Part 29

The Russian Academy of Sciences sent out this summer two of its members--the old geologist General Helmersen and Friedrich Schmidt, the indefatigable explorer of Siberia--to study the structure of those long ridges of drift which are known as åsar in Sweden and Finland, and as esker, kames, and so on, in the British Isles. The Geographical Society sent me to Finland for the same purpose. We visited, all three, the beautiful ridge of Pungaharju and then separated. I worked hard during this summer. I travelled a great deal in Finland, and crossed over to Sweden, where I spent many happy hours in the company of A. Nordenskjöld. Already then (in 1871) he mentioned to me his schemes of reaching the mouths of the Siberian rivers, and even the Behring Strait, by the northern route. Returning to Finland I continued my researches till late in the autumn, and collected a mass of most interesting observations relative to the glaciation of the country. But I also thought a great deal during this journey about social matters, and these thoughts had a decisive influence upon my subsequent development.

All sorts of valuable materials relative to the geography of Russia passed through my hands in the Geographical Society, and the idea gradually came to me of writing an exhaustive physical geography of that immense part of the world. My intention was to give a thorough geographical description of the country, basing it upon the main lines of the surface structure which I began to disentangle for European Russia; and to sketch in that description the different forms of economic life which ought to prevail in different physical regions. Take, for instance, the wide prairies of Southern Russia, so often visited by droughts and failures of crops. These droughts and failures must not be treated as accidental calamities: they are as much a natural feature of that region as its position on a southern slope, its fertility, and the rest; and the whole of the economic life of the southern prairies ought to be organized in prevision of the unavoidable recurrence of periodical droughts. Each region of the Russian Empire ought to be treated in the same scientific way, as Karl Ritter treated parts of Asia in his beautiful monographs.

But such a work would have required plenty of time and full freedom for the writer, and I often thought how helpful to this end it would be were I to occupy some day the position of secretary to the Geographical Society. Now, in the autumn of 1871, as I was working in Finland, slowly moving on foot toward the sea coast along the newly built railway, and closely watching the spot where the first unmistakable traces of the former extension of the post-glacial sea would appear, I received a telegram from the Geographical Society: ‘The council begs you to accept the position of secretary to the Society.’ At the same time the outgoing secretary strongly urged me to accept the proposal.

My hopes were realized. But in the meantime other thoughts and other longings had pervaded my mind. I seriously thought over the reply, and wired, ‘Most cordial thanks, but cannot accept.’

III

It often happens that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work. Active men are especially liable to find themselves in such a position. Every day brings with it a fresh batch of work, and a man throws himself into his bed late at night without having completed what he expected to have done; then in the morning he hurries to the unfinished task of the previous day. Life goes, and there is no time left to think, no time to consider the direction that one’s life is taking. So it was with me.

But now, during my journey in Finland, I had leisure. When I was crossing in a Finnish two-wheeled karria some plain which offered no interest to the geologist, or when I was walking, hammer on shoulder, from one gravel pit to another, I could think; and, amidst the undoubtedly interesting geological work I was carrying on, one idea, which appealed far more strongly to my inner self than geology, persistently worked in my mind.

I saw what an immense amount of labour the Finnish peasant spends in clearing the land and in breaking up the hard boulder clay, and I said to myself, ‘I will write, let me say, the physical geography of this part of Russia, and tell the peasant the best means of cultivating this soil. Here an American stump-extractor would be invaluable; there certain methods of manuring would be indicated by science.... But what is the use of talking to this peasant about American machines, when he has barely enough bread to live upon from one crop to the next; when the rent which he has to pay for that boulder clay grows heavier and heavier in proportion to his success in improving the soil? He gnaws at his hard-as-a-stone rye-flour cake, which he bakes twice a year; he has with it a morsel of fearfully salted cod and a drink of skimmed milk. How dare I talk to him of American machines, when all that he can raise must be sold to pay rent and taxes? He needs me to live with him, to help him to become the owner or the free occupier of that land. Then he will read books with profit, but not now.’

