Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

184 CRUELTIES OF PETER THE GREAT.

the emperors in all ages, was a singular union of the great and the minute. With a lust of power grasping as that of the most cruel tyrants of any age or nation, he united the ingenuity of the artisan in a degree that made him the rival of the best mechanics of his times; a sovereign scrupulously terrible, an eagle and an ant, a lion and a beaver : — this monarch, dreadful during life, now imposes himself on posterity as a species of saint, and tyrannises over the judgments, as he formerly tyrannised over the acts of men. To pass an impartial opinion upon him is at the present time a sacrilege which is not without danger, even for a stranger, in Russia. I brave this danger every moment of the day, for of all yokes, the most insupportable to me is that which imposes the necessity of admiring.* In Russia, power, all unlimited as it is, entertains an extreme dread of censure, or even of free speech. An oppressor is of all others the man who most fears the truth; he only escapes ridicule by the terror and mystery with which he environs himself. Hence it is that there must be no speaking of persons here : one must not allude to the maladies of which the Emperors Peter III. and Paul I. died, any more than to

* In the History of Russia and of Peter the Great., by M. le General Comte tie Ségur, we read as follows, (the Strelitz are the parties referred to) : — " Peter himself interrogated these criminals Ъу the torture, after which, in imitation of Ivan the Tyrant, he acted as their judge and their executioner. . . . Drunk with wine and blood, the glass in one hand, the axe in the other, in one single hour twenty successive libations marked the fall of twenty heads of the Strelitz, which the emperor struck off, piquing himself all the while on his horrible address."