The parasitic nature of Russian absolutism: bureaucracy, control, and the national mind

“ In a real sense, there cannot be an absolute monarch of a nation; political power must have a base broad enough to support the pinnacle, and rulership which seems to be identified with one man's will is in fact exercised by an oligarchy or a bureaucracy. ”

“ The military and financial might of absolutism seemed to exclude any chance whatever for the Russian Revolution. But in reality just the opposite proved to be the case.
The more a government is ctralized and the more independent it is of society, the sooner it becomes an autocratic organization standing above society. The greater the financial and military forces of such an organization are, the longer and more successfully can it continue its struggle for existence. ”

“ Thus, the administrative, military and financial power of absolutism, thanks to which it could exist in spite of social development, not only did not exclude the possibility of revolution, as was the opinion of the liberals. but, on the contrary, made revolution the only way out; furthermore, this revolution was guaranteed in advance an all the more radical character in proportion as the great might of absolutism dug an abyss between itself and the nation. ”

“ But the Russian Government was, properly speaking, not a Government. It was a caste of officials who had degraded the administration of the country to the systematic endeavor of saving their own personal careers and class interests, both of which were indissolubly bound up with unlimited autocracy. The Russian bureaucracy regarded the revolution as a personal threat, as a menace to its existence, and looked upon the Jewish participants in the revolution as their own individual enemies whose deeds were to be avenged upon the whole Jewish people. ”

“ This art of directing the activities of the masses on the basis of organized self-government, is here applied for the first time on Russian soil. Absolutism ruled the masses, but it did not direct them. It put mechanical barriers against the living creative forces of the masses, and within those barriers it kept the restless elements of the nation in an iron bond of oppression. The only mass absolutism ever directed was the army. ”

“ Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay on The First Principles of Government, says: 'It is ... on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.' [68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. ”

“ The power of the czardom has had to capitulate to that of the oligarchy of officials.
This explanation, however, requires a further one. What wrecked the attempts of well-intentioned autocrats at reform? These men did not understand joking; and open opposition to orders of the Czar is absolutely unthinkable, when punishments such as exile to Siberia are given for much slighter offences. Is it possible that the Russian nation stands morally so much lower than all others that honest and industrious servants of the state are not to be found at all? ”

“ The Russian government is a characteristic exemplification of both the good and bad side of bureaucracy: its fixed maxims, directed with Roman perseverance to the same unflinchingly-pursued ends from age to age; the remarkable skill with which those ends are generally pursued; the frightful internal corruption, and the permanent organized hostility to improvements from without, which even the autocratic power of a vigorous-minded emperor is seldom or never sufficient to overcome; the patient obstructiveness of the body being in the long run more than a match for the fitful energy of one man. ”

“ A monarchy constitutionally absolute now only maintains itself in existence (except temporarily in the hands of some active-minded usurper) through the mental qualifications of a permanent bureaucracy. The Russian and Austrian governments, and even the French government in its normal condition, are oligarchies of officials, of whom the head of the state does little more than select the chiefs. I am speaking of the regular course of their administration; for the will of the master of course determines many of their particular acts. ”

“ Neither Autocracy nor Bureaucracy is a thing which has grown out of the immemorial traditions and habits of the Russian people; Autocracy was the product of a comparatively recent change in Russian history, and Bureaucracy the accidental result of the further changes introduced by a man of genius. The Government made certain things impossible: such as education for the peasants, laws for the peasants, justice, &c. ”

“ With the vast machinery of a great modern nation autocracy becomes bureaucracy. But the autocrat makes the bureaucrats, and so determines the trend. There are settled traditions and tendencies in Russia, but they are affected and modified by the dominant temper and influence of the hour. When Russia passed from the scepter of Nicholas I to that of Alexander II she advanced from the virile and robust imperialism of an iron dictator to the progressive and expanding liberalism of an enlightened ruler. ”

“ A strong Governmental system is absolutely necessary for the holding together of the enormous Russian Empire; but the fact that the work of freeing and educating the peasants has (with only the rarest exceptions) been always violently or secretly opposed by the high officials, suggests that the bureaucracy is like a parasite which strangles, though appearing to protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the official world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is something like that of threatening soldiers surrounding the throne of a latter-day Cæsarism. ”

“ The Multiplication of agencies and their growing power make them more and more remote from the people aff cted by what they do and make more likely the arbitrary exercise of their powers. Public airing of problems through rule making makes the bureaucracy more responsive to public needs and is an important brake on the growth of absolutism in the regime that now governs all of us. ”

“ If the human race would only understand, and take the trouble to realise, that government by the state can be nothing better than government by a multitude of clerks, it would cease to be enamoured of this misconception. Government, absolute and unelastic, by a million of Bumbles, the elevation to supreme and most meddlesome power of a Bureaucracy employing an army of spies and informers in its service; this is all that the rule of the state can ever be, or can ever mean, for mankind. It is impossible that it should ever be otherwise. ”

“ Ours is not the voice of insolence but of the realization that we must get out of a situation that is unbearable for everyone. Russia is too big, her needs are to diverse and many, for her to be ruled only by bureaucrats. We need popular representation; it is necessary for the people to help itself and to administer itself. After all, only the people knows its real needs. Do not fend off its help, accept it, and order immediately, at once, that representatives of the Russian land from all classes, all estates of the realm be summoned, including representatives from the workers. ”

