Russian nation which has formed such autocrats, or whether the autocrats have stamped this character upon the nation!"* Exactly the same picture is given a century later by the French Captain Margeret,† who had long served the Russians during the civil wars. Speaking of the State Council he says: "There is no fixed number to this Council; for it entirely depends on the Emperor to appoint as many of them as it pleases him. The Secret Council, when matters of high importance are at issue, is usually composed of the nearest relatives of imperial blood. By way of outward form, the advice of the Church dignitaries is taken, the Patriarch being summoned to the Council with some bishops. But, properly speaking, there is neither law nor Council. There is nothing but the will of the Emperor, be it good or bad, which is free to waste everything with fire and sword, and to strike alike the innocent and the guilty. I hold him to be one of the most absolute princes in the world; for all the inhabitants of the country, whether nobles or commoners, even the Emperor's own brothers, call themselves clops hospodaro—that is, slaves of the Emperor." So hopeless was the bondage of the Russian nation, even at a time when, owing to the frequency of changes on the throne through long civil wars, one might have thought some independence of character would assert itself among the supporters of the different monarchs or pretenders rapidly succeeding, or fighting against, each other in the midst of endless plots. V. A FEW rare cases of the convocation of a special Assembly (Zemskoi Sobor, or Zemskaia Duma), for particular legislative purposes, must, however, be noted. In 1549 that vicious and blood-stained tyrant, Ivan IV., or the Terrible, called an Assembly together for the discussion of a law-code. In these States-General-if that name can be given them -sat the highest Church dignitaries; the abbots of the first-class cloisters; and a number of great noblemen, or boiars. Among the elected members were the deputies of the clergy in town and country, as well as those of the nobility, of the merchants, and of the townsmen in general. Again, in 1556, when a war with Poland threat 1549. ened to break out, Ivan IV. took the opinion of an Assembly for that special case. At his death, in 1584, when his son Feodor, a sickly, half-witted prince, came to the throne, the advisers of that Czar once more convoked an Assembly. In the very same year, his brotherin-law, Boris Godunoff, who belonged to a Tartar family, practically assumed the governing power. Dissolving the Assembly, he ruled in the most absolute manner. In order to gain over the smaller landed proprietors, he added to this political tyranny the enslavement of that section of the peasantry which had not yet been serfs. When the long civil wars and the rule of pretenders drew toward their end, some kind of States-General had of necessity to be convoked for the selection of a new dynasty. This happened in 1613, when Michael Romanoff, the young son of Philaret, the Metropolitan of Rostoff, was chosen. For a few years this Assembly continued to exist, but only with a consultative voice. Originally, Michael Romanoff had been selected by the States-General from the various candidates, on account of a letter produced before them, which purported to be written by Philaret, and in which that Church dignitary was made to say that the Assembly ought not to confer autocratic power upon the monarch whom they should elect, but that the legislative power should be divided between the Czar, the House of Boiars, and the States-General. The oath imposed upon Michael Romanoff was therefore to the effect that he should neither decree laws nor declare war, nor conclude treaties of peace or alliance, nor inflict capital punishment or confiscation of property upon any person, except with the assent of the Boiars and the Parliament. Philaret's letter, which had induced the Assembly to elect his son, was afterward declared to be a forgery. The young Czar himself, a few years later, ordered the Charter of 1613 to be destroyed, and to be replaced by another, in which it is laid down that Michael Romanoff was elected Czar “and Autocrat" of all the Russias. In course of time, the convocation even of the merely consultative Assembly became less and less frequent. At last its existence ceased altogether. After 1682, no convocation took place -except once, under Catharine II., for a temporary object. It is to these sporadic cases of States-Gen* "Rerum Moscovitarum Commentarii," Vienna, eral, if we may call them so, and to a charter enshrouded in some historical doubt, that Russian "Estat de l'Empire de Russie et Grand Duché de liberals have in our time, now and then, referred Moscovie," Paris, 1607. as to a precedent. At least they did so in writings published abroad; Russian censorship having forbidden the subject to be touched upon at all. This title, as I have shown in a special essay in "Fraser," of June, 1876 (“The Russian Imperial Title: a Forgotten Page of History"), was not founded for the first time in 1721, but had already been in use before, toward the end of the sixteenth century. Peter I., Catharine I., Peter II., Anna, Eliza beth, Peter III., Catharine II., Paul I., Alexander I., Nicholas, Alexander II., all ruled on the strict autocratic principle. Peter I.