Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 by Various

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The great Empress spurred hope by another movement. She proposed to
an academy the question of serf-emancipation as a subject for their
prize-essay. The essay was written and crowned. It was filled with
beautiful things about liberty, practical things about moderation,
flattering things about "the Great Catharine,"--and the serfs waited.

Again she aroused hope. It was given out that her most intense delight
came from the sight of happy serfs and prosperous villages. Accordingly,
in her journey to the Crimea, Potemkin squandered millions on millions
in rearing pasteboard villages,--in dragging forth thousands of wretched
peasants to fill them,--in costuming them to look thrifty,--in training
them to look happy. Catharine was rejoiced,--Europe sang paeans,--the
serfs waited.[F]

[Footnote F: For further growth of the sentimental fashion thus set, see
_Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw_, Vol. I. p. 383.]

She seemed to go farther: she issued a decree prohibiting the
enslavement of serfs. But, unfortunately, the palace-intrigues, and the
correspondence with the philosophers, and the destruction of Polish
nationality left her no time to see the edict carried out. But Europe
applauded,--and the serfs waited.

Two years after this came a deed which put an end to all this
uncertainty. An edict was prepared, ordering the peasants of Little
Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day of publication
should find them. This was vile; but what followed was diabolic.
Court-pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises, enticed
hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung;--in an
hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and
Catharine II. was made infamous forever.

So, about a century after Peter, there rolled over Russia a wave of
wrong which not only drowned honor in the nobility, but drowned hope in
the people.

As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must
have sunk within them. For Paul I., Catharine's son and successor, was
infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained
by public opinion. He had been born with savage instincts, and educated
into ferocity. Tyranny was written on his features, in his childhood. If
he remained in Russia, his mother sneered and showed hatred to him; if
he journeyed in Western Europe, crowds gathered about his coach to jeer
at his ugliness. Most of those who have seen Gillray's caricature
of him, issued in the height of English spite at Paul's homage to
Bonaparte, have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen
the portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps at St. Petersburg know well
that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not.

And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought
into his every fibre. He insisted on an Oriental homage. As his carriage
whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop,
descend into the mud, and bow themselves. Himself threw his despotism
into this formula,--"Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is
no one noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I
speak."

And yet, within that hideous mass glowed some sparks of reverence
for right. When the nobles tried to get Paul's assent to more open
arrangements for selling serfs apart from the soil, he utterly refused;
and when they overtasked their human chattels, Paul made a law that no
serf should be required to give more than three days in the week to the
tillage of his master's domain.

But, within five years after his accession, Paul had developed into such
a ravenous wild-beast that it became necessary to murder him. This duty
done, there came a change in the spirit of Russian sovereignty as from
March to May; but, sadly for humanity, there came, at the same time, a
change in the spirit of European politics as from May to March.

For, although the new Tzar, Alexander I., was mild and liberal, the
storm of French ideas and armies had generally destroyed in monarchs'
minds any poor germs of philanthropy which had ever found lodgment
there. Still Alexander breasted this storm,--found time to plan for
his serfs, and in 1803 put his hand to the work of helping them toward
freedom. His first edict was for the creation of the class of "free
laborers." By this, masters and serfs were encouraged to enter into
an arrangement which was to put the serf into immediate possession
of himself, of a homestead, and of a few acres,--giving him time to
indemnify his master by a series of payments. Alexander threw his heart
into this scheme; in his kindliness he supposed that the pretended
willingness of the nobles meant something; but the serf-owning caste,
without openly opposing, twisted up bad consequences with good, braided
impossibilities into possibilities: the whole plan became a tangle, and
was thrown aside.

The Tzar now sought to foster other good efforts, especially those made
by some earnest nobles to free their serfs by will. But this plan, also,
the serf-owning caste entangled and thwarted.

At last, the storm of war set in with such fury that all internal
reforms must be lost sight of. Russia had to make ready for those
campaigns in which Napoleon gained every battle. Then came that peaceful
meeting on the raft at Tilsit,--worse for Russia than any warlike
meeting; for thereby Napoleon seduced Alexander, for years, from plans
of bettering his Empire into dreams of extending it.

