Chapter V: Some Personal Recollections

When I first went to Russia the Liberal movement that had been making headway ever since the death of Nicholas I. was in full swing, and in spite of such set-backs as the reaction caused by the abortive attempt on the life of Alexander II. was perceptibly nearing a climax. I came in contact with many of the eminent men of that epoch, and also with the type of Nihilist described by Turghenieff.[1] In the course of those years I also had ample opportunities to study the Russian character in various types and in various social layers, and despite its defects, some of which are repellent, I felt drawn towards it irresistibly. The charm it sometimes possesses is hardly definable and yet at its best is positively captivating. Some Russians--Vladimir Solovieff was an instance--carry with them a mystical and subtle atmosphere of the marvellous, which throws work-a-day concerns wholly out of the perspective, seems to melt solid obstacles, to shrivel up space, do away with time, and imbue one with the airy spirit of a thaumaturge. And yet the very essence of the spell is unaffected simplicity.

One of the first phenomena that pressed its unfamiliarity upon my attention was the privileged status of educated women and the sterling qualities by which some of them justified and maintained it. Their minds were worthy of {62} their hearts, the true sources of that natural religion of sympathy and pity which seldom fails to captivate the foreigner. Another peculiarity that arrested my attention was the political division of the population into classes and castes, among which by far the worst off were the peasants and the Jews. In the province of Kieff I was favourably situated to study at close quarters the disabilities of both.

One of the phenomena that struck me most forcibly as characteristic of the political regime was the sharp division between the classes and the masses or, as the two were then termed, between society--meaning the thinking and writing sections--and the people. My first impression was that of a conquered race and its foreign masters, the latter living upon the substance of the former and giving little or nothing in return. This impression was deepened by what I learned of the rôle of the bureaucracy which soon appeared as what it really was--parasitic. A petty official was in some respects a tsarlet. He could achieve certain difficult feats that were beyond the power of the Emperor, and was often able to shield the guilty, condemn the innocent, perpetuate crying abuses, and ignore the commands of the Tsar. All these impressions were the results of experiences at various times and places.

One of my first experiences illustrated the hapless lot of the peasantry in one of the southern provinces where they were much better off than in the north. The incident happened near the village of Nabutoff, in the province of Kieff, many miles from a town. One Sunday afternoon I was wandering alone in the steppe, resting between whiles and dipping into a book, when I became aware all at once that a group of half-sober peasants were at my heels. They yelled out menacingly, called me a Turkish spy, and ordered me to halt. Instead of complying, however, I moved rapidly towards the river that separated me from the distant manor in which I resided, but finding no boat to carry me across I surrendered to the peasants whose numbers had grown considerably and whose hostility was no longer masked. They charged me with being a Turkish spy, and some of {63} them wanted to drown or hang me without further parley. And I believe they would have done it on the spot but for the warning of one individual who affirmed that he had seen me before, knew I was English, and that none of them would escape severe punishment if they harmed me. They then emptied my pockets, abstracted all the money I had--some fifty roubles--and with great reluctance allowed me to send a messenger to the owner of the house where I was staying. After a couple of hours I was finally released, but the peasants had spent my money and were unable or unwilling to refund it. Two days later the village elder paid me a visit, offered his excuses, and informed me that three of the villagers had been soundly flogged by his orders and in his presence, and he wished to know whether I should like any more of them subjected to the same punishment. If so, he would fix the time to suit my convenience so that I could watch the execution if I desired. I expostulated with him, told him that I disapproved of flogging, and discoursed to him on human dignity, but he only remarked that a mooshik who has never been flogged is good for nothing.

In the following year I was at the University of St. Petersburg studying Oriental languages and I had the good fortune to meet prominent men of all classes and parties, including the novelists Dostoyeifsky, Gontshareff, and Leskoff.[2] One afternoon, in the interval between two sections of one of the fashionable open-air concerts that were daily given at Pavloffsk, near Tsarskoye Selo, at which several grand dukes and many court dignitaries and ministers were present, I was in a group the centre of which was the Minister of the Interior,[3] when an acquaintance of mine, Count A., came up, took the minister aside, and in my presence complained of the intractable disposition of his nephew, to whom I had given tuition. "The long and short of it is," he concluded, {64} "that he is a scapegrace and bids fair to become a criminal, and I can do nothing with him. He borrows money from the servants, spends it in houses of ill repute, drinks, gambles, and is not amenable to reason, and I want you to help me.

"With pleasure," the minister replied. "Only tell me in what form you wish for help. I can shut your nephew up if that would meet your wishes, but I suppose you would draw the line at incarceration. If so, I can bundle him off to Siberia, or Archangel, or the Caucasus, or Central Asia."

