Russia in revolution

Front matter

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L V ck

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Preface

We have watched the early stages, and are about to witness the culmination, of a national movement that will probably loom as large in after history as do those which resulted in the establishment of the French Republic and the United States of America. Writingin mid-crisis (for the mind will not wait while events reach a complete development), of a subject so large and in some aspects so strange, one cannot hope to have attained perfect accuracy of detail or perspective. If rapidly written, however, this sketch of the causes, character, and course of the Russian Revolution represents a good many years of observation and study. Moreover, while much space has been given to a recital of personal experiences illustrating the quality of Russian manhood, the heroism of the revolutionary leaders, and the tragic nature of the struggle for freedom, it is hoped that these narratives will not obscure the fundamental argument that the Revolution is no mere clash of personalities, but is essentially the fulfilment of an irresistible economic process. Thus I have sought to show, in the first place, that the historic autocracy has degenerated during the last two reigns into a lawless and incapable oligarchy ; and, then, that the oligarchy is being undermined by the very economic

vii viii PREFACE

forces which it brought into existence for its own enrichment. In this part of the book I have been chiefly indebted to Eussian and British official publications.

For information as to the history and psychology of the revolutionary movement, and for other details, I am indebted to my exile friends — especially the late Sergius Stepniak and the late Col. Lavrov, Mr. Volkhovsky, Mr. Tchaykovsky, and Dr. Soskice ; to the files of Free Russia, La Tribune Busse, and the publications of the Russian secret press ; and to friends in Russia whom it would be inconvenient to name. A few passages, including a letter written in Moscow on the eve of the recent crisis, have appeared in the Daily Chronicle and other journals.

London,

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Part I A Black Heritage Chapter I

MISE-EN-SCBNE

1. Natural conditions : Geographical, climatic, economic — 2. Historical conditions: Early Russian democracy — Byzantinism — Under the Mongols — The Tsardom — Expansion — The Zemsky Sobor — The modern State — The growing revolt — Reaction — 3. East and West : At Nijni Novgorod — The Fair and the Exposition — New forces — 4. On the Eve : War, famine, superstition, despotism ... 3

Chapter II

Structure of the State : The official theory examined — " Autocracy " impossible — Council of the Empire — The Senate — Committee of Ministers — The Ministries — The Holy Synod — Lack of guarante es — Confusion of functions — Bureaucrats and favourites — Provincial administration — Governors and police 30

Chapter III

Thousands of laws, but no law — Destruction of the judicial reforms — The Code — Secret " laws " — Persecution — Revelations at Konigsberg — The Penal Code — Heresy — Political offences — Courts-martial — " Administrative order " 47

ix

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV THE UNDERWORLD I MENDEL ROSENBAUAl's STORY

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Overcrowding of prisons — Rosenbaum's offence and arrest — Sixteen months in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul — The inquisition — Solitude and silence — By etape — The forwarding prison — Pandemonium at Vilna — The prison idiot — Escape — A workman's lot — The case of Angela Karpouzi 64

Chapter V

The St. Petersburg Fortress — Kropotkin's description — Some results — Case of Maria Vetrova — Her arrest and mysterious death — Was it suicide? 80

Chapter VI Annals Op Schlusselburg

The new Bastille — Summary account of fifty-four prisoners : two shot, seven suicides, six insane, twenty other deaths — Revolutionary leaders : Kletochnikov, Dolgushin, Myshkin, Shchedrin, Grachevsky, Sophia Ginsburg, Lopatin, P.S. Polivanov, Vera Figner . . 88

Chapter VII

The modifications of June, 1900 — Exile analyzed — Recent prison scandals — Archangel — The new Arctic exile settlements — Conditions at Kolymsk — Mark Broido's story : the exile road — A lockup — New rigors (1903) — Hardships by road and river — The latest v affray in Yakutsk — Broido's escape 101

CHAPTER VIII Russia's " ile du diable "

Sakhalin : the convict system — " Unfit for Colonization " — Corporal Punishment : " politicals " flogged — Official exposures — Barbarous punishments — The system of compulsory concubinage . . .119

CONTENTS xi

Chapter IX Page

Estimates for 1905 — The " Treasury Balances," their origin and amount — " Ordinary " and " Extraordinary " Budgets : a ten years' balance — Normal revenue and expenditure analyzed .... 129

