The Russian Note

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 64, August 3, 1848]

Cologne, August 1. Instead of an army, Russian diplomacy has for the time being let loose a note in the form of a circular to all Russian legations in Germany. In the official organ of the German Reich Administration in Frankfurt!”*° this note found its first quarters and soon also a friendly reception in other official and unofficial papers. The more unusual it is for Mr Nesselrode, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, to practise public statecraft in this manner, the more this activity deserves closer inspection.

In the happy time before 1848, German censorship made sure that no word displeasing to the Russian government could be printed, not even under the heading Greece or Turkey.

Since the evil March days this convenient outlet has unfortunately been blocked. Nesselrode thus becomes a publicist.

According to him, it is the “German press, whose hatred against Russia seemed to have ceased for a moment,” which, with regard to the Russian “security measures” on the border, has given rise to the “most unfounded assumptions and commentaries.” This delicately phrased opening is followed by a strengthening, as it says: “The German press daily spreads the most tasteless rumours, the most hateful calumnies against us.” Soon, however, the talk turns to “furious declamations,” “madcaps,” and “perfidious malevolence.”

At the next press trial, a German public prosecutor may base his summing-up on the Russian note as an authenticated document.

And why must the German, especially the “democratic” press be attacked and, if possible, destroyed? Because it misjudges the “just as benevolent as disinterested sentiments,” the “openly peaceful intentions” of the Russian Emperor!

“When has Germany had reason to complain of us?,” asks Nesselrode in the name of his master. “During the whole time that the oppressive rule of a conqueror lasted on the Continent, Russia shed its blood to support Germany in the preservation of its integrity and independence. Russian territory had long been liberated when Russia still continued to follow its German allies onto all the battlefields of Europe and to assist them.”

Despite its numerous and well-paid agents, Russia is labouring under the grossest deception if it fancies it can arouse sympathies in the year 1848 by recalling the so-called Wars of Liberation. And Russia is supposed to have shed its blood for us Germans?

Quite apart from the fact that before 1812 Russia “supported” Germany’s “integrity and independence” through open alliance and secret treaties with Napoleon!"*!, it later amply compensated itself for its so-called assistance by robbery and plunder. Its help was meant for the princes allied with it; its assistance, despite the Kalisch Proclamation?*?, was for the representatives of absolutism “by the grace of God” against a ruler who had emerged from the Revolution. The Holy Alliance“?! and its unholy works, the bandit congresses of Karlsbad, Laibach, Verona!?! etc., the Russo-German persecutions of every liberal word, the entire policy since 1815, which was directed by Russia, have certainly had to impress a deep gratitude upon us. The House of Romanov and its diplomats may be unconcerned — we shall never forget this debt. As far as Russian assistance in the years 1814 and 1815 is concerned, we are more receptive to every other feeling than to gratitude for that assistance paid for with England’s subsidies.

The reasons are obvious to the discerning. Had Napoleon remained victorious in Germany, he would at least have disposed of three dozen beloved Landesväter with his well-known energetic formula. French legislation and administration would have created a solid foundation for German unity and spared us 33 years of disgrace and the tyranny of the Federal Diet, so highly praised, naturally, by Mr Nesselrode. By a few Napoleonic decrees, all the medieval rubbish, those corvées and tithes, those exemptions and privileges, the whole feudal economy and patriarchalism with which we still have to struggle in every nook and cranny of our Vaterländer, would have been completely destroyed. The rest of Germany would long since be at the same level which the left bank of the Rhine attained soon after the first French Revolution; we would now have neither Uckermark grandees, nor a Pomeranian Vendée!?H, and would no longer need to inhale the stuffy air of the “historical” and “Christian-Germanic” swamps.[!

But Russia is magnanimous. Even if it receives no thanks, its Emperor still preserves for us his old, “just as benevolent as disinterested sentiments.” Yes, “despite the insults and provocations, it has not been possible to change our” * (Russia’s) “sentiments.”

These sentiments manifest themselves for the time being in a “passive and observing system,” in which Russia has undeniably attained great virtuosity. It knows how to wait until the opportune moment seems to have come. Notwithstanding the enormous troop movements that have taken place in Russia since March, Mr Nesselrode is naive enough to try to make us believe that the Russian troops have constantly “remained immobile in their cantonments.” Despite the classic: “Now, gentlemen, to horse!”!2*], despite the confidential outpouring of heart and gall by the Police Minister Abramowicz in Warsaw against the German people, despite, or rather because of, the threatening and successful notes from Petersburg, the Russian government is and remains animated by sentiments of “peace and reconciliation.” Russia persists in being “openly peaceable and defensive.” In Nesselrode’s circular, Russia is patience itself and pious, oft-insulted and provoked innocence.

