Russia

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,--On account of the rather meagre news from Russia it is impossible to form more than general conclusions upon the major events, as we cannot ascertain the reasons for some events, or the somewhat complicated causes which have produced them. It is obvious that the causes of the revolution must have been very complicated, and that the events did not take place as a result merely of sudden impulse; no doubt it has been preparing for a lengthy period.

While the administrative system in Russia was always autocratic, there are fundamental laws which are observed, and which even the Imperial family are expected to observe. There are regular statutes and forms for legal procedure, and so on, about which the Russians are very fastidious, more so than some democratic countries. It must be remembered that the Russian people are of very complex racial origin. About 70,000,000 are properly called Russians, the other 100,000,000 are partly of Russian origin, and partly of other- origin. There are great numbers of Finlanders, these again having a somewhat mixed racial origin; and there are great numbers of Poles and of Germans. The Baltic Provinces were colonized by the Teutonic knights in the latter middle age, and they brought with them a number of German colonists, who remained there and formed a very important section of the Russian population, and although only about 1,500,000 out of 175 or 180 millions, they are important because exceedingly well educated. From the beginning of the 19th century, there was a real system of popular education in the Baltic Provinces, which was promoted really by the landed proprietors, and was occasionally even frowned at by the Government; but still that system remained, and there was a very good university in the important city of Dorbat, which was called for some years Uriak; that university became celebrated in various branches, particularly in philology. This high educational standard gave the people of the Baltic provinces a very great advantage in competition for administrative offices; and, in consequence, the Germans took a very high place in all the important Government offices in Russia. For many years Germans from the Baltic Provinces have had control of the censorship of newspapers, books, periodicals, etc., published in Russia or introduced from abroad. Then, also, the higher education gave them great interest in military affairs, and very many of the most eminent generals, and most important members of the Russian general staff, were of Baltic Province origin. It does not follow that because a man has a German name he is therefore, a German; but if you find a man named Rankom, for example, you may know that generally he is a Baltic Province man. In other government departments besides the censorship there were large numbers of the Baltic Province Germans who were exceedingly good functionaries; and, in general, a Baltic Province functionary was extremely loyal to the administration. He had the characteristic of a good functionary, that is to say, he had no mind of his own, and simply did what he was told or what he conceived to be his duty as a member of the administrative system. Sometimes he disliked the Russian authorities about him; sometimes he spoke rather contemptuously of them, but he was generally loyal to the superior authorities, and a loyal member of the administrative system of the Government.

During the past year we have seen considerable complaint about inefficiency during the war on the part of the administrative and military officers. The same thing is noticeable in other countries; but perhaps there was more reason for that criticism in Russia than in any place else, because Russia is a vast country. The railways, though not all in the hands of the government, are under its control in a more intimate sense than in Great Britain. The Government in Russia also habitually assumes an enormous number of functions about which other governments hesitate. Hence if anything goes wrong in a country where the Government has comparatively slender responsibilities the Government is not held responsible, but where a Government assumes complete control of everything of course it is the only party to whom the people can look for relief from their grievances. In proportion as a Government enlarges the area of its functions, it increases the delicacy of the political equilibrium. That appears to have been the case in Russia during the past year, and one minister gave place to another with great rapidity. Sometimes ministers are in office for only two or three weeks and a change of opinion occurs, and changes of this character were going on in Russia very rapidly. For instance, Protopopov, who was Prime Minister at the time of the revolution, had a very respectable reputation as a moderate liberal, not a radical liberal like the constitutional democrats. He came over to England with a delegation of members of the Duma, and was very well received as representative of the moderate liberal element; but almost immediately after he returned to Russia, for some reason which does not appear, he changed his attitude towards the whole political system and began to be quite reactionary. He continued to subsidize the reactionary newspapers, and to keep in office those people whom the liberal element very greatly suspected and disliked, and in general he soon became the ruler of the older reactionary party. He was subjected to enquiry by his own party men, and by a formal resolution they dismissed him from his party and ruled him out of it; that was before the revolution.