"Central Asia! That's it. Send him there. But how will he live?"

"Oh, I'll put him into the army in Tashkent and his superior officer will do the rest. He will certainly strike the fear of God into his soul and see that his body is fed and clad, I answer for that. The day after to-morrow then at nine in the morning a gendarme will fetch him, and you need worry no more."

The uncle uttered his thanks and the conversation took another turn. Two days later the prodigal youth was duly transferred to Tashkent and I never had tidings of him again. I referred to the subject later on, when I had come to know the minister better, and I asked him whether the law really invested him with the power he had invoked. He replied in the affirmative, quoted a clause of the statute, and remarked that what with the code of laws and the vast discretionary powers conferred on ministers to deal with persons administratively, the liberty of the subject was no better guaranteed in Russia than in France of Louis XIV. when _lettres de cachet_ opened the Bastille to so many members of the aristocracy. He added that neither he nor, so far as he knew, his colleagues would employ that power without first satisfying their consciences that they were not the instruments of personal hatred or injustice.

I have little doubt that M. Timasheff was a conscientious official in the Russian sense of the word, as was also the Minister of Justice, Count Pahlen, who had recently resigned. But none the less the system which they represented was weighing heavily on the nation. Cases of crying {65} injustice perpetrated by provincial organs of the central government occasionally came to my knowledge. At the university espionage and its by-products were occasional phenomena. It is fair to say, however, that I always found those ministers to whom I had access ready to listen to any appeal on behalf of victims if grounded on fact. Once when the "Liberals," as the revolutionary students were then euphemistically termed, were hard pressed by the police most members of the group with which I often mixed were arrested one after the other. My card having been found on one of the accused, he was plied with questions as to my opinions and actions, and I was cautioned by my friends to make ready to be arrested. But it was the unexpected that happened. One morning professors and students were thunderstruck to learn that one of the most promising students of the university had disappeared, nobody knew how. Alexeyenko--that was his name--had never been suspected by any of us. Apparently, and so far as we knew, his was the scholar's temper of mind rather than the revolutionary's unmeasured zeal for the welfare of his fellows. He had been regular in his attendance at the mathematical faculty and successful in his special studies there. He was in his fourth and last year and his professors were proud of him. Yet he was spirited away so mysteriously that some days elapsed before we learned that he had been kidnapped by the police in the street when returning home after midnight. As it was known that I was personally acquainted with the Minister of the Interior I was asked by a colleague and friend, who has since become one of the pillars of the autocracy, to appeal to him for the release of the prisoner, and I accepted the mission. On this occasion, however, I failed to see Timasheff himself, but I gave the message to his brother-in-law, who shortly afterwards brought me this answer: "The minister has no knowledge of the arrest. Give him details, and if Alexeyenko be as innocent as you maintain he shall be restored to his home and his studies." The students to whom I communicated these tidings were delighted. A few days later came another message from {66} Timasheff exhorting me to pursue the matter and let him know the result. The idea that an all-powerful minister should apply to a mere student for information about official acts amused me. But the prisoner could not be traced. At last a smuggled missive reached one of his university friends to the effect that he had been conveyed from gaol to gaol and was in the prison of X in western Siberia at the time of writing. I communicated this information to the minister who certainly fulfilled his promise and opened an inquiry into the facts, but with what result I never learned. Nor did I ever hear of Alexeyenko any more.

Although at first things in the Tsardom attracted my attention less in proportion to their specific weight than to the freshness of the impressions they produced, I felt at every hand's turn the consequence of Russia's long inaccessibility to western influences, and was struck with the complete cultural separation of class from class in the Empire. As for the lower orders their entire mental structure seemed different from that of the "intellectuals." At that time the merchants formed almost a close corporation of their own with hallowed traditions, recognised customs, class jealousy, and even a remarkable literary exponent in the person of the playwright Ostroffsky, who has left a complete and realistic picture of their every-day life then on the eve of its transformation. The secular clergy, too, were still a caste, their very language being tinged with mediævalism, and their principal sources of training were ecclesiastical schools and seminaries where instruction was superficial and theological. But the most isolated and peculiar of all were the peasants. So long as they were serfs they had the landlord's advice, which was a benefit when he was enlightened and well disposed, but after their emancipation the villages were proclaimed independent and "self-governing" and closed to all outside influences. Thenceforth only a peasant might vote in the village assembly. Representatives of the upper and better informed classes, like the squire, the parish priest, the doctor, even though they had resided for years in the village, were not {67} entitled to take hand or part in arranging its affairs. Their moral influence was rigorously excluded, and the ignorant soil-tillers became the wards and the prey of their own more cunning and unscrupulous members, who embezzled and cheated and committed every kind of enormity unchecked. For the _Mir_ in those days had the power to deport any of its members to Siberia without giving him the benefit of trial or alleging any legal charge against him, and a clever Machiavellian elder had but to supply his fellow-villagers with copious draughts of vodka to get them to pronounce any decree within their competence. This type of man was commonly termed a _Koolak_, or fist, to symbolise his utter callousness to pity and ruth. And of all the human monsters I have met in my travels I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the Russian _Koolak_. In the revolutionary horrors of 1905 and 1917 he was the ruling spirit--a fiend incarnate.

