education of young ladies in Russia was conducted on wonderful
principles of "finishing." Young ladies--said Gogol, with cutting
satire--receive, as is well known, a very good education. Three things
are looked upon, in the establishments to which they are sent, as the
pillars of all human virtues: namely, first, a knowledge of the French
language; secondly, the piano; thirdly, domestic economy, which consists
of the embroidery of purses and other objects of surprise. "Our present
time," he added, "has shown itself most inventive as regards the
perfection of this educational method; for in one establishment they
begin with the piano, and then go on to French, concluding with the
domestic economy alluded to; whereas in another school the embroidering
of purses forms the introduction, upon which French and the piano
follow. It will be seen that there is much difference in the methods."
Gribojedoff also, in a telling comedy, has some striking sarcasms on the
superficiality and hollow frivolousness of the education of girls of the
upper classes. "We bring up our daughters," he says, "as if they were
destined to be the wives of the dancing-masters and the buffoons to whom
we entrust their instruction." Now and then a reformer started up, but
in a very curious fashion. One of the earliest was Tatjana Passek, the
cousin of Alexander Herzen, of whom a writer, who adopts the signature
of "Borealis," in the Berlin _Gegenwart_, says that in consequence of
the straitened circumstances of her father, she was compelled to open a
Young Ladies' Establishment in a provincial town. Intelligent, but
without any solid knowledge, she herself relates in her memoirs how she
taught ancient history off-hand, chiefly by means of a lively
imagination. She even critically expounded the philosophical systems of
Greece and Rome without knowing or understanding them. Her handbook for
Greek History was "The Travels of Young Anacharsis." There was no system
or connection in what she taught, but the sprightliness of her delivery
made up for the defect. "When we came to the history of Sparta, we
became so enthusiastic for the Lacedæmonian girls that we tried to
imitate their hardened style of life, washing ourselves with cold water,
promenading with bare feet, doing gymnastics, drinking no tea, and
ceasing to cry. When I look back upon these performances, I wonder how
my pupils remained in good health." The same lady reports that the
friends of her youth, disgusted with the hollowness of drawing-room
life, had endeavoured to satisfy their emancipatory inclinations by
donning men's dress, indulging in Amazonian tastes, and secretly
frequenting taverns where, with their aristocratic small hands, they
jubilantly raised the foaming cup.
So much for girls' education in the higher strata. As to the immense
mass of the Russian population they were left to rot, intellectually, in
utter neglect. The school system in some Western countries--including
central and southern Italy before 1859-60, France, and even England
until a few years ago--was bad enough. In Russia it was simply
nonexistent. The private educational establishments and grammar schools
in a few towns, which were destined for the more well-to-do middle
class, were sorry copies of the few Government institutions. I have
before mentioned how, under the present reign, a movement for a more
Liberal education arose, which, however, soon led to students' tumults
and to severe police measures. In girls' education, too, a progressive
movement was initiated. For a short time it was said that the Empress
herself, whose German origin inclined her to that view, would assume its
protectorate. But soon it was seen that Government mainly busied itself
with bureaucratic regulations, whilst the foundation of the girls'
schools for which these extensive and often harassing regulations were
framed, proceeded with extreme slowness. In fact, the regulations were
there; but in most cases the schools were wanting.
Meanwhile, the aspiring girlhood of Russia threw itself with avidity
upon the new sources of knowledge, scant as they were, which had at last
been opened to it. The Minister of Public Instruction, Golovnin, who was
in office between 1861-66, promoted, in his quality of an opponent of
the classical method of education, by preference the study of natural
science. Hence a realistic tendency--often verging upon the harsh and
the crude--became the prevailing tone. Girls, sick of the idleness and
the conventional frivolities of social life, eagerly devoted themselves
to scientific pursuits, both as students at the new academies, and as
subscribers to the courses of lectures which were getting into vogue.
The very antagonists of the more extreme "emancipatory" practices
acknowledge that the greater number of these lady-students, who soon
were driven to seek for an opportunity of acquiring knowledge at a
foreign university--that is, at Zurich--distinguished themselves by much
diligence and talent, as well as by a spirit of personal sacrifice in
regard to worldly comforts.
