Close upon the end of the fifteenth century the Muscovite ideas of right
were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great and compressed into
a code. Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and
time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing
crime, the knout and death.
But hidden in this tough mass was one law of greater import than others.
Thereby were all peasants forbidden to leave the lands they were then
tilling, except during the eight days before and after St. George's Day.
This provision sprang from Ivan's highest views of justice and broadest
views of political economy; the nobles received it with plaudits, which
have found echoes even in these days; the peasants received it with no
murmurs which history has found any trouble in drowning.
Just one hundred years later upon the Muscovite throne, as nominal Czar,
sat the weakling Feodor I; but behind the throne stood, as real Czar,
hard, strong Boris Godunoff. Looking forward to Feodor's death, Boris
made ready to mount the throne; and he saw--what all other "Mayors of
the Palace" climbing into the places of _faineant_ kings have seen--that
he must link to his fortunes the fortunes of some strong body in the
nation; he broke, however, from the general rule among usurpers--bribing
the church--and determined to bribe the nobility.
The greatest grief of the Muscovite nobles seemed to be that the
peasants could escape from their oppression by the emigration allowed on
St. George's Day. Boris saw his opportunity: he cut off the privilege of
St. George's Day, and the peasant was fixed to the soil forever. No
Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry, but, through this
decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants,
just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges. To this the peasants
submitted; but history has not been able to drown their sighs over this
wrong; their proverbs and ballads make St. George's Day representative
of all ill-luck and disappointment.
A few years later Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued
a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain
free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This
completed the work, and Russia, which never had had the benefits of
feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse, a serf
caste, bound to the glebe.
The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world
knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time; how,
despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him; how he
dowered the nation with things and thoughts that transformed it from a
petty Asiatic horde to a great European Power.
We were present a few years since when one of those lesser triumphs of
his genius was first unfolded. It was in that room at the
Hermitage--adjoining the Winter Palace--set apart for the relics of
Peter. Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American
industry--one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of
inventors' rights.
Suddenly from the inventor, pulling over some old dust-covered machines
in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were natural indeed.
In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular
forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself: specimens
of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there unheeded
a hundred fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his
workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and
gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris Universal
Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary;
and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten
machine of Peter's.
Yet, though Peter fought so well and thought so well, he made some
mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For
in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme
lack--lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.
Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster
Hall--"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia,
and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin,
having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be
hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he
ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.
Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an
army to learn his opponent's game; in his building of St. Petersburg,
where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the
first year. But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his
dealings with the serf system. Serfage was already recognized in Peter's
time as an evil. Peter himself once stormed forth in protestations and
invectives against what he stigmatized as "selling men like beasts;
separating parents from children, husbands from wives; which takes place
nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow." He
declared that a law should be made against it. Yet it was by his
misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of
foulness.
For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that
Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron,
and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron. He never
stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands as a
natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia as a forced growth. In
lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid
workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs.
These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the
State they had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse
than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.
And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more. Cold-blooded officials were
set at taking the census. These adopted easy classifications; free
peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under a
single denomination. So serfage became still more difficult to be
distinguished from slavery. As this base of hideous wrong was thus
widened and deepened the nobles built higher and stronger their
superstructure of arrogance and pretension. Not many years after Peter's
death, they so overawed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes
of the empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from
the soil. So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.
But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler
from whom the world came to expect much. To mount the throne, Catharine
II had murdered her husband; to keep the throne she had murdered two
claimants whose title was better than her own. She then became, with her
agents in these horrors, a second Messalina. To set herself right in the
eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of scepticism
which in that age made or marred European reputations. She flattered the
fierce deists by owning fealty to "_Le Roi_" Voltaire; she flattered the
mild deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she
flattered the atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself.
Her murders and orgies were soon forgotten in the new hopes for Russian
regeneration. Her dealings with Russia strengthened these hopes. The
official style required that all persons presenting petitions should
subscribe themselves "Your Majesty's humble serf." This formula she
abolished, and boasted that she had cast out the word serf from the
Russian language. Poets and philosophers echoed this boast over
Europe--and the serfs waited.
The great Empress spurred hope by another movement. She proposed to an
academy the question of serf emancipation as a subject for their prize
essay. The essay was written and crowned. It was filled with beautiful
things about liberty, practical things about moderation, flattering
things about the "Great Catharine"--and the serfs waited.
