The Russian Government since the days of Peter the Great has been
exceptionally free. It has views, interests, relations, but no sort of
_moral obligations_.
When it freed itself from the stagnant traditions of the parental home,
it simultaneously severed all ties of blood, without assuming any others;
it handed over its own mother into bondage to a stranger, but did not
submit to him either.
The complex elements of Western life, derived from various different
sources, were selected to suit its purposes. Of a whole phrase in
which the very discords softened its one-sidedness, took the edge off
its extremes and made a harmony of a sort, a few notes were retained,
destroying the concord and the significance. All that exaggerated
authority and all that oppressed the individual was adopted; every
defence of personal liberty was laid aside; the casuistry of the
inquisition was enriched by Tatar torture, German discipline, Byzantine
servility.
Even speech, absolutely oppressed and despised, gained the power of fatal
menace, of inflicting boundless misfortune, the power of action, only
when ‘word and deed’[93] meant denunciation!
There has never in history been such a Government, relieved from all
moral principles, from every duty undertaken by authority except that of
self-preservation and maintaining the frontiers. The Russian Government
of this period is the most monstrous abstraction to which the German
metaphysics _eines Polizeistaates_ could rise. The Government exists
for the sake of the Government, the people for the sake of the State:
a complete disregard for history, for religion, for tradition, for the
heart of man; material force in place of an ideal, material power in
place of authority.
Had Russia been conquered by Poland, let us suppose, there would have
been a struggle. The Polish nobility would have brought in their
tradition of aristocratic freedom; it would, as in Little Russia, as
in the time of the Pretenders, have called forth from outraged national
feeling Lyapunovs,[94] Minins,[95] Pozharskys and Hmyelnitskys.[96] The
two elements would have measured their strength. The conqueror would
have seen what the conquered was, what were his peculiarities, where
his national characteristics lay. But the conquest of Russia by the
Government of Petersburg, without an enemy of a different race, without
a hostile flag, without an open battle, took the whole country unawares.
The people only grasped that it was conquered by the time that all the
strong places were in the hands of the enemy; for the conquerors the
vanquished people had not even the interest of novelty, of the unknown;
on the contrary, the estranged oppressor despised the ignorant Russian
people, was convinced that it knew them and felt that it was the same
flesh and blood, but purified by civilisation and called to rule the
ignorant masses.
About Peter the Great there gathered a crowd of destitute nobles who
forgot their birth, of foreigners who forgot their native land, of
orderlies and sergeants, interspersed with the old Boyar aristocrats and
the everlasting intriguers who crawl at the feet of any one in power
and take advantage of any one’s favour. This circle grew and multiplied
rapidly, sending out its parasitic branches in all directions. Little by
little this blight spread all over Russia, it trailed through the mud
and the snow carrying an officer’s commission, an appointment from the
senate, or a deed of sale, hungry and greedy, ferocious with the common
people and abject with the higher officials.
It formed a sort of net, maintained by soldiers, joined together at
the top in the knot of the Winter Palace, and holding tight peasants
and townsmen in every mesh below. This was a sort of fortuitous state
made up of nobles and government functionaries, with a flavour of army
discipline and serfdom. In it everything was shaved off: beard, regional
independence, individuality. It wore German dress and tried to speak
French. The people looked with horror and repulsion on the traitors, but
power was on the side of the latter, and however the people moaned, and
however they revolted, the census and the recruiting, the forced labour
and pay in lieu of labour, knout and rods went on unchecked. The people
murmured, made frequent efforts to revolt; joining with the Cossacks
and the Tatars, a whole countryside rose in insurrection—but there were
troops and troops of soldiers ... and order was restored by the knout.
Stunned with pain, crushed by despair, the people were felled to the
earth and lay stupefied for nearly a hundred years. It is only from that
time that Russia has become that dead, dumb sea which no hurricane will
stir.
Up to the ’seventies of last century the Petersburg orderlies and
sergeants had not fallen into step. These people of haughty insolence
and no feeling of honour, drunk with wine and blood, accustomed to the
executioner’s axe and the moan of the tortured, after tasting the sweets
of power and being beaten with the stick, remembered well how easy it is
in a state without a people to put any worthless creature on the throne
or turn it off again.
They knew that they too had their share in the Imperial ‘We.’ ... The
far-sighted among them wanted to limit the power of the autocracy
for their own benefit, but the true sergeants preferred simply to
strangle Tsars and put their mistresses in their place. The insolent
courtiers were dangerous, exacting. It was not enough for Prince
Grigory Grigoryevitch Orlov to have Catherine, he wanted the title of
her husband. Knowing how light are the chains of matrimony, Catherine
consented, but the other orderlies and sergeants would not dream of
allowing it. The name of Ivan Antonovitch[97] was pronounced: she
bade them kill him like a cat; the name of Princess Tarakanov[98] was
recalled: she bade them steal her as puppies are stolen.