At the same time it must be averred that some of them, yielding to an
exaltation and eccentricity easily aroused in womankind, mentally
overbalanced themselves as it were, and began to assume hideous mannish
and hermaphrodite ways. The close-cropped hair, the unnecessarily
spectacled face, the short tight jacket, the cigar, and the frequenting
of public-houses were unpleasant outward signs; but far more deplorable
was the cynic tone. These were and are the sad excrescences of an
otherwise laudable aspiration; but it may be hoped that in course of
time the excrescences will disappear. The sooner the better, else the
best friends of the progressive tendency among womankind will turn away
from it in sorrow and anger at the unsexing of the sex, whose tenderer
nature--in Schiller's words, let us hope not quite antiquated--is
destined to "weave wreaths of heavenly roses into the earthly life."
However, all the odd eccentricities, all the sad contempt of the natural
and recognised forms of beauty, delicacy, or even decency, into which
some may have allowed themselves to be betrayed by their eagerness to
throw off intolerable intellectual fetters, must not render us unjust to
the sounder aspect of the movement. Nor can those vagaries prevent us
from giving a due meed of admiring praise to the heroism displayed by
those nobly aspiring women, with whom the exaggerated manner is more an
outward form, whilst their self-sacrificing deeds in the cause of the
freedom of the nation and the welfare of the neglected masses, show the
true humanity and nobility of their heart. "Dead souls" they are not.
The fire of enthusiasm is within them.
VII.
After this rapid general survey of the condition of mind of the more
advanced women in Russia I come to the tragic story of Vjera Sassulitch.
It is a story typical of the base cruelty of autocratic government;
typical also of the results such a system must needs produce.
The victim and heroine of that ever-memorable tragedy was not, at first,
a member of any secret organization. Far from it. At the age of
seventeen, Vjera, then a mere school-girl, had made the acquaintance of
another school-girl, whose brother was a student. In the course of this
innocent girlish friendship she was induced to take care of a few
letters destined for the student, Netchaieff, who afterwards played a
part in the revolutionary movement. A "Nihilist" Miss Sassulitch, at
that time, certainly was not. Her whole ambition centred in the wish of
passing her examination to qualify herself for a governess, which she
did "with distinction."
Netchaieff's democratic connections having been denounced by a traitor,
whom he thereupon slew, the school-girl of seventeen, who had known his
sister, and him through her, was thrown into prison as one "suspected"
of conspiracy. There was not a shadow of proof against her. No
accusation was even formulated against her. Nevertheless she was kept,
_for two long years_, in the Czar's Bastille--an eternity of torture for
a captive uncertain of her fate. These were the words which her counsel,
Mr. Alexandroff, addressed to the jury, when, later on, she was tried
for an attempt upon Trepoff, one of the most hated tools of despotic
profligacy:--
"The time between the eighteenth and the twentieth year--these are
the years of youth when childhood ceases; when impressions lasting
for life are most powerful; when life itself appears yet spotless
and pure. For the maiden it is the most beautiful time--the time of
budding love--the time when the girl rises to the fuller
consciousness of womanhood--the time of fanciful reverie and
enthusiasm--the time to which, in later days, as a mother and a
matron, her thoughts will yet fondly turn. Gentlemen of the jury!
you know in the company of what friends Vjera Sassulitch had to
pass her best years. The walls of a casemate were her companions.
For two years she saw neither mother, nor relations, nor friends.
Sometimes she heard that her mother had come and had given a
message of greeting. That was all she was allowed to learn. Locked
up without occupation within the walls of a prison!... Everything
human concentrated in the single person of the turnkey who brings
the food!... The monotonousness only broken, now and then, by the
call of the sentinel, who, peering through the window bars,
asks,--'Prisoner, have you not done any harm to yourself?' or by
the rattling of the locks and door-bolts, the clack of guns
shouldered or grounded, or the dreary striking of the hour in the
fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.... Far, far away from
everything human!... Nothing there to nourish the feelings of
friendship and love; nothing but the sympathy created by the
knowledge that, to the right and to the left, there are
fellow-sufferers passing their wretched days in the same way....