Coming out of these dreams, Alexander had to deal with such realities
as the burning of Moscow, the Battle of Leipsic, and the occupation of
France; yet, in the midst of those fearful times,--when the grapple of
the Emperors was at the fiercest,--in the very year of the burning of
Moscow,--Alexander rose in calm statesmanship, and admitted Bessarabia
into the Empire under a proviso which excluded serfage forever.

Hardly was the great European tragedy ended, when Alexander again turned
sorrowfully toward the wronged millions of his Empire. He found that
progress in civilization had but made the condition of the serfs worse.
The newly ennobled _parvenus_ were worse than the old _boyars_; they
hugged the serf-system more lovingly and the serfs more hatefully.[G]

[Footnote G: For proofs of this see Haxthausen.]

The sight of these wrongs roused him. He seized a cross, and swore upon
it that the serf-system should be abolished.

Straightway a great and good plan was prepared. Its main features were,
a period of transition from serfage to personal liberty, extending
through twelve or fourteen years,--the arrival of the serf at personal
freedom, with ownership of his cabin and the bit of land attached to
it,--the gradual reimbursement of masters by serfs,--and after this
advance to _personal_ liberty, an advance by easy steps to a sort of
_political_ liberty.

Favorable as was this plan to the serf-owners, they attacked it in
various ways; but they could not kill it utterly. Esthonia, Livonia, and
Courland became free.

Having failed to arrest the growth of freedom, the serf-holding caste
made every effort to blast the good fruits of freedom. In Courland they
were thwarted; in Esthonia and Livonia they succeeded during many years;
but the eternal laws were too strong for them, and the fruitage of
liberty has grown richer and better.

After these good efforts, Alexander stopped, discouraged. A few
patriotic nobles stood apart from their caste, and strengthened his
hands, as Lafayette and Liancourt strengthened Louis XVI.; they even
drew up a plan of voluntary emancipation, formed an association for the
purpose, gained many signatures; but the great weight of that besotted
serf-owning caste was thrown against them, and all came to nought.
Alexander was at last walled in from the great object of his ambition.
Pretended theologians built, between him and emancipation, walls of
Scriptural interpretation,[H]--pretended philosophers built walls of
false political economy,--pretended statesmen built walls of sham
common-sense.

[Footnote H: Gurowski says that they used brilliantly "Cursed be
Canaan," etc.]

If the Tzar could but have mustered courage to _cut_ the knot! Alas for
Russia and for him, he wasted himself in efforts to _untie_ it. His
heart sickened at it; he welcomed death, which alone could remove him
from it.

Alexander's successor, Nicholas I., had been known before his accession
as a mere martinet, a good colonel for parade-days, wonderful in
detecting soiled uniforms, terrible in administering petty punishments.
It seems like the story of stupid Brutus over again. Altered
circumstances made a new man of him; and few things are more strange
than the change wrought in his whole bearing and look by that week of
agony and energy in climbing his brother's throne. The portraits of
Nicholas the Grand Duke and Nicholas the Autocrat seem portraits of two
different persons. The first face is averted, suspicious, harsh, with
little meaning and less grandeur; the second is direct, commanding, not
unkind, every feature telling of will to crush opposition, every line
marking sense of Russian supremacy.

The great article of Nicholas's creed was a complete, downright faith in
Despotism, and in himself as Despotism's apostle.

Hence he hated, above all things, a limited monarchy. He told De Custine
that a pure monarchy or pure republic he could understand; but that
anything between these he could _not_ understand. Of his former rule of
Poland, as constitutional monarch, he spoke with loathing.

Of this hate which Nicholas felt for liberal forms of government there
yet remain monuments in the great museum of the Kremlin.

That museum holds an immense number of interesting things, and masses
of jewels and plate which make all other European collections mean. The
visitor wanders among clumps of diamonds, and sacks of pearls, and a
nauseating wealth of rubies and sapphires and emeralds. There rise row
after row of jewelled scymitars, and vases and salvers of gold, and old
saddles studded with diamonds, and with stirrups of gold,--presents of
frightened Asiatic satraps or fawning European allies.

