Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of Russia

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In the midst of these distractions at home, while fighting the Ottoman
Empire for the shores of the Black Sea, and all Europe over a partition
of Poland, the Empress was at the same time introducing reforms in
every department of her incoherent and disordered empire. Peter the
Great had abolished the Patriarchate. She did more. The monasteries
and the ecclesiastical estates, which were exempt from taxes during all
the period of Mongol dominion, had never paid tribute to Khans, had in
consequence grown to be enormously wealthy. It is said the clergy
owned a million serfs. Catherine placed the property of the Church
under the administration of a secular commission, and the heads of the
monasteries and the clergy were converted from independent sovereigns
into mere pensioners of the Crown. Then she assailed the receiving of
bribes, and other corrupt practices in the administration of justice.
She struggled hard to let in the light of better instruction upon the
upper and middle classes. If she could, she would have abolished
ignorance and cruelty in the land, not because she was a
philanthropist, but because she loved civilization. It was her
intellect, not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer. When she
severely punished and forever disgraced a lady of high rank for cruelty
to her serfs,--forty of whom had been tortured to death,--it was
because she had the educated instincts of a European, not an Asiatic,
and she had also the intelligence to realize that no state could be
made sound which rested upon a foundation of human misery. She
established a Russian Academy modeled after the French, its object
being to fix the rules for writing and speaking the Russian language
and to promote the study of Russian history. In other words, Catherine
was a reformer fully in sympathy with the best methods prevailing in
Western Europe. She was profoundly interested in the New Philosophy
and the intellectual movement in France, was in correspondence with
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories of
Rousseau.

Of course the influence exerted by French genius over Russian
civilization at this time did not penetrate far below the upper and
highly educated class; but there is no doubt it left a deep impress
upon the literature and art of the nation, and also modified Russian
characteristics by introducing religious tolerance and habits of
courtesy, besides making aspirations after social justice and political
liberty entirely respectable. Catherine's "Book of Instructions" to
the commission which was created by her to assist in making a new code
of laws contained political maxims which would satisfy advanced
reformers to-day; although when she saw later that the French
Revolution was their logical conclusion, she repudiated them, took
Voltaire's bust down from its pedestal, and had it thrown into a
rubbish heap. The work she was accomplishing for Russia was second
only to that of Peter the Great; and when she is reproached for not
having done more and for not having broken the chains forged by Boris
upon twenty million people, let it be remembered that she lived in the
eighteenth, and not the nineteenth, century; and that at that very time
Franklin and Jefferson were framing a constitution which sanctioned the
existence of negro slavery in an ideal republic!

A new generation had grown up in Poland, men not nobles nor serfs, but
a race of patriots familiar with the stirring literature of their
century. They had seen their land broken into fragments and then
ground fine by a proud and infatuated nobility. They had seen their
pusillanimous kings one after another yielding to the insolent demands
for their territory. Polish territory extended eastward into the
Ukraine; now that must be cut off and dropped into the lap of Russia.
Another arm extended north, separating Eastern Prussia from Western.
That too must be cut off and fall to Prussia. Then after shearing
these extremities, the Poland which was left must not only accept the
spoliation, but co-operate with her despoilers in adopting under their
direction a constitution suited to its new humiliation. Her King was
making her the laughing-stock of Europe--but before long the name
Poland was to become another name for tragedy. Kosciusko had fought in
the War of the American Revolution. When he returned, with the badge
of the Order of the Cincinnati upon his breast and filled with dreams
of the regeneration of his own land by the magic of this new political
freedom, he was the chosen leader of the patriots.

The partition of Poland was not all accomplished at one time. It took
three repasts to finish the banquet (the partitions of 1792-1793-1794),
and then some time more was required to sweep up the fragments and to
efface its name from the map of Europe. Kosciusko and his followers
made their last vain and desperate stand in 1794, and when he fell
covered with wounds at the battle of Kaminski, Poland fell with him.
The Poles were to survive only as a more or less unhappy element among
nations where they were aliens. Their race affinities were with
Russia, for they were a Slavonic people; their religious affinities
were with Catholic Austria; but with Protestant Prussia there was not
one thing in common, and that was the bitterest servitude of all. The
Poles in Russia were to some extent autonomous. They were permitted to
continue their local governments under a viceroy appointed by the Tsar;
their Slavonic system of communes was not disturbed, nor their language
nor customs. Still it was only a privileged servitude after all, and
the time was coming when it was to become an unmitigated one. But
effaced as a political sovereignty, Poland was to survive as a
nationality of genius. Her sons were going to sing their songs in
other lands, but Mickiewiz and Sienkiewicz and Chopin are Polish, not
Russian.