-" the Great "enlarged upon it by extending the liability to corporal punishment from the nobility, which was already subjected to the knout, to the imperial family itself. He had his own sisters whipped! He put his own son to the torture, who died from it. A bestial reign-this reign of a gifted madman, who took a delight in chopping off the heads of a row of alleged political offenders, while quaffing brandy between each fatal stroke of his reddened axe. It was sultanism with a vengeance. VI. WHAT were the Russian nobility-the descendants of a proud and brave conquering race -doing in the mean time, in presence of these saturnalia of tyranny? Strange to say, though humbled to the dust by an insane autocracy, they did not wring the smallest political concession for their own order from the arrogant monarchical power-not even when women sat on the throne. All manly spirit seemed to have gone from them. True, at the death of Peter I., in 1725, some suspicion arose that there was a party among them which might try a coup for the sake of obtaining a constitution, similar to the one in neighboring Sweden or Poland. But the display of some guns, and the marching out of the Imperial Guard by Prince Menshikoff, with whose family she had once lived as a servant, sufficed to cow the would-be conspirators, and to insure the proclamation of Catharine I. as autocratic ruler. By origin, that Empress was a soldier's daughter from Livonia. First a housemaid; then alternately courtesan and mistress of a general, of a nobleman, and lastly of Czar Peter, she finally came to govern an empire in true despotic fashion, with the aid of favorites; a degraded nobility slavishly dancing attendance upon her, even when she had become a helpless drunkard and debauchee. When Peter II. died in 1730, the two leading ministers in the State Council-the Dolgorukoffs and the Gallitzins-seemed to be intent at last upon limiting the power of the Crown. The supporters of merely oligarchial views and the friends of constitutional aspirations were, however, at loggerheads. The result was, that a simple condition was imposed upon Anna, upon whom the crown had been conferred, that she should follow in everything the advice of the Supreme State Council. Parliamentary institutions were not stipulated for. Anna subscribed to the terms; but a fortnight after her arrival she easily restored the autocratic system by a successful conspiracy and state-stroke of her own. In 1740 we come upon a harrowing event. A cabinet minister, Volynski, was tried on the charge of having aimed at a diminution of the armed force of the state; of having (strange crime!) described that monster in human shape, Ivan the Terrible, as a tyrant; and-worst of all of having praised the Polish form of government, while saying that "one had everything to fear from the absolutistic power in Russia." Volynski had committed the imprudence of writing a "Project for the Reform of the Affairs of the State." There were some historical remarks in it, which the Empress interpreted as a comparison between herself and Messalina. Such was her wrath that she looked upon all those who had read the memorandum as accomplices of the unfortunate Minister. The revenge was terrible. It was done in the old Oriental style of Genghis Khan and Timur Lenk. Brought at the Czarina's order before a secret tribunal, mainly composed of military men, Volynski was sentenced to be impaled alive, after having his tongue cut out. His alleged accomplices were to be broken upon the wheel, or beheaded. His innocent children were condemned to exile for life. In her great mercy, the Empress commuted these sentences in the following manner: She ordained that Volynski was to have his tongue cut out, and then his right hand chopped off. His son was exiled to Siberia until the age of fifteen, then to be sent as a common soldier to a garrison in Kamtchatka. His daughters were to be kept in a convent under strict watch, and never to be allowed to issue from the cloister gates. Some of the so-called accomplices of the unhappy would-be reformer were beheaded, or transported as prisoners and exiles to distant parts of the country. This was her imperial mercy. It is said that the Empress fell afterward into a state of extreme terror, thinking she was pursued at night by the mutilated, blood-bespattered phantom of her former minister. On her deathbed she imagined seeing him standing before her in mute reproach. Unutterable fear agitated her at the seeming apparition. Let us hope that there was really enough conscience left in her to feel anguish at the remembrance of her fiendish deed! In 1765 Catharine II., herself a most arbitrary ruler under a philosophical mask, read the documents of Volynski's trial. She left behind her an expression