“PEACE POSSIBILITIES IN RUSSIA.”

[From a Russian Correspondent.]

“So the people who made the war are already repenting of their folly!” sneers an exponent of the gospel of cynicism, as he lays down the Times of last Wednesday, after perusing a letter from its St. Petersburg correspondent with the above heading! “Indeed!” I exclaim, with unfeigned surprise, “that is strange news. Who says so? On what authority are we to believe so incredible a statement?”

“The St. Petersburg correspondent of the Times,’’ rejoins the cynic, “who, as the Pall Mall Gazette says, is known as the writer of a famous book on Russia, which appeared some months ago—in other words, all but naming Mr R. Mackenzie Wallace.”

“And Mr Wallace says the people who made the war are repenting of what they did,” I continue. “Where does he say so? 1 don’t see any such statement in his letter.”

“Are you blind?” he asks in amazement. “What can be plainer than his account of the regret with which the war, its objects, and its sacrifices are spoken of in St. Petersburg by men who ‘consider themselves good patriots.’ Here, for instance, he speaks of the statesman or official dignitary, the representative of the St. Petersburg Liberal press, and the commercial man, all of whose sentiments are faithfully reproduced. What more would you have as a proof that those who made the war are repenting in sackcloth and ashes of their Quixotic undertaking?”

I could not help smiling. “And sо that is the evidence upon which you and Mr. Wallace build your theories of ‘peace possibilities in Russia!’ These people—they did not make the war! Not they, indeed! It was not these ‘patriots’ to whose voices our Emperor gave ear!”

And so dismissing my Turkophile acquaintance, let me in a few sentences correct the false impression which that letter in the Times has produced, as the high character and deserved reputation of its author may mislead many.

The English people were told last year, and truly told, that there are two Russias. There is official Russia, and national Russia. There is, in a word, the Russia of St. Petersburg, and the Russia of Moscow. Now, the Times correspondent lives in St. Petersburg, and he transmits faithfully enough to England his impressions of public opinion in St. Petersburg. The only danger is that his readers may mistake St. Petersburg for Russia. But St. Petersburg, thank God! is not Russia, any more than the West-end of London is England. The whole course of European history, for the last two years, would be utterly incomprehensible on the contrary hypothesis. It was because foreigners took their impression of Russia from St. Petersburg that they blundered so grossly about the course which events would take in the East, and they will blunder not less grossly if, disregarding the lessons of the past, they once more entertain the hollow fallacy that the national opinion of Russia can be ascertained in the salons of St. Petersburg or by interviewing official personages on the banks of the Neva.

There are good men and true in St. Petersburg, as there are good men and true even in the clubs of Pall Mall; but the typical St. Petersburger, of whom Mr. Wallace writes, is as destitute of faith and of enthusiasm as the West-ender. But just as you say London is Turkophile, although many Londoners are anti-Turks, so we say St. Petersburg is anti-Slav. But then it must not be forgotten that St. Petersburg is not Russia. Peter the Great styled it “a window out of which Russia could look upon the Western world;” but it is not a window by which the Western world can look in upon Russia. No, St. Petersburg is not Russian. It is cosmopolitan. It is not vitalised with the fierce warm current of Russia’s lifeblood. It stands apart. It undoubtedly exercises a great influence in ordinary times, but at great crises it is powerless. St. Petersburg did its best to avert the war. It sneered at our Servian volunteers—nay, if it had had its way it would have arrested them as malefactors. Those who went first to Servia on their heroic mission were compelled to smuggle themselves as it were out of the country for fear of the interference of officialdom supreme at St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg would, if it could, have suppressed our Slav Committees, and it did its best to induce our generous Czar to violate that knightly word which be pledged at Moscow, amid the unbounded enthusiasm of all his subjects, to take up the cause of the Slavs, “although he had to take it up alone.” In the midst of the great uprising of the nation occasioned by the Bulgarian atrocities and the Servian war, St. Petersburg was comparatively unmoved,—a mere dead cold cinder in the midst of the glowing warmth of our national revival. All the diplomatic negotiations which preceded the war are inexplicable unless this is borne in mind. My countrymen rising in the sacred wrath kindled by the inexpiable wrongs inflicted upon their kinsmen, pressed sternlу, steadily onward to redress three wrongs, to terminate for ever the status quo, which rendered them chronic, inevitable. Official Russia, unable to arrest the movement entirely, nevertheless attempted, and attempted in vain, to divert it by diplomatic contrivances. We had one device after another invented in rapid succession to avoid the war by which alone our brethren could be freed. It is humiliating to recall the tortuous windings of Russian diplomacy, the inexhaustible expedients by which the Petersburg party endeavoured to baulk the fulfilment of the national aspirations.