At the university I found myself in contact with apostles of revolution who talked as though society were a mass of clay capable of being fashioned at will by the social potter. History they despised without knowing, and the theory of evolution they treated as a disembodied fancy of the pseudo-scientific brain. Crass ignorance, ingrained prejudice, and inability to face adverse facts were characteristics of the leaders of the movement at the university. I remember one in particular who frankly admitted that he never opened a book nor attended a lecture, but simply lived for and on the coming revolution. This typical youth, who had entered the university from an ecclesiastical seminary, had no fixed abode, nearly always carried with him forbidden leaflets, proclamations, and newspapers hidden inside his scanty clothing, yet he had the good fortune to be always arrested when he chanced to have none of these compromising evidences on his person. From time to time we met to discuss general principles--I was not a member of the inner circle--to formulate the ideals of the nation, and analyse the means proposed for attaining them. Letters were then read from ardent spirits who had devoted their lives to the people, {68} were living among them in isolation and hardship, and fancied that they could fathom the ideas and divine the real sentiments of the peasant. Several of these men, who were always accompanied and keyed up by resolute, selfless, and enthusiastic young women, were pale reflections of Turghenieff's Rudin, but more than one yielded to temptation, turned against their comrades, and delivered them up to the authorities. Many settled down in time and became respected bureaucrats. Naturally I admired the ardour and self-denial of the few, the champions of a popular cause, who stirred in men and women a sense of the vast potentialities of their nation and the human race, and for a time I accepted their definition of Russia's aims as correct.

But it gradually dawned on me, and also on my close friend, the future pillar of Panslavism and autocracy, that whatever one might think about the social and political theories of the revolutionaries, they were uniformly wrong in their facts and forecasts. Thus their anticipation of the peasants' attitude towards the government were invariably belied by events. Tshernyshevsky, for example, whose writing we secretly read and warmly discussed, had staked his reputation and also the fate of his scheme on the postulate that the peasants would not accept their emancipation as offered by Alexander II., but would rise in arms and overthrow the government. He next believed that their calm resignation was but temporary, and that within two years' time the long hoped for rebellion would convulse the Empire. All the expectations and most of the assumptions of Bakunin and Herzen had also vanished at the touch of reality, and the Russian peasantry remained the impenetrable Sphinx it had been before. Nobody then nor, indeed, for forty years longer could put into words the ideals of the people--and had they divined them, no apostle, no idealist, could have utilised them for the purpose of arousing enthusiasm and generating the motive power for a revolution. The groundwork of the peasants' own scheme for his well-being is formed by what diplomatists would term "healthy robust egotism," and his cherished method is expropriation. The picture which was {69} commonly drawn of the tiller of the soil by the "intellectuals" was the projection of a poetic brain, a synthesis of the qualities adequate for the founders of a latter-day Utopia. In a word, the so-called leaders of the nation had not the remotest conception of the nation's world-philosophy, instincts, or strivings.

Looking back at their words and acts I can affirm that they created an imaginary nation after their own heart, and worked by fits and snatches and with unsuitable weapons for the welfare of that. And from that day to this the chasm between the two has never been bridged.

The abortive revolution of 1905-6, the failure of the constitutional parties to hammer in the adamantine wedge which the defeat of the bureaucracy by the Japanese had inserted into the State framework, and finally the Kadets'[4] ignorance of the movement that culminated in the outburst of March, 1917, their helplessness in face of a set of circumstances which, rightly handled, would have kept the Empire for a time intact and placed its social and political ordering in their own hands, but, botched as it was, opened the sluice gates to the floods of anarchy--are all object lessons on the difficulty of interpreting aright the spiritual and material needs and longings of the Russian people. These requirements and strivings are, to my thinking, largely conditioned by the historical factors already enumerated, and in especial by the numbing influence of ages of cultural isolation. There is a thick substratum of primeval savagery in the peasant's composition not at all far from the surface which separates him widely, not only from western peoples, but also from the intellectuals of his own race as they appear in their public words and acts. The revolting behaviour of the soldiery and the peasantry to their own kith and kin during the nation's _delirium tremens_ after March, 1917, which even revolutionary history is too prude to record, offers irrefragable evidence of the deplorable fact that the bulk of the Russian people is still in that primitive stage when {70} self-government, even in the diluted form in which it is vouchsafed to some continental nations, would harm in lieu of helping it. Education and careful training will in time qualify the people for an ever larger share in the conduct of its affairs, but in the meanwhile its spokesmen and trustees are tearing the political organism into shreds. Under a wise and strong government the peasants become as clay in the potter's hands--plasticity being one of the racial traits common to them with all their race. But take away the compelling force and they become human frenzies. The Northern Slav is an amalgam of contradictions: he can put forth stupendous efforts for a short while, but is incapable of sustaining a moderate endeavour perseveringly until the object is achieved.

