Art. 11.-DIPLOMATISTS AND REVOLUTION.

1. My Mission to Russia; and Other Diplomatic Memories. By Sir George Buchanan. Two vols. Cassell, 1923. 2. La Russie des Tsars pendant la grande Guerre. By Maurice Paléologue. Three vols. Paris: Plon.

3. Diplomatic Reminiscences Before and During the World War. By A. Nekludoff. Murray, 1920.

4. Autocracy and Revolution in Russia. By Baron Sergius A. Korff. Macmillan, 1923.

5. Slavonic Review. June, 1923.

IT is fitting that diplomatists should contribute their quota to the multitude of books which are being written about the Great War, its causes, its events, and its consequences. They have been too silent in the past. A nice sense of honour has made them carry into retirement the obligation of reticence which tradition imposes on their active service; and even when they have ventured to write their recollections it has generally been to portray the idiosyncrasies of the great men whom they have met and the social delights of lives spent in the gayest circles of the world's great cities. Their work has been mostly left to the imagination of the reader; and ambassadors have come to be regarded as the butterflies of history. Nor do their public appearances much dispel this conception. They do not make public orations, or sit in law courts, or produce works of art. They are never seen at their labours, but are known, on the other hand, to enjoy by prescription every privilege, local or international, of the country where they reside. They are the personal representatives of their sovereign. They go in and out of palaces, and attend an endless succession of social functions, at which they are the principal figures. And after their brief spell of magnificence they retire into oblivionwhile their embassy is handed over to another, and again to his successor, for an ever-recurring blaze of ephemeral splendour. The difficult, delicate work which they have performed leaves no palpable memorial. Monuments are not erected to them; they are not Vol. 240.-No. 477.

2 c

remembered for any great measure of fiscal or social amelioration, their only speeches are unreported toasts from which politics have been rigidly expunged. How many of the thousands of British Ambassadors of the last century are known by name to the public? Probably just one-Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whose statue stands beside those of his two famous kinsmen in Westminster Abbey; and he, of course, really made his name rather as a Turkish reformer than as a diplomat. Our representatives abroad are seldom heard of except in moments of crisis. Their work is to prevent trouble between nations-and so the better they do it the less it is known. When they fail to check an international dispute at its outset, they have to conduct the bitter controversy which ensues; they come into prominence when war begins to appear as an unpleasant solution of the difficulty; by an easy transition in the public mind they are often thought of as harbingers of war. If they suppress a quarrel early, the world will never hear of their success; but, like the doctor who is ever present at a death-bed, the breakdown of peace is commonly connected with the men who have been straining every nerve for its maintenance. It has, for instance, been a common accusation against the Old Diplomacy that it caused the Great War.

The books of Sir George Buchanan and M. Paléologue, the last British and French Ambassadors respectively to Tsarist Russia, contribute to the refutation of this ridiculous and ignorant charge. Their volumes, unlike memoirs written before the war, disclose the working of the diplomatic machine, and conform to the wholesome modern tendency to take the public into confidence. Very early in M. Paléologue's pages we have a vivid and detailed account of ambassadors at work. We are shown the French and British representatives, and their German and Austrian colleagues, on visits to M. Sazonoff, the Russian Foreign Minister. The German Ambassador, Pourtalès, we read with some surprise, was clearly embarrassed and annoyed that Russia should come into the war. But he had reported to his Government that, as before in the Near Eastern crisis of 1908-9, Russia would stand aside, and rather let Serbia be crushed than risk her existence by participation in a world-conflict. He

was mistaken; and was very chagrined by his mistake. We see the personal feelings of the other men whose feelings become their country's. Sazonoff was of a faithful nature; and his loyalty to Serbia was an important link in the chain of events which led from a Balkan quarrel to a world-war. But his attitude was certainly representative. His policy corresponded truly to popular sentiment. The Slavs of Russia are, apparently, corks on a sea of emotion, and at that time were carried on the crest of a powerful wave of PanSlavism. The declaration of war on behalf of the little brother' Serbia was received with demonstrations of deep enthusiasm. Not only the Allied Ambassadors

were astonished at the wholeheartedness of Russia. She seemed united as she had never been since 1812; soldiers departed to the front in the spirit of crusaders for Slavism against Germanism; the Duma proclaimed the fusion of all parties in an ecstasy of patriotic brotherhood; the Tsar went to Moscow to worship at the holy shrines of the Kremlin; and there, to a vast concourse of his people kneeling before him, he repeated the oath of his ancestor not to make peace so long as there was a single enemy on Russian soil. The pomp and the splendour of this Moscow ceremony are brilliantly described by M. Paléologue. Nothing is left out which his scrutinising glance could observe or his vivid imagination suggest. He saw here reproduced the imposing 'hieratism' of the Byzantine Church from which Russia derived her Christianity, and the glamour of the Constantinian Court colours his picture of Nicholas II; while his artist's pen also delights to record minute personal details. He is struck by the superb grace with which the saintly Grand Duchess Elizabeth kissed an ikon; notes even the raptured, varying expressions of the Tsaritsa's countenance as she kneels in prayer.

