What interest, then, could the young German Princess take in that magnum ignotum, that people unexpressed, poor, semi-barbarous, which concealed itself in its villages, behind the snow, behind bad roads, and only appeared in the streets of St. Petersburg like a foreign outcast, with its persecuted beard, and prohibited dress—tolerated only through contempt.
It was only long afterwards that Catherine heard the Russian people seriously spoken of, when the Cossack Pougatcheff, at the head of an army of insurgent peasants, menaced Moscow.
When Pougatcheff was vanquished, the Winter Palace again forgot the people. And there is no telling when it would have been again remembered had it not itself put its masters in mind of its existence, by rising in mass in 1812, rejecting, on the one hand, the release from serfdom offered to it at the point of foreign bayonets, and, on the other, marching to death to save a country which gave it nothing but slavery, degradation, misery—and the oblivion of the Winter Palace.
This was the second memento of the Russian people. Let us hope that at the third it will be remembered a little longer.
A. HERZEN.
MEMOIRS
OF THE
EMPRESS CATHERINE II.
WRITTEN BY HERSELF.