And my thoughts wandered from Finland to our Nikólskoye peasants, whom I had lately seen. Now they are free, and they value freedom very much. But they have no meadows. In one way or another the landlords have got nearly all the meadows for themselves. When I was a child the Savókhins used to send out six horses for night pasture; the Tolkachóffs had seven. Now these families have only three horses each; other families, which formerly had three horses, have only one or none. What can be done with one miserable horse? No meadows, no horses, no manure! How can I talk to them of grass-sowing? They are already ruined--poor as Lazarus--and in a few years they will be made still poorer by a foolish taxation. How happy they were when I told them that my father gave them permission to mow the grass in the small open spaces in his Kóstino forest! ‘Your Nikólskoye peasants are ferocious for work,’ that is the common saying about them in our neighbourhood; but the arable land, which our stepmother has taken out of their allotments in virtue of the ‘law of minimum’--that diabolic clause introduced by the serf-owners when they were allowed to revise the emancipation law--is now a forest of thistles, and the ‘ferocious’ workers are not allowed to till it. And the same sort of thing goes on throughout Russia. Even at that time it was evident, and official commissioners gave warning of it, that the first serious failure of crops in Middle Russia would result in a terrible famine--and famine came, in 1876, in 1884, in 1891, in 1895, and again in 1898.

Science is an excellent thing. I knew its joys and valued them, perhaps more than many of my colleagues did. Even now, as I was looking on the lakes and the hillocks of Finland, new and beautiful generalizations arose before my eyes. I saw in a remote past, at the very dawn of mankind, the ice accumulating from year to year in the northern archipelagoes, over Scandinavia and Finland. An immense growth of ice invaded the north of Europe and slowly spread as far as its middle portions. Life dwindled in that part of the northern hemisphere, and, wretchedly poor, uncertain, it fled further and further south before the icy breath which came from that immense frozen mass. Man--miserable, weak, ignorant--had every difficulty in maintaining a precarious existence. Ages passed away, till the melting of the ice began, and with it came the lake period, when countless lakes were formed in the cavities, and a wretched subpolar vegetation began timidly to invade the unfathomable marshes with which every lake was surrounded. Another series of ages passed before an extremely slow process of drying up set in, and vegetation began its slow invasion from the south. And now we are fully in the period of a rapid desiccation, accompanied by the formation of dry prairies and steppes, and man has to find out the means to put a check to that desiccation to which Central Asia already has fallen a victim, and which menaces South-Eastern Europe.

Belief in an ice cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy; but before my eyes a grand picture was rising, and I wanted to draw it, with the thousands of details I saw in it; to use it as a key to the present distribution of floras and faunas; to open up new horizons to geology and physical geography.

But what right had I to these higher joys, when all round me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.

Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge--and only that--should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?

The masses want to know: they are willing to learn; they can learn. There, on the crest of that immense moraine which runs between the lakes, as if giants had heaped it up in a hurry to connect the two shores, there stands a Finnish peasant plunged in contemplation of the beautiful lakes, studded with islands, which lie before him. Not one of these peasants, poor and downtrodden though they may be, will pass this spot without stopping to admire the scene. Or there, on the shore of a lake, stands another peasant, and sings something so beautiful that the best musician would envy him his melody for its feeling and its meditative power. Both deeply feel, both meditate, both think; they are ready to widen their knowledge: only give it to them; only give them the means of getting leisure. This is the direction in which, and these are the kind of people for whom, I must work. All those sonorous phrases about making mankind progress, while at the same time the progress-makers stand aloof from those whom they pretend to push onwards, are mere sophisms made up by minds anxious to shake off a fretting contradiction.

So I sent my negative reply to the Geographical Society.

St. Petersburg had changed greatly from what it was when I left it in 1862. ‘Oh yes, you knew the St. Petersburg of Chernyshévsky,’ the poet Máikoff remarked to me once. True, I knew the St. Petersburg of which Chernyshévsky was the favourite. But how shall I describe the city which I found on my return? Perhaps as the St. Petersburg of the cafés chantants, of the music halls, if the words ‘all St. Petersburg’ ought really to mean the upper circles of society, which took their keynote from the Court.