The last of these was the Protocol! By that famous document official Russia consented for the sake of the European concert and the peace of the Continent, to postpone indefinitely all action on behalf of the Southern Slavs, receiving in return for this sacrifice of her mission a promise that the Great Powers would watch the Turks, and after a period of time, not particularly specified, when it had once more for the thousandth time been demonstrated to the satisfaction even of the diplomatic mind that Turkish domination is utterly incapable of reform, improvement, or other amelioration than its total destruction, the Powers promised—oh, great concession!—to consider what should then be done to save our tortured brethren from the Ottoman horde. This was the patent St. Petersburg device for disappointing the hopes of the Russian people, and eagerly these officials, representatives of the Liberal press and commercial men, who are now prating of peace to the Times correspondent, hoped that it would slave off what they derided then, as they are deriding now—the “Quixotic enterprise” of the War of Liberation. In Moscow, however—that great heart of the Russian Empire—the suspense occasioned by the negotiations about the Protocol was one long drawn out agony. Those who lived in the very heart of the national movement can never forget the terrible forebodings of these dismal days. We all moved under the pressure of a great dread. “Was it to end thus? Were all our sacrifices to be sacrificed; was the blood of our martyrs spilt in vain? Was Holy Russia Holy Russia no more, but a mere appanage to cosmopolitan St. Petersburg? When the news came that the English Cabinet was insisting upon alterations we breathed more freely. “Demobilisation!” we cried. “No, it is not demobilisation; it is demoralisation! The Czar is too noble, too good a Russian; he will never consent to that!” But, then, again the news came that even that was to be accepted, and the sky grew very dark overhead, and we went about as if in the chamber of death, speaking in low accents and oppressed by a terrible fear of that national dishonour which we Russians, strange as it may appear to some people, dread even more than death! At last, to our great relief, the cloud lifted, the darkness disappeared, for the Turks rejected the Protocol; and the declaration of war was as grateful to us as the bright burst of sunlight in the east after a long, dark, stormy, night.

And here may I venture, as a Russian, to say that, for securing by his provisoes the rejection of the Protocol by the Turks, Lord Derby has at least done one good thing at the English Foreign Office. He may not have intended it but, as a matter of fact, he was our most efficient ally. But for him St. Petersburg might have triumphed. Russia might have been disgraced, and the Turks might have received a new lease of power. The Slav world has reason to thank him for having secured the victory of our cause by rendering it impossible for Russia to refrain from drawing the sword in the cause of the Southern Slavs.

Even St. Petersburg could not shrink from the contest after that last deadly blow was administered by the Turks to the schemes of the diplomatists. The war began. It is going on, and it will go on, until the end is accomplished. No babble of St. Petersburg will now be able to bring that war to a dishonourable close; and no peace can be honourable that does not secure the object of the war. St. Petersburg is even worse than usual just now. Its best elements are in Bulgaria and Romania. The Czar is there, and the sight of the fiendish atrocities perpetrated by the Turks upon our patient soldiers can only confirm his resolution to persevere “until the end.” And behind him there stands, arrayed as one man, the whole Russian nation, ready to endure any sacrifices rather than leave the Turk to re-establish his desolating sovereignty over our brethren.

Is it so strange to Englishmen that there should be two Russias? Are there not two Englands? The England that is true to English love for liberty, and the England that sees in liberty itself only a text for a sneer? There is the England of St. James’ Hall and the England of the Guildhall. An England with a soul and a heart, and an England which has only a pocket. In other words, there is the England of Mr Gladstone and the England of Lord Beaconsfield. We Russians, too, have our sordid cynics, but they are in a minority. They may sneer, but they cannot rule; and, with that distinction, let me conclude by saying that these Petersburg Tchinovniks, whose views Mr Wallace reproduces, are now what they have always been, the Beaconsfields of Russia!

November, 1877.

O.K.