of disapproval, going so far even as to avow that the unfortunate sufferer had been "a good and zealous patriot, and an innocent man, who had unjustly suffered death.” Still, the autocratic form of government remained all the same under Catharine II. VII. We now come to more modern times, only to get deeper into imperial horrors. In 1775, Nathalie, the wife of the then Grand Duke Paul, a German princess from HesseDarmstadt, privately elaborated with Count Panin a constitutional project. A woman of considerable intellect, she seems to have understood that this was the only means of closing the era of oligarchical plots and palace conspiracies ending in murder. Her plan provided for two Houses of Parliament; it had also the gradual emancipation of the serfs for its object. Panin himself, formerly Russian ambassador in Sweden, had acquired a great liking there for the parliamentary system. Still, even his project was rather of an oligarchical than of a really constitutional nature; it would have limited the power of the Crown without conferring freedom upon the nation. Catharine II., on hearing of this project, declared strongly against it. Soon afterward, Nathalie died in child-bed, and a rumor spread of her death having been brought about by the midwife who had attended upon her. Considering the many violent deaths in the imperial house of Russia, the rumor had nothing improbable in it, though no proof could be furnished in point of fact-except the somewhat strange circumstance that “this midwife amassed a great fortune, and that Prince Potemkin" (Catharine's favorite), "who was so haughty and so arrogant toward everybody, went from time to time on a visit to her." The mystery of Nathalie's death was followed by the revelation, through a heap of letters found in a secret drawer, of her intimate relations with Count Razumowski, once the friend of Paul, in his boyhood. Catharine II. had the cruelty to communicate these letters to her son, who thence fell into an access of rage, soon culminating in occasional outbreaks of madness. A slight hope there was, for a moment, of a constitution being obtained after the violent death of Paul I., brought upon him by a palace conspiracy. He was the son of the unfortunate Peter III., who himself had been murdered at the instigation of his own wife, Catharine II. It was Count Orloff, the brother of the paramour of the Empress, who murdered Czar Peter. Tyrannic autocrat as she was, Catharine, in her arbitrary dealings with men, yet preserved some outward politeness of form. In her successor, Paul, the absolutistic fury knew no bounds. "Sir," he once said to a French emigrant, "there is no nobleman except the man to whom I deign to speak, and only as long as I speak to him!" See Prince Dolgorukoff's "La Vérité sur la Russie," from which some of the above details are taken. VOL. VII.-5 Under this violent ruler, men were degraded beyond endurance. By a ukase he compelled all people that met him in their carriages to step down and kneel before him in the street. The slightest whisper of complaint marked a person as a candidate for transportation to Siberia. In his terrible fits of anger he did not even spare the dignity of his fellow-monarchs—as when, for instance, he challenged to duel every sovereign that would not declare war against England. Such a challenge, addressed to the King of Denmark, he had published in the “ Official Gazette " of St. Petersburg. He was on the verge of downright insanity—as all princes are apt to be whose violence of character is not reined in by any limitation of power. The end was that ghastly nocturnal scene, when Paul, attacked by the conspirators, died of the well-known "apoplectic stroke." The midnight surprise originated with the Princes Suboff; Count Pahlen, the Governor-General of St. Petersburg; the Vice-Chancellor, Count Panin; General Uwaroff, and some others. They personally did the deed. Paul's son Emperor Alexander I.—had been drawn into the plot. He gave his assent to a demand for his father's abdication; promising, it is said, by word of mouth, that if he himself were placed on the throne he would grant a charter. -the future It was easy to foresee what result the demand for Paul's abdication would have. Nobody expected that this proud Muscovite Sultan, whose reason was always overmastered by his wrathful impetuosity, would yield to a threat. So the issue of the assault upon his autocratic privilege could not be doubtful in his son's mind. The Czar's bedroom had but a single door. The door toward the Empress's apartments he had shortly before had walled up, expecting danger from that direction. This proved a help to the conspirators. When the monarch, driven to bay, jumped up from his couch with drawn sword, trying to reach the window, they surrounded, throttled, and battered him into such a hideous, mutilated mass of flesh, that the sorry remnants of whatever humanity there was in this mad specimen of royalty had afterward to be hidden from the members of his family. This was one of the typical scenes of