Again she aroused hope. It was given out that her most intense delight
came from the sight of happy serfs and prosperous villages. Accordingly,
in her journey to the Crimea, Potemkin squandered millions on millions
in rearing pasteboard villages, in dragging forth thousands of wretched
peasants to fill them, in costuming them to look thrifty, in training
them to look happy. Catharine was rejoiced, Europe sang paeans--the
serfs waited.
She seemed to go further: she issued a decree prohibiting the
enslavement of serfs. But unfortunately the palace intrigues, and the
correspondence with the philosophers, and the destruction of Polish
nationality left her no time to see the edict carried out. But Europe
applauded--and the serfs waited. Two years after this came a deed which
put an end to all this uncertainty. An edict was prepared ordering the
peasants of Little Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day
of publication should find them. This was vile; but what followed was
diabolic. Court pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises,
enticed hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung; in
an hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and
Catharine II was made infamous forever. So, about a century after Peter,
a wave of wrong rolled over Russia that not only drowned honor in the
nobility, but drowned hope in the people.
As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must
have sunk within them. For Paul I, Catharine's son and successor, was
infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained
by public opinion. He had been born with savage instincts, and educated
into ferocity. Tyranny was written on his features in his childhood. If
he remained in Russia his mother sneered and showed hatred of him; if he
journeyed in Western Europe crowds gathered about his coach to jeer at
his ugliness. Most of those who have seen Gillray's caricature of him,
issued in the height of English spite at Paul's homage to Bonaparte,
have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen the
portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps of St. Petersburg know well that
Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not.
And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought
into his every fibre. He demanded an oriental homage. As his carriage
whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop,
descend into the mud, and bow themselves. Himself threw his despotism
into this formula: "Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is no one
noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I speak."
And yet within that hideous mass glowed sparks of reverence for right.
When the nobles tried to get Paul's assent to more open arrangements for
selling serfs apart from the soil, he utterly refused; and when they
overtasked their human chattels Paul made a law that no serf should be
required to give more than three days in the week to the tillage of his
master's domain. But, within five years after his accession, Paul had
developed into such a ravenous wild beast that it became necessary to
murder him. This duty done, there came a change in the spirit of Russian
sovereignty as from March to May; but, sadly for humanity, there came at
the same time a change in the spirit of European politics, as from May
to March.
For, although the new Czar, Alexander I, was mild and liberal, the storm
of French ideas and armies had generally destroyed in monarchs' minds
any poor germs of philanthropy which had ever found lodgement there.
Still Alexander breasted this storm; found time to plan for his serfs,
and in 1803 put his hand to the work of helping them toward freedom. His
first edict was for the creation of the class of "free laborers." By
this, masters and serfs were encouraged to enter into an arrangement
which was to put the serf into immediate possession of himself, of a
homestead and of a few acres, giving him time to indemnify his master by
a series of payments. Alexander threw his heart into this scheme; and in
his kindliness he supposed that the pretended willingness of the nobles
meant something; but the serf-owning caste, without openly opposing,
twisted up bad consequences with good, braided impossibilities into
possibilities; the whole plan became a tangle, and was thrown aside.
The Czar now sought to foster other good efforts, especially those made
by some earnest nobles to free their serfs by will. But this plan also
the serf-owning caste entangled and thwarted. At last the storm of war
set in with such fury that all internal reforms must be lost sight of.
Russia had to make ready for those campaigns in which Napoleon gained
every battle. Then came that peaceful meeting on the raft at
Tilsit--worse for Russia than any warlike meeting; for thereby Napoleon
seduced Alexander, for years, from plans of bettering his empire into
dreams of extending it.
Coming out of these dreams, Alexander had to deal with such realities as
the burning of Moscow, the Battle of Leipsic, and the occupation of
France; yet, in the midst of those fearful times--when the grapple of
the emperors was at the fiercest; in the very year of the burning of
Moscow--Alexander rose in calm statesmanship, and admitted Bessarabia
into the empire under a proviso which excluded serfage forever. Hardly
was the great European tragedy ended, when Alexander again turned
sorrowfully toward the wronged millions of his empire. He found that
progress in civilization had but made the condition of the serfs worse.
The newly ennobled _parvenus_ were worse than the old _boyars_; they
hugged the serf system more lovingly and the serfs more hatefully. The
sight of these wrongs roused him. He seized a cross, and swore that the
serf system should be abolished.
