Russia in 1870

Preface

. "1 TR. TV. Hepworth Dixon unquestionably deserves the thanks of everyone interested in the well-being of Russia for drawing attention to that Empire, and I had hoped that the perusal of "Free Russia" would have given the reader a fair insight into that country, and that from the pen of its distinguished author the world would have learned what Russia is, and what the Russians really are. Upon i-eading Mr. Dixon' s work, however, I come to a very different conclusion, and am strongly reminded of the statement of Preface. VI Prince Dolgorouky, quoted by Mr. Suther land Edwards in his interesting book, " The Russians at Home," "That Russians alone ought to write on the subject of Russia" (the Prince of course meaning that only those, from long residence, well acquainted with Russia ought to take the subject in hand), and also that of Dr. Eckhardt, " Still worse is it with the statements of those who have come to Russia as strangers, and who endeavour to convey the impressions they have received without being acquainted with the premises or even knowing of their ex istence."

It is evident that Mr. Dixon has depended greatly upon second-hand information for much of the material of his book, otherwise he could not have been led into the errors which overrun his work. The chapters upon subjects that have been studied are not only interesting, but as might Preface. VII have been expected, coming from a source of observance so acute as Mr. Dixon' s, are graphic and powerful; how unfortunate therefore is it that Mr. Dixon' s exceedingly .limited sphere of travel in Russia should have resulted in such erroneous conclusions and inferences on those questions where he has necessarily had to depend upon the infor mation of others. Had Mr. Dixon contented himself with giving us the first volume only of his work, then, in his interesting account of the monasteries, a subject which he has evidently well studied, there would have been found an entertaining and instructive work, to which no student of Russian life and manners could have objected ; but when a writer as powerful as Mr. Dixon enters into a statement of so-called facts, and from them of deductions which are equally incorrect the one as the other, it becomes necessary for all Preface.

VIII who have studied the question, to help to place the correct side of it before the readers. Russia is a country which, young as it is in the path of reform and improvement, cannot afford to be misunderstood ; and at this time, above all others, when the re actionary party are striving to overcome that of progress, it is more than ever necessary that those interested in the subject should have placed before them none but well considered facts. Many visits to Russia during the last twelve years, together with a continued resi dence in the interior for the latter four years of that period, combined with the experience afforded me as the head of one of the largest industrial enterprises in the Empire, have given me many opportunities of studying the institutions of Russia and the character of the Russian people.

Preface. IX Extended travel over all parts of the Empire, both for the purposes of business and observation, has brought me much in contact with all sorts and descriptions of people from politicians to peasants. These experiences have prompted me to attempt to give a true account of those institutions under which I have lived, and of the people amongst whom I have lived, particularly drawing attention to the chano;es and reforms both of the people and their institutions. It will, I fear, be found that I have omitted in this book to treat upon several topics, notably literature, military, naval matters, &c. These subjects, however, are now being discussed by far abler pens than mine, and I have been throughout most careful to introduce no subject with which I was not personally quite conversant..

No one can have lived in Russia, watched Preface. X its struggles for liberty, and the manner in which its people, so unaccustomed to free dom, use their liberty, without seeing the germ of a future importance and greatness impossible to realize. CONTENTS.

Chapter I

V. TOWNS AND VILLAGES 152

CHAPTER V. PRIESTS, CHURCH, AND EMPEROR

Contents. XII ■

CHAPTER VI.

page SPORTS AND PASTIMES 208

CHAPTER VII. MANUFACTURES AND TRADE

251

CHAPTER VIII. WATS AND COMMUNICATIONS

281

CHAPTER IX. SIBERIA

308

CHAPTER X. THE GREAT FAIR OF NIJNY NOVGOROD

... 343

CHAPTER XL THE CENTRAL ASIAN QUESTION

397

CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION CHAPTER

I. ON MR. DIXON'S BOOK "FREE RUSSIA." TVTATURALLY I have .great diffidence in contradicting such an experienced and able author as Mr. Dixon ; but I have no alternative but to devote a few pages to his book. It is somewhat difficult to find out in what parts of that empire Mr. Dixon has studied " Free Russia," as from the preface I read, " My journeys, just completed, carried me from the Polar Sea to the Ural Mountains ; " and at the first page of vol. ii., " My line from the Arctic Sea to the southern slopes B 1870. 2 of the Ural range ; " statements which would have led me to suppose that Mr. Dixon would have studied his subject over an immense breadth of territory, rather than have chosen the very extraordinary spot of the " northern zones " as the principal place for his observations. Unless it were to study that specimen of the human race which Mr. Dixon describes as meaning " cannibal," I cannot make out why he went so far north to find repre sentatives of free Russia.

