On an earlier page I remarked that the element of romance passed out of the story of the Romanoffs with the last lovers of Catherine and the murder of Paul. This is true of what we may call personal romance, but it will have been apparent that a larger, impersonal romance now opens. Not individual Romanoffs, but the Romanoff dynasty, must fight for existence. Life at court is now too earnest for bibulous companions of monarchs, and handsome lovers of queens, and plots of the anteroom. The comedy is over; if one may call a comedy the enthronement of a selfish and profligate monarchy upon the poverty and ignorance of millions of human beings. The play now assumes the sombre note of tragedy. The people, represented by a few of the educated few, begin to awaken and claim their rights. The rest of the story is a ghastly record of the efforts of the Romanoffs to prevent the spread of that awakening.
Nicholas I, who succeeded Alexander, represents the struggle of the dynasty in a form which might be reconciled with conscience. He differed materially from Alexander in two respects. First, although he was, like Alexander, moderately endowed in intellect, he had great strength of character and would stubbornly pursue any policy which he adopted. In the second place, that policy was inevitably shaped by the accident that he was born many years after Alexander. The eldest son of Paul I had received his education at a time when Catherine was under the influence of the French humanitarians. Nicholas came to the years of discretion during her second phase, when the Revolution had soured her taste of all things French and liberal. His chief tutor had been a French emigrant, an incompetent teacher and a bitter enemy of liberal ideas. Nicholas had grown up a rough and conceited boy. Later he had had abler teachers, but he had yawned over their lessons. He had in 1817 married a daughter of the King of Prussia, and, like almost all the Romanoffs, he thought a minute acquaintance with military drill the first equipment for life. In spite of hints from Alexander he refused to prepare for the serious task of governing a great nation. By an unfortunate accident his vague despotic mood was at the very opening of his reign hardened into an attitude of fierce hostility to the new culture.
His elder brother Constantine had, as I said, forfeited his right to the throne. He had fallen in love with a charming Polish lady, the Countess Jeannette Grudzinsky, after divorcing his first wife. As no amount of personal charm, not associated with royal blood, fitted a woman to occupy the throne of Elizabeth and Catherine, the Tsar had, in 1822, given him the alternative of losing either the lady or his right to the throne. Constantine had not a regal disposition. He married Jeannette and abdicated the right he had to the throne on the restored principle of inheritance.
Nicholas knew of this abdication, though it was otherwise known only to a few intimate councillors. But he knew that there was much feeling against him in St. Petersburg, and he proceeded diplomatically. He proclaimed Constantine Tsar. Prince Golitzin and others who knew of the abdication begged him to refrain until the Council had opened a certain sealed letter which Alexander had left, but Nicholas persisted and sent word to his brother at Warsaw. Constantine refused the throne, and for several weeks letters went backward and forward. Nicholas was very much attached to his brother, but it is probable that he wanted time to study the threatening situation in St. Petersburg and secure the stability of his throne. He yielded on December 13th, and fixed the following day for the taking of the oath of allegiance.
On the 14th a large body of troops and the customary crowd of citizens assembled in the square, and suddenly the cry “Long Live Constantine” rang from the lips of various companies of the soldiers. “Long Live the Constitution” was also shouted; and it is said that the ignorant troops, who had been told to add this, thought that it was the name of Constantine’s Polish wife. Nicholas, who did not lack courage, came out of the palace and endeavoured quietly to convince the soldiers that his brother had abdicated. They repeated their cries, and the nucleus of mutineers began to grow and form a compact body. It is thought that if those who had arranged the plot had had more courage it might have succeeded. But Prince Trubetzkoi, the leader, kept out of sight, and there was no vigorous direction. General Miloradovitch approached the soldiers to reason with them, and was shot. The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, his golden cross lifted high in the air, next addressed them, and he was contemptuously told to go home and mind his own business. The night was falling, and it was feared that under its cover a serious riot would occur. Nicholas ordered blank firing and, when the rebels jeered, ordered grape-shot; and the rebellion was over.
