A NIHILIST ON THE NIHILIST OBJECT.
ALITTLE light at last, upon the Nihilist conspiracy. The history of that movement furnished this month to the Fortnightly by Prince Krapotkine, may not be complete, and may have a side to it which only the Russian Government could state in full ; but it is consistent and intelligible, it ac- counts for most of the facts, and it has this recommendation, that it displays the Terrorist section of the Nihilists in the light of reasoning beings, instead of madmen or mere creatures of an evil impulse. The author of the account, Prince Krapot- kine, has always been described as one of the leaders of the old Nihilist association, a body rather Socialist than Terrorist, within which the Terrorist Committee, comparatively a recent creation, lies, so to speak, imbedded. Though we see signs in his work of suppressed enthusiasm, or even passion, he writes, for a Revolutionist, with great calmness and lucidity; and there is, we believe, apart from political bias, no reason for questioning the accuracy of his statements. Prince Krapotkine, then, affirms that the Terrorist idea was originally begotten of a necessity felt by the Nihilists, who, up to 1870, were political and social innovators only, to defend themselves against the police and the spies, and the savage measures of repression sanctioned by the Government. The Revolution- aries, he says, who were employing only legal means, though with a revolutionary object, and who on one occasion exerted themselves successfully to protect the Czar's life, were banished, imprisoned, tortured by wholesale, and at last struck at their worst oppressors in self-defence,—Vera Sassulitch, for example, shooting the Chief of Police, as was shown at her trial, because he flogged an imprisoned con- spirator for failing to salute him. So widely felt was this necessity for self-defence, that it was accepted outside the Nihilist body, and accounts for Vera Sassulitch's acquittal by a jury composed entirely of educated men, including many officials. " It may seem strange in this country; but to one familiar with police raids, arrests on suspicion, and official brutality; to one who knows what a military court, with its ready-made verdicts, really is; to one made desperate by stories of women going mad after outrages of the police, or tramping for three months through ice and snow on the march to Nijne-Kolymsk (now the prison of Tchernyshevsky, the well-known Russian economist and critic); to one knowing what is sojourning in Northern Siberia in the huts of aborigines, poisoned by the most disgusting diseases; to one who has witnessed the doings of an army of spies; to one, in a word, who has lived the life that we Russians have to live, it is not strange at all." Assassination from above does not justify assassination from below, though it does justify revolt, but that is not the point just now. The attack directed against the officials failed, of course, but it was not extended to the Emperor till 1879. Up to that year," the person of the Czar remained inviolable," but in that year the passion of resistance to the " White Terror "—that is, the extreme measures of repression adopted—suggested "the idea of attacking absolutism in the person of the Czar," and the Terrorist organisation—or " Revolutionary Committee," as Prince Krapotkine calls it— sprang into existence. So far, the facts are fairly well known. What is not known is that the Terrorist Committee—if the leaders of the body form a Committee, and do not obey an individual will—had, and have, a definite object, which has been explained to the Czar, and which, if realised, would be followed by the instant dissolution of the terrible organisation. They demand, as their ultimatum, an amnesty, and the convocation of an Assembly, elected by the whole people by universal suffrage, and with Constituent powers. They acknowledge that ninety per cent. of the representatives would be elected by peasants ; they express their fears that the vote would not be in favour of their own plans ; but they hold that such an Assembly, being, in our time, the only practicable expression of the popular will, would have such a moral claim to be absolute, that they themselves, though devoted to Socialist ideas, in- cluding the repartition of the soil and the transfer of all manu- factures to elected bodies, would efface themselves before it. They would, in fact, surrender to the popular will, whatever it might be. They formulated these proposals, in a letter forwarded to the present Czar a few days after his accession to the Throne, which we give entire :- " To this situation there are but two issues—either revolution which cannot be put back by executions, or appeal from the Emperor to the nation. In the interests of our country, to avoid the useless waste of strength and the dreadful calamities inseparable from revolution, the Executive Committee advises YOUR MAJESTY to choose the second. Be sure that as soon as the Supreme Power shall cease from being despotic ; as soon as it shall take a firm reso- lution to accomplish the wishes of the conscience of the people, you may safely dismiss the spies—the shame of Government—send your escorts quietly to the barracks, and burn the gallows. The Executive Committee itself will stop its task, and the forces organised about it will scatter for peaceful, civilising work throughout the country. Peaceful discussion will take the place of brute force, the use of which is even more hateful to us than to Your officials, and is only resorted to by us out of a miserable necessity.
" We addresa ourselves directly to YOU, putting aside prejudices that are the growth of centuries. We forget that You are the representative of that power which has so long deceived and wronged the people. We speak to you as a citizen and an honest man. We hope that no feeling of personal anger will stifle in You the sentiment of moral obligations and the desire to know the truth. We, too, have the right of being angry. You have lost your father. We have lost, not our fathers only, but our brothers, our wives, our children, and our best friends. But we will not take our personal feelings into ac- count, if it is necessary for the welfare of our country. And we expect the same from You. " We are not imposing conditions on you. Do not, we pray, be shocked by our proposals. The conditions which must be fulfilled to put an end to the revolutionary agitation, and make peaceful develop- ment possible, are not of our dictating. We do not impose conditions ; we only remember them. " These conditions we see to be two : "(1.) A general amnesty for all past political crimes, inasmuch as they were not crimes, but performance of civil duties.