The alliance of the three sovereigns engaged in this dismemberment was
about as friendly as is that of three dogs who have run down a hare and
are engaged in picking nice morsels from its bones. If Russia was
getting more than her share, the Turks would be incited by Austria or
Prussia to attack her in the South; and many times did Catherine's
armies desert Poland to march down and defend the Crimea, and her new
fort at Sebastopol, and her fleet on the Black Sea. In 1787,
accompanied by her grandsons, the Grand Dukes Alexander and
Constantine, she made that famous journey down the Dnieper; visited the
ancient shrines about Kief; stood in the picturesque old capital of
Sarai, on the spot where Russian Grand Princes had groveled at the feet
of the Khans; and then, looked upon Sebastopol, which marked the limit
of the new frontier which she had created.

The French Revolution caused a revulsion in her political theories.
She indulged in no more abstractions about human rights, and had an
antipathy for the new principles which had led to the execution of the
King and Queen and to such revolting horrors. She made a holocaust of
the literature she had once thought entertaining. Russians suspected
of liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the slightest pretext sent
to Siberia, and she urged the King of Sweden to head a crusade against
this pestilential democracy, which she would help him to sweep out of
Europe. It was Catherine, in consultation with the Emperor of Austria,
who first talked of dismembering Turkey and creating out of its own
territory a group of neutral states lying between Europe and the
Ottoman Empire. And Voltaire's dream of a union of the Greek peoples
into an Hellenic kingdom she improved upon by a larger plan of her own,
by which she was to be the conqueror of the Ottoman Empire, while her
grandson Constantine, sitting on a throne at Constantinople, should
rule Greeks and Turks alike under a Russian protectorate.

Upon the private life of Catherine there is no need to dwell. This is
not the biography of a woman, but the history of the empire she
magnificently ruled for thirty-four years. It is enough to say she was
not better than her predecessors, the Tsaritsas Elizabeth and Anna.
The influence exerted by Menschikof in the reign of Catherine I., and
Biron in that of Anna, was to be exerted by Alexis Orlof, Potemkin, and
other favorites in this. Her son Paul, who was apparently an object of
dislike, was kept in humiliating subordination to the Orlofs and her
other princely favorites, to whose councils he was never invited.
Righteousness and moral elevation did not exist in her character nor in
her reign; but for political insight, breadth of statesmanship, and a
powerful grasp upon the enormous problems in her heterogeneous empire,
she is entitled to rank with the few sovereigns who are called "Great."
A German by birth, a French-woman by intellectual tastes and
tendencies--she was above all else a Russian, and bent all the
resources of her powerful personality to the enlightenment and
advancement of the land of her adoption. Her people were not "knouted
into civilization," but invited and drawn into it. Her touch was
terribly firm--but elastic. She was arbitrary, but tolerant; and if
her reign was a despotism, it was a despotism of that broad type which
deals with the sources of things, and does not bear heavily upon
individuals. The Empress Catherine died suddenly in 1796, and Paul I.
was crowned Emperor of Russia.

CHAPTER XIX

NAPOLEON IN EUROPE--ATTITUDE OF RUSSIA

Paul was forty-one years old when he ascended the throne he had for
twenty years believed was rightfully his. The mystery surrounding the
death of his father Peter III., the humiliations he had suffered at his
mother's court, and what he considered her usurpation of his
rights--all these had been for years fermenting in his narrow brain.

His first act gave vent to his long-smothered indignation and his
suspicions regarding his father's death. Peter's remains were
exhumed--placed beside those of Catherine lying in state, to share all
the honors of her obsequies and to be entombed with her; while Alexis
Orlof, his supposed murderer, was compelled to march beside the coffin,
bearing his crown.

