The Crown Court and the Treasury then treated this as a fresh case. They discovered a law which provided that, in cases where unsuitable land had been allotted, the grant should not be cancelled but an addition of 50 per cent should be made; they therefore directed that the peasants should get half a bog in addition to the bog they had been given already.

The peasants sent in a third petition to the Supreme Court. But, before this was discussed, the Board of Agriculture sent them plans of their new land, duly bound and coloured; with a neat diagram of the points of the compass arranged in a star, and suitable explanations of the rhombus R R Z and the rhombus Z Z R, and, above all, with a demand for a fixed payment per acre. When the peasants saw that, far from getting back their good land, they were to be charged money for their bog, they flatly refused to pay.

The rural inspector informed the Governor of this; and the Governor sent troops under the command of the town inspector of Vyatka. The latter went to the spot, arrested several men and beat them, restored order in the district, took money, handed over the ‘guilty’ to the Criminal Court, and was hoarse for a week after, owing to the strain on his voice. Several of the offenders were sentenced to flogging and banishment.

Two years afterwards, when the Crown Prince was passing through the district, these peasants presented a petition, and he ordered the matter to be examined. It was at this point that I had to draw up a report of all the proceedings. Whether anything sensible was done in consequence of this fresh investigation, I do not know. I have heard that the exiles were restored, but I never heard that the land had been given back.

§13

In the next place I shall refer to the famous episode of the “potato-rebellion.”

In Russia, as formerly throughout Europe, the peasants were unwilling to grow potatoes, from an instinctive feeling that potatoes are poor food and not productive of health and strength. Model landlords, however, and many Crown settlements used to grow these tubers long before the “potato revolt.”

In the Government of Kazán and part of Vyatka, the people had grown a crop of potatoes. When the tubers were taken up, it occurred to the Board of Agriculture to start communal pits for storing them. The pits were authorised, ordered, and constructed; and in the beginning of winter the peasants, with many misgivings, carted their potatoes to the communal pits. But they positively refused, when they were required in the spring to plant these same potatoes in a frozen condition. What, indeed, can be more insulting to labouring men than to bid them do what is obviously absurd? But their protest was represented as a rebellion. The minister despatched an official from Petersburg; and this intelligent and practical man excused the farmers of the first district he visited from planting the frozen potatoes, and charged for this dispensation one rouble per head. He repeated this operation in two other districts; but the men of the fourth district flatly refused either to plant the potatoes or to pay the money. “You have excused the others,” they said; “you are clearly bound to let us off too.” The official then tried to end the business by threats and corporal punishment; but the peasants armed themselves with poles and routed the police. The Governor sent a force of Cossacks to the spot; and the neighbouring districts backed up the rebels.

It is enough to say that cannon roared and rifles cracked before the affair was over. The peasants took to the woods and were routed out of their covert like wild animals by the Cossacks. They were caught, chained, and sent to Kosmodemyansk to be tried by court-martial.

By a strange chance there was a simple, honest man, an old major of militia, serving on the court-martial; and he ventured to say that the official from Petersburg was to blame for all that had happened. But everyone promptly fell on the top of him and squashed him and suppressed him; they tried to frighten him and said he ought to be ashamed of his attempt “to ruin an innocent man.”

The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia: the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.

It is worthy of remark that the Minister passed through Kosmodemyansk during the trial. One thinks he might have looked in at the court-martial himself or summoned the dangerous major to an interview. He did nothing of the kind.

The famous Turgot,^[104] knowing how unpopular the potato was in France, distributed seed-potatoes to a number of dealers and persons in Government employ, with strict orders that the peasants were to have none. But at the same time he let them know privately that the peasants were not to be prevented from helping themselves. The result was that in a few years potatoes were grown all over the country.

All things considered, this seems to me a better method than the cannon-ball plan.

In the year 1836 a strolling tribe of gipsies came to Vyatka and encamped there. These people wandered at times as far as Tobolsk and Irbit, carrying on from time immemorial their roving life of freedom, accompanied of course by a bear that had been taught to dance and children that had been taught nothing; they lived by doctoring horses, telling fortunes, and petty theft. At Vyatka they went on singing their songs and stealing chickens, till the Governor suddenly received instructions, that, if the gipsies turned out to have no passports—no gipsy was ever known to possess one—a certain interval should be allowed them, within which they must register themselves as members of the village communities where they happened to be at the time.