Thus it was that, in the depth of her solitude, there arose, in
Vjera Sassulitch, such warm-hearted sympathy for every State
prisoner that every political convict sufferer became for her a
spiritual comrade in her recollections, to whom she assigned a
place in the experience and the impressions of her past life."
During the two years that Vjera was kept in dungeons under a mere
suspicion, she was twice only subjected to a secret inquiry--"judicial,"
if that is a word applicable to these dread Inquisition procedures. At
last she feared she was forgotten. Nothing whatever having come out
against her, she was finally set free, and went back to her heart-broken
mother, only to be suddenly re-arrested ten days afterwards! For a
moment, in spite of a two years' bitter experience, she childishly
thought there was some mistake. But the horrible truth of her situation
soon broke upon her. One morning she was seized in prison, and, without
being allowed to take even a change of dress, or a mantle, transported
by gendarmes to a distant province by way of banishment. One of these
gendarmes threw his own fur over her shivering shoulders, or else she
might have perished on the road.
I will not go here through the whole "infernal circle" of her sufferings
and involuntary migrations, which I have elsewhere described more fully.
I will not relate how she was "moved on" from one place to the other;
the only variety in her treatment consisting of an occasional return to
prison. Eleven years had thus altogether elapsed when at last, in those
vast dominions of the Czar, and amidst more thrilling events which began
to crowd upon public attention, she seemed to be really forgotten. In
this way she managed clandestinely to go back to the capital, whence
again she started for Pensa. It was there that, by chance, she learnt
from the _Novoje Vremja_ ("New Times,") the infamous treatment of
Bogoljuboff, a political prisoner, by the chief of the police at St.
Petersburg, the vile and universally despised Trepoff, the personal,
intimate, and pampered darling of Alexander II.
The flogging practices of this tyrannic head of the "Third Section" are
still in every one's recollection. In referring to the knouting applied
to Bogoljuboff, Vjera Sassulitch's counsel gave the following
description:--
"The sufferer whose human dignity is to be insulted, knows not why
he is to be punished. He thinks indignation will lend him strength
to resist those who throw themselves upon him. But he is grasped by
the iron grip of jailers' hands; he is dragged down; and in the
midst of the regular counting of the strokes by the leader of the
execution, a deep groan is heard--a groan not arising from mere
physical pain, but from the soul's grief of a down-trodden,
outraged man. At last, silence reigned again. The sacred act was
accomplished!"
It was the brooding over such disgrace and affront to which a political
prisoner had been subjected in the very capital by an official whose
department is under the Czar's direct control that pressed the weapon of
revenge into the hands of a tender woman--not so much for her own past
miseries as for those of a still suffering fellow-man.
Trepoff had been attacked by Vjera Sassulitch in his own Cabinet, in the
very midst of his minions. The jury which tried her was composed almost
exclusively of Aulic Councillors and such-like titled dignitaries.
Prince Gortschakoff sat among the audience; so did the pick and flower
of the upper classes of St. Petersburg. Who could doubt, in presence of
the open avowal of the accused, that the verdict would be "Guilty?"
Strange to say, even among the officially faultless remarks of the
Public Prosecutor there were some curious admissions. "I, for my part,"
Mr. Kessel said, "fully believe the statements made by Vjera Sassulitch.
I believe that facts appeared to her in the light in which they have
been placed here; and _I am ready to accept the feelings of Vjera
Sassulitch as facts_. The Court, however, is bound to measure these
feelings, as soon as they are converted into deeds, by the standard of
the law." Through the summing up of the Judge there ran a strong vein of
interpretations favourable to the accused. "An accused person," he
remarked, "could certainly not be looked upon as an infallible
commentator on the event with which he or she was connected. At the same
time it had to be noted that criminals were to be divided into two
groups: those who are led by selfish impulses, and who therefore, in the
majority of cases, try to mask the truth by lying statements; and those
who commit an act from no motive of personal profit, and who entertain
no wish to hide anything of the deed they have done. You, gentlemen of
the jury, are in a position to judge how far the statements of Vjera
Sassulitch merit your confidence, and to which type of transgressors she
most nearly comes up."