Straightway a great and good plan was prepared. Its main features were:
a period of transition from serfage to personal liberty, extending
through twelve or fourteen years; the arrival of the serf at personal
freedom, with ownership of his cabin and the bit of land attached to it;
the gradual reimbursement of masters by serfs; and after this advance to
personal liberty, an advance by easy steps to a sort of political
liberty. Favorable as was this plan to the serf-owners, they attacked it
in various ways; but they could not kill it utterly. Esthonia, Livonia,
and Courland became free. Having failed to arrest the growth of freedom,
the serf-holding caste made every effort to blast the good fruits of
freedom. In Courland they were thwarted; in Esthonia and Livonia they
succeeded during many years; but the eternal laws were too strong for
them, and the fruitage of liberty had grown richer and better.
After these good efforts, Alexander stopped, discouraged. A few
patriotic nobles stood apart from their caste, and strengthened his
hands, as Lafayette and Lincourt strengthened Louis XVI. They even drew
up a plan of voluntary emancipation; formed an association for the
purpose and gained many signatures; but the great weight of that
besotted serf-owning caste was thrown against them, and all came to
naught. Alexander was at last walled in from the great object of his
ambition. Pretended theologians built, between him and emancipation,
walls of Scriptural interpretation; pretended philosophers built walls
of false political economy; pretended statesmen built walls of sham
common-sense. If the Czar could but have mustered courage to cut the
knot! Alas for Russia and for him, he wasted himself in efforts to untie
it. His heart sickened at it; he welcomed death, which alone could
remove him from it.
Alexander's successor, Nicholas I, had been known before his accession
as a mere martinet, a good colonel for parade days, wonderful in
detecting soiled uniforms, terrible in administering petty punishments.
It seems like the story of stupid Brutus over again. Altered
circumstances made a new man of him; and few things are more strange
than the change wrought in his whole bearing and look by that week of
energy in climbing his brother's throne. The great article in Nicholas's
creed was a complete, downright faith in despotism, and in himself as
despotism's apostle. Hence he hated, above all things, a limited
monarchy. He told De Custine that a pure monarchy or pure republic he
could understand; but that anything between these he could not
understand. Of his former rule of Poland, as constitutional monarch, he
spoke with loathing.
Of this hate which Nicholas felt for liberal forms of government there
yet remain monuments in the great museum of the Kremlin. That museum
holds an immense number of interesting things, and masses of jewels and
plate which make all other European collections mean. The visitor
wanders among clumps of diamonds and sacks of pearls and a nauseating
wealth of rubies and sapphires and emeralds. There rise rows upon rows
of jewelled cimeters, and vases and salvers of gold, and old saddles
studded with diamonds and with stirrups of gold--presents of frightened
Asiatic satraps or fawning European allies. There too are the crowns of
Muscovy, of Russia, of Kazan, of Astrakhan, of Siberia, of the Crimea,
and, pity to say it, of Poland. And next this is an index of despotic
hate--for the Polish sceptre is broken and flung aside. Near this stands
the full-length portrait of Alexander I, and at his feet are grouped
captured flags of Hungary and Poland--some with blood-marks still upon
them. But below all, far beneath the feet of the Emperor, in dust and
ignominy and on the floor, is flung the _very_ Constitution of
Poland--parchment for parchment, ink for ink, good promise for good
promise--which Alexander gave with so many smiles, and which Nicholas
took away with so much bloodshed.
And not far from this monument of the deathless hate Nicholas bore that
liberty he had stung to death stands a monument of his admiration for
straightforward tyranny, even in the most dreaded enemy his house ever
knew. Standing there is a statue in the purest of marble, the only
statue in those vast halls. It has the place of honor. It looks proudly
over all that glory and keeps ward over all that treasure; and that
statue, in full majesty of imperial robes, and bees, and diadem, and
face, is of the First Napoleon. Admiration of his tyrannic will has at
last made him peaceful sovereign of the Kremlin.
This spirit of absolutism took its most offensive form in Nicholas's
attitude toward Europe. He was the very incarnation of reaction against
revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who
infest Central Europe. Whenever, then, any tyrant's lie was to be
baptized, he stood its godfather; whenever any God's truth was to be
crucified, he led on those who passed by, reviling and wagging their
heads. Whenever these oppressors revived some old feudal wrong, Nicholas
backed them in the name of religion; whenever their nations struggled to
preserve some great right, Nicholas crushed them in the name of law and
order. With these pauper princes his children intermarried, and he fed
them with his crumbs and clothed them with scraps of his purple. The
visitor can see today, in every one of their dwarf palaces, some of his
malachite vases or porcelain bowls or porphyry columns.
