IV

St. Petersburg had changed greatly from what it was when I left it in

1862. ‘Oh yes, you knew the St. Petersburg of Chernyshévsky,’ the poet

Máikoff remarked to me once. True, I knew the St. Petersburg of which

Chernyshévsky was the favourite. But how shall I describe the city

which I found on my return? Perhaps as the St. Petersburg of the _cafés

chantants_, of the music halls, if the words ‘all St. Petersburg’ ought

really to mean the upper circles of society, which took their keynote

from the Court.

At the Court, and in its circles, liberal ideas were in sorely bad

repute. All prominent men of the sixties, even such moderates as Count

Nicholas Muravióff and Nicholas Milútin, were treated as suspects.

Only Dmítri Milútin, the Minister of War, was kept by Alexander II. at

his post, because the reform which he had to accomplish in the army

required many years for its realization. All other active men of the

reform period had been brushed aside.

I spoke once with a high dignitary of the Ministry for foreign affairs.

He sharply criticized another high functionary, and I remarked in the

latter’s defence, ‘Still there is this to be said for him, that he

never accepted service under Nicholas I.’ ‘And now he is in service

under the reign of Shuváloff and Trépoff!’ was the reply, which so

correctly described the situation that I could say nothing more.

General Shuváloff, the chief of the State police, and General Trépoff,

the chief of the St. Petersburg police, were indeed the real rulers

of Russia. Alexander II. was their executive, their tool. And they

ruled by fear. Trépoff had so frightened Alexander by the spectre of a

revolution which was going to break out at St. Petersburg, that if the

omnipotent chief of the police was a few minutes late in appearing with

his daily report at the palace, the Emperor would ask, ‘Is everything

quiet at St. Petersburg?’

Shortly after Alexander II, had given an ‘entire dismissal’ to Princess

X. he conceived a warm friendship for General Fleury, the aide-de-camp

of Napoleon III., that sinister man who was the soul of the _coup

d’état_ of December 2, 1852. They were continually seen together,

and Fleury once informed the Parisians of the great honour which was

bestowed upon him by the Russian Tsar. As the latter was riding along

the Nevsky Perspective he saw Fleury, and asked him to mount into his

carriage, an _égoïste_ which had a seat only twelve inches wide, for a

single person; and the French general recounted at length how the Tsar

and he, holding fast to each other, had to leave half of their bodies

hanging in the air on account of the narrowness of the seat. It is

enough to name this friend, fresh from Compiègne, to suggest what the

friendship meant.

Shuváloff took every advantage of the present state of mind of his

master. He prepared one reactionary measure after another, and when

Alexander showed reluctance to sign any of them Shuváloff would speak

of the coming revolution and the fate of Louis XVI., and, ‘for the

salvation of the dynasty,’ would implore him to sign the new additions

to the laws of repression. For all that sadness and remorse would from

time to time besiege Alexander. He would fall into a gloomy melancholy,

and speak in a sad tone of the brilliant beginning of his reign, and

of the reactionary character which it was taking. Then Shuváloff would

organize an especially lively bear hunt. Hunters, merry courtiers, and

carriages full of ballet girls would go to the forests of Nóvgorod. A

couple of bears would be killed by Alexander II., who was a good shot

and used to let the animal approach to within a few yards of his rifle;

and there, in the excitement of the hunting festivities, Shuváloff

would obtain his master’s consent to any scheme of repression which he

had concocted.