" (2.) The convocation of delegates representing the whole Russian people, for the revision of all fundamental laws in conformity with the people's will."
The capital letters are those given by Prince Krapotkine, and are intended, we presume, to exclude the idea of insult. The message was rejected, the Czar decided to retain the auto- cracy, the conspiracies recommenced, and Prince Krapot- kine now intimates in this paper that actual popular insurrection is at hand, that in spring a movement will commence which can be nothing else than a jac- querie. The prophecies put forward are so ominous, that we give the whole passage :—" One year ago, there was an easy way of escape from the difficulty. But now the difficulty is intensified by the intervention of a new and important element. Daring the first ten years after the Emancipation, the peasants have remained quiet. But the famines of the two last years have fully revealed to them their miserable fate, and they have begun to protest once more. The outbreaks against Jews in the south-west, and against the Russian bourgeoisie in the south-east, as well as the incendiarism and' no-rent' movement in the central provinces, are but a foreshadowing of far more intense movements which are growing in the villages. The people already talk of the general partition of land, of 'the great war and bloodshed' which are to begin some time in the spring. Until now, the Revolutionary Party has scarcely applied its forces at all to a serious agrarian agitation ; but it is easy to foresee the quality and momentum of forces that will rise ready to their hands among the peasantry, if Russian revolutionists should only apply to agrarian agitation the determination and the capa- cities of organisation they have shown in their struggle against Government ; and this will be done—the Will of the People says —if the necessary improvements cannot be obtained otherwise."
The party of " the will of the people," represented by the Terrorist Committee, will incur an awful responsibility, if they fulfil that threat, for they will hurl unarmed men in masses upon fully armed and disciplined troops, and will make a military regime universal. There is, so far as we know, no instance in history of a successful jacquerie, except the insur- rection in Haiti, and there those who rose were distinguished from those risen against by the broad dividing-line of colour. It is, however, useless to argue with men possessed of the Nihilist fanaticism, and ready to face death in heaps for their ideas, and we only want to point out to our own readers both the extremity and the danger of the Nihilist demand. They ask for a direct transfer of the Sovereignty, which no Czar will, or indeed can, grant while resistance is still possible. They allow him no chance of compromise through a deliberative Assembly convoked in order to ascertain the true will of his people, which may not be the Nihilist will at all, and, considering the enormous preponderance of peasant votes, probably would not be. They do not allow him to frame a Constitution, or surrender part of his power, or even convoke an Assembly representing the more intelligent classes. They demand the transfer of the whole power of the State to an unknown body, in which they themselves do not profess to have absolute confidence, and which might, for any guarantee that exists to the contrary, commit worse acts than the Czars,—for instance, expel from Russia the two millions of Jews, confiscate manufacturing capital, or by abolishing conscription before a new force had been created, reduce the vast empire to an anarchical collec- tion of minute but absolute communes. We do not say this would be the inevitable result, for we do not know, and think a revivification of the autocracy by a huge plebiscite 'at least as possible, but it might be, and so might also any other. After ages of absolutism, during which no peasant has been allowed even to consider politics, or taught any facts, or prepared for anything except the smallest municipal life,—and that based upon the idea that the Mir or Commune has self-derived, and, within its sphere, autocratic rights—a House of Peasant Deputies, elected not even by the communes, but by universal suffrage, is to be invested with the full sovereignty of the Russian Empire. Even if the Czar were a reformer, it would be hopeless to expect that such a programme would be conceded, while, as it is, the Czar naturally believes that not only he, but his empire, and with it the future of his people, are threatened with utter ruin, with transfer to the dominion either of anarchists, or of men whose ignorance would have all the effect of anarchy. We can see no grounds for hope in such a demand —which goes far beyond that of the true Russian Liberals, who ask, first of all, for a Parliament free, but deliberative, to be taken into counsel by the still autocratic Czar, and to reveal all popular grievances—and believe that if this is the Nihilists' last word, the conflict between them and the Russian Throne must go on for generations, fruitlessly. No series of assassinations, no jacquerie,nothing short of a universal military revolt could secure such terms, or justify the Czar in placing an unchecked autocracy in the hands of so ignorant and untried a body. The Terror- ist Committee, if rightly described by Prince Krapotkine, has far more definiteness in its ideas than Englishmen have hither- to believed, but those ideas are even more impracticable than had been feared. No Government that ever existed would volun- tarily surrender, not only the control, but the organisation of its Army, to an untried Assembly of peasants, whose first idea would necessarily be to lighten military service upon themselves, still less submit to them the executive control of an empire so vast, that even an autocracy can hardly make its will felt, as we see in the case of the Jewish persecution, when opposed to popular feeling, or circumstances of difficulty. There is something in the self-devotion of the Nihilists which separates them in the eyes of men from all similar societies, and partly blinds the ardent to the essential immorality of their methods ; but Prince Krapotkine's paper will not increase the general opinion of their practical fitness for affairs. There must be dreaminess in men who think that a huge " Mir," a Sovereign House of Peasants, could rule Russia.
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