Chapter X

Increase of Debt : £500 millions in 1889, £750 millions in 1905— Assets — Drink monopoly the only profitable part of State trading system — Kailway extension : the Siberian line — Cost of the Kailway policy 138

Chapter XI

M. Witte's record — Disillusion — Forced industrialism — 1877 and subsequent tariffs — Official claims and a typical result — £12^ millions for the benefit of the cotton lords — :Growth of leading industries — Drain of wheat exports — Estimated cost of Protectionism = £100 millions a year — Foreign industries — History of the Sugar trust 144

Chapter XII

Famines, 1873-1905 — Discouragement of education and crippling of agriculture — Siberian communications — Effects of the war — Instances of corruption — Contract scandals — The Bed Cross peculations : a Grand Duchess in tears — Compensations . .160

Chapter XIII

Pretexts for the Japanese war — Manchurian and Korean agreements — Statements of claim — The tale of bloodshed — The Army : effects of Kussian policy — Coercion, ignorance, and corruption . 169 xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIV THE PROPAGANDISTS, 1870-74 : NICHOLAS TCHAYKOVSKY's

NARRATIVE

Two phases of the revolutionary movement : 1870-85, and 1890-1905 — " Nihilism " and the democratic revival — Peter Lavrov's life and opinions — Nicholas Tchaykovsky : early life — The peasantry — School and university — Netchayev's conspiracy — The first propagandist circles — Their method of work and leaders — " To the People " — Arrest and imprisonment 185

CHAPTER XV THE TSAR'S VENGEANCE : MADAME KOVALSKY's NARRATIVE

Some leading personalities — "Trial of the 193" — Katherine Breshkovsky: early life and revolutionary activity — In Siberia — Back at work after twenty years — Elizabeth Kovalsky : as school teacher — Arrest, trial, and exile — Escape and recapture — The events at Kara — Hunger strikes and suicides — Mme. Kovalsky's protest and removal — Flogging of Mme. Sigida 207

Chapter XVI

Student at Moscow : first arrest — Seven months in the " Third Section " — The investigation — Second arrest : two years in prison — Tried and acquitted — Third arrest : another year in the St. Petersburg Fortress — Effects of solitary confinement— Trial and protest — Years of exile — Escape — Culmination of the movement — The Tsaricides 225

Chapter XVII Sergius Stepniak And Terrorism

His early life — Among the peasantry : Capture and escape — As conspirator — In England ; his work and death — The exile's friends — Attitude towards terrorism — Some tributes - 236

CONTENTS xiii

Chapter XVIII

THE NEW GENERATION : DR. SOSKICE ; MARK BROIDO

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The meaning of University " disturbances " — A new experiment in coercion : students drafted into the army — Growing agitation : official statistics, 1894-1903 — Narrative of Dr. David Soskice — Revolutionary activity — A year in the Fortress — " How I became a Revolutionist " : Mark Broido's narrative . . . . 253

Chapter XIX The Rise Op The Labour Movement : Father Gapon

Growth of the industrial town population — Strikes of 1884-5 — Labour laws of 1886 and 1893 — Wages and hours of labour — Great strikes of 1896-97 — Social Democratic Labour Party, founded 1898 : its policy — Clandestine literature — Thousands of arrests — Zubatov and his official Unions — Father Gapon 281

Part III The Awakening Chapter XX

THE END OP PLEHVE

A new crisis — Plehve's character and career — M. Witte — Secret police — Interregnum : Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky — Zemstvo movement — Prince Troubetskoy — Reaction again : the December manifestoes 295

Chapter XXI "bloody Sunady": A Broken Idol

The Putilov works strike: extension throughout St. Petersburg — Petition and proposed deputation to the Tsar — Representations to Ministers — The massacre — Intellectuals imprisoned — Trepov as Prefect — Anarchy in the provinces — " Magna Charta " canards . 307 xiv CONTENTS

Chapter XXII Page

Kevolutionary Socialist Party : its agrarian policy and propaganda — The revival of terrorism : recent assassinations — The " Organization of Combat " — Sazonov's statement — The Gershouni trial — Murder of the Grand Duke Sergius — Vladimir Korolenko : his punishment — Maxim Gorky ; arrest and imprisonment 319

Chapter XXIII The Prospects Op The Revolution

The widening discontent — Disappearance of the Tsar — Is a coup d'etat possible ? — Sedition in the army — Effects of the war — Prospects of a jacquerie — The difficulty of making peace — Insolvency of the Oligarchy — Financial situation after a year of war — The balance of trade — Eecent loans and the debt — The " Humbert Safe " of the gold reserve — Costs of the war — Conclusion .... 337

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Portrait : Sergius Stepniak. {After Felix Mosclieles.) Frontispiece

A Street Scene To face 20

Portraits : The Tsar, Grand Duke Sergius, Grand

Duke Vladimir „ 30

Portraits: M. de Witte, M. de Plehve, General Trepov „ 36

After the Flogging. {After Pasternak) „ 54

Prisoners and thetr Friends. {After Pasternak) „ 70

Portraits: N. Lopatin, Vera Figner, H. Myshkin, N.