It is not on the road from Archangel to St. Petersburgh that one can judge of the Russians under her northern latitudes ; for that purpose the traveller must go much farther to the east than Mr. Dixon appears to have gone. In the preface I also find, " Two journeys made in previous years have helped me to judge the reforms which are opening out the Japan -like empire of Russia." Why was 1870. 3 the reader not told where these journeys were made to ; and, more particularly, what was the different state of things that Mr. Dixon now found existing there ? I also read, " I have much to say about pilgrims, monks, and parish priests, — about village justices and patriarchal life, — about beggars, tramps, and sectaries, &c. &c, — in short, about the Human Forces which underlie and shape the external politics of our time."

"With the exception of the reservation I have made in my preface, I cannot admit that Mr. Dixon has said much about what he promises ; and what he has said, if allowed to pass categorically uncontradicted, can only lead to the reader being greatly mistaken in his opinions of free Russia and the free Russians. I presume to think that Mr. Dixon does not speak the Russian language ; and, as I B 1870. 4 do not find anywhere a hint dropped of his ideas or sayings being communicated by means of an interpreter, I cannot under stand expressions such as the following, which I find pervade the book : — " You hear in their speech;" — "I asked what is this hole in the stone ; " — " In answer to my question;" — "Yes, yes, you may hear a Mujik say." Does Mr. Dixon assume that a traveller can pass through a country, and write a work entering politically, socially, and economically into his subject, when he is unable to understand what is said to him, or to ask that which he wants to find out ?

Perhaps it is to this we may attribute some of the extraordinary errors which we find in that gentleman's work. I do not presume to criticize the book as a book, but at once to challenge many of the statements, trivial as some of them may be to general readers, but most important, if 1870. 5 t. we suppose that Mr. Dixon wishes any one to have a correct idea of the country from his work. I at once therefore plunge into that por tion of the book which alone justifies the title used. The chapter on the emancipation of the serfs is so manifestly incorrect, that it has already drawn forth the criticisms of the most powerful portion of the press ; there is no occasion, therefore, for me to repeat what is so well known to all students of the question. I can only say upon this head, then, What confidence can be placed in the statements of an author who leads us to suppose that Pensa and Kazan villages are occupied by Poles and Mala Russians ?

I maintain that the peasant is the most important character to note in the empire, from the great preponderance in number 1870. 6 of his class over any other, and therefore any erroneous ideas about him are of the greatest consequence. Now I find in the chapter on patriarchal life the following : — ■" A patriarch is lord in his own house and family, and no man has a right to interfere with him, not even the village elders and the imperial judge ; he stands above oral and written law . . . every act of his done within that cabin is supposed to be private and divine . . . they would not order her to be flogged — not now — the new law forbids it ; that is to say, in public. In his own cabin Daniel may flog Nadia when he likes." The whole inference to be drawn from this passage is incorrect. Everybody would suppose from it that the patriarch or head of the family, had a literal right to carry out any excesses he chose in his own home, and that, assuming they were carried out, 1870. 7 nobody had the right to interfere with him or call him to account.

The only power the patriarch has in the matter of chastising is limited, and if he carries that power out to too great an extent, the person so treated can apply to the community, and the community will interfere and punish the offender. In one village I knew a patriarch who had flogged his son, and then locked him up, so that he could not personally go and complain ; but he managed to communicate with some one who went to the community for him : and they there and then sent deputies to the house to hold an inquest on the matter. The other statement, copied from a news sheet : — " Euphrosine M , a peasant woman, living in the province of Kherson, is accused by her husband of unfaithfulness to her vows. The rustic calls a meeting 1870. of patriarchs, who hear his story, and without hearing the wife in her defence, condemn her to be walked through the village stark naked in broad daylight in the presence of all her friends."

