You pick up a newspaper – and immediately the atmosphere of “old” Russia closes in from all sides. The case of the Armavir pogrom. A beating administered with the knowledge and consent of the authorities, a trap set by the officials, “a beating of the Russian intelligentsia in the broad sense of the word, instigated and prescribed by someone” (words of the civil plaintiff). The old, but eternally new reality of Russian life – a bitter mockery of “constitutional” illusions.

A bitter, but useful mockery! For it is clear – and is becoming increasingly clear to the young generation of Russia – that no condemnations, no resolutions will help here. What is at issue here is the entire political system as a whole; here historical truth is forcing its way through the haze of fantastic self-deception that it is possible to pour new wine into old bottles.

Famine... The sale of cattle, the sale of girls, crowds of beggars, typhus, death by starvation. “The population has only one privilege – to die quietly and imperceptibly,” writes one correspondent.

“The Zemstvo folk, to put it plainly, have taken fright at the prospect of finding themselves with their estates amid hungry, embittered people who have lost all faith in any glimmer of light” (from Kazan Gubernia).

One would think the present Zemstvo to be perfectly loyal, yet a dispute is going on between it and the government over the size of loans. They ask for 6 million rubles (Kazan Gubernia) – the treasury grants 1 million. They asked for 600,000 (Samara) – 25,000 rubles have been remitted.

In the old way!

In Kholm Uyezd, Pskov Gubernia, at a Zemstvo assembly, even the Zemstvo heads came out against Zemstvo agronomy – for the *khutor* peasants only! In the Kuban region a congress of *stanitsa* atamans took place – all unanimously spoke out against the plan adopted by the Third Duma for converting allotments into personal property.

In Tsaritsyn a district congress resolved not to bring to trial a village elder who had tortured a woman (“with a view to searching for a criminal”). The gubernia board revoked the resolution.

Near Petersburg, workers threw a sack over the manager of Mr. Yakovlev’s factory and dragged him towards the Neva. “The guards drove the workers away. 18 arrested.”

It is difficult to be surprised that even the newspaper *Rech* finds itself compelled to state, given such pictures of life, “a great public degradation.” And in his letters from Samara about the famine, Mr. Kondurushkin[43] laments: “This Russian society appears to me to be as soft as rubber, as dough. It can be kneaded and moulded by word and deed. But you turn away – and everything has pulled back again in the old way.”

“He, this Russian philistine and intellectual, rich and poor, is calm. Here, when people begin ‘to swell up’ from hunger, he will rejoice, will jubilate with tears. He absolutely must go to help with tears, with ‘noble’ sentiments. This gives him an excellent chance to look after his own soul. But without sentiment, without tears, work is not work, and help is not help. Without his own tears, he will not consider a matter significant and will not budge. No, you must first move him, make him weep and blow his nose into a clean handkerchief. But sober calculation, a healthy and sober consciousness of state necessity – that is boring, that has no soft mood.”

Yes, yes, a preaching of “severity” is far from useless in a world of “dough” and “rubber.” Only our liberal fails to notice from whose side he delivers such a sermon, “a healthy and sober consciousness of state necessity” – isn’t that copied from Menshikov, Mr. Kondurushkin? For it is precisely on the basis of “dough” and “rubber,” precisely on the basis of a soft and lachrymose mood, that such speeches about statehood are alone possible. It is precisely because there exist dough-like people that the heralds of a “healthy and sober statehood” feel confident.

“Russian society is soft as rubber,” says Mr. Kondurushkin in the old way. There is society and society. There was a time when the word “society” embraced everything, covered everything, expressed the heterogeneous elements of the population awakening to consciousness, or simply the so-called “educated” people.

But it is precisely in this respect that things in Russia are no longer in the old way. When it was possible to speak only of society, the best people within it preached stern struggle, and not “a healthy and sober consciousness of state necessity.”

But now it is impossible to speak of “society” in general. In old Russia, distinctions among new forces have manifested themselves. The old calamities, in the old way – in the shape of famine, etc. – descending upon Russia, sharpening the old questions, demand an assessment of how these new forces have revealed themselves in the first decade of the twentieth century.

“Society” is soft and lachrymose thanks to the impotence and irresolution of the class towards which it gravitates and to which it 9/10ths belongs. The preaching of “sober calculation, a sober and healthy consciousness of state necessity” is merely a justification of the dominion of the “authorities” over this flaccid society.

But the past decade has revealed elements of the population not belonging to “society,” not distinguished by softness or lachrymosity...

In Russia everything is “in the old way” at the top, but there is something new at the bottom. Whoever lets the “anguish of the all-Russian malaise” help him to see, to feel out, to find this firm, non-lachrymose, non-dough-like new element will be able to find the road leading to deliverance from the old.

But whoever mingles his complaints about this anguish with speeches about a “healthy and sober consciousness of state necessity” will hardly not remain forever an integral part of the “dough” that lets itself be “kneaded and moulded.” It is precisely in the name of a “healthy and sober” statehood that such people are “kneaded and moulded” – and serve them right.

If out of a hundred persons subjected to such an operation, one from “society” should harden, the result will be beneficial. Without demarcation there will be no good.

*Zvezda* No. 28, November 5, 1911. Signed: V. F.

Printed according to the text of the newspaper *Zvezda*