Shchedrin, Dolgushin, P. S. Polivanov „ 98

The Exile's Death. {After Malchevshy) „ 102

Party of Political Exiles : Archangel . . . . „ 106

The Besieged Exiles in Yakutsk, March, 1904 : Tessler, Teflov, Perasttz, M. Broido, M. Lurie,

kurnatovsky, s. komay, eve broido, s. fried . . „ 116

Flogging with the Plet, Sakhalin „ 126

* Not referred to in the text. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia as one of the leaders of the " Party of Popular Right," which sprang up in 1894-95 and was almost immediately extinguished, nearly all its active members being caught and arrested .

xv xvi ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Portraits: Peter Lavrov, Peter Kropotkin, L. Shichko,

D. Soskice, L. Goldenberg Toface 190

A Mujik, Yasnaya Polyana „ 202

An Evening Party. {After Mahovshy) „ 202

Portraits : Vera Zassulitch, Sophie Perovsky, Elizabeth Koyalsky, Maria Kovalevsky, P. Ivanova, Hope Sigida . „ 220 >

Portraits: Felix Volkhovsky, Katherine Breshkovsky,

Nicholas Tchaykovsky „ 226

Portraits : Maxim Gorky, L. Andreyev, V. Korolenko . „ 332

m. pobyedonostsev, prince d. troubetskoy, and prince

Galitzin » 344 •

Chapter I

mise-en-sc£ne

1. Natural Conditions.

Some of the richest lands on earth, inhabited by some of the poorest peoples — such is the domain of Nicholas II., styled Autocrat of all the Russias. But Nature and History are the only real autocrats. Let us recall the primary conditions of Russian life, before we plunge into the details of the great drama that has lately caught the attention of the outer world.

As it stands to-day, the Empire occupies about one-sixth part of the land-surface of the globe, or two-thirds of the European and one-third of the Asiatic continents. Of this immense territory only one quarter can, even in the widest sense, be described as mother-country, the remainder consisting of lands of conquest and colonization. The British Empire alone, in modern or ancient times, has outmatched its prodigious bulk ; but there is this essential difference, among many others : Maritime separation has tended to preserve the diversity of the several parts of the British Empire, to foster liberty and autonomy, to stimulate international commerce and the modern forms of industry. Territorial continuity in Russia has aided the growth of centralization and arbitrary power amid communities chiefly dependent upon agriculture and internal exchange. In the ancient world, before the era of inventions, territorial continuity was a great advantage; to-day, little England, fogbound in a corner of the North Atlantic, is in close touch with every part of the earth, draws to herself the good things of the most various lands, while Russia stagnates in her vast isolation. Her northern shores are permanently ice-bound, except in the White Sea, which is open for three summer months ; her Pacific coast is closed by ice and fog during the greater part of the year ; even the northern Black Sea ports are frozen in winter ; and, in the Baltic, Libau alone is almost always open. The Chinese frontier, the longest land boundary on the globe, is far removed from the great masses of population of the two empires, and can never rival the southern sea in the attraction of trade. All this unkindness of Nature is capped by the stupidity of man. There are abundant communications with the West — river- courses, canals, roads, and railways — but they are half blocked by the erection of tariff barriers the most formidable known to Protectionist records. Finally, scores of millions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed in the vain endeavour to hold an ice-free fort in the Far East, not as a commercial outlet — if that had been all, there would have been no war with Japan — but as a fortress from which to organize new conquests of territory.

