The years 1857-61 were years of rich growth in the intellectual forces
of Russia. All that had been whispered for the last decade, in the
secrecy of friendly meetings, by the generation represented in Russian
literature by Turguéneff, Tolstóy, Hérzen, Bakúnin, Ogaryóff, Kavélin,
Dostoévsky, Grigoróvich, Ostróvsky, and Nekrásoff, began now to leak
out in the press. Censorship was still very rigorous; but what could
not be said openly in political articles was smuggled in under the
form of novels, humorous sketches, or veiled comments on West European
events, and everyone read between the lines and understood.
Having no acquaintances at St. Petersburg apart from the school and a
narrow circle of relatives, I stood outside the radical movement of
those years--miles, in fact, away from it. And yet this was, perhaps,
the main feature of the movement--that it had the power to penetrate
into so ‘well meaning’ a school as our corps was, and to find an echo
in such a circle as that of my Moscow relatives.
I used at that time to spend my Sundays and holidays at the house of
my aunt, mentioned in a previous chapter under the name of Princess
Mírski. Prince Mírski thought only of extraordinary lunches and
dinners, while his wife and their young daughter led a very gay
life. My cousin was a beautiful girl of nineteen, of a most amiable
disposition, and nearly all her male cousins were madly in love
with her. She, in turn, fell in love with one of them, and wanted to
marry him. But to marry a cousin is considered a great sin by the
Russian Church, and the old princess tried in vain to obtain a special
permission from the high ecclesiastical dignitaries. Now she brought
her daughter to St. Petersburg, hoping that she might choose among
her many admirers a more suitable husband than her own cousin. It was
labour lost, I must add; but their fashionable apartment was full of
brilliant young men from the Guards and from the diplomatic service.
Such a house would be the last to be thought of in connection with
revolutionary ideas; and yet it was in that house that I made my
first acquaintance with the revolutionary literature of the times.
The great refugee, Hérzen, had just begun to issue at London his
review, ‘The Polar Star, which made a commotion in Russia, even in the
palace circles, and was widely circulated secretly at St. Petersburg.
My cousin got it in some way, and we used to read it together. Her
heart revolted against the obstacles which were put in the way of her
happiness, and her mind was the more open to the powerful criticisms
which the great writer launched against the Russian autocracy and all
the rotten system of misgovernment. With a feeling near to worship I
used to look on the medallion which was printed on the paper cover
of ‘The Polar Star,’ and which represented the noble heads of the
five ‘Decembrists’ whom Nicholas I. had hanged after the rebellion
of December 14, 1825--Bestúzheff, Kahóvskiy, Péstel, Ryléeff, and
Muravióv-Apóstol.
The beauty of the style of Hérzen--of whom Turguéneff has truly said
that he wrote in tears and blood, and that no other Russian had ever
so written--the breadth of his ideas, and his deep love of Russia took
possession of me, and I used to read and re-read those pages, even more
full of heart than of brain.
In 1859, or early in 1860, I began to edit my first revolutionary
paper. At that age, what could I be but a constitutionalist?--and my
paper advocated the necessity of a constitution for Russia. I wrote
about the foolish expenses of the Court, the sums of money which were
spent at Nice to keep quite a squadron of the navy in attendance on
the dowager Empress, who died in 1860; I mentioned the misdeeds of the
functionaries which I continually heard spoken of, and I urged the
necessity of constitutional rule. I wrote three copies of my paper, and
slipped them into the desks of three comrades of the higher forms, who,
I thought, might be interested in public affairs. I asked my readers to
put their remarks behind the Scotch grandfather clock in our library.
With a throbbing heart, I went next day to see if there was something
for me behind the clock. Two notes were there, indeed. Two comrades
wrote that they fully sympathized with my paper, and only advised me
not to risk too much. I wrote my second number, still more vigorously
insisting upon the necessity of uniting all forces in the name of
liberty. But this time there was no reply behind the clock. Instead the
two comrades came to me.
‘We are sure,’ they said, ‘that it is you who edit the paper, and we
want to talk about it. We are quite agreed with you, and we are here
to say, “Let us be friends.” Your paper has done its work--it has
brought us together; but there is no need to continue it. In all the
school there are only two more who would take any interest in such
matters, while if it becomes known that there is a paper of this kind
the consequences will be terrible for all of us. Let us constitute a
circle and talk about everything; perhaps we shall put something into
the heads of a few others.’