There, too, are the crowns of Muscovy, of Russia, of Kazan, of
Astrachan, of Siberia, of the Crimea, and, pity to say it, of Poland.
And next this is an index of despotic hate,--for the Polish sceptre is
broken and flung aside.

Near this stands the full-length portrait of the first Alexander; and at
his feet are grouped captured flags of Hungary and Poland,--some with
blood-marks still upon them.

But below all,--far beneath the feet of the Emperor,--in dust
and ignominy and on the floor, is flung the very Constitution of
Poland--parchment for parchment, ink for ink, good promise for good
promise--which Alexander gave with so many smiles, and which Nicholas
took away with so much bloodshed.

And not far from this monument of the deathless hate Nicholas bore that
liberty he had stung to death stands a monument of his admiration for
straightforward tyranny, even in the most dreaded enemy his house ever
knew. Standing there is a statue in the purest of marble,--the only
statue in those vast halls. It has the place of honor. It looks proudly
over all that glory, and keeps ward over all that treasure; and that
statue, in full majesty of imperial robes and bees and diadem and face,
is of the first Napoleon. Admiration of his tyrannic will has at last
made him peaceful sovereign of the Kremlin.

This spirit of absolutism took its most offensive form in Nicholas's
attitude toward Europe. He was the very incarnation of reaction against
revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who
infest Central Europe.

Whenever, then, any tyrant's lie was to be baptized, he stood its
godfather; whenever any God's truth was to be crucified, he led on
those who passed by reviling and wagging their heads. Whenever these
oppressors revived some old feudal wrong, Nicholas backed them in the
name of Religion; whenever their nations struggled to preserve some
great right, Nicholas crushed them in the name of Law and Order. With
these pauper princes his children intermarried, and he fed them with his
crumbs, and clothed them with scraps of his purple. The visitor can
see to-day, in every one of their dwarf palaces, some of his malachite
vases, or porcelain bowls, or porphyry columns.

But the _people_ of Western Europe distrusted him as much as their
rulers worshipped; and some of these same presents to their rulers have
become trifle-monuments of no mean value in showing that popular idea
of Russian policy. Foremost among these stand those two bronze masses
of statuary in front of the Royal Palace at Berlin,--representing fiery
horses restrained by strong men. Pompous inscriptions proclaim these
presents from Nicholas; but the people, knowing the man and his
measures, have fastened forever upon one of these curbed steeds the name
of "Progress Checked," and on the other, "Retrogression Encouraged."

And the people were right. Whether sending presents to gladden his
Prussian pupil, or sending armies to crush Hungary, or sending sneering
messages to plague Louis Philippe, he remained proud in his apostolate
of Absolutism.

This pride Nicholas never relaxed. A few days before his self-will
brought him to his death-bed, we saw him ride through the St. Petersburg
streets with no pomp and no attendants, yet in as great pride as ever
Despotism gave a man. At his approach, nobles uncovered and looked
docile, soldiers faced about and became statues, long-bearded peasants
bowed to the ground with the air of men on whose vision a miracle
flashes. For there was one who could make or mar all fortunes,--the
absolute owner of street and houses and passers-by,--one who owned the
patent and dispensed the right to tread that soil, to breathe that air,
to be glorified in that sunlight and amid those snow-crystals. And he
looked it all. Though at that moment his army was entrapped by military
stratagem, and he himself was entrapped by diplomatic stratagem, that
face and form were proud as ever and confident as ever.

There was, in this attitude toward Europe,--in this standing forth
as the representative man of Absolutism, and breasting the nineteenth
century,--something of greatness; but in his attitude toward Russia this
greatness was wretchedly diminished.

For, as Alexander I. was a good man enticed out of goodness by the baits
of Napoleon, Nicholas was a great man scared out of greatness by the
ever-recurring phantom of the French Revolution.

In those first days of his reign, when he enforced loyalty with
grape-shot and halter, Nicholas dared much and stood firm; but his
character soon showed another side.

Fearless as he was before bright bayonets, he was an utter coward before
bright ideas. He laughed at the flash of cannon, but he trembled at the
flash of a new living thought. Whenever, then, he attempted a great
thing for his nation, he was sure to be scared back from its completion
by fear of revolution. And so, to-day, he who looks through Russia for
Nicholas's works finds a number of great things he has done, but each is
single, insulated,--not preceded logically, not followed effectively.