But the people of Western Europe distrusted him as much as their rulers
worshipped; and some of these same presents to their rulers have become
trifle-monuments of no mean value in showing that popular idea of
Russian policy. Foremost among these stand those two bronze masses of
statuary in front of the Royal Palace at Berlin, representing fiery
horses restrained by strong men. Pompous inscriptions proclaim these
presents from Nicholas; but the people, knowing the man and his
measures, have fastened upon one of these curbed steeds the name of
"Progress Checked," and on the other "Retrogression Encouraged."
A few days before Nicholas's self-will brought him to his deathbed we
saw him ride through the St. Petersburg streets with no pomp and no
attendants, yet in as great pride as ever despotism gave a man. At his
approach, nobles uncovered and looked docile, soldiers faced about and
became statues, long-bearded peasants bowed to the ground with the air
of men on whose vision a miracle flashes. For there was one who could
make or mar all fortunes--the absolute owner of street and houses and
passers-by--one who owned the patent and dispensed the right to tread
that soil, to breathe that air, to be glorified in that sunlight and
amid those snow crystals. And he looked it all. Though at that moment
his army was entrapped by military stratagem, and he himself was
entrapped by diplomatic stratagem, that face and form were proud and
confident as ever.
There was in this attitude toward Europe--in this standing forth as the
representative man of absolutism, and breasting the nineteenth
century--something of greatness; but in his attitude toward Russia this
greatness was wretchedly diminished. For, as Alexander I was a good man
enticed out of goodness by the baits of Napoleon, Nicholas was a great
man scared out of greatness by the ever-recurring phantom of the French
Revolution.
In those first days of his reign, when he enforced loyalty with
grape-shot and halter, Nicholas dared much and stood firm; but his
character soon showed another side. Fearless as he was before bright
bayonets, he was an utter coward before bright ideas. He laughed at the
flash of cannon, but he trembled at the flash of a new living thought.
Whenever, then, he attempted a great thing for his nation, he was sure
to be scared back from its completion by fear of revolution. And so,
today, he who looks through Russia for Nicholas's works finds a number
of great things he had done, but each is single, insulated, not preceded
logically, not followed effectively. Take, as an example of this, his
railway-building.
His own pride and Russian interest demanded railways. He scanned the
world with that keen eye of his, saw that American energy was the best
supplement to Russian capital; his will darted quickly, struck afar, and
Americans came to build his road from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Nothing
can be more complete. It is an air-line road, and so perfect that the
traveller finds few places where the rails do not meet, before and
behind him, in the horizon. The track is double, the rails very heavy
and admirably ballasted; station-houses and engine-houses are splendid
in build, perfect in arrangement, and surrounded by neat gardens. The
whole work is worthy of the Pyramid builders. The traveller is whirled
by culverts, abutments, and walls of dressed granite, through cuttings
where the earth on either side is carefully paved or turfed to the
summit. Ranges of Greek columns are reared as crossings in the midst of
broad marshes, lions' heads in bronzed iron stare out upon vast wastes
where never rose even the smoke from a serf's kennel.
All this seems good; and a ride of four hundred miles through such
glories rarely fails to set the traveller at chanting the praises of the
Emperor who conceived them. But when the traveller notes that complete
isolation of the work from all conditions necessary to its success, his
praises grow fainter. He sees that Nicholas held back from continuing
the road to Odessa, though half the money spent in making the road an
imperial plaything would have built a good, solid extension to that most
important seaport; he sees that Nicholas dared not untie police
regulations, and that commerce is wretchedly meagre. Contrary to what
would obtain under a free system, this great public work found the
country wretched and left it wretched. The traveller flies by no ranges
of trim palings and tidy cottages; he sees the same dingy groups of huts
here as elsewhere, the same cultivation looking for no morrow, the same
tokens that the laborer is not thought worthy of his hire. This same
tendency to great single works, this same fear of great connected
systems, this same timid isolation of great creations from principles
essential to their growth, is seen, too, in Nicholas's church-building.
Foremost of all the edifices on which Nicholas lavished the wealth of
the empire stands the Isak Church in St. Petersburg. It is one of the
largest and certainly the richest cathedral in Christendom. All is
polished pink granite and marble and bronze. On all sides are double
rows of Titanic columns, each a single block of polished granite with
bronze capital. Colossal masses of bronze statuary are grouped over each
front; high above the roof and surrounding the great drums of the domes
are lines of giant columns in granite bearing giant statues in bronze;
and crowning all rises the vast central dome, flanked by its four
smaller domes, all heavily plated with gold.
