Puslapio vaizdai
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who had sided with the rebels. There appeared not any alteration in her, nor any fear of death, when the sentence of being burned alive was pronounced against her. Crossing herself, in the Russian manner, over the forehead and breast, she "laid herself quietly down upon the pile, and was burned to ashes."

This semi-emancipated nun may be said to have been the first type of a Russian woman acting, and even dying, in the people's cause. Others were to follow in our days.

II.

THERE had at first been a law which ordained that the serf can only be sold together with the land. This law was soon set aside in practice. The same Czar who burned the public registers of nobility, in order, as he alleged, to put an end to the ceaseless disputes as regards rank-or, as is more probable, in order to do away with some of the last remnants of the prestige and influence of old families-quietly allowed the peasant to be treated like a beast. Peter I., it is true, thundered in a ukase against the evil custom of the sale of children, who were torn away from their parents, or of whole families who were sold from their native cottage into distant and unknown parts of the realm. But the reforming tendencies of this arbitrary ruler did not reach far in the question of serfage. He who handed the cup of poison to his own son in the very presence of his court, and who felt greatly astonished when to his question as to "what was the price for a German professor of natural science," the reply was made that they were not accustomed in Germany to sell professors"-this Czar Peter the Great, who stood himself on so low a level of human culture, could not be expected to be over-enthusiastic in the matter of peasant emancipation.

"

Catharine II., the philosophical Empress, the friend, as she called herself, of Hellenic regeneration, but whose life showed a sadder want of the most ordinary decency than is usually exhibited among the most degraded classes, extended serfdom over the Ukraine, or Little Russia, which at the time of Boris had not formed part of the Muscovite Empire. If Boris had acted with artful suddenness, surprising his intended victims with a tiger-like spring, the deed of enslavement in the Ukraine was, under Catharine, accompanied by even more loathsome falseness. Courtiers who were in the secret, and who had estates in southern Russia, allured, shortly before the appearance of the ukase, as many workingmen as they could to their land, in order, on the given day, to throw the lasso over their heads. Potemkin, the well-known favorite of the Empress, succeeded, before her decree was promulgated, in

having two regiments of grenadiers quartered on his estates. The result was that they became Potemkin's serfs! It was a state-stroke of the most tricky and hideous kind.

The farcical manner in which the philosopherEmpress dealt with serfdom may be seen from the fact of a decree having been issued by her which struck out the word "slave" from the Russian vocabulary, while she herself converted so many men into slaves. By another decree of Catharine (ukase of August 22, 1767) it was enacted that any serf bold enough to present a petition against his master should be knouted and sent for life to a Siberian mine. It is reported that Catharine, " in order to honor philosophy," asked the Academy to express an opinion on the rightful validity of bondage. This servile body of demi-savants and thorough lackeys repliedthat "no doubt all principles of right were in favor of freedom, but that there was a measure in all things" (in favorem libertatis omnia jura clamant, sed est modus in rebus).

III.

THE wholesale enslavement of the peasantry in what is now southern Russia, by Catharine II., had been preceded by the great conspiracy and insurrection at whose head Iemeljan Pugatcheff stood.

For two years-from 1773 to 1775-that dreaded Cossack shook the southeast of the empire.

Having served, during the Seven Years' war, first under Frederick II. of Prussia, and then in the Austrian army, he rose under the name of Peter III., whom the popular legend declared to be still alive. The foul crime Catharine II. had committed she now felt sticking on her hands. It came home to her through this terrible rebellion, in which the counterfeit figure of her murdered husband moved, like an avenger's form, from the misty banks of the Volga toward Moscow's gilded domes.

The history of Russia is full of such false royal apparitions-weird mirages of secret murders. The very attempts of races and classes bent upon escaping from oppression have generally been mixed up in Russia with these impostures of a half-tragic, half-grotesque character. In the story of the pseudo-Demetriuses, and the numerous conspiracies connected with their rise and fall, there is a succession of horrors and deceptions in which the ghastly continually verges upon the ridiculous. After Pugatcheff had been on the scene for a while under the pretense of being Peter III., not only a number of false Peters, but even many false Pugatcheffs, started up, as armed heads, everywhere, until a large part of the empire was filled with a perfect masquerade of returned ghosts and living doubles.

