Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/203

Rh All the universities participated in the uprising, students and professors, authors and journalists, following the best traditions of Russian literature and publicism.

The new spirit prevailed likewise among the clergy, for the altar could no longer sustain the burden of the tottering throne. A liberal group of clergy, formed the Brotherhood of Defenders of the Renovation of the Church, and as the outcome of their impulsion the synod called upon the government to summon a council. In conformity with this demand a committee was appointed to supervise the necessary preliminaries.

The tsarist system was torn by internal dissensions. The commander-in-chief against Japan had, under the eyes of the victorious enemy, to offer resistance to the camarilla. Thousands of officers and soldiers, wounded, crippled, shattered in health, had had bitter experience of the effects of tsarist absolutism. They suffered in mind no less than in body, these soldiers and officers who, for all their self-sacrificing spirit, for all their courage, were compelled to withdraw shame-stricken from the Asiatic theatre of war. To the wide plains of Russia there now returned thousands upon thousands of cripples, and soldier peasants to the number of hundreds of thousands, who would relate to coming generations the sins of tsarist absolutism.

In the navy, dissatisfaction was even more rife than in the army, as was shown by the mutiny of entire ships complements.

All classes and schools of thought, the peoples of all nations alities, differing in language, tradition, civilisation, and religion, united against the common enemy, displaying a splendid natural unity in face of the unnaturalness of theocratic despotism.

Nineteen hundred and five was the logical sequel of eighteen hundred and sixty-one. The liberation of the peasantry had removed the broad foundation of absolutism. The peasants, from among whom the operatives were recruited, had imbibed the teachings of the intelligentsia, and with horny hands they now realised the hopes of Radiščev and the best of his successors. The revolution of 1905 was not evoked by the defeat upon the great battleﬁelds of the far east: it was the continuation of the decabrist rising; it was the fusion of the countless isolated struggles of the terror; it was the fruit of philosophic and political enlightenment. Rh