absolutistic government, as practiced in Russia for a long time past. On Pahlen and the three brothers Suboff announcing the event to the Czarevitch, who was now Alexander I., the exclamation of the new Emperor simply was, "What a page in history!" Count Pahlen answered, "Sire, the pages that are to follow will throw oblivion over this!" In these words, a reminder was contained of Alexander's promise that he would grant a charter. Of German extraction, but a Russian subject by birth, Pestel had been educated at Dresden, in Germany, and afterward been in the corps of Imperial Pages in Russia. His father was Governor-General of Siberia. Young Pestel took part in the campaigns against France; became a captain; then adjutant of Marshal Wittgenstein; and, lastly, commander of the infantry regiment of Viatka. It is believed that he was the founder, in 1817, of "The League of WellBeing," also called "The Worthy Sons of the Fatherland." This was a short-lived association, probably on account of the great divergence of opinions among its members. Nicholas Turguenieff, a writer otherwise most competent to speak on the subject of these occult movements, denies the existence of "The League of Well-Being." But the report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry, which in later years sat to investigate the origin of the revolutionary outbreak of December, 1825, positively affirms that a league of the name mentioned had been formed in 1817. As a rule, the credibility of a Russian Government commission is not to be placed on a par with the statement or the opinion of a man of so high a character as Nicholas Turguenieff. It must, however, not be forgotten that his book was written in the way of self-defense against the judicial charges of a Government whose persecuting arm reached very far, and which even sought-unsuccessfully, of course to obtain the surrender of Turguenieff's person from an English Government ! It is, therefore, not impossible that Turguenieff may have been unnecessarily inclined to doubt the existence of a secret association of which he had not been a member, but whose doings were nevertheless lugged into a judicial report against himself. Some of the " conspirators" of this first league can not have been very dangerous men; at least not to the monarchical principle. There were those who, in the spirit of Stein, Hardenberg, Gneisenau, Arndt, and Jahn, sought to save monarchy in spite of itself. They did all they could to maintain a line of connection with the existing powers. A few of the Russian wouldbe conspirators were artless enough to propose drawing the Emperor himself into the secretunless the proposal was the very depth of art, and had merely the object of securing for them, in case of detection, a colorable excuse, however lame. The judicial report alluded to does not, indeed, put this interpretation upon the strange suggestion. It simply says that "several members proposed to solicit the assent of the late Emperor (Alexander I.) to the establishment of the society." "the principal provisions of the Code of the IX. AFTER the dissolution of the short-lived League of 1817, a secret association was started under the name of "The Society of Public Welfare." Its name was similar enough to the previous one; its rules, too, were copied from those of the German Tugend-Bund. The members were almost all officers or writers. Modern constitutional ideas were still the prevailing ones in it; but, here and there, democratic notions came up among the more ardent associates. French, German, and English principles of progress and liberalism served as themes of discussion. French writers, Benjamin Constant especially was made use of as an intellectual guide. 66 Of At that time, a few of the older Liberals, such as Admiral Mordwinoff, who wished for a change in the moderate parliamentary sense, were not prepared for the emancipation of the serfs, to which Turguenieff attached great importance. 'We must begin with the throne," said Mordwinoff; "not with the serfs. It is from above that one sweeps the stairs!" He would have been content with the introduction of a constitution on the most aristocratic basis, curtailing the power of the Crown, but leaving the vast mass of the people at the mercy of the landholders. However, the majority of the would-be reformers entertained better, more advanced ideas; and they continually tried to impress the less progressive members with the necessity of working out a great measure of peasant enfranchisement, so as to win over the masses. Those who at present always speak of the "Liberator-Czar" Alexander II. ought to note this fact of the early aspiration toward a manumission of the serfs among the opponents of irresponsible czardom. The Society of Public Welfare had members in the capital, at Moscow, and at Tultschin, in In another passage, the report declares that which latter place the headquarters of the Second Army were established. One of the generals, a commander in the Caucasus, learned, on his arrival at St. Petersburg, that the Emperor had