My Past and Thoughts

'\Yhat obstinacy then• is in all of them,' Golitsyn senior, the pn•sidPnt. added, shmgging his shoulders and glancing at Shubinsky, the colorwl of gl'ndarmes. I smill'd.

'Just like Ogarc;v.' the' good-heartl'd prPsi

A pause' follo\w

'1-lf'r<',' I said, turning to tlw presidC'nt, 'is it not unjust? I am

!wing trit>d on account of Saint-SimonisnL whi l e you. princt>, hm·e t\wnty volume's of his works.'

As the good old man had newr read anything in his life, he coqld not think what to ans\ver. But Golitsyn junior looked at me with the e:ws of a viper and asked :

'Don't vou SPe that those ar<' the memoirs of the Due de Saint

Simon at the time of Louis XIV?'

The presidC'nt with a smilP gave me a nod that signified,

'\VeiL my boy. a bit flashy, that remark of yours, wasn't it?' and said,

'You may go.'

\\"hilP I was in the

'Is he the one who wrote about Peter I, that thing you were showing me?'

'Yes.' answerC'd Shubinsky.

I stopped.

'll a drs moycns,' obsC'rved the president.

'So much the worsP. Poison in clev!'r hands IS all the more dangProus.' ndd!"d the inquisitor; 'a very pernicious and quite incorrigible' young man.'

J\fy sentence lav in those words.

A propos Saint�Simon. \Vhen the politsmc_ntcr seized Ogarev's hooks and pap<'rs. hP laid aside a ,-olume of Thiers' History of the Frrnch Rrvolution, then found a sPcond volume . . . a third

. . . an eighth. At last hP could bear it no longer, and said :

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'Good Lord ! what a number o f revolutionary books . . . and here is another,' he added, giving the policeman Cuvier's Discours sur les revolutions du globe terrcstre.

The second kind of quPstion was more confusing. In them various police traps and inquisitional tricks WPre made use of to confuse, entangle, and involve one in contradictions. Hints of information given by others and different moral torments were Pmployed . It is not vvorth-whilP to tell them: it is enough to suy that all their devices could not produce a single adequate confrontation among the four of us.4

After I had received my last question, I was sitting alone in the little room in which we \'\TOte. All at once the door opened and Golitsyn junior walked in with a gloomy and anxious face.

'I have come,' he said, 'to have a few words with you before your evidence is completed. My late father's long connection with yours makes me take a special interest in you. You are young and may still make a career; to do so you must clear yourself of this affair . . . and fortunately it depends on yourself. Your father has taken your arrest deeply to heart and is living now in the hope that you will be released: Prine!' Sergey Mikhaylovich and I have just been spPaking about it and we are genuinely ready to do all we can ; give us the means of assisting you.'

I saw the drift of his words; the blood rushed to my head; I gnawed my pen with vexation.

He went on:

'You are going straight under the white strap, or to the fortress; on the way you will kill your father; he will not survive the day when he set's you in the grey overcoat of a soldier.'

I tried to say something but he interrupted me:

'I know what you want to say. Have a little patience! That yot: had designs against the government is evident. To merit the mercy of the Monarch you must give proofs of your penitence.

You are obstinate, you give evasive answers and from a false sense of honour you spare men of whom we know more than you do and who have not been so discrN't as you,5 you will not help them, and they will drag you down with them to ruin. 'Write a letter to the commission, simply, frankly; say that you feel your guilt, that you were led away by your youth, name the unfortu-4 A. I. Herzen, N. P. Ogarev, N. l\1. Satin nnrl I. A. Obolensky. ( A .S.) 5 I need not say that this was a barefaced lie, a shameful police trap.

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nate, misguided men who have led you astray . . . . Are you willing at this easy price to redeem your future and your father's life?'

'I know nothing and have not a word to add to my evidence,' I replied.

Golitsyn got up and said coldly:

'Ah, so you won't: it is not our fault! '

With that the examination ended.

In th�> January or February of 1 835 I was before the commission for the last time. I was summon�>d to read through my answers, to add to them if I wished, and to sign them. Only Shubinsky was presf'nt. ·when I had finished reading th�>m over I said to him:

'I should like to know what charge can be made against a man upon these questions and upon these answers? What article of the Code are you applying to me?'

'The Code of laws is drawn up for crimes of a different kind,'

observed the light-blue colonel.

'That's a different point. After reading over all these literary exercises, I cannot believe that that makes up the whole business for which I have been in prison over six months.'

'But do you really imagine,' replied Shubinsky, 'that we believed you, that you have not formed a secret society?'

'\Vhere is the society?'

'It is your luck that no traces have been found, that you have not succeeded in achiPving anything. V\'e stopped you in time, that is, to speak plainly, we have savPd you.'

It was the story of the locksmith's wife and her husband in Gop;ol's lnspertor Grncral over again.

When I had signed, Shubinsky rang the bell and told them to summon the priest. The priest came up and wrote below my signature that all the evidence had been given by me voluntarily and without any compulsion. I need hardly say that he had not been present at the examination, and that he had not even the decency to ask me how it had been. (It was my impartial witness outside the gate again ! )

At the end of the investigation, prison conditions \vere somewhat n•laxPd. l\1emhPrs of our families could obtain permits for inh•rviPws. So passPrl anothPr two months.

In thf' middlP of March onr sentencf' was confirmPd. No one knPw what it was: some said we "vere hPing sent to the Caucasus, othPrs that Wl' shonlrl be tah•n to Bohrnysk, othPrs again hopPd that WI' should all lw rdPasPd ( this was the sentence which was proposed hy Staal and sent separately by him to the

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Tsar; he advised that our imprisonment should be taken as equivalent to punishment) .

A t last, on 31st March, we were all assembled a t Prince Golitsyn's to hear our sentence. This was a gala day for us. We were seeing each other for the first time since our arrest.

Noisily, gaily embracing and shaking hands, we stood surrounded by a cordon of gendarme and garrison officers. This meeting cheered us all up; there was no end to the questions and the anecdotes.

Sokolovsky was present, pale and somewhat thinner, but as brilliantly amusing as ever.

The author of The Creation of the World and of Khever and other rather good poems, had much poetic talent by nature, but was not wildly original enough to dispense with development, nor sufficiently well-educated to develop. A charming rake, a poet in life, he was not in the least a political man. He was amusing, likeable, a merry companion in merry moments, a bon vivant, fond of having a good time-as we all were-perhaps rather more so.

Having dropped accidentally from a carousel into prison, Sokolovsky behaved extremely well; he grew up in confinement.

The auditor of the commission, a pedant, a pietist, a detective, who had grown thin and grey-headed in envy, covetousness and slander, not daring from devotion to the throne and to religion to understand the last two verses of his poem in their grammatical sense, asked Sokolovsky,

'To whom do those insolent words at the end of the song refer?'

'Rest assured,' said Sokolovsky, 'not to the Tsar, and I would particularly draw your attention to that extenuating circumstance.'

The auditor shrugged his shoulders, lifted up his eyes unto the hills and after gazing a long time at Sokolovsky in silence took a pinch of snuff.

Sokolovsky was arrested in Petersburg and sent to Moscow without being told where he was being taken. Our police often perpetrate similar jests, and to no purpose at all. It is the form their poetical fancy takes. There is no occupation in the world so prosaic, so revolting that it has not its artistic yearnings for superfluous sumptuousness and decoration. Sokolovsky was taken straight to prison and put into a dark closet. Why was he put in prison while we were kept in various barracks?

He had two or three shirts with him and nothing else at all. In England every convict on being brought into prison is at once

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put into a bath, but with us they take every precaution against cleanliness.

If Dr Haas had not sent Sokolovsky a bundle of his own linen he would have been crusted with dirt.

Dr Haas was a very original eccentric. The memory of this

'crazy, deranged' man ought not to be choked among the weeds of the official necrologies describing the virtues of persons of the first two grades, which are not discovered until their bodies have rotted away.

A thin littl(', wax('n-looking old man, in a black swallow-tail coat, breeches, black silk stockings and buckl('d shoes, he looked as though he had just come out of some drama of the eighteenth century. In this grand gala fit for fun('rals and weddings, and in the agreeable climate of fifty-nine degr('eS north latitude, Haas used every V\"e('k to drive to the stage-post on the Sparrow Hills wlwn a batch of convicts were being sent off. In the capacity of prison doctor he had accPss to them; he used to go to inspect them and always brought with him a basket full of all manner of things, victuals and dainties of all sorts--walnuts, cakes, oranges and apples for tlw women. This aroused the wrath and indignation of the philanthropic ladies who were afraid of giving pl('aSurf' by th('ir philanthropy, and afraid of being more charitablP than was n('ct>ssary to save the convicts from dying of hunger and th(' ringing frost.

But Haas was not easy to move, and after listening mildly to reproaches for his 'foolish spoiling of th(' female convicts,' would rub his hands and say:

'Bf' so kind to see, gracious madam: a bit of bread, a copper ev('ryon(' giv('S th('m ; but a sweet or an orange for long they will not S('('; this no one giv('s them, that I can from your words d('duce ; I do th('m this pleasure for that it \viii not a long time be n•peated.'

Haas lived in th(' hospital. A sick man came before dinner to consult him. Haas examined him and \Wnt into his study to writ(' som(' pr('scription. On his return he found neither the patif'nt nor th(• silwr· forks and spoons which had been lying on the tab!('. Baas calh·d thP portPr and ask('rl him if any one had com(' in besid!'s the sick man. Th(' porter grasped the situation, rushed out and returned a minute Iat('r with the spoons and the pa tient, whom he harl stoppPd with tliP help of anotlwr hospital portPr. The rascal f('II at the doctor's feet and besought him for mercy. l laas \vas overcome with Pmbarrassment.

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'Go for the police,' he said to one of the porters, and to the other, 'and you send a clerk here at once.'

The porters, pleased at the discovery, at the victory and a t their share in the business altogether, r a n off, and Haas, taking advantage of their absence, said to the thief,

'You arc a false man, you have deceived and tried to rob rr:c.

God will judge you . . . and now run quickly out of the back gate before the porters come back . . . but stop: perhaps you haven't a farthing: here is half a rouble, but try to reform your soul; from God you will not escape as from a watchman.'

At this even the members of his own household protested. But the incorrigible doctor maintained his point:

'Theft is a great vice; but I know the police, I know how they torment them-they will question him, they will flog him; to give up one's neighbour to the lash is a far worse crime ; besides, huw can one tell: perhaps what I have done may touch his heart ! '

His domestics shook their heads and said, 'Er hat einen Raptus'; the benevolent ladies said, 'C'est un brave homme, mais ce n'est pas tcut a fait en regle, cda,' and tapped their foreheads.