Then when Paul had abolished from the official language the words
"society" and "citizen," which his mother had delighted to honor--when
he had forbidden the wearing of frock-coats, high collars, and
neckties, and refused to allow Frenchmen to enter his territory--and
when he had compelled his people to get out of their carriages and
kneel in the mud as he passed--he supposed he was strengthening the
foundations of authority which Catherine II. had loosened.

To him is attributed the famous saying, "Know that the only person of
consideration in Russia is the person whom I address, and he only
during the time I am addressing him." He was a born despot, and his
reforms consisted in a return to Prussian methods and to an Oriental
servility. The policy he announced was one of peace with Europe--a
cessation of those wars by which his mother had for thirty-four years
been draining the treasury. He was going to turn his conquests toward
the East; and vast plans, with vague and indefinite outlines, were
forming in the narrow confines of his restless brain. But these were
interrupted by unexpected conditions.

In 1796 the military genius of a young man twenty-seven years old
electrified Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte, at the head of a ragged,
unpaid French army, overthrew Northern Italy, and out of the fragments
created a Cisalpine Republic. The possession of the Ionian Isles,
quickly followed by the occupation of Egypt, threatened the East. So
Turkey and Russia, contrary to all old traditions, formed a defensive
alliance, which was quickly followed by an offensive one between Russia
and Austria. But the tactics so successful against Poles and Turks
were unavailing against those employed by the new Conqueror. The
Russian commander Suvorov was defeated and returned in disgrace to his
enraged master at St. Petersburg, who refused to receive him. In 1798
Bonaparte had secured Belgium, had compelled Austria to cede to him
Lombardy, also to promise him help in getting the left bank of the
Rhine from the Germanic body, and to acknowledge his Cisalpine Republic.

The Emperor Paul's feelings underwent a swift change. He was blinded
by the glory of Napoleon's conquests and pleased with his despotic
methods. He conceived not only a friendship but a passion for the man
who could accomplish such things. Austria and England had both
offended him, so he readily fell into a plan for a Franco-Russian
understanding for mutual benefit, from which there developed a larger
plan.

The object of this was the overthrow of British dominion in India.
Paul was to move with a large army into Hindostan, there to be joined
by a French army from Egypt; then they would together sweep through the
country of the Great Mogul, gathering up the English settlements by the
way and so placating the native population and Princes that they would
join them in the liberation of their country from English tyranny and
usurpation. Paul said in his manifesto to the army that the Great
Mogul and the Sovereign Princes were to be undisturbed; nothing was to
be attacked but the commercial establishments acquired by money and
used to oppress and to enslave India. At the same time he said to his
army, "The treasures of the Indies shall be your recompense," failing
to state how these treasures were to be obtained without disturbing the
Sovereign Princes.

It is known that Napoleon had plans of an empire in the East, and it is
also known that some compact of this kind did exist between him and the
Emperor Paul. In 1801 eleven regiments of Cossacks, the vanguard of
the army which was to follow, had started upon the great undertaking,
when news was received that the Emperor Paul I. was dead.

The unbalanced course pursued by the Tsar, his unwise reforms, and his
capricious policy had not only alienated everyone, but caused serious
apprehensions for the safety of the empire. He had arrayed himself
against his wife and his children; had threatened to disinherit
Alexander, his oldest son and heir, whom he especially hated. A plot
was formed to compel his abdication. To that extent his sons Alexander
and Constantine were aware of and party to it.

On the night of the 23d of March, 1801, the conspirators entered Paul's
sleeping apartment after he had retired, and, sword in hand, presented
the abdication for him to sign. There was a struggle in which the lamp
was overturned, and in the darkness the Tsar, who had fallen upon the
floor, was strangled with an officer's scarf.

On the 24th of March, 1801, Alexander, who was entirely innocent of
complicity in this crime, was proclaimed Emperor of Russia.

It is said that when Bonaparte saw the downfall of his vast design, he
could not contain his rage; and pointing to England as the instigator
of the deed, he said in the _Moniteur_: "It is for history to clear up
the secret of this tragedy, and to say what national policy was
interested in such a catastrophe!"