The reader would have supposed that this event (if it did take place) was one of recent occurrence, whereas Mr. Dixon's authority is the " Gazette of New Russia " for 1864. To show that the authorities do not shut their eyes to excesses committed by the peasants when they do occur, I will mention one fact. On our estate a woman had been bar barously treated by two men : the local coroner and the community shirked their duty : the matter got into the newspapers, and the next day an imperial order demanded an inquest, and the offenders were brought to justice. How much must my opinion be shaken 1870. 9 in what Mr. Dixon has written generally upon the sects, which is a subject I have not had time to study, when I find, speaking of an old believer, he says — " The chances are that he will not smoke," when the merest tyro would have told him that this sect abhors the use of tobacco.

I have known a member of it, have his house whitewashed and cleaned throughout, in consequence of a man having taken a couple of whiffs at his papiross, not knowing that his host was an old believer. Again — " Every new Emperor makes a Saint." Mr. Dixon should have been aware that the present Emperor, instead of making new Saints, has, by ukaze, much diminished the number of days to be observed as Saint days or Holidays. Where has Mr. Dixon seen the Scoptsi (detestable sect as they are)? "White, weak, and wasting, they appear in the shops like 1870. 10 ghosts." As a rule, with the exception of being generally rather fat, there is not much difference to be observed between them and other people. Who, that knows the people whom Mr. Dixon calls " Non-payers of Rent," can un derstand what he means by calling them a " sect ?

" They are the people to whom I allude in Chapter IX. as those who will not pay their land-tax; and they may with as much truth be called a "sect," as that portion of the Irish population who refuse to pay their rent, believing, as both parties do, that the land belongs to them. In " Village Republics " I read such state ments as these : — " From ancient times the members of these village democracies derive a body of local rights, of kin to those family rights which reforming ministers and judges think it wiser to leave alone. They choose their own elders, hold their 1870. 11 own courts, inflict their own fines exercising powers which the Emperor has not given and dares not take away. The Starosta . . . elected for three years . . . the rule is for the richest peasant of the village to be chosen ... an unpaid servant of his village . . .

But a village elder, backed by his meeting, can defeat the Imperial will, and set the beneficent public code aside." Now these certainly are about as pretty pictures of autocratical democracies as it is well able to conceive. Let me lay before the reader the real facts, and show how apt to mislead Mr. Dixon's statements are. The least competent court in the village is the Starosta acting under the power of the community, whose powers of punishment are so trivial as not to require mentioning ; the next court, and the one which doubtless Mr. Dixon means, is the district commune 1870. or volost, an assembly of representatives of several parishes, presided over by the Starshinar, or head man. To this court the previously mentioned one is in a degree sub servient, just as the Starosta is subservient to the Starshinar.

This elected assembly, then, again elect the volost court of justice, which, according to the size of the volost, consists of from four to twelve people, three of whom sit to try cases, their sentences being carried out by the Starshinar as the executive officer. From reading Mr. Dixon's account, any one would suppose the power of this court was unlimited ; on the contrary, it is very small — civil jurisdiction under one hundred roubles or fifteen pounds — the administering of twenty-four blows with the rod — power to fine in criminal cases up to three silver roubles, and to send to prison for seven days. 1870. 13 The Starosta is never chosen for his riches, but always for his talking powers, as the community love a man who can talk well. He is also invariably paid for his services. At the conclusion of the same chapter is, " Two-thirds of a village mob, in which every other voter may be drunk, can send a man to Siberia for his term of life ; " and in the following chapter is explained, " Such cases of village justice are not rare," and " they can summon him to appear, and find him worthy to be expelled . . . rejected from his commune ... he cannot enter a village."

Now I object to these statements in toto. First of all, drunken people are not allowed to be at communal meetings ; and, secondly, the commune has no power to send any one to Siberia. If any member of the community does not pay his dues, his brethren have the power of turning him - Russia in 1870. out of the community, after having tried all other means of bringing him to reason ; but he is eligible for admittance into any other commune that will take him. In cases where a discharged member cannot get into another commune, he is sent, at the expense of the Government, with others of the same sort, to found a colony, and hence a community elsewhere ; but, certainly, he is not sent to a " Siberian mine," — a punishment kept for murderers and other great criminals. Mr. Dixon evidently knows very little of the workings of the village communities, or he would never have stated what he does in page 58 of vol. ii. : — " Now, the villagers pretty well know the brother who is rich enough to give his roubles, in place of baring his back ; and when they thirst for a dram at some other man's cost, they have only to get up some flimsy charge on which that 1870. 15 brother can be tried.