Except on its West and South European, and its Central and East Asiatic borderlands, Russia has no mountains, and few hills. The very slight central elevation from which the waters of the Volga run to the south-east, those of the Duna to the west, and those of the Dnieper and Don to the south, is important as the source and division of these great river systems. Generally, however, the country is strongly contrasted with the remainder of Europe by its flatness. The plain stretches out interminably eastward and westward, the Urals — a line of low, rounded ridges through which a railway is easily carried — not constituting any substantial interruption. Lacking heights and valleys, coastline, and such a moderating influence as the Gulf Stream, climate and scenery both differ widely from those of the West. Apart from the regular seasonal changes, which come about more suddenly, there is a likeness of condition in widely differing latitudes, from the land of the reindeer to that of the camel, which gives some show of reason to the claim that this land was " destined to unity." Cold and heat are everywhere suffered in their extremes ; winds from the polar sea or eastern sands sweep over great stretches of the continent. The rainfall is small, and rivers on which one can drive sledges in winter disappear in the summer heat. In the coldest month, January, the mean temperature varies from — 3° (Centigrade) on the Black Sea to -30° in the north-west provinces. For a period differing, according to the region, between three and seven months of the year, the thermometer is below zero, so that snow covers Eussia at least for a part of the winter; and as this temperature locks up not only the rivers, but also the great lakes and even the inland seas, the climate of winter is more uniformly trying than that of summer. The mean July temperature ranges between -{-15° and + 25°; and a warm summer, with an even rainfall, makes culture of cereals throughout the greater part of the country possible without artificial irrigation. In the Western provinces, the comparatively softer winter and more temperate summer favour winter crops ; in the East and Siberia spring sowing is the rule. The sudden break-up of the long frost in a short, sharp spring, and the release from the idle indoor life of winter, with doors and windows hermetically sealed and the great stove ever hot, to the brightness of the flower-strewn fields and the green forests, has provided native poets and painters with some of their happiest inspirations.

Leaving aside the treeless moorlands or tundras of the extreme north, which are inhabited only by a few half-savage hunters and fishermen, the sand or saline wastes of Central Asia, and the mountain forests of Caucasia, we may divide the immense central plain of Eussia, with all its unity of climate, into two broadly distinguished belts — the northern, and rather the larger, that of forests and lakes, extending from the 65th to the 53rd degrees of latitude ; and that of the steppes, extending, say, from Kiev southward, and broadening somewhat as it reaches the dreary plains of Transcaspia. In the former region, known in Siberia as the taiga, which stretches from the Harz Mountains in Germany right away into Asia, virgin forests of birch, pine, fir, and larch, spring from boggy or sandy soil ; while plentiful river-courses carry down the needed wood and water in exchange for the grain of the South. Agriculture struggles against adverse conditions ; and only in the few industrial centres, especially about Moscow and the mines of the Ural, is there any great increase of population and prosperity. The zone of the steppes, extending from Bessarabia to Trans-Baikalia, is practically treeless, but very fertile. The broad rivers that flow through it, many of them joined by networks of canals, are Nature's compensation for other rigours. The famous tchernoziom or black-mould, which is found from the frontiers of Calicia and Koumania to the southern end of the Urals, makes this region one of the world's great granaries.

Here, then, are the three natural resources of the land which most vitally affect the character and activities of the people — its woods, its waters, and its wheat-fields. Of the rest we need say little except that, in one part or other of the Empire, almost every variety of mineral, vegetable, and animal wealth is to be found. Coal and iron fields occur in parts of the central plain, as well as in Poland, the Urals, Finland, and the Don basin. Salt is plentiful ; and the oil supplies of the Caspian region are of immeasurable value. There is zinc in Poland, tin and copper in Finland, manganese in Ekaterinoslav and Kherson, marble and granite in Finland, lead in the Caucasus. The Ural district is one of the richest fields of minerals — from gold and precious stones downward — in the world ; and the hidden wealth of Siberia is only just beginning to be discovered. The beet crop leaves a substantial surplus of sugar to be exported after supplying the home demand. Tobacco, vines, tea, and cotton are being cultivated in the southern and central Asiatic provinces. Cattle raising and horse breeding are leading occupations in the south and south-west, and dairying in Poland, the north-west provinces, and Siberia. As over a third of the surface of European Eussia is estimated to be wooded (two-thirds of this portion belonging to the State), the importance of forestry is obvious. Eussia is still an unspoiled land for the sportsman ; and her freshwater fisheries are peculiarly valuable.

But if forty-five millions of people can live in increasing comfort on our own comparatively barren islands, though there must be extremes of cold and heat why should there ever be famine in these immense and thinly peopled territories of which Nicholas II. is over-lord ? Evidently, Nature is not the only, perhaps not the hardest, task-master. We must look further.

