in its narrowest form condemned the West as “carrion” and exalted Tsardom as a divine institution, were the unconscious tools of Prussian foreign policy and of a bastard form of European medievalism. “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism” were proclaimed as a sacred Trinity against the false gods of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It is characteristic of our superficial reading of history that we have long tended to regard autocracy as the very kernel of things in Russia. And yet autocracy is no more natural to Russia than to France; it has been a mere stage in development. The democratic era in Novgorod was a far more natural product of the race which has produced the Mir and the Zemstvo than was the “Militarized Byzantinism” of Nicholas I. It is worth remembering to-day that the Romanovs owed their election to the Zemski Sobor.
Those who sought to justify black reaction by disapproval of the corroding influence of non-Slav and Western ideas were guilty of the most hateful hypocrisy. “To combine the slavery of the East with the discipline of the Russian barrack—this was the naïve ideal of the autocracy and bureaucracy” under Nicholas I. Their hostility was directed ostensibly against Western thought, but in reality against the pernicious practice of thinking at all. When Nicholas himself imposed upon the unhappy poet Ševčenko the prohibition against writing or even drawing, or when he forbade his officials to use the word “progress” under any circumstances, he was merely carrying the system to its logical conclusion. Many of its adherents even went so far in their fear of new ideas from Europe, as to insist on regarding Russia as an Asiatic power and to urge her to seek her objective there rather than in Europe. Incompetence bred corruption and increasing paralysis of the body politic, and occasional attempts to mark time proved even more impractical than “resignation to the boldest constitution.”
Mr. Alexinsky brings out the influence of Russia’s wars in transforming the internal situation. In the war of 1812 the soul of the nation as a whole seems to have stirred for the first time. In the Crimean War “it was not the Russian Army which was conquered at Sevastopol, but rather the social and political system of the old autocratic Russia. A serf-owning country could not hold out against more civilised states.” In 1878 the diplomatic failure which followed upon military success reacted upon popular psychology and strengthened the rival currents of autocracy and nihilism. In 1905 the Japanese adventure, more than any previous war the product of Tsardom and its attendant satellites, precipitated the internal crisis and made a change of system sooner or later inevitable. The World War has brought this sham-theocratic system to a state of final bankruptcy and moral discredit. “Caesaropapism” is dead, and the dynasts of Central Europe are left as sole mourners at the funeral. The evolution of the Russian people has been long and painful, and we must still be prepared for terrible crises and perhaps even serious set-backs; but only the ignorant or the wilfully blind can deny that it has reached its majority and can be trusted to work out its own destinies. One of the most striking sections in Mr. Alexinsky’s book
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