FREEDOM.
"What were the first effects of emancipation in your province?" I ask
a lady.
"Rather droll," replies the Princess B. "In the morning, the poor
fellows could not believe their senses; in the afternoon, they got
tipsy; next day, they wanted to be married."
"Doubt--drunkenness--matrimony! Yes, it was rather droll."
"You see, a serf was not suffered to drink whisky and make love as he
pleased. It was a wild outburst of liberty; and perhaps the two things
brought their own punishments?"
"Not the marrying, surely?"
"Ha! who knows?"
The upper ranks are much divided in opinion as to the true results of
emancipation. If the liberal circles of the Winter Palace look on
things in the rosiest light, the two extreme parties which stand aside
as chorus and critics--the Whites and Reds, Obstructives and
Socialists--regard them from two opposite points of view, as in the
last degree unsound, unsafe.
When a Russian takes upon himself the office of critic, he is always
gloomy, Oriental, and prophetic. He turns his face to the darker side
of things; he groans in spirit, and picks up words of woe. If he has
to deal as critic with the sins of his own time and country, he
prepares his tongue to denounce and his soul to curse; and his
self-examination, whether in respect to his private vices or his
public failings, is conducted in a dark, reproachful, and
inquisitorial spirit.
In one house you fall among the Whites--a charming set of men to meet
in drawing-room or club; urbane, accomplished, profligate; owners who
never saw their serfs, landlords who never lived on their estates;
fine fellows--whether young or old--who spent their lives in roving
from St. Petersburg to Paris, and were known by sight in every
gaming-house, in every theatre, from the Neva to the Seine. These men
will tell you, with an exquisite smile, that Russia has come to the
dogs. "Free labor!" they exclaim with scorn, "the country is sinking
under these free institutions year by year--sinking in morals, sinking
in production, sinking in political strength. A peasant works less,
drinks more than ever. While he was a serf he could be flogged into
industry, if not into sobriety. Now he is master, he will please
himself; and his pleasure is to dawdle in the dram-shop and to slumber
on the stove. Not only is he going down himself, but he is pulling
every one else down in his wake. The burgher is worse off; the
merchant finds nothing to buy and sell. Less land is under plough and
spade; the quantity of corn, oats, barley, and maize produced is less
than in the good old times. Russia is poorer than she was, financially
and physically. Famines have become more frequent; arson is
increasing; while the crimes of burglary and murder are keeping pace
with the strides of fire and famine. As rich and poor, we are more
divided than we were as lords and serfs. The rich used to care for the
poor, and the poorer classes lived on the waste of rich men's boards.
They had an influence on each other, and always for their mutual good.
In this new scheme we are strangers when we are not rivals,
competitors when we are not foes. A rustic cares for neither lord nor
priest. A landlord who desires to live on his estate must bow and
smile, must bend and cringe, in order to keep his own. The rustics rob
his farm, they net his lake, they beat his bailiff, they insult his
wife. His time is wasted in complaining--now to the police, now to the
magistrate, now again to the cantonal chief. All classes are at
strife, and the seeds of revolution are broadly sown."
In a second house you fall among the Reds--a far more dashing and
excited set; many of whom have also spent much time in passing from
St. Petersburg to Paris, though not with the hope of becoming known to
croupiers and ballet-girls; men with pallid brows and sparkling eyes,
who make a science of their social whims, and treat the emancipating
acts as so many paths to that republic of rustics which they desire to
see. "These circulars, reports, and edicts were necessary," they
allege, "in order to open men's eyes to the tragic facts. Our miseries
were hidden; our princes were so rich, our palaces so splendid, and our
troops so numerous, that the world--and even we ourselves--believed
the imperial government strong enough to march in any direction, to
strike down every foe. The Tsar was so great that no one thought of
his serfs; the sun was so brilliant that you could not see the motes.
But now that reign of deceit is gone forever, and our wretchedness is
exposed to every eye. You say we are free, and prospering in our
freedom; but the facts are otherwise; we are neither free nor
prosperous. The act of emancipation was a snare. Men fancied they were
going to be freed from their lords; but when the day of deliverance
came they found themselves taken from a bad master and delivered to a
worse. A man who was once a serf became a slave. He had belonged to a
neighbor, often to a friend, and now he became a property of the
crown. Branded with the Black Eagle, he was fastened to the soil by a
stronger chain. A false civilization seized him, held him in her
embrace, and made him pass into the fire. What has that civilization
done for him? Starved him; stripped him; ruined him. Go into our
cities. Look at our burghers; watch how they lie and cheat; hear how
they bear false witness; note how they buy with one yard, sell with
another yard. Go into our communes. Mark the dull eye and the stupid
face of the village lout, who lives alone, like a wild beast, far from
his fellows--part of the forest, as a log of wood is part of the
forest. Observe how he drinks and shuffles; how he says his prayers,
and shirks his duty, and begets his kind, with hardly more thought in
his head than a wolf and a bear. This state of things must be swept
away. The poor man is the victim of all tyrants, all impostors; the
minister cheats him of his freedom, and the landlord of his field; but
the hour of revolution is drawing nigh; and people will greet that
coming hour with their rallying cry--More liberty and more land!"