After the burial of the victims came the inquiry, and it was thorough and protracted. Two hundred and forty were arrested, and they included men of the highest rank in St. Petersburg and many officers of the army. Princes, counts, barons, and generals were on the list of the condemned. The five ringleaders, including two colonels of military distinction, were sentenced to be quartered, but the Tsar commuted the sentence to hanging. The death-sentence had become so unusual in Russia that a bungling amateur made a horrible tragedy of the business; but those five first martyrs of the Russian people met their death with impressive dignity and courage. Thirty-one were sentenced to be beheaded, and were sent to the mines for life. Seventeen were condemned to the mines, and had their sentences changed to twenty years’ imprisonment. Others went, with their wives and families, to Siberia or to remote provinces. And Tsar Nicholas I went to Moscow to be crowned.
Nicholas was sufficiently intelligent to realise that this conspiracy of soldiers and nobles and intellectuals was a new thing in the annals of Russia. He had a very candid memorandum drawn up from the subversive literature which was taken with the conspirators, and he carefully studied the condition of Russia as they had seen it. The new Tsar had a type of mind entirely different from that of his brother. He had a clear, robust, and narrow intelligence, unclouded either by mysticism or moral hypocrisy. He seriously considered the evils of the Empire: the corruption of officials, the arrears of payment which led to extortion, the heavy taxes, the parody of justice, the general squalor and ignorance, the State-monopoly of drink, the shocking condition of the serfs, and so on. These things must be remedied; and they must be remedied by the god-appointed person—the Tsar. That was his attitude. In his Coronation-Manifesto he said:
“The statutes of the land are gradually perfected, the faults corrected, the abuses remedied, not by insolent dreams of destruction, but from above.”
The new Tsar was for “true enlightenment.” Any other enlightenment, any unauthorised enlightener, must look out.
That was the note of the early part of the reign of Nicholas I. Speranski was brought from his retirement and told to carry out the reforms he had projected. His older code of laws was not passed, but he was directed to codify the existing laws of Russia; which was something. There were not competent lawyers in Russia to ensure the proper administration of justice, and young men were sent abroad to study law. But no youth must go and acquire education abroad for any other purpose. No foreign teachers or tutors must be tolerated any more in Russia. No foreign ideas must be permitted to taint the purity of the docile Russian soul. No noble could remain abroad more than five years, and no commoner more than three years.
A very rigorous and complete censorship was set up. All manuscripts, even the manuscripts of journalistic copy, must be revised before they reached the printer. Any that ventured to recommend the ideas which were in France leading up to the Revolution of 1830, and in England to the Reform Bill of 1832, were suppressed. Intellectual life must concern itself with the native contents of the Russian tradition. It was stifled. Russia was just at the stage of a literary renaissance, but it was directed into this channel, and, as it was mainly artistic, it contrived to thrive on nationalist soil. Pushkin and Gogol wrote their famous stories and poems. Karamsin founded Russian history—of the dynastic type. Young men like Turgenieff, Dostoievski, and Tolstoi began, at the end of the reign, to take up the artistic tradition. The national drama was advanced. But it was all genuinely Russian. The new theologies and philosophies and sciences of the west were banned.
