III.
So deeply shaken was the Empire by the events of 1853-56, that Alexander did not dare for several years—in fact, not until 1863—to ordain any fresh recruitment for the army. This necessity greatly diminished the oppressive power of the Crown. At the same time, public opinion showed signs of a threatening unrest. An "Underground Literature," as it was called, began once more to express the ideas of the better-educated, progressive classes. Among the troops, the "Songs of the Crimean Soldiers," by Tolstoy, an artillery officer, made a great stir. Count Orloff, then Minister of the Police, wrote to the Commanding-General in the South, that he should silence these rebel songs. The General somewhat bluntly replied, "Please come yourself, and try to silence them!"
Among the secret publications then in vogue there were some political poems of Pushkin, hitherto only known in clandestine manuscript form. Pushkin is often called, with a great deal of exaggeration, the Russian Byron, whereas others will only let him pass as a Byron travestied, wanting in originality, like most of his Russian brother-poets of the end of the last and the beginning of this century. At all events, one of Pushkin's utterances containing the words,
"I hate thee and thy race,
Thou autocratic villain,"
does not lack in allusive clearness. Secretly printed abroad, his writings were largely propagated at Alexander the Second's accession. Again, men like Lawroff—who, ten years later, was imprisoned as a suspect, after Karakasoff's attempt against the life of the Czar—had celebrated the advent of the successor of Nicholas with such ironically questionable sentiments as this:—
"Be proud, ye Russian men,
Of being the slaves of a Czar!"
Writers of comedies, novelists, delineators of the life of the people, ultra-realistic and cynical describers of the criminal classes arose in rapid succession, whose tendency, one and all, was to show to what a state of corruption Russian society, from top to bottom, had come under the famous "Champion of Order," the dreaded Nicholas. That Czar had been in the habit of speaking of Turkey as the Sick Man. Russia was now shown to be the Sick Man. Neither did St. Petersburg, Moscow or the other chief towns, alone serve as a theme for this kind of semi-political literature. "Provincial Sketches" also came out in a similar strain. These publications obtained an ever-increasing success among those classes—few in number, it is true—which were able to read. A whole "Revelation Literature" sprang up, dealing with cases of governmental corruption. The censorship could not be upheld any longer against these writers with the strict severity of the previous reign. A beaten Absolutism had to do things a little more cautiously; and the watchful eyes of men hitherto treated like slaves quickly found out, with the rapid glance and intuition of the oppressed, that it was safe to "dare it on" a little more than they would have dreamt of doing before the end of the Crimean War. Truly, those Liberals in this country who now denounce that war as a mistake and even a crime, do not know, or do not care to remember, what a relief it brought to Russian Liberals themselves.
Soon after the death of Nicholas, desires, until then only muttered, were publicly expressed for the recall and the amnesty of the Martyrs of the Conspiracy and the Insurrection of December, 1825. Pestel, Ryleieff, Bestujeff-Rumin, and the other leaders, had been strung up on the gallows. Many of those transported to Siberia had died a miserable felon's death in the lead-mines. Brought up in the lap of luxury, they ended like galley-slaves, because they had loved freedom more than wealth and ease. It is reported of one of the political prisoners, a nobleman, that he died in Kamtschatka with a chain round his neck, fastened to the wall. Others had been sent to the Caucasus, which in Russia was long ago said to be "not so much a frontier as a grave-yard." There they had fallen in a hateful war against brave, independent mountain tribes, as the unwilling tools of an aggressive tyranny. Still, some of the sufferers were yet alive—among them men of the foremost families of the country. They had to be allowed to come back. They came—mere shadows and ruins of their former selves. But their decrepit condition was the most telling evidence of the infamy of the Tyrant who had fortunately passed away.
In the salons of the upper classes these suffering witnesses of a terrible past received lavish proofs of admiration. Men would listen with sympathetic avidity to the tales of horror told by them. All those present at such a gathering made it a point to be profuse towards the martyrs with little attentions such as only women ordinarily receive from the other sex. Thirty years—a long time—had passed since the armed struggle in the streets of St. Petersburg. Now, all of a sudden, memories were revived. Political tendencies, which some imagined had died out, came up afresh among a younger generation, for whom the "December Conspiracy" was surrounded with a poetical halo. There was danger in the air for the autocratic principle.
Count Rostoptchin, the same who ordered the burning of Moscow in 1812, said in 1825 he could not understand that attempt at a revolution. He "could understand the French Revolution, because there the ordinary citizen wished to become an aristocrat, but he could not conceive aristocrats wishing to become simple burghers." That was the version of a cynical, though otherwise clever, member of the nobility, who was unable to comprehend the spirit of self-sacrifice for noble aims showing itself even among the wealthy and the "noble" by birth. However, had Count Rostoptchin only been capable of feeling the degradation under which the Russian aristocracy itself lies in its relations with a despotic Crown, he might, even from his own point of view as a mere man of the world, have found a reason for the uprising of independent characters among men of his own rank.