Another instance of the extreme delicacy of the equilibrium belongs to a different category. The Minister Sturmer, for example, who was a moderate liberal, met with some complication as Miliukov was endeavouring to get rid of the influence of Rasputin. Sturmer was the procurator of the Holy Synod, and it was quite within his function as the legal head of the church, as the leading ecclesiastic, and he tried to get rid of Rasputin, who was a Siberian monk, an ignorant man of enormous influence over the Czar and other members of the Imperial Family, through the power which some quite ignorant people possess of exercising hypnotic influence. He appeared to exercise that influence for purposes of those who made use of Rasputin. Sturmer insisted on the dismissal of Rasputin from the Court on the ground that his influence was injurious, but immediately afterwards Sturmer himself was dismissed, Rasputin's influence being too strong for him. That meant that the influence of an obscure monk was greater than that of the leading ecclesiastical lawyer, a man in the highest position in the Synod, when it was possible for Rasputin to secure his dismissal. Of course that led to the assassination of Rasputin, and the final removal of his influence.

It is impossible to know exactly what has happened at the present time, but it appears to me that the revolution which has taken place has not been exclusively an anti-German revolution, that is, a revolution against the German elements. The revolution has not been exclusively of a dynastic character, because the Duma was quite willing to have a member of the Imperial Family, as Czar, if the Grand Duke Michael had chosen to take the position. The revolution has been of a more complicated and deep character than that. Neither has it been provoked or promoted by the extreme revolutionary elements. It has not been a revolution provoked by the peasants, or promoted by the working people. It has been a parliamentary coup d'etat, in which the delicate state of equilibrium has been taken advantage of to upset the dynasty and upset the autocratic rule of Russia, and that probably by the parties who originally intended to revolt. It appears to me that the extreme revolutionary parties-the extreme social democrats in the Duma and the socialists' revolutionary parties outside the Duma--were very anxious to take advantage of the situation and make a revolution; but that the parties of the centre, that is to say, the constitutional democrats, with certain elements of the disintegrated right, that is the conservative party, had been subject to a rapid process of disintegration during the past year, and those disintegrated elements of the right joining together with the Constitutional democrats, and a large section of the moderate democrats, have made a formidable block consisting of the bulk of the Duma--not a mere majority. This formidable block has made the revolution, and taken it out of the hands of the extreme elements, and are now guiding it themselves; that is my interpretation of it.

It must be remembered that a revolution, especially in Russia, has to encounter very big risks; first, the risk of a revolt of the extreme element; next, the risk of the ignorance of the people through not knowing what is happening-and you may be quite sure that tens of millions of Russians do not know what is happening. today one sees in the newspapers that some soldiers had been deserting from the front arid going back to their villages, because they had heard there was to be a new distribution of the land, and they determined to be on the spot so as to get their share. That is entirely characteristic, and I should be quite prepared to believe that that movement was very considerable. That is exactly what the Russian peasant might be counted upon doing. That is one of the reasons that the revolutionary movement occurred--the reason of a stampede from the front--and it is quite possible that the Germans have been shrewd enough to realize that it was quite well to give time for that to happen, for some disintegrating force to take place. It is very likely that that has been a more or less important movement.

There were other movements in process during the past year besides those I have mentioned. I suppose you realize that there is no country where local government is quite so fully developed as in Russia, where every Province and every municipality has its more or less effective Provincial and Municipal Government. One of the points which made people very optimistic about the entry of Russia into the war at the beginning, was the manner in which the Government encouraged the growth of municipal enterprise and of local government. In respect to the provision of munitionment for the army, it was thought by many people that the nation was united in a great movement for the elevation of the national prestige; for the recovery of the national military prestige after the defeat of Russia by Japan, and for the effective guaranteeing of the country against the very great power that had been looked upon for long as a menace against Russia. There was a great deal to be said for that point of view. The local councils, the zemstvos councils, threw themselves with great energy into the manufacture of munitions. The local factories for making boots for the army, clothing for the army, supplying flour and meat and so on, assisted the central Government to a very serious degree. Now, what was the reason for the change of policy in that respect? I do not know, but there was some reason; and the fact of that mysterious movement, whatever it was, came to be apparent in the steady discouragement of those municipal efforts on the part of the central administration. The excuse given by the apologists for the central administration was that the local councils, the zemstvo councils, were becoming too intimate with the Duma, that they were coming too much into relations with the Duma, and that these created danger for the stability of the crown. That may be; at all events, the authorities did undoubtedly discourage the zemstvos. One of the difficulties of course was this, that changes were occurring so rapidly in the personnel of the government, and were reflecting themselves undoubtedly in the mind of the Czar, and all sorts of contradictory ukases were delivered during last year. For instance, one ukase would subordinate the zemstvos to the central authorities; another ukase would approve of what the zemstvos were doing, and so on; the whole thing was really causing confusion of a very serious character.