2. Historical Conditions.

" The immense territory of Russia," says an official writer, M. A. Poutilov,* "which includes the most diverse races, having nothing in common, neither language, nor civilization, nor religious beliefs, forms, from a political point of view, an indivisible unity. Certain parts of the Empire till recently formed autonomous States having their own historic past. At present these countries constitute with Russia a single political organization ; the numerous sovereign titles belonging to the Emperor of Russia are only historical souvenirs recalling the progressive extension of the territory of the Russian State. All the political institutions of the Empire, affecting millions of subjects, are administratively centralized, and are moved by the will of the Autocratic Monarch alone. The system of absolute monarchy is, in fact, deeply rooted in the national history, and closely bound up with the geographical situation of the country. In measure as the Muscovite State grew and became consolidated into the great Russian Empire, the autocratic power of the sovereigns became stronger, and administrative centralization, closely bound to the absolute power, grew and was consolidated with it. Thanks to the policy of the Muscovite Grand Dukes, the country was unified, despite its being open on all sides and subject to repeated invasion ; it could only defend and preserve its independence by giving all its forces into a single hand. The long struggle against West and East

* Essay on the " Political Constitution " in a composite volume edited by M. W. de Kovalevsky, adjoint of the Ministry of Finance, and published by the Kussian Government, in French and Kussian, under the title " Russia at the End of the Nineteenth Century." I shall often quote from this volume, as presenting a recent official statement of facts and deductions, using the French edition (Paris : Paul Dupont, 1900).

accelerated the concentration of power. This is one of the most characteristic phenomena of the history of Russia."

This plea from history is a familiar feature of every orthodox defence of the auto-bureaucratic regime. But a very short review of the facts will serve to show that the truth it contains has long since lost its validity ; that, in fact, it is long since Eussia proper secured her independence ; that the chief growth of despotic power occurred afterwards, and was directed to a quite different end, that of conquest and exploitation ; and that, so far from preserving unity, it is now, especially under the pressure of the newer economic problems, an influence tending to disintegration and even chaos in the State.

Eussian history may, for our present purpose, be divided into five periods. The first of these covers the growth of the Slavic principalities down to the Mongol invasion. Gathered round the overland route from the Baltic to the Black Sea and Bosphorus, with important trade centres at Novgorod and Kiev, spreading down to the mouth of the Dniester, and westward thence into Poland and Pomerania, these peaceful groups long enjoyed a simple agrarian communism under their local rulers, easily removable soldiers of fortune who interfered little with the local authority of the mir and vetche* Western carpet-baggers talk of the Slav being incapable of self-government. The fact is that down to this day the humble mujik has enjoyed a power over the essential conditions of life, political and economic, such as the Western peasant has not possessed since the dawn of the Middle Ages ; and in the form

* See "Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia," by Maxime Kovalevsky (London, 1891) ; " The Empire of the Tsars," by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, vol. i. (London, 1893) ; and " Russia under the Tsars," by Stepniak (London, 1886).

io RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION

of the artel or co-operative society he maintains his primitive collectivism even in the strongholds of modern machine industry. The State, on the other hand, was from the first tainted with alien and anti-popular tendencies. The virus of Byzantinism was even more deadly in the East than that of Romanism in the West. It gave a simple pagan people something of culture, something of ethics and philosophy, but it gave these in a degraded form, and one peculiarly mischievous in that it cut them off from Western thought by its separate alphabet and language, art and political ideals. Even worse, it set upon them the doom of an insane State ambition. First Kiev, then Moscow was to become the new Byzantium, the capital of a yet greater Eastern Empire. The dream of a vast spiritual dominion survives even to this day ; and, while we Western heretics are smiling over the unction of the Tsar and the philippics of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, we should remember that they represent a theocracy not only the most numerous in the world, but the more powerful because it is subject within its own sphere to no such open criticism and organized rivalry as that which Protestantism has opposed to Romanism in the West. Everywhere, and all through the centuries, State and Church have advanced together, mutually helpful, mutually dependent. It is not a single but a double centralization. Yet as the village community, long antedating serfdom and now surviving it, has maintained itself through the centuries against the central despotism, so popular dissent has held its ground against all persecutions, and by constant instinctive reversion to the simplicity of the G-ospels now sets an example of democratic rationalism even to the lands of the Reformation. On the religious side, as on the political, it may be said that, while the Orthodox

MISE-EN-SCENE n

(which does not even pretend to be a Catholic) Church helped at the outset to maintain the national spirit amongst the invader, that justification has long disappeared. Its great body of secular clergy has not reconciled it with the spirit of the people. It may still be useful as a means of bringing pagan tribes into subjection, but the educated class and the workmen of the ruling race are nearly always rationalists, and the more enlightened peasant is either an open nonconformist or conforms only outwardly and for convenience. The imposing structure remains, but the life-spirit has slowly ebbed away. Father Gapon, prison priest and revolutionary leader, was an isolated phenomenon significant only for its rarity.

