The new eastern Europe

Front matter

; a iy mote) ee eee

: nia = ae Seats

- ues

Introduction

THE FOURTH SCANDINAVIAN STATE .

THE NEw LITHUANIA POLAND IQI7

POLAND IQIg

EHE NEW EASTERN EUROPE

INTRODUCTION

THE new borderland of nations, which has come into existence between Russia and Central Europe, constitutes a political group for which it is convenient to use the collective expression ‘Eastern Europe.’ It is with this group of nations that the present volume is concerned. Russia forms the background to them all. But Russia is not here treated separately ; for on Russia there is available in English an extensive and excellent literature, and the events of the War period in Russia, at any rate since the Revolution, have been fully reported in the Press. On the East European nations, on the other hand, very little has been reported in the Press, and the literature available in English is peculiarly scant. Before the War there was perhaps no region in Europe of which so little was known in England. The Balkans, the Islamic lands, the Far East, were all better known. There was a certain interest in Finland; for the constitutional dispute between Finland and Russia had attracted attention. There were some works on Polish history and politics; but the best of them, an Essay by the late Lord Salisbury, was half a century old.1. On the Ukranian Question a

1 By far the best introduction in English to contemporary Polish questions is Mr. Geoffrey Drage’s Pre-War Statistics of Poland and Lithuania in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 1xxx1. pt. ii. (March 1918). An English translation of Petite Encyclopédie Polonaise (Lausanne, 1916), one of the principal authorities used by Mr. Drage for the above paper, appeared at the beginning of 1919 (Polund, Her People, History, Industries, &c., London, 1919—the date on the titlepage is wrongly printed 1909).

Prof. Alison Phillipsin his volume on Poland (London, 1915) has an interesting chapter on the Ukranian Movement, written from a different point of view from that taken up in this volume. B couple of pamphlets had appeared before the War. On Lithuania and the three races of the Baltic Provinces there were no sources of information in English at all. That the Foreign Office possessed a store of esoteric intelligence on all these countries does not appear probable from a consideration of the policy which it has pursued. Ministers have had to pioneer in terra incognita, without any of that preliminary clearing of the ground which is afforded by public discussion in books and newspapers.

The object of this book, appearing at an hour when the diplomats of all the belligerents are assembling to redraw the map of Europe, is not to discuss policy, still less to attack or defend the policy of this or that Government, but to give a conspectus of the material on which any discussion of policy must be based. It takes in turn each of the five regions, Finland, the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine, and endeavours to bring into relief the factors which in each compose the situation. Two main factors dominate the situation in all these countries. The first is Nationalism, a political movement drawing its inspiration from ideas, which were more current in the last century than this, but are by no means yet exhausted. The second is Socialism, an economic movement, in its East European development a movement of the twentieth century, first awakening to consciousness in the Russian Revolution of 1905. The interaction of these two movements during the twelve years: between the first Russian Revolution in 1905 andthe second in 1917 constitutes the principal theme of this book. Sometimes, as in Finland, the two are in open conflict. Sometimes, as in Poland, the political dominates the economic movement. Sometimes, as in the Ukraine, the economic movement dominates the political. But more often the two are found working in combination under the influence of a common hostility to Russia. After the second revolution the ‘tendency is to conflict ; and in this conflict Socialism labours under one great disadvantage. Its literature and tradition are industrial; and the conditions, to which it has to

INTRODUCTION 3 be applied in Eastern Europe, are agricultural. In most of the East European countries—Finland is an exception—the Socialists have no thought-out agrarian policy. When the question of the land is raised, they either take refuge in rhetoric, or they adopt en plein the agrarian programme of the Russian Revolutionaries. But the conditions in Russia and in Eastern Europe are not identical. The Agrarian Revolution in Russia has been based on the principle of communal ownership, which is in harmony with the profoundly Socialistic Russian temperament, and in the working of which the Russian peasants have had long experience in the village communes. But the Russian commune is not an East European institution. To the Finnish, or Lettish, or Polish peasant, even to the Ukranian peasant, it makes scant appeal. The attempt to apply it to East European social conditions at once rallies to the side of Reaction every class or individual which owns any property at all. This development has been most conspicuous in the case of the Ukraine, and is discussed at length in the chapter devoted to the Ukranian Movement. The influence of the mighty Agrarian Revolution in Russia is already felt in a hundred ways, and will in future, no doubt, be felt increasingly. But for the present property in Eastern Europe seems still too fundamental an institution easily to be disturbed.

