Free Russia ... With original illustrations

Preface

. Svobodnaya Rossia — Free Russia — is a Avord on every lip in that great country ; at once the Name and Hope of the new empire born of the Crimean war. In past times Russia was free, even as Germany and France were free. She fell before Asiatic hordes; and the Tartar system lasted, in sphit, if not in form, until the war ; but since that conflict ended, the old Russia has been born again. This new country — hoping to be pacific, meaning to be Free — is what I have tried to paint. My journeys, just completed, carried me from the Polar Sea to the Ural Mountains, from the mouth of the Vistula to the Straits of Yeni Kale, including visits to the four holy shrines of Solovetsk, Pechersk, St. George, and Troitsa. My object being to paint the Living People, I

PREFACE.

. VI have much to say about pilgrims, monks, and parish priests ; about village justice, and patri archal life ; about beggars, tramps, and sectaries ; about Kozaks, Kalmuks, and Kirghiz ; about workmen's artels, burgher rights, and the division of land ; about students' revolts and soldiers' grievances ; in short, about the Human Forces which underhe and shape the external pohtics of our time. Two journeys made in previous years have helped me to judge the reforms which are opening out the Japan-like empire of Nicolas into the Free Russia of the reigning prince. February, 1870. 6 St. James' Terrace. NOTE TO THIRD EDITION. A feAv shps of the pen, and some errors of the press, which escaped my eye in the earlier proofs, have been removed from the text in this new edition. April, 1870. CONTENTS or THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAP. PAQK I. UP NORTH ...... 1 TI. THE FROZEN SEA 11 III. THE DVINA ..... 20 IV. ARCHANGEL . .... 29 V. RELIGIOUS LIFE ..... 39 VI. PILGRIMS ...... 49 VII. FATHER JOHN . .' . . . 60 .'III. THE VLADIKA ..... 73 IX. A PILGRIM BOAT ..... 83 X. THE HOLY ISLES ..... 95 XI. THE LOCAL SAINTS . . . . .105 XII. A MONASTIC HOUSEHOLD . . . . 117 5 XIII. A PILGRIM S DAY 127 XIA\ PRAYER AND LABOUR . . . .138 XV. BLACK CLERGY . . . . .150 XVI. SACRIFICE . . . . . .163 CONTENTS. VIII chap. PAGE XVIT. MIRACLES 175 XArIII. THE GREAT MIRACLE . . . .188 XIX. A CONA'ENT SPECTRE .... 203 XX. STORY OF A GRAND DUKE . . . 209 XXI. DUNGEONS . . . . . .219 XXII. NICOLAS ILYIN ..... 230 XXIII. ADRIAN PUSHKIN. .... 242 XXIV. DISSENT . . . . . .252 XXA\ NEAV SECTS . . . . . .266 XXVI. MORE NEW SECTS ..... 274 XXVII. THE POPULAR CHURCH .... 284 XXA'III.

OLD BELIEA'ERS ..... 297 XXIX A FAMILY OF OLD BELIEA'ERS 304 XXX, CEMETERY OF THE TRANSFIGURATION 315 XXXI. RAGOSKI ...... 326 XXXII. DISSENTING POLITICS .... 337 XXXIII. CONCILIATION

Chapter I. Tjp North

' White Sea ! ' laughs the Danish skipper, curling his thin red hp ; ' it is the colour of Enghsh stout. The bed may be white ; being bleached wdth the bones of Avrecked and sunken men ; but the waves are never white, except when they are ribbed into ice and furred with snow. A better name is that which the sailors and seal-fishers give it, — the Frozen Sea.' Rounding the North Cape, a wehd and hoary mass of rock, projecting far into the Arctic foam, we drive in a south-east course, lashed by the wdnd, and beaten by hail and rain, for two long days, during which the sun never sets and never rises, and in which, if there is daAvn at the hour VOL. I. B of midnight, there is also dusk at the time of noon. Leaving the picturesque lines of fiord and alp behind, we run along a dim, unbroken coast, not often to be seen through the pall of mist, until, at the end of some fifty hours, we feel, as it were, the land in our front ; a stretch of low-lying shore in the vague and far-off distance, trending away towards the south, hke the trail of an evening cloud We bend in a southern course, between Holy Point (Sviatoi Noss, called on our charts, in rough salt slang, Sweet Nose), and Kanin Cape, towards the Corridor ; a strait some thirty miles wide, leading down from the Polar ocean into that vast irregular dent in the northern shore of Great Russia known as the Frozen Sea.

