November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Basking in the Emperor’s favor, Guchkov was also called that summer to the Peterhof Conference, to help draft proposals for the Duma. All present proposed a complex system of election by classes, to ensure their own leadership, except Shipov and Guchkov, who wanted nationwide elections, but in stages, not direct, which would ensure that at each level candidates were sufficiently well known to the electorate.

  Surely the holders of supreme power, shown a rational road forward, would take it. No—they had blundered into this war and bungled it, and were now in a stupid and costly hurry to extricate their feet from the accursed Asian morass. At home, in Russia, instead of taking bold steps they made do all summer with small, cowardly, belated ones, and when they realized that the water was up to their necks rushed out the muddled 30 October Manifesto. The Manifesto was wrested from the regime not because it lacked physical force (the force was there, and was exhibited two months later in the suppression of an armed uprising in Moscow), but because the Tsar’s seldom used willpower gave way at times to fits of uncertainty, and at such times people could take from him whatever they pleased.

  The Manifesto was condemned by right and left alike. The attitude of the educated public was: he’s taken fright, the Tsar’s backing down, let’s extort more from him, what we’ve got so far is nothing! (When, in November, Guchkov proposed that the Zemstvo Congress condemn violence and assassination as means of political struggle the “constitutional” majority rejected his wording!) The Kadets refused to join Witte’s cabinet, half of which he suggested should be drawn from the “public.”

  Others who were invited and refused were Shipov, Guchkov, Stakhovich, president of the Orel zemstvo, and Prince Evgeni Trubetskoy, believing that they were invited only for the sake of appearances, that they would be mixed in with the old administrators, and that there would be no real reform of policy. Shipov, indeed, insisted that they were a minority, and that the leftists, who were in the majority, were the ones to be invited if the public was to support the government. However, in the course of long conversations as they traveled together from Moscow to Petersburg and back, to advise on the establishment of a legislative Duma or discuss their entry into the cabinet, Shipov, Guchkov, and Stakhovich identified and confirmed the basis for a new party.

  New parties proliferated after the Manifesto. More and more of them, smaller and smaller. This problem of party alignment caught Shipov’s group at a disadvantage. They were, of course, against all forms of adversarial politics. But now they had to accept constitutional government and political parties as necessary evils, given that they had already been introduced by the will of the monarch. There was no other choice: they had to bear their share of the burden under the new system. Then again, now that a constitution and the rule of law had been adopted—and these were for practical purposes the only matters on which Shipov was at odds with the zemstvo majority—there was no practical reason why he should not join the Kadet Party. What kept them apart was, in his words, the remoteness of the Kadets from “the fundamental characteristics of the Russian national spirit.”

  Guchkov, however, was in favor of a constitutional monarchy of the very sort promised by the Manifesto, with a government responsible to the monarch, not to the political parties. He did not approve of the aggressive attitude of the left zemstvo men, of the Kadets’ overinsistence on parliamentarianism for its own sake. As far as he was concerned, the Manifesto was good enough as it was, and his worry was that the regime might stealthily retract it bit by bit.

  Shipov and Guchkov agreed that the time had come to unite politically all those who wanted to put the Manifesto into practice, and to establish a new system of government while preserving the authority of the monarch—in other words, all who rejected both immobility and revolutionary upheavals, who had some feeling for historical roots, for what had endured the test of the ages and must be preserved in this new phase of development. This required the creation, not of a party, but of an alliance of parties, so that electors would not form excessively small groups, aggravating party divisions with their disagreements on particular questions, though they were at one on the main issue. The first such alliance would not oppose the government, but support it.

  Early in November 1905 its sixteen founding members announced the formation of the Union of 30 October, which invited small parties to join it without abandoning their programs. Entry was denied only to supporters of republican democracy. The main planks in the new Union’s program included: all the usual civil rights and immunities; equalization of the rights of the peasantry with those of other classes; state and crown lands to be declared a fund for the relief of land hunger; confiscation of private land to be permitted, but only in exceptional circumstances and with fair compensation; insurance for workers, limitation of the workday to eight hours, and even the right to strike, on condition that it did not harm the rest of the population or the interests of the state; direct progressive taxation (the richer you are, the more you pay), and the reduction of indirect taxes.

  The organizers of the Union of 30 October wanted the Duma to be convened as soon as possible—imagining that this would be the beginning of a close union between monarch and people. But the weeks went by quickly, bringing with them new shocks and new ordeals for Russia: the drunken mutiny at Kronstadt, the naval mutiny at Sevastopol, disturbances in the provinces, assassinations, other terrorist acts, all Siberia paralyzed, the armed uprising in Moscow, and in reply a “state of emergency” instead of “the unshakable foundations of the civic freedoms” promised by the Manifesto. The left and the government seemed to be trying to anticipate and outdo each other—in toppling the ill-starred Manifesto and trampling it underfoot. And the Union of 30 October, which had hoped to base all its activity on the Manifesto, had to contend for its most cherished principles before it was fully established itself.