A stranger listening to every one, looking into every thing, will see
that on the fringe of actual fact there are appearances which might
seem to justify, according to the point of view, these opposite and
extreme opinions; yet, on massing and balancing his observations of
the country as a whole, a stranger must perceive that under
emancipation the peasant is better dressed, better lodged, and better
fed; that his wife is healthier, his children cleaner, his homestead
tidier; that he and his belongings are improved by the gift which
changed him from a chattel into a man.
A peasant spends much money, it is true, in drams; but he spends yet
more in clothing for his wife. He builds his cabin of better wood, and
in the eastern provinces, if not in all, you find improvements in the
walls and roof. He paints the logs, and fills up cracks with plaster,
where he formerly left them bare and stuffed with moss. He sends his
boys to school, and goes himself more frequently to church. If he
exports less corn and fur to other countries, it is because, being
richer, he can now afford to eat white bread and wear a cat-skin cap.
The burgher class and the merchant class have been equally benefited
by the change. A good many peasants have become burghers, and a good
many burghers merchants. All the domestic and useful trades have been
quickened into life. More shoes are worn, more carts are wanted, more
cabins are built. Hats, coats, and cloaks are in higher demand; the
bakeries and breweries find more to do; the teacher gets more pupils,
and the banker has more customers on his books.
This movement runs along the line; for in the wake of emancipation
every other liberty and right is following fast. Five years ago
(1864), the Emperor called into existence two local parliaments in
every province; a district assembly and a provincial assembly: in
which every class, from prince to peasant, was to have his voice. The
district assembly is elected by classes; nobles, clergy, merchants,
husbandmen; each apart, and free; the provincial assembly consists of
delegates from the several district assemblies. The district assembly
settles all questions as to roads and bridges; the provincial assembly
looks to building prisons, draining pools, damming rivers, and the
like. The peasant interest is strong in the district assembly, the
landlord interest in the provincial assembly; and they are equally
useful as schools of freedom, eloquence, and public spirit. On these
local boards, the cleverest men in every province are being trained
for civic, and, if need be, parliamentary life.
On every side, an observer notes with pleasure a tendency of the
villagers to move upon the towns and enter into the higher activities
of civic life. This tendency is carrying them back beyond the Tartar
times into the better days of Novgorod and Pskoff.
In his commune, a peasant may hope to pass through the dreary
existence led by his mule and ox; his thoughts given up to his
cabbage-soup, his buckwheat porridge, his loaf of black bread, and his
darling dram. If he acquires in his village some patriarchal
virtues--love of home, respect for age, delight in tales and songs,
and preference for oral over written law--he also learns, without
knowing why, to think and feel like a Bedouin in his tent, and a
Kirghiz on his steppe. A rustic is nearly always humming old tunes.
Whether you see him felling his pine, unloading his team, or sitting
at his door, he is nearly always singing the same old dirge of love or
war. When he breaks into a brisker stave, it is always into a song of
revenge and hate. Bandits are his heroes; and the staid young fellow
who dares not whisper to his partner in a dance, will roar out such a
riotous squall:
"I'll toil in the fields no more!
For what can I gain by the spade?
My hands are empty, my heart is sore;
A knife! my friend's in the forest glade!"
Another youth may sing:
"I'll rob the merchant at his stall,
I'll slay the noble in his hall;
With girls and whisky I'll have my fling,
And the world will honor me like a king."
One of the most popular of these robber songs has a chorus running
thus, addressed in menace to the noble and the rich:
"We have come to drink your wine,
We have come to steal your gold,
We have come to kiss your wives!
Ha! ha!"
This reckless sense of right and wrong is due to that serfage under
which the peasants groaned for two hundred and sixty years. Serfage
made men indifferent to life and death. The crimes of serfage have
scarcely any parallel, except among savage tribes; and the liberty
which some of the freed peasants enjoyed the most was the liberty of
revenge.
Ivan Gorski was living in Tamboff, in very close friendship with a
family of seven persons, when he conceived a grudge against them on
some unknown ground, obtained a gun, and asked his friends to let him
practice firing in their yard. They let him put up his target, and
blaze away till he became a very fair shot, and people got used to the
noise of his gun. When these two points were gained, he took off every
member of the house. He could not tell the reason of his crime.
Daria Sokolof was employed as nurse in a family, and when the child
grew up went back to her village, parting from her master and mistress
on the best of terms. Some years passed by. On going into the town to
sell her fruit and herbs, and finding a bad market, she went to her
old home and asked for a lodging for the night. Her master was ill,
and her mistress put her to bed. At two in the morning she got up,
seized an Italian iron, crept to her master's room, and beat his
brains out; then to her mistress's room, and killed her also.
Afterwards she went into the servant's room, and murdered her; into
the boy's room, and murdered him. A pet dog lay on the lad's coverlet,
and she smashed its skull. She took a little money--not much; went
home, and slept till daylight. No one suspected her, for no living
creature knew she had been to the house. Twelve months elapsed before
a clue was found; but as no witness of the crime was left, she could
only be condemned to a dozen years in the Siberian mines. Her case
excited much remark, and persons are even now petitioning the ministry
of justice to let her off!
It is only by living in a wider field, by acting for himself, by
gaining a higher knowledge of men and things, that the peasant can
escape from the bad traditions and morbid sentiments of his former
life. It will be an immense advantage for the empire of villages to
become, as other nations are, an empire of both villages and towns.