INTRODUCTION

WAR IS A TIME OF rapid vicissitudes. Among all the vicissitudes in the destinies of nations which this great war has caused or occasioned, none have been more rapid or more striking than those which we have seen in Russia. Failure has alternated with success: one figure after another has appeared, stood for a moment in the ascendant, and then passed away: parties, causes, political creeds have come and gone with an amazing velocity. From our thoughts and pictures of Holy Russia we have been swung to the spectacle of Russia secularized and socialist: we have seen the apparent unity of Russia dissolved, and Poland, Finland, and the Ukraine disengaged from the body of the Russian Empire; and while we recognize the depth and profundity of these changes, we dimly guess that the future may bring us changes still deeper and still more profound. Bewildered by all these revolutions of the wheel, we cannot but ask ourselves how and why they came—whence they sprang, and whither they tend.

If we are to answer such questions, we must turn to the story of Russian history. History cannot solve the riddle of humanity, but it can at any rate record the gradual accumulation of factors which have gone to produce the result by which we are confronted, and by breaking up the problem into its constituent elements and successive stages it may enable the student to find some reason and provide some answer for the whole. The stages of Russian history, as they appear in this volume, are sufficiently various. In the first book Professor Beazley paints the romantic epoch of mediaeval Russia—the epoch of vikings and traders, of Kiev and Nóvgorod: in the second Mr. Forbes depicts the hard and austere story of the building of the Russian colossus: in the third Mr. Birkett traces the infiltration of Western thought and Western science into the Russian State, and the accumulation, during the nineteenth century, of a mass of social and political problems—problems of serfdom, peasant proprietorship and socialistic doctrine; problems, again, of autocracy and bureaucracy, of nationality and constitutionalism. The one gives an impression as of a gay banquet: the other unfolds a story of perpetual wars and annexations: the third has to tell a tale of railways, education, economics, and agitation—a tale which ends, for the moment, in the crumbling of the colossus and the dissolution of the structure reared by autocracy into the component elements from which it was built.

The original Russia was gay, boisterous, and full of colour, vitality and emotion. It suggests to the imagination the spectacle of the great Russian opera, with all its colour and motion and music. The Tartar Invasion of the thirteenth century clouded much of the gaiety—but not all. It left traces for many centuries—but not, perhaps, as many as the famous dictum ascribed to Napoleon (‘scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar’) would suggest. More important in its influence on the future history and character of Russia was the rise of the Princes of Moscow, and their steady pursuit of a dour policy of adding acre to acre and principality to principality. It was a policy natural under the geographical conditions amid which it was pursued. Here was a vast plain, with few or no marked boundaries or natural frontiers within which a State might feel itself naturally designed to live. A snowball once set rolling would roll continuously over this area until it was shattered by some shock of events, or dissolved by some sudden heat of action. This absence of natural frontiers has, indeed, been the sad geographical dower of Eastern Europe, and it explains much of its history—the intermixture and interlacing of its stocks: the dissolution of Poland, unsupported by any frontier buttresses: the increase of Russian territory, unchecked by any resistance of physical barriers. As long as the face of the earth remains the same, this dower will tend to produce its tragedies; and as one Power has rolled westwards, another may roll eastwards in its turn for its appointed space. But there has been another factor in Russian history which also accounts for Russian expansion—a factor partly dependent upon the last. This is the migratory habit of the Russian stock, moving restlessly towards new land and new settlements—southwards towards the Black Sea and the rich black soil on the way towards it, or eastwards across the Urál Mountains into Siberia. The most striking result of this migratory habit is the Cossacks; but the migrations of the Russian stock are older than the Cossacks, and its results are written in many other regions of the world than those of the Cossack settlements.

Combine these things—the policy of the Princes of Moscow and their successors, the absence of natural frontiers, and the migratory habit of the Russian people—and the result is that enormous expansion which has carried Russia from Warsaw to Vladivostok, and from the White Sea to Southern Turkestan. This expansion has two sides—one which is national, and another which is governmental, or, according to a prevalent word, ‘imperialistic’. The national expansion still lives, and—perhaps above all in Siberia, a solid core of Russian life—it will continue to live. It has created the Russian ‘Colonies’, which (we hope) may yet find self-government in a Russian Commonwealth. The governmental expansion is different: it has brought into dependence on the Tsars a belt of non-Russian peoples on the west, and another belt of non-Russian peoples on the south. On the west are the Finns, the Baltic peoples between Finland and Poland, and the Poles; on the south, from the Crimea to Turkestan, are the Turks. The expansion which has brought the belt of peoples on the west of Russia into dependence on the Tsars is now being undone before our eyes; and as for what may happen on the south of Russia, that is a thing which perhaps no man can tell.

We are beginning to realize that the dissolution of the great State which had been built on the east European plains is less astonishing than its long continuance in the past. Shaped by force to a great extent, it was held and clamped together almost entirely by force. Nothing but the old bureaucracy, with all its engines of police and gendarmerie, could have maintained that artificial structure for so long a period; and even while we condemn its methods, we cannot withhold a meed of admiration from its achievement. But if it was, in its way, an Atlas, it was not a very thoughtful or efficient Atlas, and the world which it sustained on its shoulders was a world possessed by an instinct for dissolution. On a long view, it was perhaps an unwise policy for Russian rulers, if they valued the preservation of the status quo, ever to venture on a great European war. War searches the joints and harness of every State that challenges its verdict: it appraises, first by a rude and sudden shock and then by a long, slow, dragging tension (just as we test and appraise the worth of steel), the endurance and the capacity for survival of each political community. More than once, in the last few decades, the test of war has shaken Russia. The Crimean War caused searchings of heart; the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 left an uneasy legacy; the Russo-Japanese War of this century made the whole structure of Russia rock on its foundations. Less than ten years after its conclusion there ensued the great war in which we are still engaged—a war which dwarfs all previous wars to child’s play—and the structure, though it endured the strain for almost three years, cracked and collapsed. A State with communications still thin and scanty, and an organization of her resources still largely imperfect, was plunged into a modern scientific war that demanded perfect communications, along which millions of men could be moved like the shuttle across a loom, and required an intensive organization of resources and productive effort which would have taxed the most highly developed machinery of government. The communications were not there: the organization was not ready. The triumph of Russia over Austria was more amazing than the triumph of Germany over Russia. The triumph of Germany let loose the forces of dissolution, social and national, which were already at work in Russia—suis et ipsa viribus ruit.

It was natural, a year ago, as we watched the beginning of the Russian Revolution, that we should think of the French Revolution. We drew hope from the analogy for our ally and for our own cause. We remembered revolutionary France gathering herself together to defend her freedom against Prussia and Austria: we hoped that revolutionary Russia would gird her loins no less successfully against the same foes. Historical parallels are often misleading; and we have found by experience that the parallel which we drew for ourselves was very far from true. The French Revolution was a revolution of a united country—a country united round the common hearth of Paris, in spite of federalist or royalist movements in the south-west and the west, with an intimate and enduring unity. The Russian Revolution was a revolution of a country essentially disunited—a country of many centres, many nationalities, many languages, many creeds. There is also another difference perhaps no less profound. The French Revolution was political rather than social: it sprang more from the bourgeoisie than from the proletariate. Not till the days of the Directory did any movement of a socialistic character appear, and when it appeared it was rapidly stifled. From the beginning of the Russian Revolution the socialistic...