  The organizers explained their complicated, pacific middle-of-the-road line as follows:

  Shipov: Anyone who holds dear the peaceful transformation of the state order must acknowledge that the Manifesto marks the end of the revolutionary movement in our country, and show his goodwill by contributing to the implementation of the new principles. We distance ourselves both from the left-wing and from the right-wing parties. From the right because they strive to preserve the old system of ministerial command, which brought us to Tsushima. From the left because the whole Russian people is devoted to the idea of monarchy, and not to the despotism of an oligarchy or of the masses. The monarch is above all political parties and the freedom and rights of every citizen are best assured under constitutional monarchy. Unlike the parties of the left, we believe that man must be not only free but imbued with a moral ideal.

  Here the chairman of its Central Committee was greatly exaggerating, attributing his own lofty program to the motley alliance which constituted the Union. For Shipov, the objectives of the Union coincided with his own old dream of eliminating bad temper, prejudiced suspicion, and mutual distrust from political struggle and reducing the political struggle as far as possible to amicable elucidation of debatable questions in order to reach agreements acceptable to the opposing sides.

  Guchkov: We cannot take a negative attitude toward what was created by old Russia. The monarchical principle also must be carried over in revised form into the new Russia.

  In the Huntsman’s Club on Vozdvizhenskaya Street, with three hundred beautifully dressed people listening to the self-assured orators, the “Octobrist” Congress might look like a triumph: the complicated middle road of social development was clearly expressed in the speeches and unquestioningly accepted by the audience. But when the Duma elections began soon after, the minor parties and their candidates quickly split off from the Union of 30 October and joined whichever opportunist bloc might get them elected. So that the Union, apparently so strong and solid, proved to be jerry-built. While educated society, more and more exasperated, more and more convinced that no agreement with “that regime” was possible, did not vote for th
e eccentric preachers of the middle line—whatever that meant—and of compromise. At the Duma elections early in 1906 the Octobrists were crushingly defeated, even Shipov and Guchkov failing to win seats. It looked as though their efforts during the preceding months to implant their high principles in a receptive political body had been in vain.

  It was a critical moment for both of them, but although the difference in age between them was only eleven years, for Shipov it marked the beginning of a sharp political decline, whereas Guchkov rose swiftly to higher things. It was not so much because of their defeat as for a number of other contributory reasons that they parted company, and indeed were estranged, at this point. Shortly after their failure in the elections, Shipov ceded the presidency of the Union of 30 October to Guchkov. Their parting can be seen as the passing of an age and the beginning of a new one, but in any case it is one of life’s rules that no one should linger on the stage once he has played his part to the full. For Shipov that time came when he was fifty-five. The lucky ones are those whom it overtakes at seventy. Some are squeezed out at thirty.

  Our reason for devoting so much attention to Dmitri Shipov in our survey of events is not that he influenced the course of Russian history, but rather that once the cruelest years, the years of great convulsions, set in he lost all influence. Once the social upheaval began, the beneficent, moderating activities of earlier, quieter years, which had brought some success for his patient, deep-laid plans, and given him influence throughout Russia, were succeeded by a series of defeats, honorable retractions, and complete withdrawal into inaction, a recoil into helplessness. Our reason for looking so attentively at the lessons Shipov teaches us is in fact that in a quarter of a century in public life he seems not to have diverged by a single degree from a moral concept determined by his religious beliefs, seems never at any stage to have become embittered, to have lost control of himself in the heat of the battle, to have sought revenge on rivals, to have been underhanded, or self-seeking, or greedy for fame—never! Instead, his calm, meticulous mind applied that moral concept to Russian history, not somewhere behind the scenes but at the center of events, and in what were Russia’s most dangerous and fateful months he was called in to advise the Emperor and offered a post in the government (in July 1906 that of Prime Minister). But the advice he gave was never taken. And he refused all governmental posts, after weighing the balance of forces and of feelings. This was the curious fate of so many Russian men of action: for a variety of reasons they nearly always refused to act.

  The case of Shipov raises an awkward question: Does history admit of consistently moral activity? Or at what level of moral maturity in a given society does such activity become possible? Even seventy years later, in the most open of countries, with centuries of political maturity and flexibility behind them, how often does agreement and compromise result from a higher understanding, a friendly willingness to give way and oblige another, rather than from an equilibrium of selfish interests and forces? Hardly ever.

  On an imperceptibly bending path our eyes assure us that the way lies straight ahead, and we belatedly realize that we have described a circle. So it was in Shipov’s political life: in this last, too stormy year he had rounded a bend without noticing it. Only a year earlier he had thought that the constitutional path would be a disastrous one for Russia. Then, in obedience to the monarch’s will, he had become one of the proponents of the Manifesto of 30 October, a stauncher one than the Emperor himself. Now that victory—just about, still precarious—was with the regime, Shipov, without realizing it, began siding more and more frequently with the Kadets: “The regime must give up its struggle against society.”

  In those very months hundreds of officials were killed or received death threats. (A meeting of Moscow tramway workers “officially” voted to kill Guchkov’s brother Nikolai, mayor of Moscow, for his actions against strikers.) Yet Shipov did not go on to say, “And society must give up its struggle against the regime.” He recoiled from Stolypin’s vigorous measures, claiming that he “does not acknowledge the moral principle in the state order and state life,” and was inclined to put the latter at the mercy of the Kadets, the very ones for whom morality would always dissolve in expediency.