The land now lying on our right, as we rim through the Corridor, is that of the Lapps ; a country of barren doAvns and deep black lakes ; over which a few trappers and fishermen roam ; subjects of the Tsar and followers of the Orthodox rite; but speaking a language of then OAvn, not understood in the Whiter Palace, and folloAving a custom of then fathers, not yet recognised in St. Isaac's Chinch. Lapland is a tangle of rocks and pools ; the rocks very big and broken, the pools very deep and black ; Avith here and there a valley Avhiding through them, on the slopes of which grows a httle reindeer moss. Now and then you come upon a patch of birch and pine. No grain Avill grow in these Arctic zones, and the food of the natives is game and fish. Rye-bread, then only luxury, must be fetched in boats from the toAvns of Onega and Archangel, standing on the shores of the Frozen Sea, and fed from the warmer provinces in the South.

These Lapps are still nomadic ; cowering through the winter months in shanties ; sprawling through the summer months in tents. Then shanty is a log pyramid, thatched Avith moss to keep out wind and sleet ; then tent is of the Comanche type ; a roll of reindeer skins drawn slackly round a pole, and opened at the top to let out smoke. A Lapp removes his dwelling from place to place, as the seasons come and go ; now herding game on the hill-sides, now whipping the rivers and creeks for fish ; in the warm months, roving inland in search of moss and grass ; in the frozen months, draAving nearer to the shore in search of seal and cod. The men are equally expert with the bow, then ancient weapon of defence, and with the bhding-piece, the arm of settlers in then midst. The women, looking any thing but lovely in then seal-skin tights and reindeer smocks, are infamous for magic and second sight.

In every district of the North, a female Lapp is feared as a wdtch — an enchantress — who keeps a devil at her side, bound by the powers of darkness to obey her will She can see into the coming day. She can bring a man ill-luck. She can throw herself out into space, and work upon ships that are sailing past her on the sea Far out in the Polar brine, in waters where her countrymen fish for cod, stands a lump of rock, which the crews regard as a Woman and her Child. Such fantasies are common in these Arctic seas, where the waves wash in and out through the cliffs, and rend and carve them into wondrous shapes. A rock on the North Cape is called the Friar ; a group of islets near that cape is known as the Mother and her Daughters. Seen through the veil of Polar mist, a block of stone may take a mysterious form ; and that lump of rock in the Polar waste, which the cod-fishers say is like a wroman with her child, has long been known to them as the Golden Hag.

She is rarely seen ; for the clouds in summer, and the snows in wdnter, hide her charms from the fishermen's eyes ; but when she deigns to show her face in the clear bright sun, her children hail her with a song of joy, for on seeing her face they know that then voyage wdll be blessed by a plentiful harvest of skins and fish. Woe to the mariner tossed upon then coast ! The land on our left is the Kanin peninsula ; part of that region of heath and sand over which the Samoyed roams ; a desert of ice and snow, still vrilder than the countries hunted by the Lapp. A land without a village, vrithout a road, Avithout a field, Avithout a name ; for the Russians who oaati it have no name for it save that of the Samoyeds' Land ; this province of the great empire trends away north and east from the walls of Archangel and the Avaters of Kanin Cape to the summits of the Ural chain and the Iron Gates of the Kara Sea.