For the situation which arose a few weeks ago the precise military reason we cannot see: but from what I have said you can see there were all the materials for a complete upset of the whole system, for the complete upset of the autocracy, which had lost its grip upon the situation. No one member of the Government remained in his place for any length of time, and the consequence was a situation of affairs in which any skilful, able politician might come forward, and as it were, tear Russian life up by the roots so far as its parliamentary system was concerned. That appears to have been accomplished by people like Miliukov, who was away from Russia a great many years, spending a good part of his time in Bulgaria at Sofia, and at odd moments he lived in Western Europe. His general ideas were those rather of Western Europe than of Russia. He looked upon the Russian Government system as being quite reactionary, and for many years he had been writing in Russian journals and otherwise in favour of an increasing western influence upon Russian affairs. There are other members of the new-party who are of a somewhat similar character. There are also to be found in the new party some very curious anachronisms; for instance, the leader, who was the President of the Duma before the revolution, is a Little Russian; I do not know whether his sympathies are Ukranian or not, but he is not a Great Russian. The new premier of the revolution is not a Great Russian, for he is a Georgian from the Caucasus. Again, to show how mingled is the question of German influence, Burtales, who was a minister of state and is a German, is not in jail; he was arrested and kept in durance for two or three hours and then liberated. That illustrates how very curiously confused the whole question is.

It is quite possible, as I have hinted, that the revelations within the past few days, whether really susceptible to absolute proof or not, led to the suspicion that there was a good deal of what is known in this country as graft in the Government. The accusations against the Government of Kovno, and the Government of Liballa for having sold the fortress of Liballa, are very serious if they can be sustained, and there is a further accusation against the Germans that they attempted to bribe General Kuropatkin. It has been known for very many years that there has been a great deal of corruption in the Russian Government, and it has been popularly supposed that business could not be done in Russia, except by means of corruption. I have never had the opportunity of making any judicial inquiry into this matter, yet from such as I have been able to make in Russia, I was always inclined to disbelieve those stories. I heard a great many of that kind, and some were very old, though told to me as having been of very recent occurrence; but they had been told to many people and under very different circumstances, showing that there was a considerable amount of legend in the matter. On the other hand, there have been state trials in Russia of people accused, and a number of convictions were secured. When I was in Russia a railway contractor was accused of having embezzled 2,000,000 roubles, about $1,000,000, from the Government, and he was sent to jail for 7 years, I think, which was a very respectable sentence considering that he belonged to a highly aristocratic family. I doubt whether similar drastic measures would have been taken in this country even if he had stolen $2,000,000 instead of $1,000,000.

Notwithstanding appearances, there is a certain very important element of solidarity among the Russian people, and I think this element will be very greatly increased owing to what has happened. For a time, at all events, we will not find an aggressive anti-governmental attitude on the part of the Finlanders, or on the part of the people of Ukrania, that is, Little Russia, or the Pole. Those people will find it to their great advantage to throw in their influence with democratic Russia, rather than run the risk of being absorbed by autocratic Germany; so that, when it has time to penetrate the minds of the people, I think we will find a more solid and efficient and able resistance to Germany on the Eastern front than there has been. I feel quite persuaded of that. At the same time, at the moment we run a very great risk indeed of weakening resistance on the eastern front, and I think that is one reason why the Anglo-French Armies are pressing very hard on the Western front, so that Germany will be unable to spare a single man to go to the Eastern front to take advantage of the situation. The coming in of America is of great advantage from that point of view. Just at the critical moment when we run the risk of a certain movement on the Eastern front, to have the tremendous reserves of America thrown into the Western scale is a very important matter.

A hearty vote of thanks was moved by Sir Frederick Stupart, seconded by Mr. J. D. Allan, and was carried.