"Be proud, ye Russian men,
Of being the slaves of a Czar!"
Writers of comedies, novelists, delineators of the life of the people, ultra-realistic and cynical describers of the criminal classes arose in rapid succession, whose tendency, one and all, was to show to what a state of corruption Russian society, from top to bottom, had come under the famous "Champion of Order," the dreaded Nicholas. That Czar had been in the habit of speaking of Turkey as the Sick Man. Russia was now shown to be the Sick Man. Neither did St. Petersburg, Moscow or the other chief towns, alone serve as a theme for this kind of semi-political literature. "Provincial Sketches" also came out in a similar strain. These publications obtained an ever-increasing success among those classes—few in number, it is true—which were able to read. A whole "Revelation Literature" sprang up, dealing with cases of governmental corruption. The censorship could not be upheld any longer against these writers with the strict severity of the previous reign. A beaten Absolutism had to do things a little more cautiously; and the watchful eyes of men hitherto treated like slaves quickly found out, with the rapid glance and intuition of the oppressed, that it was safe to "dare it on" a little more than they would have dreamt of doing before the end of the Crimean War. Truly, those Liberals in this country who now denounce that war as a mistake and even a crime, do not know, or do not care to remember, what a relief it brought to Russian Liberals themselves.
Soon after the death of Nicholas, desires, until then only muttered, were publicly expressed for the recall and the amnesty of the Martyrs of the Conspiracy and the Insurrection of December, 1825. Pestel, Ryleieff, Bestujeff-Rumin, and the other leaders, had been strung up on the gallows. Many of those transported to Siberia had died a miserable felon's death in the lead-mines. Brought up in the lap of luxury, they ended like galley-slaves, because they had loved freedom more than wealth and ease. It is reported of one of the political prisoners, a nobleman, that he died in Kamtschatka with a chain round his neck, fastened to the wall. Others had been sent to the Caucasus, which in Russia was long ago said to be "not so much a frontier as a grave-yard." There they had fallen in a hateful war against brave, independent mountain tribes, as the unwilling tools of an aggressive tyranny. Still, some of the sufferers were yet alive—among them men of the foremost families of the country. They had to be allowed to come back. They came—mere shadows and ruins of their former selves. But their decrepit condition was the most telling evidence of the infamy of the Tyrant who had fortunately passed away.
In the salons of the upper classes these suffering witnesses of a terrible past received lavish proofs of admiration. Men would listen with sympathetic avidity to the tales of horror told by them. All those present at such a gathering made it a point to be profuse towards the martyrs with little attentions such as only women ordinarily receive from the other sex. Thirty years—a long time—had passed since the armed struggle in the streets of St. Petersburg. Now, all of a sudden, memories were revived. Political tendencies, which some imagined had died out, came up afresh among a younger generation, for whom the "December Conspiracy" was surrounded with a poetical halo. There was danger in the air for the autocratic principle.
Count Rostoptchin, the same who ordered the burning of Moscow in 1812, said in 1825 he could not understand that attempt at a revolution. He "could understand the French Revolution, because there the ordinary citizen wished to become an aristocrat, but he could not conceive aristocrats wishing to become simple burghers." That was the version of a cynical, though otherwise clever, member of the nobility, who was unable to comprehend the spirit of self-sacrifice for noble aims showing itself even among the wealthy and the "noble" by birth. However, had Count Rostoptchin only been capable of feeling the degradation under which the Russian aristocracy itself lies in its relations with a despotic Crown, he might, even from his own point of view as a mere man of the world, have found a reason for the uprising of independent characters among men of his own rank.
IV.
The more cultured and wealthier classes again came to the front as political agitators, at the accession of Alexander. They wanted to throw down the Chinese Wall which Nicholas had built around them—if it is not an insult to the Chinese to compare the wall they erected as a protection against barbarism with the barrier set up by Nicholas against Western ideas of culture and freedom. At first, Alexander II. did not hold out any hope of reform. Driven to straits, he busied himself with throwing a sop to public opinion by various small relaxations in administrative matters. They were small enough; and they were given with a niggard hand.
Anyone taking a survey of the earlier part of the reign of Alexander II. must see that the main object of his government was to foil the tendency towards the introduction of parliamentary institutions, which was sullenly but perceptibly making its way among the better educated section of the nation; that, with the view of attaining this reactionary end, he pursued the traditional despotic policy of approaching the lower classes on the one hand, and engaging the country in fresh warlike enterprise abroad on the other. Foiled in Europe by England and France, he throws his armies, after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris, with renewed fury upon the Tcherkess tribes. They had long barred the way of Russia towards Asia Minor and Persia, thereby insuring the safety of India from that side. Now Schamyl, the hoary-headed warrior-prophet, is compelled to surrender in his last mountain stronghold. From his lofty Alpine home, which is filled with the renown of his romantic deeds, he is carried a prisoner to St. Petersburg, there to be stared at by the crowd of decorated slaves of autocracy.
With this "pacification" of the Caucasus, the Czar obtained the unimpeded use of the high-road leading into Asia Minor. He then struck a blow against the independent tribes on the eastern shore of the Caspian. With the Court of Teheran he entered into relations calculated to threaten Turkey with a double danger from the Asiatic side, in case of a renewal of war. Again, he enlarged his Empire, at the cost of China, by filching territories as extensive as some of the greatest European countries. In what once was Independent Turkestan, his armies overran one Khanate after the other, thus coming nearer and nearer to India from the north-west. There is a striking war-picture by Vereshagin, with a pyramid of skulls as its centre—a very Golgotha of the horrors of massacre; but Russian monarchs, in their ceaseless career of conquest, out-Tatar the Tatar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in these Turkestan campaigns:—"Kill all; spare no age, or sex!" Witness also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head of Holy Russia, the magnanimous Champion of Religion and Humanity, made his victorious entry into Plevna,[48] carousing there jubilantly, whilst the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two days—a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony.
I have anticipated for a moment the course of events. In glancing at the reign of Alexander II., the eye involuntarily runs over the full panorama of tyrannic outrages. From the time of the wholesale proscription of the Tcherkess and Abchasian tribes to the heart-rending horrors committed against Toork populations and wounded Ottoman prisoners of war, there has been, in his career, a perfect climax of inhumanity. Conferences for the professed humanization of warfare were, with him, only the hypocritical precursors of fresh barbarities. But it is not necessary to forestall events. Enough was done in the way of atrocities even in the earlier years of his rule.