We shall list some of Germany’s crimes against Russia cited in the note: 1. “hostile mood” and 2. “change fever throughout Germany.” In the face of so much benevolence from the Tsar, a “hostile” mood! How hurtful to the paternal heart of our dear brother-in-law. And then this accursed disease — “change fever”! That is actually the first, though here the second, horror. From time to time Russia bestows another disease upon us — cholera. Very well! But that “change fever” is not only contagious; it often appears in so malignant an intensification that high personages very easily find themselves compelled to a hasty departure for England!”!. Was the “German change fever” perhaps one of the reasons which deterred Russia from invading in March and April? 3rd crime: The Pre-Parliament in Frankfurt!!! presented the war against Russia as a necessity of the time. The same has been done in clubs and newspapers, and it is all the more unforgivable because, according to the provisions of the Holy Alliance and later treaties between Russia, Austria and Prussia, we Germans are to shed blood only for the interest of the princes, but not for our own. 4th. In Germany there has been talk of restoring old Poland within its real frontiers of 1772. The knout for you and then off to Siberia! But no, when Nesselrode wrote the circular, he did not yet know the Frankfurt Parliament’s vote on the question of incorporating Posen! The Parliament has expiated our guilt, and a gentle, forgiving smile now hovers on the Tsar’s lips. 5th crime of Germany: “Its deplorable war against a Nordic monarchy.” For such an enterprise, Germany might, in consideration of the effect of Russia’s threatening note, of the hasty retreat of the German army ordered from Potsdam, and in view of the declaration made by the Prussian envoy in Copenhagen on the motives and purpose of the war!, be punished more mildly than would be permissible without these circumstances; 6th. “open preaching of a defensive and offensive alliance between Germany and France.” Finally 7th. “the reception accorded to the Polish refugees, their free travel on the railways, and the insurrection in the Poznań region.”

If language were not given to diplomats and relevant persons “to conceal their thoughts,” Nesselrode and Brother Nikolaus would jubilantly throw their arms around our necks and fervently thank us that so many Poles have been lured from France, England, Belgium, etc., to the Poznań region and conveyed there with every facility, in order to shoot them down with case-shot and shrapnel, brand them with hell-stone, cut them down, send them off with shaven heads, etc., and, on the other hand, to completely wipe them out if possible in Krakow by a treacherous bombardment.

And in the face of these seven deadly sins of Germany, Russia has nonetheless remained on the defensive, has not proceeded to any attack? Thus it is, and precisely for that reason the Russian diplomat calls upon the world to admire his Emperor’s love of peace and moderation.

The rule of procedure of the Russian Emperor, “from which he has not deviated for a moment” so far, is, according to Mr Nesselrode, the following,

“to interfere in no way in the internal affairs of countries which might wish to change their organisation, but rather to leave the peoples completely free to carry out, without any hindrance on his part, the political and social experiments they might wish to undertake; to attack no power that had not attacked him; but on the other hand, resolved to repel any encroachment upon his own internal security and to watch that, should the territorial equilibrium be destroyed or altered at any point, this should not take place at the cost of our legitimate interests.”

The Russian note forgets to add the illustrative examples. After the July Revolution, the Emperor assembled an army on the western frontier in order, in alliance with his faithful in Germany, to prove to the French in practice how he intended to “leave the peoples completely free to carry out their political and social experiments.” That he was disturbed in his rule of procedure was not his fault, but that of the Polish Revolution of 1830, which gave a different direction to his plans. We saw the same procedure soon afterwards with regard to Spain and Portugal. His open and secret support of Don Carlos!!! and Dom Miguel?! are evidence of this. When the King of Prussia, at the end of 1842, wanted to grant a kind of estates-based constitution on the most cosy “historical” basis, which played such a splendid role in the Patents of 1847, it was notoriously Nikolaus who emphatically protested and cheated us “Christian Germans” out of several years of patent delights. He did this, as Nesselrode says, because Russia never meddles in the internal organisation of a country. We hardly need to mention Krakow. Let us only recall the latest example of the imperial “rule of procedure”:

The Wallachians overthrow the old government and provisionally put a new one in its place. They want to reshape the whole old system and to arrange themselves after the example of civilised peoples. “To leave them quite free to carry out the political and social experiments,” a Russian corps of troops invades the country.?*°]

After this, everyone could already find for himself the application of this “rule of procedure” to Germany. However, the Russian note spares us our own conclusion. It says:

“As long as the Confederation, whatever new form it may give itself, leaves the neighbouring States untouched and does not set out to extend its territorial demarcation further by force or to assert its legitimate competence outside the limits which the treaties prescribe for it, the Emperor will also respect its internal independence.”