In her clefts and ridges snow never melts ; and her shorefines, stretching towards the sunrise upwards of two thousand miles, are bound in icy chains for eight months in the twelve. In June, Avhen the Avinter goes away, suddenly, the slopes of a few favoured valleys grow green vrith reindeer moss ; slight specks of verdure in a landscape which is even then dark vrith rock and grey with rime. On this green moss the reindeer feed, and on these camels of the Polar zone the vrild men of the country hve. Samoyed means cannibal — man-eater; but whether the men who roam over these sands and bogs deserve then evil fame is one of the questions open to new lights. They use no fire in cooking food ; and perhaps it is because they eat the reindeer raw that they have come to be accused of fondness for human flesh In chasing the game on which they feed, the Samoyeds crept over the Ural mountains from then far-off home in the north of Asia, running it down in a tract too cold and bare for any other race of men to dwell on.

Here the Zarayny found them, thrashed them, set them to work. These Zarayny, a clever and hardy people, seem connected in type and speech Avith the Finns ; and they are thought to be the remnant of an ancient colony of trappers. Fairer than the Samoyeds, they hve in log-huts like other Russians, and are rich in herds of reindeer, which they com pel the Samoyeds to tend like slaves. This service to the higher race is slowly changing the savage Samoyed into a civilised man ; since it gives him a sense of property and a respect for life. A red man kills the beast he hunts ; kills it beyond his need, in the animal wantonness of strength. A Samoyed woidd do the same ; but the Zarayny have taught him to rear and tend, as well as to hunt and snare, his food. A savage, only one degree above the Pavraee and the Ute, a Samoyed builds no shed ; plants no field ; and owns no property in the soil.

He dwells, like the Lapp, in a tent ; a roll of skins, seAvn on to each other Avith gut, and tAvisted round a shaft, left open at the top, and furnished vrith skins to lie on hke an Indian lodge. No art is lavished on this roll of skin ; not so much as the totem which a Cheyenne daubs on his prahie tent. Yet the Samoyed has notions of village life, and eATen of government. A collection of tents he calls a Choom ; his Choom is ruled by a medicine-man ; the official name for whom in Russian society is a Pope. The reigning Emperor has sent some" priests to live among these tribes, just as in olden times Marfa of Novgorod sent her popes and monks into Lapland and Kareha ; hoping to divert the natives from theh Pagan habits and bring them over to the church of Christ. Some good, it may be hoped, is done by these Christian priests ; but a Russ who knows the country and the people smiles when you ask him about then doings in the Gulf of Obi and around the Kara Sea.

One of these missionaries whom I chanced to meet, had pretty well ceased to be a civilised man In name, he was a pope ; but he hved and dressed like a medicine-man ; and he was groAving into the likeness of a Mongol in look and gait. Folk said he had taken to his bosom a native vritch. Through the gateway held by these tribes we enter into Russia — Great Russia ; that country of the old Russians, whose plains and forests the Tartar horsemen never SAvept. Why enter Russia by these northern gates ? If the Great Mogul had conquered England in the seventeenth century ; if Asiatic manners had been paramount in London for two hundred years ; if Britain had recovered her ancient freedom and ciAdl life ; Avhere would a foreign observer, anxious to see the English as they are, begin his studies? Would he not begin them in Massachusetts rather than in Middlesex, even though he shoidd have to complete his observations on the Mersey and the Thames?

A student of the Free Russia born of the Crimean War, must open his work of observation hi the northern zones ; since it is only vrith hi tins region of lake and forest that he can find a Slavonic race which has never been tainted by foreign influence, never been broken by foreign yoke. The zone from Onega to Perm — a country seven times larger than France — Avas colonized from Novgorod the Great, wdiile Novgorod was yet a Free City ; rich in trade, in piety, in art ; a rival of Frankfort and Flo rence ; and, like London and Binges, a station of the Hanseatic League. Her colonies kept the charter of their freedom safe. They never bent to the Tartar yoke, nor learned to walk in the German ways. They knew no masters, and they held no serfs. ' We never had amongst us,' said to me an ATchangel farmer, ' either a noble or a slave.' They clung, for good and evil, to then ancient life ; and when the Patriarch Nikon reformed the Church in a Byzantine sense (1667), as the Tsar Godounof had transformed the Village in a Tartar sense (1601), they disoAvned then Patriarch just as they had denied then Tsar.