At the opening of the thirteenth century colonization had extended the power of the small Slavic republics at the cost of the Finnish tribes in the North, and of the Tartars and Turks in the East. The expansion had reached the middle Volga region, and Nijni (or Lower) Novgorod had just been founded, when it was violently terminated by the Northern edge of the crescent of Ottoman conquest. Russia saved the West from the Mongols at a cost which, prolonged through two and a half centuries of crushing tyranny, has left plain marks upon the national character. Only the religion and the village commune were left, and these became the yet more highly treasured possessions of the people. By the middle of the fifteenth century the Muscovite nobles had become partly Tartarized in blood, and thoroughly imbued with the Asiatic idea of rule. The use of the knout and the plet began at this period ; the former was abolished sixty years ago, the latter is still in use. Ivan the Great established the Tsardom by suppressing the petty princes and the nobles, and by defeating the Tartar Khans on the lower Volga and the

Lithuanian invaders on the West. Very soon, for good and ill, Eussia was to have no independent nobility ; to be an aristocrat was simply to be an obedient servant of the Tsar.

So far, the movement towards a central absolutism had some flavour of national liberation. Beggars cannot be choosers, and a people that had been for two hundred and forty years under a hard alien yoke — especially when the primary natural factors of life predisposed it to patient endurance as definitely as our insularity and our temperate climate have disposed us to independence and an equable activity — would be thankful for the smallest blessings that came to them from Moscow. The power given for defence was now, as in lands and times presumedly wiser, turned to the very different purpose of conquest. Ivan III. had married a niece of the last Greek Emperor and assumed the Imperial insignia, the double eagle; Ivan IV., the Terrible, took the full Caesarian title, and proceeded to eclipse all Byzantine records in cruelty, treachery, and superstition. The notes of this third period are the consolidation of the Muscovite State and the beginning of an expansion which offers points both of likeness and of contrast to the then just commencing colonization and conquest of America. While all the energy of West Europe was being turned toward the Atlantic, all the energy of Eussia was being drawn in the opposite direction ; and the hands of a race, as of an individual, surely receive the imprint of its predominant task. The " Grand Tartary" of the old maps was gradually submerged. As the Scottish highlanders went to Virginia, so the Don Cossacks struck out into Asia. The capture of Kazan in 1552 gave Moscow the key to the chief artery of the great central plain, and twenty years later Yermak opened the way into Siberia. If the Americans of European race now number eighty millions, and the Russians in Asia only half as many, it must be remembered not only that communications in the one case were much more difficult, and conditions of climate and soil less favourable, than in the other, but also that expansion was conditioned in the East by a central despotism of growing strength, in the West by almost complete freedom guaranteed by democratic institutions. During what Russian historians call the "time of troubles," which filled most of the seventeenth century, Boris Gudonov practically founded serfdom by a temporary measure, that afterwards became permanent, attaching the vagrant peasant to the soil. But instincts of liberty were not dead among the pastoral Slavs. From its first session in 1550 to its last in 1698, the Zemsky Sobor had an important though intermittent influence. The first Romanov Tsar, Michael, was elected by this National Council in 1613 ; and in the following reign occurred the great movement of religious dissent, the immediate cause of which was the arbitrary innovations of the Patriarch Nikon.

In its fourth historical period Russia takes rank, under Peter the Great and his successors, as a European State, with a standing army, navies on the Baltic and Black Seas, and a Germanized administration. On the one hand, public works, literature, and art are created ; on the other, there is a long succession of court scandals and plots of the grossest description. Serfdom is extended and hardened, the press censorship begins, and the secret police become a power in the land. Finland, Poland, Ukraina, Georgia, Bessarabia, are added to the Empire by force or fraud. But a second attempt to obtain a constitution, in 1730, and the jacquerie of Pugachov in 1773, prove that the spirit of liberty is still not extinguished.