The Autobiography of a Revolutionist: St. Petersburg

I.

EARLY in the autumn of 1867 my brother and I, with his family, were settled at St. Petersburg. I entered the university, and sat on the benches among young men, almost boys, much younger than myself. What I so longed for five years before was accomplished, — I could study ; and, acting upon the idea that a thorough training in mathematics must be at the foundation of all subsequently gained knowledge, I joined the physicomathematical faculty in its mathematical section. My brother entered the military academy for jurisprudence, whilst I left military service altogether, to the great dissatisfaction of my father, who hated the very sight of a civilian dress. We both had now to rely entirely upon ourselves.

Study at the university and scientific work absorbed all my time for the next five years. A student of the mathematical faculty has, of course, very much to do, but my previous studies in higher mathematics permitted me to devote part of my time to geography ; and, moreover, I had not lost in Siberia the habit of hard work.

The report of my last expedition was in print; but in the meantime a vast new problem rose before me. The journeys that I had made in Siberia had convinced me that the mountains which at that time were drawn on the maps of Northern Asia were simply fantastic, and gave no idea whatever of the structure of the country. The great plateaus which are so prominent a feature of Asia were not even suspected by those who drew the maps. Instead of them, several great ridges, such as, for instance, the eastern portion of the Stanovói, which used to be drawn on the maps as a black worm creeping eastward, had grown up in the topographic bureaus, contrary to the indications and even to the sketches of such explorers as L. Schwartz. They have no existence in nature. The heads of the rivers which flow toward the Arctic Ocean on the one side, and toward the Pacific on the other, lie intermingled on the surface of a vast plateau ; they rise in the same marshes. But, in the European topographer’s imagination, the highest mountain ridges must run along the chief water-partings, and the topographers had drawn there the highest Alps, of which there is no trace in reality. Many such imaginary mountains were made to intersect the maps of Northern Asia in all possible directions. To discover the true leading principles in the disposition of the mountains of Asia — the harmony of mountain formation — now became a question which for years absorbed my attention. For a considerable time the old maps, and still more the generalizations of Alexander von Humboldt, who, after a long study of Chinese sources, had covered Asia with a network of mountains running along the meridians and parallels, hampered me in my researches, until at last I saw that even Humboldt’s generalizations would not agree with the facts. Beginning then with the beginning, in a purely inductive way, I collected all the barometrical observations of previous travelers, and from them calculated hundreds of altitudes ; I marked on a large scale map all geological and physical observations that had been made by different travelers, — the facts, not the hypotheses ; and I tried to find out what structural lines would answer best to the observed realities. This preparatory work took me more than two years, and then followed months of intense thought, in order to find out what all the bewildering chaos of scattered observations meant, until one day, all of a sudden, the whole became clear and comprehensible, as if it were illuminated with a flash of light. The main structural lines of Asia are not north, and south, or west and east; they are from the southwest to the northeast, — just as, in the Rocky Mountains and the plateaus of America, the lines are southeast to northwest; only secondary ridges shoot out northwest. Moreover, the mountains of Asia are not bundles of independent ridges, like the Alps, but are subordinated to an immense plateau, an old continent which once pointed toward Behring Strait. High border ridges have been towered up along its fringes, and in the course of ages, terraces, formed by later sediments, have emerged from the sea, thus adding on both sides to the width of that primitive backbone of Asia.

There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the sudden birth of a generalization, illuminating the mind after a long period of patient research. What has seemed for years so chaotic, so contradictory, and so problematic takes at once its proper position in an harmonious whole. Out of a wild confusion of facts and from behind the fog of guesses, — contradicted almost as soon as they are born,—a stately picture makes its appearance, like an Alpine chain suddenly emerging in all its grandeur from the mists which concealed it the moment before, glittering in the sun in all its simplicity and variety, in all its mightiness and beauty. And when the generalization is put to a test, by applying to it hundreds of separate facts which had been hopelessly contradictory before, each of them assumes its due position, increasing the impressiveness of the picture, accentuating some characteristic outline, or adding an unsuspected detail full of meaning. The generalization gains in strength and extent; its foundations grow in width and solidity ; while at a distance, in the far-off mist on the horizon, the eye detects the outlines of new and still wider generalizations.

