VII.
After this rapid general survey of the condition of mind of the more advanced women in Russia I come to the tragic story of Vjera Sassulitch. It is a story typical of the base cruelty of autocratic government; typical also of the results such a system must needs produce.
The victim and heroine of that ever-memorable tragedy was not, at first, a member of any secret organization. Far from it. At the age of seventeen, Vjera, then a mere school-girl, had made the acquaintance of another school-girl, whose brother was a student. In the course of this innocent girlish friendship she was induced to take care of a few letters destined for the student, Netchaieff, who afterwards played a part in the revolutionary movement. A "Nihilist" Miss Sassulitch, at that time, certainly was not. Her whole ambition centred in the wish of passing her examination to qualify herself for a governess, which she did "with distinction."
Netchaieff's democratic connections having been denounced by a traitor, whom he thereupon slew, the school-girl of seventeen, who had known his sister, and him through her, was thrown into prison as one "suspected" of conspiracy. There was not a shadow of proof against her. No accusation was even formulated against her. Nevertheless she was kept, for two long years, in the Czar's Bastille—an eternity of torture for a captive uncertain of her fate. These were the words which her counsel, Mr. Alexandroff, addressed to the jury, when, later on, she was tried for an attempt upon Trepoff, one of the most hated tools of despotic profligacy:—
"The time between the eighteenth and the twentieth year—these are the years of youth when childhood ceases; when impressions lasting for life are most powerful; when life itself appears yet spotless and pure. For the maiden it is the most beautiful time—the time of budding love—the time when the girl rises to the fuller consciousness of womanhood—the time of fanciful reverie and enthusiasm—the time to which, in later days, as a mother and a matron, her thoughts will yet fondly turn. Gentlemen of the jury! you know in the company of what friends Vjera Sassulitch had to pass her best years. The walls of a casemate were her companions. For two years she saw neither mother, nor relations, nor friends. Sometimes she heard that her mother had come and had given a message of greeting. That was all she was allowed to learn. Locked up without occupation within the walls of a prison!... Everything human concentrated in the single person of the turnkey who brings the food!... The monotonousness only broken, now and then, by the call of the sentinel, who, peering through the window bars, asks,—'Prisoner, have you not done any harm to yourself?' or by the rattling of the locks and door-bolts, the clack of guns shouldered or grounded, or the dreary striking of the hour in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.... Far, far away from everything human!... Nothing there to nourish the feelings of friendship and love; nothing but the sympathy created by the knowledge that, to the right and to the left, there are fellow-sufferers passing their wretched days in the same way.... Thus it was that, in the depth of her solitude, there arose, in Vjera Sassulitch, such warm-hearted sympathy for every State prisoner that every political convict sufferer became for her a spiritual comrade in her recollections, to whom she assigned a place in the experience and the impressions of her past life."
During the two years that Vjera was kept in dungeons under a mere suspicion, she was twice only subjected to a secret inquiry—"judicial," if that is a word applicable to these dread Inquisition procedures. At last she feared she was forgotten. Nothing whatever having come out against her, she was finally set free, and went back to her heart-broken mother, only to be suddenly re-arrested ten days afterwards! For a moment, in spite of a two years' bitter experience, she childishly thought there was some mistake. But the horrible truth of her situation soon broke upon her. One morning she was seized in prison, and, without being allowed to take even a change of dress, or a mantle, transported by gendarmes to a distant province by way of banishment. One of these gendarmes threw his own fur over her shivering shoulders, or else she might have perished on the road.
I will not go here through the whole "infernal circle" of her sufferings and involuntary migrations, which I have elsewhere described more fully. I will not relate how she was "moved on" from one place to the other; the only variety in her treatment consisting of an occasional return to prison. Eleven years had thus altogether elapsed when at last, in those vast dominions of the Czar, and amidst more thrilling events which began to crowd upon public attention, she seemed to be really forgotten. In this way she managed clandestinely to go back to the capital, whence again she started for Pensa. It was there that, by chance, she learnt from the Novoje Vremja ("New Times,") the infamous treatment of Bogoljuboff, a political prisoner, by the chief of the police at St. Petersburg, the vile and universally despised Trepoff, the personal, intimate, and pampered darling of Alexander II.