Some of the types of the rising generation with whom I was thrown into contact at the university would have exercised the ingenuity of the most experienced psychologist and tempted a literary portraitist like Balzac. The procession of them that passed before my eyes kept my mind constantly in an active mood ever seeking for labels and sometimes finding none that were applicable. I remember in particular the following incident characteristic of much. I had asked a professor to read the book of Genesis with me in Hebrew and to give me the benefit of his special knowledge of that subject. He agreed to do this, provided that I found three other students willing to join me, and that he might deliver the lectures every Monday morning at nine in his own private dwelling. The hour was repellent to many, considering that we were then in the height of the winter season, but I contrived to persuade two students to join the class. To get a third, however, seemed impossible. At last I besought one of our comrades, a fine, tall, well-built youth who was studying Chinese and Mongol and, unlike so many others, was well-to-do, content with the world, and shy of politics. But when he learned the hour of the lecture and the place--which was very remote from the street in which his own rooms were situate--he refused categorically to join the class. And all my suasion was in {71} vain. Somehow I mentioned casually it would be only once a week, every Monday morning, and he at once exclaimed, "Oh, Monday morning? Yes, of course, I can come. Nothing easier. You see every Sunday I spend the night in a house of--of--amusement a stone's throw from the professor's place, and I get up about eight or half-past eight, so that I can be at his rooms by nine without an effort. I will oblige you." Accordingly he too came--straight from his dissipation--and we had our lecture on Genesis. One day he was late and the professor, in consequence of some jocular allusion of ours, the point of which he missed, put a plain question and wormed the secret out of us, and on learning the motives that had determined his fourth student to frequent his lectures on Genesis he laughed heartily.

The oriental faculty was the least political section of the university. Its students held aloof from revolutionary meetings, and either worked very hard or enjoyed life to the top of their bent. Our friend of the Monday morning lectures having burned the candle at both ends and also in the middle, melted away rapidly and was buried within a twelvemonth.

With the bureaucracy and its workings I became acquainted under the guidance of a few of its gifted members, one, the celebrated Tertius Philippoff, imperial comptroller, who took me into his department, gave me a post there, and initiated me into the psychology of the _tshinovnik_; another, Basil Grigorieff, Professor of Oriental Languages and Director-General of the Censor's Department; and a less exalted but more highly endowed censor, who had fought in the Crimea and was one of the most gifted, typical, devil-may-care, captivating Russians, and one of the most plausible Nihilists I ever met. S.K. had witnessed the utter breakdown of the bureaucratic war machine under Nicholas I. and had contemplated the misery it inflicted on the soldiers whose heroism, unrequited and unrewarded, was unparalleled. He had observed the progress of revolutionary propaganda in the army, among Russian soldiers, in Bulgaria and in Warsaw; and in his capacity of censor he was {72} continually reading revolutionary leaflets, manifestos, newspapers, and books, and discussing them with hardly veiled sympathies. He supplied me with the forbidden works of Dobroliuboff, Tshernyshevsky, Herzen, and others, and gradually filled me with pity for the victims of the autocratic Juggernaut and with loathing for the idol and its priests. In speculative matters there were no bounds to S.K.'s enterprise: he would call in question the holiest institutions, attack the root dogmas of Christianity, or the morality of remaining alive in this world of misery and squalor, but he discharged the duties of censor efficiently and with a breadth of view in which his colleagues were lacking, and always congruously with the letter of the law. He was at once a most successful apostle of Nihilism and one of the most efficient servants of the State.

In those days I used frequently to visit the palace of Tsarskoye Selo, accompanied by a member of a family which, at that time, was living on terms of close friendship with that of the heir apparent, afterwards Alexander III. The Tsarevitch and his consort called occasionally at the villa where the head of the family resides, and it was there that I first saw and spoke to him. When S.K. heard of my visits to the palace he exclaimed, "Look well at the children of the Tsarevitch Alexander Alexandrovitch. None of them will ever reach the throne. Mark my words. I think I know my country." I noted his prophecy which was not fulfilled, but it came very near to the mark. I watched the children of the Tsarevitch and speculated in my mind on their future. In particular I made inquiries respecting the character and mental outfit of him who I afterwards saw crowned as Nicholas II. As it happened I was present at every great event in his life down to a short time before the outbreak of the war.