He who has once in his life experienced this joy of scientific creation will never forget it; he will long to renew it; and he cannot but feel with pain that this sort of happiness is the lot of so few of us, while it could be lived through by so many, — on a small or on a grand scale, — if scientific methods and leisure were not limited to a handful of men.

This work I consider my chief contribution to science. My first intention was to produce a bulky volume, in which the new ideas about the mountains and plateaus of Northern Asia should be supported by a detailed examination of each separate region ; but in 1873, when I saw that I should soon be arrested, I prepared only a map which embodied my views, with an explanatory paper. Both were published by the Geographical Society, under the supervision of my brother, while I was already in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Petermann, who was then preparing a map of Asia, and knew my preliminary work, adopted my scheme for his map, and it has been adopted since by most cartographers. The map of Asia, as it is now understood, explains, I believe, the main physical features of the great continent, as well as the distribution of its climates, faunas, and floras, and even its history. It reveals, also, as I was able to see during my last journey to America, striking analogies between the structure and the geological growth of the two continents of the northern hemisphere. Very few cartographers could say now whence all these changes have come ; but in science it is better that new ideas should make their way independently of any name attached to them. The errors, which are unavoidable in a first generalization, are easier to rectify.

II.

At the same time I worked a great deal for the Russian Geographical Society in my capacity of secretary to its section of physical geography. In the years 1869-71, the bold Norwegian seahunters bad quite unexpectedly opened the Kara Sea to navigation. To our extreme astonishment, we learned one day at the society that that sea, which lies between the island of Nóvaya Zemlyá and the Siberian coast, and which we used confidently to describe in our writings as " an ice cellar permanently stocked with ice,” had been entered by a number of small Norwegian schooners and crossed by them in all directions. Even the wintering place of the famous Dutchman Barentz, which we believed to be concealed forever from the eyes of man by ice fields hundreds of years old, had been visited by these adventurous Norsemen.

“ Exceptional seasons and an exceptional state of the ice ” was what our old navigators said. But to a few of us it was quite evident that, with their small schooners and their small crews, these bold men, who feel at home amidst the ice, had ventured to pierce the floating ice which usually bars the way to the Kara Sea, while the commanders of government ships, hampered by the responsibilities of the naval service, had never risked doing so.

A general interest in arctic exploration was awakened by these discoveries of the Norwegians. In fact, it was the sea-hunters who opened the new era of arctic enthusiasm which culminated in Nordenskjöld’s circumnavigation of Asia, in the permanent establishment of the northeastern passage to Siberia, in Peary’s discovery of North Greenland, and in Nansen’s Fram expedition. Our Russian Geographical Society also began to move, and a committee was appointed to prepare the scheme of a Russian arctic expedition, and to indicate the scientific work that could be done by it. Specialists undertook to write each of the special scientific chapters of this report ; but, as often happens, a few chapters only — botany, geology, and meteorology — were ready in time, and the secretary of the committee (that is, myself) had to write the remainder. Several subjects, such as marine zoölogy, the tides, pendulum observations, and terrestrial magnetism, were quite new to me ; but the amount of work which a healthy man can accomplish in a short time, if he strains all his forces and goes straight to the root of the subject, no one would suppose beforehand, — and so my report was ready.

