The great contradiction: Russian identity, autocracy, and the incorruptible people

“ I have never changed the faith I held while wandering in the forests and bogs of Siberia. It sustained me then--it sustains me now. The great Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--and the cause of their collapse will be very simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling against their proletariat. In Russia it is different. In Russia we have no classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and the other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as the ocean. ”

“ Count A——, a young vice-governor, fresh from college, came to live in a certain town of the Black Soil country. Fond of dogs and horses, fond of wines and dinners, the young gentleman found his official income far below his wants. He took "his own" (what Russian officials used to call vzietka) from every side; for he loved to keep his house open, his stable full, his card-room merry; and a nice house, a good stable, and a merry card-room, cost a good many rubles in the year. He was lucky with his cards—luckier, some losers said, than a perfectly honest player should be ”

“ Owning a large portion of the earth's surface, rich beyond calculation in all that makes for national wealth and prosperity, with a peasantry the most confiding, the most loyal, the most industrious in the world, with intellectual power and genius in abundant measure, and with pride of race and a patriotism profound and intense, what more does Russia need? Only three things—that cruelty be abandoned; that she be made a homogeneous nation ”

“ The second Russia is that of the "Old Believers," of the fanatical haters of Europe's culture, civilization, and democracy. It is a truly mystic Russia, and its philosophy has never yet been adequately presented to the European or American reader.
There was a time, in the history of Russia's intellectual development, when some of the ablest exponents of Russian thought supported those conception of social and political inertness which usually go under the name of the Oriental philosophy of life. ”

“ The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and materialists abound, whose lives and thoughts would unsettle the holy, orthodox feelings of Russia, disturb her ancient conscience and poison her humility with murmurings of discontent and rebellion. ”

“ Razumov’s record, I lay it aside, I take up the pen—and the pen being ready for its office of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in creeping under its point is no other word than “cynicism.”
For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. ”

“ I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. ”

“ That is to say, the STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. ”

“ A Russian devoted to his fatherland is as little willing to permit the subtraction of a single dogma from our Orthodox faith as he would be to allow the theft of a pearl from the crown of Monomachus. Autocracy is the main condition of Russia's political existence. In conformity with these two national bases is the third basis, equally important and equally strong—patriotism."
The official program of reaction—Orthodoxy, autocracy, and patriotism—had thus been formulated. To the present day this program constitutes the alpha and omega of official political wisdom ”

“ We then find the inevitable military chiefs, not born of the Slav people, intruding and creating princedoms: we find an oriental autocracy fastening itself, violently and parasitically, upon the helpless nation: we find the evil example and the tincture of foreign blood continuing the development until Princes of Moscow become Tsars of all the Russias, and convert a title dipped in blood into a title to rule by the grace of God and the affection of the people. ”

“ Amidst the various and heavy trials imposed by destiny on Russia, besides the miseries of the feudal or appanage system, besides the Mongolian yoke, Russia had also to bear the ferocity of the autocrat-tormentor: yet she preserved her love for autocracy, believing that plagues, earthquakes and tyrants are sent by God. ”

“ In truth, the nobles and aristocracy are the immediate oppressors of the ignorant masses, who are taught to regard them as demigods, and bow down before them in slavish abasement. Now and then, in extreme cases, where the autocrat discovers abuses which threaten to impair his authority, he sends some of these aspiring gentlemen on a tour of pleasure to Siberia, and thus practically demonstrates that there is a ruling power in the land. ”

“ The Autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the Russian Church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. I remembered that banishment to Siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the Orthodox Church and refused to believe as the Tsar believes and to pray as the Tsar prays. The Kings of Spain and the Emperors of Austria are sons, not rulers, of the Church, and I had been taught that the Pope was king of kings. ”

“ It is not unusual to speak of these men as irresponsible autocrats and to regard the Russian system as an irre- sponsible autocracy. But an irrespon- sible autocrat never has held the scepter, and irresponsible autocracy never has existed, even in phlegmatic Russia. An irresponsible autocrat among people of Indo-European stock is an utter impossibility. Each autocrat is weighed in the balances and judged — if need be punished — by those over whom he reigns. This judgment no Russian autocrat from the accession of Michael Romanoff has escaped. ”

“ It no more separates one from the other than does the river of the same name; and when one day Siberia shall boast a denser population, the Ural will be regarded as the axis, the backbone of the two great halves of the empire.
THE DUALISM OF NORTH AND SOUTH
Unity in immensity is Russia’s chief characteristic. From the huge wall of the Caucasus to the Baltic this empire, in itself greater than all the rest of Europe, in its numerous provinces presents perhaps less variety of climate than west European countries whose area is ten or twelve times less. ”

“ But Great Russia is a paradise of monks. In the vast regions stretching from Kem to Belgorod—an eagle's flight from north to south of a thousand miles—from Pskoff on Lake Peipus, to Vasil on the Middle Volga—a similar flight from west to east of seven hundred miles—the land is everywhere bright with cloisters, musical with monastic bells.
Nothing on this earth's surface can be drearier than a Russian forest, unless it be a Russian plain. The forest is a growth of stunted birch and pine ”

