UNDER NICHOLAS I.
I understand that doom awaits him who first rises against the oppressors of the people. When has Liberty been redeemed without victims? Fate has already condemned me. I shall perish for my native land. I feel it, I know it, and gladly bless my destiny.—Ryleev.
fabled king of Thrace fed his horses on human flesh, but a real czar of Russia washed his streets with blood. On his accession to the red throne, the Iron Despot immediately expelled progress from his empire by butchering the Decembrists—those pioneers of freedom who fought for a constitution and the abolition of serfdom. Exiles began to tramp the lonely Siberian highway, and from the time of that Nicholas I. to this Nicholas II.—a period of 75 years—over a million political prisoners have taken the 'long journey.'
The mighty country was turned into a military camp. The term of service was twenty-five years. The life was so hard that when a man was recruited, his relatives followed him as if to his grave. His mother ran after him, and sometimes fell dead on the spot. The emperor spent his time reviewing troops and altering uniforms.[1] If an officer appeared in the streets with the hooks of his uncomfortable collar unfastened, he was liable to be degraded to the rank of a common soldier and deported to some distant province. If a soldier complained of his diet, or was guilty of the slightest infraction of the most insignificant rule, he was condemned to run the gauntlet. He was stripped naked, his hands were tied behind him, and he was brought between two long rows of pawing privates and eager 'non-coms,' equipped and armed with sticks, whips and gun-stocks. Behind the soldiers stood officers commanding, "Harder! Harder!" Thru these lines the victim was compelled to run—because in yesterday's paltry parade conducted by a petty sergeant, he scratched his itching neck. At first it was his shoulders which they struck, but before he had gone very far he had no longer a back, but only a bleeding mass of quivering flesh thru which parts of the bones protruded. A doctor was always present to see that the culprit did not die before receiving his full punishment. That is, if he were booked for 500 blows and was on the point of succumbing after receiving 300, it was the physician's duty to send him to a hospital to regain sufficient strength to allow the additional 200 to be administered. However, in spite of the medicus, the mangled men often perished before their time, and then there was nothing to do but beat the corpse.[2]
During this reign originated the widespread system of stealing Jewish children from their homes, separating them from their families, severing them from their faith, and bringing them up to serve in the army. These were the Cantonists.[3] Thus it came about that when a mother of Israel gave birth to a boy, she did not rejoice as for one born and living, but lamented as for one dead and departed. (Sometimes Jewish mothers saved their children from the army by cutting off their fingers, or taking out one of their eyes).
Liberty was so shackeled she did not even dare weep aloud.[4] Since that unlucky day when Ryleev, Pestel, Bestuzhev, Kakovsky and Muraviov-Apostol dangled from a tall straight post and a strong crossbar, no revolutionist arose to oppose tyranny. During all the many years of the reign of Nicholas-with-the-Stick, no ray of light brightened a darkened nation, no torch glimmered in the bloody gloom. Hope was dead. Freedom was buried. Literature was in exile. Knowledge lay in a closed coffin. But censorship was alive, and autocracy had more eyes than Argus.
An anonymous pamphlet, toward the end of his reign, cried out that the czar had rolled a great stone before the door of the sepulchure of Truth, that he had placed a strong guard round her tomb, and in the exultation of his heart had exclaimed, "For thee, no resurrection!"