But Haas rubbed his hands and went his own way .

. . . Sokolovsky had hardly finished his anecdotes, when several others at once bpgan to tell theirs ; it \Vas as though we had all returned from a long journpy-thcrc was no end to the questions, jokes, and witticisms.

Physically. Satin had suffered more than the rest; he was thin and had lost part of his hair. He had been at his mother's in the country in the Tambov province when he heard that we had been arrested, and at once set off for Moscow, for fear that his mother should be alarmed by a visit of the gendarmes; but he caught cold on the way and reached home in a high fpvcr. The policP

found him in bed, and it was impossible to move him to the police station. He was placed under arrest at home, a soldier from the police station was put on guard inside th£> bedroom and the local police superintendPnt was s<'t to act as a male nurse by the patient"s bedside, so that on coming to himself after his delirium hP met thP attcntii'C gazP of the on£'. or thP wizened phiz of the other.

At the beginning of the winter he was moved to the Lefortovsky Hospital ; it appearerl there was not a single empty private room for a prisoner, but such trifles were not deemed \vorth considering; a corner parti tioned off, with no stove, was found.

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the sick man \Vas put in this southern verandah and a sentry posted to watch him. What the temperature in this stone closet was like in winter may be judged from the fact that the sentry was so benumbed with cold at night that he would go into the corridor to warm himself at the stove, begging Satin not to tell the duty officer of it.

The hospital authorities themselves saw that such tropical quarters were impossible in a latitude so near the pole, and mowd Satin to a room near the one in which frost-bitten patients were rubbed.

Before we had time to describe and listen to half our adventures, the adjutants began suddenly bustling about, the gendarme officers drew themselves up, and the policemen set themselves to rights: the door opened solemnly and little Prince Sergey Mikhaylovich Golitsyn walked in en grande tcnue with a ribbon across his shoulder; Tsynsky \vas in court uniform, and e,·en the auditor, Oransky, had put on some sort of pale-green civil-military uniform for the joyful occasion. The commandant, of course, had not come.

Meanwhile the noise and laughter had risen to such a pitch that the auditor came menacingly into the room and obse1·ved that loud conversation and, above all, laughter, showed a subversive disrespect to the will of His Majesty, which we were to hear.

The doors were opened. Officers divided us into three groups: in the first was Sokolovsky, the painter Utkin, and an officer callPd lbayev; we were in the second ; in the third, the tutti frutti.

The sentence regarding the first category was read separately.

It was terrible ; condemned for lese-majcste they were sent to the Schli.issPihurg for an indefinite period. All three listened to this savagP sentence like heroes.

"'lwn Oransky. drawling to give himself importance, read, with pauses, that for 'll;Sc-majcstc and insulting the Most August Famil:\', ct crtrra.' Sukolovsky observed:

'\V ell, I never insultf'd the family.'

Among his pap<'I'S besidf's that poem were found some resolutions written in jest as though by the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, with intf'ntional mistakes in spelling, and those orthographical <'!Tors help<'d to convict him.

Tsynsky, to show that he could be free and easy and affable, said to Sokolo,·sky a fter the spntence:

'I say, you',·e been in Schli.isselburg before?'

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'Last year,' Sokolovsky answered promptly, 'as though I felt in my heart what was coming, I drank a bottle of Madeira there.'

Two years later Utkin died in the fortress. Sokolovsky, half dead, was released and sent to the Caucasus; he died at Pyatigorsk. Some remnant of shame and conscience led the government after the death of two to transfer the third to Perm.

-Ibayev's death was sui gencris: he had become a mystic.

Utkin, 'a free artist confined in prison,' as he described himself in his signature to questionnaires, was a man of forty; he had never taken part in any kind of politics, but, being of a generous and impulsive ternperaml.'nt, he gave free rein to his tongue in the commission and was abrupt and rude to the members of it.

For this he was done to death in a damp cell, in which the water trickled down the walls.

Ibayev's greater guilt lay in his epaulettes. Had he not been an officer, he would never have been so punished. The man had happened to be present at some supper party, had probably drunk and sung like all the rest, but certainly neither more nor louder than the others.

Our turn came. Oransky wiped his spectacles, cleared his throat, and began reverently announcing His Majesty's will. In this it was represented that the Tsar, after examining the report of the commission and taking into special consideration the youth of the criminals, commanded that we should not be brought to trial, but that we should be notified that by law we ought, as men convicted of lesc-majeste by singing seditious songs, to lose our lives or, in virtue of other laws, to be transported to penal servitude for life. Instead of this, the Tsar in his infinite mercy forgave the greater number of the guilty, leaving them in their present abode under the supervision of the police.

The more guilty he commanded to be put under reformatory treatment, which consisted in being sent to civilian duty for an indefinite period in remote provinces, to live under the superintendence of the local authorities.

It appeared that there were six of the 'more guilty': Ogarcv, Satin, Lakhtin, Obolensky, Sorokin, and I . I was to be sent to Perm. Among those condemned was Lakhtin, who had not bl.'en arrested at all. When he was summoned to the commission to hear the sentl.'nce, he supposed that it was as a warning, to be punished by hearing how others were punished. The story was that someone of Prince Golitsyn's circle, being angry with Lakhtin's wife, had obliged him with this agreeable surprise. A man of delicate health, he died three yaars later in exile.

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'Yhen Ornmky had finished reading, Colonel Shubinsky mnde a speech. In choice language and in the style of Lomonosov he informed us that i t was due to the good offices of the noble gentlf'man who had presided at the commi ttee that the Tsar had been so merciful.

Shubinsky waited for all of us to thank Prince Golitsyn, but this did not come off.

Some of those \vho \vere pardoned nodded, stealing a steal thy gla nce nt us as they did so.

"·e stood wi th folded arms, making not the slightest sign that our hearts \Wre touclwd by the ImpPrial and princely mercy.

Then Shubinsky thought of another dodge and, addressing Ogari;,., said:

'You are going to Penza ; do you imagine tha t tha t is by chance? Your father is lying paralysed a t Penza and the prince besought the Tsar to designate that town for you, that your being nPar m ight to somp •·xtent alleYiate for him the blow of your ••xih•. Do you not think you haYe reason to thank the prince?'

There was no help for it: Ogarev made a slight bow. This was what tlwy were trying to get.

The good-na tured dd man was pleased at this, and next, I do not know why, he summoned me. I steppPd forward with the devout intentwn of not thanki ng h im, whatewr he or Shubinsky might say: besides, I was being sent farther away than any and to the nastiest town.

'You are going to Perm.' said Prince Golitsyn.

I said nothing. He was d isconcerted and, for the silke of saying somPthing, he added,

'I have an estate there.'

''Yould you care to s!'rHI some commission through me to your steward ?' I asked 'vith a smile.

'I do not gin• commissions to people like you-Carbonari,'

added the resourceful old man.

'Then whilt do you wish of meJ'

'Nothing.'

'I thought :vou cnl lcd me.'

'You mav go.' Shuhinsky i n terposed.

'Allow me,' I n•plied, 'since I am lu•n', to rPmind you thil t you told nw, Colonel, last time I was bdor·e tlH• commission, that no onP accused me of being connected with the supper-party affair.

Yd in thP sen tf'IIC!' it is statl·d that I was one of those guilty in corm••ctiun w ith that a ffair. ThPre is somP m istakf' lu•re.'

·no yon wish to object to I lis Majesty's decision?' observed

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Shubinsky. 'You had bet1 er take care that Perm is not changed to something worse. I shall order your words to be taken down.'

'I meant to ask you to do so. In the sentence the "vords occur

"on the report of the commission": I am protesting against your report and not against the will of His Majesty. I appeal to the prince: there was no question in my case of a supper party or of songs, was there?'

'As though you did not know,' said Shubinsky, beginning to turn pale with wrath, 'that you are ten times more guilty than those who were at the supper party. He, now'-he pointed to one of those \vho had be!'n pardoned-'in a state of intoxication sang some filthy song, but afterwards he begged forgiveness on his knees with tears. llut you are still far from any penitence.'

The gentleman at whom the colonel pointed said nothing, but hung his head and flushed crimson . . . . It was a good lesson: so he should, after behaving so vilely! . . .

'Excuse me, it is not the point whether my guilt is great or not,' I went on; 'but, if I am a murderer, I don't want to be considered a thief. I don't want it to be said of me, even in justification, that I did something in a "state of intoxication," as you expressed yourself just now.'

'If I had a son, my own son, who showed such stubbornness, I would myself beg the Tsar to send him to Siberia.'

At this point the oberpolitsmeystcr interposed some incoherent nonsense. It is a pity that Golitsyn junior was not present, for it would have been an opportunity for his eloquence.

It all ended, of course, in nothing.

Lakhtin went up to Prince Golitsyn and asked that his departure might be deferred.

'My wife is with child,' he said.

'I am not responsible for that,' answered Golitsyn.

A wild beast, a mad dog when it bites, looks in earnest and puts its tail between its legs, but this crazy grandee, aristocrat, though he had the reputation of a good-natured man, was not ashamed to make this vulgar joke.

We stayed for a quarter of an hour more in the room, and, in spite of the zealous exhortations of the gendarme and police officers, embraced one anoth!'r warmly and took a long farewell.

Except Obolensky I saw none of them again until I came back from Vyatka.

Departure was before us.

Prison had been a continuation of our past; but our departure into the wilds was a complete break with it.

Our youthful existence in our circle of friends was over.

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Our exile would probably last several years. Where and how should we meet, and should we ever meet? . . .

I regretted my old life, and I had to leave it so abruptly . . .

without saying good-bye. I had no hope of seeing Ogarev. Two of my friends had succeeded in seeing me during the last few days, bu t that was not enough for me.

If I could but once again see my youthful comforter and press her hand, as I had pressed it in the graveyard . . . . I longed both to take leave of my past and to greet my f�ture in her person . . . .

We did see each other for a few minutes on the 9th of April, 1 835, on the day before I was sent off into exile.

For years I kept that day sacred in my memory; it was one of the happiest moments in my l ife.

Why must the thought of that day and of all the bright days of my past bring back so much that is frightening? . . . The grave, the wreath of dark-red roses, two children holding my hand-torches, the crO\'\'d of exiles, the moon, the warm sea under the mountainside, the \vords that I did not understand and that wrung my heart.

All is over!6

f.JerJJ Z

In Pl.'rm I was takl.'n straight to the governor. He was holding a great recl.'ption; his daughter was being married that day to an officer. HI.' insistPd on my going in, and I had to present myself to the whole society of Perm in a dirty travelling coat, covered with mud and dust. The govPrnor, aftf'r talking all sorts of nonsPnsP, forbad<' me to make acquaintance with the Poli sh exiles and orden·d lllf' to com<' to him in a few days, saying that then lw would find me work in the office.