This was so sensible that I could only agree, and we sealed our union
by a hearty shaking of hands. From that time we three became firm
friends, and used to read a great deal together and discuss all sorts
of things.
The abolition of serfdom was the question which then engrossed the
attention of all thinking men.
The Revolution of 1848 had had its distinct echo in the hearts of the
Russian peasant folk, and from the year 1850 the insurrections of
revolted serfs began to take serious proportions. When the Crimean war
broke out, and militia was levied all over Russia, these revolts spread
with a violence never before heard of. Several serf-owners were killed
by their serfs, and the peasant uprisings became so serious that whole
regiments, with artillery, were sent to quell them, whereas in former
times small detachments of soldiers would have been sufficient to
terrorize the peasants into obedience.
These outbreaks on the one side, and the profound aversion to serfdom
which had grown up in the generation which came to the front with the
advent of Alexander II. to the throne, rendered the emancipation of
the peasants more and more imperative. The emperor, himself averse
to serfdom, and supported, or rather influenced, in his own family
by his wife, his brother Constantine, and the grand duchess Hélène
Pávlovna, took the first steps in that direction. His intention was
that the initiative of the reform should come from the nobility, the
serf-owners themselves. But in no province of Russia could the nobility
be induced to send a petition to the Tsar to that effect. In March
1856 he himself addressed the Moscow nobility on the necessity of such
a step; but a stubborn silence was all their reply to his speech, so
that Alexander II., growing quite angry, concluded with those memorable
words of Hérzen: ‘It is better, gentlemen, that it should come from
above than to wait till it comes from beneath.’ Even these words had no
effect, and it was to the provinces of Old Poland--Gródno, Wílno, and
Kóvno--where Napoleon I. had abolished serfdom (on paper) in 1812, that
recourse was had. The Governor-General of those provinces, Nazímoff,
managed to obtain the desired address from the Polish nobility. In
November 1857 the famous ‘rescript’ to the Governor-General of the
Lithuanian provinces, announcing the intention of the emperor to
abolish serfdom, was launched, and we read, with tears in our eyes,
the beautiful article of Hérzen, ‘Thou hast conquered, Galilean,’ in
which the refugees in London declared that they would no more look upon
Alexander II. as an enemy, but would support him in the great work of
emancipation.
The attitude of the peasants was very remarkable. No sooner had the
news spread that the liberation long sighed for was coming than the
insurrections nearly stopped. The peasants waited now, and during a
journey which Alexander made in Middle Russia they flocked around
him as he passed, beseeching him to grant them liberty--a petition,
however, which Alexander received with great repugnance. It is most
remarkable--so strong is the force of tradition--that the rumour went
among the peasants that it was Napoleon III. who had required of the
Tsar, in the treaty of peace, that the peasants should be freed. I
frequently heard this rumour; and on the very eve of the emancipation
they seemed to doubt that it would be done without pressure from
abroad. ‘Nothing will be done unless Garibaldi comes,’ was the reply
which a peasant made at St. Petersburg to a comrade of mine who talked
to him about ‘freedom coming.’
But after these moments of general rejoicing years of incertitude and
disquiet followed. Specially appointed committees in the provinces
and at St. Petersburg discussed the proposed liberation of the serfs,
but the intentions of Alexander II. seemed unsettled. A check was
continually put upon the press, in order to prevent it from discussing
details. Sinister rumours circulated at St. Petersburg and reached our
corps.
There was no lack of young men amongst the nobility who earnestly
worked for a frank abolition of the old servitude; but the serfdom
party drew closer and closer round the emperor, and got power over his
mind. They whispered into his ears that the day serfdom was abolished
the peasants would begin to kill the landlords wholesale, and Russia
would witness a new Pugachóff uprising, far more terrible than that
of 1773. Alexander, who was a man of weak character, only too readily
lent his ear to such predictions. But the huge machine for working out
the emancipation law had been set to work. The committees had their
sittings; scores of schemes of emancipation, addressed to the emperor,
circulated in manuscript or were printed in London. Hérzen, seconded by
Turguéneff, who kept him well informed about all that was going on in
government circles, discussed in his ‘Bell’ and his ‘Polar Star’ the
details of the various schemes, and Chernyshévsky in the ‘Contemporary’
(_Sovreménnik_). The Slavophiles, especially Aksákoff and Bélyáeff, had
taken advantage of the first moments of relative freedom allowed the
press, to give the matter a wide publicity in Russia, and to discuss
the features of the emancipation with a thorough understanding of its
technical aspects. All intellectual St. Petersburg was with Hérzen, and
particularly with Chernyshévsky, and I remember how the officers of the
Horse Guards, whom I saw on Sundays, after the church parade, at the
home of my cousin (Dmítri Nikoláevich Kropótkin, who was aide-de-camp
of that regiment and aide-de-camp of the emperor), used to side with
Chernyshévsky, the leader of the advanced party in the emancipation
struggle. The whole disposition of St. Petersburg, in the drawing-rooms
and in the street, was such that it was impossible to go back. The
liberation of the serfs had to be accomplished; and another important
point was won--the liberated serfs would receive, besides their
homesteads, the land that they had hitherto cultivated for themselves.
