The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this code.
It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms from the government. Nothing was lawless, so it was argued, when directed, in self-defence, against the representatives of a system that was the embodiment of bloodthirsty lawlessness.
Thus peaceful missionaries became Terrorists. The government inaugurated a system of promiscuous executions; the once unresisting propagandists retaliated by assassination after assassination. Socialists were hanged for disseminating their ideas or for resisting arrest; high officials were stabbed or shot down for the bloodthirsty cruelty with which they fought the movement; and finally a series of plots was inaugurated aiming at the life of the emperor himself.
The White Terror of the throne was met by the Red Terror of the Revolution.
CHAPTER VI.
A MEETING ON NEW TERMS.
IT was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young engineer in Kharkoff—a slender little man with eyelids that looked swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy appearance—was filled with Nihilists come to hear “an important man from St. Petersburg.” The governor of the province had recently been killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was asserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.
The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand, but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin’s face as anæmic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin had been expelled from the University for signing some sort of petition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain kind of magnetism.