In spite of every force that could be brought against them by a line of autocrats, these free colonists have not been driven into accepting the reformed Official liturgies in preference to then Ancient rites. They kept then native speech, when it was ceasing to be spoken in the capital ; and when the time was ripe, they sent out into the world a boy of genius, peasant-born and reared (the Poet, Michael Lomonosof), to' impose that popular language on the college, on the senate, on the court.

Chapter II. The Frozen Sea

At Cape Intsi we pass from the narrow straits dividing the Lapp country from the Samoyed country into this northern gulf. About tvrice the size of Lake Superior in the United States, this Frozen Sea has something of the shape of Como ; one narrow northern bay, extending to the town of Kandalax, in Russian Lapland; and two southern bays, divided from each other by a broad sandy peninsula, the home of a few villagers employed in snaring cod and hunting seal. These southern bays are known, from the rivers which fall into them, as Onega Bay and Dvina Bay. At the mouths of these rivers stand the two trading ports of Onega and Archangel. The open part of this inland gulf is deep — from sixty to eighty fathoms ; and in one place off the entrance into Kandalax Bay, the line goes down no less than a hundred and sixty fathoms.

Yet the shore is neither steep nor high. The gulf of Onega is rich in rocks and islets ; many of them only banks of sand and mud, washed out into the sea from the uplands of Kargopol ; but in the vride entrance of Onega Bay, between Orlof Point and the town of Kem, stands out a notable group of islets — Solovetsk, Anzersk, Moksalma, Zaet and others ; islets which play a singular part in the history of Russia, and connect themselv-es Avith curious legends of the Imperial court. In Solovetsk, the largest of this group of islets, stands the famous Convent of that name ; the house of Saints Savatie and Zosima ; the refuge of St. Philip ; the shrine to which emperors and peasants go on pilgrimage ; the haunt of that Convent Spectre which one hears described in the cod-fisher's boat and in the Kozak's tent ; the scene of many great events, and of One event Avhich Russians have agreed to sing and paint as the most splendid miracle of these latter days.

Off the Dvina bar stands the new tower and lighthouse, where the pilots hve; a shaft some eighty feet high, not often to be seen above the hanging drapery of fog. A pilot comes on board ; a man of soft and patient face, Arith grey-blue eyes, and flow of broAvnish hah, who tells us in a bated tone, — as though he feared we might be vexed vrith him and beat him, — that the tide is ebbing on the bar, and we shall have to wait for the flow. ' Wait for the tide ! ' snaps our Danish jarl; ' stand by, we '11 make our course.' The sun has just peeped out from behind his veil ; but the clouds droop low and dark, and every one feels that a gale is coming on. Two barks near the bar, — the ' Tliera' and the ' Olga,' — bob and reel hke tipsy men ; yet our pale Russ pilot, urged by the stronger will, gives way vrith a smile ; and our speed being lowered by half, we push on slowly towards the line of red and black sig nals floating in our front.

The ' Thera' and the ' Olga' are soon behind us, shivering, in all then sheets, like men in the clutch of amie, — left in our wake to a swift and terrible doom. In half an hour we pass the line of buoys, and gain the outer port. Like all great rivers, the Dvina has throAvn up a delta of isles and islets near her mouth, through which she pours her flood into the sea by a dozen arms. None of these dozen arms can now be laid doAvn as her main entrance ; for the river is more capricious than the sea ; so that a skipper who leaves her by one outlet in August, may have to enter by another when he comes back to her in June. The main passage in the old charts flowed past the convent of St. Nicolas ; then came the turn of Rose island ; afterwards the course ran past the guns of Fort DAdna ; but the storms which swept the Polar seas two summers since, destroyed that passage as an outlet for the larger kinds of craft.