Echoes from the subterranean forge where seismic explosions were being prepared reached us periodically in the halls of the university, and more than once I arranged for a private meeting (skhodka) to be held in the auditory of the oriental faculty which, being somewhat distant from {73} the principal lecture rooms, was not likely to be invaded by the authorities. We there listened to wordy debates about the duty of patriots to forego their individual life-schemes, settle down among the peasants and working men, and discharge the function of leaven to raise them to the revolutionary pitch;[5] about the relative merits of a social and a political upheaval; about the separation of the working man from the intellectuals; and about the part which terrorism should be made to play in the coming purification of the Russian world. My friend the student B. and I never actually joined any secret society, but we listened to the general discussions with something more than mere interest, and we never hesitated between a political change and the social debacle preached by the uncompromising pioneers who quoted Bakunin. S.K. on the other hand, ever uncompromising in theory, favoured Bakunin's programme, and often quoted these words of the master, "Let us put our faith in the eternal spirit which pulls down and annihilates only because he is the inscrutable and creative source of all life. The desire to destroy is at the same time a creative desire." Among an extreme section of the party known as "The People's Will" this doctrine was assimilated and when possible practised with deep-reaching consequences. The seed sown in those days produced the fruits we beheld in 1905-6 and in 1917.

The first attempt at terrorism that took place while I was in the country was made by Vera Zassulitch who, belonging to no party, travelled on her own initiative all the way from the Volga to the capital, fired at the Prefect of St. Petersburg, General Trepoff, and severely wounded him because, according {74} to statements published in the daily paper, he had had a political prisoner flogged. This audacious deed sent a thrill of satisfaction over the entire nation. The girl was tried for the offence before a jury and acquitted, whereupon excitement rose to white heat. The authorities ordered her immediate re-arrest, but she was nowhere to be found. The Minister of Justice, a conscientious German, Count Pahlen, had to resign. The police arrested crowds of people, many were deported to Siberia without trial, and terror from on high begot terror from below. I well remember the August day when Stepniak stabbed Mezentseff in St. Petersburg, and the flushed cheeks and flaming eyes of S.K. who hastened to me with all the particulars at his fingers' ends and assured me that this was but the overture. In effect the Tsar himself was the next target of the terrorists and a student his would-be assassin. Five shots from a revolver were fired at the Emperor from a moderate distance, but Alexander's hour had not struck. The attempt was not unforeseen. The revolutionists had formally condemned the monarch to death, apprised him of the sentence, and added that his only hope of escape was to bestow constitutional government on the country. This move bespoke a change of programme. Instead of social, political renovation was now demanded. The terrorists who had been theretofore working exclusively for a social burst-up won the support, by accepting the aims, of the Liberals who clamoured for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The Liberals testified their reconciliation by a bootless effort to induce the government to commute the death sentence on the would-be assassin of the Tsar into banishment to Siberia.

For victory in the struggle that now ensued the secret police of the "Third Section" relied on its spies, agents provocateurs, and its power to punish the discontented administratively. But the conspirators were dauntless and resourceful in their schemes against the monarch's life, which, although baulked continually, were resumed with unflagging ardour. Time after time a chance discovery, a {75} precaution neglected, a trick of fate saved the Emperor--some unforeseen accident always--who had been encouraged to believe that the danger he ran was only apparent. But when one evening the apartment under his dining-room in the Winter Palace was blown to splinters at the moment when he would have been sitting at table had he not been delayed unexpectedly, he awoke to the conviction that the only way to ensure his safety and escape his enemies was to look into their demands and see how far he could prudently go towards satisfying them. This conclusion marked a turning point in his policy. He promoted the Governor-General of Kharkoff, Loris Melikoff, to be president of a committee to carry on the home government, invested him with almost dictatorial powers, and ordered him to elaborate a project of far-ranging reform. Unfortunately this good resolution was unknown to the terrorists, who fancied that the external change meant but greater intensity in coercion.

Loris Melikoff was well intentioned and fairly well informed, but the revolutionary party knew of no reason why it should trust him. An early and hasty attempt was even made on his life. I, who was living on a footing of cordial friendship with the leading Armenians of St. Petersburg, with Delyanoff, the Esoffs, Patkanoff, etc., etc., learned a good deal of what was going on behind walls and doors. From the utterances of Professor Gradoffsky on the other hand, who was spoken of as Melikoff's secretary, I could gauge the suspicions of the Liberal party, and by S.K. I was apprised in a general way that a wide web was believed to be woven by the terrorists round the Tsar, in the meshes of which he would probably be caught.