The church within is one gorgeous mass of precious marbles and mosaics
and silver and gold and jewels. On the tabernacle of the altar, in gold
and malachite, on the screen of the altar, with its pilasters of lapis
lazuli and its range of malachite columns fifty feet high, were lavished
millions on millions. Bulging from the ceilings are massy bosses of
Siberian porphyry and jasper. To decorate the walls with unfading
pictures, Nicholas founded an establishment for mosaic work, where sixty
pictures were commanded, each demanding, after all artistic labor, the
mechanical labor of two men for four years.
Yet this vast work is not so striking a monument of Nicholas's luxury as
of his timidity. For this cathedral and some others almost as grand
were, in part at least, results of the deep wish of Nicholas to wean his
people from their semi-idolatrous love for dark, confined, filthy
sanctuaries, like those of Moscow; but here again is a timid purpose and
half result; Nicholas dared set no adequate enginery working at the
popular religious training or moral training. There had been such an
organization, the Russian Bible Society, favored by Alexander I; but
Nicholas swept it away at one stroke of the pen. Evidently, he feared
lest Scriptural denunciations of certain sins in ancient politics might
be popularly interpreted against certain sins in modern politics. The
corruption system in Russia is old, organized, and respectable. Stories
told of Russian bribes and thefts exceed belief only until one has been
on the ground.
Nicholas began well. He made an imperial progress to Odessa, was
welcomed in the morning by the governor in full pomp and robes and flow
of smooth words; and at noon the same governor was working in the
streets with ball and chain as a convict. But against such a chronic
moral evil no government is so weak as your so-called "strong"
government. Nicholas set out one day for the Kronstadt arsenals to look
into the accounts there; but before he reached them, stores,
storehouses, and account-books were in ashes. So at last Nicholas folded
his arms and wrestled no more. For, apart from the trouble, there came
ever in his dealings with thieves that old timid thought of his, that,
if he examined too closely their chief tenure, they might examine too
closely his despot tenure.
We have shown this vague fear in Nicholas's mind thus at length and in
different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key
to his dealings with the serf system. Toward his toiling millions
Nicholas always showed sympathy. Let news of a single wrong to a serf
get through the hedges about the Russian majesty, and woe to the guilty
master! Many of these wrongs came to Nicholas's notice; and he came to
hate the system, and tried to undermine it. Opposition met him, of
course; not so much the ponderous laziness of Peter's time as an
opposition, polite and elastic, which never ranted and never stood
up--for then Nicholas would have throttled it and stamped upon it. But
it did its best to entangle his reason and thwart his action. He was
told that the serfs were well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed,
well-provided with religion; were contented, and had no wish to leave
their owners.
Now Nicholas was not strong at spinning sham reasons nor subtle at
weaving false conscience; but, to his mind, the very fact that the
system had so degraded a man that he could laugh and dance and sing,
while other men took his wages, his wife, and homestead, was the
crowning argument against the system. Then the political economists
beset him, proving that without forced labor Russia must sink into sloth
and poverty.
Yet all this could not shut out from Nicholas's sight the great black
fact in the case. He saw, and winced as he saw, that, while other
European nations, even under despots, were comparatively active and
energetic, his own people were sluggish and stagnant; that, although
great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in
Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or
builders, or inventors, but only two main products of Russian
civilization, dissolute lords and abject serfs.
Nearly twenty years went by in this timid dropping of grains of salt
into a putrid sea. But at last, in 1842, Nicholas issued his ukase
creating the class of "contracting peasants." Masters and serfs were
empowered to enter into contracts, the serf receiving freedom, the
master receiving payment in instalments. It was a moderate innovation,
very moderate--nothing more than the first failure of the First
Alexander. Yet even here that old timidity of Nicholas nearly spoiled
what little good was hidden in the ukase. Notice after notice was given
to the serf-owners that they were not to be molested, that no
emancipation was contemplated, and that the ukase contained "nothing
new." The result was as feeble as the policy. A few serfs were
emancipated, and Nicholas halted. The revolutions of 1848 increased his
fear of innovation; and finally the war in the Crimea took from him the
power of innovation.
The great man died. We saw his cold dead face, in the midst of crowns
and crosses, very pale then, very powerless then. One might stare at
him, then, as at a serf's corpse; for he who had scared Europe during
thirty years lay before us that day as a poor lump of chilled brain and
withered muscle. And we stood by, when, amid chanting and flare of
torches and roll of cannon, his sons wrapped him in his shroud of gold
thread, and lowered him into the tomb of his fathers.