The port pohce looked on in silence. What were they to do ? Archangel was cut off from the sea, until a Danish blacksmith, who had set up forge and hammer in the new port, proposed that the foreign traders should hire a steamer and find a deliverance for then ships. ' If the water goes down,' he said, ' it must have made a way for itself. Let us try to find it out.' A hundred pounds were lodged in the bank, a steamer was hired, and a channel, called the Maimax Arm, was found to be deep enough for ships to pass. The work was done, the city opened to the sea ; but then came the question of port authorities and then rules. No bark had ever left the city by this Maimax Arm ; no rules had been made for such a course of trade ; and the port police could not permit a ship to sail unless her papers were drawn up in the usual forms.

In vain the merchants told them the case was new, and must be governed by a ride to match. They might as well have reasoned with a Turkish bey. Here rode a fleet of vessels, laden wdth oats and deals for the Elbe, the Maas, and the Thames ; there ran the abundant Maimax waters to the sea ; but the printed rules of the port, unconscious of the freaks of nature and of the needs of man, forbade tins fleet to sail. Appeal was made to Prince Gagarine, governor of Archangel ; but Gagarine, though he laughed at these port rulers and then forms, had no deals and grain of his OAvn on board the ships. Gospodin Sredine, a keen-Avitted Master of the Customs, tried to open the ports and free the ships by offering to put officers on the new channel ; but the pohce were — the pohce. In vain they heard that the goods might spoil, that the money they cost was idle, and that every ruble wasted would be so much loss to then toAvn.

To my question, ' How was it arranged at last ?' a skipper, who was one of the prisoners in the port, rephes, 'I Avill tell you in a word. We sent to Petersburg ; the minister spoke to the Emperor ; and here is what we have heard they said "What's all this row in Archangel about?" asks the Emperor. "It is all about a new mouth being found in the Dvina, Sh, and ships that want to sail doAvn it, Sh, because the old channel is now shoaled up, Sh." " In God's name," rephes the Emperor, "let the ships go out by any channel they can find." ; Whether the thing was done in this sailor like way, or by the more likely method of official report and order, the Maimax mouth was opened to the world in spite of the port-police and then printed rules. A Hebrew of the olden time would have called this sea a whited sepulchre.

Even men of science, to whom vrintry storms may be summed up in a line of figures — so many ships in the pack, so many corpses on the beach — can find in the records of this frozen deep some show of an excuse for that old Lapland superstition of the Golden Hag. The year before last was a tragic time, and the memory of one dark day of Avrack and death has not yet had time to fade away. At the end of June, a message, flashed from the English Consul at Archangel — a man to represent his country on these shores, — alarmed our Board of Trade by such a cry for help as rarely reaches a pubhc board. A hundred ships were perishing in the ice. These ships were Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and English; luggers, sloops, corvettes, and smacks ; all built of wood, and many of them English manned. Could anything be done to help them ? ' Help is coming,' flashed the wires from Charing Cross ; and on the first day of July, two steamers left the Thames to assist in rescuing those ships and men from the Polar ice.

On the fifteenth night from home these English boats were off Cape Gorodetsk on the Lapland coast, and Avhen morning daAvned they were striving to cross the shallow Archangel bar. They could not pass ; yet the work of humanity was svriftly and safely done by the Enghsh crews. That fleet of all nations, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, left the Dvina ports on news coming up the delta that the pack AAras breaking up in the gulf; but on reaching that Corridor, through which we have just now come, they met the ice swaying to and fro, and crashing from point to point, as the changing wind veered round from north to south. By careful steering they -went on, until they reached the straits be- VOL. I. C tween Kanin Cape and Holy Point. The ice in then front was now thick and high ; no passage through it could be forced ; and then vessels reeled and groaned under the blows which they suffered from the floating drifts.