Melikoff's conception was businesslike and his way of executing it tactful. On the one hand he was loth to scare the Emperor by a far-reaching project sprung upon him without warning, and on the other hand neither the gist nor the details of his moderate scheme must be allowed to leak out prematurely lest the reactionary press, headed by the redoubted Katkoff, should organise a national opposition. What the virtual dictator had in view was to increase the {76} powers of the zemstvos, to authorise them to co-operate with each other throughout the Empire, and thus to enable them to create an intelligent representative assembly. That seemed to outsiders who were free from bias to be the right step at that conjuncture. I confess that my own mind was not quite made up at the time, partly because I was not sure of the data, and partly because I was a reader of the writings of Katkoff whom I knew personally. I also enjoyed the advantage of listening occasionally to Dostoyeffsky's diatribes and perusing his dull periodical, and S.K. was never tired of telling me that nothing must be expected from the crown except decrees of banishment to Siberia, nor from the revolutionists barring the martyrdom of some and the treachery of others. One thing alone was clear to me: a social upheaval would endanger the very existence of the Empire. The utmost that the cultural level of the nation would admit of was a moderate political change.

In the meantime, the two enemies went their respective ways, the terrorists plotting the death of the Tsar, and the Tsar making up his mind to yield what the terrorists had demanded, and even to contemplate its corollary, a genuine parliament. At last Loris Melikoff completed his project and secured the Emperor's assent to it about the same time that the conspirators had put the final touch to theirs. On Saturday, 12th March, 1881, I was sauntering down the Nevsky Prospekt with my Professor of Armenian, Patkanian, and we were about to cross the Morskaya, a street leading to the palace, when the police suddenly stopped us in order to let the imperial sleigh glide past. At close quarters we saluted Alexander II. Mechanically he returned the greeting, looking pensive and weary as he glided shadow-like from before our eyes. "I should feel sorry to be in that man's shoes to-day," whispered Professor Patkanian to me, as we moved out of ear-range of the police. "Why to-day?" I asked. "Don't you know," he replied, "that Loris Melikoff is very anxious about the Tsar's safety? They have discovered another plot, this time a formidable affair, and have arrested the principal conspirators. But the others are {77} still at large, and may yet carry out their scheme unless Loris baffles it. He is all the more worried about it that the Emperor refuses to submit to rational measures of precaution. He has besought him to stay indoors for a few days, but the Tsar is reckless. Loris is worried."

The next day I was in the mined house[6] which would have been blown to smithereens had the Tsar, who had just signed and sanctioned the desired reform, driven down the Nevsky. But instead he went along the Moika. I reached the fatal spot a few minutes after the bombs had exploded, the victims had fallen, and the dying Tsar had been taken to the Winter Palace. I saw the blood on the snow and crowds of old women dipping handkerchiefs or clothes in it and reverently making the sign of the cross. I stood in front of the palace an hour or two later in the midst of a dense throng waiting for the monarch to show himself, for he was believed to have escaped intact or with a slight wound. And I then had another opportunity to observe the peasant's true character as it revealed itself when temporarily freed from outside restraint. As I stood that memorable afternoon among the crowd in the snow, my eyes fixed on the balcony from which the monarch was wont on exceptional occasions to greet or address the people, there were two students near me who were talking in a tone that denoted indifference, callousness, or satisfaction. Now and again they broke into a laugh. I could not hear anything they were saying, but I noticed that the one nearest to me was particularly light-hearted and blithe. All at once I heard the rasping tones of a dvornik's[7] voice shouting, "What do you mean?" followed by the subdued response of one of the students, then a chorus of angry voices waxing louder and louder around the pair. A violent push past me where the students stood, a hustling movement, some cynical ejaculations, and {78} then a sequence of awful screams that froze one's blood were the only sights and sounds that reached me of the revolting tragedy that had been enacted almost by my side. The two students had been seized first by the ears which were pulled away, and then torn limb from limb. Sick at heart I returned home to learn that a blood bath was apprehended, as the dvorniks and other peasants had announced their intention of killing every well dressed person in the capital. That was my first insight into what is connoted by the elemental ferocity of the people. I began to understand how essential are outward restraints to good, nay, to human behaviour in those benighted masses. Neither the doctrines of Christ nor the instincts of humanity had been cultivated by their leaders. The people had for ages seen robbery, murder, in a word all kinds of crime, political, private, and absolutely wanton outrages perpetrated in the name of God, the Tsar, and the fatherland by their own educated and spiritual guides. Is it to be wondered at that whenever they had the chance in turn to rob and burn and torture and kill they used it to the full relentlessly?