The man is sure to bay himself off." I would venture to advise Mr. Dixon, the next time he goes to Russia, to study the administration of justice* by some of the volost tribunals : he will not be ashamed of the justice he sees administered there, I am sure. So with their houses and living is Mr. Dixon as much in error as with the insti tutions of the peasant. I read, " The elder's hut is bigger than the rest . . . the floor is mud. One house here and there may have a balcony, a cow-shed." Where, in the name of goodness, is this general descrip tion taken from ? Most positively not from Russia. Has Mr. Dixon ever seen a mud floor in a peasant's house in Great Russia ? Excepting, perhaps, when a village has been burned, and temporary huts have been erected, I have hardly ever seen one. The living part of a peasant's house is almost 1870. invariably approached by a staircase.

How can a mud floor be found on the first story of a house without the mud is placed on wood ? and it is hardly likely a peasant would take that trouble from choice. Not only what is called a cow-shed, but under the denomination of " yard," containing rough shanty for stable, place for carts, sledges, &c, in fact, the housing for the peasant's all, is a universal attribute to every peasant's house. This is so general, that, in speaking of the number of domiciles in a village, one never says, so many houses, but such and such a number of " yards." Again, I read, speaking generally of the peasants, that " His dinner, on days that are not kept as fasts, being a slice of black bread, a gherkin, and a piece of dried cod." What little knowledge this shows of what the peasant does live upon : on fast days he does eat fish, but certainly not cod.

I do not 1870. 17 suppose ninety-nine out of a hundred Rus sians ever heard the word " cod ; " the most ordinary observer could have seen what fish they do eat, and whence it comes ; but the mistake is, that in this description the national dish, " Tschee," or cabbage-soup, is entirely overlooked, whilst it is the universal dish of the Russian peasant. I know peasants who eat three pounds of black bread for their dinner, and also — not one gherkin — but six. Had I not already expressed a supposi tion that Mr. Dixon does not speak the Russian language, I should have questioned the statement, " I have myself heard a rustic ordered to be flogged by his elder, on the bare request of two gentlemen, who said he was drunk and could not drive." Now I conclude he was told that this was what the elder ordered.

I cannot find the sequel. Assuming the word here used as c 1870. 18 meaning village elder, it was impossible that he could individually order the boy to be flogged ; that is to say, according to com munal law, he must have been tried by the village tribunal first. But, of course, people sometimes do, not only in Russia, but in all other countries, that which they have no business to do ; but this fact is told us, in the chapter on serfs, as though it were the regular way of proceeding. Mr. Dixon will excuse my saying that, if he did not see the sentence of flogging carried out, I cannot think it took place. In the chapter on serfs there appears this passage, describing the origin of serfage : — "A bargain was made between two con senting parties, peasant and noble, under the authority of law, for their mutual dealing with a certain estate, consisting (say) of land, lake, and forest, with the various rights attached to ownership, hunting, &c." 1870. 19 What can this mean ?

Are we to under stand that the serfs wished and consented of their own free will to be serfs ? If so, why does not the writer bear out the assertion which, I assume, from his statement, he means to make ? Reading the account of the parish priest and his family, is to me more like a farce than a comedy. Does Mr. Dixon seriously mean to assert that the following is a correct description ? — " Each parish priest is the centre of a circle, who regard him, not only as a man of God, ordained to bless in His holy name, but as a father to advise them in weal and woe." ..." Father Peter, the village pope . . . his cabin is very clean ; some flower-pots stand on his window-sill ; a heap of books loads his presses ; . . . a pale and comely wife is sitting near his door . . . watching the urchins at their play . . . those boys are singing beneath a tree ; singc 1870. 20 inowith soft, sad faces one of their ritual psalms ...

A priest is so great a man in his village, that even when he is tipsy . . . he is treated by his parishioners with a child-like duty and respect." It is the more extraordinary that the writer should have been led into this error, as eVery traveller who has noted the subject has not failed to observe upon the very disagreeable feature of the parish priest, and his mode of life. From a rather extensive knowledge of the village priest or " pope," I find him to be, firstly, a man for whom the villagers do not have the slighest respect; a character happily only confined to Russia, of hardly any education, hardly any morals, depending for his support almost as much upon the sweat of his brow as upon his clerical duties, and is very little removed from his neighbours the Mujiks. 1870. 21 He lives in very much the same sort of house as the other villagers, with, however, a few more comforts in it, in the shape of furniture ; his wife, differing little from her peasant neighbour, does all the house work, whilst her children run about pretty much the same as the other village children.