All this was done from terror. Feverish, irresistible terror took
possession of every one who sat on Peter’s blood-stained throne. It was
hard to rely on such faithful subjects as the orderlies and sergeants,
as the German adventurers; still more so to rely on the people, on
the voiceless people, trampled in the mud, handed over as a gift to
the nobility: they did not exist. Those who wore the crown kept up
appearances, tried to forget themselves, but panic got the upper hand,
and suddenly they would be overcome by the terror of the rope-walker:
below, a black mass of downcast heads that never look up, no voice can
reach it; near at hand ... it would be better if there were no one
... near at hand, sergeants, orderlies, and no one akin.... They were
terrified by their own infertility, and sent seeking everywhere among
German _landgrafs_ and archbishops a drop of Peter’s blood in the fourth
or fifth generation, or hurriedly ordered children, as Elizabeth did from
Catherine, and kept looking about them, afraid that a drunken orderly
would come ... with the ribbon of Saint Andrew on his breast and a rope
in his hand.
_Another figure_ appeared on the scene, and everything was changed.
The storm-clouds had parted, men could see clear again. A picture of
the greatest family happiness was displayed to the world: the god-like
Felitsa,[99] ‘the mother of her country,’ stood serenely at the pinnacle
of power and authority, graciously smiling on her kneeling orderlies
and sergeants, senators and cavaliers; every one worshipped her, every
one did homage to her. Radiant with paste gems, after the manner of the
_encyclopaedic_ diamonds, she sparkled with the wisdom of Beccaria[100]
and the profound thought of Montesquieu, delivered classical speeches to
the landowners of the steppes, put Roman helmets on her _balafrés_ ...
sent for legislators who took her will for law.... Her generals brought
her victory on land and on sea, Derzhavin sang her praises in heavy
verse, Voltaire exalted her in light prose, and she, drunken with power,
weighed down with love, gave everything to _her own_ people, everything:
her body, the souls of the free Cossacks, the estates of the monasteries.
‘Glory, glory to you, Catherine!’
Who had performed this miracle, who had roped in the Russia of the
renegades and the Germans? Who wedded the mutinous orderlies and
blood-stained sergeants to Felitsa?
An unknown old lady, a landowner of the steppes after the style of
Korobotchka,[101] had bewitched them. What happened, it was said, was
this.
Pugatchov came to her farm; the old woman was frightened and went out to
offer His Majesty bread and salt.
‘Well, what sort of a mistress has she been to you, good Christians?’ the
Tsar-Cossack asked the peasants.
‘We will not take a sin on our souls, Your Majesty; we have always been
satisfied with our mistress, she has been a mother to us.’
‘Good! I will come to you, old lady, and drink your vodka, since the
people praise you.’
The old lady regaled him as best she could. Pugatchov took leave of her
and went to his sledge. The peasants stood waiting for him; their faces
were dissatisfied.
‘If you have some favour to ask, speak boldly.’
‘Well, Your Royal Majesty, how is it left then for us?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, here, you see, Sire, you were at such a place and there you hanged
the master and his children too, and at the other village, too ... and
how about us?’
‘Why, you say yourselves your old woman is a very good one.’
‘That is so, Your Majesty, she is a good woman, but still, perhaps it
would be better to do for her.’
‘Well, brothers, if you want to—as you like, we can do for her.’
‘It is a pity, it is a pity, but there is no help for it,’ said the
peasants, going to fetch the old lady, who was calmly clearing away the
plates and dishes, delighted at having been spared by the Tsar, and to
her great surprise they hanged her from the crossbeam. It was she, they
said, who cast a spell over the mutinous orderlies and sergeants of the
Government.
They pondered, seeing such impartial justice. ‘Is that how we did for
them? I say, but you know, might not this happen to any one of us? No,
enough of mutiny; what could we do without the help of the Tsar?’
And the family feud was ended.
From that time forward the Government dared not hold out a hand to the
peasants in any way. The nobles lost all sense of civic courage in face
of the Government, and all feeling of moral shame in regard to the
peasants. The two Russias completely ceased to recognise each other as
human beings. There was no human tie, neither compassion nor justice
between them. Their morality was different, what they held sacred was
different. The terrified peasant crouched in his village, afraid of
the landowner, afraid of the police-captain, afraid of the town where
every one could beat him, where his full coat and jerkin were looked
on with contempt, where he saw a beard only on the images of Christ.
