lot, as it came to be called, was altogether insufficient to provide minimum subsistence.

Then, large portions of the land were made exempt from the Act and remained in the hands of the lords. Often this turned out to be pasture land, without which the peasant could not feed his cattle.

A further provision required the Mir-the loosely organized village community electing its own officials and having much to say about land, crops, and general administration (always, however, subject to the lord's veto)-to be held responsible as a unit for individual payments of its former serf's allottment. This obviously restricted quite severely the mobility and choices of the individual peasant. For example, peasant A, wanting to leave the village and having finally paid his redemption dues in full, might be prevented from doing so by the elder and his advisors who might feel that the Mir would be penalized without the labor of A. Until all former serfs of the Mir had paid their redemption dues, each was obligated, legally, to its decisions.

...

Sir John Maynard—probably the West's foremost authority on the Russian peasant—has evaluated the Emancipation Act thus: Generally speaking, the serfs received less land than they had held before Emancipation. In Russia as a whole the reductions (the ostryeski, or "cuttings") played an important part in subsequent history. . . But the most intimate and comprehensive of the restrictions upon the freedom of the liberated serf was the absence of any demarcation of his legal rights and duties. He was as completely at the command of every representative of the executive power as the bullock or horse which he drove to the fields was at the command of the switch he carried. He was expected to do what he was told, and he was beaten if he failed to do it.

Thus the "Great Reform" failed to relieve both the centuriesold land hunger of the peasant, and his unceasing urge to find a “release of energy" in more than a kind of sub-human existence.

At this time—that is, just after Emancipation-there occurred a development constituting one of the most puzzling ironies of Russian history. A number of "conscience-stricken gentlemen" -landlords who, through their reading, had come into contact

with western life and thought (who had, in short, finally brushed the spirit of the Enlightenment)—began to preach "going to the people." In this they were joined indeed, led-by the remarkable phalanx of Russian intellectuals which the nineteenth century produced. For a full generation Russian huts were invaded by solicitous lords and intelligentsia who preached that "the people" were really, despite their crudeness, their ignorance, and their "sin," a kind of redeeming Christ. In them somehow resided the secret of Russia's salvation, and neither arguments nor the peasant's often ill-concealed hostility could serve to destroy the illusion. Thus as the twentieth century dawned the masses and many of Russia's best minds were bound, in what might be called a marriage of inconvenience, in a strange, passive struggle against the frightened lords and their even more frightened Autocrat. A year of reckoning was coming, a time of troubles, that might last long and perhaps remind one of Lincoln's words at the time of our own civil strife: “. . . if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Lermontov, one of Russia's great poets of the midnineteenth century, looked ahead and saw just such a time. In his Prophecy he said:

A year, a black year for Russia will come, when the crown will fall off the Tsar's head. The people will forget their old love for them, and the masses will feed on blood and murder. The destroyed law will protect neither women nor innocent children. And the fetid corpses will cause pestilence in the desolate villages and call the victims from the huts. Famine will torment the unfortunate country and rivers will be red with the reflexes of fires.

At this point a question may occur. "How, in the life of a Great Power, could such conditions become fixed and prevail for so long?" Full development is too long and involved to be essayed here, but the basic features of the answer may be sketched.

Of all the large European nations Russia alone missed the Renaissance. It is impossible, of course, to say what the history

of western man would have been if the "awakening" had not occurred. But it is certain that it helped mightily to develop in western man the consciousness of his individual worth, and to enable him to construct that vast edifice of inquiry which liberated him, in part, from ancient error and, as well, from mediaeval inertia. It is quite reasonable to suppose that Russia would have experienced, in some degree at least, this stimulus to self reëxamination had not, at that very moment in history, a “golden horde” from the eastern steppes overrun the country and deflected its life from the main stream of western development. If Russia is different from other European Great Powers, certainly the Mongol invasion, which lasted from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, is one of the basic reasons for this difference.

Likewise Russia missed the stimulus of the Reformation and the corrective it brought in the form of a curb to the repressive force of ecclesiastical power over the peasant. And it missed, of course, the Counter Reformation which had done so much to reinvigorate the mind and learning of the Roman Catholic cleric. In this connection it is worthwhile to remember that the evil Rasputin, the so-called monk who wielded tremendous power in the Russian empire just prior to the Great Revolution, had no counterpart in western Europe.