The Emperor Paul had an acute, although narrow, intelligence, and was
not without generous impulses. But although he sometimes made
impetuous reparation for injury, although he recalled exiles from
Siberia and gave to Kosciusko and other patriots their freedom, unless
his kindness was properly met the reaction toward severity was
excessive. A little leaven of good with much that is evil sometimes
creates a very explosive mixture, and converts what would be a mild,
even tyranny into a vindictive and revengeful one. When we behold the
traits exhibited during this brief reign of five years, we are not
surprised at Catherine's unwillingness to resign to her son the empire
for which she had done so much; and we are inclined to believe it is
true that there was, as has been rumored, a will left by the Empress
naming as her heir the grandson whom she had carefully prepared to be
her successor, and that this paper was destroyed by the conspirators.

There is one wise act to record in the reign of Paul--although it was
probably prompted not by a desire to benefit the future so much as to
reverse the past. Peter the Great, probably on account of his perverse
son Alexis, had set aside the principle of primogeniture; a principle
not Slavonic, but established by the Muscovite Princes. Peter, the
ruthless reformer, placed in the hands of the sovereign the power to
choose his own successor. Paul reestablished this principle, and
thereby bestowed a great benefit upon Russia.

CHAPTER XX

NAPOLEON IN RUSSIA--HOLY ALLIANCE

A youth of twenty-five years was Tsar and Autocrat of All the Russias.
Alexander had from his birth been withdrawn entirely from his father's
influence. The tutor chosen by his grandmother was Laharpe, a Swiss
Republican, and the principles of political freedom were at the
foundation of his training. It was of course during the period of her
own liberal tendencies that Alexander was imbued with the advanced
theories which had captured intellectual Europe in the days before the
French Revolution. The new Emperor declared in a manifesto that his
reign should be inspired by the aims and principles of Catherine II.
He then quickly freed himself from the conspirators who had murdered
his father, and drew about him a group of young men like himself,
utterly inexperienced, but enthusiastic dreamers of a reign of goodwill
which should regenerate Russia. With the utmost confidence, reforms of
the most radical nature were proposed and discussed. There was to be a
gradual emancipation of the serfs, and misery of all sorts to be lifted
from the land by a new and benign system of government which should be
representative and constitutional. Many changes were at once
instituted. The old system of "colleges," or departments, established
by Peter the Great was removed and a group of ministers after the
European custom constituted the Tsar's official household, or what
would once have been called his _Drujina_. In the very first year of
this reign there began an accession of territory in Asia, which
gravitated as if by natural law toward the huge mass. The picturesque
old kingdom of Georgia, lying south of the Caucasus between the Black
and Caspian seas, was the home of that fair and gifted race which,
fallen from its high estate, had become the victim of the Turks, and,
with its congener Circassia, had long provided the harems of the
Ottoman Empire with beautiful slaves. The Georgians had often appealed
to the Tsars for protection, and in 1810 the treaty was signed which
incorporated the suffering kingdom with Russia.

A portion of the state passed to Russia in 1801, at the commencement of
Alexander's reign; but the formal surrender of the whole by treaty was
not until 1810.

So day by day, while the young Emperor and his friends were living in
their pleasant Utopia, Russia, with all its incoherent elements, with
its vast energies, its vast riches, and its vast miseries, was
expanding and assuming a more dominating position in Europe. What
would be done at St. Petersburg, was the question of supreme
importance; and Alexander was being importuned to join the coalition
against the common enemy Bonaparte.

The night before the 2d of October, 1805, the Russian Emperor and his
young officers, as confident of victory as they were of their ability
to reconstruct Russia, were impatiently waiting for the morrow, and the
conflict at Austerlitz. With a ridiculous assurance the young
Alexander sent by the young Prince Dolgoruki a note addressed--not to
the Emperor--but to the "Head of the French Nation," stating his
demands for the abandonment of Italy and immediate peace! Before
sundown the next day the "Battle of the Three Emperors" had been
fought; the Russian army was scattered after frightful loss, and
Alexander, attended by an orderly and two Cossacks, was galloping away
as fast as his horse could carry him. Then Napoleon was in
Vienna--Francis II. at his bidding took off his imperial crown--the
"Confederation of the Rhine" was formed out of Germanic States; and
then the terrible and invincible man turned toward Prussia, defeated a
Russian army which came to its rescue, and in 1806 was in
Berlin--master and arbiter of Europe!