The second relevant passage is clearer:

“If Germany really succeeds in solving the problem of its organisation, without detriment to its internal tranquillity, without the new forms impressed upon its nationality being such as to endanger the tranquillity of other States, we shall sincerely congratulate it, for the same reasons that made us wish it strong and united under its former political forms.”

The following passage, however, sounds most clearly and unambiguously, where the circular speaks of Russia’s unremitting efforts to recommend and preserve concord and unity in Germany:

“Certainly not that material unity of which a democracy greedy for levelling and aggrandisement dreams today, and which, if it could realise the ambitious theories as it has conceived them, would sooner or later inevitably bring Germany into a state of war with all neighbouring States — but the moral unity, the sincere concord of views and intentions in all political questions which the German Confederation had to deal with externally.

To preserve this unity, to draw the bonds which link the German governments together more tightly, that alone is what our policy strove for.

What we wanted at that time, we still want today.”

As we can see from the foregoing, the Russian government is only too happy to allow us Germany’s moral unity, but no material unity, no displacement of the previous Diet business by a central power based on popular sovereignty, not merely apparent, but real and thoroughly effective! What magnanimity!

“What we wanted at that time” (before February 1848) “we still want today.”

That is the only sentence in the Russian note that certainly no one will doubt. We remark to Mr Nesselrode, however, that wanting and accomplishing are still two different things.

The Germans now know fully where they stand with regard to Russia. As long as the old system, painted over with new modern colours, persists, or if, having deviated from the Russian and “historical” track in the “drunkenness and exaltation of the moment,” one docilely returns to it — as long as that lasts, Russia will stand by “openly peaceable.”

The conditions inside Russia, the raging of the cholera, the partial uprisings in individual districts, the revolution hatched in Petersburg but prevented in time, the plot in the citadel of Warsaw, the volcanic soil in the Kingdom of Poland!?? — all these are, in any case, circumstances which have contributed to the just as benevolent as “disinterested sentiments” of the Tsar towards Germany.

However, a far more powerful influence on the “passive and observing system” of the Russian government was undoubtedly the course of events in Germany itself so far.

Could Nikolaus in his own person attend to his business better, carry out his intentions more quickly, than has happened so far in Berlin-Potsdam, in Innsbruck, Vienna and Prague, in Frankfurt as in Hanover and in almost every other cosy corner of our Fatherland, once more filled with Russian moral unity? Have not Pfuel (of the hell-stone)”!, Colomb and the Shrapnel-General! in Posen, worked in such a way, and Windischgrätz in Prague, that the Tsar’s heart must swim with delight? Did not Windischgrätz receive a brilliant letter of commendation from Nikolaus via Potsdam from the hands of young Mr Meyendorf? And do the Messrs Hansemann-Milde-Schreckenstein in Berlin, the Radowitzes, Schmerlings and Lichnowskis in Frankfurt leave anything to be desired for Russia? Must not the Biedermeier-ness and Basserkeit? in the Frankfurt Parliament be a soothing balm for many a pain of the recent past?

Under such conditions, Russian diplomacy needed no armies invading Germany. The “passive and observing system” and — the note just discussed — are perfectly sufficient!

The Hansemann Ministry and the Old Prussian Draft Penal Code

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 65, August 4, 1848]

Cologne, August 3. We have often said it: The Hansemann Ministry makes itself in every way the eulogiser of the Bodelschwingh Ministry; after the recognition of the revolution, the recognition of the old Prussian business — that is the way of the world!

But that Mr Hansemann should carry it to the point of virtuosity, praising even the deeds of Messrs Bodelschwingh, Savigny and Consorts, which he himself, in his time, as a Rhenish provincial deputy, had fought with the greatest embitterment — that is a triumph on which the Potsdam Camarilla had certainly not reckoned. And yet! Let the following article from the latest “Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger” be read:

Berlin, August ... The latest Justice-Ministerial Gazette contains in its “non-official part” statistical observations on the death penalty and a survey of the death sentences which were passed and confirmed in the years 1826 to 1843 inclusive, apart from the sentences passed in the so-called demagogic investigations. The work has been undertaken with the aid of the files of the Ministry of Justice and, given the importance of the subject, ought to attract particular attention in this respect. According to the survey, in the period in question:

1. In the Rhine Province 189 death sentences were passed, 6 confirmed,
2. in the other provinces 237 were passed, 94 confirmed,
in total 426 death sentences were passed, 100 confirmed,
of which, however, four did not lead to execution because of the flight or death of the criminals.

