ANOTHER VARIATION ON AN OLD THEME A Letter to X

No, dear friend, I am not going to keep the promise I made you to write an article in explanation of what I said of Western Europe and what I said of Russia.

After you had gone, under the influence of your criticisms and the criticisms made by our common friends, I looked through part of what I had written and found I had nothing to add. I had said all that was in my heart, what I understood, and how I understood it. If I have not succeeded in making my outlook clear in whole books, in a series of articles, and a series of letters, how can I succeed in doing so in a few pages? Even if my view were really simply morbid, partial, and personal when I wrote ‘From the Other Side’ eight years ago, time has so terribly confirmed it that it has become a more settled conviction, and has merely cooled without being changed in anything essential. I refuse to repeat coldly what I said then with warmth, and I write now rather to show you that I listened to you attentively and took our friends’ criticisms sincerely to heart. The chief points of their censure may be reduced to two: first, that my attitude to Western Europe weakens convictions which are still essential in Russia; secondly, that my attitude to Russia approximates to that of the Slavophils. These criticisms are themselves the proof that your feud with the Moscow Old Believers has not subsided; that is a pity.

Carried away by your polemics, you do not notice how tedious and boring your disputes have become. Your quarrel with the Slavophils has lost all interest, especially since the death of Nicholas. It is high time to apply the manifesto of August 26, 1856, to all these wretched wrangles, and to consign them to oblivion with the other transgressions of Nicholas’ reign.

A new life is unmistakably surging up in Russia; even the Government is carried away by it. Questions, each more pressing than the last, are arising on all sides; hopes crushed to the earth are reviving; one wants to know what is being thought in Russia about the Emancipation of the Serfs, about the abolition of spiritual and corporal punishment—the censorship and the stick—about the restraint of official plundering and the irresponsible tyranny of the police, and one reads instead scholastic controversies about the precedence of races and the nationality of truth. I have never denied that the Slavophils have a true sense of the living soul in the people, that they ‘look for the world to come,’ but unhappily I must repeat that their instinct is clearer than their understanding, clearer, indeed, than their conscience. I have read with horror and repulsion some articles in Slavophil reviews; they stink of the torture chamber, of slit nostrils, penances, and the Solovetsky monastery. If power came into the hands of these gentry, they would be worse than the ‘Third Section,’ and am I supposed to be like these savages in sympathy and opinion and language? Why, then, did one of them not so long ago, under the protection of the irresponsible police, fling at me a handful of patriotic mud with the insolence of a flunkey protected from the stick by his safe perch behind the carriage, diffusing such a national stench of the servants’ hall, and such a flavour of orthodox lenten oil, that for several minutes I fancied myself in one of the remote quarters of Moscow?

But your controversy with them is of no use; leave them alone or beat them on their own ground. They do not know the real Russia, they are changelings and corpses; not one of them will take up your challenge; they have distorted their understanding by a false show of orthodoxy and a pretence of nationalism.

It would be difficult to confute them by holding up Western Europe as an example (here I am answering another criticism) when a single copy of any newspaper you like is enough to show the terrible malady from which Europe is suffering. To ignore her wounds and to preach reverence not only for the ideas which she has worked out and which are inconsistent with her life of to-day, but for her herself, is as impossible as to persuade us that the fanatically crazy lucubrations of the followers of Buddha, or the Carpathian Dissenters, are of more value and significance than all the problems that occupy us.

You love European ideas—I love them too; they are the ideas of all history, they are the monument on which is inscribed what has been bequeathed not only by the men of yesterday, but by Egypt and India, Greece and Rome, Catholicism and Protestantism, the Latin peoples and the Germanic peoples. Without them we should sink into Asiatic quietism or African blankness of mind. With those ideas, and only with them, can Russia be brought into possession of that great part of the heritage which comes to her share. About that we are completely in agreement. But you are unwilling to recognise that contemporary life in Europe is not in harmony with her ideas. You are alarmed for them; ideas which fail to find their realisation at home seem to you unrealisable anywhere. Historical embryology scarcely warrants such a conclusion. From the fact that the new social ideas are not applied in the contemporary life of the European peoples (even if this were completely proved) you cannot deduce that they are impossible of realisation, that they cannot be applied in practice anywhere. Has not the European ideal in one form, to wit, the Anglo-Saxon, found complete expression on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?

