Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1875 — Russia at Home. [ARTICLE]

Russia at Home.

M. Koscheteff, a leading Russian political writer, has lately published in Germany what a Loadon 7Vma> correspond•at pronounces the most remarkable book on Russia at home that has appeared for many years, and which he says could not have been published in Russia. The followingsketch is contained in the introduction: From 1825 to 1855 we were laden with the pressure of a heavy yoke. There was no change, no variety. Of civic life we had not a trace. If the press so much as hinted at the possibility of the public participating in the government, all manner of disagreeables and even dangers threatened the unwary writer. The provincial nobility assemblies were a mere name, transacting hardly any business, and leading only to contention and scandal. The elgctibn of the presiding members of the various local courts of justice, as well as the other nobility elections, were governed by interested motives. In the towns self-government was a farce, being in the hands of the most unenlightened, and forced to bend to the dictates of the impci ial authorities. The courts of law inspired no confidence. Even the honorable and disinterested, when they happened to act as judges, because of thtwule of secrecy, were suspected, if not of corruptness, at least of carelessness and pliability. Commerce was at a very low ebb; credit hardly exand the bane of serfdom lay upon the shoulders of many millions. As to literature, it was confined to poetry, comedy and novels, which might be immoral with impunity, but dared not be Elitical. Neither in his journals nor in > books could a Russian venture to speak of public affairs, or vent the rage and spite of the moment. In a word, the people were condemned to a living death, while in the upper sphere arbitrariness prevailed without a check. The Russian had to conceal his thoughts in the innermost recesses of Ins soul. Only in his heart he felt himself a being created after the image of his Maker, with the right of independent will and deed. The cannon of the Crimea at last sobered despotism, woke up the nation to a sense of its political wants, and conferred untold benefits upon the country at large. We may not be satisfied with the rights now vested in our municipal and representative assemblies; we may smart under the tyranny of the administrative officials placed over us; we may suffer from the new laws, little adapted to public needs and constantly changed by amendments, supplements and fresh statutes nipping the privileges'conferredj upon us in the first ten years ot the present reign; but, notwithstanding all this, we have representative institutions in towns, districts and provinces in which we may discuss our wants, regulate financial matters, and regulate our taxes iiflhf way we-think best. Nor arc our personal or property rights any longer endangered; ana, although we are still liable to be banished for life to the far East -without judicial procedure, although our personal freedom and rights of property may be infringed with impunity by the police and civil service generally, yet despotic action of this sort is not the rule but has become the exception. The administration of justice is public and no more governed by the dead letter of the law or the arbitrary interpretation of the Judge. Justices ot the Peace elected by ourselves and juries give their verdicts in accordance with the dictates of conscience? Taxes and imposts of every sort are. it is true, steadily on the increase; the public expenditure has assumed terrible proportions. What we pay is not always fairly distributed among the various classes, and what we spend is not always productive. But the public estimates at any rate tell us what we are expected to pay. and the Comptroller’s reports enlighten us as to how it has been employed. All this formerly was not the case; and, although it may be sorry’ comfort to know what is going,on if we have no voice in it, we are at any rate treated as beings capable of forming conclusions from what we hear and see. Again, though our financial affairs are constantly getting more entangled by the fluctuating value of the rouble and the wonderful measures of the financial minister, still our commerce is more animated and, though artificially propped up, has led tP a good deal of speculative enterprise. We have commercial and mortgage banks; we suffer not so much from the absence of credit as from want of system and order in according it; and altogether in financial matters, though not rejoicing in the broad light of prosperity. yet we are walking in the dawn that * precedes the day. Our rural arangements certainly do not enable either the peasantry or the landed proprietors to develop their resources successfully, yet it is a great fact that serfdom has been abolished, that corporal punishment for the peasants is greatly restricted, that the relations of the villagers and their former masters are better defined, end that agriculture has a fair chance of developing upon reasonable if not upon the best foundations that could be devised. The prosperity of the peasant, indeed, has but slightly increased, it it has not actually decreased; but this is partly the result of the peasant himself, unfit to make use of his privileges, and choosing drunkenness rather than work, and partly must be attributed to the landed proprietors preferring the dependent position of a Government employe or the questionable morality ot jointstock enterprise to the hard work of agricttlt ire and civic usefulness. Possibly the non-improvement or decline of the peasantry arises from other causes too. The pea- mts, so long in a state of absolute dep> udence on the landed proprietors and the police, were suddenly accorded a mucu more extended degree of selfgovernm< nt than fell to the lot of the nobility or townspeople —8 circumstance which naturally led to the new privilege being un appreciated and gradually falling into disuse. Thus the officials placed immediately over them, from being upright and liberal at the time serfdom Whs abolished, have by degrees become as arbitrary as the worst landed proprietors of the former regime. The new generation of rural superintendents are very different from their predecessors. As to the landed proprietors, they are forced into the service ot the State or induced to live in the towns, but very insufficiently protected by the police,'who have no power nowadays to guard them frojn injury, yet retain their former despotic habits and their traditional skill in creat ing confusion wherever they appear,and it is intelligible that the landed proprie tors should have no particular penchant for living on thejr estates. Some fancy that . to increaae the police force would remedy the evil; but it is not numerical strength that is wanted. In this, as in many other respects, we ought to be guided by the example of England, where the strength