This was a clear hint to any intelligent jury; and the jury of Aulic
Councillors were intelligent men. Going over all the details of the
case, the Judge made a great many more remarks in the same spirit. The
audience, who had frequently cheered the eloquence of counsel to such an
extent that the President of the Tribunal had to warn them, were on the
tip-toe of expectation. When the Foreman brought in the verdict: "No;
she is _not_ guilty!" the Hall of Justice--for justice had for once been
done--rang with enthusiastic applause. Vjera Sassulitch was borne away
in triumph.
In the streets, however,--and here we come once more upon all the dark
and terrible ways of Autocracy,--there ensued a fearful scene. An attack
was made upon the coach in which Vjera Sassulitch was to be carried
home--apparently with the object of getting her once more into police
clutches. There was a clash of swords and a confused tumult. Gensdarmes
and police broke in upon the mass of people, who wished to protect her.
Shots were fired. A nobleman and relation of Vjera, Grigori Sidorazki,
lay dead in the street. A lady also, Miss Anna Rafailnowna, a medical
student, writhed on the ground, wounded. The victim of so much prolonged
persecution had herself mysteriously disappeared. Afterwards, an order
for her re-arrest, marked "No. 16," and dated from the Secret Department
of the Town, came to light--evidently through information given by an
affiliate of the Revolutionary Committee within the police
administration itself. This occult connection of sundry officials with
the leaders of the Democratic or Nihilist Conspiracy explains why
Government should so often have been hampered in its efforts to suppress
that organization.
The verdict of "not guilty," in the case of Vjera Sassulitch, has been
followed by several similar ones--a strong proof of the sympathy felt
among the town populations, at least, with the aims of the
revolutionists. Franz von Holtzendorff, a well-known legal authority in
Germany, wrote on the case above detailed:--"Far more significant than
the verdict of the jury is the fact that that verdict, in spite of its
contrast to the existing law, has received the approval, as it appears,
of the whole Russian press, of the whole of the upper classes, and even
of the circles of Russian legists. I have had personal occasion to
convince myself that prominent officials of the Russian Empire gave
their applause to that verdict." Again, Dr. Holtzendorff said:--
"In Russia, the feelings of right and justice, which are
systematically and artificially kept down and repressed, and which
have no outlet in public life, concentrate themselves with their
full weight in the verdict of a jury. That which the press had no
liberty of saying during long years, is given vent to in the
debates of a Court of Justice. An accusation is raised on account
of a deed which, though punishable as a crime in itself, has been
produced and nurtured by a system of administrative arbitrariness
and gross ill-treatment that stands morally deep below the deed in
question--a system of corruption which cannot be attacked legally,
nay, which enjoys all the honours the State can award. And who can
help it if an injustice committed day after day, in the name of the
State, without any expiation, weighs more heavily upon the public
conscience than the act of a single person who, boldly risking his
or her own life, rises with a feeling of the deepest indignation
against so rotten a system of Government? It is but too natural,
this wrathful utterance of the popular voice, when it declares that
a high official, who, trusting in the practical approval of the
Imperial favour, ordains corporal punishment according to his
arbitrary caprice against defenceless prisoners, is guilty of a
greater offence than he who feels driven, by a passionate notion of
justice, to constitute himself, of his own free will, an avenger of
the public conscience.... If, in a State afflicted with political
sickness, the institution of the jury had fallen so deep as to work
with the mechanical certainty of a military court, and to heed
nothing but the points of view of jurisprudence, without being
touched by the current of moral aspirations, thus merely
registering, with Byzantine obedience, the paragraphs of a code of
law: such a phenomenon--keeping, as it would, the Government in a
dangerous error as regards public life--would be far more
reprehensible than that verdict of 'not guilty' by which a whole
system of Government was practically condemned."
