Contemporary Socialism

smuch as she enjoyed an absolute protection against all such revolutionary agitation in her communistic rural institutions. There was no proletariat in Russia, every man in the countr

e so utterly fallacious. Instead of sparing or avoiding Russia, revolutionary agitation has grown positively endemic in that country; it is more virulent in its type, and apparently more de

communistic system of Russia than they would have been elsewhere that the system itself is beginning to give way. With an unlimited stock of good land, all is plain sailing under any social institutions; but when land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and converts the right to the land from an asset into a liability. This is what is now happening in Russia. It appears there are already more paup

Emancipation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation-an intellectual revolt all round, if you will-shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bi

d one common master-Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where

ry social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and the priesthood

the subject apart; but presently, out of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found, and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political question arises affecting their interests-a question of taxes or of administration-they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with. "Nobody but God," they say, "dare judge the mir," and the Czar, at any rate, respects the tradition. That rude assembly is the only free institution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there

pation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law-gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators-Pestel, the poet-said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse-he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come. All freedom o

ption. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but i

as sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously-perhaps it was to keep him there-to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep int

emselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of offici

their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," w

me from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge, a

pects nothing," sa

thing from a critical poi

e to the same thin

no authority, who accepts no principle without exam

sts. We shall see what you will do to exist in no

peculiar character. It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repea

e spirit of intellectual revolt-carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary

argely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with

t lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in literature, in art, in scienc

they could not with any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby clothes to avoid any offensive superi

s were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of the Contemporary magazine, and a political economist of some note in his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and revolutio

heir serfs, few of them actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and, besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were 633 separate estates in 1861, before the emancipation, but only 422 in 1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for o

ws, subject to a barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members, and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though the Revolutionary Executive Commi

ge that these sects are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the freethinkers of the unlettered classes, however, and their ideas no doubt have some influence in preparing these classes for socialist principles. But there is anot

ovinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent hi

ary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no

ther side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view. You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of

lutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrect

ces of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane-it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"-society not merely without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destr

war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties of parentage, friendship, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemne

untry, and the subsequent development of Russian affairs s

try a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly possible-but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor, health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and forced into complete dependence on th

ladies of position baptized their children in the name of Lassalle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From 1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the young girl

les, without scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avengi

the Russian army, and professor in the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but, as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present, communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago. Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their education, a

ed and simultaneous; it must, above all, first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it-that is, an itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society

ged pass, procured at the secret nihilist pass factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet, set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats

a handful of apparently harmless and amiable enthusiasts-a kind of Russian Quakers-who believed in one Malikov, and called themselves "God-men," because they held every man had a "divine spark" in him, and was therefore every other man's equal and brother. Second, the Bakunists, who adopted Bakunin's programme of "deeds," but did not, till 1875, think of putting it to practice. Third, the Lavrists, who sent the money to print Lavroff's newspaper in Zurich, the En Avant, and who seem to have gradually imbibed German socialism to the extent of thinking the Russian commune a reactionary and decaying institution not worth stirring a finger to preserve, and who called for the na

or the moment. Thun states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy, hoping in this way to b

ale. The whole public of Russia was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do, a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the political and constitutional liberty which was still denied to the Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a constitution rose again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to the autocratic régime. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay, not in their numbers-which he admits to have been few-but in the general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without tr

itant might be once more accommodated with his proper share of the soil. This great secular redistribution is the black division, and it belongs as naturally to the Russian peasants' system of agrarian ideas as the little local and periodical divisions that take place within the communes themselves. The Black Division section of the revolutionists are terrorist in their methods like the other section, but they care nothing about a constitution, which they say is only a demand of the bourgeoisie, but of no inte

asserts that a third of the rural population, or 20,000,000 souls in all, are in the condition of absolute proletarians, and his account of the situation is entirely supported by the descriptions of a competent and unprejudiced German economist, Professor Alphonse Thun, who speaks partly from the results of official inquiries institut

illagers, they possess no right to participate in the distribution of the village land. They are as much outside the communistic system as the nobles or the foreign residents. Russian citizenship alone is not enough to give a right to the land; local birth in a commune is also an essential pre-requisite, and ability to work is another. A family gets one share for every able-bodied member it contains; the share is therefore called a "soul" of land; and although between one distribution and another the widow may still retain the

oses in 1882 showed that one-fourth of the peasant families had then no horse. Russia is, in fact, a vast continent of crofters, practising primitive husbandry on mere "cat's-plots" of land, and depending for the greater part of their subsistence on some auxiliary trade. In one respect they have the advantage over our Scotch crofters; they practise, in many cases, skilled trades. Of course they work as ploughmen or fishermen when that sort of work is wanted, or they will hire a piece of waste land from a neighbouring owner and bring it into rude cultivation; but every variety of craft is to be found among them. They are weavers, hatters, cabinet-makers, workers in metals; they make shoes, or images, or candles, or musical instruments, or grindstones; they dress furs, they knit lace, they train singing-birds. According to the official inquiry, most of the goods of some of the best commercial houses of Moscow, trading in Parisian silk hats and Viennese furniture, are manufactured by these peasants in their rural vil