It concluded by advocating a great arctic expedition, which would awaken in Russia a permanent interest in arctic questions and arctic navigation, and in the meantime a reconnoitring expedition on board a schooner chartered in Norway with its captain, pushing north or northeast of Nóvaya Zemlyá. This expedition, we suggested, might also try to reach, or at least to sight, an unknown land which must be situated at no great distance from Nóvaya Zemlyá. The probable existence of such a land had been indicated by an officer of the Russian navy, Baron Schilling, in an excellent but little known paper on the currents in the Arctic Ocean. When I read this paper, as also Lütke’s journey to Nóvaya Zemlyá, and made myself acquainted with the general conditions of this part of the Arctic Ocean, I saw at once that the supposition must be correct. There must be a land to the northwest of Nóvaya Zemlyá, and it must reach a higher latitude than Spitzbergen. The steady position of the ice at the west of Nóvaya Zemlyá, the mud and stones on it, and various other smaller indications confirmed the hypothesis; besides, if such a land were not located there, the ice current which flows westward from the meridian of Behring Strait to Greenland (the current of the Fram’s drift) would, as Baron Schilling had truly remarked, reach the North Cape and cover the coasts of Laponia with masses of ice, just as it covers the northern extremity of Greenland. The warm current alone — a feeble continuation of the Gulf Stream — could not have prevented the accumulation of ice on the coasts of Northern Europe. This land, as is known, was discovered a couple of years later by the Austrian expedition, and named Franz Josef Land.

The arctic report had a quite unexpected result for me. I was offered the leadership of the reconnoitring expedition, on board a Norwegian schooner chartered for the purpose. I replied, of course, that I had never been to sea ; but I was told that by combining the experience of a Carlsen or a Johansen with the initiative of a man of science, something valuable could be done ; and I would have accepted, had not the ministry of finance at this juncture interposed with its veto. It replied that the exchequer could not grant the four or five thousand pounds which would be required for the expedition. Since that time Russia has taken no part in the exploration of the arctic seas. The land which we distinguished through the subpolar mists was discovered by Payer and Weyprecht, and the archipelagoes which must exist to the northeast of Nóvaya Zemlyá — I am even more firmly persuaded of it now than I was then — remain undiscovered.

Instead of joining an arctic expedition, I was sent out by the Geographical Society for a modest tour in Finland and Sweden, to explore the glacial deposits; and that journey drifted me in a quite different direction.

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 Russia; of giving a thorough geographical description of that immense part of the world, basing it upon the main lines of the surface structure which I began to disentangle for European Russia; and of attending, in that description, to 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 failure of crops. These droughts and famines 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, just 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 seacoast 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, — when 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 every one 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 do, while 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 labor the Finnish peasant spends in clearing the land and in breaking up the hard boulder-clay, and I said to myself: “ I will write 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-astone 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 sell 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 seen lately. Now they are free, and they value freedom very much. But they have no meadows. In one way or another, the landlords have got all the meadows for themselves. When I was a child, the Savókhins used to send out six horses for night pasture, the Tolkachoffs had seven. Now, these families have only three horses each ; other families, that 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 neighborhood ; 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 serfowners 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 all Russia. (Even at that time it was evident, and official commissioners stated 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 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 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 new horizons for geology and physical geography.

But what right had I to these highest 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 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.

IV.

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 favorite. 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 Dmitri 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 criticised another high functionary, and I remarked in the latter’s defense, “ 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 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 honor 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 égoiste 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.

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 one 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 a 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 the Emperor, who was a good shot, and used to let the animal approach within a few yards of his rifle ; and there, in the excitement of the hunting festivities, Shuváloff would obtain his master’s signature to any scheme of repression or of robbery in the interest of his clients, 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 behavior, 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 terrible fear of the dangers which he conceived 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-hearted toward his friends, but that kind-heartedness existed side by side with the terrible cold - blooded cruelty — a seventeenthcentury cruelty — which he displayed in crushing the Polish insurrection, and later on in 1880, and of which no one would have thought him capable. He thus lived a double life, and at the period I am speaking of he merrily signed the most reactionary decrees, and afterward became despondent and actually cried about them. Toward the end of his life this inner struggle became still stronger, and assumed an almost tragical character.

In 1872 Shuváloff was nominated ambassador, 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’s exchequer, as also of the crown lands, the estates confiscated in Lithuania after the insurrection, the Bashkir lands in Orenbúrg, and so on, was going on, on a grand scale. Several such affairs were subsequently brought to light and judged publicly by the Senate acting as a 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 Trépoff and his clients became widely known and he was dismissed. Thinking that he was going to die, Trépoff wrote his will, from which it became known that this man, who had made the Tsar believe that 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 colossal 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, afterward 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,” the owner 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 priest, 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 socalled 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 four million dollars included every year in the state budget for primary schools used not to be spent by the ministry of public instruction, while twice 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.