But there was shown in those days far greater tribute than the prayers
of bishops or the reverence of ambassadors. Massed about the Winter
Palace and the Fortress of Peter and Paul, stood thousands on thousands
who, in far-distant serf-huts, had put on their best, had toiled wearily
to the capital to give their last mute thanks to one who for years had
stood between their welfare and their owners' greed. Sad that he had not
done more. Yet they knew that he had wished their freedom and loathed
their wrongs; for that came up the tribute of millions.
The new Emperor, Alexander II, had never been hoped for as one who could
light the nation from his brain; the only hope was that he might warm
the nation somewhat from his heart. He was said to be of a weak, silken
fibre. The strength of the family was said to be concentrated in his
younger brother, Constantine. But soon came a day when the young Czar
revealed to Europe not merely kindliness, but strength. While his
father's corpse was still lying within his palace, he received the
diplomatic body. As the Emperor entered the audience-room he seemed
feeble, indeed, for such a crisis. That fearful legacy of war seemed to
weigh upon his heart; marks of plenteous tears were upon his face;
Nesselrode, though old and bent and shrunk in stature, seemed stronger
than his young master.
But as he began his speech it was seen that a strong man had mounted the
throne. With earnestness he declared that he sorrowed over the existing
war; but that, if the Holy Alliance had been broken, it was not through
the fault of Russia. With bitterness he turned toward the Austrian
minister, Esterhazy, and hinted at Russian services in 1848, and
Austrian ingratitude. Calmly then, not as one who spoke a part but as
one who announced a determination, he declared: "I am anxious for peace;
but if the terms at the approaching congress are incompatible with the
honor of my nation, I will put myself at the head of my faithful Russia
and die sooner than yield."
Strong as Alexander showed himself by these words, he showed himself
stronger by acts. A policy properly mingling firmness and conciliation
brought peace to Europe and showed him equal to his father; a policy
mingling love of liberty with love of order brought the dawn of
prosperity to Russia and showed him the superior of his father. The
reforms now begun were not stinted as of old, but free and hearty. In
rapid succession were swept away restrictions on telegraphic
communication, on printing, on the use of the Imperial Library, on
strangers entering the country, on Russians leaving the country. A
policy in public works was adopted which made Nicholas's greatest
efforts seem petty; a vast network of railways was begun. A policy in
commercial dealings with Western Europe was adopted, in which Alexander,
though not apparently so imposing as Nicholas, was really far greater;
he dared advance toward freedom of trade.
But soon rose again that great problem of old--that problem ever rising
to meet a new autocrat, and, at each appearance, more dire than
before--the serf question. The serfs in private hands now numbered more
than twenty millions; above them stood more than a hundred thousand
owners. The princely strength of the largest owners was best represented
by a few men possessing over a hundred thousand serfs each, and, above
all, by Count Scheremetieff, who boasted three hundred thousand. The
luxury of the large owners was best represented by about four thousand
men possessing more than a thousand serfs each. The pinching
propensities of the small owners were best represented by fifty thousand
men possessing fewer than twenty serfs each.
The serfs might be divided into two great classes. The first comprised
those working under the old or _corvée_ system, giving usually three
days in the week to the tillage of the owner's domain; the second
comprised those working under the new or _obrok_ system, receiving a
payment fixed by the owner and assessed by the community to which the
serfs belonged. The character of the serfs had been moulded by the serf
system. They had a simple shrewdness, which, under a better system, had
made them enterprising; but this quality soon degenerated into cunning
and cheatery--the weapons which the hopelessly oppressed always use.
They had a reverence for things sacred, which under a better system
might have given the nation a strengthening religion; but they now stood
among the most religious peoples on earth and among the least moral. To
the picture of Our Lady of Kazan they were ever ready to burn wax and
oil; to truth and justice they constantly omitted the tribute of mere
common honesty. They kept the Church fasts like saints; they kept the
Church feasts like satyrs.