Alexander II. certainly was not a rank and file man, but two different

men lived in him, both strongly developed, struggling with each other;

and this inner struggle became more and more violent as he advanced in

age. He could be charming in his behaviour, and the next moment display

sheer brutality. He was possessed of a calm, reasoned courage in the

face of a real danger, but he lived in constant fear of dangers which

existed in his brain only. He assuredly was not a coward; he would meet

a bear face to face; on one occasion, when the animal was not killed

outright by his first bullet, and the man who stood behind him with a

lance, rushing forward, was knocked down by the bear, the Tsar came

to his rescue, and killed the bear close to the muzzle of his gun (I

know this from the man himself); yet he was haunted all his life by the

fears of his own imagination and of an uneasy conscience. He was very

kind in his manner toward his friends, but that kindness existed side

by side with the terrible cold-blooded cruelty--a seventeenth-century

cruelty--which he displayed in crushing the Polish insurrection, and

later on in 1880, when similar measures were taken to crush the revolt

of the Russian youth--a cruelty of which no one would have thought him

capable. He thus lived a double life, and at the period of which I am

speaking he merrily signed the most reactionary decrees, and afterward

became despondent about them. Towards the end of his life this inner

struggle, as will be seen later on, became still stronger, and assumed

an almost tragical character.

In 1872 Shuváloff was nominated ambassador in England, but his friend

General Potápoff continued the same policy till the beginning of

the Turkish war in 1877. During all this time the most scandalous

plundering of the State exchequer, and also of the Crown lands, of the

estates confiscated in Lithuania after the insurrection, of the Bashkir

lands in Orenbúrg, and so on, was proceeding on a grand scale. Several

such scandals were subsequently brought to light and some of them were

judged by the Senate, acting as high court of justice, after Potápoff,

who became insane, and Trépoff had been dismissed, and their rivals at

the palace wanted to show them to Alexander II. in their true light. In

one of these judicial inquiries it came out that a friend of Potápoff

had most shamelessly robbed the peasants of a Lithuanian estate of

their lands, and afterward, empowered by his friends at the Ministry

of the Interior, he had caused the peasants, who sought redress, to

be imprisoned, subjected to wholesale flogging, and shot down by the

troops. This was one of the most revolting stories of the kind even

in the annals of Russia, which teem with similar robberies up to the

present time. It was only after Véra Zasúlich had shot at Trépoff

and wounded him (to avenge his having ordered one of the political

prisoners to be flogged in prison) that the thefts of this party became

widely known and Trépoff was dismissed. Thinking he was going to die,

he wrote his will, from which it became known that this man, who had

made the Tsar believe he was poor, even though he had occupied for

years the lucrative post of chief of the St. Petersburg police, left in

reality to his heirs a considerable fortune. Some courtiers carried the

report to Alexander II. Trépoff lost his credit, and it was then that

a few of the robberies of the Shuváloff-Potápoff-Trépoff party were

brought before the Senate.

* * * * *

The pillage which went on in all the ministries, especially in

connection with the railways and all sorts of industrial enterprises,

was really enormous. Immense fortunes were made at that time. The navy,

as Alexander II. himself said to one of his sons, was ‘in the pockets

of So-and-so.’ The cost of the railways, guaranteed by the State, was

simply fabulous. As to commercial enterprises, it was openly known that

none could be launched unless a specified percentage of the dividends

was promised to different functionaries in the several ministries.

A friend of mine, who intended to start some enterprise at St.

Petersburg, was frankly told at the Ministry of the Interior that he

would have to pay twenty-five per cent. of the net profits to a certain

person, fifteen per cent. to one man at the Ministry of Finances, ten

per cent. to another man in the same ministry, and five per cent.

to a fourth person. The bargains were made without concealment, and

Alexander II. knew it. His own remarks, written on the reports of the

Comptroller-General, bear testimony to this. But he saw in the thieves

his protectors from the revolution, and kept them until their robberies

became an open scandal.