The flogging practices of this tyrannic head of the "Third Section" are still in every one's recollection. In referring to the knouting applied to Bogoljuboff, Vjera Sassulitch's counsel gave the following description:—
"The sufferer whose human dignity is to be insulted, knows not why he is to be punished. He thinks indignation will lend him strength to resist those who throw themselves upon him. But he is grasped by the iron grip of jailers' hands; he is dragged down; and in the midst of the regular counting of the strokes by the leader of the execution, a deep groan is heard—a groan not arising from mere physical pain, but from the soul's grief of a down-trodden, outraged man. At last, silence reigned again. The sacred act was accomplished!"
It was the brooding over such disgrace and affront to which a political prisoner had been subjected in the very capital by an official whose department is under the Czar's direct control that pressed the weapon of revenge into the hands of a tender woman—not so much for her own past miseries as for those of a still suffering fellow-man.
Trepoff had been attacked by Vjera Sassulitch in his own Cabinet, in the very midst of his minions. The jury which tried her was composed almost exclusively of Aulic Councillors and such-like titled dignitaries. Prince Gortschakoff sat among the audience; so did the pick and flower of the upper classes of St. Petersburg. Who could doubt, in presence of the open avowal of the accused, that the verdict would be "Guilty?"
Strange to say, even among the officially faultless remarks of the Public Prosecutor there were some curious admissions. "I, for my part," Mr. Kessel said, "fully believe the statements made by Vjera Sassulitch. I believe that facts appeared to her in the light in which they have been placed here; and I am ready to accept the feelings of Vjera Sassulitch as facts. The Court, however, is bound to measure these feelings, as soon as they are converted into deeds, by the standard of the law." Through the summing up of the Judge there ran a strong vein of interpretations favourable to the accused. "An accused person," he remarked, "could certainly not be looked upon as an infallible commentator on the event with which he or she was connected. At the same time it had to be noted that criminals were to be divided into two groups: those who are led by selfish impulses, and who therefore, in the majority of cases, try to mask the truth by lying statements; and those who commit an act from no motive of personal profit, and who entertain no wish to hide anything of the deed they have done. You, gentlemen of the jury, are in a position to judge how far the statements of Vjera Sassulitch merit your confidence, and to which type of transgressors she most nearly comes up."
This was a clear hint to any intelligent jury; and the jury of Aulic Councillors were intelligent men. Going over all the details of the case, the Judge made a great many more remarks in the same spirit. The audience, who had frequently cheered the eloquence of counsel to such an extent that the President of the Tribunal had to warn them, were on the tip-toe of expectation. When the Foreman brought in the verdict: "No; she is not guilty!" the Hall of Justice—for justice had for once been done—rang with enthusiastic applause. Vjera Sassulitch was borne away in triumph.
In the streets, however,—and here we come once more upon all the dark and terrible ways of Autocracy,—there ensued a fearful scene. An attack was made upon the coach in which Vjera Sassulitch was to be carried home—apparently with the object of getting her once more into police clutches. There was a clash of swords and a confused tumult. Gensdarmes and police broke in upon the mass of people, who wished to protect her. Shots were fired. A nobleman and relation of Vjera, Grigori Sidorazki, lay dead in the street. A lady also, Miss Anna Rafailnowna, a medical student, writhed on the ground, wounded. The victim of so much prolonged persecution had herself mysteriously disappeared. Afterwards, an order for her re-arrest, marked "No. 16," and dated from the Secret Department of the Town, came to light—evidently through information given by an affiliate of the Revolutionary Committee within the police administration itself. This occult connection of sundry officials with the leaders of the Democratic or Nihilist Conspiracy explains why Government should so often have been hampered in its efforts to suppress that organization.