been secretly informed of the existence of the society, and that Government had its eyes upon the members. This he communicated to some of the conspirators, adding that Alexander thought the society a large one-which, in point of fact, was very far from being the case-and that this alone kept him from "playing them a bad trick.' One of the members of the society, General Michael Orloff, also heard through his brother, who was the Emperor's adjutant, that Alexander I. knew of the meetings of the would-be conspirators. Here we have a clew to the Czar's cautious conduct and to his occasional affectation of liberal sympathies. Altogether, his position was a dubious one. The Congress of Vienna had stipulated for the "Kingdom of Poland"-as the Russian portion of the dismembered country was called a representative form of government. Hence the Czar, autocrat in the larger part of his empire, had to observe some constitutional forms in the western section of his dominions. At the opening of the Polish Diet in 1818, he made a speech which seemed to foreshadow similar parliamentary institutions for Russia. These, however, he was evidently bent, at heart, upon preventing as long as he could. At the same time he knew that he was surrounded by men longing for a parliamentary régime-men who might at any moment spring a mine upon him, but whom it would not be safe to attack just now. His father's terrible end was before his eyes as a warning. In the complicated position in which he was placed, Alexander I. no doubt feared that if he unbosomed himself to persons of his immediate surrounding, asking them to proceed against others of equal social or military rank, the very men so addressed in confidence would perhaps turn out to be themselves members of the secret society. Would he not thus bring about his own doom? Would not his enemies, forewarned, arm themselves at once, and proceed against him? Must not the danger have appeared to him all the greater because he thought-erroneously, it is true-the society to be a large one? But he knew how to dissimulate. "By the falseness of his character," Prince Peter Doigorukoff says, "he was the worthy grandson of Catharine, whose remarkable intellect he was, however, far from possessing. . . . During the first eighteen years of his reign he played the Liberal in Europe, and wore the mask of the same in Russia. But during the last years of his government, having fallen, as regards foreign policy, under the influence of the Minister who then governed Austria, and in home matters under the influence of the cruel and pitiless Araktcheïeff, he abjured the tendencies of his youth, and entered upon a completely reactionary course though without adding the violence and the brutality which his brother Nicholas afterward showed." Such is the appreciation of the character of Alexander I. by a writer of most moderate constitutional views, who always shows as much reserve as is possible in judging of the acts of crowned heads. When, in consequence of this reactionary course of government, matters approached a crisis, the Society of Public Welfare was dissolved—in appearance at least; for immediately afterward it was reorganized. Nicholas Turguenieff presided at the meeting which pronounced the dissolution. In reality, the league was transformed by the bolder men, who had only resorted to this manœuvre in order to get rid of the timid. Turguenieff professes to have from that time discontinued his connection with the society. X. THE Society of Public Welfare had existed with two chief branches-a "Society of the North," comprising St. Petersburg and Moscow, and a "Society of the South," with Kiev and one or two other southern towns as head-centers. In the Society of the North, where the less advanced ideas prevailed, dissatisfaction gradually arose against Pestel, who entirely swayed the southern branch. Upon this, Pestel himself brought about a general meeting of the members at Moscow, in February, 1821, where high words were bandied between the different partisans. Finally, as already mentioned, the dissolution of the league was pronounced under the chairmanship of Nicholas Turguenieff. Colonel Abramoff, who protested against this resolution, exclaimed that "the society could not be dissolved, as it would continue to exist even if he alone were to remain of it." He evidently did not know what Pestel and his friends aimed at. Their only object had been to weed out the less audacious. A fresh society, under the directorate of Pestel, Yushneffski, and Nikita Murawieff, was at once established. The activity of this new league, whose headquarters were at Tultschin, was such that in the course of less than two years four branch societies were called into existence. Soon almost the whole staff of Field-Marshal Prince Wittgenstein consisted of members of the conspiracy-without the Prince himself, or the Chief of the Staff, Paul Kisseleff, suspecting anything wrong! Prince Dolgorukoff, in speaking of these secret propagandistic labors, says The Liberals of St. Petersburg and Moscow |