of the police consists in that it acts legally, and therefore may count upon the support of all. Passing on to the sphere of literature, we find journals and books most arbitrarily treated, articles prohibited; circulation restricted, and private orders issued forbidding allusion in the press to this or that. Yet, although we may not openly speak in print of the shortcomings of the administration and other important political topics, we use a little dexterity and savoir fare, we cah discuss our needs and desires and advert to the great questions of the day. Hence it will be seen that our general condition differs very advantageously from that anterior to 1855. How then is it that people' acquainted with the past as the present regime are inclined to look upon the present as even worse than the past, that they feel more than ever trodden under foot, and have a sensation of a general decline of political health and strength ? How is it that the young, especially, just entering upon life, are overwhelmed by a feeling of deep, unqualified despair?

It is not difficult to account for this phenomenon. Present misfortunes are always more aggravating than reminiscences of the past; and a man imprisoned for life more easily accommodates himself to the exigencies of his position than one let out at intervals and cooped up again at the pleasure of his jailers. If a prisoner is granted immunities and deprived of them alternately, his nerves are shattered by the process; and if he does not resolve upon some desperate step his very soul is crushed out of him by the intolerable see-saw to his feelings. Such is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Serfdom has been abolished ; provincial and’municipal representative assemblies have been instituted ; a public and conscientious administration of justice is allowed; liberty of the press promised, and to a certain extent conceded—much, in short, is done to introduce law and justice into the land of the Russians. When all these benefits were bestowed on us how else could we feel but like prisoners set free from the cell to wander at will about God’s fair earth? What else could we think but that a new era would begin, in** which we should be permitted to share in the general progress of humanity? But what has happened? His Majesty’s will having conceded to us a costly budget of rights, embodied in a number of fundamental laws, those appointed to carry out these laws immediately set to work to render them nugatory. Little by little, by crooked interpretation and amendment, the official executors of the imperial will, wise only in restriction, have changed the original spirit of the statutes, and instead of preserving and developing them have suspended their operation and even perverted their sense. We are in hopes of entering at last upon an epoch when the law would be supreme, and after all are disappointed to find the inherent evils of our political existence redoubled and the old falsehoods preserved under the guise of new words. However it may be to the interest of both Czar and nation to place the greatest confidence in each other and act in perfect harmony, the bureaucracy, having a presentiment that such a state of things would do away with themselves, are indefatigably engaged in preventing the alliance between sovereign and people. Into the Emperor’s ear they whisper suspicion and distrust; the people they deprive of privileges already conceded, producing dissatisfaction and discontent.