# Great Russia/Chapter 7

​CHAPTER VII
RUSSIA STANDS FOR DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
I
IF there is any truth in the Darwinian doctrine of "the survival of the fittest," the Russian people must be one of the strong nations of the earth. From early history they have been schooled in the stern discipline of privation and suffering. For centuries they have borne the brunt of the Tartar invasion. Their physical power of resistance and their moral fibre have been tested periodically by plague and famine, by war and political persecution. They have at all times been tested by poverty and by the severity of a relentless climate. In the process the weak have been eliminated and the strong have become stronger. The result has been a sturdy, hardened people, with a magnificent physique and of extraordinary vitality. The final outcome has been one of the creative civilizations of the world, ​equally original in religion and politics, in art and literature, a civilization which is rapidly assimilating all the best elements of Western culture.
II. Russia Stands for Essential Christianity
Superficial publicists have identified Russia with Nihilism, and especially with that Nihilist type impersonated in the character of the Atheist Revolutionist Bazarov in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." As a matter of fact, Revolutionary Atheism is an entirely German importation. In no other country has the Christian religion struck deeper root than in Russia. The typical Russian believes not in the gospel according to St. Marx, but in the gospel according to St. Mark. Orthodoxy, the pravos slavie of the Slavophiles, has been one of the three factors of Russian nationality. As the Prussians are certainly to-day the least religious people in Europe, the Russians are probably the most religious. As I pointed out in a previous chapter, in the Russian language the same word Krestianine means both "peasant" and "Christian." Even unsympathetic observers like Mr. Wells have been profoundly ​impressed by the childlike and simple faith of the people. Cynics have railed at the superstition of the ignorant moujik, as if Christianity were a monopoly of the wealthy, the educated, and the learned. The truth is, that the religion of the moujik is the nearest approach to primitive Christianity and to the faith of the Golden Age of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. To visit the Catacombs of Kiev or the Troitsa Lavra on a holiday, to accompany the Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem, is to travel back to the Middle Ages. The Russian Church may have badly suffered from the confusion of spiritual and temporal power introduced by Peter the Great. Formalism and ritualism may play an excessive part in the economy of religion, but the spirit is everywhere alive, and the ideals of Christianity continue to inspire the individual lives of the people. Nowhere is the "Nietschean" spirit so little prevalent. Nowhere is the Christian temper of meekness and humility, of charity and brotherhood, of self-surrender and self-sacrifice so common as in Russia.
And the Christian spirit is a no less potent force in the public life of the nation. As I have amply proved in a subsequent chapter ​dealing with the revolutionary crisis of 1905, it was an unpardonable blunder of the so-called "Intelligensia" of the doctrinaire revolutionists of 1905 to ignore the spiritual force of the Church. When drastic religious reforms were originally proposed by the clerical members of the Church in the first Duma, their demands were contemptuously dismissed by a superior "Intelligensia." Those doctrinaires ignored the vital fact that no Revolution has ever been successful unless it assumed a religious form, and that this truth applies to Russia even more completely than to England or America or France. In 1905 the Press of the world unanimously predicted the downfall of the Monarchy and the triumph of the Revolutionists. I confidently predicted that nothing would happen. And nothing did happen. The political leaders, disciples of the super-thinkers Marx, and Haeckel and Nietzsche, leaders whose revolutionary theories had been almost entirely "made in Germany"—that is to say, in the very country which never had the courage to carry through a successful revolution—were neither understood nor followed by the people. The only leader who in that eventful year had a powerful following ​precisely happened to be a priest. If Father Gapon had been an honest man and an enthusiast, he would have succeeded where all the orators of the "Intelligensia" ignominiously failed.
III. Russia Stands for Democracy
The spirit of equality and brotherhood is universally prevalent in Russia, and I need hardly add that that spirit is the spiritual foundation of all democratic government. Strange as it may sound to the English theorist, Russia stands for democracy. To outward appearance the Russian Government is an autocracy, but that autocracy is of an essentially democratic nature. The Russian Empire is a huge peasant commonwealth, a federation of forty thousand democratic republics, thousands of which have retained the socialist and collectivist organization of the "Mir" or village community.
For the Russian is not like the Scot or the American a born individualist, rather is he a born Socialist. Now, individualism generally creates for itself an aristocratic or bourgeois or middle class form of society. The Socialist spirit finds its most fitting expression in democracy.
​There is in Russia no caste or class, there is no pride of birth. The mercantile and industrial class is only just emerging, and its place is largely taken by Jews and foreigners. From 85 to 90 per cent. of the people remain peasants. There is no organized nobility, and whatever nobility exists possesses no such feudal basis as in Prussia and even as in England. There is no right of entail; there are no privileges of the elder son. Every child, son or daughter, inherits an equal share of the parental property, and inherits the rank and title of the family. We often hear members of the Russian nobility described in the British Press as Prince Troubetzkoy or Prince Galitzine. The fact is, that there are hundreds of Princes Troubetzkoi and Princes Galitzine, and the title of prince carries with it neither wealth nor political distinction. A man's position in the State is entirely determined by the "Tchin"—i.e. by the rank he has attained in the civil and military service.
It is interesting to note that at the other extremity of Europe the same democratic feature should be the outstanding characteristic of two other Slav and Greek orthodox commonwealths—the Serbians and the Bulgarians. Both ​countries are like Russia peasant communities. The Serbian statistics of the division of land, with its total absence of large estates, are a revelation of the social and economic conditions of gallant little Serbia. Such statistics are, perhaps, unparalleled in European history. They show to what extent the old aristocracy has been stamped out, and how completely Serbia, like Bulgaria and Russia, is a country of small landholders, and in the strictest sense of the word, a peasant democracy.