They had curiosity, which under a better system would have made them
inventive; but their plough, in common use, was behind the plough
described by Vergil. They had a love of gain, which under a better
system would have made them hardworking; but it took ten serfs to do,
languidly and poorly, what two free men in America would do quickly and
well. They were naturally a kind people; but let one example show how
serfage can transmute kindness. It is a rule, well known in Russia, that
when an accident occurs, interference is to be left to the police. Hence
you would see a man lying in a fit, and the bystanders giving no aid,
but waiting for the authorities. Some years ago, as all the world
remembers, a theatre took fire in St. Petersburg, and crowds of people
were burned or stifled. The whole story is not so well known. The
theatre was but a great temporary wooden shed--such as is run up every
year at the holidays, in the public squares. When the fire burst forth,
crowds of peasants hurried to the spot; but though they heard the
shrieks of the dying, separated from them only by a thin planking, only
one man in that multitude dared cut through and rescue some of the
sufferers.
The serfs, when standing for great ideas, would die rather than yield.
Napoleon I learned this at Eylau; Napoleon III learned it at Sebastopol;
yet in daily life they were slavish beyond belief. On a certain day, in
the year 1855, the most embarrassed man in all Russia was doubtless our
excellent American minister. The serf coachman employed at wages was
called up to receive his discharge for drunkenness. Coming into the
presence of a sound-hearted American democrat, who never had dreamed of
one mortal kneeling to another, Ivan throws himself on his knees,
presses his forehead to the minister's feet, fawns like a tamed beast,
and refuses to move until the minister relieves himself from this
nightmare of servility by a full pardon.
Time after time we have entered the serf field and serf hut; have seen
the simple round of serf toils and sports; have heard the simple
chronicles of self joys and sorrows: but whether his livery were filthy
sheepskin or gold-laced caftan; whether he lay on carpets at the door of
his master, or in filth on the floor of his cabin; whether he gave us
cold, stupid stories of his wrongs, or flippant details of his joys;
whether he blessed his master or cursed him--we have wondered at the
power which a serf system has to degrade and imbrute the image of God.
But astonishment was increased a thousand-fold at study of the reflex
influence for evil upon the serf-owners themselves, upon the whole free
community, upon the very soil of the whole country. On all those broad
plains of Russia, on the daily life of that serf-owning aristocracy, on
the whole class which was neither of serfs nor serf-owners, the curse of
God was written in letters so big and so black that all mankind might
read them. Farms were untilled, enterprise deadened, invention crippled,
education neglected; life was of little value; labor was the badge of
servility, laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. Despite
the most specious half-measures, despite all efforts to galvanize it, to
coax life into it, to sting life into it, the nation remained stagnant.
Not one traveller who does not know that the evils brought on that land
by the despotism of the autocrat were as nothing compared to that dark
network of curses spread over it by a serf-owning aristocracy. Into the
conflict with this evil Alexander II entered manfully. Having been two
years upon the throne, having made a plan, having stirred some thought
through certain authorized journals, he inspired the nobility in three
of the northwestern provinces to memorialize him in regard to
emancipation.
Straightway an answer was sent conveying the outlines of the Emperor's
plan. The period of transition from serfage to freedom was set at twelve
years; at the end of that time the serf was to be fully free and
possessor of his cabin, with an adjoining piece of land. The provincial
nobles were convoked to fill out these outlines with details as to the
working out by the serfs of a fair indemnity to their masters. The whole
world was stirred; but that province in which the Czar hoped most
eagerly for a movement to meet him--the province where beat the old
Muscovite heart, Moscow--was stirred least of all. Every earnest throb
seemed stifled there by that strong aristocracy.
Yet Moscow moved at last. Some nobles who had not yet arrived at the
callous period; some professors in the University who had not yet
arrived at the heavy period, breathed life into the mass, dragged on the
timid, fought off the malignant. The movement had soon a force which the
retrograde party at Moscow dared not openly resist. So they sent answers
to St. Petersburg, apparently favorable; but wrapped in their phrases
were hints of difficulties, reservations, impossibilities. All this
studied suggestion of difficulties profited the reactionists nothing.
They were immediately informed that the imperial mind was made up, that
the business of the Muscovite nobility was now to arrange that the serf
be freed in twelve years, and put in possession of homestead and
enclosure.
The next movement of the retrograde party was to misunderstand
everything. The plainest things were found to need a world of debate;
the simplest things became entangled; the noble assemblies played
solemnly a ludicrous game of cross-purposes. Straightway came a notice
from the Emperor which, stripped of official verbiage, said that they
must understand. This set all in motion again. Imperial notices were
sent to province after province, explanatory documents were issued, good
men and strong were set to talk and work.
The nobility of Moscow made another move. To scare back the advancing
forces of emancipation, they elected, as provincial leaders, three
nobles bearing the greatest names of old Russia and haters of the new
ideas. To defeat these came a successor of St. Gregory and St. Bavon,
one who accepted the thought that when God advances great ideas the
Church must marshal them. Philarete, Metropolitan of Moscow, upheld
emancipation and condemned its foes; his earnest eloquence carried all.