However, the terrific nature of the insurrection was ever present before the eyes of the affrighted Empress Catharine. Malcontents of all kinds took up arms in the lands near the Ural, the Volga, and the Don. These insurrectionary outbreaks were not the mere achievement of an ambitious leader; they were the result of a widespread discontent. Tribes which had lost their national independence made common cause with enslaved men that once were yeomen on their own freehold property. The spirit of Spartacus mingled with that of Vercingetorix and Civilis. Rebellious hinds, workmen from the salt and metal mines, religious dissenters, Raskolniks, and the like, together with Cossacks, Calmucks, Bashkirs, Wotjaks, Permjaks, and other Finnic and Tartar hordes, were taken into the ranks of the insurgents, whom Pugatcheff hurled against the Muscovite Empire. Poles, exiled as captives to those southeastern provinces, helped to organizė his artillery. Kazan, the old Tartar capital, fell into his hands. One Russian general after the other was defeated by him. The troops of Catharine II., in many cases, went over to Pugatcheff, delivering their officers into his hands. He hanged the officers, and took the soldiers into his army, dressing them in Cossack fashion, with their hair and beards trimmed in the manner of those bold raiders. For a time Pugatcheff was the Czar in eastern Russia.

Moscow, where a hundred thousand serfs lived, showed signs of deep agitation. The masses began to talk boldly of freedom. Threats of a wholesale massacre of their masters were heard. In this grave crisis Generals Suwaroff and Panin at last succeeded in cutting off the leader of the insurrection from the bulk of his forces. Being surprised, he was pinioned, put in an iron cage, and thus delivered over to the tender mercies of the philosopher-Empress.

I have before me a painfully interesting account of the last days of the bold Cossack leader of this servile revolt, published in London in 1775, under the title of "Le Faux Pierre III." There we read: "The clemency of the Empress having restricted the action of the judges, who would have considered it a duty to accumulate tortures in order to punish him for his misdeeds, they simply condemned him, in their sentence, to have his feet and hands cut off, and then to be beheaded." This was the merciful view which Catharine, the murderer of her own consort, took. But by a strange aberration of the executioner she was foiled in her humane desire.

Instead of first cutting off Pugatcheff's feet and hands, the executioner began by striking off his head. Taken to task for this reversal of the order, he excused himself by saying that he had labored under a sudden access of forgetfulness.

The book quoted above, which is a translation from a Russian work, says, however, that many believed there had been secret orders from adherents of the condemned leader, forcing the executioner to act as he did. This reminds one almost of the secret orders at present so often issued by the so-called Nihilist League.

It was also said at the time that “powerful secret friends of the impostor had promised the executioner a considerable reward, as well as impunity, for his culpable distraction of mind.'" Others alleged that even the executioner was a friend and adherent of Pugatcheff, and had promised him to shorten his sufferings by hastening his death.

In all this the dark and doubtful character of everything connected with an irresponsible autocracy, which shuns the light and avoids public control, comes out in perfection.

Pugatcheff died bravely, as even his enemies acknowledge. His rising was the last grand attempt at restoring the independence of the steppe tribes, and taking the yoke of villeinage from the cottier. After the fall of this rebel chieftain, the south could not any longer resist the institution of serfdom. "The peasant of the Ukraine," says Ogareff, "yielded to force; but never did he believe that the soil on which he dwells, and which he tills, did not belong to him; and there are still old men who recollect the time when there was no serfage. The Russine peasant considers himself, therefore, proprietor of the soil, and looks upon serfdom as a temporary yoke, inflicted upon him by a foreigner—that is, by the imperialism of St. Petersburg, which, traditionally, he designates as 'Muscovite.'"

IV.

In this way it came to pass at last that nearly the whole population of Russia, north and south, with the exception of a small fraction, comprising the upper classes and a few of the nomadic tribes, had lost the simplest rights of personal freedom. The Slavonic, or Slavonized, Russian race of the center was, in its peasent population, almost to a man under the yoke of serfdom. Whatever "free" peasants still existed were mainly found among the Finns and the Tartars of the outlying provinces. Out of about sixty million inhabitants of European Russia, nearly fifty million were serfs, more than half of whom, at the time of the emancipation decree, under Alexander II., were serfs of the crown domains.