However, the party of the old nobility were not discouraged. They
centred their efforts on obtaining a postponement of the reform,
on reducing the size of the allotments, and on imposing upon the
emancipated serfs so high a redemption tax for the land that it would
render their economical freedom illusory; and in this they fully
succeeded. Alexander II. dismissed the real soul of the whole business,
Nikolái Milútin (brother of the minister of war), saying to him, ‘I am
so sorry to part with you, but I must: the nobility describe you as one
of the Reds.’ The first committees, which had worked out the scheme of
emancipation, were dismissed too, and new committees revised the whole
work in the interest of the serf-owners; the press was muzzled once
more.
Things assumed a very gloomy aspect. The question whether the
liberation would take place at all was now asked. I feverishly followed
the struggle, and every Sunday, when my comrades returned from their
homes, I asked them what their parents said. By the end of 1860 the
news became worse and worse. ‘The Valúeff party has got the upper
hand.’ ‘They intend to revise the whole work.’ ‘The relatives of the
Princess X. [a friend of the Tsar] work hard upon him,’ ‘The liberation
will be postponed: they fear a revolution.’
* * * * *
In January 1861 slightly better rumours began to circulate, and it was
generally hoped that something would be heard of the emancipation on
the day of the emperor’s accession to the throne, February 19.
The 19th came, but it brought nothing with it. I was on that day at
the palace. There was no grand _levée_, only a small one; and pages of
the second form were sent to such _levées_ in order to get accustomed
to the palace ways. It was my turn that day; and as I was seeing off
one of the grand duchesses who came to the palace to assist at the
Mass, her husband did not appear and I went to fetch him. He was called
out of the emperor’s study, and I told him, in a half jocose way, of
the perplexity of his wife, without having the slightest suspicion
of the important matters that may have been talked of in the study at
that time. Apart from a few of the initiated, no one in the palace
suspected that the manifesto had been signed on February 19, and was
kept back for a fortnight only because the next Sunday, the 26th, was
the beginning of the carnival week, and it was feared that, owing to
the drinking which goes on in the villages during the carnival, peasant
insurrections might break out. Even the carnival fair, which used
to be held at St. Petersburg on the square near the winter palace,
was removed that year to another square, from fear of a popular
insurrection in the capital. Most sanguinary instructions had been
issued to the army as to the ways of repressing peasant uprisings.
A fortnight later, on the last Sunday of the carnival (March 5, or
rather March 17, new style), I was at the corps, having to take part
in the military parade at the riding-school. I was still in bed, when
my soldier servant, Ivánoff, dashed in with the tea-tray, exclaiming,
‘Prince, freedom! The manifesto is posted on the Gostínoi Dvor’ (the
shops opposite the corps).
‘Did you see it yourself?’
‘Yes. People stand round; one reads, the others listen. It _is_
freedom!’
In a couple of minutes I was dressed and out. A comrade was coming in.
‘Kropótkin, freedom!’ he shouted. ‘Here is the manifesto. My uncle
learned last night that it would be read at the early Mass at the Isaac
Cathedral; so we went. There were not many people there; peasants
only. The manifesto was read and distributed after the Mass. They well
understood what it meant: when I came out of the church, two peasants,
who stood in the gateway, said to me in such a droll way, “Well, sir?
now--all gone?”’ And he mimicked how they had shown him the way out.
Years of expectation were in that gesture of sending away the master.