The verdict of "not guilty," in the case of Vjera Sassulitch, has been followed by several similar ones—a strong proof of the sympathy felt among the town populations, at least, with the aims of the revolutionists. Franz von Holtzendorff, a well-known legal authority in Germany, wrote on the case above detailed:—"Far more significant than the verdict of the jury is the fact that that verdict, in spite of its contrast to the existing law, has received the approval, as it appears, of the whole Russian press, of the whole of the upper classes, and even of the circles of Russian legists. I have had personal occasion to convince myself that prominent officials of the Russian Empire gave their applause to that verdict." Again, Dr. Holtzendorff said:—
"In Russia, the feelings of right and justice, which are systematically and artificially kept down and repressed, and which have no outlet in public life, concentrate themselves with their full weight in the verdict of a jury. That which the press had no liberty of saying during long years, is given vent to in the debates of a Court of Justice. An accusation is raised on account of a deed which, though punishable as a crime in itself, has been produced and nurtured by a system of administrative arbitrariness and gross ill-treatment that stands morally deep below the deed in question—a system of corruption which cannot be attacked legally, nay, which enjoys all the honours the State can award. And who can help it if an injustice committed day after day, in the name of the State, without any expiation, weighs more heavily upon the public conscience than the act of a single person who, boldly risking his or her own life, rises with a feeling of the deepest indignation against so rotten a system of Government? It is but too natural, this wrathful utterance of the popular voice, when it declares that a high official, who, trusting in the practical approval of the Imperial favour, ordains corporal punishment according to his arbitrary caprice against defenceless prisoners, is guilty of a greater offence than he who feels driven, by a passionate notion of justice, to constitute himself, of his own free will, an avenger of the public conscience.... If, in a State afflicted with political sickness, the institution of the jury had fallen so deep as to work with the mechanical certainty of a military court, and to heed nothing but the points of view of jurisprudence, without being touched by the current of moral aspirations, thus merely registering, with Byzantine obedience, the paragraphs of a code of law: such a phenomenon—keeping, as it would, the Government in a dangerous error as regards public life—would be far more reprehensible than that verdict of 'not guilty' by which a whole system of Government was practically condemned."
The Russian Government system Herr von Holtzendorff, who personally belongs to a very moderate political party, brands as "a system of arbitrary police ordinances, and of the virtual sovereignty of the Adjutants-General of the Czar—a system of administrative deportations, of despotic arrestations, of press-gagging—a swashbuckler's government." Another German writer of some distinction, Dr. Henry Jaques, observes—
"Where an absolutist monarch rules in arbitrary manner, without any limits to his power, the jury becomes the only representative organ of a people utterly bereft of all political rights. In such a case, a jury is indeed entitled to speak, before all, the language of the people, the language of its aspirations towards freedom, which must be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its true rights. Even as, in the Iliad, the orphaned Andromache says to the parting Hector: 'Thou art now father, brother, and dear mother to me!' so the Russian people may say to its jury: 'You are now legislators, judges, and the source of mercy at one and the same time to me! In you there reposes the One and All of my political hopes, of my political rights!"
Noble words, but vain hope! First of all, it is not correct to say that Vjera Sassulitch had been judged by a jury under a political charge. For political crimes, or accusations, no jury has ever existed under Alexander II. Vjera Sassulitch was charged with what Government chose to consider a common crime; hence only she was brought before a jury. For political offenders, or what Government chooses to regard as political offenders, packed tribunals have always been assigned. Happily, Government overreached itself in the case of Vjera Sassulitch, feeling too secure in the loyalty of its own Aulic Councillors.
Secondly, no sooner had the trial resulted in a verdict of "not guilty," than Count Pahlen, the Minister of Justice, who thought the jury were, of course, quite a safe one, was dismissed. Thirdly, an ukase went forth, withdrawing from the cognizance of juries even cases of "common crime," when such crime was directed against one of the Czar's officials. Fourthly, fresh regulations were framed for a change of the jury system, as well as for the discipline of lawyers acting for the defence. Fifthly, in the teeth of the verdict given in favour of Vjera Sassulitch, a fresh trial was ordered, to be held in a country town, at Novgorod, as soon as she could be recaptured. Finally, Alexander the Liberal, seeing that all ordinary procedures were of no avail, instituted a state of siege and drum-head law for political offenders over a large portion of his Empire.
These are the desperate doings of a despotism maddened by an ever-active host of enemies. It is usually the beginning of the end.