A new Balkans has been created in Eastern Europe ; and no diplomatic reversal of the Treaty of Brest can reverse the facts of the situation. The Ukraine may join with Russia again, for Little Russia is one of All the Russias after all. But the non-Russian, non-Orthodox races of the Borderland, Finns, Balts, Letts, Esths, Lithuanians, Poles, are now launched for good or bad on an independent career. Hitherto they have been held in artificial equilibrium by the presence of the German armies. Now these are being withdrawn, and there is beginning to ensue, as in the Balkans when the Turkish power was removed, a jostling of infant nationalities struggling to find their feet. The young Balkan States could look to powerful neighbours,

Austria on the one hand and Russia on the other, for support; and the rest of Europe could preserve the peace of the Balkans, tant bien que mal, by balancing the rival influences of these two Powers. But the two ereat neighbours of the new Eastern Europe are both in collapse: and the friction between the several States has a free field. Force, in the shape of international Armies of Occupation, can no doubt hold it in suspense, as the Austro-German Occupation held it in suspense. But a mistake will be made if it is supposed that it can be dissipated by force—still less by diplomatic machinery. Friction in the case of young Nationalisms in conflict is a process of biological growth.

Much will depend on the stability which the new States are able to develop for themselves in the first decade of their existence. Political stability in Eastern Europe is mainly dependent on agrarian conditions. The analogy with the Balkans is again illuminating. It will be long before unhappy Roumania recovers from her present disasters, because her internal weakness arises out of the concentration of the Jand in the hands of her governing oligarchy. Bulgaria survived the scarcely less crushing disasters of 1913 with an elasticity which surprised the world, because the Bulgarian State has the stability of its land-owning peasantry. Even in Western Europe not a few historians have ascribed the recovery of France after 1870 to the stabilising influence of the French peasantry. For the economic structure of an agricultural country no better base has yet been discovered than a peasantry in possession of the land. The attempt is made in this book to show in some relief the elements in each country, out of which such a peasantry can be formed. It must be admitted on a general conspectus that they do not at present bulk largely in the view. The initial conditions in the new Eastern Europe are less favourable in this respect than they were in the Balkan States after the abolition of Turkish rule. There is less to build on, and more to be done,

INTRODUCTION 5

The most uncertain factor of the future is Poland. Ten years of anarchy at the outset in Poland would lead, not only to a Fourth Partition, or some similar measure such as International Control, in Poland itself, but in all probability to the collapse of the other States as well. The Poles are a baffling race. In all Europe there is no people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only one in whose composition there is included that subtle differentia which marks off the ‘big’ nation from the ‘small.’ Their culture is not borrowed : it is original and creative, the true expression of their national genius and their historic tradition. Yet in the political sphere their genius is strangely unfruitful. They are of those artists who produce nothing. Their conceptions are brilliant, but they have no technique, and do not see the need of it: and they never finish their work. Their political capacity is, as it were, negative. Their resistance to outside pressure is amazing ; but they seem unable to develop their own strength. Lack of positive qualities, of discipline on the one hand and of moderation on the other, brought them to their fate in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century their negative qualities found their scope: and they may fairly claim that by a hundred years of successful resistance alike to Russian and to Teuton penetration they have proved to the world that they can be neither absorbed nor crushed. To-day their captivity is over, and they are free to rebuild their fallen State. Yet they are rent by internecine quarrels: all their old imperialism has revived: and instead of betaking themselves to trowel and mortar, and with prayer and fasting each man labouring night and day at the foundations, they sit disputing amid the ruins whether they shall ally themselves with Babylon or the Mede, while their trumpeters and shawm-players march in procession to all the cities of Philistia to proclaim, when their greatness is re-established, how great that greatness will be. Here, for example, is the matured. utterance in the summer of 1918 of a Society founded by, and in close touch with, the then Polish Prime Minister! :—

The Allies, when they declare that a Poland united, strong and independent, both politically and economically (with access to the sea), is an indispensable requisite for a stable peace, admit what appears to be a self-evident truth. That truth is simply this, that Russia has for many years ceased to exist as a real power, and in order to secure the European equilibrium it is necessary to replace her by a new factor, that is, by Poland. Poland appears perfectly designed to group around her all the Slavonic peoples, united amongst themselves by bonds of amity and by more or less close alliance. Here we are face to face with a really sound idea which, as we are glad to see, has entered into the War calculations of the Entente as a positive value.