We find nothing of this sort-nor would we expect to find it in Sir George Buchanan's book. Between the Frenchman's and the Englishman's work there is indeed a wide difference. The first is the work of an artist, the second of a statesman. If we are not mistaken, the motive which chiefly prompted M. Paléologue to write 'La Russie des Tsars' was his known ambition to become a member of the French Academy, to which his previous

6

works on poetry, archæology, and travel gave him some claim. He sees everything through the spectacles of a literary exquisite. He has admirable pen-pictures of Sturmer, Sazonoff, Witte, the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, Rasputin, Lenin—‘a Savonarola and Marat in one'—all the principal actors in the Russian tragedy. We are introduced to the heart of Petrograd society-whimsical, captivating, and untrustworthy, ultra-refined and brutal, contradictory and extremist, like everything else in Russia. From the lips of the Ambassador's friends and haphazard acquaintance we hear, as well, intimate accounts of the peasants at home in their isbas on the vast, unending, snow-clad steppes. How illuminating are some of their casual remarks! I know my country,' said the editor of the Novoie Vremya,' when Paléologue congratulated him on the élan with which the Russians had thrown themselves into the war, this impulse will only have a span. Then we shall relapse into our apathy.' Another day, still early in the war, he quotes the lady who said that Turgenieff was right in declaring that the Russian had an extraordinary talent for making all his schemes miscarry; 'we start to climb to the sky,' she said, but no sooner have we started than we notice that it is a long way off. Then we only think of how to drop back as quickly as possible and hurt ourselves as much as possible in doing so.' Reading Tchadaieff, he notes that that penetrating writer observed in 1840; Russians belong to the nations which only seem to exist to give humanity terrible lessons.' Talented artistically, lacking the political sense, creatures of impulse, they fly from the most abject passivity to savage insurgence and back again. Eight out of every ten Russians being illiterate they are peculiarly susceptible to eloquence. Through long winter evenings they sit round the farm-table discussing endlessly problems concrete and abstract, coming to no conclusions, but acquiring the knack of expressing opinions fluently, and eagerly resuming the topic on the following day. For during five to seven months, according to the latitude, all agricultural work is suspended owing to the snow.

What an influence this snow exercises on the Russian character! An expanse of grey sky and rolling steppes ; snow underfoot and more ever falling, blotting out the

horizon, and rendering all formless, vague; nothing can be seen with precision, the outlook is dim, foreboding, quickening the imagination and deadening reason. Endurance and fatalism become integral parts of the Russian peasant's character. If he has physical energy it is stored, until it finds an outlet for activity in the summer. His private life may be a long bearing of daily privations, a silent submission to domestic discomforts, and to the vexations of family incompatibilities, in a household dominated by patriarchal gentleness. But all the time he is irrational, imaginative, impulsive. Of a sudden come individual rebellion, crimes of passion, personal or political assassination by men and women to whom resignation has become intolerable.

The same contrasts are noted by M. Paléologue in the sphere of religion. No Church has a more immutably determined dogma, or greater respect of canonical law; nowhere does a more sumptuous and conservative ritual demand a blinder and humbler acceptance from its devotees. Yet here and there schismatics have broken away to carry individualism and licence to their extreme. The Raskol sect, whose following is numbered at eleven millions, practise a cult positively ferocious in its antagonism to a priesthood, negative and subversive, summary in its rites.' The most eccentric sect, that which contradicted every canon of every recognised religion, was that to which the peasant Rasputin belonged. They were known as the Khlisty, or Flagellants, and were to be found chiefly in the Kazan, Saratoff, and Tobolsk districts. They held their meetings at night, during the summer months in the clearings of forests, where in the mysterious chequerings of the moonlight they claimed to commune with the Divine Being. Men and women hand in hand would move in a circle, chanting invocations to their god, moving ever faster in a dance which grew wilder and wilder. Those whose energy showed signs of waning were lashed by the flagellant master of the ceremonies. Finally, after a supreme burst of capering and vociferation, they would all sink to the ground, soon to indulge in an orgy of unabashed libertinism.

These singular practices are recorded with rather less detail by Sir George Buchanan than by M. Paléologue, who finds, of course, in Rasputin an unquenchable source