At the same time, the severity with which oppression was exercised had grown year by year, since the days of Boris, in a frightful degree. The ukase prohibiting the sale of landslaves without the land was openly broken in the capital itself. Bondsmen were sold by auction

under the windows of the Imperial Palace. The labor, the body, the life of the peasant remained at the absolute disposal of the owner. With the whip the latter inculcated upon his serf the Muscovite proverb that "a beaten man is worth two unbeaten ones." If ever a proprietor wished to get rid altogether of a hated or incapable worker, he could, on his own responsibility, send him to Siberia. Scarcely ever was a land-owner taken up for downright murder committed against his human cattle.

Such being the general state of things, it looked liked progress that Alexander I. sought to create a class of peasant freeholders by gradual redemption, though on an almost infinitesimal scale. The measure led to very little, from its execution being surrounded by a mass of troublesome and oppressing formalities. As often as autocracy put its hand to this question, it did so in a halting, half-hearted way. Two opposite currents of thought were ever at war with each other within the Imperial Government. The Czar was continually thrown backward and forward between the desire of breaking the social power of the nobility by an act of "liberalism" and the fear lest the nobles should do an act of vengeance against him, or outrun him even in liberal aspirations.

In the beginning of the present century the comparatively more decided action was taken by the Court of St. Petersburg with regard to serfdom in those provinces which had been recently acquired or conquered-in Courland, Livonia, Esthonia, Lithuania, and Poland. There the object was to gain over the great mass, as against a nobility of ancient renown and influence. In those parts of the empire the Russian Government, therefore, acted with some degree of resolution. However, apart from such considerations of autocratic state policy, the attitude of the fettered multitude itself—especially in the Baltic provinces-strongly suggested to the authorities the overthrow, or at least the considerable alleviation, of serfage. Toward the end of last century, a deputation of the discontented Baltic peasantry went to Riga and St. Petersburg. After their demands had been refused, the enraged people broke out in open insurrection (1783-84). It was only suppressed after much bloodshed, and by means of a large force of troops. A few years later, when the news of the French Revolution and of the abolition of all socage service came to those distant shores of the Finnic Gulf, the Baltic peasantry compelled the nobility to make some concessions, which, however, were soon retracted. In 1802 a new servile revolt took place. It had been prepared by a conspiracy similar to that of the German Peasant Leagues in the sixteenth century. This

time, again, the rising was overthrown. Not many years afterward, however, an imperial ukase appeared, at least for Livonia and Esthonia, which somewhat bettered the lot of the suffering bondmen.

The whole position of that class in the Baltic provinces was regulated after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. From the position of men bound to the soil, the agricultural laborers were raised to that of farmers enjoying personal freedom, though by no means holding the same position as the corresponding class in other parts of Continental Europe. For the Lithuanian and Polish peasants also Alexander I. meditated some slight reform. The French invasion, albeit quickly repelled, yet brought some change for the better there.

In the Old Muscovite parts of the empire matters remained as bad and as cruelly oppressive as before. The atrocities practiced on the estate of Count Araktcheyeff, the favorite of Alexander I., were of a nature so revolting that their fiendishness can only be said to have been surpassed by those of a lady of the name of Soltykoff, who had been brought to justice in 1788 for having killed, by inhuman tortures, in the course of ten or eleven years, about a hundred of her serfs, chiefly of the female sexamong them several young girls of eleven and twelve years of age! The sole alleviation, under Alexander I., of the lot of the peasantry, was the gradual conversion of not a few of the serfs of the nobility into serfs of the Crown. That is to say, the Crown, by way of redemption or of loans made to the nobles, bought a number of landslaves in order to put them into its own domains.

These Crown peasants" were, of course, not free. Their treatment was better than that of their brethren on the estates of the land-owners. They even possessed the right of removing. But in reality they still were far from having freedom in our sense; for the right of removing was dependent upon so many formalities, not to mention the pecuniary difficulties, that the thought of exercising that right could but seldom take the shape of an act. The small difference between the two kinds of peasants may be seen from the fact that, down to Alexander I., even the Crown peasant could be given away as a present, like any head of cattle. This custom only ceased after the influence of modern ideas had brought about a better treatment of subject classes all through the Continent.