This governor was a Little Russian; he did not oppress the Pxil<'s, and altogether was a harmless person. He was improving

'' HPI'Zl'll is n•call ing till' burial of his wife in ! 8:32. (A.S.)

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his fortune somehow on the sly, like a mole working unseen underground; he was adding grain to grain and laying by a little something for a rainy day.

From some inexplicable idea of security and good order, he used to command all the exiles who lived in Perm to appear before him at ten o'clock in the morning on Saturdays. He would come out with his pipe and a l ist, verify whether we were all present, and, if anyone was not, send a policeman to find out the reason; then, after saying scarcely anything to anyone, he would dismiss us. In this way in his reception-room I became acquainted with all the Polish exiles, whose acquaintance he had warned me I must not make.

The day after my arrival the gendarme went away, and for the first time since my arrest I found myself at liberty.

At liberty . . . in a little town on the Siberian border, with no experience, with no conception of the environment in which I had to live.

From the nursery I had passed into the lecture-room, from the lecture-room to a circle of friends-it had all been theories, dreams, my own people, no active relationships. Then prison to let it all settle. Practical contact with life was beginning here ncar the Ural Mountains.

It manifested itself at once ; the day after my arri�al I went with a porter from the governor's office to look for a lodging and he took me to a big house of one storey. However much I explained that I was looking for a very small house or, still better, part of a house, he obstinately insisted on my going in.

The landlady made me sit down on her sofa and, learning that I came from Moscow, asked if I had seen Mr Kabrit in Moscow.

I told her that I had never even heard the name.

'How is that?' observed the old woman; 'I mean Kabrit,' and she mentioned his Christian name and his father's name. 'Upon my word, sir, why, he was our Whist-Governor! '

'But I have been nine months i n prison ; perhaps that is why I have not heard of him,' I said, smiling.

'Maybe that is it. So you will take the house, my good sir?'

'It is too big, much too big; I told the man so.'

'You can't have too much of a good thing,' she said.

'That is so, but you will want more rent for so much of a good thing.'

'Ah, my good sir, but who has talked to you about my price? I have not said a word about i t yet.'

'But I know that such a house cannoi he let cheaply.'

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'How much \viii you give?'

To get rid of her, I said that I would not give more than three hundred and fifty paper roubles.

'Well, I would be thankful for that. Bid the man bring your bits of trunks, my dear, and take a glass of Teneriffe.'

·

Her price seemed tv me fabulously low. I took the house, and, just as I was on the point of going, she stopped me:

'I forgot to ask you: are you going to keep your own cow?'

'Good Heavens, no!' I ans\vered, almost appalled by her question.

'\Veil, then, I will let you have cream.'

I went away thinking with horror v1rhere I was and what I

\vas that I could be considered capable of keeping my own cow.

But before I had time to look round, the governor informed me that I was being transferred to Vyatka because another exile who had been allotted to Vyatka had asked to be transferred to Perm, where he had relations. The governor wanted me to leave the next day. This was impossible: thinking to remain some time in Perm, I had bought all sorts of things, and I had to sell them even at half-price. After various evasive answers, the governor gave me permission to remain forty-eight hours, exacting a promise that I would not seek an opportunity of seeing the other exiles.

On the day after we left Perm there was a heavy, unceasing downpour of rain ever since dawn, such as is common in forest districts, which lasted all day : about two o'clock we reached a very poor Votyak village. There was no house at the postingstation. Votyaks1 (who could not read or \'\Tite) performed the duties of overseers, looked through the permit for horses, saw whether there were t\vo seals or one, shouted 'Ayda, ayda ! ' and harnessf'rl the horses twice as quickly, I need hardly say, as it would have been done had there been a superintendent. I want.'d to get dry ami warm and to have something to eat.

Before \W reachf'd thP village the Perm gendarme had agreed to my snggPstion that we should rest for a couple of hom·s. \Vhen I went into the stifling huL \vithout a chimney, and found that it was absolutely impossible to get anything, that there was not 1 The Votyaks a re a :'\lon�olian trihP. found in Sihcriil iln

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even a pot-house for five versts, I regretted our decision and was on the point of asking for horses.

While I was thinking whether to go on or not to go on, a soldier came in and reported that an escorting officer had sent to invite me to a cup of tea.

'With the greatest pleasure. Where is your officer?'

'In the hut near by, your honour,' and the soldier made the familiar left-about-turn.

I fol!O\ved him.

A short, elderly officer with a face tha t bore traces of many anxieties, petty necessities, and fear of his superiors, met me with all the genial hospitality of deadly boredom. He was one of those unintelligent, good-natured 'old' soldiers who pull at the collar for twenty-five years in the SC'n·ice, and plod along withant promotion and without reasoning nLout it, as old horses work, who probably suppose that it is their duty to put on their hnrness at dawn and haul something.

'vVhom are you taking, and where to? '

'Oh, don't ask ; it'd even break your heart. \Vel!, I suppose m y superiors know a l l nbout i t ; i t is our dnty to carry out orders and we are not responsible, but, looking at it as a man, it is an ugly business.'

'\Vhy, what is it?'

'You see, they have collected a crowd of cursed little Jew boys of eight or nine years old. \Vhether they are taking them for the navy or \vhat, I can't say. At first the orders zvcrc to drive them to Perm; then there was a change and u·c arc driving them to 1\a:::an. I took them over a hundred versts fnrther back. Tlw officer \vho handed tlwm over 'aid. " " I t"s dn•adfuL and tha t's all about it; a third were left on the way" (and the officer pointed to the earth ) . Not half will reach their destination,' he said.

'I Ian• there beC'n epidemics, or what?' I asked. deeply moved.

'No, not epidemics, but they just die off like llies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly cren ture, like a skinnf'd cat; he is not nsed to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day am!

ea ting biscuit-then again, being among strangers, no father nor motl}er nor petting ; well, they cough and cough until they cough themselves into their graves. And I ask you_ what use is i t to them ? \Vhat can they d o with little boys?'

I made no answer.

'\Vhen do you set off?' I asked.

'\Vel!, we ought to have gone long ago, but it has been raining so heavily . . . . Hey, you then', soh�ier! tell them to get the small fry together.'

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They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children ! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehovv have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten . . . . Not even a brush full of black paint could put such horror on canvas.

Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers' overcoats, vvith stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes bore witness to fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.

And note that they were being taken by a kind-hearted officer who was obviously sorry for the children. 'What if they had been takPn by a military political economist?

VVhat monstrous crimes are obscurely buried in the archives of the wicked, immoral reign of Nicholas! vVe are used to them, tl!('y "·pre committPd every day, committed as though nothing was wrong, unnoticed, lost in the terrible distance, noiselessly sunk in the silent sloughs of officialdom or kept back by the censorship of the police.

Have we not seen with our own eyes seven hungry peasants from Pskov, who were being forcibly removed to the province of Tobolsk, wandering, without food or lodging for the night, about Tverskoy Square in Moscow until Prince D. V. Golitsyn ordered them to be looked after at his own expense?

THE GovER:\'OR of Vyatka did not receive me, but sent word tha t I was to present myself nPx l morning at tPn o'clock.

I found in the room next morning the district police-captain, the politsmcystcr, and two officials: they were all standing talking in whispers and looking uneasily at the door. The door opPned and tlwrP walkPd in a short, broad-shouldered old man

\vith a head set on his shoul(lers like a bull-dog's, and with big jaws, which completed his resemblance to that animal and moreover wore a carnivorous-looking smile; the elderly and at the same time priapic expression of his face, the quick little grey

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eyes, and the sparse, stiff hair made an incredibly disgusting impression.

To begin with he gave the district police-captain a good dressing-down for the state of the road on which he had driven the day before. The district police-captain stood with his head somewhat bowed in token of respect and submission, and replied to everything as servants used to do in the old days,

'I hear, Your Excellency.'

When he had done with the district police-captain, he turned to me. He looked at me i nsolently and asked:

'Did you finish your studies at Mosco"v University?'

'I took my degree.'

'And then served?'

'In the Kremlin Department.'

'Ha, ha, ha ! a fine sort of service! Of course, you had plenty of time there for supper parties and singing songs. Alenitsyn ! ' he shouted.

A scrofulous young man walked in.

'Listen, my boy: here is a graduate of Moscow University. I expect he knows everything except his duties in the service; it is His Majesty's pleasure that he should learn them with us. Take him into your office and send me special reports on him. Tomorrow you will come to the office at nine o'clock, and now you may go. But stay, I forgot to ask how you write.'

I did not at once understand.

'Come, your handwriting.'

'I have nothing with me.'

'Bring paper and pen,' and Alenitsyn handed me a pen.

'What am I to write?'

'What you like,' observed the secretary. '"Write, "On inquiry' it appears-" '

'\Veil, you \von't be corresponding with the Tsar,' the governor remarked, laughing ironically.

Before I left Perm I had heard a great deal about Tyufyayev, but he far surpassed all my expectations.

What does not Russian life produce!

Tyufyayev was born at Tobolsk. His father had nearly been exiled, and belonged to the poorest class of townsfolk. At thirteen young Tyufyayev joined a troupe of travelling acrobats who wandered from fair to fair, dancing on the tight-rope, turning somersaults and cart-wheels, and so on. \Vith these he travelled from Tobolsk to the Polish province<>, entertaining good Christian people. There, I do not know "'·hy, he was arrested, and

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since he llil d no passport he was treated a s a vagrant, and sen t on foot with a party of prisoners back to Tobolsk . His mother was by then a widow and was li,·ing in great poverty. The son rebuilt the stow with his own hands when it was broken: he had to find some trade; the boy had learned to read and wri te, and he

\vas engaged as a copying clerk in the local court. Bei ng naturally of a free-and-easy character and having developed his a bi l ities by a many-si(led Pducation i n the troupe of acroba ts and the parties of com·icts with whom he had passed from one end of Russia to the o tltPr, lw had made himself an enterprising, practical man.

At the beginning of till' reign of Akxander some sort of inspector came to Tobolsk. He needed capabh- clerks, and someone recommcncll•cl Tyufyayev. The i nspector \va s so well satisfied with him that he suggested tha t he should go with him to PetPrsburg. Tlwn TyufyayPv, whose ambi tion, i n his own \Yords, had nPver risen above the post of secretary in a district court, formed a higher opi n ion of himself, a nd with an iron will rPsohed to make a career.