The landowner, who shed genuine tears over the novels of Marmontel,
flogged the peasant in his stable for arrears with perfect equanimity;
the peasant with untroubled conscience deceived the landowner and the
judge. ‘Are you a gentleman?’ an old woman would say in the coach-house
to Mitka or Kuzka, ‘that you eat meat in Lent? As for the master, it’s
not expected of him, but why don’t you keep the law of God?’ The division
could be no wider.
The people were broken. Without murmur, without revolt, without hope,
they passed with clenched teeth _through the next thousand blows_,[102]
sank exhausted, died; their children were driven the same way, and so one
generation followed another. Tranquillity prevailed, the masters’ tribute
was paid, the forced labour was performed, the horn sounded for the hunt
with hounds, the serfs’ band played, the motherly heart of the Empress
rejoiced.
The Petersburg throne was made secure. It was supported on the graduated
table of ranks, made fast to the earth with bayonets and butt-ends of
guns; it was supported by the provincial nobility, who battened upon the
peasants. The light from the West shed its pale, cold beams on the top
of the pyramid, lighting up one side of it only; on the other, behind
its shadow, nothing could be discerned—and, indeed, there was no need to
look: there lay a scourged body covered with sacking, waiting for _some
one_ to come and decide whether it was dead or not. It seemed as though
the conquest was complete.
But the revolution made by Peter the Great introduced a double-edged
element into the life of the Russian nobility. Peter liked the material
side of civilisation, practical science. The rich resources it provided
increased the power of government tenfold. But he did not know what
thorns lie hid in these West European roses, and, maybe, had too
much contempt for his own people to dream that they could assimilate
something else as well as constructing fortifications, building ships
and establishing official routine. Science is as bad as any wood-worm
which gnaws day and night until somewhere it comes forth into the light,
struggles into consciousness. And some thought, like the gnawing of
conscience, begins to ferment, until the whole dough rises.
In 1789 the following incident took place. A young man[103] of no
importance, after supping with his friends in Petersburg, drove in
a postchaise to Moscow. He slept through the first station. At the
second, Sofya, he was detained a long time before he could get horses,
and consequently, it may be supposed, was so thoroughly awakened that
when the fresh team carried him off with the bells ringing, instead of
sleeping he listened to the driver’s song in the fresh morning air.
Strange ideas came into the mind of the young man of no importance. Here
are his words:—
‘My driver sang a song, as usual a mournful one. Any one who knows
the airs of the Russian peasants’ songs will recognise that there
is something suggestive of spiritual sadness. Almost every tune of
these songs is in a minor key. The Government should be based on this
peculiarity of the peasants’ musical taste. In it you will find the
character of our people’s soul. _Look at the Russian and you will find
him melancholy._ If he wants to shake off his dreariness, or, as he
himself says, if he wants to enjoy himself, he goes to the pot-house....
The barge-hauler going with hanging head to the pot-house and coming back
red with blood from blows in the face may provide the solution of much
that has hitherto been enigmatic in the history of Russia.’
The driver went on wailing his song: the traveller went on thinking his
thoughts, and before he had reached Tchudovo suddenly recalled how he had
once in Petersburg struck his Petrushka for being drunk. And he burst out
crying like a child, and, without blushing for his honour as a nobleman,
had the shamelessness to write: ‘Oh, if only, drunk as he was, he had
plucked up spirit enough to answer me in the same way!’
This song, these tears, these words, cast at hazard on the posting-road
between two stations, must be regarded as one of the first signs of the
turning tide. The seed always germinates in silence, and at the beginning
there is no trace of it.
The Empress Catherine saw the point of it, and was graciously pleased
‘with warmth and feeling’ to say to Hrapovitsky: ‘Radishtchev is a rebel
worse than Pugatchov!’
To wonder that she sent him in chains to Ilimsky Prison is absurd. It is
much more wonderful that Paul brought him back, but he did that to spite
his dead mother, he had no other object in it.
Thenceforward, from time to time, stray gleams of light flash on the
horizon with no clap of thunder. Men appear on the stage who embody in
themselves the historical gnawings of conscience, helpless and guiltless
victims expiating the sins of their fathers. Many of them are ready to
give up everything, sacrifice everything, but there is no altar, no one
to accept their sacrifice. Some knocked at the palace doors, and on their
knees besought their rulers to take heed to their ways; their words
seemed to trouble the rulers, but nothing came of it. Others knocked
at the hut but could say nothing to the peasant, since they spoke a
different language. The peasant looked with sullen distrust at these
‘Greeks bearing gifts,’ and the conscience-stricken turned away bitterly,
feeling that they had no fatherland.
Bereaved of all through thought, bereaved of all through love, foreigners
at home, cut off from communication with each other, the five or six best
men in Russia perished in idleness, surrounded by hatred, indifference,
misunderstanding. Novikov[104] was in the fortress, Radishtchev in
Ilimsk. A fine place Russia must have seemed to them when Paul released
them!
