THE NEW RUSSIAN MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR. T HE defeat of
General Kuropatkin is producing its natural effect in Russia. The people did not expect it ; they are irritated ; and though they appear to out- siders to be silent, they have means of making their irritation known to the Palace and the bureaucracy. The Czar hears some little truth, at all events, from his friends among the dynasties, and the agents of the bureaucracy are in immediate contact with the population. The ruling men, in consequence, feel weaker than they were, and are disposed, therefore, in some degree at least, to conciliate opinion. The Czar himself has caused it to be made known that he will deal with the " subordinate nationalities "—the Poles, Finlanders, Esthonians, Armenians, and the rest— with a lenity which has not recently been displayed, and he has appointed as a successor to M. de Plehve, as head of the police as well as Minister of the Interior, Prince Svietopolk-Mirski, who is believed in Russia to belong to the moderately liberal party. We should call him in England a High Tory ; but the High Tory of England would in Russia be accounted a nian of almost radical opinions. He has hastened to make known his policy through a conversation with M. Marcel Hutin, the corre- spondent of a Parisian paper ,which appears for the moment to be in favour with Russian grandees. That policy is simply lenient administration. He will avoid, he says, any approach to a Parliamentary regime, which, he declares, only succeeds in Great Britain. He also definitely refuses to advocate any responsibility for Ministers. They must be left to their present function, which he describes as that of " interpreting the will of the Sovereign by the grace of God." But he will " decentralise " the adminis- tration by giving to the Zemstvos, or County Councils, all the liberty which is possible—a vague expression, which, we see, the bureaucracy already explain as a promise, not of increased powers, but of increased liberty of sugges- tion—especially, he says, on "all questions affecting schools, local stores, les approvisionnements, and railways." He will, moreover, abstain from persecution, and grant to the Jews everything except equality with Russians—which, he says, with an odd revelation of the secret fear of all Russian bureaucrats, would make that race too powerful—and will treat recalcitrant students with lenity, as persons who are young enough to repent. The Prince, in fact, is in favour, as he declares, of " progress " in the abstract, which, he remarks, with the curious pessimism of the Slav character, cannot be entirely kept out.
These promises are received in Russia with something of gratitude, for when one is under the harrow even a little flattening of the teeth is acceptable ; but to outside observers it does not appear that they signify much. They may all be withdrawn to-morrow at the will of the Emperor, and, moreover, they do not in any way lighten either of the two oppressions which do so much to impair the happiness of Russian life. One of these is the weak- ness of the law when appealed to as a means of defence. There are laws in Russia, and in the majority of cases they are put in force, or society could not go on ; but there is no guarantee that in individual cases they may not be set aside. "An administrative order " is independent of law, and a man who has come under suspicion of liberalism, or who has offended a great official, may find himself, without trial of any kind and without opportunity of defence, marching as a convict on the road to Siberia. M. de Plehve is said to have sent hundreds of the most respectable classes, who were not only not guilty of crime, but were not even suspected of anything but disaffection, to pass the remainder of their lives as prisoners in towns within the Arctic Circle. There was no trial and no éclat. The police appeared, and the man disappeared as com- pletely as if he had been drowned. It is the dread of a sentence of this kind, against which there is no appeal, which produces the silence of Russian society, and that dread of espionage which in times of emergency takes all freedom even from the intercourse of family life. Until this right of sentence by administrative order is abolished, and the law made absolute, even though the Czar remains sole legislator, there can for the cultivated be no security in Russia. The Russian disaffected, be it remembered, are not asking at present for liberty as in England, but only for liberty as in India, where, though a dozen gentle- men can pass any law they please, the freedom of the individual to do, to say, or to write anything he chooses, within the limits of the law, is as perfect as it is in the Strand. Nor does the lenity of Prince Svietopolk-Mirski in the slightest degree disperse that cloud of obscurantism under which the educated Russian writhes. It is still a serious offence for the Press to discuss the war freely, to intimate that it has been mis- managed, or to ask for inquiry into the corruptions whose existence even the great officials admit. The absence of this freedom is perhaps as much felt in Russia as it would be in any other country of the Continent, for the Slav is by nature a man who loves to discuss, who appeals when- ever he dare to abstract principles, and who thinks that if you can only speak boldly about an abuse the abuse is certain to disappear. Free men know by long experience that this is by no means universally the case; but the Russian, who has no experience of government by deliberation, has that intensity of hope which we are all apt to feel in an unknown remedy. There is no evidence whatever that free speech will be fatal to the autocracy ; but the bureaucracy cannot find in themselves the fortitude which can endure open criticism. It seems to them insult as well as menace, and to insult, they say, they never will submit. The supremacy of law and the right of free speech are the two concessions which would for a genera- tion at least placate the disaffected elements in Russia, and which, we fear, will never be given except under the pressure of revolt. They certainly are not contained, or even adumbrated, in the utterances of the new Minister of the Interior, whose popularity, we venture to predict, will disappear after he has experienced for a few months the pressure of the reactionary party that controls the Court and supplies " energy " to the officials throughout Russia.
The idea that revolution is coming, and coming rapidly, has again, we see, caught hold of the abler Russians, many of whom are expressing to confidential friends a positive and most unpatriotic wish for the success of the Japanese. They think that the shock of defeat would loosen the bonds which now bite so strongly into their flesh, and so impair the energies of the bureaucracy that it would be possible for the educated, who are also the disaffected, to struggle with them with some faint hope of success. They must know their country and their countrymen better than outsiders can pretend. to do, and may be aware that in certain contingencies the compressing forces would collapse, that the troops would not fire, and that the police would be cowed; but we cannot perceive visible grounds for this belief. It is true that the war is un- popular, as a misdirection of Russian force ; and true also that the news of defeat has spread from mouth to mouth, till it has become the talk of the villages ; but the Russian has a fierce patriotism, which is perplexed, but not destroyed, by the fact that he is fighting for an object which he does not comprehend ; and his predominant quality is a capacity of endurance prob- ably greater than that assigned in popular belief to the peoples of the East. They are much more in- clined to rebel when remonstrance has failed than he is. As yet the Reservists swarm to the depots in tens of thousands ; as yet the police are regarded with abject terror; as yet the Nihilists have not abandoned. their evil theory that with a Government so irresistible assassina- tion is the only effective protest left. That the Govern- ment trembles a little is evident from the secret orders issued to the regiments, and recently published in the Times, to establish a strict espionage upon the soldiers' letters, and especially to watch all Jews within the ranks, lest they should teach the conscripts to question the necessity of implicit obedience. But it is not clear that the apprehension is justified, or that the hundreds of spies who are said to be infesting the armies in the East have anything to do except draw their pay. It may be, of course, that the disaffected are right, and that Russia is on the edge of a revolution ; but it is much more probable that all classes will consent to wait until the war is finished ; and with a success followed by a peace the bureaucracy would regain much both of their confidence and their ascendency. Even if defeat should be permanent, the Government may main- tain its control of its immense machine ; and there is not in Russia, so far as we can see, any force which can resist the weight of that machine when once in move- ment. The machine itself must break before there can be liberty in Russia ; and it did not break after the fall of Sebastopol, or after the failure to carry Plevna without external assistance. Russia in one respect is just like Turkey. All physical power is in the hands of a caste, and while that caste obeys the throne, the disaffected, however just their disaffection, can only hope for better days. The discontented in Russia sometimes strike us as men who are so fretted and weary with a continued downpour that they take every flash of lightning to herald the end of the storm, and sometimes talk as if they thought that a well- arranged series of explosions would disperse the clouds. Clouds on that awful plain are very slow to roll by.
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