Liberal professionals and industrialists did more than applaud

Monday, November 19th, 2018

Liberal professionals and industrialists did more than applaud Russian terrorists, Gary Saul Morson notes:

They offered their apartments for concealing weapons and contributed substantial sums of money. Lenin supposedly said “when we are ready to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope,” but he might better have said “buy us the rope.” Liberals proudly defended terrorists in court, in the press, and in the Duma. Paul Miliukov, the leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, affirmed that “all means are legitimate… and all means should be tried.” The Kadets rejected the government offer of amnesty for political prisoners unless it included terrorists, who would, they well knew, promptly resume killing government officials. “Condemn terror?” exclaimed Kadet leader Ivan Petrunkevich. “Never! That would mean moral ruin for the party!”

If the strategy was to demoralize the government, it worked. Wearing a uniform made one a target for a bullet — or sulfuric acid in the face, another favorite form of attack. In Petersburg the head of the security police faced insubordination from agents afraid of revolutionaries. My favorite story concerns the reporter who asked his editor whether to run the biography of the newly appointed governor-general. Don’t bother, came the reply. Save it for the obituary.

Comments

  1. Candide III says:

    If the strategy was to demoralize the government, it worked.

    Only while the government kept avoiding taking any effectual measures, perhaps from fear of appearing despotic before foreign opinion and proving true the worst foreign prejudices about Russia, perhaps partly from a disinclination to go against local public (i.e. mostly intelligentsia) opinion. Stolypin said in his speech to the II. Duma of March 13th 1907 (my translation; my comments are in brackets):

    We have heard here accusations against the government, that its hands drip with blood, that it is a shame and a disgrace on Russia that it has used field court-martials [in peacetime]. … As a lawyer, I would have found this institution difficult to defend against such principled arguments as advanced by Mr. Maklakov. However, I remain convinced that the state [gosudarstvo] must think in a different manner and occupy a different viewpoint. The state can, indeed must, when in danger, adopt the strictest and most exceptional laws to defend itself from disintegration. This is the way it has been, is and always will be. This principle is in the nature of man and of state. When the house is on fire, Sirs, you break doors and windows and barge into other apartments. When a man is sick, the doctors give him poison to cure him. When a murderer assails you, you kill him. All nations recognize this order of things. … There are fateful times in the life of states when state necessity stands higher than law and one must choose between the integrity of one’s theories and the integrity of the nation. … I must state openly that such temporary remedies cannot take on a permanent character; if they do so, they lose their force and also may affect the people, whose morals ought to be brought up in law. The temporary remedy is a severe remedy, it has to break the lawless wave, to crush the ugly phenomena, and then pass away. Therefore the government must take a clear account of the national situation and give a clear answer as to what it must do.

    Two questions present themselves: can the government protect the life and property of the Russian citizen by its regular institutions, by application of its regular laws? But there is also another question: does the extraordinary law block the natural flow of the life of the nation, and inhibit its return to its natural quiet course?

    To the first question, Sirs, I submit that the answer is not difficult, it is obvious from today’s discussion. Regrettably, the bloody bedlam has not yet subsided, and it is hardly in the power of our usual institutions to quell it. The second question is more difficult: what will happen if we do not stop the antigovernment movement by force and give it free rein? … Here is an official document – the platform of the Russian social workers’ party. I read in it, “Only the pressure of broad masses of the people and popular revolt will undermine the army that is the bulwark of the government, only under this pressure will fall the dark citadels of autocratic despotism, only in struggle will the people win state power, land and freedom.” … Here is another document: the resolutions of the congress in Tammerfors [now Tampere, Finland; Stolypin is speaking of the 1. congress of the Russian social-democratic workers' party, chaired by Lenin] state, “The congress strongly condemns the tactic that defines the role of the Duma as working in organic cooperation with the government, and the self-limitation of the Duma by laws not sactioned by popular will.” The final resolution reads, “The congress finds it necessary, as a temporary measure, to put under explicit control and direction of the central committee all central and local terrorist acts against agents of state power in executive, political and administrative positions. However, the congress finds that the party must use all newly available means and occasions of agitation to expand and deepen its influence on the national level, and with this aim to continuously develop the principal demands of a broad popular movement that is to transform into a general insurrection.”