The Russian Government system Herr von Holtzendorff, who personally
belongs to a very moderate political party, brands as "a system of
arbitrary police ordinances, and of the virtual sovereignty of the
Adjutants-General of the Czar--a system of administrative deportations,
of despotic arrestations, of press-gagging--a swashbuckler's
government." Another German writer of some distinction, Dr. Henry
Jaques, observes--
"Where an absolutist monarch rules in arbitrary manner, without any
limits to his power, the jury becomes the only representative organ
of a people utterly bereft of all political rights. In such a case,
a jury is indeed entitled to speak, before all, the language of the
people, the language of its aspirations towards freedom, which must
be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its
true rights. Even as, in the Iliad, the orphaned Andromache says to
the parting Hector: 'Thou art now father, brother, and dear mother
to me!' so the Russian people may say to its jury: 'You are now
legislators, judges, and the source of mercy at one and the same
time to me! In you there reposes the One and All of my political
hopes, of my political rights!"
Noble words, but vain hope! First of all, it is not correct to say that
Vjera Sassulitch had been judged by a jury under a political charge. For
political crimes, or accusations, no jury has ever existed under
Alexander II. Vjera Sassulitch was charged with what Government chose to
consider a _common_ crime; hence only she was brought before a jury. For
political offenders, or what Government chooses to regard as political
offenders, packed tribunals have always been assigned. Happily,
Government overreached itself in the case of Vjera Sassulitch, feeling
too secure in the loyalty of its own Aulic Councillors.
Secondly, no sooner had the trial resulted in a verdict of "not guilty,"
than Count Pahlen, the Minister of Justice, who thought the jury were,
of course, quite a safe one, was dismissed. Thirdly, an ukase went
forth, withdrawing from the cognizance of juries even cases of "common
crime," when such crime was directed against one of the Czar's
officials. Fourthly, fresh regulations were framed for a change of the
jury system, as well as for the discipline of lawyers acting for the
defence. Fifthly, in the teeth of the verdict given in favour of Vjera
Sassulitch, a fresh trial was ordered, to be held in a country town, at
Novgorod, as soon as she could be recaptured. Finally, Alexander the
Liberal, seeing that all ordinary procedures were of no avail,
instituted a state of siege and drum-head law for political offenders
over a large portion of his Empire.
These are the desperate doings of a despotism maddened by an ever-active
host of enemies. It is usually the beginning of the end.
VIII.
If any more proofs were wanted of the "benevolent" character of the
Government of Alexander II., they might be found in the increase, year
by year, of the deportations to Siberia. They are reckoned to be now
four or five times more numerous than under the galling system of
Nicholas. Political banishments have enormously augmented under his
successor. So has the number of the prescribed loose and vagabond class
of ordinary criminals, or suspects, who are frequently whisked off to
Siberia--for the sake of clearing "Society," as it is called--when the
criminals often become mixed up with the political exiles in an
indistinguishable mass. This is the very refinement of torture, applied
by the agents of a brutal despotism against men generously striving for
a reform of the State and of society.
The arbitrary deportations are decreed by the "Third Section," or Secret
Police, which is under the Emperor's personal direction. Formerly, this
dreaded office had the power of administering corporal punishment, in
secret, to persons of the upper classes, male or female. At the
Sassulitch trial, the counsel for the defence made a dark allusion to
this practice, which created a deep impression in Court. It was a
reference to a whipping-machine once in use, and of which some of those
present--ladies, as well as gentlemen--may have had personal experience.
A correspondent has given the following description:--The suspected
person, who could not be brought to trial, but whom it was intended to
castigate, would be invited to call at the Office of the Secret Police.
After a few moments' conversation with the dread functionary, the floor
would suddenly sink beneath the visitor's feet, and he would find
himself suspended by the waist, all that part of the body below it being
under the floor, and concealed from view. Then invisible hands and
equally invisible rods would rapidly perform their duty--the trap-door
would rise again--and the visitor would be bowed out with great
courtesy, and go home, carrying with him substantial marks to remind him
of his interview.
Though this more than Oriental custom has been abolished, enough remains
of barbarity to explain why successive chiefs of the hated police
Hermandad--Trepoff, Mesentzoff, and Drentelen--should have been the mark
of the bullet of popular revenge. A Russian writer says:--