During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare: it is true that he exiled Púshkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member;[[27]] but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not swollen to its later proportions: it was merely an office, presided over by De Sanglin, a freethinking old gentleman and a sayer of good things, in the manner of the French writer, Etienne de Jouy. Under Nicholas, De Sanglin himself came under police supervision and passed for a liberal, though he remained precisely what he had always been; but this fact alone serves to mark the difference between the two reigns.
[27]. The president had proposed to elect Arakchéyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilyá Baikov, the Tsar’s coachman. “He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,” he said.
The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. On the contrary, men became zealots for tyranny, some to gain their own ends, while others were even worse, because they had nothing to gain by subservience.
Women alone were not guilty of this shameful denial of their dear ones. By the Cross none but women were standing; and by the blood-stained guillotine there were women too—a Lucile Desmoulins, that Ophelia of the French Revolution, wandering near the fatal axe and waiting her turn, or a George Sand holding out, even on the scaffold, the hand of sympathy and friendship to the young fanatic, Alibaud.[[28]]
[28]. Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, with Danton, April 5, 1794; his wife, Lucile, soon followed him. Alibaud was executed July 11, 1836, for an attempt on the life of Louis Philippe.
The wives of the exiles were deprived of all civil rights; abandoning their wealth and position in society, they faced a whole lifetime of slavery in Eastern Siberia, where the terrible climate was less formidable than the Siberian police. Sisters, who were not permitted to accompany their condemned brothers, absented themselves from Court, and many of them left Russia; almost all of them retained in their hearts a lively feeling of affection for the sufferers. But this was not so among the men: fear devoured this feeling in their hearts, and none of them dared to open their lips about “the unfortunate.”
As I have touched on this subject, I cannot refrain from giving some account of one of these heroic women, whose history is known to very few.
§2
In the ancient family of the Ivashevs a French girl was living as a governess. The only son of the house wished to marry her. All his relations were driven wild by the idea; there was a great commotion, tears, and entreaties. They succeeded in inducing the girl to leave Petersburg and the young man to delay his intention for a season. Young Ivashev was one of the most active conspirators, and was condemned to penal servitude for life. For this was a form of mésalliance from which his relations did not protect him. As soon as the terrible news reached the young girl in Paris, she started for Petersburg, and asked permission to travel to the Government of Irkutsk, in order to join her future husband. Benkendorf tried to deter her from this criminal purpose; when he failed, he reported the case to Nicholas. The Tsar ordered that the position of women who had remained faithful to their exiled husbands should be explained to her. “I don’t keep her back,” he added; “but she ought to realise that if wives, who have accompanied their husbands out of loyalty, deserve some indulgence, she has no claim whatever to such treatment, when she intends to marry one whom she knows to be a criminal.”
In Siberia nothing was known of this permission. When she had found her way there, the poor girl was forced to wait while a correspondence went on with Petersburg. She lived in a miserable settlement peopled with released criminals of all kinds, unable to get any news of her lover or to inform him of her whereabouts.