The young grand dukes, with the exception of the heir-apparent,

afterwards Alexander III., who always was a good and thrifty

_paterfamilias_, followed the example of the head of the family. The

orgies which one of them used to arrange in a small restaurant on

the Nevsky Perspective were so degradingly notorious that one night

the chief of the police had to interfere and warned the owner of the

restaurant that he would be marched to Siberia if he ever again let his

‘grand duke’s room’ to the grand duke. ‘Imagine my perplexity,’ this

man said to me on one occasion, when he was showing me that room, the

walls and ceiling of which were upholstered with thick satin cushions,

‘On the one side I had to offend a member of the Imperial Family, who

could do with me what he liked, and on the other side General Trépoff

menaced me with Siberia! Of course I obeyed the General; he is, as

you know, omnipotent now.’ Another grand duke became conspicuous for

ways belonging to the domain of psychopathy; and a third was exiled to

Turkestan, after he had stolen the diamonds of his mother.

The Empress Marie Alexándrovna, abandoned by her husband, and probably

horrified at the turn which Court life was taking, became more and

more a devotee, and soon she was entirely in the hands of the

palace priests, a representative of a quite new type in the Russian

Church--the Jesuitic. This new genus of well-combed, depraved, and

Jesuitic clergy made rapid Progress at that time; already they were

working hard and with success to become a power in the State and to lay

hands on the schools.

It has been proved over and over again that the village clergy in

Russia are so much taken up by their functions--performing baptisms

and marriages, administering Communion to the dying, and so on--that

they cannot pay due attention to the schools; even when the priest is

paid for giving the Scripture lesson at a village school he usually

passes that lesson to some one else, as he has no time to attend to

it himself. Nevertheless the higher clergy, exploiting the hatred of

Alexander II. toward the so-called revolutionary spirit, began their

campaign for laying their hands upon the schools. ‘No schools unless

clerical ones’ became their motto. All Russia wanted education, but

even the ridiculously small sum of two million roubles included every

year in the State budget for primary schools used _not_ to be spent

by the Ministry of Public Instruction, while nearly as much was given

to the Synod as an aid for establishing schools under the village

clergy--schools most of which existed, and now exist, on paper only.

All Russia wanted technical education, but the Ministry opened

only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and

Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from

reading and thinking. In these gymnasia only two or three per cent.

of the pupils succeeded in completing an eight years’ course, all

boys promising to become something and to show some independence of

thought being carefully sifted out before they could reach the last

form, and all sorts of measures were taken to _reduce_ the numbers

of pupils. Education was considered as a sort of luxury, for the

few only. At the same time the Ministry of Education was engaged

in a continuous, passionate struggle against all private persons

and institutions--district and county councils, municipalities,

and the like--which endeavoured to open teachers’ seminaries or

technical schools, or even simple primary schools. Technical

education--in a country which was so much in want of engineers,

educated agriculturists, and geologists--was treated as equivalent to

revolutionism. It was prohibited, prosecuted; so that up to the present

time, every autumn, something like two or three thousand young men are

refused admission to the higher technical schools from mere lack of

vacancies. A feeling of despair took possession of all those who wished

to do anything useful in public life; while the peasantry were ruined

at an appalling rate by over-taxation, and by ‘beating out’ of them the

arrears of the taxes by means of semi-military executions, which ruined

them for ever. Only those governors of the provinces were in favour at

the capital who managed to beat out the taxes in the most severe ways.

Such was the official St. Petersburg. Such was the influence it

exercised upon Russia.

V

When we were leaving Siberia we often talked, my brother and I, of

the intellectual life which we should find at St. Petersburg, and of

the interesting acquaintances we should make in the literary circles.

We made such acquaintances, indeed, both among the radicals and among

the moderate Slavophiles; but I must confess that they were rather

disappointing. We found plenty of excellent men--Russia is full of

excellent men--but they did not quite correspond to our ideal of

political writers. The best writers--Chernyshévsky, Mikháiloff,

Lavróff--were in exile, or were kept in the fortress of St. Peter and

St. Paul, like Písareff. Others, taking a gloomy view of the situation,

had changed their ideas, and were leaning toward a sort of paternal

absolutism; while the greater number, though holding still to their

beliefs, had become so cautious in expressing them that their prudence

was almost equal to desertion.

