It has been proved over and over again that the village clergy in Russia are so much taken up by their functions—performing baptisms and marriages, administering Communion to the dying, and so on—that they cannot pay due attention to the schools; even when the priest is paid for giving the Scripture lesson at a village school he usually passes that lesson to some one else, as he has no time to attend to it himself. Nevertheless the higher clergy, exploiting the hatred of Alexander II. toward the so-called revolutionary spirit, began their campaign for laying their hands upon the schools. ‘No schools unless clerical ones’ became their motto. All Russia wanted education, but even the ridiculously small sum of two million roubles included every year in the State budget for primary schools used not to be spent by the Ministry of Public Instruction, while nearly as much was given to the Synod as an aid for establishing schools under the village clergy—schools most of which existed, and now exist, on paper only.
All Russia wanted technical education, but the Ministry opened only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from reading and thinking. In these gymnasia only two or three per cent. of the pupils succeeded in completing an eight years’ course, all boys promising to become something and to show some independence of thought being carefully sifted out before they could reach the last form, and all sorts of measures were taken to reduce the numbers of pupils. Education was considered as a sort of luxury, for the few only. At the same time the Ministry of Education was engaged in a continuous, passionate struggle against all private persons and institutions—district and county councils, municipalities, and the like—which endeavoured to open teachers’ seminaries or technical schools, or even simple primary schools. Technical education—in a country which was so much in want of engineers, educated agriculturists, and geologists—was treated as equivalent to revolutionism. It was prohibited, prosecuted; so that up to the present time, every autumn, something like two or three thousand young men are refused admission to the higher technical schools from mere lack of vacancies. A feeling of despair took possession of all those who wished to do anything useful in public life; while the peasantry were ruined at an appalling rate by over-taxation, and by ‘beating out’ of them the arrears of the taxes by means of semi-military executions, which ruined them for ever. Only those governors of the provinces were in favour at the capital who managed to beat out the taxes in the most severe ways.
Such was the official St. Petersburg. Such was the influence it exercised upon Russia.
V
When we were leaving Siberia we often talked, my brother and I, of the intellectual life which we should find at St. Petersburg, and of the interesting acquaintances we should make in the literary circles. We made such acquaintances, indeed, both among the radicals and among the moderate Slavophiles; but I must confess that they were rather disappointing. We found plenty of excellent men—Russia is full of excellent men—but they did not quite correspond to our ideal of political writers. The best writers—Chernyshévsky, Mikháiloff, Lavróff—were in exile, or were kept in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, like Písareff. Others, taking a gloomy view of the situation, had changed their ideas, and were leaning toward a sort of paternal absolutism; while the greater number, though holding still to their beliefs, had become so cautious in expressing them that their prudence was almost equal to desertion.
At the height of the reform period nearly everyone in the advanced literary circles had had some relations either with Hérzen or with Turguéneff and his friends, or with the ‘Great Russian’ or the ‘Land and Freedom’ secret societies, which had at that period an ephemeral existence. Now, these same men were only the more anxious to bury their former sympathies as deep as possible, so as to appear above political suspicion.
One or two of the liberal reviews which were tolerated at that time, owing chiefly to the superior diplomatic talents of their editors, contained excellent material, showing the ever-growing misery and the desperate conditions of the great mass of the peasants, and making clear enough the obstacles that were put in the way of every progressive worker. The amount of such facts was enough to drive one to despair. But no one dared to suggest any remedy, or to hint at any field of action, at any outcome from a position which was represented as hopeless. Some writers still cherished the hope that Alexander II. would once more assume the character of reformer; but with the majority the fear of seeing their reviews suppressed, and both editors and contributors marched ‘to some more or less remote part of the empire,’ dominated all other feelings. Fear and hope equally paralyzed them.
The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary circles, and we went occasionally to their friendly gatherings; but the moment the conversation began to lose its frivolous character, or my brother, who had a great talent for raising serious questions, directed it toward home affairs, or toward the state of France, where Napoleon III. was hastening to his fall in 1870, some sort of interruption was sure to occur. ‘What do you think, gentlemen, of the latest performance of “La Belle Hélène”?’ or, ‘What is your opinion of that cured fish?’ was loudly asked by one of the elder guests, and the conversation was brought to an end.
Outside the literary circles things were even worse. In the sixties Russia, especially in St. Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. ‘What has become of them?’ I asked myself. I looked up some of them; but, ‘Prudence, young man!’ was all they had to say. ‘Iron is stronger than straw,’ or ‘One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead,’ and similar proverbs, unfortunately too numerous in the Russian language, constituted now their code of practical philosophy. ‘We have done something in our life: ask no more from us;’ or, ‘Have patience: this sort of thing will not last,’ they told us, while we, the youth, were ready to resume the struggle, to act, to risk, to sacrifice everything, if necessary, and only asked them to give us advice, some guidance and some intellectual support.
Turguéneff has depicted in ‘Smoke’ some of the ex-reformers from the upper layers of society, and his picture is disheartening. But it is especially in the heartrending novels and sketches of Madame Kohanóvskaya, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘V. Krestóvsky’ (she must not be confounded with another novel-writer, Vsévolod Krestóvsky), that one can follow the many aspects which the degradation of the ‘liberals of the sixties’ took at that time. ‘The joy of living’—perhaps the joy of having survived—became their goddess, as soon as the nameless crowd which ten years before made the force of the reform movement refused to hear any more of ‘all that sentimentalism.’ They hastened to enjoy the riches which poured into the hands of ‘practical’ men.