Or, How the People of Russia May Preserve their Progress

By Edward Pichler

Published by the National Society for Sociocracy and Positive Philosophy

Washington, Anacostia, United States of America, 1905

INTRODUCTION

THE TSARIST ORDER

........THE RISE

........THE CRISIS

........THE DOWNFALL

GREAT REVOLUTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF MAN

........THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

........THE ANGLO-AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS

........REVOLUTIONS CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY

THE CONTRADICTION OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF STATES

........ON THE NECESSITY OF ORDER

........ON THE NECESSITY OF PROGRESS

........ON THEIR UNION - SOCIOCRACY

CONCLUSION

THIS Pamphlet is not merely an informatory guide to the late events in Russia. It is also intended to be submitted for the review of the Russian Sobor, so it may avoid the anarchy and disorder which felled the revolutions of old. For though it may have done away with the infamous Constantine II, it has yet to finish its revolution.

To this end, we wish to not only present the late events in Russia in their historical context; but also to review the history of other revolutions, so that the Russian people may avoid the issues which destroyed them. On this basis, we shall then recommend how the Russian people may bring the principles of order and progress in harmony, and then build a state which preserves both, and finally we shall enter into a conclusion, judging our and Russia's chances of success in inaugurating such a new order.

If you, the reader, concur with what we say here, we plead for you to submit this pamphlet to your local Congressman and request it be sent to the International Forum, so they may transmit it to the Russian Sobor for its review.

THE Tsarist Order saw its origins not with any Slavic racial spirit, but rather with the Mongol invasion of Russia. Under the great Batu Khan, the Mongolic race pushed into Russia, eliminated any trace of opposition, and with great firmness established the western flank of their great empire. When the Mongol Empire collapsed in 1260 A.D., the Mongols of Russia established an empire of their own, the Golden Horde. Here, they erected a state very much like their old home, of a despotic ruler ruling over an administration of feudal oligarchy as not merely an overlord, but an autocrat. And having all but erased Russia's old tradition of statehood, they yoked the Russian people to their own. It is this from this great Oriental well from which the Tsarist Order sprang.

When Ivan the Great turned his Muscovite feudatory into an empire independent of the Golden Horde, he was not a ruler in the European mould. Rather, by custom absorbed by his former overlords he was a Khan, a Christian Khan of his people, in stark contrast to the peoples of the rest of Europe. To analogize his position to the rest of Europe, he declared himself Caesar, or as the term came to be corrupted into Russian, Tsar. It was also here that Russian society received its greatest plight, that of serfdom. To achieve the great principle of order, Ivan the Great began the process of reducing the Russian peasant to nothing but property - and by doing so, he forsook the great principle of progress.

The cost of this sacrifice of progress at the altar of order became clear with Ivan the Great's great-grandson, whose inability to hold the apparatus of state together resulted in a chaotic civil war upon his death in 1598. In its absence, Russian society fell into a period of absolute anarchy. Order entirely collapsed, and both Poland and Sweden invaded Russia. This great crisis only ended in 1613, with the coronation of Michael I, of the House of Romanov, forming the dynasty that dominated Russia for the next three centuries. With order restored, the newly rejuvenated Russian state firmly imposed serfdom on the Russian peasants, took Malorussian territories from Poland, and expanded its territory to Siberia.

The greatest figure of the Tsarist Order was, without a doubt, Peter the Great. After a tour of Europe, he recognized that Russia was fundamentally different to European society - and he sought to drag his realm into Europe by force. He did away with the last vestiges of tribal governance and established an absolute autocracy, and with this despotic hold order, he sought to push forward with progress. He gave Russia a world-class fleet, along with a modern army, and to this he established a new tax base to fund it. Most notably, he introduced Russia to the latest of modern science, bringing about a bloom of progress. This great set of reforms ensured that the eighteenth century was the very golden age of the Tsarist Order.

With the state-strengthening reforms of Peter the Great,

THE disorders than felled the Tsarist Order were products of the Tsarist Order itself. Its golden age did not see fundamental change to the Tsarist apparatus, and despite the orderly progress of the era, scientific knowledge did not disseminate beyond a thin elite. Above all, it did not change the status of the serf, who remained as ever property of cruel and unfeeling elites. This left Russian high society mere icing on a great cake propped up by a great slave-race, and it meant whatever those of high society said about scientific progress, it remained as stagnant as ever. It also ensured that, true to its Mongolic-Asiatic predecessors, the Tsarist Order was essentially dependent on the whims of the Tsar, as was its limited progress.