Megalomania so childish, so pitifully out of all relation to the world of actualities, induces a sinking in the breast of every friend of Poland. And yet, when the student is tempted to think all Poles are like this, he must never lose sight of what the Poles have accomplished in Poznania by slow methodic toil, with iron discipline, and with a self-abnegation which makes the heart ache to see it. The prospect in Poland looks brightest when seen from this quarter, and the writer has endeavoured to give it full prominence in the following pages. It would be absurd to say that all the problems of Warsaw find their solution in Posen. Nevertheless, in the writer’s opinion, the future in Poland in the next ten years depends very largely on whether Warsaw is prepared to seek in Posen its inspiration.

1 The Society is La Pologne et la Guerre of Lausanne; and the Manifesto, from which this passage is quoted, was published in The New Europe, August 15, 1918. The New Europe in publishing it expressed the opinion that ‘ it may be accepted as embodying the views of the great majority of Poles in their own country, though for very obvious reasons it could not be publicly endorsed by the Government of Warsaw under military occupation.’

Chapter I

‘Caesar knew Gaul better than the Western nations know Eastern Europe.—ALEXANDER HERZEN,

OF the various alien races, which before the War Russia held in subjection within her Western border three —the Poles, the Lithuanians, and the Finns—at some previous period of their history enjoyed an independent existence. The memory of that independence was kept green in the days of their captivity. By the waters of Babylon they sang the songs of Sion ; and when the day came that Babylon the Great was fallen, they set out with rejoicing to rebuild the Temple in Salem by the favour, and at the direction, of Cyrus the Mede. Of these three races more was known in Western Europe of the Finns than of either of the other two. There was—before the War—no oppressed people which had so successfully exploited its grievances in Western ears. They had known how to mobilise half the Universities of Europe to plead their cause. At one time they had Protests from half a dozen European Parliaments lying on the table of the Russian Duma. Their story, as they told it, was the story of a wicked Government and an oppressed people, a villain nation and a hero nation, Reaction panoplied against Liberty, just as in Naples or Austria in the ‘fifties, or any of the other classics of British Liberalism, with the Middle Class well in the foreground of the picture taking ‘ their natural place’ as leaders and no troublesome social problems to complicate the issue. The War has revealed the gaps in this account, and the falseness which is inherent in all propaganda is painfully in evidence. It is clear now to all the world, writ large in the atrocious reprisals of the 7

Whites and in the despairing resistance of the Reds, that the real issue in Finland is not between Russian tyrant and Finnish victim, but between one-half of Finland brigaded against the other, with Russia helping the one and Germany supporting the other. On this issue the Finnish propagandists before the War had little to say. One may read books and brochures mountains high from the pens of these writers, and find no mention of such a thing as a Red Guard or a White Guard. And yet Red Guards and White Guards were not making their first appearance in Finland in the winter of 1917.

When Finland passed from Swedish into Russian hands in 1809, the Tsar Alexander was under the impression that he had annexed a Swedish province. The culture was Swedish ; the religion was Swedish; when he visited the country the language in which the Diet greeted him was Swedish. The peasants, he was told, spoke a barbarous tongue of their own; but for all Alexander knew that might well be a dialect of Swedish, as Little Russian was of Russian. He was not interested in the matter. Very few persons at this time were. There was, however, in Helsingfors a small group of Swedish academics, who had been awakened to the life, and above all to the language, of the peasants. Rousseau’s conception of the Noble Savage, then universally acclaimed in polite circles in Scandinavia, had invested with a novel glamour the ugly-looking Mongols, with whom most of the Helsingfors intellectuals had grown up. Wolf’s ‘ Prolegomena to Homer,’ a book whose repercussions outside the philological field are curiously extensive in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, had directed attention to the possibility of the preservation of a national literature over long periods by oral tradition without the use of writing. The bearing of Wolf’s thesis on the ancient Finnish folk-songs seized the imagination of the Helsingfors savant Lénnrot. For many years he collected them, taking them down in writing from the mouths of village singers. When he had collected 12,000 lines he arranged them in Runes, or Books, as Peisistratus is said to have arranged the Homeric poems, and in 1835 produced them as the Finnish national epic with the title ‘ Kalewala.’+ Siparva licet componere magnis, Lonnrot’s publication of the ‘ Kalewala’ was to the Finnish tongue and people what the Divine Comedy was to the Italian tongue and Italy. It is the date with which the history of modern Finland begins.