A brisk north wind arose, and blowing three days on without a pause, drove blocks and bergs of ice from the Polar ocean down into the gut, forcing the squadrons to fall back, and closing up every means of escape into the open sea. The ships rolled to and fro, the helmsmen trying to steer them in mid-channel, but the currents were now too strong to stem, and the helpless craft were driven upon the Lap land reefs, where the crews soon saAv themselves folded and imprisoned in the pack of ice. Like shots from a fort, the crews on board the stronger ships could hear in the grim waste around them hull after hull crashing up, in that fierce embrace, like fine glass trinkets in a strong man's hand. When a ship broke up and sank, the creAv leaped out upon the ice and made for the nearest craft, from which in a few hours more they might have to fly in turn.

One man was wrecked five times in a single day ; each of the boats to Avhich he clung for safety parting beneath his feet a_ad gurgling doAvn into the frozen deep. When the tale of loss was made up by the relieving steamers, this account was sent home to the Board of Trade : The number of ships abandoned by then crews was sixty-four ; of this great fleet of ships, fourteen were saved and fifty lost. Of the fifty ships lost in those midsummer days, eighteen were English built and manned; and the master mentions Avith a noble pride, that only one ship flying the English flag was in a state to be recovered from the ice after being abandoned by her crew. It would be well for our fame if the natives had no other tales to tell of an Enghsh squadron in the Frozen Sea.

Chapter III. The Dvina

By the Maimax arm we steam through the delta for some twenty miles ; past low, green banks and isles like those in the Missouri bed ; though the loam in the Dvina is not so rich and black as that on the American stream. Yet these small isles are bright vrith grass and scrub. Be yond them, on the mainland, lies a fringe of pines, going back into space as far as the eye can pierce. The low island, lying on your right as you scrape the bar, is called St. Nicolas, after that sturdy priest, who is said to have smitten the heretic Arius on his cheek. No one knows where this Nicolas lived and died ; for it is clear from the Acta that he had no part in the Council of Nice. The Book of Saints describes him as born in Liki and hving in Mha ; whence they call THE DVTNA. him the Saint of Mirliki ; but not a line of his Avriting is extant, and the virtues assigned to him are of opposing kinds.

He is a patron of nobles and of children, of sailors, of cadgers, and of pilgrims. Yet, in spite of his doubtful bhth and genius, Nicolas is a popular saint. Poor peo ple like him as one who is good to the poor ; a friend of beggars, fishermen, and tramps. A Russian turns to him as the hope of starving and droAvning men ; so that his name is often heard, his image often seen, in these northern wilds ; more than all else, on the banks of rivers and on the margins of the frozen sea. A peasant leams with dehght from his Book of Saints (his Bible, Epos, Drama, Code, and History, all in one) that Nicolas is the most potent saint in heaven ; sitting on the right hand of God ; and having a cohort of three hundred angels, armed and ready to obey his nod. A mujik asked a foreign friend to tell him, who will be God when God dies ? ' My good fellow,' said he, smiling, ' God vrill never die.' At first the peasant seemed perplexed. ' Never die ! ' and then a light fell on him. ' Yes,' he retorted, slowly ; ' I see it now.

You are an unbeliever ; you have no rehgion. Look you ; I have been better taught. God Avill one day die; for He is very old ; and then St. Nicolas will get his place.' Though he is common to all Russians — adored on the Dnieper, on the Volkhof, on the Moskva, no less than on the Dvina — he is wor shipped with peculiar zeal in these northern zones. Here he is the sailor's saint, the adven turer's help ; and all the paintings of him show that his watchful eyes are bent in eager tender ness upon the SAvirl and passion of the Frozen Sea. This delta might be called his province ; for not only was the island on your right called after him, but also the ancient channel, and the bay itself. The oldest cloister in the district bears his name. On passing into the Maimax arm, your eyes — long dimmed by the sight of sombre rock, dark cloud, and sullen surf — are charmed by soft, green grass and scrub ; but the sight goes vainly out, through reeds and copse, in search of some cheery note of house and farm.