BOOKS.
RUSSIA IN THE MELTING-POT.*
Ma. ROBERT WILTON, the Times correspondent at Petrograd, has during the past fourteen years been an eyewitness of events in Russia, " able to study at first hand the manifold aspects of Revolu- tion and Reaction, as each in its turn was exploited by our relentless foe." He has had the personal acquaintance of most of the men prominent in Russian history during that period, and he has delayed the communication of much of his knowledge because the whole truth could not be told during the Old Regime, and he preferred not to deal in half-truths. He was often tempted to put his information into book form, because few people understood better than he the depth of British ignorance of Russia, and the harm this ignorance wrought in our relations with Russia.
This elaborate, informing, and thoroughly readable contribution to recent Russian history is welcome now : one regrets that Mr. Wilton was not in a position to enlighten us earlier in the war, and on some matters even before the war—for example, as to the scope and force of German penetration and German influence in high places. Assuredly Mr. Wilton does not despair of the recovery of Russia from her present chaos and anarchy. It may be that he does not look upon her even as out of the present war, so far as her Allies are concerned. He believes in the Cossacks, the riverine tradesmen, and the Mussulrnan element—which alone numbers twenty-five millions—as a force which will defeat the Leninists, whose aim is the dismemberment of Russia, and her subordination to German plans and ambitions. Bolshevism is strictly limited to its destructive function. It lays waste but cannot repair :—
" A new Russia is springing up amid the ruins of the old. The day of Lenin and destruction draws to a close. Do not believe outward aspects and appearances. Russia is not dead. Her agony, still upon her, is not the agony of death but the agony of a living, breathing organism, struggling to find expression, wrestling against the fiend of Bolshevism that has gripped her when she was at her weakest."
We have turned to the close of this volume, like the novel-reader of a former era, impatient to he assured of the " happy ending "- in which respect there was seldom disappointment—before settling down to the story. Mr. Wilton's narrative divides itself into three main sections. " Slavdom, the Tatars, and the Autocracy " covers a discussion of the Bureaucracy and the Okhrana—the police department kept for the protection not of the individual but of the Autocracy from internal foes ; the National Conscience ; Rasputism and the Court ; German influences ; Revolution versus Ewo'Aition. A second section deals with such topics as the
• !:eosin's Jg.ne. By Robert Wilton. London; Edward Arnold. [15s. neg..'
Revolution of last year ; the Soviet ; Coalition and Bolshevism ; Abdication and After ; " No Annexation and No Indemnity." And the third section describes Russia at War, drawing a sharp contrast between her magnificent troops and her poor armament, and giving a clear and vivid account of the brilliant success and the crushing disaster of Soldau-Tannenberg, which sent refugees from East Prussia in flocks to Berlin, which relieved the pressure on the Franco- British front at an anxious time, and which ended miserably. through faulty generalship, in a loss of about one hundred and twenty thousand men and the suicide of Samsonoff, who had been forced to surrender all his guns and four hundred thousand rounds of shell—a crushing blow to a munition-hampered State.
Two very interesting chapters deal with Rasputin, the evil genius of the House of Romartoff in its latest phase, and with the abdication of the Emperor. No doubt the Autocracy was " trashed for over- topping " ; but it was Rasputin who brought it to the ground. Nominally the Tsar ruled Russia. In fact the Empress ruled the Tsar and Rasputin ruled the Empress. Of them the Tsar said to an old General who ventured to mention this sore subject : " 1 prefer five Rasputins to one hysterical woman." This " drunken. perverted, lazy peasant," who had nevertheless plenty of driving- power, dispensed official favour to those who would buy it of him. " A few words scrawled by him to a Minister would bring immediate results. . . . No Minister's career, no woman's honour were safe from the enterprise of this ' holy man.' . . . The Grand Duke Nicholas, when he was Generalissimo, openly announced his inten- tion of hanging Rasputin, if he ever got hold of him—which was perhaps the chief reason of the Grand Duke's transfer to the Caucasus." Rasputin worried the Tsar out of Petrograd and into the nominal command of the Russian Armies in the field, thus obtaining still ampler scope for intrigue. That Rasputin was a traitor he openly boasted on the night when he was " removed," at a supper arranged for his demise by some young Guardsmen. " Peace will soon be proclaimed, I am attending to it." That was on December 29th, 1916. He had attended to the foundations of a German peace only too thoroughly. When the Empress went in disguise to the mortuary where Rasputin's body lay, she was more convinced than ever that he was a saint, " because his arms were crossed."