Take, as an example of this, his railway-building.

His own pride and Russian interest demanded railways. He scanned the
world with that keen eye of his,--saw that American energy was the best
supplement to Russian capital; his will darted quickly, struck afar, and
Americans came to build his road from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Nothing can be more complete. It is an "air-line" road, and so perfect
that the traveller finds few places where the rails do not meet on
either side of him in the horizon. The track is double,--the rails very
heavy and admirably ballasted,--station-houses and engine-houses are
splendid in build, perfect in arrangement, and surrounded by neat
gardens. The whole work is worthy of the Pyramid-builders. The
traveller is whirled by culverts, abutments, and walls of dressed
granite,--through cuttings where the earth on either side is carefully
paved or turfed to the summit. Ranges of Greek columns are reared as
crossings in the midst of broad marshes,--lions' heads in bronzed iron
stare out upon vast wastes where never rose even the smoke from a serf's
kennel.

All this seems good; and a ride of four hundred miles through such
glories rarely fails to set the traveller at chanting the praises of the
Emperor who conceived them. But when the traveller notes that complete
isolation of the work from all conditions necessary to its success, his
praises grow fainter. He sees that Nicholas held back from continuing
the road to Odessa, though half the money spent in making the road an
Imperial plaything would have built a good, solid extension to that
most important seaport; he sees that Nicholas dared not untie
police-regulations, and that commerce is wretchedly meagre. Contrary to
what would obtain under a free system, this great public work found the
country wretched and left it wretched. The traveller flies by no ranges
of trim palings and tidy cottages; he sees the same dingy groups of huts
here as elsewhere,--the same cultivation looking for no morrow,--the
same tokens that the laborer is _not_ thought worthy of his hire.

This same tendency to great single works, this same fear of great
connected systems, this same timid isolation of great creations from
principles essential to their growth is seen, too, in Nicholas's
church-building.

Foremost of all the edifices on which Nicholas lavished the wealth of
the Empire stands the Isak Church in St. Petersburg. It is one of the
largest, and certainly the richest, cathedral in Christendom. All is
polished pink granite and marble and bronze. On all sides are double
rows of Titanic columns,--each a single block of polished granite with
bronze capital. Colossal masses of bronze statuary are grouped over each
front; high above the roof and surrounding the great drums of the domes
are lines of giant columns in granite bearing giant statues in bronze;
and crowning all rises the vast central dome, flanked by its four
smaller domes, all heavily plated with gold.

The church within is one gorgeous mass of precious marbles and mosaics
and silver and gold and jewels. On the tabernacle of the altar, in
gold and malachite, on the screen of the altar, with its pilasters of
_lapis-lazuli_ and its range of malachite columns fifty feet high, were
lavished millions on millions. Bulging from the ceilings are massy
bosses of Siberian porphyry and jasper. To decorate the walls with
unfading pictures, Nicholas founded an establishment for mosaic work,
where sixty pictures were commanded, each demanding, after all artistic
labor, the mechanical labor of two men for four years.

Yet this vast work is not so striking a monument of Nicholas's luxury as
of his timidity.

For this cathedral and some others almost as grand were, in part, at
least, results of the deep wish of Nicholas to wean his people from
their semi-idolatrous love for dark, confined, filthy sanctuaries, like
those of Moscow; but here, again, is a timid purpose and half-result;
Nicholas dared set no adequate enginery working at the popular religious
training or moral training. There had been such an organization,--the
Russian Bible Society,--favored by the first Alexander; but Nicholas
swept it away at one pen-stroke. Evidently, he feared lest Scriptural
denunciations of certain sins in ancient politics might be popularly
interpreted against certain sins in modern politics.

It was this same vague fear at revolutionary remembrance which thwarted
Nicholas in all his battling against official corruption.

The corruption-system in Russia is old, organized, and respectable.
Stories told of Russian bribes and thefts exceed belief only until one
has been on the ground.