At the height of the reform period nearly everyone in the advanced

literary circles had had some relations either with Hérzen or with

Turguéneff and his friends, or with the ‘Great Russian’ or the ‘Land

and Freedom’ secret societies, which had at that period an ephemeral

existence. Now, these same men were only the more anxious to bury their

former sympathies as deep as possible, so as to appear above political

suspicion.

One or two of the liberal reviews which were tolerated at that time,

owing chiefly to the superior diplomatic talents of their editors,

contained excellent material, showing the ever-growing misery and

the desperate conditions of the great mass of the peasants, and

making clear enough the obstacles that were put in the way of every

progressive worker. The amount of such facts was enough to drive one

to despair. But no one dared to suggest any remedy, or to hint at any

field of action, at any outcome from a position which was represented

as hopeless. Some writers still cherished the hope that Alexander II.

would once more assume the character of reformer; but with the majority

the fear of seeing their reviews suppressed, and both editors and

contributors marched ‘to some more or less remote part of the empire,’

dominated all other feelings. Fear and hope equally paralyzed them.

The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their

fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary

circles, and we went occasionally to their friendly gatherings; but

the moment the conversation began to lose its frivolous character,

or my brother, who had a great talent for raising serious questions,

directed it toward home affairs, or toward the state of France,

where Napoleon III. was hastening to his fall in 1870, some sort of

interruption was sure to occur. ‘What do you think, gentlemen, of the

latest performance of “La Belle Hélène”?’ or, ‘What is your opinion of

that cured fish?’ was loudly asked by one of the elder guests, and the

conversation was brought to an end.

Outside the literary circles things were even worse. In the sixties

Russia, especially in St. Petersburg, was full of men of advanced

opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for

their ideas. ‘What has become of them?’ I asked myself. I looked up

some of them; but, ‘Prudence, young man!’ was all they had to say.

‘Iron is stronger than straw,’ or ‘One cannot break a stone wall with

his forehead,’ and similar proverbs, unfortunately too numerous in the

Russian language, constituted now their code of practical philosophy.

‘We have done something in our life: ask no more from us;’ or, ‘Have

patience: this sort of thing will not last,’ they told us, while we,

the youth, were ready to resume the struggle, to act, to risk, to

sacrifice everything, if necessary, and only asked them to give us

advice, some guidance and some intellectual support.

Turguéneff has depicted in ‘Smoke’ some of the ex-reformers from

the upper layers of society, and his picture is disheartening. But

it is especially in the heartrending novels and sketches of Madame

Kohanóvskaya, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘V. Krestóvsky’

(she must not be confounded with another novel-writer, Vsévolod

Krestóvsky), that one can follow the many aspects which the degradation

of the ‘liberals of the sixties’ took at that time. ‘The joy of

living’--perhaps the joy of having survived--became their goddess,

as soon as the nameless crowd which ten years before made the

force of the reform movement refused to hear any more of ‘all that

sentimentalism.’ They hastened to enjoy the riches which poured into

the hands of ‘practical’ men.

Many new ways to fortune had been opened since serfdom had been

abolished, and the crowd rushed with eagerness into these channels.

Railways were feverishly made in Russia; to the lately opened private

banks the landlords went in numbers to mortgage their estates; the

newly established private notaries and lawyers at the courts were in

the possession of large incomes; the shareholders’ companies multiplied

with an appalling rapidity and the promoters flourished. A class of men

who formerly would have lived in the country on the modest income of a

small estate cultivated by a hundred serfs, or on a still more modest

salary of a functionary in a law court, now made fortunes, or had such

yearly incomes as in the times of serfdom were possible only for the

land magnates.

The very taste of ‘society’ sank lower and lower. The Italian Opera,

formerly a forum for radical demonstrations, was now deserted; the

Russian Opera, timidly asserting the rights of its great composers, was

frequented by a few enthusiasts only. Both were found ‘tedious,’ and

the cream of St. Petersburg society crowded to a vulgar theatre where

the second-rate stars of the Paris small theatres won easy laurels from

their _jeunesse dorée_ admirers, or went to see ‘La Belle Hélène,’

which was played on the Russian stage, while our great dramatists were

forgotten. Offenbach’s music reigned supreme.

