’s destiny. A leading publicist like Menshikoff, the brilliant leader-writer of the Novoye Vremya, actually demands the annexation of all Prussia’s eastern provinces, the extirpation of their German populations, and their resettlement by Russian mujiks.

Such is the complex mind of Russia to-day. There are, as we have seen, powerful forces working for reconciliation and renewed friendship with Germany. There are other forces, such as the Liberals and Revolutionists, which, while hostile to the German government, are not fundamentally hostile to the German people. Yet the driving forces behind the present régime, the Nationalist war-party which still guides Russian policy, hates Germanism on principle and continues to call for a battle to the death. Russia’s military reverses have been great and her human losses have been almost unthinkable — certainly five, possibly six millions. But the dogged fanaticism of the Russian masses has been stirred to its depths by the ‘holy war’ against the ‘infidel’ Turk and the ‘accursed’ German. The Russian people continues to pay the government’s huge blooddrafts on sight without question. How long this would continue in face of fresh military disasters and growing internal opposition remains to be seen. Certain it is, however, that to-day Russian Nationalism is still in the saddle, with no signs of a speedy fall.