All Russia wanted technical education, but the ministry opened only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from reading and thinking. In these gymnasia, only two or three per cent of the pupils succeeded in completing an eight years’ course,—all boys promising to become something being carefully sifted out before they could reach the last form. At the same time, the ministry of education was engaged in a continuous, passionate struggle against all private persons and all institutions — district and county councils, municipalities, and the like — that endeavored to open teachers’ seminaries or technical schools, or even simple primary schools. Technical education — in a country which was so much in want of engineers, educated agriculturists, and geologists — was treated as equivalent to revolutionism. It was prohibited, prosecuted ; so that up to the present time, every autumn, something like two or three thousand young men are refused admission to the higher technical schools from mere lack of vacancies. The universities were filled with boys unable to follow the higher education, and even in the classical gymnasia all sorts of measures were taken to reduce the number of pupils. A feeling of despair took possession of all those who wished to do anything useful in public life ; while the peasantry were ruined at an appalling rate by over-taxation, and by “beating out” of them the arrears of the taxes by means of semi-military executions.

Such was the official St. Petersburg. Such was the influence it exercised upon Russia.

V.

When we were leaving Siberia, we often talked, my brother and I, of the intellectual life which we should find at St. Petersburg, and of the interesting acquaintances we should make in the literary circles. We made such acquaintances, indeed, both among the radicals and among the moderate Slavophiles ; but I must confess that they were rather disappointing. We found plenty of excellent men, — Russia is full of excellent men, — but they did not quite correspond to our ideal of political writers. The best writers — Chernyshévsky, Mikháiloff, Lavróff — were in exile, or were kept in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, like Písareff. Others, taking a gloomy view of the situation,had changed their ideas, and were now leaning toward a sort of paternal absolutism ; while the greater number, though holding still to their beliefs, had become so cautious in expressing them that their prudence was almost equal to desertion.

At the height of the reform period nearly every one in the advanced literary circles had had some relations either with Hérzen or with Turguéneff and his friends, or with the Great Russian or the Land and Freedom secret societies which had had at that period an ephemeral existence. Now, these same men were only the more anxious to bury their former sympathies as deep as possible, so as to appear above political suspicion.

One or two of the liberal reviews which were tolerated at that time, owing chiefly to the superior diplomatic talents of their editors, contained excellent material. showing the ever growing misery and the desperate conditions of the great mass of the peasants, and making clear enough the obstacles that were put in the way of every progressive worker. The amount of such facts was enough to drive one to despair. But no one dared to suggest any remedy, or to hint at any field of action, at any outcome from a position which was represented as hopeless. Some writers still cherished the hope that Alexander II. would once more assume the character of reformer ; but with the majority the fear of seeing their reviews suppressed, and both editors and contributors marched “ to some more or less remote part of the empire,” dominated all other feelings. Fear and hope equally paralyzed them.

The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary circles, and we went occasionally to their friendly gatherings ; but the moment the conversation began to lose its frivolous character, or my brother, who had a great talent for raising serious questions, directed it toward home affairs, or toward the state of France, where Napoleon III. was hastening to his fall in 1870, some sort of interruption was sure to occur. “ What do you think, gentlemen, of the latest performance of La Belle Hélène ? ” or “ What are you going to say of that cured fish ? ” was loudly asked by one of the elder guests — and the conversation was brought to an end.

Outside the literary circles, things were even worse. In the sixties, Russia, and especially St. Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. “ What has become of them ? ” I asked myself. I looked up some of them; but, “ Prudence, young man! ” was all they had to say. " Iron is stronger than straw,” or “ One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead,” and like proverbs, so numerous, alas, in the Russian language, constituted now their code of practical philosophy. " We have done something in our life : ask no more from us ; ” or “ Have patience : that sort of thing will not last,”they told us, while we, the youth, were ready to resume the struggle, to act, to risk, to sacrifice everything. if necessary, and only asked them to give us advice, some guidance and some intellectual support.