  When Shipov and Stolypin met to discuss the possibility of forming a joint government, circumstances were conspiring in their favor. There was, however, never a glimmer of agreement between them, but instantaneous antipathy, which provoked Shipov, usually so mild and peaceable, into making an incoherent, offensive statement, later spelled out in more logical form. Stolypin (he said) was not sincerely committed to the Manifesto, but in fact opposed to it; he wanted to run the country in the tradition of the old absolutism; he was contemptuous of representative institutions, and bore the main responsibility for the dissolution of the First Duma; he had a limited political horizon; and in general a superficial worldview; he did not aim at the general good and the higher truth; he was, moreover, conceited and domineering, and he had succeeded in subjugating the Emperor to his pernicious but potent influence.

  For his part, Stolypin probably thought that Shipov, loftily surveying the scene with saintly eyes, lacked a practical grasp of things, tactical resourcefulness, speed, and energy, that he was a marvelous talker, but incapable of any action whatsoever at moments of crisis—and so was not up to the task of saving Russia.

  What makes Shipov’s case all the sadder is that in his last years, when he was no longer elected to the Duma but more and more unceremoniously sidelined, excluded even from minor posts, even from the district zemstvo and the Moscow City Duma, and while he dawdled over his memoirs, his vision became not keener but weaker, as a half-tearful film of loving kindness and inflexible faith clouded his view. Finishing off his reminiscences in the autumn of 1918, he informs us that the last great war in history is over, that no such bloody catastrophe will ever happen again, that the ideas of militarism and imperialism have been discredited forever, that religious consciousness has triumphed, especially in the United States, that the God-bearing and God-seeking Russian people will in the near future rise again from its knees, and that the intelligentsia will bring its views into line with the people’s ideals—witness the conversion of the terrorist-socialist Savinkov to Christianity.

  That Shipov ended in this way makes us wonder how quick and accurate his assessment of events and his decisions would have been if he had agreed to head the Russian government in June 1906. (This is not a purely imaginary exercise. Prince G. E. Lvov, a close political associate of Shipov, took part with him in the same discussions. Lvov showed in 1917 just what their whole policy was worth.) If you regard the people as a stalwart God-bearer—why indeed not entrust them to the caprices of a Kadet Duma? Nothing can harm a God-bearer, he will rise to his feet whatever happens. From our distance it is easier to judge which of them, Shipov or Stolypin, was more right or more wrong. They themselves, in those hot weeks, could only rely on intuition.

  For Guchkov too, after he parted company with Shipov, Stolypin was a fateful figure. One who sundered the recent allies as though with a saber stroke. At their first meeting, thanks to that intuition which is so often our salvation, Guchkov took an instant and unqualified liking to his strong, confident, brave contemporary. We often fail to realize how much our likes and dislikes are determined not by beliefs but by temperament. Guchkov recognized in Stolypin a man of action, strong-willed and clear-minded, with a definite view on every question, straightforward in all his pronouncements—and one in whom “things Russian are at the center of everything.”

  Guchkov himself had returned from his travels and his wars at forty-five, still to all appearances a young man. His one aim, his one eager ambition, was to set public life on a new course. He took the helm of the Union of 30 October from Shipov when it was on the rocks, and sought to carry forward the plan which they had launched together: that of amicable collaboration between the regime and society. Guchkov found it strange to hear from Shipov that, though politically active, he
condemned political strife.

  For me, on the contrary, it is always very satisfying to give my opponent a good drubbing!

  The fight itself, the cut and thrust, the excitement of combat, were Guchkov’s passion. Even in the most turbulent months, when Russia was threatened with collapse and disintegration, he rejected as absurd Shipov’s advice to cede Russia to a Kadet Duma and let both of them realize their mistake later. Guchkov could not stand the Kadets, and missed no opportunity to hit out at them: even at a provincial zemstvo board meeting, discussing a turn of phrase in some minor local matter, the Kadets must be made to choke on it.

  But in spite of this attitude, and for all his sympathy with Stolypin, Guchkov could not bring himself to join his first cabinet: that would have meant crossing the gulf between government and society. On Aptekarsky Island, a few months before the explosion, Stolypin offered him the post of Minister of Trade and Industry, and Guchkov showed his approval of the government’s policy, but doggedly made his acceptance conditional on invitations to various other representatives of society to join the government. No agreement was reached, but Guchkov promised support for Stolypin from “society’s” side.

  At about the same time the Emperor also felt a need to talk to Guchkov again and received him at Peterhof. This was during the Sveaborg mutiny, but what struck Guchkov was Peterhof’s dreamy tranquillity. The Emperor was in a good humor, affable and charming, as so often, irresistibly charming. He also invited Guchkov to join the government. But it was obvious that he did not realize the seriousness of the situation. He might have been the monarch of some other country. On some other planet. In his view any updating of domestic policy was superfluous and he was unwilling to tie his hands with any definite program.