    Sirs, I will not wear your attention by reading from other, no less official documents. I ask myself only, does the government in such a situation have the right … to move against the law? [Stolypin is speaking of the government submitting, in contravention to Articles 87 and 56 of the Russian constitution of 1906, the extraordinary law authorizing field court-martials to immediate discussion in the Duma and thus allowing it to lapse] Does the government have the right, before its faithful servants who are every minute in danger of their lives, to make a concession to the revolution? … The government wants to believe, Sirs, that we will hear from you the word of peace that stops the bloody insanity. We believe that you will say the word that will put us all not to the destruction of the Russian nation, but to its recreation, reform and beautification.

    While we are waiting for this word, the government will engage to limit the application of the severe law [on field court-martials] only to the most exceptional cases of the most flagrant crimes, in order that, when the Duma directs Russia to quiet work, the extraordinary law should fall by itself through non-submission to the legislature. Sirs, the peace of Russia is in your hands, the peace of a Russia that will surely distinguish the blood, of which so much has been spoken here, the blood on the hands of butchers from the blood on the hands of honest surgeons who apply, maybe, the most extreme remedies with the sole hope and aspiration of curing the gravely ill patient.

  2. Adar says:

    “There are fateful times in the life of states when state necessity stands higher than law and one must choose between the integrity of one’s theories and the integrity of the nation.”

    “During a time of war all laws may be set aside, execept for murder and apostacy.” — Rabbi Akiva, around 120 A.D.

  3. Harry Jones says:

    The good Rabbi has too much faith in the good intentions of the ruling class.

    Me, I’m for rule of law. Let the nation earn its integrity.

    That said, any system of laws that prevents a just regime from surviving needs to be modified. Not ignored or subverted. Just fix the laws. Attack the problem at the right level.

  4. Kirk says:

    There is something to be said for the idea that the Russian state was dealing with fundamentally irrational people–And,to us, that certainly seems to be so, from our perspective today. Throwing acid in the face of policemen, or other government officials? Insane. Yet…

    What had the despotic government of the Tsars done before all that, which convinced the Russian people that such behavior was a rational choice?

    In order to understand the entire situation, you need to examine everything; insane behavior from revolutionaries and the general public supporting them does not come out of the clear blue sky, else the public would not support having acid thrown in the faces of policemen who were drawn from the public in the first place.

    No, there was more wrong with the Russian polis than some crazy revolutionaries; the public trust had been broken long before by despotic Tsars and their boyars. You treat your citizenry like the Russian state habitually did (and, still does…), and you are going to get the reaction to that being that they are going to throw up men like Stolypin, and support them.

    To a degree, it is a vicious spiralling circle of national dysfunction, and overcoming it…? May not be doable, to be quite honest.

    Even if the best-case scenario of no WWI, and a liberalizing of policy under Nicholas II, we might have still gotten the totalitarian outcome of Soviet governance that we got, only under a different name and schedule. Russia may not ever be a rational, normal state. The inmates, after all, are the ones running the asylum, and have been since 1917.

  5. Sam J. says:

    “…the public trust had been broken long before by despotic Tsars and their boyars. You treat your citizenry like the Russian state habitually did (and, still does…)…”

    Nah. If this is so why not mass terrorism in the USSR, Lenin, Stalin?? Much worse by orders of magnitude.

    “…Veronika succumbs, but it is not love of the people that convinces her. Rather, she cannot resist the “precariousness and poignancy of life in the underground, a life that was really a succession of thrilling experiences.” Solzhenitsyn got it right: what is most remarkable in the memoirs of terrorists is how rarely they express concern for the unfortunate. “Sympathy for the suffering of the people did not move me to join those who perished,” Vera Zasulich explains. “I had never heard of the horrors of serfdom [when growing up] at Biakolovo—and I don’t think there were any.”…”

  6. Kirk says:

    LOL… Did you miss that the terrorists were the government, after Lenin took over?

    Not to mention that the interregnum between the Tsars like Ivan the Terrible and Communists was filled with men who were cruel and tyrannical, but who still had some cavils against the measures of Ivan and Lenin, who managed to nearly totally suppress non-state terrorists by the simple measure of co-opting them into state service.

    Russia is a tragedy; I’m not sure that the conventional wisdom that it’s all due to the government is entirely correct–There’s a strong thread of self-fulfilling prophecy and desire among the public for “strong leaders”. A humane man like Alexander II or Kerensky was doomed, on principle. Men like Ivan the Terrible or Lenin? They’re the ideal Russian strong-man leader, in popular imagination and choice.

    It’s notable that the syndrome of the revolution only coming once the boot comes off the neck holds true, when examining Russian history. Alexander wanted to be a decent man and govern well; his reward? The madness of the populace. Likewise, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, replaced by Putin.