Turguéneff has depicted in Smoke some of these ex-reformers from the upper layers of society, and his picture is disheartening. But it is especially in the heart-rending novels and sketches of Madame Kohanóvsky, who wrote under the pen name of " V. Krestóvskiy ” (she must not be confounded with another novel-writer, Vstfvolod Krestdvskiy), that one can follow the many aspects which the degradation of the “ liberals of the sixties ” took at that time. “ The joy of living ” — perhaps the joy of having survived — became their goddess, as soon as the nameless crowd which ten years before made the force of the reform movement refused to hear any more of “ all that sentimentalism.” They hastened to enjoy the riches which poured into the hands of “ practical ” men.

Many new ways to fortune had been opened since serfdom had been abolished, and the crowd rushed with eagerness into these channels. Railways were feverishly built in Russia ; to the lately opened private banks the landlords went in numbers to mortgage their estates; the newly established private notaries and lawyers at the courts were in possession of large incomes ; the shareholders’ companies multiplied with an appalling rapidity and the promoters flourished. A class of men who formerly would have lived in the country on the modest income of a small estate cultivated by a hundred serfs, or on the still more modest salary of a functionary in a law court, now made fortunes, or had such yearly incomes as in serfdom times were possible only for the land magnates.

The very tastes of “ society ” sunk lower and lower. The Italian opera, formerly a forum for radical demonstrations each time that Wilhelm Tell was played (under the name of Charles le Téméraire) or the duet of the Puritans was sung, was now deserted ; the Russian opera, timidly asserting the rights of its great composers, was frequented by a few enthusiasts only. Both were found “ tedious,” and the cream of St. Petersburg society crowded to a vulgar theatre where the second-rate stars of the Paris small theatres won easy laurels from their Horse Guard admirers, or went to see La Belle Hélène, which was played on the Russian stage, while our great dramatists were forgotten. Offenbach’s music reigned supreme.

It must be said that the political atmosphere was such that the best men had reasons, or had at least weighty excuses, for keeping quiet. After Karakózoff had shot at Alexander II. in April, 1866, the state police had become omnipotent. Every one suspected of “ radicalism,”no matter what he had done or what he had not done, had to live under the fear of being arrested any night, for the sympathy he might have shown to some one involved in this or that political affair, or for an innocent letter intercepted in a midnight search, or simply for his “ dangerous ” opinions ; and arrest for political reasons might mean anything : years of seclusion in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, transportation to Siberia, or even torture in the casemates of the fortress.

This movement of the circles of Karakózoff remains up to this date very imperfectly known, even in Russia. I was at that time in Siberia, and know of it only by hearsay. It appears, however, that two different currents combined in it. One of them was the beginning of that great movement " toward the people,” which later became so important and extended ; while the other current was mainly political. Groups of young men, some of whom were on the road to become brilliant university professors, or men of mark as historians and ethnographers, had come together about 1864, with the intention of carrying to the people education and knowledge in spite of the opposition of the government. They went as mere artisans to great industrial towns, and started there coöperative associations, as well as informal schools, hoping that by the exercise of much tact and patience they might be able to educate the peopde, and thus to create the first centres from which better and higher conceptions would gradually radiate amongst the masses. Their zeal was great; considerable fortunes were brought into the service of the cause ; and I am inclined to think that compared with all similar movements which took place later on, this one stood perhaps on the most practical basis. Its initiators certainly stood very near to the working people.