But the national epic was no more than the foundation on which the fabric of the national language had to be built up. The vocabulary of Wainamoinen and the beauteous Aino, as may be imagined, contained no ready equivalents for ‘ proportional representation,’ ‘intensive agriculture,’ and other conceptions, in which the modern Finn is largely interested. The expansion of the vocabulary took time ; and the Finnish revivalists found that it was not possible to hasten the process, as the Czechs at the same period were finding in Bohemia, and the Gaelic League is finding in Ireland to-day. But numbers told. Of the 3,000,000 inhabitants of Finland over 2,500,000 are Finns and under 500,000 are Swedes. Once the majority became ‘ tongueconscious,’ it was bound to prevail over the minority. The language early obtained political recognition ; in 1863, twenty-eight years after the publication of the * Kalewala,’ it was permitted as an alternative to Swedish in the Courts of Law and in the Diet; in 1886 it was allowed for official correspondence; and in 1894 it was admitted to the Senate. In the year 1915 there were 274 newspapers in Finnish, 103 in Swedish, and seven with Finnish and Swedish in parallel columns. The street-names in the towns are placarded in two languages, as in Dublin. The University of Helsingfors has three academic languages—Finnish, Swedish, and Latin— and there are, or used to be, one or two Professors who lectured alternately in Finnish and Swedish, to the intense discomfiture of the foreign student. The Finns

' Kalewala (pronounced Kaléwal4 not KaAléw4la) is the country (Finland) from which the heroes go out for adventures into Pohjola (Lapland), the mysterious Land of the North,

Io THE NEW EASTERN EUROPE have captured the two National Societies of Science and Literature; and the Swedes have founded two rival Societies in self-defence. The strongholds of ‘Swedish are the houses of the landed gentry, in which remnants of old-fashioned Swedish culture still linger. The numbers of the landed gentry are dwindling, and the day of their political and social influence is over ; but in the past they formed the nucleus of a movement which has preserved a compact island of Swedish culture amid the rising flood of Finnish nationalism, and they still leaven the middle-class intelligentsia, in which they are being merged. The language issue may indeed be said to be chose jugée. Undermost is now uppermost, as a Czech patriot once observed of Bohemia. But, like the German tradition in Bohemia, the tradition of a superior Swedish culture still lingers in Finland, sometimes in unexpected places: there are few beggars in Finland, but if the traveller meets with one he may be sure that the language in which he will be asked an alms will be Swedish. As to what the Swedes themselves think of the position, the writer takes leave to quote the following story from the delightful pages of a clever English traveller,1 who visited Finland only two or three years before the War. It is the traveller’s first visit to a Finnish country house :—

Celia and I. . . found ourselves talking to an agreeable, elderly man, a senator of some kind, who spoke fluent but Teutonic English. It was quite soon after our arrival [in Finland], when she had yet learnt little of Swede-Finn controversy, so Celia chanced to say, in all innocence:

‘Of course, you write and speak Finnish ? ’ He went a bright salmon-pink, and replied : ‘Got-d forpit-d!’

The Fennoman movement—such is the name given to the Finnish Renascence *—would perhaps not have

1 R. Travers (Mrs. H. M. Hyndman), Leiiers from Finland, London, rgII.

2 The Latin words ‘ Fennoman’ and ‘Svecoman’ are generally used both by Finns and Swedes to describe respectively the Finnish and the Swedish elements in Finland,

THE FOURTH SCANDINAVIAN STATE = ir goneso far, had it been purely linguistic. Butit had almost from the first a political—and it now has in addition an economic—aspect, in which the linguistic side of the movement has been wellnigh lost. In its early days the movement was welcomed by the Russians as a check to the Swedophil sentiments which had lasted in some circles, principally amongst the Svecoman aristocracy, for long after the Russian annexation. The political party, which is now known as the Old Finns, had its origin in the early Fennomans, who, in order to secure the tolerance of the Russian Government for their nationalist propaganda, pursued a strong Russophil policy. In later years, and especially during the period of Russification before the War, the Old Finns were opportunist, and are now paying the penalty which in the end political opportunism always pays. Their record somewhat resembles that of the Polish National Democrats; before the War, though widely distrusted, they served for many years as the focus of an otherwise unorganised body of Finnish opinion, which, if not exactly Russophil, was disposed to compromise and anxious to avoid conflict. But their strength in the Diet has for some years been declining.?

