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

usually orders the transportation of the entire village to Siberia. This is called in Petersburg peopling Asia.

When I reflect upon these, and a thousand other cruelties, which, with greater or less secrecy, take place daily in the bosom of this immense empire, where the distances equally favour oppression and revolt, I am ready to conceive a hatred against the land, the government, and the entire population : an indefinable sense of uneasiness takes possession of me, and I think only of flyiug.

The fortune of a wealthy man is here computed by the heads of peasants. The man who is not free is coined; he is equivalent (on an average) to ten roubles a year to his proprietor, who is called free because he is the owner of serfs. There are districts where each peasant brings three and four times this sum to his master. In Russia the human money alters in value, as, with us, the land, which doubles in price when markets can be opened for its produce. Here I involuntarily pass my time in calculating how many families it has taken to pay for a bonnet, a shawl, or a rose tree : nothing appears to me as it does elsewhere ; every thing seems tainted with blood. The number of human beings condemned to suffer, even unto death, in order to furnish the requisite quantity of stuff which forms the dress of some lovely woman at court, occupies my thoughts more than all her finery or her beauty. Absorbed in the labour of this melancholy computation, I feci myself growing unjust. The most charming face reminds me, in spite of my efforts to banish such ideas, of those caricatures of Bonaparte which were spread all over Europe