It was with the death of Catherine the Great in 1796 that this golden age came to an end. Her embittered son, Paul, was no supporter of anything he associated with his mother. Thus, as Tsar he swiftly did away with the Age of Reason, science, and modern administration; instead, under his capricious rule, he allowed Russia to dither and falter towards stagnation; he even rejoiced in it, for at least it was not his mother's Russia. Serfdom, he left untouched, and lacking a spirit of progress, he wouldn't dare reform it. Upon his death in 1822, his son Alexander took power, and filled with delusions of grandeur, he went to war with Prussia - in the name of restoring Polish statehood.

The resulting intervention in the Parthenopean War pitted Russia's chronically mismanaged army against the starving army of Prussia, and though Russia prevailed in this conflict, this had less to do with any superior tactics and more with the sheer dismal state of Prussia, whose already decayed army fell into near-collapse with the potato famine. At home, Alexander sought to become the benefactor of his people, and to this end he inaugurated a series of parliaments, with a National Duma at their apex. In practice, these parliaments never rose to become anything more than mere advisory councils, and like all parliaments it fell prey to factionalism that weakened the unity of the people. This situation was made even more absurd, for these parliaments were elected by none but the landed nobility. Thus, though Alexander's reforms stuck after the end of his short reign, and though they may have given the appearance of turning Russia's Mongolic order with a more European one, the change was only at the surface. It represented that the Golden Age of Tsarism was well and truly over.

In the decades that followed, Russian progress saw failed start after failed start. Though the shock of the Parthenopean War, and the later defeat of the First Circassian War, began a program of military modernization and rail expansion. With the young Michael II under the regency of his military man uncle, Russia became modernized not as a country, but as a grand military camp - and with not an iota of change to its political institutions. And when Michael II rose to full authority in 1851, he gave no time to the officers of the Adelphi; instead he had them shot for their revolutionary demands for political progress.

Despite this political stagnation, Russia was well-poised with its modern military to take advantage of instability in its surrounding areas. With the rise of the Bai dynasty in China over the 1850s, Russia saw an opportunity against a weakening neighbor. Coming to the rescue to the defeated Qing dynasty, it formally declared its remnant in Manchuria and Mongolia its protectorate, and yet-unstable Bai China gave it a wide berth. At the same time, in the 1850s, came the rise of the Bab in Persia, who so swept onto the scene and, claiming the title of Mahdi, toppled the Qajar dynasty. Before the Bakhtiari could put Persia in order, Russia swept in and took Tabriz. With these two great conquests, the Russian Empire became the largest in history, and the empire slowly expanded further, as it swept through Central Asia and Korea. With Russia's great triumphs - of the growth of industrial capacity, the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and the intervention of the War of German Unification - it seemed at the top of the world. If a person was deemed to judge the state of Russia based on its state in 1890, he would have concluded the Tsarist Order was ready for a century of prosperity. It therefore makes what succeeded it the more profound.

FOR all that the Russian Empire seemed an intercontinental leviathan, underneath the surface the rot was self-evident. Its power was dependent not on the scale of its institutions, but the weakness of its neighbors. Its administration was based not on logical principles of scientific governance, but on the caprice of its Tsar. And its industrial development was based not on the urban efficiency of dignified labor, but on the rural disorder of the terrorized serf. It only took a push for these issues to destroy the Russian Empire.

For Bai China, driven towards a harmony of order and progress by its ancient industrious Confucian customs and habits engaged in a rapid period of modernization and industrialization. This being focused in its south, far away from Russian rule, established a political order which seamlessly combined all that was good about Chinese nationhood with the greatest advances of modernity. Driven by the great precedents of old, it was intent on reclaiming all Chinese territory from Russia, and it became clear a war was increasingly in the air. The trigger came when, in 1893, the court of Japan under Shogun Yoshinobu, made the decision to invade Korea. Seeing as Korea was a Russian protectorate, this immediately brought these Japanese troops to war with Russia; Japanese feudal custom impacted the metallurgy of Russian autocratic war, and swiftly suffered defeat. This, Bai China regarded as a Russian intrusion of its ancient claim of tributary status over Korea, and this it responded by sending a huge army to the border. It did not take so long for Marshal Lee to launch an attack on Russian Manchuria. And with that began the Russo-Chinese War

Though the Tsarist Order came into the war believing the Chinese to be their inferiors, the events of the ensuing war proved them wrong. It was not so long into the war that Marshal Lee launched the first of his great offensives. He aimed itself straight at Mukden and put the great city of Manchuria under siege. Against this brutal bloody battle, the Russians could but use the oldest tactic of oriental despotism, the conscription of peasant armies; with the Trans-Siberian Railroad, this made it easy for them to swarm and end the siege by sheer numbers. The calos demonstrate the sheer brutality to which this strategy affected the common conscripted serf. Against this campaign, the cunning and industrious Marshal Lee saw that the whole of the Russian eastern apparatus was based on one, and only one, artery - the Trans-Siberian Railroad. If he took it, Russia's eastern limb would die.