* * * * *

It must be said that the political atmosphere was such that the best

men had reasons, or had at least weighty excuses, for keeping quiet.

After Karakózoff had shot at Alexander II. in April 1866 the State

police had become omnipotent. Everyone suspected of ‘radicalism,’ no

matter what he had done or what he had not done, had to live under

the fear of being arrested any night for the sympathy he might have

shown to some one involved in this or that political affair, or for

an innocent letter intercepted in a midnight search, or simply for

his ‘dangerous’ opinions; and arrest for political reasons might mean

anything--years of seclusion in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul,

transportation to Siberia, or even torture in the casemates of the

fortress.

This movement of the circles of Karakózoff remains up to this date very

imperfectly known, even in Russia. I was at that time in Siberia, and

know of it only by hearsay. It appears, however, that two different

currents combined in it. One of them was the beginning of that great

movement ‘towards the people’ which later on took such a formidable

extension, while the other current was mainly political. Groups of

young men, some of whom were on the road to become brilliant university

professors, or men of mark as historians and ethnographers, had come

together about 1864, with the intention of carrying to the people

education and knowledge in spite of the opposition of the Government.

They went as mere artisans to great industrial towns, and started there

co-operative associations, as well as informal schools, hoping that by

the exercise of much tact and patience they might be able to educate

the people, and thus to create the first centres from which better and

higher conceptions would gradually radiate amongst the masses. Their

zeal was great; considerable fortunes were brought into the service of

the cause; and I am inclined to think that, compared with all similar

movements which took place later on, this one stood perhaps on the most

practical basis. Its initiators certainly were very near to the working

people.

On the other side, with some of the members of these

circles--Karakózoff, Ishútin, and their nearest friends--the movement

took a political direction. During the years from 1862 to 1866 the

policy of Alexander II. had assumed a decidedly reactionary character;

he had surrounded himself with men of the most reactionary type, taking

them as his nearest advisers; the very reforms which made the glory

of the beginning of his reign were now wrecked wholesale by means of

by-laws and ministerial circulars: a return to manorial justice and

serfdom in a disguised form was openly expected in the old camp; while

no one could hope at that time that the main reform--the abolition of

serfdom--could withstand the assaults directed against it from the

Winter Palace itself. All this must have brought Karakózoff and his

friends to the idea that a further continuance of Alexander II.’s

reign would be a menace even to the little that had been won; that

Russia would have to return to the horrors of Nicholas I. if Alexander

continued to rule. Great hopes were felt at the same time--this is ‘an

often repeated story, but always new’--as to the liberal inclinations

of the heir to the throne and his uncle Constantine. I must also

say that before 1866 such fears and such considerations were not

unfrequently expressed in much higher circles than those with which

Karakózoff seems to have been in contact. At any rate Karakózoff shot

at Alexander II. one day, as he was coming out of the Summer Garden to

take his carriage. The shot missed, and Karakózoff was arrested on the

spot.

Katkóff, the leader of the Moscow reactionary party, and a great

master in extracting pecuniary profits from every political

disturbance, at once accused all radicals and liberals of complicity

with Karakózoff--which was certainly false--and insinuated in his

paper--making all Moscow believe it--that Karakózoff was a mere

instrument in the hands of the Grand Duke Constantine, the leader of

the reform party in the highest spheres. One can imagine how the two

rulers, Shuváloff and Trépoff, exploited these accusations and the

fears of Alexander II.

Mikhael Muravióff, who had won during the Polish insurrection his

nickname of ‘the Hangman,’ received orders to make a most searching

inquiry, and to discover by every possible means the plot which was

supposed to exist. He made arrests in all classes of society, ordered

hundreds of searches, and boasted that he ‘would find the means to

render the prisoners more talkative.’ He certainly was not the man

to recoil even before torture; and public opinion in St. Petersburg

was almost unanimous in saying that Karakózoff was tortured to obtain

avowals, but made none.