On the other side, with some of the members of these circles — Karakózoff, Ishútin, and their nearest friends — the movement took a political direction. During the years from 1862 to 1866 the policy of Alexander II. had assumed a decidedly reactionary character; he had surrounded himself with men of the most reactionary type, taking them as his nearest advisers ; the very reforms which made the glory of the beginning of his reign were now wrecked wholesale by means of by-laws and ministerial circulars : a return to manorial justice and serfdom in a disguised form was openly expected in the old camp; while no one could hope at that time that the main reform —the abolition of serfdom — could withstand the assaults directed against it from the winter palace itself. All this must have brought Karakózoff and his friends to the idea that a further continuance of Alexander II.’s reign would be a menace even to the little that had been won; that Russia would have to return to the horrors of Nicholas I. if Alexander continued to reign. Great hopes were felt at the same time — this is “ an often repeated story, but always new ” — as to the liberal inclinations of the heir to the throne and his uncle Constantine. I must also say that before 1866 such fears and such considerations were not unfrequently expressed in much higher circles than those with which Karakózoff seems to have been in contact. At any rate, Karakózoff shot at Alexander II. one day, as he was coming out of the summer garden to take his carriage. The shot missed, and Karakózoff was arrested on the spot.

Katkóff, the leader of the Moscow reactionary party, and a great master in extracting pecuniary profits from every political disturbance, at once accused of complicity with Karakózoff all radicals and liberals, — which was certainly untrue,— and insinuated in his paper, making all Moscow believe it, that Karakózoff was a mere instrument in the hands of the Grand Duke Constantine, the leader of the reform party in the highest spheres. One can imagine how much money the two rulers, Shuváloff and Trépoff, made out of these accusations and of the consequent fears of Alexander II.

Mikhael Muravióff, who had won during the Polish insurrection his nickname “ the Hangman,” received orders to make a most searching inquiry, and to discover by every possible means the plot which was supposed to exist. He made arrests in all classes of society, ordered hundreds of searches, and boasted that he “ would find the means to render the prisoners more talkative.” He certainly was not the man to recoil even before torture,—and public opinion in St. Petersburg was almost unanimous in saying that Karakózoff was tortured to obtain avowals, but made none.

State secrets are well kept in fortresses, especially in that huge mass of stone opposite the winter palace, which has seen so many horrors, only in recent times disclosed by historians. It still keeps Muravióff’s secrets. However, the following may perhaps throw some light on this matter.

In 1866 I was in Siberia. One of our Siberian officers, who traveled from Russia to Irkútsk toward the end of that year, met at a post station two gendarmes. They had accompanied to Siberia a functionary exiled for theft, and were now returning home. Our Irkútsk officer, who was a very amiable man, finding the gendarmes at the tea table on a cold winter night, joined them and chatted with them, while the horses were being changed. One of the men knew Karakózoff.

“ He was cunning, he was,” he said. “ When he was in the fortress we were ordered, two of us, — we were relieved every two hours, — not to let him sleep. So we kept him sitting on a small stool, and as soon as he began to doze we shook him to keep him awake. . . . What will you ? — we were ordered to do so ! ... Well, see how cunning he was : he would sit with crossed legs, swinging one of his legs to make us believe that he was awake, and himself, in the meantime, would get a nap, continuing to swing his leg. But we soon made it out and told those who relieved us, so that he was shaken and waked up every few minutes, whether he swung his legs or not.” “And how long did that last ? ” my friend asked. “ Oh, many days, — more than one week.”

The naive character of this description is in itself a proof of veracity : it could not have been invented ; and that Karakózoff was tortured to this degree may be taken for granted.

When Karakózoff was hanged, one of my comrades from the corps of pages was present at the execution with his regiment of cuirassiers. “ When he was taken out of the fortress,” my comrade told me, “ sitting on the high platform of the cart which was jolting on the rough glacis of the fortress, my first impression was that they were bringing out an india-rubber doll to be hanged; that Karakózoff was already dead. Imagine that the head, the hands, the whole body were absolutely loose, as if there were no bones in the body, or as if the bones had all been broken. It was a terrible tiling to see, and to think what it meant. However, when two soldiers took him down from the cart, I saw that he moved his legs and made strenuous endeavors to walk by himself and to ascend the steps of the scaffold. So it was not a doll, nor could he have been in a swoon. All the officers were very much puzzled at the circumstance and could not explain it.” When, however, I suggested to my comrade that perhaps Karakózoff had been tortured, the color came into his face and he replied, “ So we all thought.”

Absence of sleep for weeks would alone be sufficient to explain the state in which that morally very strong man was during the execution. I may add that I have the absolute certitude that — at least in one case — drugs were administered to a prisoner in the fortress, namely, Adrián Mikháiloff, in 1880. Did Muravióff limit the torture to this only? Was he prevented from going any further, or not ? I do not know. But this much I know : that I often heard from high officials at St. Petersburg that torture had been resorted to in this case.

Muravióff had promised to root out all radical elements in St. Petersburg, and all those who had had in any degree a radical past now lived under the fear of falling into the despot’s clutches. Above all, they kept aloof from the younger people, from fear of being involved with them in some perilous political associations. In this way a chasm was opened not only between the “ fathers ” and the “sons,” as Turguéneff described it in his novel, —not only between the two generations, but also between all men who had passed the age of thirty and those who were in their early twenties. Russian youth stood consequently in the position not only of having to fight in their fathers the defenders of serfdom, but of being left entirely to themselves by their elder brothers, who were unwilling to join them in their leanings toward Socialism, and were afraid to give them support even in their struggle for more political freedom. Was there ever before in history. I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, left in so complete an isolation by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life, the intellectual inheritance of these same fathers and brothers ? Was there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these ?

VI.

The only bright point which I saw in the life of St. Petersburg was the movement which was going on amongst the youth of both sexes. Various currents joined to produce the mighty agitation which soon took an underground and revolutionary character, and engrossed the attention of Russia for the next fifteen years. I shall speak of it in a subsequent, chapter; but I must mention in this place the movement which was carried on, quite openly, by our women for obtaining access to higher education. St. Petersburg was at that time its main centre.

Every afternoon the young wife of my brother, on her return front the women’s pedagogical courses which she followed, had something new to tell us about the animation which prevailed there. Schemes were laid for opening a medical academy and universities for women ; debates upon schools or upon different methods of education were organized in connection with the courses, and hundreds of women took a passionate interest in these questions, discussing them over and over again in private. Societies of translators, publishers, printers, and bookbinders were started in order that work might be provided for the poorest, members of the sisterhood who flocked to St. Petersburg, ready to do any sort of work, only to live in the hope that they, too, would some day have their share of higher education. A vigorous, exuberant life reigned in those feminine centres, in striking contrast to wliat I met elsewhere.

Since the government had shown its determined intention not to admit women to the existing universities, they had directed all their efforts toward opening universities of their own. They were told at the ministry of education that the girls who had passed through the girls’ gymnasia (the high schools) were not prepared to follow university lectures. “ Very well,” was their reply, “permit us to open intermediate courses, preparatory to the university, and impose upon us any programme you like. We ask no grants from the state. Only give us the permission, and it will be done.” Of course, the permission was not given. Then they started private courses and drawing-room lectures in all parts of St. Petersburg. Many university professors, in sympathy with the new movement, volunteered to give lectures. Poor men themselves, they warned the organizers that any mention of remuneration would be taken as a personal offense. Natural science excursions used to be made every summer in the neighborhoods of St. Petersburg, under the guidance of university professors, and women constituted the bulk of the excursionists. In the courses for midwives they forced the professors to treat each subject in a far more exhaustive way than was required by the programme, or to open additional courses. They took advantage of every possibility, of every breach in the fortress, to storm it. They gained admission to the anatomical laboratory of old Dr. Gruber, and by their admirable work they won this enthusiast of anatomy entirely to their side. If they learned that a professor had no objection to letting them work in his laboratory on Sundays and at night on week days, they took advantage of the opening, working late and earnestly. At last, notwithstanding all the opposition of the ministry, they opened the intermediate courses, only giving them the name of pedagogical courses. Was it possible, indeed, to forbid future mothers studying the methods of education ? But as the methods of teaching botany or mathematics could not be taught in the abstract, botany, mathematics, and the rest were soon introduced into the curriculum of tlie pedagogical courses.

Step by step they thus widened their rights. As soon as it became known that at some German university a certain professor might open his lecture room to a few women, they knocked at his door and were admitted. They studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics at Berlin ; while at Zürich more than a hundred girls and women worked at the university and the polytechnicum. There they won something more valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine ; they won the esteem of the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times. When I came to Zürich in 1872, and became acquainted with some of the students, I was astonished to see quite young girls, who were studying at the polytechnicum, solving intricate problems of the theory of heat, with the aid of the differential calculus, as easily as if they had had years of mathematical training. One of the Russian girls who studied mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie Kovalévsky, became a mathematician of high repute, and was invited to a professorship at Stockholm ; she was the first woman in our century to hold a professorship in a university for men. She was so young that in Sweden no one wanted to call her anything but Sophie; she went in the country by her diminutive name of Sónia.

In spite of the open hatred of Alexander II. for educated women, — when he met in his walks a girl wearing spectacles and a round Garibaldian cap, he began to tremble, thinking that she must be a nihilist bent on shooting at him ; in spite of the bitter opposition of the state police, who represented every woman student as a revolutionist; in spite of the thunders and the vile accusations which Katkóff directed against the whole of the movement in almost every number of his venomous gazette, the women succeeded, in the teeth of the government, in opening a series of educational institutions. When several of them had obtained medical degrees abroad, they forced the government, in 1872, to let them open a medical academy with their own private means. And when the Russian women were recalled by their government from Zürich, to prevent their intercourse with the revolutionist refugees, they forced the government to let them open in Russia four universities of their own, which soon had nearly a thousand pupils. It seems almost incredible, but it is a fact that notwithstanding all the prosecutions which the Woman’s Medical Academy had to live through, and its temporary closure, there are now in Russia more than six hundred and seventy women in possession of the degree of M. D.

It was certainly a grand movement, astounding in its success and instructive in a high degree. Above all, it was through the unlimited devotion of amass of women in all possible capacities that they gained their successes. They had already worked as sisters of charity during the Crimean war ; as organizers of schools later on ; as the most devoted schoolmistresses in the villages ; as educated midwives and doctors’ assistants amongst the peasants. They went afterward as nurses and doctors in the feverstricken hospitals during the Turkish war of 1878, and won the admiration of the military commanders and of Alexander II. himself. I know two ladies, both very eagerly " wanted ” by the state police, who served as nurses during the war, under assumed names which were guaranteed by false passports ; one of them, the greater " criminal ” of the two, was even appointed head nurse of a large hospital for wounded soldiers, while her friend nearly died from typhoid fever.

In short, women took any position, no matter how low in the social scale, and no matter what privations it involved, if only they could be in any way useful to the people; not a few of them, but hundreds and thousands. They have conquered their rights in the true sense of the word.

Another feature of this movement was that in it the chasm between the two generations — the older and the younger sisters — did not exist ; or, at least, it was bridged over to a great extent. Those who were the leaders of the movement from its origin never broke the link which connected them with their younger sisters, even though the latter were far more advanced in their ideals than the older women were.

They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof from any political agitation ; but they never committed the fault of forgetting that their true force was in the masses of younger women, of whom a great number finally joined the radical or revolutionary circles. These leaders were correctness itself, — I considered them too correct ; but they did not break with those younger students who went about as typical nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their behavior. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there was friction, but they never repudiated them, — a great thing, I believe, in those times of madly raging prosecutions.

They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people : “ We shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, because we have to deal with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of ‘ political reliability ; ’ but you, girls, remain free in your tastes and inclinations.” When the women who studied at Zürich were ordered by the Russian government to return, these correct ladies did not turn against the rebels. They simply said to the government: “ You don’t like it? Well, then, open women’s universities at home ; otherwise our girls will go abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter into relations with the political refugees.” When they were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, “ Yes, many students become revolutionists ; but is that a reason for closing all universities?” How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party !

The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere “ feminists,” desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the state. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stásova, the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in 1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls, the interest they manifested in the hard life of these girls outside the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical courses, in the village schools, and in the work of those few who, like Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that direction, and the social spirit which permeated those courses. The rights they strove for — both the leaders and the great bulk of the women — were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses. This is why they succeeded to such an extent.

P. Kropotkin.