§2
While I was still at Perm, I had heard much about Tufáyev, but the reality far surpassed all my expectations.
There is no person or thing too monstrous for the conditions of Russian life to produce.
He was born at Tobolsk. His father was, I believe, an exile and belonged to the lowest and poorest class of free Russians. At thirteen he joined a band of strolling players, who wandered from fair to fair, dancing on the tight rope, turning somersaults, and so on. With them he went all the way from Tobolsk to the Polish provinces, making mirth for the lieges. He was arrested there on some charge unknown to me, and then, because he had no passport, sent back on foot to Tobolsk as a vagabond, together with a gang of convicts. His mother was now a widow and living in extreme poverty; he rebuilt the stove in her house with his own hands, when it came to pieces. He had to seek a trade of some kind; the boy learned to read and write and got employment as a clerk in the town office. Naturally quick-witted, he had profited by the variety of his experience; he had learned much from the troupe of acrobats, and as much from the gang of convicts in whose company he had tramped from one end of Russia to the other. He soon became a sharp man of business.
At the beginning of Alexander’s reign a Government Inspector was sent to Tobolsk, and Tufáyev was recommended to him as a competent clerk. He did his work so well that the Inspector offered to take him back to Petersburg. Hitherto, as he said himself, his ambition had not aspired beyond a clerkship in some provincial court; but now he set a different value on himself, and resolved with an iron strength of will to climb to the top of the tree.
And he did it. Ten years later we find him acting as secretary to the Controller of the Navy, and then chief of a department in the office of Count Arakchéyev,[[88]] which governed the whole Empire. When Paris was occupied by the Allied Armies in 1815, the Count took his secretary there with him. During the whole time of the occupation, Tufáyev literally never saw a single street in Paris; he sat all day and all night in the office, drawing up or copying documents.
[88]. Arakchéyev (1769-1835) was Minister and favourite of Emperor Alexander I; he has been called “the assassin of the Russian people.”
Arakchéyev’s office was like those copper-mines where the workmen are kept only for a few months, because, if they stay longer, they die. In this manufactory of edicts and ordinances, mandates and instructions, even Tufáyev grew tired at last and asked for an easier place. He was of course, a man after Arakchéyev’s own heart—a man without pretensions or distractions or opinions of his own, conventionally honest, eaten up by ambition, and ranking obedience as the highest of human virtues. Arakchéyev rewarded him with the place of a Vice-Governor, and a few years later made him Governor of Perm. The province, which Tufáyev had passed through as acrobat and convict, first dancing on a rope and then bound by a rope, now lay at his feet.
A Governor’s power increases by arithmetical progression with the distance from Petersburg, but increases by geometrical progression in provinces like Perm or Vyatka or Siberia, where there is no resident nobility. That was just the kind of province that Tufáyev needed.
He was a Persian satrap, with this difference—that he was active, restless, always busy and interfering in everything. He would have been a savage agent of the French Convention in 1794, something in the way of Carrier.[[89]]
[89]. Infamous for his noyades at Nantes; guillotined in 1794.
Profligate in his life, naturally coarse, impatient of all opposition, his influence was extremely harmful. He did not take bribes; and yet, as appeared after his death, he amassed a considerable fortune. He was strict with his subordinates and punished severely those whom he detected in dishonesty; but they stole more under his rule than ever before or since. He carried the misuse of influence to an extraordinary pitch; for instance, when despatching an official to hold an enquiry, he would say, if he had a personal interest in the matter, “You will probably find out so-and-so to be the case,” and woe to the official if he did not find out what the Governor foretold.
Perm, when I was there, was still full of Tufáyev’s glory, and his partisans were hostile to his successor, who, as a matter of course, surrounded himself with supporters of his own.