I read and re-read the manifesto. It was written in an elevated style
by the old metropolitan of Moscow, Philarète, but with a useless
mixture of Russian and old Slavonian which obscured the sense. It was
liberty; but it was not liberty yet, the peasants having to remain
serfs for two years more, till February 19, 1863. Notwithstanding all
this, one thing was evident: serfdom was abolished, and the liberated
serfs would get the land and their homesteads. They would have to pay
for it, but the old stain of slavery was removed. They would be slaves
no more; the reaction had _not_ got the upper hand.
We went to the parade; and when all the military performances were
over, Alexander II., remaining on horseback, loudly called out, ‘The
officers to me!’ They gathered round him, and he began, in a loud
voice, a speech about the great event of the day.
‘The officers ... the representatives of the nobility in the
army’--these scraps of sentences reached our ears--‘an end has been put
to centuries of injustice.... I expect sacrifices from the nobility
... the loyal nobility will gather round the throne’ ... and so on.
Enthusiastic hurrahs resounded amongst the officers as he ended.
We ran rather than marched back on our way to the corps--hurrying to
be in time for the Italian opera, of which the last performance in the
season was to be given that afternoon; some manifestation was sure to
take place then. Our military attire was flung off with great haste,
and several of us dashed, lightfooted, to the sixth-story gallery. The
house was crowded.
During the first entr’acte the smoking-room of the opera filled with
excited young men, who all talked to one another, whether acquainted or
not. We planned at once to return to the hall, and to sing, with the
whole public in a mass choir, the hymn ‘God save the Tsar.’
However, sounds of music reached our ears, and we all hurried back to
the hall. The band of the opera was already playing the hymn, which was
drowned immediately in enthusiastic hurrahs coming from the galleries,
the boxes, the pit. I saw Bavéri, the conductor, waving his stick,
but not a sound could be heard from the powerful band. Then Bavéri
stopped, but the hurrahs continued. I saw the stick waved again in
the air; I saw the fiddle bows moving and musicians blowing the brass
instruments, but again the sound of voices overwhelmed the band. Bavéri
began conducting the hymn once more, and it was only by the end of that
third repetition that isolated sounds of the brass instruments pierced
through the clamour of human voices.
The same enthusiasm was in the streets. Crowds of peasants and educated
men stood in front of the palace, shouting hurrahs, and the Tsar could
not appear without being followed by demonstrative crowds running after
his carriage. Hérzen was right when, two years later, as Alexander was
drowning the Polish insurrection in blood, and ‘Muravióff the Hanger’
was strangling it on the scaffold, he wrote, ‘Alexander Nikoláevich,
why did you not die on that day? Your name would have been transmitted
in history as that of a hero.’
* * * * *
Where were the uprisings which had been predicted by the champions
of slavery? Conditions more indefinite than those which had been
created by the Polozhénie (the emancipation law) could not have been
invented. If anything could have provoked revolts, it was precisely
the perplexing vagueness of the conditions created by the new law.
And yet--except in two places where there were insurrections, and
a very few other spots where small disturbances, entirely due to
misunderstandings and immediately appeased, took place--Russia remained
quiet, more quiet than ever. With their usual good sense, the peasants
had understood that serfdom was done away with, that ‘freedom had
come,’ and they accepted the conditions imposed upon them, although
these conditions were very heavy.
I was in Nikólskoye in August 1861, and again in the summer of
1862, and I was struck with the quiet intelligent way in which the
peasants had accepted the new conditions. They knew perfectly well how
difficult it would be to pay the redemption tax for the land, which
was in reality an indemnity to the nobles in lieu of the obligations
of serfdom. But they so much valued the abolition of their personal
enslavement that they accepted the ruinous charges--not without
murmuring, but as a hard necessity--the moment that personal freedom
was obtained. For the first months they kept two holidays a week,
saying that it was a sin to work on Friday; but when the summer came
they resumed work with even more energy than before.
When I saw our Nikólskoye peasants, fifteen months after the
liberation, I could not but admire them. Their inborn good nature
and softness remained with them, but all traces of servility had
disappeared. They talked to their masters as equals talk to equals,
as if they never had stood in different relations. Besides, such men
came out from among them as could make a stand for their rights. The
Polozhénie was a large and difficult book, which it took me a good
deal of time to understand; but when Vasíli Ivánoff, the elder of
Nikólskoye, came one day to ask me to explain to him some obscurity
in it, I saw that he, who was not even a fluent reader, had admirably
found his way amongst the intricacies of the chapters and paragraphs of
the law.