As soon as the Emperor's death became known, Petersburg fell into a state of chaotic confusion. The city was surrounded by a military cordon. Incongruous self-contradictory measures were framed, discussed, adopted, and dropped. The brains of the rulers seemed paralysed. But one official remained as cool and detached as if nothing had happened. This man of nerve and resource was Plehve, the public prosecutor, destined soon to become Director of the Police Department, then Dictator of Russia and an instrument of Fate in her downfall. A thousand tongues anathematised the regicides and discussed ingenious measures of public safety. Students were badly mauled in the streets of the cities and a publican mistaken for a student was beaten to death before my eyes. From out of the din and tumult two alternative policies took definite shape and presented themselves to the new Emperor--the execution of his father's plan or a fresh spell of "resolute government," and he unhesitatingly announced his preference for the former.

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Many of the eminent people whom I met most frequently in those days, Katkoff, Pobiedonostseff, Philippoff, the Metropolitan Archbishop of St. Petersburg, Delyanoff, Komaroff, were ranged on the side of the autocracy and preached a crusade against the reform scheme which the Tsar proposed to carry out. Impressed by their attitude he first submitted it to his ministers in order to learn from their lips what results they expected it to yield. A majority warmly declared for it and, curiously enough, the Grand Duke Vladimir was one of its most convinced spokesmen. I was personally acquainted with most of the others,[8] but nearly half the votes were on the opposite side.

The leader of the dissentients, the celebrated K. Pobiedonostseff, whose disinterested brooding over the cavernous deeps of human nature impressed the Emperor, was a host in himself. It was my privilege to meet this remarkable man over and over again during those historic days and later. After the Council of Ministers[9] at which Melikoff's reform project was debated, I heard him on the subject and watched him intently while he talked. For he looked like a man possessed. His eyes were wild and his voice hollow like that, say, of Samuel raised from the dead. One such scene in particular made a deep dent on my memory. He had been inveighing against Loris Melikoff, and asserting that the outcome of his project would be to turn over the Empire and its destinies to the scoundrels who had slain its protector and Tsar, and would fain annihilate all checks and restraints, divine and human. And clutching his head with his hands he repeatedly exclaimed, "They are mad, stark mad." Bessarion Komaroff who was present remarked, "It is for you to protect your imperial pupil from their folly." "Ah! if only the Emperor would listen to me." "Have you doubts about it then?" "I am sure of nothing. The decision lies with him. He has heard my views and also those of Milyutin & Co. And he is hesitating between the two courses. At first he seemed ready to ratify the sinister scheme, but {80} happily he postponed the execution. And now we can still hope, but only hope." Then turning to Komaroff, the editor of the oldest journal in St. Petersburg, and to myself, who was then one of its leader writers, he said, "The press has much to answer for and much to make good. You must go to work and help us. There is no time to be lost." The press had already gone to work with vigour and, in the case of the Moscow thunderer Katkoff, with virulence. Intrigues increased and multiplied and were conducted with profound secrecy by the reactionaries. The Liberal ministers were listless and self-satisfied, relying upon the Tsar's approval of the reform, expressed after his father's death and accompanied by his promise to carry it out. He would not go back on his word after that, they said. They also thought he needed time to accustom himself to the concession. And they waited. The others worked.

While the Tsar was hesitating between two courses Fate in its ironical mood played a trick which probably decided him. The reform which had actually been assented to by Alexander II. had, as we saw, been hindered by the very men who were sacrificing money, liberty, life, to attain it--the revolutionists. And now again, just when it was about to be confirmed, had, in fact, been confirmed in writing by the Tsar[10] and the ministers, these same revolutionists through their executive committee sent him a long-winded, arrogant, and argumentative letter[11] taking credit for the murder of his father, but assuming that the son would see eye to eye with them and concede to vulgar threats what they fancied had been denied to reason. They ended their missive with a demand for a representative body to be chosen by free general election and, until the voting ceased, for liberty of the press, of speech, and of meeting. I received a copy of this curious document from S.K., who remarked that its effect on the Emperor would be like that of the red cloth on the bull in the ring. "There is now no hope of a {81} constitution," he added. "The executive committee of the revolutionary party is composed of downright fools."

