Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/212

186 and directly on three occasions through the instrumentality of an electoral board, did not secure the expected majority.

F we desire to understand absolutism and the revolution we must examine the methods of the counter-revolution somewhat more closely.

The October strike alarmed and confused the government of the tsar. In 1848, in a similar manner, the Viennese government lost its head, and at the outset yielded ground before the revolution. The disordered state of the Russian government was most conspicuously displayed in its dealings with the press laws.

On the strength of the October manifesto, Russian journalists assumed without further parley that freedom of the press had been established. Faced by this pressure, in December 1905 the government abolished preventive censorship as far as the towns were concerned, and made a few other liberal concessions, whilst leaving intact certain old oppressive regulations and supplementing these by new. In actual fact, after October 1905, St. Petersburg journalists wrote with a freedom which is still unknown in Austria. Not merely were the predecessors of the reigning tsar criticised without reserve, but for a time even Nicholas II was subjected to more cautious criticism. Large freedoms were likewise assumed as far as books were concerned. As if between night and morning the book market was transformed. Works previously prohibited, both native and translated, were now freely published. and often simultaneously by several firms. Thus were promptly circulated in large numbers the writings of Radiščev, the decabrists, Herzen, Kropotkin, Černyševskii, etc.; the confiscated works and the censored portions of the works of Dostoevskii, Turgenev, Tolstoi, etc.; the writings of Marx, Lassalle, Plehanov, etc.; the works of Spencer, Strauss, Feuerbach, Spinoza, Diderot, and Voltaire; the pamphlets and larger books issued by the socialist publishing house in Stuttgart; and so on. Russia was furnished with a supply of revolutionary literature for the coming epoch of reaction, and not until later could there be leisure for the quiet perusal and digestion of the vast quantities of matter rapidly issued from the press.

But after certain vacillations in the revolutionary direction,