The pope has his land, which he farms himself the same as the peasant, and his life is one monotonous roll of church ser vices, farming, and idleness. His drinking powers are renowned, and upon the great holidays he is invariably drunk. They themselves are not ashamed of the practice, and the people are so used to the sight of a drunken pope, that they take no notice of it, and pass him by with perhaps, in some cases, a shrug of the shoulders. Left much to their own resources, with a very lax system of inspection, they gradually subside into a state little better, 1870. 22 in a social point of view, than their neighbours the Mujiks, and what little association they do have is generally with them. One great reason that kept them in this state of abjectness has been their perfect inability to rise beyond the grade of parish priest ; thus one great incentive to industry, that of self-raising, has been denied to them.

I have several times seen a pope drunk when attending to a religious service, and have on more than one occasion found one stealing. What can be said in defence of priests who would tolerate one of their number keeping a whiskyshop, and yet I knew such a one, and gave him the license to do so : he asked for it nominally for the profits of his church, but really, under the rose, it was for his own account, and curiously enough, as against Mr. Dixon's 1870. 23 theory, this pope was, with the exception of his drinking propensities, a very respectable and better educated specimen of his class. How is it possible that the parish priest can be as Mr. Dixon represents him — poverty-stricken and socially kept down as he is. I trust that from the pages of this book, may be gathered what Father Peters are really like.

There are exceptions to all rules, but I am afraid that Mr. Dixon's Father P is the exception and not the rule. In the chapter on " Freedom " is this statement : — " This reckless sense of right and wrong is due to that .serfage under which the peasants groaned for two hundred and sixty years — serfage made men indif ferent to life and death . . . and the liberty which some of the freest peasants enjoyed the most was the liberty of revenge." 1870. 24 I In order to prove this theory of peasant revenge, Mr. Dixon quotes the Gorski process, a case in which a man murdered a whole family at Tambof; but unfortunately for Mr. Dixon's case, Gorski did not happen to be a peasant or an emancipated serf, but was a Polish student and tutor in the family he so cruelly murdered. This is followed by the recountal of Daria Sokolof's case, who Mr. Dixon says murdered a whole family, including a lap-dog, and " as no witness of the crime was left, she could only be condemned to a dozen years in Siberian mines."

The jury who tried her, however, in spite of a confession subsequently recanted, came to the conclusion that she did not commit the murders, but that they were committed by another person who was not found, and Daria Sokolof was found guilty of concealing the murder, and so received her punishment. 1870. 25 That somebody must have been misin forming Mr. Dixon very materially, is clear from the following, written in the chapter on the "Secret Police:" — "The secret police have an authority which knows no bounds save that of the Emperor's direct com mands." What can this possibly be read as implying, but that the " third division " * are paramount, above all law and all jurisdiction ? Will Mr. Dixon take upon himself the responsibility of asserting that the secret police have any, or exercise any, jurisdiction in ordinary matters, criminal or civil ?

Does he not know that the fundamental habeas corpus clause of the new law is, that no man can be arrested without being brought before a proper judge within a very limited time ? TVhat are the "third division" but the executive to carry out the order of their * Appellation for secret police. 1870. 26 chief; and are they not chiefly, or, I may say, invariably employed in what are called political matters ? Do not let it for one moment be supposed that I am defending such an institution as secret police ; or that I am not quite capable of believing that this "third division" are even now an institution much to be deplored; and that at this day they are sometimes em ployed for purposes which they ought not to . be ; but Mr. Dixon, in describing the secret, or, properly called, political police, is saying what they were like in 1848, not what they are now.

If he refers to the new measure of law as proposed in 1862, which is so clearly ex plained by Dr. Eckhardt,* and which plan was adhered to in the ultimate completion of the arrangements, he will find that the * In "Modern Russia." 1870. 27 first part ordained separation of judicial power from that of the administration ; the executive power from that of legislation ; the introduction of juries for hearing and trying crimes in so far as these were not of a political nature ; publicity of justice, &c. &c. I have remarked that this plan was carried out in the final arrangement which came into force in some portions of the Empire in 1864 : how can, then, this asser tion of Mr. Dixon's be substantiated ? The " third division " have nothing what ever to do with anything but political matters ; and, what is more, I have never heard of late years of any interference by them in ordinary criminal business.