“ It is not an exaggeration to say that four-fifths of the northern portions of Russia consist of the sandy plains and marshy forest-land I have already described, but, in the winter, it matters little what lies underneath the frozen snow.
From Archangel to St. Petersburg we passed hundreds of versts of this description of country. In these districts utter desolation reigns, scarcely a living thing is seen; even the birds have deserted them, and have flown to the neighbourhood of the towns, to find there the food their native woods can no longer afford them. ”

“ He was not the man to understand the federal principles which prevailed in Russia down to the fifteenth century, and still less the communal principles which pervaded Russian life and had permitted the nation to conquer and to colonise an immense continent. For him, the history of Russia was the regular, organic development of a monarchy, from the first appearance of the Scandinavian varingiar down to the present times, and he was chiefly concerned with describing the deeds of monarchs in their conquests and their building up of a State ”

“ Two of the causes which have aided in the preservation of epic poetry in these remote districts, long after its disappearance from other parts of Russia, are liberty and loneliness. These people have never been subjected to the oppressions of serfdom, and have never lost the ideal of free power celebrated in the ancient rhapsodies. ”

“ Many had lived in the United States for decades and acquired families and homes. But their hearts dwelt more in Russia than in the country they were enriching by their labor, which nevertheless scorned them as "foreigners." Russia was welcoming them, her doors wide open to receive her sons and daughters. Like swallows at the first sign of spring they began to fly back, orthodox and revolutionists for once on common ground --- their love and longing for their native soil.
Our own old yearning, Sasha's and mine, began to stir again in our hearts. ”

“ It is melancholy to have to record this fact in the pages of a respectable volume like the present; but facts—as the orator who deals in fiction is ever ready to announce—facts cannot be ignored. And any man who has lived in Russia, has dabbled in Russian humanity, and noted the singular unattractiveness of Russian life—any such man can scarcely deny the fact that if one deprives the moujik of his privilege of getting gloriously and frequently intoxicated, one takes away from that same moujik the one happiness of his existence. ”

“ The mental attitude of the Russian peasant indeed implies that in blood he is nearer akin to the Asiatics than Russian ethnologists have wished to allow. Certainly in the inner life of thought, intellectually, morally, and emotionally, he is a half-way house between the Western and Eastern races, just as geographically he spreads over the two continents. ”

“ Yet in these latter years a resisting spirit, nursed and suckled largely in western Europe, has falsely made it appear that all Russia was in arms, storming with chaotic unity at the church, the state and the army, deluging their ancient customs with the destructive and re-creative might of radicalism. Far and wide of the truth is this! Let no one think the vast heart of Russia has changed! Only the few have cast away the ancient quiet; only the few have the modern consciousness instead of the medieval, theocratic one; only the few are not at heart Slavophiles in feeling and in morality. ”

“ The government found, therefore, in the educated classes a new-born public spirit, anxious to assist it in any work of reform that it might think fit to undertake. Fortunately for Russia the autocratic power was now in the hands of a man who was impressionable enough to be deeply influenced by the spirit of the time, and who had sufficient prudence and practical common-sense to prevent his being carried away by the prevailing excitement into the dangerous region of Utopian dreaming. ”

“ The dumb popular heart makes no harsh or hard demand upon its sovereigns. It asks that the autocrat shall be profoundly Russian, Russian in feeling and sympathy, in orthodoxy and faith, in fidelity to old tradition, in heart-whole devotion to her whom the peasant reverently calls "Holy Russia." ”

“ The Nihilism of Russia is the outgrowth of monopoly in land and the consequent enslavement of the people by the aristocracy, beginning with the autocrat upon his throne. England has reached a transition period. ”

“ In the name of our well-beloved fatherland, we call upon all faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfil their sacred and patriotic duty in obeying the Czar at the painful moment of national trials, and to aid him, together with the representatives of the nation, to conduct the Russian State in the way of prosperity and glory. May God help Russia. ”

“ So in Sophie's case the desire for self-sacrifice, and her impregnable conviction that to suffer and endure is right, is truly Russian in the sense of letting the individuality go with the stream of fate, not against it. And hence the formidable spirit of the youthful generation that sacrificed itself in the Nihilistic movement: the strenuous action of 'the youth' once set in movement, the spirit of self-sacrifice like Rembrandt's portraits, they make the living people, who stand looking at them, absurdly grey and lifeless by comparison! ”

“ In the second novel we are shown very clearly that Ropšin's terrorist longs to sacrifice himself. But he realises that in addition to sacrificing himself he has to kill others, and he enquires whether his voluntary sacrifice of himself gives him the right to rule Russia. Such a right cannot be founded on machine guns, any more than it can be founded on the Holy Mass, or on loyalty to the autocracy. ”