And lw did makP i t . TPn years later we find him the indefatigable sPcretary of Kankrin,1 \vho was a t that time a general in the commissariat, A year la ter still he was superintending a departnwnt in Arakcheyev's secretariat whi ch administered tlw whole of Russia . He was \vith Arakcheyc\· i n Pa ris at the time

\Yhen it \vas occupiPd by the allied troops.

T:n1f:-·ayev spent the who!(' time sitting in the secreta ri at of tlw PX]JPdi tiona ry anny and litera lly did not sec one strePt i n Paris. He sa t day and nigh t collating a nd copying papers with h i s worthY coll eague. K!Pimnikhel .

ArakchPYPv's secretariat \vas like thosp copper mines i nto wh ich nw;1 arP sPnt to work only for a fe\\· months, because i f tlwv stav longPr tlw:-· cl iP. Ewn Tyufyaycv \vas tired at last in that factory of ordPrs and clPcrePs, of rpgula tions a n d i nstitution.;,

;md bega n asking for a ([U iPtPr post. A rakchl')"PV could not fail to l i kP a m;m like TyufyayPv, a man frpe from higher prPtPnsions, from a l l i tHPr·Psts awl opin ions, formally horwst, devoured by ambi tion, and n•ga nl ing olwdiPncP a;; the foremost human virtu£>. Arakc!H')'P\" rPw;Jn!Pd Tvufyayev with tlw post of dqmty governor. A few vPars later he madP him governor of the Perm PrO\·ince. Tlw provinCl'. through which Tyufyayl'v had walked oncP on a ropP and onc0 tiPd to a rope, lay a t his feet.

1 Tyufya · ·t)Y \vas not Kankriu's Sf'CJ"('tary. ( A .S. )

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A governor's power generally increases i n direct ratio to his distance from Petersburg, but it increases i n geometrical progression in the provinces where there are no gentlefolk, as i n Perm, Vyatka, and Siberia. Such a remote region was just what Tyufyayev needed.

He was an Oriental satrap, only an active, restless one, meddling in everything and for ever busy. Tyufyayev would have been a ferocious Commissaire of the Convention in 1 794, a Carrier.2

Dissolute in his life, coarse by nature, intolerant of the slightest objection, his influence was extremely pernicious. He did not take bribes, though he did make his fortune, as it appeared after his death. He was strict with his subordinates, he punished without mercy those who were detected in wrongdoing, yet his officials stole more than ever. He carried the abuse of influence to an incredible point; for instance, when he sent a n official on an inquiry h e would ( that is, if h e was interested i n the case) tell him that probably this o r that would b e discovered; and woe to the official if he discovered something else.

Perm was still full of the fame of Tyufyayev ; there was a party of his adherents there, hostile to the new governor, who, of course, had surrounded himself with his own coterie.

On the other hand, there were people who hated him. One of them, a rather singular product of the warping influence of Russian life, particularly warned me what Tyufyayev was like. I am speaking of a doctor in one of the factories. This doctor, whose name was Chebotarev, an intelligent, very nervous man, had made an unfortunate marriage soon after he completed his studies; then he was sent off to Yekaterinburg and without any experience stuck into the slough of provincial life. Though placed in a fairly independent position in these surroundings, none the less he was debased by them ; all his activity took the form of a sarcastic persecution of the officials. He laughed at them to their faces, he said the most insulting things to them with leers and grimaces. Since no one was spared, no one particularly resented the doctor's spiteful tongue. He made a social position for himself by his attacks and forced a flabby set of people to put up with the lash with which he chastised them without resting.

2 Jean-Baptiste Carrier ( 1 756-94) , was responsible for the noyades and massacre of hundreds of people at Nantes, while suppressing the counter·

revolutionary rising of La Vendee. (Tr.)

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I was warned that he was a good doctor, but crazy and extremely impertinent.

His gossip and jokes were neither coarse nor pointless; quite the contrary, they were full of humour and concentrated bile ; they \vere his poetry, his revenge, his outcry of exasperation and, to some extent, perhaps, of despair as well. He had studied the circle of officials like an artist, and as a doctor he knew all their petty, concealed passions and, encouraged by their cowardice and lack of resource, took any liberty with them he liked.

At every word he would add, 'It won't make a ha'p'orth of difference to you.'

Once in joke I remarked upon his repeating this.

'Why are you surprised? ' the doctor replied. 'The object of everything that is said is to convince. I hasten to add the strongest argument that exi sts. Convince a man that to kill his own father won"t cost him a halfpenny, and he will kill him.'

Chebotarcv never refused to lend small sums of a hundred or two hundred paper roubles. \\'hen any one a sked him for a loan, he "·ould take out his note-book and inquire the exnct date when the borrower would return the money.

'Now,' he would say, 'allow me to make a bet of a silver rouble that you won't rPpay it then.'

'Upon my soul,' the otlwr would object, 'what do you take me for?'

'It makes not a ha'p'orth of difference to you what I take you for,' the doctor would answer, 'but the fact is I have been keeping a record for six years, and not one person has paid me up to time yet. and hardly any

The dny fixed \Votdd pass and the doctor would very gravely ask for the silwr rouble he had won.

A tax-farmer at Perm wns selling a travelling coach. The doctor presented himself before him and made, without stopping, the following speech:

'You have a coach to sell, I need it; you are a wea lthy man, you are a millionaire, everyone respects you for it and I hav!'

therefore come to pay you my respects also ; as you are a wealthy man, it makes not a ha'p'orth of difference to you whether you sell the coach or not, whilP I need it very much and have very li ttle morlf'y. You want to squeeze me, to take advantage of my necessi ty and ask fifteen hundred for the coach. I offer you seven hundrPd roubles. I shall be coming every day to bargain with you and in a week you will let me have it for seven-fifty or eight hundred; wouldn't it be better to begin with that? I am ready to give it.'

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'Much better,' answered the astonished tax-farmer, and he let him have the coach.

Chcbotarev's anecdotes and mischievous tricks were endless. I will add two more.s

'Do you believe in magnetism?' a rather intelligent and cultured lady asked him in my presence.

'What do you mean by magnetism?'

The lady talked some vague nonsense in reply.

'It makes not a ha'p'orth of difference to you whether I believe in magnetism or not, but if you like I will tell you what I have seen in that way.'

'Please do.'

'Only listen attentively.'

After this he described in a very l ively, witty and interesting way the experiments of a Kharkov doctor, an acquaintance of his.

In the middle of the conversation, a servant brought in some lunch on a tray.

As he was going out the lady said to him,

'You have forgotten to bring the mustard.'

Chcbotarev stopped.

'Go on, go on,' said the lady, a little scared already, 'I am listening.'

'Has he brought the salt?'

'So you arc angry a lready,' said the lady, turning red.

'Not in the least, I assure you ; I know that you were listening attentively. But I also know that, however intelligent a woman is and whatever is being talked about, she can never rise above the kitchen-so how could I dare to be angry with you personally?'

At Countess Polier's factory, where he also practised, he took a liking to a stout lad, and invited him to enter his service. The boy was willing, but the foreman said that he could not let him go without permission from the countess. Chcbotarcv wrote to the lady. She told the foreman to let the lad have his passport on condition that the doctor paid five years' obrok in advance. The doctor promptly wrote to the countess that he agreed to her terms, but asked her as a preliminary to decide one point that troubled him: from whom could he recover the monev if Encke's Comet should intersect the earth's orbit and knock it out of its course-which might occur a year and a half before the term fixed.

3 These two anecdotes were• not m the first edition. I recollected them when I was revising the sheets.

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On the day of my departure for Vyatka the doctor appeared early in the morning and began with the follo,ving foolishness:

'Like Horace, once you sang, and to this day you are a lways being translated.'4

Then he took out his notecase and asked if I did not need some money for the journey. I thanked him and refused.

'Why won't you take any? It won't make a ha'p'orth of difference to you.'

' I have money.'

'That's bad,' he said ; 'the end of the \Vorld must be at hand.'

He opened his note-book and \HOte down: 'After fifteen years of practice I have for the first time met a man who 'von't borrow, even though he is going away.'

Having finished playing the fool, he sat do\vn on my bed and said gravely:

'You are going to a frightful man. Be on your guard against him and keep as far away from him as you can. If he likes you it will be a poor recommendation ; if he dislikes you, he ,..,.ill finish you off by slander, chicanery, and I don't know what, but he will finish you, and it won't make a ha'p'orth of difference to him.'

"With this he told me an incident the truth of which I had an opportunity of verifying afterwards from documents in the secretariat of the Minister of Home Affairs.

Tyufyayev carried on an open intrigue with the sister of a poor government clerk. The brother \vas made a laughing-stock and he tried to break the liaison, threatened to report it to the authorities, tried to \vrite to Petersburg-in fact, he fretted and made such a to-do that on one occasion the police seized him and brought him before the provincial authorities to be certified as a lunatic.

The provincial authorities_ the president of the court, and the inspector of the medical board, an old German who was very much liked hY the \Yorking- people and whom I knew personally, all found that Petrovsky, i!S the man was called, was mad.

Our doctor knew Petrovsky_ who was a patient of his. He was asked too_ as a matter of form. He told the inspector that Petrovsky was not mad at all. and that he proposed that they should make a fresh inquiry into the case, otherwise he \vould 4 Pun on the R ussian "·onl for 'transl atP,' which a lso nwans 'transfer from o1w placr• to anotlwr.' ( Tr. )

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take the matter further. The local authorities were not at all opposed to this, but unluckily Petrovsky died in the madhouse without waiting for the day fixed for the second inquiry, although he was a robust young fellow.

The report of the case reached Petersburg. Petrovsky's sister was arrested (why not Tyufyayev? ) and a secret investigation began. Tyufyayev dictated the answers; he surpassed himself on this occasion. To hush it up at once and to ward off the danger of a second involuntary journey to Siberia, Tyufyayev instructed the girl to say that her brother had been on bad terms with her ever since, carried away by youth and inexperience, she had been deprived of her innocence by the Emperor Alexander on his visit to Perm, for which she had received five thousand roubles through General Solomka.

Alexander's habits were such that there was nothing improbable in the story. To find out whether it was true was not easy, and in any case would have created a great deal of scandal. To Count Benckendorf's inquiry General Solomka answered that so much money passed through his hands that he could not remember the five thousand.

'La regina ne aveva molto!' says the improvisatore in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights . . . .

So this estimable pupil of Arakcheyev's and worthy comrade of Kleinmikhel's, the acrobat, vagrant, copying clerk, secretary, and governor, this tender heart, and disinterested man who locked up the sane in a madhouse and did them to death there, the man who slandered the Emperor Alexander to divert the attention of the Emperor Nicholas, was now undertaking to train me in the service.

