Sec.3. The Revolutionary Movement and its Significance.—­It is now time to say something of the revolutionary movement of 1905 and of its ruthless suppression which gave Russia so evil a reputation in the eyes of Western Europe.  It was my good fortune to be a resident in the dominions of the Tsar during the critical years of 1906-9, to be present at a session of the first Duma and to mingle with the members of that historic assembly in the lobby of the Parliament House, to catch something of the extraordinary belief in the coming of the millennium which was prevalent among all classes in Petrograd in the first charmed months of 1906, and finally to have been acquainted with active revolutionaries and their friends throughout the whole of my period of residence.  I can therefore speak with a certain amount of inner knowledge of the revolution; and though I do not wish to claim any particular authority for the opinions stated below, which are after all nothing but the opinions of a single individual who has lived for three years in a corner of the Russian Empire, yet they have at least this advantage over those entertained on the subject by the average Englishmen, viz. that they are based not on newspaper reports but on actual experience, and that they were arrived at gradually and—­it may be added—­with considerable reluctance, since they had, as it were, to win their way through a number of my own personal sympathies and political prejudices.  There is, of course, no room here for any detailed treatment of a movement upon which a big book might be written, and I shall therefore have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian revolution.

The main reason why English people get mistaken ideas about Russia is that they imagine Russians to be nothing but Englishmen picturesquely disguised in furs and top-boots, and because they interpret the political situation in Russia in terms of English history and politics.  As I have already tried to show, Russians are built differently from English people, from the soul outwards, while the political and social condition of the Russian Empire is totally unlike anything that has ever existed in this country.  If therefore the real causes of the movement of 1905 and of its failure are to be rightly understood, we must put away from our minds the desire to find analogies in the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789, or the social revolution of which Karl Marx dreamed; Russia can only be interpreted in terms of Russian history and Russian conditions.  In one thing, however, the Russian revolution was like all revolutions which have ever been or are ever likely to be, viz. that it was concerned with two distinct issues, one a narrow question of political and constitutional reform, and the other a far wider question involving an attempt to reconstruct not merely the institutions of society but also to transform the ideals and conceptions upon which society rested.