The censorship was moderated a little in 1830, when Prince Lieven, a religious but cultivated man, became minister of education. For a time the anathema was confined to matters which had a plain political import. But after a few years a reactionary succeeded Prince Lieven, and the task of preventing enlightenment was rigorously resumed. The second revolutionary wave was slowly spreading over Europe. The stupid and harsh dynasty of the French kings went forever. The reform of the parliamentary franchise was now won in England. An historic fight for freedom and knowledge was raging in Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
Winder Palace, Petrograd
Everywhere it was this detestable new middle class which was assailing the old traditions. Young men of the working class to-day have little conception in how overwhelming a proportion the champions and martyrs of “the people” in those sanguinary days belonged to the middle class. The task of rulers plainly was to check literature and the university-life, which were manufacturing this intellectual middle class. Literature of a modern kind was entirely suppressed. The universities were watched by the police—the new secret police which Nicholas created as an instrument of the threatened autocracy—and controlled after a time by the clergy. The Slavophile creed was elevated to the rank of a philosophy. Against this bold scheme of human development which the liberals were basing upon the philosophy of Hegel, the “sound” teachers pitted a very plausible static creed. It was, they said, the peculiar gift of the Russian soul to reconcile the jarring elements of life, which in the west created only discord. These new notions of democracy and evolution (which was just emerging from the pit in England) and rationalism only increased the misery of life. Look at the contrast of the restless proletariate of England or France and the Russian peasant! Self-absorption in love, as taught by Russian Christianity, not self-assertion, as taught by religious and political rationalism, was the creed to make people happy.
The influence of the Church was ardently enlisted. Nicholas was sincere—he read a page of the Bible every night to his wife—and liked to have sincere people about him. He got rid of Arakcheeff and the converted atheist Magnitski, and he upheld the abbot Photi. The Bible Society was directed to return to England, and its property was confiscated. The Roman Catholic Church had made progress under the liberal Alexander. It was checked, and its property confiscated. The secret police penetrated study and boudoir in search of traces of heresy. In Poland four and a half million Roman Catholics were “converted” to the Orthodox Church. In Protestant Livonia the Russian priests and officials did almost as they willed. School-children were damped with holy water and oil, and counted members of the Orthodox Church. Presents of money or land settled the hesitating consciences of their parents. The Russian Church supported the autocracy and anathematised culture: all Russians must therefore belong to the Russian Church.
It must not be supposed that this drastic campaign extinguished the light in Russia. It merely compelled men to hide their light underground, or to speak and write with discretion. A sullen and stern fight went on all the time. Once the Catholics of Poland and Hungary had tried to shut off Russia from the culture of the west and they had eventually failed. Now the Tsars, who had torn down the barrier, would set up a barrier of their own. It had no greater chance of lasting success, though it did postpone the awakening of Russia. In the end, when a third revolutionary wave spread over Europe, Nicholas doubled his precautions. Not more than three hundred students were allowed at each university. This was “true enlightenment.” But a nobler race was rising amidst the densely ignorant mass, and Nicholas I could not crush it.
It may be asked what he did for the honest improvement of the country which he had sincerely regarded as the task of the autocracy. Very little. To educate the mass of the people was, of course, a mischievous delusion in the creed of Nicholas I. The spread of elementary education was either arrested or carefully controlled. Under Speranski’s early influence he appointed an official, Count Kisseleff, to look after the eighteen million serfs on the Crown Estates, and the official was a good man. Schools of a kind were established. The filthy and unhealthy habits of the people were partly corrected. In 1842 a serf was enabled by statute to purchase his freedom. In 1848 it was enacted that the serfs of an insolvent landowner might collectively purchase the estate. Nicholas encouraged nobles to free their serfs. Then came the French Revolution of 1848, with its echoes all over Europe, and Nicholas abandoned reform. Even within the limits of his own plan he had rendered insignificant service, in comparison with the task which the papers of the conspirators had impressed on him. The thirty years of his reign were occupied in fighting the light which from all sides now sought to penetrate the darkness of Russia.
The wars which interrupted or accompanied the Emperor’s efforts do not properly concern us, but in some features they illustrate his personality and work. On this side also the new morality of the Romanoffs was degenerating rapidly into casuistry. Alexander had sought neither war nor territory. The dynasty was converted from the brutal attitude which had put the quintessence of glory in conquest by the sword. Alexander interfered in European affairs only in the lofty interests of justice and civilisation. Nicholas also was a lover of peace and justice, and on this plea he started, or re............