There is no wonder that all men looked with ecstatic hope to Alexander.
Young, handsome, with a mild and pensive expression, shy and extremely
gracious, he might well fascinate them. Was he not suffering for the ills
of Russia as they were? Was he not trying to heal them as they were? And,
moreover, he _could_ do it—so at least they fancied.
And Radishtchev, who had paid so dearly for his pity of the dark masses
of Russia, went with the same faith as Karazin to offer his services
to the young Emperor, and he too was accepted. Zealously Radishtchev
plunged into work and drew up a series of legislative projects for the
abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment. But all at once, after a
short discussion, not with the sledge-driver but with Count Zavadovsky,
he stopped short, hesitated, was overcome by doubt and dread, pondered,
poured himself out a glass of sulphuric acid and drank it. Alexander
sent his own doctor, Villiers, but it was too late. Villiers only said,
looking at his features as he lay in agony: ‘This man must have been very
unhappy!’
He must have been!
This was in the autumn of 1802. Karazin was then in power. He knew
Radishtchev very well, and indeed on one occasion lost the manuscript
of his proposed reforms—but his alarming example had no effect on him.
Dismissed from the palace, Karazin came back five years later, ten years
later, twenty years later, thirty years later, with his plan for the
emancipation of the serfs and a representative assembly of the nobles,
his programme for a revolution from above. Not even observing that
Nicholas was reigning, he knocked at his door too, and urged upon that
dull-witted martinet that ‘storms were rising, there would be trouble;
that to save the throne concessions must be made,’ and could not imagine
why, in 1820, Alexander had ordered him to be put in the fortress, and
the head gendarme Benckendorf ordered the gendarmes to turn him out of
Nicholas’ anteroom. He should have asked Speransky how the ‘steep hills
break the spirited steed’ even in flat Petersburg, and make of him a
respectable harnessed nag, gravely jogging along in blinkers.
But how was it these people could be so deceived, or was it Alexander
who deceived them? But that was not the case at all. We have not, at
any rate before 1806 or 1807, the slightest right to doubt his genuine
desire to alleviate the lot of his subjects: to protect his peasants from
maltreatment by their owners, from maltreatment by officials, from the
veniality of the law-courts and the injustice of the mighty. Alexander
did not set before himself as the exclusive aim of his reign the futile
preservation and increase of his power, as Nicholas did. It was not his
desire that his word should have the effect of strychnine; he strove
not only to be feared but to be loved. In his most passionate moments
he could not only listen to another man’s opinion, but even accept it.
When he had decided to shoot Speransky in 1812, he commuted the senseless
sentence after talking to the academician, Parrot. All that is so, but he
_could not_ do anything real for the Russian people. That was just the
tragedy of his position.
And who can tell whether he did not rush into foreign wars because
he had begun to discern the magic circle which grew wider every time
that he ordered a levy or increased the taxes on the peasants, and at
once contracted when he undertook anything for the peasants? He became
irresolute, he was oppressed by mistrust of others, lack of confidence
in himself; his hesitation grew with defeat and grew with victory. From
Paris he returned a gloomy mystic: he no longer wanted to transform
or to improve; he brought back Speransky, but his projects of reform
were pigeonholed in the archives. To Engelhart, who said something to
him about bringing order into the civilian side of the Government, he
answered gloomily: ‘There is no one to undertake it!’
He was accustomed to power, he had glory enough, all he wanted now was
peace, and among all his ministers and grandees, among the generals
covered with glory and courtiers about his person, he chose the heartless
torturer, Araktcheyev, and handed Russia over to him, and, what is more,
arranged that even after his death it should pass into the hands of
another Araktcheyev.
He did not trust the nobles, the peasants he did not know—and that is
no matter for wonder, since about him stood men like Speransky and his
rival Karamzin; like Shishkov, the forerunner of Slavophilism, who might
have known the peasants but did not know them; since the most intelligent
statesmen, like Mordvinov, talked of the nobility as the one prop of the
throne; since honest senators, like Lopuhin, were indignant at the idea
of the emancipation of the serfs.
It is a pity that Alexander was rather deaf and did not drive about in a
chaise alone on the high-roads. He too might have been awakened at dawn
by the song of the sledge-driver and might have sought the key to the
mysteries of the people in that instead of in Eckhartshausen.
To understand the Russian people it was not enough for Alexander to kill
his father. He would have had to renounce his wise grandmother, to
renounce Peter the Great, to renounce his whole family and kindred. He
would have had—horrible to say—to renounce even Laharpe, who had made a
man of him, but who could never have grasped that one could learn more
of Russian history from the barge-hauler who goes gloomily into the
pot-house and comes out of it covered with blood than from the records of
Governments.
5