At the Court, and in its circles, liberal ideas were in sorely bad repute. All prominent men of the sixties, even such moderates as Count Nicholas Muravióff and Nicholas Milútin, were treated as suspects. Only Dmítri Milútin, the Minister of War, was kept by Alexander II. at his post, because the reform which he had to accomplish in the army required many years for its realization. All other active men of the reform period had been brushed aside.

I spoke once with a high dignitary of the Ministry for foreign affairs. He sharply criticized another high functionary, and I remarked in the latter’s defence, ‘Still there is this to be said for him, that he never accepted service under Nicholas I.’ ‘And now he is in service under the reign of Shuváloff and Trépoff!’ was the reply, which so correctly described the situation that I could say nothing more.

General Shuváloff, the chief of the State police, and General Trépoff, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, were indeed the real rulers of Russia. Alexander II. was their executive, their tool. And they ruled by fear. Trépoff had so frightened Alexander by the spectre of a revolution which was going to break out at St. Petersburg, that if the omnipotent chief of the police was a few minutes late in appearing with his daily report at the palace, the Emperor would ask, ‘Is everything quiet at St. Petersburg?’

Shortly after Alexander II, had given an ‘entire dismissal’ to Princess X. he conceived a warm friendship for General Fleury, the aide-de-camp of Napoleon III., that sinister man who was the soul of the coup d’état of December 2, 1852. They were continually seen together, and Fleury once informed the Parisians of the great honour which was bestowed upon him by the Russian Tsar. As the latter was riding along the Nevsky Perspective he saw Fleury, and asked him to mount into his carriage, an égoïste which had a seat only twelve inches wide, for a single person; and the French general recounted at length how the Tsar and he, holding fast to each other, had to leave half of their bodies hanging in the air on account of the narrowness of the seat. It is enough to name this friend, fresh from Compiègne, to suggest what the friendship meant.

Shuváloff took every advantage of the present state of mind of his master. He prepared one reactionary measure after another, and when Alexander showed reluctance to sign any of them Shuváloff would speak of the coming revolution and the fate of Louis XVI., and, ‘for the salvation of the dynasty,’ would implore him to sign the new additions to the laws of repression. For all that sadness and remorse would from time to time besiege Alexander. He would fall into a gloomy melancholy, and speak in a sad tone of the brilliant beginning of his reign, and of the reactionary character which it was taking. Then Shuváloff would organize an especially lively bear hunt. Hunters, merry courtiers, and carriages full of ballet girls would go to the forests of Nóvgorod. A couple of bears would be killed by Alexander II., who was a good shot and used to let the animal approach to within a few yards of his rifle; and there, in the excitement of the hunting festivities, Shuváloff would obtain his master’s consent to any scheme of repression which he had concocted.

Alexander II. certainly was not a rank and file man, but two different men lived in him, both strongly developed, struggling with each other; and this inner struggle became more and more violent as he advanced in age. He could be charming in his behaviour, and the next moment display sheer brutality. He was possessed of a calm, reasoned courage in the face of a real danger, but he lived in constant fear of dangers which existed in his brain only. He assuredly was not a coward; he would meet a bear face to face; on one occasion, when the animal was not killed outright by his first bullet, and the man who stood behind him with a lance, rushing forward, was knocked down by the bear, the Tsar came to his rescue, and killed the bear close to the muzzle of his gun (I know this from the man himself); yet he was haunted all his life by the fears of his own imagination and of an uneasy conscience. He was very kind in his manner toward his friends, but that kindness existed side by side with the terrible cold-blooded cruelty--a seventeenth-century cruelty--which he displayed in crushing the Polish insurrection, and later on in 1880, when similar measures were taken to crush the revolt of the Russian youth--a cruelty of which no one would have thought him capable. He thus lived a double life, and at the period of which I am speaking he merrily signed the most reactionary decrees, and afterward became despondent about them. Towards the end of his life this inner struggle, as will be seen later on, became still stronger, and assumed an almost tragical character.