The ways of development are very hard, and far from simple in nature and in history; they make use of a terrible number of forces and forms. That is not very obvious to us, because we are always confronted with the complete result, with what has been accomplished and successful. Numbers of unsuccessful forms were evolved by the way, did not attain a full life (in comparison with those that follow), and were replaced by others of which we know nothing. They were not sacrificed, for they lived for themselves, but when they passed away they handed on their heritage not to their own offspring, but to strangers, the mammoths and ichthyosaurians to the elephants and crocodiles, Egypt and India to Greece and Rome. It may very well be that the whole creative ability of the Western European peoples has been spent and is exhausted in evolving their social ideal, their science, in striving towards it, and in realising separate partial phases of it with all the passion and fervour of the struggle, in which men are ready to die because at every step they fancy they are attaining the whole of their ideal.

Will the down-trodden masses wrest out of the hands of the monopolists the powers evolved by science, and all the accumulation of technical improvements, and make of them the common weal? Or will the propertied classes, resting on the force of government and the ignorance of people, keep the masses down? In either case the ideas are saved, and that is what is of first importance for you. Science, independent of political systems and nationality, remains as the grand achievement of European life, ready to transform men’s hard existence of the past everywhere where it meets a suitable soil, understanding and, together with understanding, strength and freedom. The question of the future of Europe I do not regard as finally settled; but, looking at it conscientiously with the humble desire to see the truth and with prejudices rather in favour of Western Europe than opposed to it, studying it for ten years, not in theories and books, but in clubs and in market-places, in the centre of its political and social life, I am bound to say that I see neither a speedy nor a happy solution. Looking on the one hand at the feverish, one-sided development of industry, at the concentration of all riches, moral and material, in the hands of the minority of the middle class, at the way in which that minority has taken hold of the Church and the Government, the machines and the schools, at the fact that the army obeys it, that the judges interpret the law in its favour, and, looking on the other hand at the undeveloped state of the masses, the immaturity and instability of the revolutionary party, I cannot predict the speedy downfall of the bourgeoisie and the reform of the old political order without a most terrible and bloody struggle.

It is of no use to dream now of the ordinary revolutions of the past, made half in jest, with a song of Béranger and a cigar in the mouth; now there is no Charles X. ready to flee at the sight of danger, no Louis Philippe who would not bombard Paris; now there is no silly Austrian Emperor who would give a Constitution at the first musket-shot. Though the Prussian King is the same, he would not now take the cap off his drunken head at the sight of murdered revolutionaries; even Pius IX. has grown wiser. The June days of 1848 and Cavaignac have shown the world what massacres of St. Bartholomew, what September days, await the future conflict. Whether Europe will emerge rejuvenated from this ordeal, or be drowned like Seneca in her own blood, I do not know; but I fancy neither you nor I will live to see the day. Your hair is grey, while I am forty-four.

Is it not natural under these circumstances for an enlightened man to enlarge his horizon, to look about him, to enquire how other lands, not drawn into the death-struggle of Europe, stand in regard to the future, what can be expected from them, whither they are tending, and whether there is no inconspicuous preliminary work being done there. But outside Europe there are only two progressive countries, America and Russia, with possibly Australia just beginning. All the rest lie in unbroken slumber or struggle in convulsions which are alien to us and outside our comprehension, like the Chinese rebellion, with its piles of corpses and revolting butchery.

America is Europe colonised, the same race (predominantly Anglo-Saxon), but living under different conditions. Wave after wave carries the overflow to her shores further and further. Just as in Cromwell’s days England sailed across the ocean and was scattered over the northern plains and forests, so now crowds of European fugitives sail thither to escape from hunger, from the stifling atmosphere, from persecution, ‘from the future,’ foreseeing troubles at home. It is the continuation of the age-long movements to the West. Three millions of Irishmen have settled there since the days of Robert Peel; the German monarchs who, in the eighteenth century, traded in herds of their subjects for making war against independence, for settling Pennsylvania, and so on, pause when they see how the population is flowing away. The movement goes on in America itself: the newcomers make their way through the settled population, sometimes draw it with them, and keep pressing, crowding, and hurrying to the South; to-day to the equator, where there will be a new meeting and a new combination of the Anglo-Saxon element with the Latin-Spanish.

We see that all this is but the clearing of the ground, the marking out of the arena, and that no power can prevent the North Americans with their overflowing strength, plasticity, and untiring energy from reaching Central America and Cuba. While in Europe Venice is falling into ruins, Rome is reduced to beggary, the little towns of Italy and Spain are declining from lack of capital and labour, from indolence and lack of energy, in California, in Honduras and Nicaragua, deserts are in a few years being transformed into cultivated fields and clearings into towns, the plains are lined with railways, capital is abundant, and the restless vigour of the Republic absorbs more and more. What is growing is young.