IV. Russia Stands for Freedom
Russia stands for freedom, for the untrammelled freedom of the nomad roaming over the steppe. The Russians carry freedom to the verge of anarchy. It is not a mere accident that the three most consistent theorists of anarchism, Bakounine, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, are typical Russians. All through the Middle Ages a considerable part of civilized Russia was inhabited by free tillers of the soil. She glorified the free republics of Novgorod, Pskov, and Viatka. As was pointed out in Chapter II, it was only the necessity of national defence and the incessent incursions of Tartars in the East and of Poles in the West which ​compelled the Russian people to accept the protection of a strong Government, and to surrender their liberties to the Grand Dukes of Muscovy. And it was only in the sixteenth century that serfdom was established, namely, in the troubled times of the Smoutnoe Vremia of Boris Godounov. It is strange that serfdom should have been established in Russia at the very moment when everywhere else in Europe it was being abolished. But it is stranger still that the Russian peasants should have been free at the time when everywhere else in Europe peasants still were slaves. In the words of a famous French writer: "C'est la liberté qui est ancienne en Russie et non le despotisme."
Freedom with the Russians is an elemental instinct, a fanatical passion, the passion which creates martyrs, which sends its votaries to Siberia and to the scaffold. Political freedom in Russia has often been repressed, it has never been destroyed, as it has been destroyed in Prussia. In Prussia the people have had the benefit of universal education. They have attained to a high degree of industrial development. The German Socialists are strongly organized in a party, they command many millions of ​votes. Yet they have never had the courage of asserting their rights. They have been ready to hold processions innumerable. But they have always forgotten that political liberty is not gained by talking, by making demonstrations. They have always forgotten that men must be prepared to make sacrifices in order to conquer their freedom.
The one uprising of the Prussian people was the abortive revolutionary movement of 1848, which mainly resulted in the people offering the Imperial Crown of Germany to the reactionary King of Prussia.
Compare with the attitude of the German people to their oppressors the attitude of the Russian people. It is true, the vast majority are poor, illiterate, inarticulate peasants. They have no Press to voice their demands. They are not organized in a party. Yet again and again they have challenged reactionary Governments. We may condemn the Terrorist crimes, we may come to the conclusion that they were not only political crimes, but tactical blunders, but we cannot help admiring the spirit which animated the Russian revolutionists, even when those revolutionists had their minds poisoned with the dreary philosophical ​materialism of Büchner and Haeckel, and the economic materialism of Marx. Russians, even when they are materialists in theory, remain incurable idealists in practice.
And it is because the Russian is animated with that noble passion for freedom, it is because he is not politically servile like the Prussian, it is because the Slav refuses to be a slave, that we may look forward with every confidence to the result of the new Liberal Constitution which the Russian people conquered in 1905. The Russian Duma is only a few years old, but representative institutions have already struck deeper roots in Russia in five years than they have in Prussia in fifty years. And the Russian people have proved their capacity for self-government even more conspicuously in their local administration, in their Zemstvo which, as well as Zemski Sobor, can be traced back to the remotest traditions of Russian history. The Zemstvo is destined more and more to encroach on the activities of the Central Parliament. For decentralization and Home Rule, Voluntary Association and Cooperation are the watchwords of all Russian Liberals. And it is certainly a significant fact that in a few years twenty thousand ​agricultural co-operative societies have renewed the economic life of the country.
V. Intellectual Freedom in Russia and the Russian Censorship
A legend has grown up in England, and still largely obtains, that intellectual freedom does not exist in Russia, that every original thinker has been ruthlessly suppressed. It is true that Russian literature has known many dark days of implacable reaction and has produced many martyrs. But even in those dark days a Gogol or a Tolstoy could not be prevented from giving their message. And the fact is, that before the revolutionary movement of 1905 greater intellectual freedom existed in Russia than even in Great Britain, that revolutionists were allowed almost untrammelled to carry on their propaganda through the written word, that the Russian Empire was flooded with subversive and anarchist literature, and that a young writer's best chance to please a large section of the Russian public was to be sufficiently "advanced" and in opposition to the Government. It is also true that even at the present day publicists and journalists continue to be subjected to the censorship. But so are playwrights ​subjected to dramatic censorship in Great Britain. And British censorship is in many cases more severe than Russian. "Monna Vanna," of Maeterlinck, was widely circulated in Russia. It was prohibited in Great Britain. It is also true that any personal attack on members of the Government or the bureaucracy might lead to unpleasant encounters with the police, but any personal attack in Great Britain might lead to even more unpleasant prosecutions under the libel law.
I hold no brief for the Russian censorship, which is a survival of a régime which is rapidly passing away, and which is a disused organ of a vanishing autocracy. But the Russian censorship, even in its palmiest days, was utterly futile, and for the last generation it has interfered with the liberty of the Press just as little as French censorship interfered with the freedom of French literature in the days of Voltaire and Rousseau, in the days when "Emile" was burned by the hangman. Russian censorship does not even prevent an amount of intellectual licence which would stagger the British public. It is the impulsive and irresponsible violence of a section of the opposition Press which largely explains the retention of ​the censorship. The Russian extremists have not yet learnt the lesson of British political history, that self-government is impossible without self-control and self-restraint. If the Russian Press used but a fraction of the self-restraint which in Britain is imposed either by public opinion or by the libel law, Russian censorship would have long ceased to exist.