I was almost completely dependent upon him. He had only to write some nonsense to the minister and I should have been sent off to some place in Irkutsk. And no need to write: indeed he had the right to transfer me to any outlandish town, Kay or Tsarevo

Sanchursk, without any communications, without any resources.

Tyufyayev despatched a young Pole to Glazov because the ladies preferred dancing the mazurka with him to dancing it with His Excellency.

The government office was incomparably worse than prison. Not that the actual work was great, but tl:� stifling atmosphere, as of

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the Dogs' Grotto,5 of those musty surroundings, and the fearful, stupid waste of time made the office intolerable. Alenitsyn did not worry me: he \Vas, indeed, more polite than I expected; he had been at the Kazan High School and consequently had a respect for a graduate of Moscow University.

There were some twenty clerks in the office. For the most part they were persons of no education and no moral conceptions ; sons of clerks and secretaries, accustomed from their cradle to regard the service as a source of profit, and the peasants as soil that yielded revenue, they sold certificates, took twenty kopecks and quarter-roubles, cheated for a glass of 'vine, demeaned themselves and did all sorts of shabby things. My valet gave up going to the 'billiard room,' saying that the officials cheated there worse than anybody, and one could not teach them a lesson because they wt>re 'officers.'

So with these people, \vhom my servant did not thrash only on account of their rank, I had to sit every day from nine in the morning until two, and from five to eight in the evening.

Besides Alenitsyn, who was the head of the office, there was a head-clerk of the table at which I was put, who also was not an ill-natured creature, though drunken and illiterate. At the same table sat four clerks. I had to talk to and become acquainted with these, and, indeed, with all the others, too. Apart from the fact that these people would have paid me out sooner or later for being 'proud' if I had not, it is simply impossible to spend several hours of every day with the same people without making their acquaintance. Moreover it must not be forgotten that provincials make up to anyone from outside and particularly to anyone who comes from the capital, especially if there is some interesting story connected with him.

After spending the whole day in this galley, I would sometimes come home with all my faculties in a state of stupefaction and fling myself on the sof�, worn out, humiliated, and incapable of any work or occupation. I heartily regretted my Krutitsky cell with its charcoal fumes and black beetles, with a gendarme on guard and a lock on the door. There I had freedom, I did what I liked and no one interfered with me ; instead of these vulgar remarks, dirty people, mean ideas and coarse feelings, there had been the stillness of death and undisturbed leisure. And when I remembered that after dinner I had to go again, and again to-

;; At Trrme d'Agnano, west of NaplPs. tlwrp is a grotto, filled at the bottom with ca rbon d ioxide, where dogs sufforatrll. F. L. Lucas: The Search for Good Sense ( Collins. 1 958) , p. 2 H. (R.)

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morrow, I was at times overcome by fury and despair and tried to find comfort in drinking wine and vodka.

And then, what is more, one of my fellow-clerks would look in

'on his way' and relieve his boredom by staying on talking until it was time to go back to the office.

Within a few months, however, the office became somewhat more bearable.

Prolonged, regular persecution is not in the Russian charac�er unless a personal or mercenary element comes in; and this is not at all because the government does not want to stifle and crush a man, but is due to the Russian carelessness, to our laissez-aller.

Russians in authority are as a rule ill-bred, audacious, and insolent; it is easy to provoke them to rudeness, but persistent knocking about is not in their line: they have not enough patience for it, perhaps because it brings them no profit.

In the first heat, in order to display, on the one hand their zeal, and on the other their power, they do all sorts of stupid and unnecessary things; then little by little they leave a man in peace.

So it was with the office. The Ministry of Home Affairs had at that time a craze for statistics: it had given orders for committees to be formed everywhere, and had issued programmes which could hardly have been carried out even in Belgium or Switzerland ; at the same time there were to be all sorts of elaborate tables with maxima and minima, with averages and various deductions from the totals for periods of ten years (made up on evidence which had not been collected for a )"car before!) , with moral remarks and meteorological observati�ns. Not a farthing was assigned for the expenses of the committees and the collection of evidence; all this was to be done from love of statistics through the rural police and put into proper shape in the governor's office. The clerks, overwhelmed with work, and the rural police, who hate all peaceful and theoretical tasks, looked upon a statistics committee as a useless luxury, as a caprice of the ministry; however, the reports had to be sent in with tabulated results and deductions.

This business seemerl immensely difficult to the whole office ; it was simply impossible; but no one troubled about that: all they worried about was that then• should be no occasion for reprimands. I promised Alenitsyn to prepare a preface and introduction, and to draw up summaries of the tables with eloquent remarks introducing foreign words, quotations, and striking deductions, if he would allow me to undertake this very hard

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vvork not at the office but at home. After parleying with Tyufyayev, Alenitsyn agreed.

The introduction to the record of the work of the committee, in which I discussed their hopes and their plans, for in reality nothing had been done at all, touched Alenitsyn to the depths of his soul. Tyufyayev himself thought it was written in masterly style. "With that my labours in the statistical line ended, but they put the committee under my supervision. They no longer forced upon me the unpleasant task of copying papers, and the drunken head-clerk who had been my chief became almost my subordinate. Alenitsyn only required, from some consideration of propriety, that I should go to the office for a short time every day.

To show the complete impossibility of real statistics, I will quote the facts sent in from the unimportant town of Kay. There, among various absurdities, were for instance the entries: Drowned-2. Causes of drowning not known-2, and in the column of totals was set out the figure 4. Under the heading of extraordinary incidents was reckoned the following tragic anecdote: So-and-so, townsman, having deranged his intelligence by ardent beverages, hanged himself. Under the heading of the morality of the town's inhabitants was the entry: 'There have been no Jews in the to\vn of Kay.' To the inquiry whether sums had been allotted for the building of a church, a stock exchange, or an almshouse, the answer ran thus: 'For the building of a stock exchange was assigned-nothing.'

The statistics that rescued me from work at the office had the unfortunate consequence of bringing me into personal relations with Tyufyayev.

There was a time '"·hen I hated that man ; that time is long past and the man himself is past. He died on his Kazan estates a bout 1 845. NO\v I think of him without anger, as of a peculiar beast met in the wilds of a forest which ought to have been studied, but with which one could not be angry for being a beast. At the time I could not help coming into conflict with him; tha t was inevitable for any decent man. Chance helped me or he would have done me great injury; to owe him a g1udge for the harm he did not do me would be absurd and paltry.

Tyufyayev liwd alone. His wife was separated from him. The governor's favourite, the wife of a cook who for no fault but being married to her had been sent away to the country, was,

\vith an awkwardness which almost seemed intentional, kept out of sight in the back rooms of his house. She did not make her appearance officially, but officials who were particularly afraid of

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inquiries formed a sort of court about the cook's wife, 'who was in favour.' Their wives and daughters paid her stealthy visits in the evening and did not boast of doing so. This lady was possessed of the same sort of tact as distinguished one of her brilliant predecessors-Potemkin; knowing the old man's disposition and afraid of being replaced, she herself sought out for him rivals who were no danger to her. The grateful old man repeated this indulgent love with his devotion and they got on well together.

All the morning Tyufyayev worked and was in the office of the secretariat. The poetry of life only began at three o'clock. Dinner was for h im no jesting matter. He liked a good dinner and he liked to eat it in company. Preparations were always made in his kitchen for twelve at table ; if the guests were fewer than half that number he was mortified; if there were no more than two visitors he was wretched; if there was no one at all, he would go off on the verge of despair to dine in his Dulcinea's apartments.

To procure people in order to feed them till they felt sick was no difficult task, but his official position and the terror he inspired in his subordinates did not permit them to enjoy his hospitality freely, nor him to turn his house into a tavern. He had to confine himself to councillors, presidents (but with half of these he was on bad terms, that is, he would not condescend to them) , travellers ( who were rare) , rich merchants, tax-farmers, and the few visitors to the town and 'oddities.' Of course I was an oddity of the first magnitude at Vyatka.

Persons exiled 'hr their opinions' to remote towns are somewhat feared, but are never confounded with ordinary mortals. 'Dangerous people' have for provincials the same attraction that notorious Lovelaces have for women and courtesans for men.

Dangerous people are far more shunned by Petersburg officials and Moscow big pots than by provincials, and especially by Siberians.

Those who were exiled in connection with the Fourteenth of December were looked upon with immense respect. Officials paid their first visit on New Year's Day to the widow of Yushnevsky.

Senator Tolstoy, when taking a census of Siberia, was guided by evidence received from the exiled Decembrists in checking the facts furnished by the officials.

Miinnich6 from his tower in Pelym superintended the affairs 6 Mi.innich (also spelt Minikh) , Burchardt Christoph (Khristophor Antonovich), 1 683-1 767, was a minister and general prominent under Peter the Great and Anna. On the latter's death he brought about the downfall

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of the Tobolsk Province. Governors used to go to consult him about matters of importance.

The working people are still less hostile to exiles: on the whole they are on the side of those who are punished. The word

'convict' disappears near the Siberian frontier and is replaced by the word 'unfortunate.' In the eyes of the Russian people a legal sentence is no disgrace to a man. The peasants of the Perm Province, living along the main road to Tobolsk, often put out kvas, milk, and bread in a little window in case an 'unfortunate'

should be secretly slipping through that way from Siberia.

By the way, speaking of exiles, Polish exiles begin to be met beyond Nizhny Novgorod a nd their number increases rapidly after Kazan. In Perm there were forty, in Vyatka not fewer; there were several besides in every district town.

They lived quite apart from the Russians and avoided all contact with the inhabitants. There was great unanimity among them, and the rich shared with the poor like brothers.

On the part of the inhabitants I never saw signs of either hatred or special good-will towards them. They looked upon them as outsiders-the more so, as scarcely a single Pole knew Russian.

One tough old Sarmatian, who had been an officer in the Uhlans in Poniatowski's time and had taken part in Napoleon's campaigns, recf:'ived permission in 1 83 7 to return to his Lithuanian domains. On the eve of his departure he invited me and several Poles to dinner. After dinner my cavalry oflicf:'r came up to me, goblet in hand, embraced me, and with a warrior's simplicity whispered in my ear, 'Oh, why are you a Russian!' I did not anS\VPr a word, but this observation sank deeply into my heart. I realised that this generation could never set Poland free.

From the time of Konarski7 the Poles have come to look quite differently upon the Russians.

As a rule Polish exiles are not oppressed, bu t the material situation is awful for those who have no private means. The of Biron. was t>x ilPd hy El izabeth. and finally hroup;ht hack from Siberia hy CatherinE'. ! Tr.)