The work progressed unevenly--nobles in different governments differed
in plan and aim--an assembly of delegates was brought together at St.
Petersburg to combine and perfect a resultant plan under the eye of the
Emperor. The Grand Council of the Empire, too, was set at the work. It
was a most unpromising body, yet the Emperor's will stirred it.
The opposition now made the most brilliant stroke of its campaign. Just
as James II of England prated of toleration and planned the enslavement
of all thought, so now the bigoted plotters against emancipation began
to prate of constitutional liberty. But Alexander held right on. It was
even hinted that visions of a constitutional monarchy pleased him. But
then came tests of Alexander's strength far more trying. Masses of
peasants, hearing vague news of emancipation--learning, doubtless, from
their masters' own spiteful lips that the Emperor was endeavoring to
tear away property in serfs--took the masters at their word, and
determined to help the Emperor. They rose in insurrection. To the
bigoted serf-owners this was a godsend. They paraded it in all lights;
therewith they threw life into all the old commonplaces on the French
Revolution; timid men of good intentions wavered. The Czar would surely
now be scared back.
Not so. Alexander now hurled his greatest weapon, and stunned reaction
in a moment. He freed all the serfs on the Imperial estates without
reserve. Now it was seen that he was in earnest; the opponents were
disheartened; once more the plan moved and dragged them on. But there
came other things to dishearten the Emperor; and not least of these was
the attitude of those who moulded popular thought in England. Be it said
here, to the credit of France, that from her came constant encouragement
in the great work. Wolowski, Mazade, and other true-hearted men sent
forth from leading reviews and journals words of sympathy, words of
help, words of cheer.
Not so England. Just as in the French Revolution of 1789, while yet that
Revolution was noble and good, while yet Lafayette and Bailly held it,
leaders in English thought, who had quickened the opinions which had
caused the Revolution, sent malignant prophecies and prompted foul
blows, so in this battle of Alexander against a foul wrong they seized
this time of all times to show all the wrongs and absurdities of which
Russia ever had been or ever might be guilty--criticised, carped, sent
much haughty advice, depressing sympathy, and malignant prophecy. Review
articles, based on no real knowledge of Russia, announced a desire for
serf-emancipation, and then, in the modern English way, with plentiful
pyrotechnics of antithesis and paradox, threw a gloomy light into the
skilfully pictured depths of imperial despotism, official corruption,
and national bankruptcy.
They revived Old World objections, which, to one acquainted with the
most every-day workings of serfage, were ridiculous. It was said that if
the serfs lost the protection of their owners they might fall a prey to
rapacious officials. As well might it have been argued that a mother
should never loose her son from her apron-strings. It was said that
"Serfism excludes pauperism"--that, if the serf owes work to his owner
in the prime of life, the owner owes support to his serf in the decline
of life. No lie could be more absurd to one who had seen Russian life.
We were first greeted, on entering Russia, by a beggar who knelt in the
mud; at Kovno eighteen beggars besieged the coach, and Kovno was hardly
worse than scores of other towns; within a day's ride from St.
Petersburg a woman begged piteously for means to keep soul and body
together, and finished the refutation of that sonorous English theory,
for she had been discharged from her master's service in the metropolis
as too feeble, and had been sent back to his domain, afar in the
country, on foot and without money.
It was said that freed peasants would not work. But, despite volleys of
predictions that they would not work if freed, despite volleys of
assertions that they could not work if freed, the peasants when set
free, and not crushed by regulations, have sprung to their work with an
earnestness and continued it with a vigor at which the philosophers of
the old system stand aghast. The freed peasants of Wologda compare
favorably with any in Europe. And when the old tirades had grown stale,
English writers drew copiously from a new source--from _La Vérité sur la
Russie_--pleasingly indifferent to the fact that the author's praise in
a previous work had notoriously been a thing of bargain and sale, and
that there was in full process of development a train of facts which led
the Parisian courts to find him guilty of demanding in one case a
blackmail of fifty thousand rubles.
All this argument outside the empire helped the foes of emancipation
inside the empire. But the Emperor met the whole body of his opponents
with an argument overwhelming. On March 5, 1861, he issued his manifesto
making the serfs free! He had struggled long to make some satisfactory
previous arrangement; his motto now became: Emancipation first,
arrangement afterward. Thus was the result of the great struggle
decided.