Alexander, the romantic champion of right and justice, the dreamer of
ideal dreams, had been carried by the whirlpool of events into currents
too strong for him. He stood alone on the continent of Europe face to
face with the man who was subjugating it. His army was broken in
pieces, and perhaps an invasion of his own empire was at hand. Should
he make terms with this man whose career had so revolted him?--or
should he defy him and accept the risk of an invasion, which, by
offering freedom to the serfs and independence to the Poles, might give
the invader the immediate support of millions of his own subjects?
Then added to the conflict with his old self, there was the
irresistible magic of Napoleon's personal influence. A two-hours'
interview on the raft at Tilsit--June 25, 1807--changed the whole
direction of Alexander's policy, and made him an ally of the despot he
had detested, whom he now joined in determining the fate of Europe.
Together they decided who should occupy thrones and who should not; to
whom there should be recompense, and who should be despoiled; and the
Emperor of Russia consented to join the Emperor of the French in a war
upon the commercial prosperity of England--his old friend and ally--by
means of a continental blockade.

Times were changed. It was not so long ago--just one hundred
years--since Peter the Great had opened one small window for the light
from civilized Europe to glimmer through; and now the Tsar of that same
Russia, in a two-hours' interview on a raft, was deciding what should
be the fate of Europe!

The Emperor's young companions, with small experience and lofty aims,
were keenly disappointed in him. This alliance was in contravention of
all their ideals. He began to grow distrustful and cold toward them,
leaning entirely upon Speranski, his prime minister, who was French in
his sympathies and a profound admirer of Napoleon. Alexander, no less
zealous for reforms than before, hurt at the defection of his friends
and trying to justify himself to himself, said "Does not this man
represent the new forces in conflict with the old?" But he was not at
ease. He and his minister worked laboriously; a systematic plan of
reform was prepared. Speranski considered the Code Napoleon the model
of all progressive legislation. Its adoption was desired, but it was
suited only to a homogeneous people; it was a modern garment and not to
be worn by a nation in which feudalism lingered, in which there was not
a perfect equality before the law; hence the emancipation of the serfs
must be the corner-stone of the new structure. The difficulties grew
larger as they were approached. He had disappointed the friends of his
youth, had displeased his nobility, and a general feeling of irritation
prevailed upon finding themselves involved by the Franco-Russian
alliance in wars with England, Austria, and Sweden, and the prosperity
of the empire seriously impaired by the continental blockade. But when
Bonaparte began to show scant courtesy to his Russian ally, and to act
as if he were his master, then Alexander's disenchantment was complete.
He freed himself from the unnatural alliance, and faced the inevitable
consequences.

Napoleon, also glad to be freed from a sentimental friendship not at
all to his taste, prepared to carry out his long-contemplated design.
In July of 1812, by way of Poland, he entered Russia with an army of
over 678,000 souls. It was a human avalanche collected mainly from the
people he had conquered, with which he intended to overwhelm the
Russian Empire. It was of little consequence that thirty or forty
thousand fell as this or that town was captured by the way. He had
expected victory to be costly, and on he pressed with diminished
numbers toward Moscow, armies retreating and villages burning before
him. If St. Petersburg was the brain of Russia, Moscow--Moscow the
Holy--was its heart! What should they do? Should they lure the French
army on to its destruction and then burn and retreat? or should they
there take their stand and sacrifice the last army of Russia to save
Moscow? With tears streaming down their cheeks they yielded to the
words of Kutuzof, who said: "When it becomes a matter of the salvation
of Russia, Moscow is only a city like any other. Let us retreat." The
archives and treasures of the churches and palaces were carried to
Valdimir, such as could of the people following them, and the city was
left to its fate.

On September the 14th, 1812, the French troops defiled through the
streets of Moscow singing the Marseillaise, and Napoleon established
himself in the ancient palace of the Ivans within the walls of the
Kremlin. The torches had been distributed, and were in the hands of
the Muscovites. The stores of brandy, and boats loaded with alcohol,
were simultaneously ignited, and a fierce conflagration like a sea of
flame raged below the Kremlin. Napoleon, compelled to force his way
through these volcanic fires himself, narrowly escaped.

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