7Simon Konarski. a Polish rpvolutionary. also active in thl' 'Young Europe' ( aftNwanls 'Young I taly' ) movement, lived in disguist> and with a falst> passport in Poland. fouJl(l ing a printing prt>ss and ca rrying on actiw propap;anda till ht> was caught and shot at Yilna in 1 8 39. His admirPrs cut tlw post to which ht> WilS tit>d into hits which tht>y presPned, l i ke the rPlics of a saint. !Tr.) An a t tt>mpt to l ihPrate Konilrski from tlw prison il t Vilna was madP hy a SPcrN organis

!waded hy Kuzmin-Kilrayev. ( /l .S.)

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government gives those who have nothing fifteen paper roubles a month; with that they must pay for lodging, food, clothes, and fuel. In fairly big towns, in Kazan and Tobolsk, it was possible to earn something by giving lessons or concerts, playing at balls, executing portraits and teaching dancing. In Perm and Vyatka they had no such resources. And in spite of that they would ask for nothing from Russians.

Tyufyayev's invitations to his greasy Siberian dinners were a real imposition on me. His dining-room was just like the office, but in another form, less dirty but more vulgar, because it had the appearance of free will and not of compulsion.

Tyufyayev knew his guests through and through, despised them, showed them his claws at times, and altogether treated them as a master treats his dogs: at one time with excessive familiarity, at another with a rudeness which was beyond all bounds-and yet he invited them to his dinners and they appeared before him in trembling and in joy, demeaning themselves, talking scandal, eavesdropping, trying to please, smiling, bowing.

I blushed for them and felt ashamed.

Our friendship did not last long. Tyufyayev soon guessed that I was not fit for 'high' Vyatka society.

A few months later he was dissatisfied with me, and a few months later still he hated me, and I not only went no more to his dinners but even gave up going to him at all. The Heir's passage through Vyatka saved me from his persecution, as we shall see later on.

I must observe that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve first his attention and invitations, and aftenvards his anger and disfavour. He could not endure to see in me a man who behaved independently, though not in the least insolently; I was always en regie with him, and he demanded obsequiousness.

He loved his power jealously. He had earned it the hard \vay, and he exacted not only obedience but an appearance of absolute submission. In this, unhappily, he was typically native.

A landowner says to his servant. 'Hold your tongue; I won't put up with your answering me back ! '

The head o f a department, turning pale with anger, observes to a clerk who has made some objection, 'You forget yourself; do you know to whom you are speaking?'

The Tsar sends men to Siberia 'for opinions,' docs them to death in dungeons for a poem-and all these three are readier to forgive stealing and bribe-taking, murder and robbery, than the

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impudence of human dignity and the insolence of a plain-spoken word.

Tyufyayev was a true servant of the Tsar. He was highly thought of, but not highly enough. Byzantine servility was exceptionally well combined in him with official discipline. Obliteration of self, renunciation of will and thought before authority went inseparably with harsh oppression of subordinates. He might have been a civilian Kleinmikhel ; his 'zeal' might in the same way have overcome everything,8 and he might in the samP

way !wve plastered the walls with the dead human bodies, have used living men's lungs to dry the damp walls of his palace, and have flogged the young men of the enginPering corps even more severely for not being informers.

Tyufyayev had an intense, secret hatred for everything aristocratic ; he had kl'pt this from his bittPr experiences. The hard labour of Arakcheyev's secretariat had been his first refuge, his first deliverance. Till then his superiors had never offered him a chair, but had employed him on menial l'rrands. When he served in the commissariat, the officPrs had pPrSPCUtPd him, as is tlw custom in the army, and onP colonPl had horsewhipped him in thP street at Vilna . . . . All this had enterPd into the copying clerk's soul and rankled thPre; now he was governor and it was his turn to oppress, to kPep men standing, to call people 'thou,' to raise his voice more than was necpssary, and sometimes to bring gentlemPn of ancient lineagp to trial.

From Perm TyufyayPV had been transferrPd to Tver. The gPntry of the province, for all their submissiveness and servility, could not put up with him. They petitioned the minister, Bludov, to n•movl' him. Bludov appointed him to Vyatka.

There he was quitp at home again. Officials and contractors, factory-owners and government clerks-a free hand, and that was all hP wantl'd. EvPryone trembled hP forP him, evPryone stood up when hP came in. Pwrvonl' offPrPd him drink and gave him dinners, l'VI'ryonl' waitPd on his slightt>st wish ; at wl'ddings and namP-day partiPs, the first toast was 'To tht> health of His ExcPllencv!'

A The motto o f the roat o f nnns �rant('d by Nirholns I t o Count Kl('inmikhel WilS 'Zeal OYerromcs nJJ.' ( !l.S. )

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Misgovernn1ertt ill Siberia

ONE OF THE most melancholy results of the Petrine revolution was the development of the official class. An artificial, hungry, and uncultivated class, capable of doing nothing but 'serving,'

knowing nothing but official forms, it constitutes a kind of civilian clergy, celebrating divine service in the courts and the police forces, and sucking the blood of the people with thousands of greedy, unclean mouths.

Gogo! lifted one corner of the curtain and showed us Russian officialdom in all its ugliness: but Gogo! cannot help conciliating one with his laughter; his enormous comic talent gets the upper hand of his indignation. Moreover, in the fetters of the Russian censorship he could scarcely touch upon the melancholy side of that foul underworld, in which the destinies of the miserable Russian people are forged.

There, somewhere in grimy offices which we make haste to pass through, shabby men write and write on grey paper, and copy on to stamped paper-and persons, families, whole villages are outraged, terrified, ruined. A father is sent into exile, a mother to prison, a son for a soldier-and all this breaks like a thunderclap upon them, unexpected, for the most part undeserved. And for the sake of what? For the sake of money. A contribution . . . or an inquiry will be held into the dead body of some drunkard, burnt up by spirits and frozen to death. And the head-man collects and the village elder collects, the peasants bring their last kopeck. The police-commissary must live; the police-captain must live and keep his wife, too; the councillor must live and educate his children, for the councillor is an exemplary father.

Officialdom reigns supreme in the north-eastern provinces of Russia and in Siberia. There it has flourished unhindered, without looking back . . . it is a fearful long way, and everyone shares in the profits, stealing becomes res publica. Even the Imperial power, which strikes like grape-shot, cannot breach these boggy trenches that are dug in mud, that suck you down and are hidden under the snow. All t�e measures of government are enfeebled, all its intentions are distorted ; it is deceived,

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fooled, betrayed, sold, and all under cover of loyal servility .md with the observance of all the official forms.

Speransky1 tried to improve the lot of the Siberian people. He introduced everywhere the collegiate principle, as though it made any difference whether the officials stole individually or in gangs. He discharged the old rogues by hundreds and engaged new ones by hundreds. At first he inspired such terror in the rural police that they actually bribed the peasants not to lodge petitions against them. Three years later the officials were making their fortunes by the new forms as well as they had done by the old.

Another eccentric was General Velyaminov. For two years he struggled at Tobolsk trying to check abuses, but, seeing his lack of success, threw it all up and quite gave up attending to business.

Others, more judicious, did not make the attempt, but got rich themselves and let others get rich.

'I shall eradicate bribe-taking,' said Senyavin, the Governor of Moscow, to a grey-haired peasant who had lodged a complaint against some obvious injustice. The old man smiled.

'What are you laughing at?' asked Senyavin.

'Why, you must forgive me, sir,' answered the peasant; 'it put me in mind of one fine young fellow who boasted he would lift the Tsar-pushka,2 and he really did try, but he did not lift it for all that.'

Senyavin, who told the story himself, belonged to that class of unpractical men in the Russian service who imagine that rhetorical sallies on the subject of honesty, and the despotic persecution of two or three rogues who happen to be there, can remedy so universal a disease as Russian bribe-taking, which grows freely under the shadow of the censorship.

There are only two remedies for it: publicity, and an entirely different organisation of the whole machinery, the re-introduction of the popular principle of the arbitration courts, verbal proceedings, sworn witnesses, and all that the Petersburg administration detests.

1 Speransky, Mikhail Mikhaylovich ( 1 772- 1 839), a leading statesman of the early period of the reign of Alexander I, banished in 1 8 1 2 on a trumped-up charge of treason. recalled by Nicholas. He was responsible for the codification of Russian laws. ( Tr. ) 2 A cannon, cast in the seventeenth century, which weighs forty tons.

It is in the Kremlin at Moscow and is said to be the biggest in the world.

It has never been fired. (R.)

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Peste!, the Governor-General o f Western Siberia, father o f the celebrated Peste! put to death by Nicholas, was a real Roman proconsul and one of the most violent. He carried on an open system of plunder in the whole region which was cut off from Russia by his spies. Not a single letter crossed the border without the seal being broken, and woe to the man who should dare to write anything about his government. He kept merchants of the first guild for a year at a time in prison in chains; he tortured them. He sent officials to the borders of Eastern Siberia and left them there for two or three years.

For a long time the people bore it; at last a working man of Tobolsk made up his mind to bring the condition of affairs to the knowledge of the Tsar. Afraid of the ordinary routes, he went to Kyakhta and from there made his way with a caravan of tea across the Siberian frontier. He found an opportunity at Tsarskoye Selo of gi ving Alexander his petition, beseeching him to read it. Alexander was amazed by the terrible things he read in it. He sent for the man, and after a long talk with him was convinced of the melancholy truth of his report. Mortified and somewhat embarrassed, he said to him:

'You go home now, my friend; the thing shall be inquired into.'

'Your Majesty,' answered the man, 'I shall not go home now.

Better command me to be put in prison. My conversation with Your Majesty will not remain a secret and I shall be killed.'

Alexander shuddered and said, turning to Miloradovich, who was at that time Governor-General in Petersburg:

'You will answer to me for him.'

'In that case,' observed Miloradovich, 'allow me to take him into my own house.'

And the man actually remained there until the case was ended.

Peste! almost always lived in Petersburg. You may remember that the proconsuls as a rule lived in Rome. By means of his presence and connections, and still more by the division of the spoils, he anticipated all sorts of unpleasant rumours and scandals.a The Imperial Council took advantagP of Alexander's 3 This gave Count Rostopchin occasion for a biting jest at Pestel's expense.

They were both dininp; with the Tsar. The Tsar, who was standing at the window, asked: '\\'hat's that on the church, the black thing on the cross?' 'I can't make out,' observed Count Rostopchin. 'You must ask han Borisovich, he has wonderful eyes, for he can see from here what is being done in Siberia.'