State secrets are well kept in fortresses, especially in that huge

mass of stone opposite the Winter Palace, which has seen so many

horrors, only in recent times disclosed by historians. It still keeps

Muravióff’s secrets. However the following may perhaps throw some light

on this matter.

In 1866 I was in Siberia. One of our Siberian officers, who travelled

from Russia to Irkútsk toward the end of that year, met at a post

station two gendarmes. They had accompanied to Siberia a functionary

exiled for theft, and were now returning home. Our Irkútsk officer, who

was a very amiable man, finding the gendarmes at the tea table on a

cold winter night, joined them and chatted with them while the horses

were being changed. One of the men knew Karakózoff.

‘He was cunning, he was,’ he said. ‘When he was in the fortress we

were ordered, two of us--we were relieved every two hours--not to let

him sleep. So we kept him sitting on a small stool, and as soon as he

began to doze we shook him to keep him awake.... What will you? we were

ordered to do so!... Well, see how cunning he was: he would sit with

crossed legs, swinging one of his legs to make us believe that he was

awake, and himself, in the meantime, would get a nap, continuing to

swing his leg. But we soon made it out and told those who relieved us,

so that he was shaken and waked up every few minutes, whether he swung

his legs or not.’ ‘And how long did that last?’ my friend asked. ‘Oh,

many days--more than one week.’

The naïve character of this description is in itself a proof of

veracity: it could not have been invented; and that Karakózoff was

tortured to this degree may be taken for granted.

When Karakózoff was hanged one of my comrades from the corps of pages

was present at the execution with his regiment of cuirassiers. ‘When

he was taken out of the fortress,’ my comrade told me, ‘sitting on

the high platform of the cart which was jolting on the rough glacis

of the fortress, my first impression was that they were bringing out

an india-rubber doll to be hanged, that Karakózoff was already dead.

Imagine that the head, the hands, the whole body were absolutely loose,

as if there were no bones in the body, or as if the bones had all been

broken. It was a terrible thing to see, and to think what it meant.

However, when two soldiers took him down from the cart I saw that he

moved his legs and made strenuous endeavours to walk by himself and to

ascend the steps of the scaffold. So it was not a doll, nor could he

have been in a swoon. All the officers were very much puzzled at the

circumstance and could not explain it.’ When, however, I suggested to

my comrade that perhaps Karakózoff had been tortured the colour came

into his face, and he replied, ‘So we all thought.’

Absence of sleep for weeks would alone be sufficient to explain the

state in which that morally very strong man was during the execution.

I may add that I have the absolute certitude that--at least in one

case--drugs were administered to a prisoner in the fortress--namely,

‘Sabúroff,’ in 1879. Did Muravióff limit the torture to this only? Was

he prevented from going any further, or not? I do not know. But this

much I know: that I often heard from high officials at St. Petersburg

that torture had been resorted to in this case.

Muravióff had promised to root out all radical elements in St.

Petersburg, and all those who had had in any degree a radical past now

lived under the fear of falling into the despot’s clutches. Above all

they kept aloof from the younger people, from fear of being involved

with them in some perilous political associations. In this way a chasm

was opened not only between the ‘fathers’ and the ‘sons,’ as Turguéneff

described it in his novel, not only between the two generations, but

also between all men who had passed the age of thirty and those who

were in their early twenties. Russian youth stood consequently in the

position not only of having to fight in their fathers the defenders

of serfdom, but of being left entirely to themselves by their elder

brothers, who were unwilling to join them in their leanings toward

socialism, and were afraid to give them support even in their struggle

for more political freedom. Was there ever before in history, I ask

myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a

foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those

young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life,

the intellectual inheritance of these same fathers and brothers? Was

there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these?