Under such conditions a revolutionary government had ample opportunity for immensely improving upon the Russian law. It was bound to accomplish an act of justice towards the serfs—whose condition in Poland was as bad as, and often worse than in Russia itself—by granting them better and more definite terms of emancipation. But nothing of the sort was done. The purely nationalist party and the aristocratic party having obtained the upper hand in the movement, this fundamentally important matter was left out of sight. This made it easy for the Russian government to win the peasants to its side.
Full advantage was taken of this mistake when Nicholas Milútin was sent to Poland by Alexander II with the mission of liberating the peasants in the way he intended doing it in Russia—whether the landlords were ruined in consequence or not. “Go to Poland; apply there your Red programme against the Polish landlords,” said Alexander II to him; and Milútin, together with Prince Cherkássky and many others, really did their best to take the land from the landlords and give good-sized allotments to the peasants.
I once met one of the Russian functionaries who went to Poland under Milútin and Prince Cherkássky. “We had full liberty,” he said to me, “to turn over the land to the peasants. My usual plan was to go and to convoke the peasants’ assembly. ‘Tell me first,’ I would say, ‘what land do you hold at this moment?’ They would point it out to me. ‘Is this all the land you ever held?’ I would then ask. ‘Surely not,’ they would reply with one voice. ‘Years ago these meadows were ours; this wood was once in our possession; these fields, too,’ they would say. I would let them go on talking all over and then would ask: ‘Now, which of you can certify under oath that this land or that land has ever been held by you?’ Of course there would be nobody forthcoming—it was all too long ago. At last, some old man would be thrust out from the crowd, the rest saying: ‘He knows all about it; he can swear to it.’ The old man would begin a long story about what he knew in his youth, or had heard from his father, but I would cut the story short … ‘State on oath what you know to have been held by the gmína (the village community), and the land is yours.’ And as soon as he took the oath—one could trust that oath implicitly—I wrote out the papers and declared to the assembly: ‘Now, this land is yours. You stand no longer under any obligations whatever to your late masters: you are simply their neighbors; all you will have to do is to pay the redemption tax, so much every year, to the government. Your homesteads go with the land: you get them free.’ ”
One can imagine the effect which such a policy had upon the peasants. A cousin of mine, Petr Nikoláevich Kropotkin, a brother of the aide-de-camp whom I have mentioned, was in Poland or in Lithuania with his regiment of uhlans of the guard. The revolution was so serious that even the regiments of the guard had been sent from St. Petersburg against it, and it is now known that when Mikhael Muravyov was sent to Lithuania and came to take leave of the Empress Marie, she said to him: “Save at least Lithuania for Russia!” Poland was regarded as lost.
“The armed bands of the revolutionists held the country,” my cousin said to me, “and we were powerless to defeat them, or even to find them. Small bands over and over again attacked our smaller detachments, and as they fought admirably, and knew the country, and found support in the population, they often had the best of the skirmishes. We were thus compelled to march in large columns only. We would cross a region, marching through the woods, without finding any trace of the bands; but when we marched back again, we learned that bands had reappeared in our rear; that they had levied the patriotic tax in the country; and if some peasant had rendered himself useful in any way to our troops, we found him hanged on a tree by the revolutionary bands. So it went on for months with no chance of improvement, until Milútin and Cherássky came and freed the peasants, giving them the land. Then—all was over. The peasants sided with us; they helped us to capture the bands, and the insurrection came to an end.”
I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the mistake that had been made. A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards “the downtrodden and the oppressed,” not a promise of such reparation later on; otherwise it is sure to fail. Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing. For revolutionists not to succeed in proving to the masses that a new era has really begun for them is to ensure the certain failure of their cause.
The disastrous consequences for Poland of this revolution are known; they