    The whole country and culture is a tragedy, given the potential. Russia should be a world leader in technology and engineering, but is doomed to never realize that potential because of corruption and a general lack of attention to detail in execution. Their design and engineering is marvelous; production work? LOL… Just good enough to get out of the plant, and seemingly the workers still think they’re factory serfs, instead of professional craftsmen.

    In Russia, as with a lot of other cultures, one of the root problems is that there’s a lot that’s imposed on the people, instead of rising up from within. You go to Germany or Japan, and compare the factory floor culture with that of the rest of the world–The average worker is prideful, and has the initiative to fix things. In the UK, and Russia? Not so much–The UK factory worker is one of the major problems for UK industry, although I think you can make a good case that the real problem is middle-management. Same set of workers do wonders under Japanese management, so perhaps it is the mid-level management culture, there. British Leyland and a bunch of other UK companies I’ve dealt with do things that I’ve never seen anywhere else, ever–Stupid simple things like logistics and packaging seemingly sabotaged on the shipping docks, and through sheer animalistic I-don’t-give-a-damn. The Russians have similar issues, and I think there’s a common thread of top-down imposed power and control by the management.

    The thing that all too many people running things seem to miss is that you really cannot impose a moral or cultural system; if you want things to work without heroic, constant, and inevitably futile intervention by management or other “authority”, then the order and pride-in-work must well up from within the individual. You can threaten, beat, murder the individual into submission to your goals, but eventually, unless they’ve bought into it and internalized it all, you’re going to lose.

    That’s Russia’s major issue: Civilization is imposed from the top down, in a lot of respects, and the basic message has been resentfully denied and thrown off at every opportunity. For ever Stakhanovite, there are a dozen wreckers who make believe they are working, because “…the government makes believe they pay us…”.

    The dysfunction is disturbing to witness, not least because there’s a lot of that same dysfunction creeping into daily life, here in the US. We very badly need a Renaissance, a Reformation, where the wreckers of society are at the least, condemned and set aside. Instead, more and more of them are taking part in governance and management, like a viral cancer, destroying the body politic as they make their way through life.

    It’s not accidental that Communism did so well in Russia; that philosophy of life, with its petty resentments, theft, and cruelties…? Well, it resonates with the Russian worldview and attitude towards life, which is deeply cynical and paranoid.

    A paranoia which has often been justified, but which has also been very self-fulfilling. It’s an irony of history that Nicholas II died due to a war that his out-of-control intelligence apparatus likely fomented in Serbia, the Black Hand being a creature of the Okhrana, or at least, one of its agents. In the end, Nicholas II bore a responsibility for the death of the Archduke, and paid the karmic price for it with the death of his entire immediate family. Sad, but entirely just, in a historical sense.

    Of course, war might have come without that provocation, but if WWI hadn’t have happened at that precise moment in history, with the specific technologies and cultural features of that specific moment, it would have been a very different war–Perhaps less destructive of human life, or perhaps even more so. It’s an unknowable thing, that, but one still gets the sense that we are living in the aftermath of a “worst possible case” scenario for how that era played out. A war fought in the mid-1920s, with better motorization and communications would have been over far more quickly, and a war fought earlier would have ended quickly due to a lack of munitions stocks without the Haber-Bosch process. Germany’s inept management of resources would have seen to that one–It was only a stroke of luck that they captured extensive stocks of nitrates on the docks in Belgium, that tided them over until the the artificial process could be ramped up to produce enough substitute nitrates to fight a war with.

  7. Pseudo-chrysostom says:

    “What had the despotic government of the Tsars done before all that, which convinced the Russian people that such behavior was a rational choice?”

    Answer: little to nothing.

    All ‘insurgencies’ that succeed succeed because they are getting support from a greater power; a greater power forments and supports things like ‘insurgencies’ because it wishes to see a rival power destroyed.

  8. Pseudo-chrysostom says:

    “LOL… Did you miss that the terrorists were the government, after Lenin took over?

    Not to mention that the interregnum between the Tsars like Ivan the Terrible and Communists was filled with men who were cruel and tyrannical, but who still had some cavils against the measures of Ivan and Lenin, who managed to nearly totally suppress non-state terrorists by the simple measure of co-opting them into state service.”

    You understand the lemma then: states that support and validate their own powers of terror succeed in defeating terror and succeed in surviving; states that fail to do so fail against terror and fail to survive.

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