“ Sovereign, there are thousands of us here; outwardly we are human beings, but in reality neither we nor the Russian people as a whole are provided with any human rights, even the right to speak, to think, to assemble, to discuss our needs, or to take measure to improve our conditions. They have enslaved us and they did so under the protection of your officials, with their aid and with their cooperation. They imprison and send into exile any one of us who has the courage to speak on behalf of the interests of the working class and of the people. ”

“ The Russian writer who aims to bring about reforms, in like manner displays his melancholy picture, with spasms of indulgent sympathy for the evils he unveils. The public needs but a hint. This time it understood. Russia looked upon serfdom in the mirror he showed her, and shuddered. The author became celebrated, and his cause was half gained. The censorship, always the last to become convinced, understood too, at last. Serfdom was already condemned in the heart of the Emperor Nicholas, but the censorship does not always agree with the Emperor; it is always procrastinating ”

“ Father Sylvester also wrote the “Domostroi,” a treatise on morals and domestic economy; a practical encyclopædia for Russians of the sixteenth century.
In the second half of this century Ivan the Terrible introduced printing into Russia. A part of the venerable building he erected at Moscow for a printing establishment is still standing. He tried to obtain from Germany skilful hands in the new art, but they were refused him. Each sovereign jealously guarded every master of the great secret, as they did good alchemists or skilful workers in metals. ”

“ The Russian leadership invests significant resources in both foreign and domestic propaganda and places a premium on transmitting what it views as consistent, self-reinforcing narratives regarding its desires and redlines, whether on Ukraine, Syria, or relations with the United States. ”

“ The remedy is equal rights to all nationalities.
The evil is race fanaticism and race antagonism. The remedy is race co-operation and race harmony.
The evil is a narrow and shallow policy of obscurantism, sinning against the Holy Spirit.
The evil is the keeping of the people in ignorance. The remedy is the spread of popular education, the diffusion of sweetness and light.
But greatest of all political evils in the Russian Empire has been the insensate dream of religious unity, imposed by authority, the pagan confusion of spiritual and temporal power. ”

“ Of course, formal justification can be found for every act, and every evil-doer endeavours to convince himself of the justice of his evil deeds. So it is in this case, too: the intentional shutting-off of the Jewish masses from education is motivated by the desire to keep them from becoming superior to the Russian population, which, it is said, is intellectually inferior to the Jews. This argument is an outright insult flung in the face of the Russian people. It shows that the official guardians of the nation do not know its rich natural powers. ”

“ I at any rate am firmly convinced that the production of souls of a good quality is the most lucrative national manufacture. And therefore the favourable external conditions under which, as I have explained, Russia lives, are from my point of view important above all as conditions of the production of that which Ruskin again called "human worth." ”

“ Many children of the ghetto rapidly enlisted under the banner of the Russian youth, and became intoxicated with the luxuriant growth of Russian literature which carried to them the intellectual gifts of the contemporary European writers. The masters of thought in that generation, Chernyshevski, Dobrolubov, Pisaryev, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, became also the idols of the Jewish youth. The heads which had but recently been bending over the Talmud folios in the stuffy atmosphere of the heders and yeshibahs were now crammed with the ideas of positivism, evolution, and socialism. ”

“ Though enormous power is in the hands of the Government, and the gross credulity and ignorance of the peasants, and the self-interest of the officials, all work to preserve the status quo, nevertheless there is in the Russian mind, side by side with its natural Slavophilism, a great susceptibility to European example, and therefore the work of the Nihilists of yesterday and the liberals of to-day was, and is, to awaken the public mind. ”

“ Intolerance on the part of morality is a sign of man s weakness: he is frightened of his own " immorality," he must deny his strongest instincts, because he does not yet know how to use them. Thus the most fruitful quarters of the globe remain uncultivated longest: the power is lack ing that might become master here. ”

“ It is a life whose daily requirements you only need picture to yourselves in order to feel the deep decline of character to which it must lead. To be obliged daily to take an attitude of opposition to everything great and good, to bewail its success, to rejoice at its failures, to check its further progress, to make futile or to curse the progress which has already been made, is like a continual existence in the enemy's country; and this enemy is the moral fellowship of the whole country in which you live, for which all true morality urges support. ”

“ By means of love, reverence, gratitude towards the person who created the work, or by means of the thought that our ancestors fought for it, or by virtue of the feeling that the safety of our descendants will be secured if we uphold the work for instance, the polls. Morality is essentially the means of making something survive the individual, because it makes him of necessity a slave. ”

“ The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them. ”

“ The sanction, so far as it is disinterested, is always in the mind itself; and the notion therefore of the transcendental moralists must be, that this sanction will not exist in the mind unless it is believed to have its root out of the mind; and that if a person is able to say to himself, This which is restraining me, and which is called my conscience, is only a feeling in my own mind, he may possibly draw the conclusion that when the feeling ceases the obligation ceases, and that if he find the feeling inconvenient, he may disregard it, and endeavour to get rid of it. ”

“ That people may become better, it is necessary that they should turn their attention ever more and more to their inner life. But external public activity, and especially public strife, always diverts men's minds from the inner life; and, therefore, by perverting people, always and inevitably lowers the level of general morality, as has everywhere been the case, and as we now see most strikingly exemplified in Russia. ”

“ What you need is not a really just order of life: for nothing would be more dangerous for you than an order in which everyone had to do work useful to all.
Only cease to deceive yourselves: consider well the place you hold among the Russian people and what you are doing, and it will be clear to you that your struggle with the Government is the struggle of two parasites on a healthy body, and that both contending parties are equally harmful to the people. ”