e net produce of theirs. Landowning on these terms is manifestly a questionable privilege, and the moujik pays his land taxes as the Scotch crofter has sometimes to pay his rent, not out of the produce of his holding, but out of the wages of his auxiliary labour; but the Scotch crofter, under his system of individual tenure, has one great resource which is wanting to the other: he can always cut the knot of his troubles by throwing up his holding, if he chooses, and emigrating. To the Russian peasant emigration brings no relief. He is born a proprietor, and cannot escape the obligation of his position wherever he may go. He may try to let his ground-and in many cases he does-but, as we see, he cannot often get enough rent to meet the dues. He may leave his village, if he will, but his village liabilities travel with him wherever he may settle. He cannot obtain work anywhere in Russia without showing his pass from his own commune; and since, under the principle of joint liabil

re not living in the villages they belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma, etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was state

arians, without land and having nothing to live by but their manual trade. The tendency, in short, is towards the break-up of the communal tenure, and instead of the Russian Commune invading Europe, as Cavour once said there was fear it would do, we are likely to see the individual tenure of Western Europe invading Russia and superseding primitive rural institutions in that country, as it has already superseded them in others. "It is quite evident," says Stepniak, "that Russia is marching in this direction. If nothing happens to check or hinder the process of interior disintegration in our villages, in another generation we shall have on one side an agricultural proletariat of sixty or seventy millions, and on the other a few thousand landlords, mostly former koulaks and mir-eaters, in possession of all the land." It is legally permissible at present for a Russian commune, if it so choose, to abolish its communal system

, but chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and brings back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester near home, and earns no more than twenty-five. Now, according to an author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such greediness by all the numerous members of the household-by the e

at almost never occurs. Thun states that in the province of Moscow during the twenty years 1858-1878 the average interval of distribution was 12? years, four rotations; that 49 per cent. of the communes had a distribution only once in 15 years, and 37 per cent. only once in 20 years. The dislike to frequent distributions is growing, on the obvious and very reasonable ground that they either discourage a man from doing well by his land, or they inflict on him the grave injustice of depriving him of the ground he has himself improved before he has reaped from it the due reward of his labour. The tendency towards individual property is therefore strongly at work here, and as this system of periodical redistribution is established merely to give every man that natural right by virtue of his birth to a share in the land, which is now in so many cases such a delusive irony, the resistance to the new tendency cannot be expected to be very resolute. The runrig system of cultivation, which prevails in Russia in the same form as it did in the Highlands of Scotland, does not give any similar appearance of decay. Stepniak says the peasants still prefer that arrangement becau

hat this law has been altered seriously to their disadvantage, under the influence of the nobility, in the process of carrying it into execution. But his confidence always is that the Czar will still interfere and put everything to rights. And when, only a few years ago, the revolutionist Stephanovitch stirred up some disturbances in Southern Russia, which were commonly dignified at the time with the name of a peasants' insurrection, he was only able to succeed in doing what he did by first going to St. Petersburg with a petition from the peasants of the district to the Czar, and then issuing on his return a false proclamation in the Czar's name, commanding the people to rise against the nobility, who were declared to be persistently obstructing and defeating his Majesty's good and just intentions for his loyal people's welfare. If an imperial proclamation were issued to the contrary effect-a proclamation condemning or repudiating the operations of the peasants-the latter would refuse to believe it to be genuine. That occurs again and again about this very idea of the black division, which has obtained possession of the brains of the rural population. It often happens that in a season of excitement, like the time of the Russo-Turkish war, or of famine, like the winter of 1880-81, the rumours and expectations of the black division become especially definite and lively, and lead to meetings and discussions and disturbances which the Government think it prudent to stop. In 1879 the Minister of the Interior, with this object in view, issued a circular contradicting the rumours that were spread abroad, which was read in all the villages and affixed to the public buildings. It stated, as plainly as it was possible to state anything, that there would be no redistribution, and that the landlords would retain their property; but it produced no effect. Professor Engelhardt wrote one o

emselves settled on plots of ground too small to work with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough to make nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been in the past. Hitherto it has taken little hold of the peasantry. At first it was a

anized themselves into a society called the Labour Emancipation League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885, published its programme, demanding (1) a constitution, (2) the nationalization of land, (3) the handing over of factories to the possession of societies of productive labourers, (4) free education, (5) abolition of a standing army, and (6) full liberty of association and meeting. The same writer states, however, that this socialist group are not numerous, and that the various robberies, murders, plots against the Czar's life, incitements of peasant disturbances, seizures of weapons and printing presses that keep on occurring, show that the nihilists, as the others still appear to be called, are much the most active a