Geography and history combined to cut Russia off from development in the western tradition. Adjacent to the East, she easily absorbed its mystic fatalism and absolutism. Converted by the eastern church, she thereby "went without the Latin language, the common tongue of European thought and learning, without the rationalistic training of the Roman mentality and without the scholastic philosophers who applied reason to doctrine."

Finally, she missed the original impetus of the Industrial Revolution and lingered long outside its influence. Thereby she failed to fashion a strong middle class, always and everywhere the class which introduces economic and political liberalism—though it may later come to regret its championing of the latter.

Unlike the peasant, who has been present in Russia from its beginnings, the industrial worker came late upon the scene. And

when he did appear, he still held close ties with his old Mir and hence tended to remain peasant-oriented in his thought and feelings. As late as 1914 the industrial workers formed under fifteen percent of the total population. In their grievances, proletariat and peasant shared alike.

After the Emancipation peasants began to drift, in substantial numbers, to the cities. About 4,000,000 serfs had been made landless as a result of the Tsar's "beneficence," and from this group, especially, the migrants came.

In the 1870's and 1880's the working day in the factory for men, women, and children averaged somewhere from twelve to sixteen hours. Wages were so low that Americans, particularly, find it hard to credit the truth. At the outbreak of World War I the average factory worker's wage was 300 rubles a year, or about $150. Many of the factories built workers' barracks where proletarian life centered. If this suggests a military atmosphere, the full truth makes it explicit, for under Count Witte-Russia's leading exponent of industrialization, and the Tsar's Minister of Finance in the closing years of the nineteenth and opening years of the twentieth century-the state became the chief entrepreneur; and state and army were really one.

Sometimes the worker was paid in kind, or partially so. At no time, however, from the beginnings of Russian industrialization until the Revolution (or after it, for that matter) did the factory worker receive a wage sufficient to maintain a living standard which, by western measure, could be called even modest.

Until a few years before the Revolution all union activity was forbidden by the state. Many times workers sought to elect a "headman" to lead them in efforts to raise wages or to better working conditions. Invariably the government crushed these efforts and sent the leaders to prison or into exile. Thus union activities were forced underground. So much agitation of this kind was carried on, and so harassing to officialdom did it become that in 1900 the government took a fantastic step. It inaugurated what later came to be called "police socialism." Zubatov, head of the police system, was entrusted with the task of setting up unions supervised by police officials. The aim was to divert worker unrest into manageable channels. Americans might think

of such a system as one of "official company unions.” The idea backfired when the movement passed out of the hands of policeunionists and headed toward what was thought of as "worker extremism." By 1904, Zubatovism had run its course. In its wake was left a reservoir of worker union experience later to prove of high value to trained organizers.

Out of these conditions arose the "soviet," a non-communist invention. The original soviets were worker organizations, headed by a factory "elder"; the idea and pattern were copied directly from the peasant Mir. Subsequently the Communistsat first suspicious of the soviets-absorbed them into their pattern of activity and, still later, identified the name exclusively with themselves. The average American, as a consequence, has come to think of the soviet as an original Communist device. This is an unfortunate misconception, for it tends to blur the basic peasant nature of this organization and renders more difficult the understanding of its role in the revolutions of 1917.

By necessity, much of its work was carried on in an atmosphere of restriction and secrecy. On the other hand, the work of these factory groups was facilitated by a paradox in Russian industry. Although this industry was greatly retarded in general scope, compared with that of western nations, it contained a higher concentration of workers per factory-in proportion to total workers involved-than any other country. For example, by 1905 "the proportion employed in large works having more than a thousand hands apiece was in Russia three times as great as in Germany." For the Russian worker these soviets, springing up in numerous cities in and after 1905, proved to be the seedbed of revolutionary activity. And since, in 1917, many if not most of the factory workers were raw recruits from the land, the soviets served all the more as a strong, albeit strange, link binding proletariat and peasant together.

By the opening decade of the twentieth century, Russian peasants and Russian workers shared a deep and abiding hatred of the autocratic machine and all its parts. For over a half century, furthermore, the greatest minds of Russia had been preaching the revolutionary doctrines of the West in the face of a censorship