Had the draft of the new Penal Code of 1847 been in force during that period:

1. In the Rhine Province only 53 death sentences would have been passed, 5 confirmed,
2. in the other provinces only 134 would have been passed, 76 confirmed,
in total 187 death sentences would have been passed, 81 confirmed,
always provided that the same principles as hitherto had been followed in confirmation. Thus, in the case of 237 criminals sentenced to death under the existing laws, the death penalty would not have been passed, and in the case of 19 executed criminals, this penalty would not have been carried out.

According to the survey, the annual average was:

1. In the Rhine Province 10¹/₃ death sentences passed and ⁵/₃ confirmed,
2. in the other provinces 13¹/₅ passed and 5¹/₅ confirmed.

But if the draft had been in force at that time, the annual average would have been:

1. In the Rhine Province only 2¹⁷/₁₈ passed and ⁵/₁₅ confirmed,
2. in the other provinces only 7¹/₅ passed and ... confirmed.

And now admire the mildness, the excellence, the glory of the royal Prussian draft Penal Code of 1847! One whole death sentence fewer would perhaps have been carried out in the Rhine Province in 18 years! What advantages!

But the countless law courts which would have been withdrawn from the juries, with royal judges sentencing and locking up people, the shameful flogging penalties which would have been carried out with old Prussian sticks here on the Rhine, here, where we have freed ourselves from the stick for forty years, the filthy proceedings resulting from the crimes against morality unknown to the Code and conjured up again by the depraved haemorrhoidal fantasy of the land-law knights, the most inevitable juridical confusion of concepts, and finally the countless political trials resulting from the despotic and perfidious provisions of that reprehensible concoction — in a word, the Prussianisation of the whole Rhine Province: do the Rhenish renegades in Berlin think that we would forget all that over the one head that did not fall?

It is clear: Mr Hansemann intends, through his agent in the justice department, Mr Märker, to push through what Bodelschwingh foundered on; he now really intends to let the so thoroughly hated old Prussian draft Penal Code come into force.

At the same time one learns that juries are to be introduced only in Berlin, and even there only on a trial basis.

In other words: Not introduction of Rhenish law in the old Prussian provinces, but introduction of old Prussian law in the Rhineland — that is the great result, the colossal “achievement” of the March revolution! Rien que ça!

As we have just reliably learned, here in the city of Cologne up to today approximately 210,000 thalers have been partly paid in cash, partly subscribed for the voluntary loan. It is to be expected that those who have so far not taken part in this state loan will recognise and fulfil their duty as citizens in the next ten days, all the more so since their own advantage must surely advise them to lend their money before 10 August at 5 per cent rather than after that date at 3½ per cent. In particular it is necessary that the rural inhabitants, who up to now have not contributed to that loan in the right proportion, should not miss that deadline. Where patriotism and correct insight are lacking, compulsion would otherwise have to set in.

A whole 1½ per cent premium is placed on the patriotism of the taxpayers, and “for all that”!???! patriotism persists in its latent state! C’est inconcevable.¹ 1½ per cent difference! Can patriotism resist such a ringing argument as 1½ per cent?

It is our duty to explain this wonderful phenomenon to our beloved colleague.

What will the Prussian state use to pay not 5 but only 3½ per cent? With new taxes. And when the ordinary taxes are not sufficient, as is foreseeable, with a new forced loan. And what will forced loan No. II be paid with? With a forced loan No. III. And what will forced loan No. III be paid with? With bankruptcy. Patriotism therefore bids us to barricade the path the Prussian government has taken in every possible way, not with thalers, but with protests.

* * *

Prussia furthermore already rejoices in an original sin of 10 million thalers for the Hun war in Posen!?! Fifteen million thalers of voluntary loan would thus be nothing but an indemnity bill!?! for the intrigues of the secret cabinet of Potsdam, which, contrary to the orders of the weak cabinet of Berlin, waged this war in the interest of the Russians and reaction. The Junker-like counter-revolution is condescending enough to address itself to bourgeois and peasant purses, which are afterwards to foot the bill for its heroic deeds. And the hard-hearted “rural inhabitants” resist such condescension? The “Ministry of Action” furthermore demands money for the constable economy, and you do not have the “correct insight” into the blessings of constablery translated from the English into the Prussian²⁷²! The “Ministry of Action” wants to gag you, and you refuse the money for the procurement of gags? A strange lack of insight!

The Ministry of Action needs money to push through the Prussian special interests against German unity. And the rural inhabitants of the Cologne district are blind enough not to want to bear the costs of defending the Uckermark-Pomeranian nationality, despite the premium of 1½ per cent? Where is patriotism here?

Our patriotic colleague, who threatens “execution”, forgets finally in her zeal that the forced loan has not yet been voted by the Agreement Assembly and that ministerial drafts have the same force of law as the leading articles of the “Kölnische Zeitung”.

¹ That is inconceivable.

304 Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels — “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”