'My driver struck up a song, a plaintive one, as usual. Anyone who knows the sounds of the songs of the Russian people will admit that there is something in them that expresses a sadness of the spirit. Almost every tune of these songs is in a minor key.
The government should be founded on this musical inclination of the people's ear. In it one will find the formation of the soul of our people. Look at the Russian and you will find him pensive. If he \vants to shake off tedium or, as he calls it himself, if he
'"·ants to have a good time, he goes to the pot-house . . . . The barge-hauler going with hanging head to the pot-house and coming back bloody from blows in the face may provide the 1 Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev ( 1 i1-9-1 802) is meant, the author of the famous lourner from Petersburg to Jl.1oscow. ( Tr.)
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solution of much that has hitherto been enigmatic in the history of Russia.'
The driver went on wailing his song: the traveller went on thinking his thoughts, and before he had reached Chudovo he suddenly remembered how once in Petersburg he had struck his Petrushka for being drunk; and he burst out crying like a child, and, without blushing for his honours as a gentleman, he had the shamelessness to write: 'Oh, if only, drunk as he was, he had come to his senses, enough to answer-me in the same way! '
This song, these tears, these words, scattered between two stations on the post-road, must be regarded as one of the first signs of the turning tide. The conception always happens quietly, and the trace of it is usually lost to begin with.
The Empress Catherine understood the point of it, and was graciously pleased 'with w<�rmth <Jnd feeling' to say to Khrapovitsky: 'Radishchev is a worse rebel than Pugachev! '2
To be surprised that she sent him in chains to Ilimsky prison is absurd. It is much more surprising that Paul brought him back; but he did that to spite his dead mother-he had no other purpose.
-from The Emperor Alexander I and V. N. Karazin ( 1 862) I I
'WHEN IN 1826 Yakubovich saw Prince Obolensky with a beard and wearing the coarse uniform of a soldier, he ·could not help exclaiming: '\Nell, Obolensky, if I am like Stenka Razin,3 you must be like Vanka K<�in4 and no mistake!' . . . Then the officer commanding the escort c<�me up; the prisoners were put in fetters and sent to pen<J! servitude in Siberia.
The common people did not recognise this resemblance, and dense crowds of them looked on indifferently in Nizhny Novgorod as the fettered prisoners \Wre conveyed through it at the very time of the f<� ir. Perh<Jps they were thinking: 'Our poor de<�rs have to w<Jlk there on foot, but here the gentry are driven by the gendarmes in carts! '
2 PugarhPY ll'd the grPat rl'bPll ion of the serfs i n I i75. (D.M.) 3 Legendary Cossack bandit who led a large-scale peasant uprising m I 6i0. (D.M.)
4 '\'anka Kain' ( <>q uivalPnt to Jack Cain-from Cain of the Bible) is a slang t erm of abuse for a desperah• fellow rl'ady for anything. ( Tr.)
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But on the other side of the Ural Range comes a mournful equality in the face of penal servitude and hopeless misfortune.
Everything changes. The petty official whom we were accustomed to know as a heartless, dirty taker of bribes, in a voice trembling with tears beseeches the exiles at Irkutsk to accept a gift of money from him ; the rude Cossacks escorting them leave them in peace and freedom so far as they can ; the merchants entertain them as they pass through. On the farther side of Lake Baikal some of them stopped at the ford at Verkhne-Udinsk ; the inhabitants learnt who they were, and an old man at once seilt them by his grandson a basket of white bread and rolls, and the grandfather dragged himself out to tell them about the country beyond the Baikal and ask them questions about the great world.
While Prince Obolensky was sti!l at the Usolsky Works he went out early one morning to the place where he had been told to chop down trees. While he was at work a man appeared out of the forest, looked at him intently with a friendly air and then went on his way. In the evening, as he was going home, Obolensky met him again; he made signs to him and pointed to the forest. Next morning he came out of a thicket and made signs to Obolensky to follow him. Obolensky went. Leading him deeper into the forest, the man stopped and said to him solemnly: 'We have long known of your coming. It is told of you in the prophecy of Ezekiel. We have been expecting you. There are many of us here; rely upon us, for we shall not betray you ! ' It was a banished Dukhobor.
Obolensky had for a long time been tormented by his desire to have news of his own people through Princess Trubetskoy, who had come to Irkutsk. He had no means of getting a letter to her so he asked the schismatic for help. The man did not waste time thinking. 'At dusk to-morrow,' he said, 'I shall be at such and such a place. Bring the letter, and it shall be delivered . . . .'
Obolensky gave him the letter, and the same night the man set off for Irkutsk ; two days later the answer was in Obolensky's hands.
What would have happened if he had been caught?
'One's own people do not regard dangers . . . .'
The Dukhobor paid the people's debt for Radishchev.
And so in the forests and mines of Siberia, the Russia of Peter, of the landowner, of the public official, of the officer, and the 'black' Russia of the peasants and the village, both banished and fettered, both with an axe in the belt, both leaning on the spade and wiping the sweat from their faces, looked at each
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other for the first time and recognised the long-forgotten traits of kinship.
It is time that this should take place in the light of day, loudly, openly, everywhere.
It is time that the nobility, artificially raised above the common level in a reservoir of their own by German engineers, should mingle with the surrounding sea. We have become accustomed to seeing fountains, and Samson's column of water from the lion's jaws is no wonder to us beside the infinity of the surging sea.
The Peterhof fete is over, the Court masque in fancy dress is played out, the lamps are smoking and going out, the fountains have almost run dry-let us go home.
'All that is so, but . . . but . . . would it not be better to raise the people?' Perhaps; only one must know that to make them really bristle up there is one sure method-the method of the torture-chamber, the method of Peter I, of Biron, of Arakcheyev. That is why the Emperor Alexander accomplished nothing with his Karazins and Speranskys-but when he got to Arakcheyev that was where he stayed.
There are too many ordinary common people for it to be possible actually to raise them all to the Fourteenth Rank,5 and in 5 The Old Believers of the English schooL who are bound by their doctrine to maintain all the age-old gains of their historical life, even when these do not exist or when they are pernicious, do not agree with this.
They think that every sort of right, however wrongly acquired, must be kept, and others united to it. For instance, instead of depriving the nobles of the right to flog and beat the peasants. the peasants should be given the same right. In the old days they used to say that it would be a good thing to promote all the people into the Fourteenth Rank, • in order that they should not be flogged: would it not be better to promote them directly to be captains in the Guards or hereditary noblemen, seeing that heredity with us is reckoned in the opposite direction? ! Yet the Ukrainians in the seventeenth century did not reason like this when there was a plan to ennoble them-a plan suggested not by bookish scholars but by the brilliant, magnificent, exuberant nobility of the Free Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. They thought it better to go on being Cossacks.