The growth of Russia has been vigorous too, and it can hardly be over yet, it can hardly have reached its natural limits; that is evident, not only from its geographical physiology, but also from the unceasing aggression of the Government, from the perpetual striving to get hold of every morsel of land. But Russia is extending by a different law from America; because in its present state it is not a colony, not an overflow, not a migration, but an independent world advancing in all directions, yet sitting tight on its own soil. The United States, like an avalanche torn away from its mountain, carries everything before it; every step gained by it is a step lost by the American Indians. Russia saturates all about it like water, surrounds races on all sides, then covers them with the uniform layer of the ice of autocracy—and under it makes of the worshippers of the Grand Llama defenders of orthodoxy, of Germans uncompromising Russian patriots. There is the same youthful plasticity here. Why did Joseph II. laugh at laying the foundation of Ekaterinoslavl, saying that the Empress had laid the first stone of the city, and he the last? It was not a city that was founded then, but a State. The Novorossisk region is the best proof of the plastic power of Russia. And all Siberia? And the settlements on the banks of the Amur, where to-morrow the Stars and Stripes of the American Republics will be fluttering? And indeed the Eastern Provinces of European Russia themselves.

Reading the chronicle of the Bagrov family,⁠[42] I was struck by the resemblance of the old man who migrated into the Province of Ufa to the settlers who migrate from New York to Wisconsin or Illinois. It is a completely new clearing of uninhabited places, and the turning of them to agriculture and civilised life. When Bagrov summons the people from all parts to dig the dam for the mill, when the neighbours come singing and bring the earth, and he triumphantly crosses the conquered river at their head, one fancies one is reading Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving. And all that happened only a hundred years ago; it was the same thing in the Saratov province and in Perm. In Vyatka, in my day, it was hard to keep the peasants from migrating into the forests and there making new clearings; the land was still in their eyes common property, the res nullius to which every man has a right.

America presents no new elements; it is a further development of Protestant Europe, set free from its historic past, and put under different conditions of life. The grand idea developed by the Northern States is purely Anglo-Saxon, the idea of self-government, that is of a strong people with a weak government, the home rule of every tract of land without centralisation, without bureaucracy, held together by an inner moral unity. What attitude America will take up to socialism is hard to say; the spirit of comradeship, of association, of enterprise in common is highly developed in her, but it has not common ownership nor our artel, nor the village community; the individual combines with others only for a definite task, apart from which he jealously guards his complete independence.

Russia, on the contrary, is a quite special world, with her own natural habit of life, with her own physiological character—not European, not Asiatic, but Slav. She takes her share in the destinies of Europe, though she has not its historical traditions and is free from its obligations to the past. ‘What good fortune for a Russian lawgiver,’ said Bentham to Alexander I., when the latter was in London after the Napoleonic Wars, ‘that he has not to contend with Roman law at every step!’ And we add, nor with feudalism, nor with Catholicism, nor with Protestantism. The Book of Church Law and the Civil Code do not cover every aspect of life, do not govern every action; other institutions have been introduced by force and are maintained by force. We have nowhere those hard-and-fast prejudices which, like a paralysis, deprive the Western European of the use of half his limbs. The village commune lies at the basis of our national life with the re-division of fields, with the common ownership of land, with an elective control, with the equality of duties laid on each workman (the tyagla). All this is in an oppressed, distorted state, but it is all living, and has outlived its worst period.

If there is any truth in all this, one need not be a Russian to turn special attention to Russia in these black days for Europe. And, as a matter of fact, many vigorous minds are occupied with Russia. I have myself chanced to speak of Russia with serious men like Proudhon and Mazzini ... and I assure you that the attitude of hatred and fear, fully deserved by the thirty years’ reign of Nicholas, is being replaced by hesitation and a desire to gain a closer knowledge of this newcomer, whose rights and power for the future they are neither able nor willing to deny.

