IV.
The more cultured and wealthier classes again came to the front as political agitators, at the accession of Alexander. They wanted to throw down the Chinese Wall which Nicholas had built around them—if it is not an insult to the Chinese to compare the wall they erected as a protection against barbarism with the barrier set up by Nicholas against Western ideas of culture and freedom. At first, Alexander II. did not hold out any hope of reform. Driven to straits, he busied himself with throwing a sop to public opinion by various small relaxations in administrative matters. They were small enough; and they were given with a niggard hand.
Anyone taking a survey of the earlier part of the reign of Alexander II. must see that the main object of his government was to foil the tendency towards the introduction of parliamentary institutions, which was sullenly but perceptibly making its way among the better educated section of the nation; that, with the view of attaining this reactionary end, he pursued the traditional despotic policy of approaching the lower classes on the one hand, and engaging the country in fresh warlike enterprise abroad on the other. Foiled in Europe by England and France, he throws his armies, after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris, with renewed fury upon the Tcherkess tribes. They had long barred the way of Russia towards Asia Minor and Persia, thereby insuring the safety of India from that side. Now Schamyl, the hoary-headed warrior-prophet, is compelled to surrender in his last mountain stronghold. From his lofty Alpine home, which is filled with the renown of his romantic deeds, he is carried a prisoner to St. Petersburg, there to be stared at by the crowd of decorated slaves of autocracy.
With this "pacification" of the Caucasus, the Czar obtained the unimpeded use of the high-road leading into Asia Minor. He then struck a blow against the independent tribes on the eastern shore of the Caspian. With the Court of Teheran he entered into relations calculated to threaten Turkey with a double danger from the Asiatic side, in case of a renewal of war. Again, he enlarged his Empire, at the cost of China, by filching territories as extensive as some of the greatest European countries. In what once was Independent Turkestan, his armies overran one Khanate after the other, thus coming nearer and nearer to India from the north-west. There is a striking war-picture by Vereshagin, with a pyramid of skulls as its centre—a very Golgotha of the horrors of massacre; but Russian monarchs, in their ceaseless career of conquest, out-Tatar the Tatar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in these Turkestan campaigns:—"Kill all; spare no age, or sex!" Witness also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head of Holy Russia, the magnanimous Champion of Religion and Humanity, made his victorious entry into Plevna,[48] carousing there jubilantly, whilst the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two days—a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony.
I have anticipated for a moment the course of events. In glancing at the reign of Alexander II., the eye involuntarily runs over the full panorama of tyrannic outrages. From the time of the wholesale proscription of the Tcherkess and Abchasian tribes to the heart-rending horrors committed against Toork populations and wounded Ottoman prisoners of war, there has been, in his career, a perfect climax of inhumanity. Conferences for the professed humanization of warfare were, with him, only the hypocritical precursors of fresh barbarities. But it is not necessary to forestall events. Enough was done in the way of atrocities even in the earlier years of his rule.
Between the conquests made in the Caucasus and the annexations on the Amoor or in Central Asia, Alexander II. bullied, and at last put down, by unspeakably cruel means,—even as did his predecessor,—the national aspirations of unhappy Poland. Like Nicholas, he kept the road to Siberia alive with the wretched convoys of unfortunate exiles. Even in the Baltic Provinces, whence the Russian Government draws so many able administrators, diplomatists, and military leaders, whose capacities might be employed in a better cause, he began a system of persecution against the German population, of so galling a nature that it threatened, in course of time, to alienate that very mainstay of the public administration. The special towns' charters of the Baltic Provinces were infringed. The German tongue, hitherto possessing full privileges, was threatened. A process of Russification was attempted; the superior civilized element being pushed and annoyed by the inferior and barbarous one.
These acts of the earliest years of the reign of Alexander II. have to be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the Serf Emancipation measure. On his death-bed, Nicholas is stated to have said to his son:— "Thou hast two enemies—the nobility and the Poles. Emancipate the serfs; and do not allow the Poles any Constitution!"
It is impossible, with the mystery which envelopes the last days of Nicholas, to know whether these words are authentic. At all events, Alexander did not give back to the Poles the Constitution they possessed until 1830. Nor did he grant a Constitution to the Russians either. He emancipated the serfs—but not before the principles which had actuated the Conspirators of 1817-25 once more began to show themselves among the upper strata of society; and in passing his measure, he mainly sought to deprive a restive nobility of some of its influence, and to take the wind out of the sails of those Liberal agitators who would have made the abolition of bondage the outcome of the establishment of a freely-chosen Legislature. When, finally, the Poles, counting upon a corresponding movement in Russia, resolved upon that heroic, though desperate, rising which by anticipation I alluded to in the last article, such fresh cruelties were practised by Alexander II. against the vanquished victims, that every human heart worthy of the name must shudder at the mere recollection of them.
From those days, however, the Conspiratory Movement in Russia began to assume larger proportions. What I have said in the preceding pages, goes far to explain the violence by which that movement has latterly been characterized.