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THE RUSSIA OF THE TSARS
from
Glimpses of World History
by
Jawaharlal Nehru
*******************************************
Russia today is a soviet country, and its government is run by representatives of the workers and peasants. In some ways it is the most advanced country in the world. Whatever the actual conditions may be, the whole structure of the government and society is based on the principle of social equality. That is so now. But some years ago, and right through the nineteenth century and before, Russia was the most backward and reactionary country in Europe. The purest form or autocracy and authoritarianism flourished there; in spite of revolutions and changes in Western Europe, the theory of the divine right of kings was still upheld by the Tsars. Even the Church, which was the old orthodox Greek Church and not the Roman or Protestant, was perhaps even more authoritarian then elsewhere, and it was a prop and a tool of the Tsarist government. "Holy Russia" the country was called, and the Tsar was the "Little White Father" of everybody, and these legends were used by the Church and the authorities to befog people's minds and turn their attention from political and economic conditions. Holiness has kept strange company in the course of history!
The typical symbol of this "Holy Russia" was the knout, and a frequent occupation was pogroms-two words which the Tsarist Russia presented to the world. The knout was the whip used to punish serfs and others. Pogrom means devastation and organized persecution; in effect it meant massacres, especially of the Jews. And behind Tsarist Russia was the vast lonely steppes of Siberia, a name which had come be to associated with exile and prison and despair. Large numbers of political convicts were sent to Siberia, and big exile camps and colonies grew up, and near each of them were the graves of suicides. Long and lonely terms of exile and prison are hard to bear, and the mind of many a brave person has given way and the body broken down under strain. To live cutoff from the world and far away from one's friends and companions and those who share one's hopes and lighten one's burden, one must have strength of mind, and inner depths which are calm and steady, and the courage to endure. So Tsarist Russia struck down every head that were raised and crushed every attempt to gain freedom. Even traveling was made difficult, so that liberal ideas might not come from abroad. But freedom repressed has a way of adding compound interest to itself, and when it moves forward, its progress is likely to be in jumps, which upset the whole applecart.
In our previous letters we have had some glimpses of the activities and policies of Tsarist Russia in various parts of Asia and Europe-in Far East, in central Asia, in Persia, and in Turkey. Let us now fill in the picture a little and connect these separate activities with the main theme. The geographical position of Russia is such that it has always had two faces, one looking west and the other East. It is, by virtue of its position, a Eurasian power, and its later history has been an alternation of its interest in East and West. Repulsed in the West, it looked to the East; held up in the East, it turned round again to the West.
I have told you of the breaking up of old Mongol empires, the legacy of Chengiz Khan, and of how the Mongols of the Golden Horde were ultimately driven away from Russia by the Russian princes under the leadership of the Prince of Moscow. This took place at the end of the fourteenth century. The Princes of Moscow gradually become the autocratic ruler of the whole country and began to call themselves Tsar’s (or Caesars). Their outlook and customs remained largely Mongolian, and there was little in common between them and the Western Europe, which considered the Russia as barbarous. In 1689 came Tsar Peter to the throne, called the Peter the Great. He decided to make Russia face west, and he went on a long tour of European countries to study conditions there. He copied much that he saw and imposed his ideas of westernization on his reluctant and ignorant nobility. The masses, of course were very backward and repressed, and there was no question for Peter as to what they thought of their reforms. Peter saw that the great nations of his day were strong on the sea, and he realized the importance if sea-power. But Russia, as huge it was. had then no outlet on sea except in the Arctic Ocean, which was not much good. So he pushed north-west to the Baltic and the south to the Crimea. He did not reach the Crimea (his successors did that), but he got to the Baltic after defeating Sweden. He founded a new westernized city, called St.Petersburg, on the Neva, off the Gulf of Finland, which led to the Baltic Sea. He made this his capital, and so tried to break with the old traditions which clung to Moscow. Peter died in 1725.
More than half century later, in 1782, another Russian ruler tried to “westernize” the country. This was a woman, Catherine II, also called the Great. She was an extraordinary women, strong, cruel, able, and with a very unsavoury reputation about her personal life. Having disposed of her husband, the Tsar, by murder, she became the Autocrat of all the Russians and ruled for fourteen years. She posed as a great patron of culture and tried to make friends with Voltaire, with whom she corresponded. The French Court of Versailles was copied by her to some extend, and some educational reforms were introduced. But all this was at the top and for show purposes. Culture cannot be copied suddenly; it has to take root. A backward nation merely aping advanced nations changes the gold and silver of real culture into tinsel. The culture of Western Europe was based on certain social conditions. Peter and Catherine, without trying to produce these conditions, tried to copy the superstructures, with the result that the burden of these changes fell on the masses and actually strengthened serfdom and the Tsar’s autocracy.
So in Tsarist Russia an ounce of progress went hand in hand with a ton of reaction. The Russian peasants were practically slaves. They were tied to their lands and could not leave them without special permission. Education was limited to certain officers and intellectuals, all drawn from the landed gentry. There was practically no middle class, and the masses were entirely illiterate and backward. In the past there had been frequent and bloody peasant revolts, blind revolts due to too much oppression, and they had been crushed. Now, with a bit of education at the top, some of the prevalent ideas of Western Europe also trickled through. Those were the days of the French revolution and then of Napoleon. Napoleon’s fall, you will remember, resulted in reaction all over Europe, and Tsar Alexander I, with his “Holy Alliance” of emperor, was the champion of this reaction. His successor was even worse. Stung into action, a group of young officers and intellectuals rose in rebellion in 1825. They all belonged to the landowning class and had no backing in the masses or the army; they were crushed. They are called “Decembrists” because their revolt took place in December, 1825. This revolt was the first outward sign of political awakening in Russia. It was preceded by secret political societies, as every kind of public political activity was prevented by the Tsar’s government. These secret societies continued and revolutionary ideas began to spread, especially among intellectuals and university students.
After Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war, some reforms were introduced, and in 1861 serfdom was abolished. This was a great thing for the peasantry, and yet it did not bring much relief, for the freed serfs were not given enough land to support them. Meanwhile the spread of revolutionary ideas among the intelligentsia and their repression by the Tsar’s government went on side by side. There was no link or common ground between these advanced intellectuals and the peasantry. So, in the early seventies, the socialistically inclined (they were all vague and idealistic) students decided to carry their propaganda to the peasantry, and thousands of students descended upon the villages. The peasants did not know these students. They distrusted them and suspected some plot perhaps to restore serfdom. And so these peasants actually arrested many of these students, who had come at the peril of their lives, and handed them over to the Tsar’s police! This was an extraordinary example of trying to work in the air without being in touch with the masses.
This utter want of success with the peasantry was a great shock to these student intellectuals and, in disgust and despair, they took to what is called “terrorism”, that is, throwing bombs and otherwise trying to kill those in authority. This was the beginning in Russia of terrorism and the cult of the bomb, and with it revolutionary activities took a new phase. These bomb-throwers called themselves “Liberals with a bomb”, and their terrorist organization was named “Will of the people”. This name was pretentious, as the people concerned were relatively small groups.
Thus began the new contest between these groups of determined young men and women and Tsar’s government. The revolutionary forces were swelled by the addition of people from many subject races and national minorities in Russia. All these races and minorities were ill-treated by the government. They were not allowed to make public use of their own languages, and in many other ways they were harassed and humiliated. Poland, which was industrially more advanced than Russia, had been made just a province of Russia, and the very name of Poland had practically disappeared. The Polish language was prohibited. If this was the treatment according to the Poland, worst treatment was given to other minorities and races. There was a rebellion in Poland in the sixties which was suppressed with great cruelty; and 50,000 Poles were sent to Siberia. Jews were continually being subjected to pogroms----that is, massacres, and large numbers of them migrated to other countries.
It was natural that these Jews and others, full of anger at the Tsarist oppression of their races, should join the Russian terrorists. Nihilism, as this terrorism was called, grew, and it met naturally with a bloody suppression, and long trains of political convicts trudged into the Siberian steppes, and many were executed. To meet this menace the Tsar’s government adopted a method which was carried to the extraordinary lengths. They sent agents-provocateurs to the ranks of the terrorists and revolutionaries and these people actually provoked bomb outrages, and sometimes committed them themselves, so that they might implicate others. One of these famous agents-provocateurs was Azeff, who was one of the leading bomb-throwing revolutionaries and was at the same time a chief of the Russian secret police! There are other well authenticated cases of this kind where Tsarist generals in the secret police took to bomb-throwing as agents of the police to get others into trouble!
While all this was happening, the Russian dominions were continually spreading eastwards and, as I have told you, they eventually reached the Pacific. In Central Asia they came to the Turkish frontier. Another important development, from the sixties onwards, was the rise of western industry. This was limited to a few areas only, like the Petersburg neighborhood, and in Moscow, and the country as whole remained completely agricultural. But the factories that were put up were quite up-to-date, and were usually under English management. Two results followed. Russian capitalism developed rapidly in these few industrial areas, and a working class also grew equally rapidly. As in the early days of the British factory system, the Russian workers were terribly exploited, and made to work almost night and day. But there was this difference. New ideas had now arisen, ideas of socialism and communism, and the Russian worker had a fresh mind and was receptive to these ideas. The British worker, with a long tradition behind him, had grown conservative and tied to old ideas.
These new ideas began to take shape, and a “Social Democratic Labour Party” was formed. This was based on the Marxist philosophy. These Marxists declared themselves against acts of terrorism. According to the theories pf Karl Marx, the working class had to be roused to action, and only by such mass action could they achieve their goal. The killing of individuals by terrorism would not move the working class to such action, for the goal was the overthrow of Tsarism, and not the assassination of the Tsar or his ministers.
As early as the ‘eighties a young man later to become known all over the world as Lenin, had participated in revolutionary activities even as a student at school. In 1887, when he was seventeen, he had to face a terrible below. His elder brother Alexander, to whom Lenin was greatly attached, was executed on the scaffold for taking part in a terrorist attempt on the Tsar’s life. In spite of the shock, Lenin said even then, that freedom was not to be obtained by methods of terrorism; the way was through mass action only. And, grimly and with set teeth, this young man went on with his school work, appeared for his final school examination, and passed with distinction. Such was the stuff of which the leader and maker of the revolution of thirty years later was made!
Marx used to think that the working-class revolution which he predicted would begin in a highly industrialized country, like Germany, with a big and organized working class. He considered Russia as the most unlikely place for this because of its backwardness and medievalism. But in Russia he found faithful followers among the young, who studied him with a passion for finding out that they should do to put an end to their intolerable condition. The very fact that in Tsarist Russia no open activity or constitutional methods were open to them drove them to this study and to discussion, among themselves. These were sent in large numbers to prison, to Siberia, or exile abroad. Wherever they went they continued this study of Marxism and their preparation for the day of action.
March 16, 1933
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