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temporary absence at Verona or Aachen1 to come to the inte!ligent and just decision that since the matter in a denunciation related to Siberia the case should be passed to Peste! to deal with, seeing that he was on the spot. Miloradovich, Mordvinov, and 1'....-o others were opposed to this decision, and the case was brought before the Senate.

The Senate, with that outrageous injustice with which it constantly judges cases relating to higher officials, exculpated Peste! but exiled Treskin, the civilian governor of Tobolsk, deprived him of his rank and privileges as a member of the gentry and relegated him to somewhere or other. Peste! was only dismissed from the service.

Peste! was succeeded at Tobolsk by Kaptsevich, a man of the school of Arakcheyev. Thin, bilious, a tyrant by nature and a tyrant because he had spent his whole life in the army, a man of restless activity, he brought outward discipline and order into everything, fixed maximum prices for goods, but left everyday affairs in the hands of robbers. In 1 824 the Tsar wished to visit Tobolsk. Through the Perm Province runs an excellent, broad high-road, which has been in use for ages and is probably good o-..ving to the nature of the soil. Kaptsevich made a similar road to Tobolsk in a few months. In the spring, in the time of alternate thaw and frost, he forced thousands of workmen to make the road by levies from villages near and far; sickness broke out and half the workmen died, but 'zeal can overcome anything'the road was made.

Eastern Siberia is still more negligently governed. It is so far away the news hardly reaches Petersburg. At Irkutsk, Bronevsky, the Governor-General, was fond of firing off cannon in the town when 'he was merry.' And another high official when he was drunk used to say mass in his house in full vestments and in the presence of the bishop. At least the noisiness of the one and the devoutness of the other were not so pernicious as Pestel's blockade and Kaptsevich's indefatigable activity.

It is a pity that Siberia is so rottenly governed. The choice of its governors-general has been particularly unfortunate. I do not know what Muravev is like ; he is well known for his intelligence and his abilities; the others were good for nothing. Siberia 1 Congresses of the Holy Alliance were held in Aachen in 1 8 1 8 and Verona in 1 822. (A.S.)

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has a great future: it is looked upon merely as a cellar, in which there are great stores of gold, fur, and other goods, but which is cold, buried in snow, poor in the means of life, without roads or population. This is not true.

The dead hand of the Russian government, which does everything by violence, everything with the stick, cannot give the vital impetus that would carry Siberia forward with American rapidity. We shall see what will happen when the mouths of the Amur are opened for navigation and America meets Siberia near China.

I said long ago that the Pacific Ocean is the Mediterranean of the future. 5 In that future the part played by Siberia, the land that lies between the ocean, Southern Asia, and Russia, will be extremely important. Of course Siberia is bound to extend to the Chinese frontier. Why freeze and shiver in Berezov and Yakutsk when there are Krasnoyarsk, Minusinsk, and other such places?

Even the Russian immigrants into Siberia have elements in their nature that suggest a different development. Generally speaking, the Siberian race is healthy, well-grown, intelligent, and extremely steady. The Siberian children of settlers know nothing of the landowners' power. There is no upper class in Siberia and at the same time there is no aristocracy in the towns; the officials and the officers, who are the representatives of authority, are more like a hostile garrison stationed there by a victorious enemy than an aristocracy. The immense distances save the peasants from frequent contact with them; money saves the merchants, who in Siberia despise the officials and, though outwardly giving way to them, take them for what they aretheir clerks employed in civil affairs.

The habit of using firearms, indispensable for a Siberian, is universal. The dangers and emergencies of his daily life have made the Siberian peasant more war-like, more resourceful, readier to offer resistance than the Great Russian. The remoteness of churches leaves his mind freer from fanaticism than in Russia ; he is phlegmatic about religion and most often a schismatic. There are remote hamlets which the priest visits only three or four times a year and administers baptism wholesale, buries, marries, and hears confessions for the whole time since he was there last.

5 I have seen with great pleasure that the New York papers have several times repeated this.

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Before the end of my time at Vyatka the Department of Crovvn Property was stealing so impudently that a commission of inquiry was appointed over it, which sent inspectors about the provinces. With that began the introduction of the new administration of Crown peasants.

Governor Kornilov was to appoint two officials frQm his staff for this inspection. I was one of those appointed. What things it was my lot to read!-sad, funny and nasty. The very headings of the cases struck me with amazement.

'Relating to the disappearance of the house of the Parish Council, no one knows where to, and to the gnmving of the plan of it by mice.'

'Rela ting to the loss of twenty-two government quit-rent articles,' i.e., of fifteen versts of land.

'Relating to the registration of the peasant boy Vasily among the female sex.'

This last was so good that I at once read the case from cover to cover.

The father of this supposed Vasily \'\Tote in his petition to the governor that fifteen years earlier he had a daughter born, whom he had wanted to call Vasilisa, but that the priest, being 'in liquor,' christened the girl Vasily and so entered it in the register. The circumstance apparently troubled the peasant very little; but when he realised that it \'\"ould soon come to his family to furnish a recruit and pay the poll tax, he reported on the matter to the mayor and the rural police superintendent. The case seemed very odd to the police. They began by refusing the peasant's request, saying that he had let pass the ten-year limitation. The peasant went to the governor; the latter arranged a solemn examination of the boy of the female sex by a doctor and a midwife . . . . At this point a correspondence suddenly sprang up with the Consistory, and a priest, the successor of the one who, wlwn 'in liquor.' had chastely failed to makP fleshly distinctions, appeared on the scene, and the case went on for years and the girl \vas nearly left under the suspicion of being a man.

Do not imagine that this is an absurd figment made up by me for a joke; not at all: it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Russian autocracy.

In the reign of Paul a colonel in the Guards in his monthly report entered as dead an officer who was dying in the hospital.

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Paul struck him off the list a s dead. Unluckily the officer did not die, but recovered. The colonel persuaded him to withdraw to his country estate for a year or two, hoping to find an opportunity to rectify the error. The officer agreed, but unfortunately for the colonel the heirs who had read of the kinsman's death in the Orders refused on any consideration to acknowledge that he was a live and, inconsolable at their loss, demanded possession of the property. When the living corpse saw that he was likely to die a second time, not merely on paper but from hunger, he went to Petersburg and sent in a petition to Paul. The Tsar wrote with his own hand on the petition: 'Forasmuch as His Majesty's decree has been promulgated concerning this gentleman, the petition is to be refused.'

This is even better than my Vasilisa-Vasily. Of what consequence was the crude fact of life beside the decree of His Majesty? Paul \vas the poet and dialectician of autocracy!

Foul and muddy as this morass of officialdom is, I must add a few words more about it. To bring it into the light of day is the least poor tribute one can pay to those who have suffered and perished, unknown and uncomforted.

The government readily gives the higher officials uncultivated lands by way of reward. There is no great harm in that, though it would be more sensible to keep these reserves to provide for the increase of population. The regulations that govern the fixing of the boundaries of these lands are fa irly detailed ; forests containing building timber, the banks of navigable rivers, indeed both the banks of any river, must not be given away, nor under any circumstances may lands be so assigner! that have been cultivated by peasants, even though the peasants have no right to the land except that of long usage . . . .6

All these restrictions of course are only on paper. In reality the assignment of land to private owners is a fearful source of plunder to the Treasury and of oppression to the peasants.

Great noblemen in receipt of lands usually either sell their rights to merchants, or try through the provincial authorities to gain some special privilege contrary to the regulations. Even G In the province of Vyatka the peasants are particularly fond of moYing to new settlements. Very often three or four clcarinf(S are suddenly discovered in the forest. The immense lands and forPsts ( now half cut down) tempt the peasants to take this res nullius which is left unused. The Ministry of Finance has se,·eral times llePn obliged to confirm these squatters in possession of the land.

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Count Orlov himself was by chance assigned a main road and lands on which flocks and herds are pastured in the province of Saratov.

It is therefore no wonder that one fine morning the peasants of Darovsky volost1 in Kotelnichesky district had their land cut away right up to their woodyards and houses and given as private property to merchants who had bought them from some kinsman of Count Kankrin. The merchants fixed a rent for the land. This led to a lawsuit. The Court of Justice, bribed by the merchants and afraid of Kankrin's kinsman, confused the issues of the case. But the peasants were determined to persist with it.

They chose two hard-headed peasants from amongst themselves and sent them to Petersburg. The case was brought before the Senate. The land-surveying department perceived that the peasants were in the right, but did not know what to do, so they asked Kankrin. He simply admitted that the land had been irregularly cut away, but considered that it would be difficult to restore it, because it might have changed hands since then, and its present owners might have made various improvements. His Excellency proposed, therefore, that advantage should be taken of the vast amount of Crown property available, and that the peasants should be assigned a full equivalent in another place.

Everybody liked this except the peasants. In the first place, it is no light matter to bring fresh land under cultivation, and, in the second, the fresh land turned out to be swampy and unsuitable.

Since the peasants of Darovsky volost were more interested in growing corn than in shooting snipe, they sent another petition.

Then the Court of Justice and the Ministry of Finance made a new case out of the old one and, finding a law in which it was said that, if the land that was assigned turned out to be unsuitable, it was not to be cancelled, but another half of the amount was to be added to it, they ordered the Darovsky peasants to be given another half swamp in addition to the swamp they already had.

The peasants once more petitioned the Senate, but, before their case came up for investigation, the land-surveying department sent them plans of their new land, bound and coloured, as is usual, with the points of the compass in the form of a star and appropriate explanations for the lozenge marked R.R.Z., and the lozenge marked Z.Z.R., and, what was most important, a demand for so much rent per acre. The peasants, seeing that far from 1 An administrative district which included several villages. (R.)

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giving them land they were trying to squeeze money out of them for the bog, refused point-blank to pay.

The police-captain reported it to Tyufyayev, who sent a punitive expedition under the command of the Vyatka politsmeyster.

This man arrived, seized a few persons, flogged them, restored order in the volost, took the money, handed over the guilty parties to the Criminal Court, and was hoarse for a week afterwards from shouting. Several men were punished with the lash and sent into exile.

Two years later, when the Heir to the Throne passed through the volost, the peasants handed him a petition; he ordered the case to be investigated. It was upon this occasion that I had to draw up a report on it. \Vhether any sense came of this reinvestigation I do not know. I have heard that the exiles returned, but whether the land was returned I have not heard.

In conclusion, I must mention the celebrated story of the potato revolt8 and how Nicholas tried to bring the blessings of Petersburg civilisation to the nomad gypsies.

Like the peasantry of all Europe at one time, the Russian peasants were not very keen on planting potatoes, as though an instinct told the people that this was a trashy kind of food which would give them neither health nor strength. However, on the estates of decent landowners and in many Crown villages 'earth apples' had been planted long before the potato terror. But anything that is done of itsel f is d istastPful to the Russian government. Everything must be done under threat of the stick and the drill-sergeant, and by numbers.