The abdication of Nicholas II. took place in the saloon of his railway carriage, on a bleak winter day. Addressing his old enemy Guchkov, he said :- " Tell me the whole truth.' We come to tell your Majesty that all the troops in Petrograd are on our side.' And, with slow emphasis, Even your own bodyguard.' This was news to the unhappy Sovereign. He quivered under the blow. They also,' he murmured. Yes,' went on Guchkov, pitilessly. It is useless to send more regiments. They will go over as soon as they reach the station.' I know it,' replied the Tsar. The order has already been given to them to return to the front.' Then, after a slight pause, the Tsar asked : What do you wish me to do ? ' " So the last Tsar of All the Russias did as he was bidden, being allowed to vary his instructions slightly. " I cannot part with my boy. I shall hand the throne to my brother. You understand my motives." A little later his boy, evidently primed by the Empress, asked M. Kerensky : " Had my father the right to abdicate for me ? Could he renounce my rights ? " To this the
Minister of Justice, taking some time for thought, replied : 1 think that as your father he had not the right, but as the Emperor he had the right."
Among the conditions making for upheaval, in the early part of 1917, were the queues at the bakeries and provision-shops, " the wildest stories of profiteering," the popular ignorance of the Allies and their doings, and even of the achievements of the Russian Army —the German-influenced Press saw to this—the drinking of methy- lated spirits, and the refusal of the Empress to allow the County Councils to take charge of the food supply. Mr. Wilton traces patiently, through exhaustive detail, the maze of Provisional Committees, Socialist cliques, Dtuna resolutions, and Soviet maul- festoes inciting tho troops to mutiny, whose result was anarchy, and anarchy made jocund by lofty political ideals coupled with unlimited loot:
" Anarchy in the Government was multiplied a hundredfold in the country. The workmen simply did not know how much to ask in wages and emoluments. At one great rubber factory they brought a number of sacks with the request that they should be filled with money—' the war profits of three years '—or they would put the directors into the sacks and drown them.' . . . Mansions pillaged, farmsteads destroyed, cattle maimed, landowners, small and great, murdered or fugitive—such was the common relaort. Even prisoners of war took a hand in the game. . . . I have huddled in a first-class compartment, pellmell with soldiers, nurses, and wounded men, the only passenger with a ticket, and seen heavy sacks of loot landing in our midst., preceded by fragments of glass and followed by the owners. Food and goods trains were systemati- cally plundered by deserters. . . . At the end of 1917 Russia's debts, unsecured by any assets, exceeded the colossal figure of £1,500,000,000. Such were the net results of the Revolution. It had cost ' over £4,000,000 a day."
Space does not permit more than a reference to the chapters on such recent events as tho Bolshevist Betrayal and the Fight with Bolshevism—which, in Mr. Wilton's view, is thoroughly dis- credited by its traitorous action ; nor will the millions of peasant freeholders accept the Leninist principle of confiscation. We have seen Russia breaking up into its constituent parts, but " this tendency is conservative rather than centrifugal—intrinsically a revolt against anarchy." Mr. Wilton's wish for Russia is a Consti- tutional Monarchy, under Alexis Nikolaievitch, who " would not attempt the impossible task of personal government under which his father broke down." But one must not take too sanguine a view of the early reconsolidation of a State whose European population includes sixty per cent.—over seventy millions—of ignorant peasants. Out of a number of illustrations of varying interest in this volume that which faces p. 134 bears significantly on this point. It is an Army Committee of Four, of whom two are officers, in private session : and the N.C.O. and the private wear the wandered " expression of a dock labourer or stoker suddenly set down to a Greek chorus or a page of conic sections.
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