Russia could not really be understood by Western Europeans so long as the latter had faith in themselves, and were advancing; but they are convinced of the impossibility of progressing by way of revolutions, having lost at one blow all the fruits of them, except the lesson of failure. ‘The equality of slavery’ has let them look more closely at each other, and this is why it is in England that there is least understanding of Russia; the English have not taken an equal share in the Continental revolutions, nor in the general downfall that has followed. Free after their own fashion, they look with indifference at the land of slavery and despotism. But other nations in their fetters feel instinctively that, though a temporary necessity may yesterday have forced the discipline of the barracks on a peaceful agricultural people and turned all Russia into military settlements, another necessity may to-morrow do away with all that, just as Alexander II. has done away with Araktcheyev’s settlements; the period of military despotism will pass, leaving behind a political unity indissolubly welded together and forces hardened in a harsh and bitter school. The stumbling-blocks over which Europe has tripped scarcely exist for us. In the natural simplicity of our peasant life, in our uncertain and unsettled economic and judicial conceptions, in our vague sense of property, in our lack of a strong middle class, and in our extraordinary capacity for assimilating foreign ideas, we have an advantage over nations that are fully organised and exhausted. The Russian State has been firmly established by terrible means; by slavery, the knout, and executions, the Russian people have been driven into making a vast empire, through torture they have moved to the achievement of their destinies. It is idle to waste anger on the past; it is the task of the living to take advantage of all forces alike, whether they have been won by good means or ill, by bloodshed or by the ways of peace. The military settlements, as I have said, are passing away, but the villages remain. In our shifting primitive soil there is nothing conservative but the village commune; that is, nothing but what ought to be preserved.

I have read your discussions about the commune; they are very interesting, but less to the point than appears on the surface. Whether the village commune is racial in origin or the work of the Government, whether the land belonged in the past to the commune, to the landowners, or to the princes, whether the institution of serfdom strengthened the commune or not, all that ought to be investigated; but what is most important for us is the present position of affairs. The fact, whether distorted or not, whether right or wrong, forces itself upon us. The Government and the institution of serfdom have, in their own fashion, maintained our native commune; the stable, permanent principle left in it from patriarchal days is not lost. The common ownership of land, the mir, and the village elections form a groundwork upon which a new social order may easily grow up, a groundwork which, like our black earth, scarcely exists in Europe.

That is why, dear friend, in the midst of the gloomy, heartrending requiem, in the midst of the dark night which is falling upon the sick and weary West, I turn away from the death agony of the mighty warrior whom I honour, but whom I cannot aid, and look with faith and hope to our native East, inwardly rejoicing that I am Russian.

The period upon which Russia is now entering is extraordinarily important; instead of small political reforms for which we are too old, not in experience, but in intelligence, we are confronted with a vast economic revolution, the emancipation of the peasants. And that is not all: our problems are so set that they can be solved by social and political measures without violent upheavals. We are called to overhaul the rights of land ownership and the relations of the workman to the means of production. Is this, perhaps, our solemn entry upon our future growth? The whole new programme of our historical activity is so simple that there is no need of genius for it, but merely eyes to see what to do. It is only the timidity, the clumsiness and bewilderment of the Government that hinder it from seeing the way, and it is letting the marvellous chance slip by. Good Lord! What might not be done in this spring sunshine after the winter of Nicholas! The blood is thawed in the veins and the oppressed heart beats more freely, and what profit might be made of it!

Few feelings are more painful and oppressive than the sense that one might make a dash forward now at once, that everything is in readiness, and that the only thing lacking is understanding and courage on the part of the leaders. The machine is stoked up and ready, the fuel is burning for nothing, energy is being wasted, and all because there is no bold hand to turn the key without fear of an explosion. Our leaders should know that nations pardon a great deal—the barbarism of Peter and the dissoluteness of Catherine; they pardon violence and wickedness, if only they are aware of strength and boldness of mind. But however good the heart may be, lack of understanding, colourless vacillation, incapacity to take hold of circumstances and turn them to account, in a ruler whose power is unlimited, is never forgiven, either by the people or by history.

My passionate impatience in this case is in no way a contradiction of my resigned acceptance of the tragic fate of Europe. In Russia I see the chance at hand. I feel I can touch it; there is no such possibility in Western Europe, at any rate, at this moment. If I were not a Russian, I should long ago have gone away to America. You know that I am not a fatalist, and do not believe in anything ordained beforehand, not even in the famous ‘Perfectibility of Humanity.’