The one other party in Finland, which could be said to have Russian sympathies, was the Socialists; but, as may be imagined, it was not towards official Russia that their sympathies were directed. The doctrines of Social Democracy came late in the day to Finland ;

1 The fluctuations of the parties in the’Diet during the last ten years are worth tabulating ;

Socialists : A 8 83 83 86 87 103 92 Old Finns. a SS 53 48 42 42 33 o Young Finns . Si ay 26 28 28 28 22

Agrarians , Pi 7 15 12 II 19 26 Svecomans . - 24 25 25 26 26 21 2i Christian Workers . 2 2 I I I I —

The Agrarians (Conservative intelligentsia) and Young Finns (Liberal sntelligentsia) represent the Centre: the Svecomans the Right. The Agrarians poll what there is of a clerical vote in Finland. The Christian Worker is a crank, it was not until 1903 that the political party was organised. Like the British Labour Party, it grew up out of a Federation of Trade Unions. It maintained close relations with the Russian and Jewish revolutionaries. In Finland its activities were at first concentrated on agitation for the reform of the Diet. The Diet, for the maintenance of which the Svecomans and their friends in Europe were shedding at this period many tears, was a thoroughly reactionary body, the last survival of a Parliamentary type once common in Northern Europe. It consisted of four Estates—Nobles, Clerics, Burghers, and Peasants—with a very limited franchise for the last. The second constitutional factor was the Senate, which by a curious arrangement combined the functions of an Upper House to the Diet with those of an irresponsible Executive on the German or American model. The theory of the Constitution gave to the Tsar Grand Duke concurrent legislative and administrative powers, the extent and limitations of which were the subject of hot dispute between Russian and Finnish lawyers.

When the Revolution broke out in Russia in 1905, the Socialists in Finland, as elsewhere, leapt to seize the helm. Finland was seething with discontent. The country had just been subjected under the well-known Governor-General Bobrikov to six years of resolute ‘ Russification.’ The Constitution had been cut and pared and the powers of the Russian Governor-General increased. The Russian language had been introduced in the Administration, the University, and the schools. Worst of all, the Finlanders for the first time had been made liable to the Russian Conscription. Since Finland became a part of Russia no Finlander had ever served, save as a Volunteer, in the Russian Army. Conscription waS no more popular than it isin Ireland ; and in Finland, as in Ireland, all, or almost all, parties were united in the feeling that, if it was to be introduced, it must be by legislation of the Diet and not of the Imperial Government. On this question something like a ‘Sacred Union’ had been achieved when the Revolution broke out at Petrograd, and the Tsar’s Government reeled under the shock, and all the Provincial Administrations were paralysed. It was the hour of the subject nations. Poles, Letts, Jews, and Armenians were in open revolt. In Finland the revolt took the form of an extremely complete General Strike, which the Socialists organised, opposing without bloodshed a blank wall of passive resistance to every operation of government. After six days the Government capitulated unconditionally. A ukase was hurriedly drawn up and signed by the Tsar, and brought to Helsingfors by one of de Witte’s private secretaries—not without difficulty, for the train service had joined the Strike. It repealed unconditionally the most obnoxious part of the Russifying measures of the previous six years On the military question a compromise had already been arranged: Finland was once again exempted from the Russian Conscription, but in return the Finnish Legislature undertook to pay an annual contribution to the Imperial Treasury.

