Only one thing puzzled him. It was absurd, really, but he had a curious sense, the moment he had set eyes on him, that there was something vaguely familiar about Nicolai’s friend. Yet what the devil was it?
Yevgeny Pavlovich Popov. That was how the ginger-haired fellow had been introduced: it was a common enough name. ‘Have I seen you before?’ Misha had asked.
‘No.’
He had not pursued the subject. Yet – he was sure of it – there was something about the fellow… And that night, as he lay for many hours, too excited to sleep, this little conundrum was one of many matters the landowner turned over in his mind.
The arrival of his son always made Misha Bobrov think about the future. What sort of estate would he be able to hand on to the boy? What sort of life would Nicolai have? Above all, what did the boy think about things. I must ask him about such-and-such, he’d think. Or, remembering some pet project of his own: I wonder if he’d approve of that? So it was that, in the darkness, a host of subjects crowded into his head.
And it was typical of Misha Bobrov that, although for him personally things had gone rather badly, he remained convinced that, in general, they were going well. ‘I am optimistic about the future,’ he would declare. It was one of the few matters upon which his wife could not agree with him.
In fact, on the Bobrov estate, things were going extremely badly. For if the Emancipation had disappointed the peasants, it had hardly been any better for the landowners either.
The first problem was old and familiar. By 1861 Misha Bobrov, like nearly every landowner he knew, had already pledged seventy per cent of his serfs against mortgages at the State bank. In the decade after Emancipation, half the money he received as compensation went straight to the bank to pay off these debts. Furthermore, the State bonds that he was given in part payment – the bonds which the peasants were struggling so hard to pay off – were slowly losing their value as Russia suffered a mild inflation. ‘Those damned bonds are already worth two-thirds of what they were,’ he had remarked to Anna just the week before.
Because he was in debt and short of cash, Bobrov found it hard to pay for labour from his former serfs to cultivate the land he had left. Some had been rented out to peasants; some leased to merchants; and some, he feared, would soon have to be sold. Most of his friends were selling land. Each year, therefore, he grew a little poorer.
Why then should he be optimistic?
There were several reasons. The Russian Empire was certainly more settled and stronger than when he was a young man. After centuries of conflict, the vast empire seemed to be reaching out, at last, to its natural frontiers. True, the huge territory of Alaska, in 1867, had been sold to the United States. ‘But it was too far away,’ Bobrov would say. And meanwhile, Russia was consolidating her hold on the distant Pacific rim of the Eurasian plain where the new port of Vladivostok, opposite Japan, gave promise of a vigorous Far Eastern trade. Down in the south, after the débâcle of the Crimea, Russia had once again secured the right to sail her fleet in the warm Black Sea; and to the south-east, she was gradually absorbing the desert peoples beyond the Caspian Sea, with their fierce ruling princes and rich caravans. In the west, the last uprising of the Poles had been crushed and Russia – closely allied now with Prussia – was at peace with her western neighbours. And if, some said, the Prussian kingdom and its brilliant Chancellor Bismarck seemed a little too hungry for power, what was that to the empire of the Tsar, which covered a sixth of the land surface of the globe?
But the real reason why Bobrov was optimistic was because of what he saw inside Russia itself.
‘We’ve seen more reform in the last fifteen years,’ he would point out, ‘than at any time since Peter the Great.’
It might be that, in private, Tsar Alexander II only wanted to maintain order in Russia; but having decided that reforms were needed to do so, he had made amazing progress. The creaking, ancient legal system had been totally reformed. Now, for the first time in eight hundred years of Russian history, there were independent courts, with independent judges, professional lawyers, open to all men and conducted, not in secret, but in the open. There was even trial by jury. The military had been reformed: all men, noble and peasant, were liable to be chosen by lots for service – but six years only, not twenty-five. And in all but the elite regiments, a man of humble birth could even become an officer. ‘God knows, we can only do better than we did in the Crimea,’ Misha liked to say to fellow gentlemen who complained of this mixing of classes.
But the reforms which pleased Misha Bobrov the most were the new local assemblies.
For these were the bodies known to history as the zemstvos – zemstvo meaning: ‘of the land, the community’ – in the country; and the dumas – the duma being the ancient Tsar’s council – in the towns. And Russia had seen nothing like them before. In every district, town and province, these assemblies for local government were elected by all taxpayers, whether gentry, merchant or peasant. ‘So now,’ Misha cheerfully claimed, ‘Russia has entered the modern world of democracy too.’
True, the zemstvos and dumas had only modest powers; and key posts like that of governor and the police chiefs were all appointed by the Tsar’s government.
True, there were also some special features in the election. In the towns, for instance, the votes were weighted by how much in taxes was paid: the great majority of the people therefore, who only contributed a third of the taxes, could only elect a third of the council members. In the country, similar weighting, and a series of indirect election, ensured that in the provincial zemstvos, over seventy per cent of the members belonged to the gentry. ‘But it’s the principle of the thing that matters,’ Misha declared. ‘And all the classes have a say.’
Besides – and this was, perhaps, the thing Bobrov liked best of all – these zemstvos gave men like him a role in society. As a service class, the nobles might have been passed by; their serfs might have been taken from them; but in these local zemstvos, however modest their power, a noble like himself might still preserve the illusion that he was important and useful to his country. ‘We have always served Russia,’ he could still say, with a trace of satisfaction.
It was just before he fell asleep that a possible solution to the puzzle concerning his familiar guest occurred to Misha Bobrov.
Devil take it, he thought. Didn’t the young fellow say his patronymic was Pavlovich? And didn’t that horrid old priest at Russka, with the red hair, have a son called Paul Popov – a petty official of some kind in Moscow. Could this ginger-haired fellow be the priest’s grandson, then?
It was an amusing thought. He decided to ask him in the morning.
Yet when morning came, and Misha descended to the dining room where he expected to find the two young men at breakfast, he was greeted by his manservant with a most curious bit of news.
‘Mister Nicolai went out with his friend just before dawn, sir,’ the fellow said.
‘Before dawn? Where to?’
‘Down to the village, Mikhail Alexeevich.’ And then, with obvious disapprovaclass="underline" ‘They were dressed as peasants, sir.’
Misha looked at the man. He was not usually given to inventing stories.
‘Why the devil should they be doing that?’ he demanded.
‘I can’t understand it, sir,’ he replied. ‘They said,’ he hesitated for an instant, ‘they said, sir, that they were going to look for work.’