In 1872 Shuváloff was nominated ambassador in England, but his friend General Potápoff continued the same policy till the beginning of the Turkish war in 1877. During all this time the most scandalous plundering of the State exchequer, and also of the Crown lands, of the estates confiscated in Lithuania after the insurrection, of the Bashkir lands in Orenbúrg, and so on, was proceeding on a grand scale. Several such scandals were subsequently brought to light and some of them were judged by the Senate, acting as high court of justice, after Potápoff, who became insane, and Trépoff had been dismissed, and their rivals at the palace wanted to show them to Alexander II. in their true light. In one of these judicial inquiries it came out that a friend of Potápoff had most shamelessly robbed the peasants of a Lithuanian estate of their lands, and afterward, empowered by his friends at the Ministry of the Interior, he had caused the peasants, who sought redress, to be imprisoned, subjected to wholesale flogging, and shot down by the troops. This was one of the most revolting stories of the kind even in the annals of Russia, which teem with similar robberies up to the present time. It was only after Véra Zasúlich had shot at Trépoff and wounded him (to avenge his having ordered one of the political prisoners to be flogged in prison) that the thefts of this party became widely known and Trépoff was dismissed. Thinking he was going to die, he wrote his will, from which it became known that this man, who had made the Tsar believe he was poor, even though he had occupied for years the lucrative post of chief of the St. Petersburg police, left in reality to his heirs a considerable fortune. Some courtiers carried the report to Alexander II. Trépoff lost his credit, and it was then that a few of the robberies of the Shuváloff-Potápoff-Trépoff party were brought before the Senate.

* * * * *

The pillage which went on in all the ministries, especially in connection with the railways and all sorts of industrial enterprises, was really enormous. Immense fortunes were made at that time. The navy, as Alexander II. himself said to one of his sons, was ‘in the pockets of So-and-so.’ The cost of the railways, guaranteed by the State, was simply fabulous. As to commercial enterprises, it was openly known that none could be launched unless a specified percentage of the dividends was promised to different functionaries in the several ministries. A friend of mine, who intended to start some enterprise at St. Petersburg, was frankly told at the Ministry of the Interior that he would have to pay twenty-five per cent. of the net profits to a certain person, fifteen per cent. to one man at the Ministry of Finances, ten per cent. to another man in the same ministry, and five per cent. to a fourth person. The bargains were made without concealment, and Alexander II. knew it. His own remarks, written on the reports of the Comptroller-General, bear testimony to this. But he saw in the thieves his protectors from the revolution, and kept them until their robberies became an open scandal.

The young grand dukes, with the exception of the heir-apparent, afterwards Alexander III., who always was a good and thrifty paterfamilias, followed the example of the head of the family. The orgies which one of them used to arrange in a small restaurant on the Nevsky Perspective were so degradingly notorious that one night the chief of the police had to interfere and warned the owner of the restaurant that he would be marched to Siberia if he ever again let his ‘grand duke’s room’ to the grand duke. ‘Imagine my perplexity,’ this man said to me on one occasion, when he was showing me that room, the walls and ceiling of which were upholstered with thick satin cushions, ‘On the one side I had to offend a member of the Imperial Family, who could do with me what he liked, and on the other side General Trépoff menaced me with Siberia! Of course I obeyed the General; he is, as you know, omnipotent now.’ Another grand duke became conspicuous for ways belonging to the domain of psychopathy; and a third was exiled to Turkestan, after he had stolen the diamonds of his mother.

The Empress Marie Alexándrovna, abandoned by her husband, and probably horrified at the turn which Court life was taking, became more and more a devotee, and soon she was entirely in the hands of the palace priests, a representative of a quite new type in the Russian Church--the Jesuitic. This new genus of well-combed, depraved, and Jesuitic clergy made rapid Progress at that time; already they were working hard and with success to become a power in the State and to lay hands on the schools.

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.