He took a detachment of his men and proceeded to besiege the Cheremises. Several villages were baptised. Kurbanovsky sang the Te Deum in church and went back to Moscow, to receive with 6. In the ninth century Cyril and his brother Method ius, two Greek monks of Salonika, introduced Christianity among the Slavs. They invented the Russian alphabet.
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humility the velvet cap for good service ; and the Government sent the Vladimir Cross to the Tatar.
But there was an unfortunate misunderstanding between the Tatar missionary and the local mullah. The mullah was greatly displeased with this believer in the Koran took to preachng the Gospel and succeeded so well. During Ramadan, the inspector boldly put on his cross and appeared in the mosque wearing it; he took a front place, as a matter of course. The mullah had just begun to chant the Koran through his nose, when he suddenly stopped and said that he dared not go on, in the presence of a true believer who had come to the mosque wearing a Christian emblem.
The congregation protested ; and the discomfited inspector was forced to put his cross in his pocket.
I read afterwards in the archives of the Home Office an account of this brilliant conversion of the Cheremises. The writer mentioned the zealous cooperation of Devlet Kildeyev, but unfortunately forgot to add that his zeal for the Church was the more disinterested because of his firm belief in the truth of Islam.
1 1
Before I left Vyatka, the Department of Imperial Domains was committing such impudent thefts that a commission of enquiry was appointed ; and this commission sent out inspectors into all the provinces. A new system of control over the Crown tenants was introduced after that time.
Our Governor at that time was Kornilov ; he had to nominate two subordinates to assist the inspectors, and I was one of the two. I had to read a multitude of documents, sometimes with pain, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with disgust. The very headings of the subjects for investigation struck me with astonishment : (1) The loss and total disappearance of a police-station, and the destruction of the plan by the gnawing of mice.
(2) The loss of twelve miles of arable land.
(3) The transference of the peasant's son Vasily to the female sex.
The last item was so remarkable that I read the details at once from beginning to end.
There was a petition to the Governor from the father of the
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child. The petitioner stated that fifteen years ago a daughter had been born to him, whom he wished to call Vasilisa ; but the priest, not being sober, christened the girl Vasily, and entered the name thus on the register. This fact apparently caused little disturbance to the father ; but when he found he would soon be required to provide a recruit for the Army and pay the poll-tax for the child, he informed the police. The police were much puzzled.
They began by refusing to act, on the ground that he ought to have applied earlier. The father then went to the Governor, and the Governor ordered that this boy of the female sex should be formally examined by a doctor and a midwife. But at this point, matters were complicated by a correspondence with the ecclesiastical authorities ; and the parish priest, whose predecessor, under the influence of drink, had been too prudish to recognise differences of sex, now appeared on the scene ; the matter went on for years, and I rather think the girl was never cleared of the suspicion of being a boy.
The reader is not to suppose that this absurd story is a mere humorous invention of mine.
During the Emperor Paul's reign a colonel of the Guards, making his monthly report, returned as dead an officer who had gone to the hospital ; and the Tsar struck his name off the lists.
But unfortunately the officer did not die ; he recovered instead.
The colonel induced him to return to his estates for a year or two, hoping to find an opportunity of putting matters straight ; and the officer agreed. But his heirs, having read of his death in the Gazette, positively refused to recognise him as still alive ; though inconsolable for their loss, they insisted upon their right of succession. The living corpse, whom the Gazette had killed once, found that he was likely to die over again, by starvation this time.
So he travelled to Petersburg and handed in a petition to the Tsar.
This beats even my story of the girl who was also a boy.
12
It is a miry slough, this account of our provincial administration ; yet I shall add a few words more. This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.
Government is very ready to reward high officials with grants of unoccupied land. There is no great harm in that, though it
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might b e wiser t o keep i t for the needs of a n increasing population. The rules governing such allotments of land are rather detailed ; it is illegal to grant the banks of a navigable river, or wood fit for building purposes, or both sides of a river ; and finally, land reclaimed by peasants may in no case be taken from them, even though the peasants have no title to the land except prescription.
All this is very well, on paper ; but in fact this allotment of land to individuals is a terrible instrument by which the Crown is robbed and the peasants oppressed.
Most of the magnates to whom the leases are granted either sell their rights to merchants, or try, by means of the provincial authorities, to secure some privileges contrary to the rules. Thus it happened, by mere chance, of course, that Count Orlov himself got possession of the road and pastures used by droves of cattle in the Government of Saratov.
No wonder, then, that the peasants of a certain district in Vyatka were deprived one fine morning of all their land, right up to their houses and farmyards, the soil having passed into the possession of some merchants who had bought the lease from a relation of Count Kankrin.7 The merchants next put a rent on the land. The law was appealed to. The Crown Court, being bribed by the merchants and fearing a great man's cousin, put a spoke in the wheel ; but the peasants, determined to go on to the bitter end, chose two shrewd men from among the�nselves and sent them off to Petersburg. The matter now came before the Supreme Court. The judges suspected that the peasants were in the right ; but they were puzzled how to act, and consulted Kankrin. That nobleman admitted frankly that the land had been taken away unjustly ; but he thought there would be difficulty in restoring it, because it might have been re-sold since, and because the new owners might have made some improvements. He therefore suggested that advantage should be taken of the vast extent of the Crown lands, and that the same quantity of land should be granted to the peasants, but in another district. This solution pleased everyone except the peasants : in the first place, it was no trifle to reclaim fresh land ; and, in the second place, the land 7· Count Kankrin (1774-1845) was Minister of Finance from 1823
till his death. He carried through some important reforms in the currency.