When Marshal Lee secured the Bogdo Lama's defection to his side, Chinese victory was practically assured. The Mongols who once imparted their custom and habit onto the Tsarist Order thence became Chinese patriots - and Russia was eclipsed. It was not so long afterwards that China took Lake Baikal and broke the Trans-Siberian Railroad into two. With this, the Russian war effort came to decay; Vladivostok, once to be the capital a new Russia planted on the Pacific, instead flew the green banner of China. In place of the optimism of a decade before came famine, serf revolt, and chaos. Its old colonial holdings became essentially independent, Russia having had to pull troops to fight the Chinese. By the time the Treaty of San Francisco was signed, it was clear that the Tsarist Order was in peril, and not even the extravagant coronation of Constantine II could hide it.

In the chaos of defeat came a new popular anger. Veterans of the war, who stretched from the highest nobles to the humblest of serfs, organized in clubs where they called themselves Young Russians, intent on reforming their homeland. Peasants, returned to their farms after having fought in the army of the Tsar, rebelled against their masters. And in the halls of the Free Economic Society, the erudite talked of the light of progress. Constantine II was no fool; he could see that the Tsarist Order was in peril, and he could see the pattern of disorder organizing across Russia. Against this, he deployed the fist of the state. He banned Young Russia, he suppressed peasant rebellions, and he summarily executed those he suspected of conspiracy. Despite this change did come.

And thus, we get to the events of the last few years. For though Constantine II may have banned Young Russia, they still existed underground, and they created a vast network connecting high-ranking army officers with lowly peasant veterans. And they planned. And so it was in 1902 that Major-General Mikhail Morozov marched on the Winter Palace, arrested Constantine II, and forced him to give him dictatorial powers. Now, here we do not need to need to get on Morozov's actions as Dictator of Russia, for they did not happen so long ago, but it was a sincere attempt to establish order and progress as principals of a new Russian state. By turning the Tsar into a powerless figurehead, he hoped he could maintain order, even as he pursued progress through such impossibly huge goals as the abolition of serfdom, the declaration of gender equality, and the convening of a wholly democratic National Assembly. But this stability did not last long, for its entire basis of legitimacy was based on a tsar locked in a room.

In only a year, restorationist officers marched on the Winter Palace and freed the Tsar. In true power once more, he simply undid all of Morozov's reforms - and Morozov became not the champion of a new era, but a tragic martyr. And though the National Assembly successfully fled the Tsar to Pskov and became the focal point of a rebel government, order collapsed. In the ensuing months, Constantine launched his full wrath against all he considered against him. The memory of this White Terror is so new it needs no introduction - but in the end, no matter how many Jews and rebellious serfs the Black Guard killed, the Tsarist order was dead. Her Mongolic spirit had run out.

Last year, the National Assembly took Petrograd and captured the Tsar - and it is only very recently that his trial finally came to a conclusion and he finally saw his end by guillotine. This represents the final destruction of the Tsarist Order, destroyed by the winds of progress. But though the serfs may have killed their owners, though no more Tsarist ships may shell the Winter Palace, and though the separatist rebellions of today shall surely suffer defeat, it may be safely stated that the Young Russians and the National Assembly have simply demolished the old order in the name of progress. To maintain this progress, they must make a new order, not through the Mongolic tactics of old but the scientific progress of modernity.

This is not a new issue. Every revolution has succumbed to the luster of progress without order, and they have been left to either make a new order from the miseries of anarchy - or make way for a restoration. To this end, so Russia may learn the mistakes of old, we shall discuss the great revolutions in the history of man.

OF all the world's revolutions, none has had quite so much ink spilled as the French Revolution. As such, this shall not be an overview of that event, but rather an analysis of its nature.

The roots of the French Revolution came from the corrupt and unreformable order of the Bourbon order. The institutions of the state were stuck in a stasis for centuries, which made it impossible to establish anything resembling progress. And as France went to war, against the British and the Prussians, its debts ballooned in size, and its institutions made it impossible to raise the capital to pay this off. In the end, France's creditors forced the Bourbons to convene the Estates-General - a hitherto-inactive representative body of the whole nation - to force through reforms over the rot of active institutions.