THE RUSSIAN WELTER. T HE attempt on the life of the
Russian Premier helps to clear up the situation a little, at least for observers in Western Europe. Throughout the progress of the Russian Revolution one singular feature has been the absence at once of recognised leaders and of any definite programme at which they are aiming. The Duma is not by itself a programme until its powers are defined. Even the Russian Government does not know the real chiefs of the movement, or it would arrest them ; and observers on the spot contradict each other with vague talk about "Socialists," "Social Democrats," "Anarchists," and "peasants," the last of whom are supposed to be seeking only possession of the land. Sometimes it is even denied that there are any leaders or any parties properly so called, all movements, however startling, and all crimes, however dreadful, being attributed to local hatreds, or "instigation" from unknown quarters. The reckless attempt to remove M. Stolypin, which ended in his escape unharmed and the murder of thirty persons who were not even threatened, seems, however, to prove that the revolutionaries receive orders from some secret authority, and are pursuing a clearly defined plan of campaign. There was no special reason for killing M. Stolypin except his official rank. He had ordered no massacres, tortured no indi- viduals, and held out no threats against prominent revolu- tionaries. He is not even a reactionary, for he looks forward, in words at least, to many of the reforms which the revolutionaries desire, but which the group above him at Peterhof will not as yet concede. The revolutionaries may distrust him, but have no particular reason for hating him. They must, therefore, have attacked him in pursuance of a plan ; and after carefully studying their acts and the menaces which they occasionally circulate, we take it that the plan must be something of this kind. Their real chiefs, whoever they are, are encouraging the peasantry to seize the land and drive out the landlords by a general uprising after the harvest, and they are persuading the private soldiery, who are only peasants in uniform, not to interfere with that widespread movement, not, as they phrase it in circulars which are distributed in every barrack, to fire upon their own fathers and. brothers, who are seeking only their rights. This rising cannot, how- ever, be carried out for two months, as the peasantry must get in their crops or starve, and the revolutionaries are trying intermediately to cut the sinews of the official organisation. They have decided to kill the ablest and most prominent of the bureaucracy, together with the most tyrannical of the Generals, and thus to establish a terror which will render the action of the autocracy feeble and uncertain. They have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of adherents who are ready to sacrifice their lives if only they may inflict vengeance for their own wrongs or those of their kinsfolk, or in some cases those of their compatriots ; and day by day they kill off the most prominent men in Russia. Nearly a hundred of them have perished already, not to reckon the immense number of those who have fallen, as it were incidentally, during the progress of the assassinations. Modern science has furnished them with a terrible weapon—the small bombshell filled with picric acid or other high explosive—which it is most difficult to avoid ; and thy rely on the quiescence of the population, who are so penetrated with hatred of the officials and of the more brutal of the Generals that they will make no effort to defend either, or to arrest the assassins as they fly into biding. Those who order these " executions " think that the fear of them will cow their ablest opponents and render them unwilling to carry out any effective policy of repression.
If this is the plan of the revolutionaries—and it certainly explains the facts—it is, we imagine, without any close precedent in history. The men who ordered the Roman proscriptions drew up their lists in secret, but they were themselves the chiefs of the State and employed military force. The French revolutionists, except in the single instance of the September massacre of prisoners already arrested, murdered their enemies through the agency of Tribunals or Commissioners, who, though they resembled assassins in motive, derived their terrible powers from the law, and endeavoured in the majority of cases to find prosecutors and some modicum of evidence capable of being recorded. We admit to the full the provocation of the revolutionaries in Russia; but they are acting as assassins, upon principles and methods which, if persisted in, would destroy society by rendering the punishment of crime impossible. In Poland, for example, they daily slay the police for being policemen, oppressive policemen, no doubt, but still men under legal authority. In any other country they would rouse a passion of abhorrence which would at once arrest their action and transfer all pity from the oppressed to their victims. But in Russia it is evident that the hatred of the governing class has gone so deep that both the " intellectuals " and the masses regard assassination as a justifiable, because unavoidable, incident in a social war. The people, habitually docile and law- abiding, have thrown off the chains, whether of religion or of habit, and judge the struggle between themselves and the reactionaries without reference to legality, or even to the instinctive ideas of right and wrong. We may learn from this how terrible the oppression has been which has transformed millions of quiet and industrious folk, hitherto only too submissive to authority, into mental accomplices of murder. We hesitate to believe that a whole people can lose its reason ; but we confess that we are not surprised when we hear men, like the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, who really know all classes in Russia, declare that the people have been stricken with a" murder mania." They have not been so stricken ; but it is clear that their consciences, like those of their opponents, have been temporarily paralysed.
If this frightful condition of opinion continues, what will be the end ? One can hardly doubt that it will be civil war. It is always possible, as we have so often observed, that the nation in its death-throe may produce a strong man who will restore order by other means than the bullet and the loaded whip, who will find a method of giving the peasants the land without general confiscation —that is, we believe, always possible by a broad system of perpetual leases, or, as they are all. called in Scotland, feus—who will restore obedience in the Army by a sufficient but more lenient discipline, and who will abolish once and for ever the system of "administrative punishment," which makes of every official a petty Czar. But failing the emergence of a great man, we see no other process than civil war through which order and content can be• restored. The people, excited to madness, and with just reason for their excitement, are little likely to give way and submit for another generation or . two to a system they have learned to detest. On the other hand, the bureaucracy are as brave as their enemies, and consider the preservation of the " system " a matter of life and death for them. The soldiery are not agreed as to the necessity of mutiny, and the two forces, equally brave and. equally strong—for those who adhere to the Government are armed, and their multitudinous opponents are not—must ultimately come into full collision. Then the stronger will win, as they would in an invasion, and. the winners will remake Russia according to their leaders' ideas of what Russia ought to be. They may make a Con- stitutional Government—though Constitutions do not rise at first out of civil war—or they may make a Federal Republic, or—and this is one of the probable possibilities— they may make a new Monarchy, to be controlled by a new dynasty. The one thing which, as we judge, cannot happen is a despairing return to the old method. A new spirit has passed into the people, and even the reactionaries perceive that repression will give them only a momentary security. The system which sacrificed everything— freedom, prosperity, and that sense of security which is the charm of civilised life—to external grandeur perished when that grandeur collapsed under the blows of the Japanese. The birth of the new system is being accomplished amidst horrible agonies, but that it will be accomplished we can feel no reasonable doubt. The Roman Empire perished through the incessant onrush of swarms of invaders but Russia cannot be invaded, and. we, at least, are unable to believe that its hundred and twenty millions are utterly incapable of organising a system of 'government which shall bear a fair relation to their genius and their aspirations. The Russians are not an inferior people, though they are a terribly ignorant one.
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