It was the appearance of a foreign army on Russian soil in 1812 which forced the Czar to occupy himself with the question of the abolition of bondage. In order to beat back the invader, the peasantry had to be armed as a mass-levy. The nobility, on their part, readily responded to

the call of Alexander I., who, in his great affright at the approach of the tricolor, hastened in person to the ancient Kremlin of Moscow, to beseech and entreat the aristocracy and the merchants to lend their aid to him. Since the days of Peter I., the Sovereign had not condescended to speak in this way to the nation. The peril was extreme. The answer to the imploring request was not lacking in patriotic decision. While the Pole, the Finn, the Crim Tatar, and other subject races, listened, as it were, with ear held to the ground, to catch the tramping sound of the approaching foreign hosts, the land-owners of Russia personally took up arms to repel the foe, giving at the same time a serf out of every ten for the Czar's army. The merchants offered the tenth part of their revenues.

In the memory and the imagination of the masses, Moscow was always looked upon as the real capital. When Moscow was burned, as an earnest of the national resolve to throw back the invasion at all costs, the gigantic flood of flames spoke with fiery tongues, across the stillness of the Russian snow-desert, to many a sluggish mind. So great a sacrifice seemed worthy of a reward in the shape of liberty at home. Not a few believed in the existence of a patriotic conspiracy, which had brought about the terrible event. This was an error, no doubt. The initiative of the startling act had been taken by the Government authorities themselves. Yet the impression upon the public mind remained a powerful one. The conflagration of Moscow roused many a political sleeper.

V.

I HAVE described before how the contact of the Russian troops with Western nations had led to liberal and parliamentary aspirations. New ideas of human dignity were learned by them, both from the Germans, with whom Russia then was allied, and from their enemies the French. Some of the officers warmly caught this progressive infection. In a smaller degree the uniformed serfs became imbued with unaccustomed notions.

No wonder, under these circumstances, that the proposal to do away with compulsory labor and serfdom should have found warm advocates in the more enlightened circles. At first the Court entered into the question with apparent zeal. Committees of inquiry were appointed. Speeches and articles of a promising character were published. A good result was deemed certain; the Czar himself having apparently been gained over.

But the promoters of the scheme had left out of account the feelings of mistrust which had only been lulled for a while in the heart of the

Emperor. When Alexander I. perceived that there were men who, along with their principles of humanity, harbored political views which clashed with the interests of autocracy, their devotion to the cause of peasant emancipation suddenly filled him with suspicion. The thought rose in him whether the movement in favor of the abolition of serfage was not a desire for bringing about a union of all the elements of opposition. An irresponsible ruler is easily frightened by a shadow on the wall. He sees enemies lurking everywhere. He is not sure of the trustworthiness of any of his own partisans. Alexander all at once recollected the attempts made by the nobles at the advent of the Empress Anna to transform Russia in the Polish or Swedish sense—that is, to convert the Crown into an elective one, or at any rate largely to curtail its privileges, and to introduce a parliamentary representation. He now feared the recurrence of similar aims, the more so because the standardbearers of peasant emancipation might easily become popular among the masses, and thereby acquire irresistible strength.

The Czar's alarm grew from day to day. He already saw himself, in his terrified mind's eye, in the grasp of a court conspiracy. He even thought he was in danger of being dethroned. Poor almightiness of an autocrat !

The deputations which appeared before him for the furtherance of serf emancipation were now received by him with icy coldness. With the zeal of mistrustfulness, he sought to find out why men had taken such great trouble to combine, in order to constitute, so to say, a body of directing reformers, while he himself had been in favor of the reform scheme, which he considered was all-sufficient. His mind became deeply troubled. The memory of his father's violent death tormented him. He would not hear any more of projects which might lead to further demands. So the whole affair, the solution of which had seemed to be near at hand, came to be stopped by the fears of a suspicious monarch, and was finally laid aside altogether.

After Alexander I., Nicholas held the country under his iron heel. The events of 1825 filled that tyrant with deadly hatred against everything connected with liberal tenets. The stillness of death which, during his reign, lay over Russia in a political sense, was, however, not seldom broken by an agrarian riot and by the frequent murder of harsh land-owners. As a rule, the Russian peasant is a good-natured, easy-going, lazy, but docile fellow, averse to blood-shedding and even to personal encounters among his equals-so much so that foreigners often wonder at the tameness with which he bears the grossest insult. Great must, therefore, have been the provocation

which induced the hinds to attack the life of their masters.