Nicholas began well. He made an Imperial progress to Odessa,--was
welcomed in the morning by the Governor in full pomp and robes and
flow of smooth words; and at noon the same Governor was working in the
streets, with ball and chain, as a convict.

But against such a chronic moral evil no government is so weak as your
so-called "_strong_" government. Nicholas set out one day for the
Cronstadt arsenals, to look into the accounts there; but before he
reached them, stores, storehouses, and account-books were in ashes.

So, at last, Nicholas folded his arms and wrestled no more. For, apart
from the trouble, there came ever in his dealings with thieves that
old timid thought of his, that, if he examined too closely their
thief-tenure, they might examine too closely his despot-tenure.

We have shown this vague fear in Nicholas's mind, thus at length and in
different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key
to his dealings with the serf-system.

Toward his toiling millions Nicholas always showed sympathy. Let news
of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian
majesty, and woe to the guilty master! Many of these wrongs came
to Nicholas's notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to
undermine it.

Opposition met him, of course,--not so much the ponderous laziness of
Peter's time as an opposition polite and elastic, which never ranted and
never stood up,--for then Nicholas would have throttled it and stamped
upon it. But it did its best to entangle his reason and thwart his
action.

He was told that the serfs were well fed, well housed, well clothed,
well provided with religion,--were contented, and had no wish to leave
their owners.

Now Nicholas was not strong at spinning sham reason nor subtle at
weaving false conscience; but, to his mind, the very fact that the
system had so degraded a man that he could laugh and dance and sing,
while other men took his wages and wife and homestead, was the crowning
argument _against_ the system.

Then the political economists beset him, proving that without forced
labor Russia must sink into sloth and poverty.[I]

[Footnote I: For choice specimens of these reasonings, see Von Erman,
_Archiv fuer Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland_.]

Yet all this could not shut out from Nicholas's sight the great black
_fact_ in the case. He saw, and winced as he saw, that, while other
European nations, even under despots, were comparatively active and
energetic, his own people were sluggish and stagnant,--that, although
great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in
Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or
builders, or inventors, but only those two main products of Russian
civilization,--dissolute lords and abject serfs.

But what to do? Nicholas tried to help his Empire by setting right any
individual wrongs whose reports broke their way to him.

Nearly twenty years went by in this timid dropping of grains of salt
into a putrid sea.

But at last, in 1842, Nicholas issued his ukase creating the class of
"contracting peasants." Masters and serfs were empowered to enter into
contracts,--the serf receiving freedom, the master receiving payment in
instalments.

It was a moderate innovation, _very_ moderate,--nothing more than the
first failure of the first Alexander. Yet, even here, that old timidity
of Nicholas nearly spoiled what little good was hidden in the ukase.
Notice after notice was given to the serf-owners that they were not to
be molested, that no emancipation was contemplated, and that the ukase
"contained nothing new."

The result was as feeble as the policy. A few serfs were emancipated,
and Nicholas halted. The revolutions of 1848 increased his fear of
innovation; and, finally, the war in the Crimea took from him the power
of innovation.

The great man died. We saw his cold, dead face, in the midst of crowns
and crosses,--very pale then, very powerless then. One might stare at
him then, as at a serf's corpse; for he who had scared Europe during
thirty years lay before us that day as a poor lump of chilled brain and
withered muscle.

And we stood by, when, amid chanting, and flare of torches, and roll of
cannon, his sons wrapped him in his shroud of gold-thread, and lowered
him into the tomb of his fathers.

But there was shown in those days far greater tribute than the prayers
of bishops or the reverence of ambassadors. Massed about the Winter
Palace, and the Fortress of Peter and Paul, stood thousands on thousands
who, in far-distant serf-huts, had put on their best, had toiled wearily
to the capital, to give their last mute thanks to one who for years had
stood between their welfare and their owners' greed. Sad that he had not
done more. Yet they knew that he had _wished_ their freedom,--that he
had loathed their wrongs: for _that_ came up the tribute of millions.

The new Emperor, Alexander II., had never been hoped for as one who
could light the nation from his brain: the only hope was that he might
warm the nation, somewhat, from his heart. He was said to be of a weak,
silken fibre. The strength of the family was said to be concentrated in
his younger brother Constantine.

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