The role played by the Socialists in this successful Revolution surprised everyone. Nobody up to now in Finland had taken the Socialists very seriously. Socialism in Finland was so new a growth that the Russian authorities had not realised its significance. The Finnish bourgeoisie was equally amazed at its meteoric emergence, though in the first stage of the Revolution they followed its lead implicitly, as men will follow a leader in a crisis. The extent to which Fennoman Socialist and Svecoman bourgeois have combined against the Russian has always been exaggerated in Western Europe, because Western Europe has taken its information from Svecoman sources. On this occasion the ‘Sacred Union’ did not survive the turn of the year. After the capitulation of the Petrograd Government and the repeal of the Russifying legislation the bourgeois parties at once began to take alarm at the Socialist programme; and as it became apparent that the Russian Government was likely to regain control in Russia, the consequences of the Socialist alliance with the Russian revolutionaries began to loom large to many prudent souls. The antipathy of bourgeois and Socialist came to a head at Sveaborg in the summer of 1906. The Russian garrison at Sveaborg having turned against its officers, the local Finnish Red Guard—the Socialists had organised a Red Guard at the outset of the Revolution—joined the Russian mutineers. There was a certain amount of disorder, and the bourgeoisie organised ‘ White Guards,’ and—not without the help of the Russian Government—suppressed the Red Guard, and threw its leader into a Russian prison.

Having successfully carried through the General Strike and secured the capitulation of the Russian Government, the Socialists took no further part in the constitutional negotiations with Russia. The Russian Governor- General, Prince Obolensky, relied largely on the counsel of the Svecoman leader Dr. Mechelin, who had been brought back from the exile into which just before the Revolution he had been sent. The Socialists, without criticising, stood aloof from this arrangement, and devoted their energies entirely to agitation for reform of the Diet. Under their steady pressure the Diet was induced to pass a Bill (which was immediately confirmed by Petrograd) substituting for the four Estates a single Chamber of the most advanced type, with equal, adult, secret, proportional voting, for both sexes. Having thus secured a working instrument, the Socialists proceeded to draw up a programme which consisted entirely of social and economic reforms. Nothing is more striking in the welter of Russian revolutionary politics during the years 1905-1908 than the moderate policy of the Finnish Socialists. They offer an impressive contrast to the Polish Socialists during the same period. The Finns have that feeling for the essential and the unessential which is at the root of political aptitude, and which seems by nature to be lacking in the more talented Pole. While the Pole is formulating his rights, the Finn is discounting his claims. To the Pole politics is an end, to the Finn it is a means. The acute sense of political values of the Finnish Socialists was twice shown in these years—first when, after the General Strike, they subordinated national policy to constitutional reform ; secondly when, the Reform Bill once carried, they abandoned political for economic measures. In neither case had they secured more than an initial success; the abrogation of the Russifying laws left the powers of the Tsar to initiate new ones undiminished ; and the reform of the Diet left the position of the Senate untouched. But the Socialists had the instinct, rare indeed in a Revolutionary Party, not to press their victory. They knew, what scarcely any Pole ever learns, that half a loaf is better than the noblest vindication of the right to unlimited bread.

In this spirit they proceeded to carry through the reformed Diet, not without the co-operation of one or other of the bourgeois parties—for the Socialists had not as yet a majority in the Diet—a Land Bill, a Temperance (Total Abolition) Bill, a (Compulsory) Education Bill, a Bill for removing Jewish disabilities (which under the old Finnish Constitution were fully as severe in Finland as in Russia), and some elementary measures of factory legislation. But the establishment of the Constitution in Russia had introduced a new factor into the Finnish situation. Up till this time there had been in Finland a dual authority, on the one hand the Finnish Diet, on the other hand the Russian Autocrat. The Russian Autocrat had now handed over his powers to Constitutional Ministers and a Parliament. Had he handed over his powers in Finland to the new Constitutional Government in Russia? The Finns maintained that he had not. The Russian Ministers maintained that he had; and the Third and Fourth Dumas agreed with them. With the suppression of the Revolution the Russian bureaucracy had resolved to reintroduce the Russifying policy in Finland. Constitutionalism was now the order of the day; and, indeed, the methods of the Bobrikov regime stood condemned by their results. Sozt/ The new Russification should proceed on Constitutional lines. With this end in view the Russian Government prepared and passed through the Duma during the years 1909-1914 a quantity of legislation relating to Russo- Finnish, and sometimes to purely Finnish, questions. To all this legislation the Finnish Diet at the instance of the bourgeois parties, with the occasional exception of the Old Finns, opposed a passive resistance. When the laws were referred to the Diet for its opinion the Diet refused to consider them. Certain Finnish judges declared them illegal. To this policy of passive resistance the Socialists gave a general adhesion, but were at pains on more than one occasion to proclaim solidarity with the Russian proletariate. In 1910, when one of the Russian Bills came before the Diet, one of the Socialist leaders, speaking for the Party, uttered the following words, striking enough in the light of subsequent events: