On the evening of the next day, Count Komarovsky, a high officer of the police, was at our house, and told us of the band of revolutionaries in the Cathedral Square, the cavalry charge, and the death of Miloradovich.1
Then followed the arrests - 'They have taken so-and-so' ; 'They have caught so-and-so' ; 'They have arrested so-and-so in the country.' Parents trembled in fear for their sons ; the sky was covered over with black clouds.
During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare : 1 . When Nicholas became Emperor in place of his brother Constantine, the revolt of the Decembrists took place in Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Five of the conspirators were afterwards hanged, and over a hundred banished to Siberia.
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it is true that he exiled Pushkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member,2 but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not swollen to its later proportions : it was merely an office, presided over by de Sanglin, a freethinking old gentleman and a sayer of good things, in the manner of the French writer, �tienne de Jouy. Under Nicholas, de Sanglin himself came under police supervision and passed for a liberal, though he remained precisely what he had always been ; but this fact alone serves to mark the difference between the two reigns.
The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. On the contrary, men became zealots for tyranny, some to gain their own ends, while others were even worse, because they had nothing to gain by subservience.
Women alone were not guilty of this shameful denial of their dear ones. By the Cross none but women were standing ; and by the blood-stained guillotine there were women too - a Lucile Desmoulins, that Ophelia of the French Revolution, wandering near the fatal axe and waiting her turn, or a George Sand holding out, even on the scaffold, the hand of sympathy and friendship to the young fanatic, Alibaud.3
The wives of the exiles were deprived of all civil rights; abandoning their wealth and position in society, they faced a whole lifetime of slavery in Eastern Siberia. where the terrible climate was less formidable than the Siberian police. Sisters, who were not permitted to accompany their condemned brothers, absented themselves from Court, and many of them left Russia ; almost all of them retained in their hearts a lively feeling of 2. The president had proposed to elect Arakcheyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilya Baykov, the Tsar's coachman. 'He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,' he said.
3· Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, with Danton, 5 April 1794; his wife, Lucile, soon followed him. Alibaud was executed 1 1 July 1836, for an attempt on the life of Louis Philippe.
C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E
affection for the sufferers. But this was not s o among the men : fear devoured this feeling in their hearts, and none of them dared to open their lips about 'the unfortunate'.
As I have touched on this subject, I cannot refrain from giving some account of one of these heroic women, whose history is known to very few.
2
In the ancient family of the Ivashevs a French girl was living as a governess. The only son of the house wished to marry her. All his relations were driven wild by the idea ; there was a great commotion, tears, and entreaties. They succeeded in inducing the girl to leave Petersburg and the young man to delay his intention for a season. Young Ivashev was one of the most active conspirators, and was condemned to penal servitude for life. For this was a form of mesalliance from which his relations did not protect him. As soon as the terrible news reached the young girl in Paris, she started for Petersburg, and asked permission to travel to the Government of Irkutsk, in order to join her future husband.
Benkendorf tried to deter her from this criminal purpose ; when he failed, he reported the case to Nicholas. The Tsar ordered that the position of women who had remained faithful to their exiled husbands should be explained to her. 'I don't keep her back,' he added ; 'but she ought to realise that if wives, who have accompanied their husbands out of loyalty, deserve some indulgence, she has no claim whatever to such treatment, when she intends to marry one whom she knows to be a criminaL'
In Siberia nothing was known of this permission. When she had found her way there, the poor girl was forced to wait while a correspondence went on with Petersburg. She lived in a miserable settlement .peopled with released criminals of an kinds, unable to get any news of her lover or to inform him of her whereabouts.
By degrees she made acquaintances among her strange companions. One of these was a highwayman who was now employed in the prison, and she told him all her story. Next day he brought her a note from Ivashev ; and soon he offered to carry messages between them. All day he worked in the prison ; at nightfall he got a scrap of writing from Ivashev and started off,
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undeterred by weariness or stormy weather, and returned to his daily work before dawn.
At last permission came for their marriage. A few years later, penal servitude was commuted to penal settlement, and their condition was improved to some extent. But their strength was exhausted, and the wife was the first to sink under the burden of all she had undergone. She faded away, as a flower from southern climes was bound to fade in the snows of Siberia.
Ivashev could not survive her long : just a year later he too died.
But he had ceased to live before his death : his letters (which impressed even the inquisitors who read them) were evidence not only of intense sorrow, but of a distracted brain ; they were full of gloomy poetry and a crazy piety ; after her death he never really lived, and the process of his death was slow and solemn.
This history does not end with their deaths. Ivashev's father, after his son's exile, transferred his property to an illegitimate son, begging him not to forget his unfortunate brother but to do what he could. The young pair were survived by two children, two nameless infants, with a future prospect of the roughest labour in Siberia - without friends, without rights, without parents. Ivashev's brother got permission to adopt the children.
A few years later he ventured on another request : he used influence, that their father's name might be restored to them, and this also was granted.
3
I was strongly impressed by stories of the rebels and their fate, and by the horror which reigned in Moscow. These events revealed to me a new world, which became more and more the centre of my whole inner life ; I don't know how it came to pass ; but, though I understood very dimly what it was all about, I felt that the side that possessed the cannons and held the upper hand was not my side. The execution of Pestel 4 and his companions finally awakened me from the dreams of childhood.