Rumours which ran wild in those troublous days credited the celebrated General Skobeleff with a sudden dictatorial impulse to which he was said to be giving reinless scope when chance or design removed him from the scene. There was no doubt that he was supremely dissatisfied with the course things political were taking, and it was known that he had sulkily refused a post offered to him by Loris Melikoff. I, who was then one of the representatives of the anti-German tendency in the Russian press, and was also in touch with an officer who was Skobeleff's intimate friend and boon companion, was well aware of that. According to the improbable story current, he harboured a plan to march at the head of a body of devoted troops, surround the Winter Palace, arrest the Tsar, and proclaim a constitution. In order the better to execute this scheme he took Count Nicholas Ignatieff, who had been Ambassador to Russia, into his confidence, and Ignatieff first approached Melikoff on the subject, but receiving no encouragement from that quarter, and fearing to be compromised, he denounced the plot to the Tsar. Such was the rumour. But the project was so utterly out of touch with all the circumstances that in the absence of good evidence, which is lacking, I shrink from ascribing it to a man like Skobeleff. For although ambitious he was also shrewd, had everything to lose by the probable failure of the scheme, and little or nothing to gain by its success which was doubtful. His sudden death, attributed to poison, has been instanced as a corroborative circumstance, but Skobeleff's life--a life like that of my fellow-student at the lectures on Genesis--explains his death quite as satisfactorily as the assumption that he fell by the hand of a member of the Holy League.[12]

Nearly two months passed in doubt and hesitation before the new Tsar made up his mind what course to strike out. {82} In the end Pobiedonostseff won him over to autocracy and received the order to draw up a manifesto to the nation announcing the fateful decision, which was duly signed and promulgated.[13] Loris Melikoff and some of his colleagues, who had not been informed of the Emperor's gradual conversion to the old ideas and had no foreknowledge of the manifesto, resigned and fell into disfavour. The revolutionists were roused to fury by the new course which was entered upon after so much deliberation, persevered in with firmness, and sustained with more method and thoroughness than is usual in Russian politics. Their anger was impotent, however, against the systematic precautions adopted by the new government, and they no longer had the sympathy of the people, without which no great Liberal movement could lead to practical results. The terrorists had overshot the mark and defeated their object, and new problems of absorbing interest in the economic domain received actuality and diverted public attention to other channels. Thus closed a thrilling chapter of Russian history which may be epitomised as a waste of energy for lack of vision. The government reproached the revolutionists with being out of touch with the people whose aims and strivings they misunderstood, and the revolutionists hurled back the taunt. Both were right. In the meanwhile the people's attitude towards the two adversaries resembled that of Candide towards Pangloss when he set forth his proofs that this is the best of all possible worlds, "Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."

[1] By way of preparation I had studied Slav languages at the University of Innsbruck, and afterwards under Leskien at the University of Leipzig, and the first period of my sojourn in Russia was spent on the Steppes of the Ukraine where I acquired the language of the province. Since then I lived and worked for years in close contact with the Liberal movement under three Tsars, and in various capacities as a student, as a graduate of two Russian Faculties and Universities, as Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Kharkoff, as the author of several literary and scientific works, as leader-writer of two Russian newspapers and editor of one, as representative of the Daily Telegraph, and adviser to my eminent friend Count Witte.

[2] Others were Russia's only philosopher, Vladimir Solovieff, who afterwards became a close friend of mine; Katkoff, the greatest journalist Russia ever had, the editor of the principal Moscow daily paper; and Bilbassoff, editor of the Petersburg _Goloss_.

[3] Timasheff.

[4] The "Kadets" are the Constitutional Democrats presided over by M. Milyukoff. The name arose from the initial letters of the two words--K.D.

[5] This injunction was religiously carried out by a number of ardent spirits of both sexes who grudged no effort, shrank from no sacrifices to reach the hearts and brains of the lower classes. Sophia Perovskaya went among the working women of the capital, subsequently joined the terrorists, and finally was hanged for the murder of Alexander II. I looked upon her face as she was being taken to the place of execution. Officers like Shishka abandoned the army and became factory hands. Altogether no fewer than three thousand apostles thus went among their own and their own received them not. The peasants and the workers looked with contemptuous wonder upon these political missionaries.

[6] In the same house there was a joint-stock concern of which Patkanian was a director, and I had an appointment there with him at the very hour when the whole place was to have been blown up had the Tsar returned that way.

[7] A dvornik, literally the "gate keeper," is one of several house janitors whose duties were to carry fuel to the flats, take the passports to the police, watch at the gates all night, and spy on the inmates of the house.

[8] Saburoff, Nabokoff, Solsky, Abaza, and Milyutin.

[9] Held on 30th March, 1881.

[10] By a remark penned on the project and by his announcement to the Grand Duke Vladimir.

[11] Dated 10th/22nd March, 1881.

[12] A secret society for the protection of the person of the Tsar, consisting of members of the nobility presided over by the Grand Duke Vladimir, who agreed to adopt the methods of the terrorists, but appear to have shrunk from redeeming their pledge.

[13] On 11th May.

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