In the earlier part of the government of Nicholas, about seventy land-owners were, according to official statistics, killed every year. In 1850 the proportion had risen to two hundred. Hence absenteeism was continually on the increase. Horrible tales now and then came out of the cruelty practiced against land-owners by the otherwise slavish serfs—such as rolling the victim's living body over splintered glass until death put an end to his sufferings. The utter neglect in which the agricultural masses were left with regard to mental culture thus avenged itself in fiendish barbarities, all the more loathsome because the same men who committed them were otherwise of a cringing character, and, in their cups, showed a lachrymose sentimentality which struck the beholder as rather laughable.

Haxthausen says: "Among the Russians all social power makes itself respected by blows, which do not change either affection or friendship. Every one deals blows: the father beats his son; the husband his wife; the territorial lord, or his steward, the peasants-without any bitterness or revenge resulting from it. The backs of the Russians are quite accustomed to blows, and yet the stick is more sensibly felt by the nerves of their backs than by their souls."

Warned by the dangers of the conspiracy and insurrection which had threatened his accession to the throne, and in which so many men of the first families were implicated, Nicholas played toward the serfs a double game. He acted the part of the "Little Father" in his dealings with the peasantry. He sometimes impressed them, by confidential agents, with goodygoody talk about his reforming wishes; that is to say, whenever he stood in need of striking terror once more into malcontent land-owners. But as soon as the signs of dissatisfaction with his harsh and arbitrary government disappeared from among that class, and there were no longer any whisperings in favor of parliamentary rule, the promises of social reform spread about in his name were quickly withdrawn. Occasionally, a proprietor who had flogged a serf to death, or murdered him by slow demoniacal torture, was, under Nicholas, punished for his cruelty. A few restrictions were also placed upon the privileges of the "slaveholder"; but, beyond this, no change was wrought. To give the measure of the ideas of Nicholas as regards peasant freedom, I need only say that he pushed the spirit of bureaucratic regulation so far as to prescribe the plan for building village houses by a decree from St. Petersburg, and that he held to uniformity in the appearance of the streets as much as to uniformity in military concerns.

Meanwhile, as under Czar Paul, who created the institution of "Appanage Serfs," so also under Nicholas, the process of increasing the number of Crown bondmen steadily went on. Nicholas definitively formed a special administration over the Crown serfs. Under every reign, peasants had been attached as serfs to the mines and imperial manufacturing establishments. Under Alexander II., down to 1862, there were still serfs of the printing-office of the Imperial University of Moscow. The compositors had to do compulsory labor for pay below the minimum of wages paid anywhere—a strange irony of fate that men employed in the diffusion of that science which ought to strike off the fetters of the intellect should have been treated as slaves!

VI.

THE abolition of serfdom was the result, as before stated, of the defeat of czardom on the Crimean battle-fields, and the consequent loss of imperial prestige. Something had to be done to allay the feeling of discontent which had spread through all classes. Naturally, the upholder of the principle of unlimited monarchy preferred conciliating the large majority of the people by a boon, the grant of which did not touch the exercise of his unrestricted sovereignty, to satisfying the claims of men who hoped for the introduction of representative government.

In the probable course of events, any convocation of a duma, or Parliament, would have led to the discussion and the enactment of bills for the manumission, and even the partial political representation, of the peasantry. This, however, did not suit Alexander II. At the same time entire inaction was no longer possible to him— the less so because the Polish aristocracy, in the provinces bordering upon Germany, had taken the initiative in favor of serf emancipation. This is a fact generally lost sight of, but of great importance in judging of the causes of the measure which was happily accomplished at last, and for which ignorance and courtier-like adulation now give the Czar the sole credit.

By a decree dated December 2, 1857, Alexander II. accorded to the nobility of Wilna, Kovno, and Grodno, the necessary authorization for electing committees in which peasant emancipation was to be discussed. Thanking them for the readiness they had shown, he ordered the Home Secretary to communicate this rescript to the marshals of the Russian nobility, so that they might proceed to similar action, if they chose. Care was, however, taken not to let the Polish land-owners proceed to an immediate practical realization of their intention, lest they should gain popularity thereby.

There can be no doubt that the readiness of

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