Nature and history plod along from day to day and from age to age, stepping aside, making new ways, stumbling upon old ones, amazing us now by their swiftness, now by their slowness, now by their sense, now by their folly, pressing in all directions, but advancing only where the gates are open. When I talk of possible development I am not talking of its inevitability; what part of all that is possible will be accomplished I do not know, because very much in the life of nations depends on persons and will. I feel in my heart and in my mind that history is knocking at our door; if we have not the strength to open it, and those who have are unwilling or incapable, progress will find fitter means in America or in Australia, where political life is being formed on quite a different basis. Perhaps even Europe herself will be renewed, will rise up, will take up her bed and walk on her Holy Land, under which so many martyrs are buried, and on which so much sweat and blood has been spent. Perhaps!

But is it really possible that after setting one foot on the beaten track we shall sink back into the swamp, giving the world the spectacle of immense strength and complete incapacity to use it? Something forbids the heart to accept that!

How bitter are these doubts, how bitter this loss of time and strength!... When will the scales fall from their eyes? And why are they afraid to answer the loud summons of the future? ‘A new period has come for Russia,’ we said, when we heard of the death of Nicholas; now all the Russian journals are saying it, the Tsar himself is saying it in other words. Well, then let it be new.

Everything that is being done shows our unhappy passion for prefaces and introductions at which we love to stop short complacently. As though it were enough to decide to do something, for the thing to be done.

The Petersburg Government has but few traditions, yet those are like fetters on the legs of Alexander II. How slowly and indirectly he advances along the path of reform, of which he has himself said so much! In what shallow waters the boat of his autocracy floats! At this rate it will take us over two hundred years to catch up the Prussia of to-day. And it is all due to the Nicholas tradition, the Nicholas policy, and, what is perhaps worst of all, the Nicholas men.

It is high time to give up this stupid fear of free speech and daylight through dread of some phantom revolution, for which there are no elements ready. It is high time to abandon the futile meddling in every European squabble, always in support of despotism, of brute force, and of flagrant injustice. To the devil with this diplomatic influence which makes all the nations hate us. It is not the Russian, but the Holstein policy of Nicholas. Nicholas turned the sentimental Holy Alliance into a police compact. Why does Alexander go on playing the same part? The Russian Tsardom is not bound up in any way with the fate of the decrepit European thrones, so why will he needlessly share all their abominations and bring upon himself all the hatreds gained by them?

With the partition of Poland the attitude of the new Empire to old Europe was transformed. But the memory of that crime ought not to lead to mere dread of losing the ill-gotten gains, but to pangs of conscience and to repentance. What has Alexander II. done to show repentance? All that remains in our memory is the refrain of the song with which he concluded his speech at Warsaw—Pas de rêveries! Pas de rêveries!

Pas de rhétorique! Pas de rhétorique! we say in our turn. We have no dreams! Crushed by authority, by injustice, by bribery, by the suppression of free speech and the contempt for personal freedom, we want to speak out fearlessly, to exchange ideas with each other and to unmask the abuses of which even the Government is ashamed and which it will never check without publicity. We want the peasants to be freed from the power of the landowners and all subject Russia to be freed from the stick; of course, that is not rêverie, but is something very practical and extremely little. Yes, it is very little, but it is just our youthfulness and our strength which makes us need so little in order to push ahead boldly and rapidly. We ask no help from the Government; all we ask of it is not to meddle. Western Europe, on the contrary, having so much, cannot make use of its riches; they have cost it so much that it is miserly over them; it is conservative, like every property-owner. We have nothing to preserve. Of course, poverty is not of itself a claim to a different future, nor are years of slavery a claim to freedom, but here, starting from the opposite principles to opposite ends, I meet not the Slavophils but some of their ideas.

I believe in the capacity of the Russian people; I see from the seedling crop what the harvest may be; I see in their life, poor and oppressed as it is, an unconscious fitness for the social ideal which European thought has consciously reached.

So that, dear friend, is why it is that you have found a similar strain in my views and in those—worse than false—mischievous and dangerous views of the Moscow literary Old Believers, those orthodox Jesuits who reduce every one to despondency. And that is why, warmly accepting the new social religion that is arising on the blood-soaked fields of reformation and revolution, repeating with throbbing heart the great legends of those days, I turn away from contemporary Europe and have little sympathy with the pitiful heirs of mighty fathers.

Do not let us dispute about methods, our aim is the same. Let us devote all our efforts, each according to his strength at his own post, to throw down every barrier that hinders the free development of the abilities of our people and maintains the present worthless régime, let us stir the minds of the people and the Government alike. And so I conclude my long letter to you with the words: to work, to toil, to toil for the Russian people, which has toiled enough for us!

London, February 3, 1857.