The ‘household people’--that is, the servants--came out the worst
of all. They got no land, and would hardly have known what to do
with it if they had. They got freedom, and nothing besides. In our
neighbourhood nearly all of them left their masters; none, for
example, remained in the household of my father. They went in search
of positions elsewhere, and a number of them found employment at once
with the merchant class, who were proud of having the coachman of
Prince So-and-So, or the cook of General So-and-So. Those who knew a
trade found work in the towns: for instance, my father’s band remained
a band, and made a good living at Kalúga, retaining amiable relations
with us. But those who had no trade had hard times before them, and yet
the majority preferred to live anyhow rather than remain with their old
masters.
As to the landlords, while the larger ones made all possible efforts
at St. Petersburg to re-introduce the old conditions under one name
or another (they succeeded in doing so to some extent under Alexander
III.), by far the greater number submitted to the abolition of serfdom
as to a sort of necessary calamity. The young generation gave to Russia
that remarkable staff of ‘peace mediators’ and justices of the peace
who contributed so much to the peaceful issue of the emancipation.
As to the old generation, most of them had already discounted the
considerable sums of money they were to receive from the peasants for
the land which was granted to the liberated serfs, and which was valued
much above its market price; they schemed as to how they would squander
that money in the restaurants of the capitals, or at the green tables
in gambling. And they did squander it, almost all of them, as soon as
they got it.
For many landlords the liberation of the serfs was an excellent
money transaction. Thus, land which my father, in anticipation of
the emancipation, sold in parcels at the rate of eleven roubles the
Russian acre, was now estimated at forty roubles in the peasants’
allotments--that is, three and a half times above its market
value--and this was the rule in all our neighbourhood; while in my
father’s Tambóv estate, on the prairies, the _mir_--that is, the
village community--rented all his land for twelve years at a price
which represented twice as much as he used to get from that land by
cultivating it with servile labour.
Eleven years after that memorable time I went to the Tambóv estate,
which I had inherited from my father. I stayed there for a few weeks,
and on the evening of my departure our village priest--an intelligent
man of independent opinions, such as one meets occasionally in our
southern provinces--went out for a walk round the village. The
sunset was glorious; a balmy air came from the prairies. He found a
middle-aged peasant--Antón Savélieff--sitting on a small eminence
outside the village and reading a book of psalms. The peasant hardly
knew how to spell in Old Slavonic, and often he would read a book
from the last page, turning the pages backward; it was the process of
reading which he liked most, and then a word would strike him, and its
repetition pleased him. He was reading now a psalm of which each verse
began with the word ‘rejoice.’
‘What are you reading?’ he was asked.
‘Well, father, I will tell you,’ was his reply. ‘Fourteen years ago
the old prince came here. It was in the winter. I had just returned
home, quite frozen. A snowstorm was raging. I had scarcely begun
undressing when we heard a knock at the window: it was the elder, who
was shouting, “Go to the prince! He wants you!” We all--my wife and
our children--were thunderstricken. “What can he want of you?” my wife
cried in alarm. I signed myself with the cross and went; the snowstorm
almost blinded me as I crossed the bridge. Well, it ended all right.
The old prince was taking his afternoon sleep, and when he woke up he
asked me if I knew plastering work, and only told me, “Come to-morrow
to repair the plaster in that room.” So I went home quite happy, and
when I came to the bridge I found my wife standing there. She had stood
there all the time in the snowstorm, with the baby in her arms, waiting
for me. “What has happened, Savélich?” she cried. “Well,” I said, “no
harm; he only asked me to make some repairs.” That, father, was under
the old prince. And now, the young prince came here the other day. I
went to see him, and found him in the garden, at the tea table, in the
shadow of the house; you, father, sat with him, and the elder of the
canton, with his mayor’s chain upon his breast. “Will you have tea,
Savélich?” he asks me. “Take a chair. Petr Grigórieff”--he says that
to the old one--“give us one more chair.” And Petr Grigórieff--you
know what a terror for us he was when he was the manager of the old
prince--brought the chair, and we all sat round the tea table, talking,
and he poured out tea for all of us. Well, now, father, the evening is
so beautiful, the balm comes from the prairies, and I sit and read,
“Rejoice! Rejoice!”’
* * * * *
This is what the abolition of serfdom meant for the peasants.