The peasants of the Kazan and of part of the Vyatka Province planted potatoes in thPir fields. "•Jwn the potato<>s were harvested, the idea occHITPd to the lVIinistry to set up a central potato-pit in each volost. Potato-pits were ratifiPd, potato-pits were prescribPd, potato-pits \Wr<' dug; and at the beginning of winter the peasants, much against their \viii, took the potatoes to the central pits. But whPn in tlw follo\ving spring the authorities tried to make them plant fro::.cn potatoes, they r<>fused.

There cannot, indeed, b<• a morp flagrant insult to labour than a command to do something obviously absurd. This refusal was represented as a rPvolt. The ;\Iinistpr Kiseli;v SPilt all official from Petersburg; he, being an intellig<>nt and practical man, 8 Herzen appears to be speaking of the 'p0tato rPvolt' of 1 8-1-2; there had been an earlier one, less wide-spread. in 1 83-1-. ( A.S. )

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exacted a rouble apiece from the peasants of the first volost and allowed them not to plant the frozen potatoes.

He repeated this proceeding in the second volost and the third; but in the fourth the head-man told him point-blank that he would neither plant the potatoes nor pay him anything. 'You have let off these and those,' he told the official. 'It's clear you must let us off too.'

The official would have concluded the business with threats and thrashings, but the peasants snatched up stakes and drove the police away; the military governor sent Cossacks. The neighbouring volosts came in on their own people's side.

It is enough to say that it came to using grape-shot and bullets. The peasants left their homes and dispersed into the woods; the Cossacks drove them out of the thickets like wild beasts; then they were caught, put into irons, and sent to be court-mar·tialled at Kosmodemyansk.

By an odd chance the old major in charge there was an honest, simple man ; he good-naturedly said that the official sent from Pe tersburg was solely to blame. Everyone pounced upon him, his voice was stifled, he was suppressed; he was intimidated and even put to shame for 'trying to ruin an innocent man.'

And the inquiry followed the usual Russian routine: the peasants were flogged during the examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, flogged to extort money, and a whole crowd of them sent to Siberia.

It is worth noting that Kiselcv passed through Kosmodemyansk during the inquiry. Hc> might, it may be thought, haw looked in at the court-martial or have sent for the major.

He did not do so!

The famous Turgot, seeing the dislike of the peasants for the potato, distributed seed-potatoes among contractors, purveyors, and other persons under government control, strictly forbidding thPm to giw thPm to the peasants. At the same time he gave thPm SPCrPt ordPrs not to prevPnt the pPasants from stealing them. In a few years a part of France \vas under potatoes.

Tout bien pris, is not that bPttPr than grape-shot, Pavel Dmitriyevich?9

In 1 836 a party of gypsies came to Vyatka and settled in a field.

ThPsP gvpsi<'s had wamiPrPd as far as Tobolsk and Irbit and, accompanied by their eternal trained bear and entirely un-B P. D. Kiselev. (A .S.)

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trained children, had led their free, wandering existence from time immemorial, engaged in horse-doctoring, fortune-telling, and petty pilfering. They peacefully sang songs and robbed henroosts, but all at once the governor received instructions from His Majesty that if gypsies were found without passports (not a single gypsy had ever had a passport, and that Nicholas and his men knew perfectly well) they were to be given a fixed time within which they were to inscribe themselves as citizens of the

-

village or town where the decree found them.

At the expiration of the time limit, it was ordained that those fit for military service should be taken for soldiers and the rest sent into exile, all but the children of the male sex.

This senseless decree, which recalled biblical accounts of the massacre and punishment of whole races and him that pisseth against the wall, disconcerted even Tyufyayev. He communicated the absurd ukaz to the gypsies and wrote to Petersburg that it was impossible to carry it out. To get themselves inscribed as citizens they would need both money for the officials and the consent of the town or village, which would also have been unwilling to accept the gypsies for nothing. It was necessary, too, to assume that the gypsies should themselves have been desirous of settling just there. Taking all this into consideration, Tyufyayev-and one must give him credit for it-asked the Ministry to grant postponements and exemptions.

The Minister answered by instructions that at the expiration of the time-limit this Nebuchadnezzar-like decree should be carried out. Most unwillingly Tyufyayev sent a squad of soldiers with orders to surround the gypsy camp ; as soon as this was done, the police arrived with a garrison battalion, and what happened, I am told, was beyond all imagination. Women with streaming hair ran about in a frenzy, screaming and weeping, and falling at the feet of the police; grey-headed old mothers clung to their sons. But order triumphed and the lame politsmeystcr took the boys and took the recruits-while the rest were sent by stages somewhere into exile.

But when the children had been taken away, the question arose what was to be done with them and at whose expense they were to be kept.

There had formerly been foundling hospitals connected with the Charitable Board, which cost the government nothing. But the Prussian chastity of Nicholas abolished them as detrimental to morals. Tyufyayev advanced money of his own and asked the Minister for instructions. Ministers never stick at anything.

They ordered that the boys, until further instructions, were to be

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put into the care of the old men and women maintained in the almshouses.

Think of lodging little children with moribund old men and women, making them breathe the atmosphere of death-and charging old people who need peace and quiet with looking after children for nothing.

What imagination!

While I am on the subject I must describe what happened some eighteen months later to the head-man of my father's village in the province of Vladimir. He was a peasant of intelligence and experience who carried on the trade of a carrier, had several teams of three horses each, and had been for twenty years the head-man of a little village that paid obrok to my father.

Some time during the year I spent in Vladimir the neighbouring peasants asked him to hand over a recruit for them. Bringing the future defender of his country on a rope, he arrived in the to.,vn with great self-confidence as a man proficient in his business.

'This,' said he, combing with his fingers the fair, grizzled beard that framed his face, 'is all the work of men's hands, sir.

The year before last we pitched on our lad, such a wretched, puny fellow he was-the peasants were fearfully afraid he wouldn't do. So I says, "And roughly how much, good Christians, will you go to? A \Vheel will not turn without being greased." We talked it over and the mir10 decided to give twentyfive gold pieces. I went to the town and after talking in the government office I went straight to the president-he was a sensible man, sir, and had known me for ages. He told them to call me into his study and he had something the matter with his leg, so he was lying on a sofa. I put it all before him and he answered me with a laugh, "All right, all right; you tell me how many of them you have brought-you are a skinflint, I know you." I put ten gold pieces on the table and made him a low bow-he took the money in his hand and kept playing with it.

"But I say," he said, "I am not the only one you will have to pay; what more have you brought?" I reported that I'd got together another ten. "Well," he said, "you can reckon yourself what you must do with it. Two to the doctor, two to the army receiver, then the clerk . . . and any treating won't come to 10 Village council. ( R.)

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more than three-so you had better leave the rest with m e and I will try to arrange the affair." '

'Well, did you give it to him?'

'To be sure I did-and they shaved the boy's head11 all right.'

Trained in such a way of rounding off a ccounts, and a ccustomed to reckonings of this sort, and also, perhaps, to the five gold pieces about the fate of which he had been silent, the headman was confident of success. But there may be many mishaps between the bribe and the hand that takes it. Count Essen, one of the Imperial adjutants, was sent to Vladimir for a levy of recruits. The head-man approached him with his gold pieces.

Unfortunately the Count had, like the heroine of Pushkin's Nulin, been reared 'not in the traditions of his fathers,' but in the school of the Baltic aristocracy, which instils a German devotion to the Russian Tsar. Essen lost his temper, shouted at him and, what was worse than anything, rang the bel l ; the clerk ran in and gendarmes made their appearance. The head-man, who had never suspected the existence of men in uniform who would not take bribes, lost his head so completely that he did not deny the charge, did not vow and swear that he had never offered money, did not protest, might God strike him blind and might another drop never pass his lips, if he had thought of such a thing! He let himself be caught like a sheep and led off to the police station, probably regretting that he had offered the general too little and so offended him.

But Essen, not satisfied with the purity of his own conscience, nor the terror of the luckless peasant, and probably wishing to eradicate bribery in Russland, to punish vice and set a salutary example, wrote to the police, wrote to the governor, wrote to the recruiting office about the head-man's wicked attempt. The peasant was put in prison and committed for trial. Thanks to the stupid and grotesque law which metes out the same punishment to the honest man who gives a bribe to an official and to the official himself who accepts the bribe, things looked black and the head-man had to be saved at a ll costs.

I rushed to the governor; he refused to intervene in the matter; the president and councillors of the Criminal Court shook their heads, terrified at the interference of the Imperial adjutant. The adjutant himself, relenting, was the first to declare that he 'wished the man no harm, that he only wanted to give him a lesson, that he ought to be tried and then let off.' When I 11 Took him as a recruit. (R.)

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told this to the politsmeyster, he observed : 'The fact is, none of these gentry know how things are done; he should have simply sent him to me. I would have given the fool a good drubbing-to teach him to look before he leaps-and would have sent him home. Everyone would have been satisfied, but now how are things to be patched up with the Criminal Court?'

These two comments express the Imperial Russian conception of law so neatly and strikingly that I cannot forget them.

Between these pillars of Hercules of the national jurisprudence, the head-man had fallen into the deepest slough, that is, into the Criminal Court. A fe\v months later the verdict was prepared that the head-man after being punished with the lash should be exiled to Siberia. His son and all his family came to me, imploring me to save their father, the head of the family. I myself felt fearfully sorry for the peasant, ruined though perfectly innocent. I went again to the president and the councillors, and pointed out to them once more that they were doing themselves harm by punishing the elder so severely; that they knew vPrv well themsPiv<>s that no busin<>ss was ever done without bribes; that, in fact, they would have nothing to eat if they did not, like true Christians, consider that every gift is perfect and every gift is good. Entreating, bO\ving, and sending the head-man's son to bow still lower, I succeeded in gaining half my object. The elder was condemned to a few strokes of the lash within the prison walls, was allowed to remain in his place of residence, but was forbidden to act as intermediary for the other peasants.

I sighed with relief when I sa\v the governor and the prosecutor had agreed to this, and went to the police to ask for some mitigation of the severity of the flogging; the police, partly because they were flattered at my coming myself to ask them a favour, partly through compassion for a man who was suffering for something that concerned them all so intimately, and knowing, moreover, that the man was well off, promised me to make it a pure formnlitv.

One morning a- few days later the head-man appeared, thinner and greyer than before. I saw that for all his delight he was sad about something and weighed down by some thought that oppressed him.

'\\"hat are you worrying about?' I asked him.