If they failed to do so by the date mentioned, then all who were fit for military service were to be sent to the colours, the rest to be banished from the country, and all their male children to be taken from them.

Tufáyev himself was taken aback by this decree. He gave notice of it to the gipsies, but he reported to Petersburg that it could not be complied with. The registration would cost money; the consent of the communities must be obtained, and they would want money for admitting the gipsies. After taking everything into consideration, Tufáyev proposed to the Minister—and he must get due credit for the proposal—that the gipsies should be treated leniently and given an extension of time.

In reply the Minister ordered him to carry out the original instructions when the time had expired. The Governor hardened his heart and sent a detachment to surround the gipsy encampment; when that was done, the police brought up a militia battalion, and scenes that beggar description are said to have followed—women, with their hair flying loose, ran frantically to and fro, shrieking and sobbing, while white-haired old women clutched hold of their sons. But order triumphed, and the police-inspector secured all the boys and the recruits, and the rest were marched off by stages to their place of exile.

But a question now arose: where were the kidnapped children to be put, and at whose cost were they to be maintained?

In former days there had been schools for foundlings which cost the Crown nothing; but these had been abolished, as productive of immorality. The Governor advanced the money from his own pocket and consulted the Minister. The Minister replied that, until further orders, the children were to be looked after by the old people in the alms-house.

To make little children live with dying old men and women, and to force them to breathe the atmosphere of death; and on the other hand, to force the aged and worn-out to look after the children for nothing—that was a real inspiration!

§15

While I am on this subject, I shall tell here the story of what happened eighteen months later to a bailiff of my father’s. Though a peasant, he was a man of intelligence and experience; he had several teams of his own which he hired out, and he served for twenty years as bailiff of a small detached village.

In the year which I spent at Vladímir, he was asked by the people of a neighbouring village to supply a substitute as a recruit for the Army; and he turned up in the town with the future defender of his country at the end of a rope. He seemed perfectly self-confident and sure of success.

“Yes, bátyushka,” he said to me, combing with his fingers his thick brown beard with some grey in it, “it all depends on how you manage these things. We put forward a lad two years ago, but he was a very poor miserable specimen, and the men were very much afraid that he would not do. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you must begin by collecting some money—the wheel won’t go round unless you grease it!’ So we had a talk together, and the village produced twenty-five gold pieces. I drove into the town, had a talk with the people in the Crown Court, and then went straight to the President’s house—a clever man, bátyushka, and an old acquaintance of mine. He had me taken into his study, where he was lying on the sofa with a bad leg. I put the facts before him. He laughed and said, ‘All right, all right! But you tell me how many of them you have brought with you; for I know what an old skin-flint you are.’ I put ten gold pieces on the table with a low bow. He took them up and played with them. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I’m not the only person who expects payment; have you brought any more?’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘we can go as far as ten more.’ ‘You can count for yourself,’ says he, ‘where they are to go to: the doctor will want a couple, and the inspector of recruits another couple, and the clerk—I don’t think more than three will be needed in that quarter; but you had better give me the lot, and I’ll try to arrange it for you.’”

“Well, did you give it?” I asked.

“Certainly I did; and the man was passed for the Army all right.”

Enlightened by this method of rounding off accounts, and attracted probably by the five gold pieces to whose ultimate destination he had made no allusion, the bailiff was sure of success this time also. But there is many a slip between the bribe and the palm that closes on it. Count Essen, an Imperial aide-de-camp, was sent to Vladímir to inspect the recruits. The bailiff, with his golden arguments in his pocket, found his way into the presence of the Count. But unfortunately the Count was no true Russian, but a son of the Baltic provinces which teach German devotion towards the Russian Tsar. He got angry, raised his voice, and, worse than all, rang his bell; in ran a secretary, and police-officers on the top of him. The bailiff, who had never dreamed of the existence of a man in uniform who would refuse a bribe, lost his head altogether; instead of holding his tongue, he swore by all his gods that he had never offered money, and wished that his eyes might fall out and he might die of thirst, if he had ever thought of such a thing. Helpless as a sheep, he was taken off to the police-station, where he probably repented of his folly in insulting a high officer by offering him so little.

Essen was not content with his own clear conscience nor with having given the man a fright. He probably wished to lay the axe to the tree of Russian corruption, to punish vice, and to make a salutary example. He therefore reported the bailiff’s nefarious attempt to the police, the Governor, and the Recruiting Office. The offender was put in prison and ordered to be tried. Thanks to the absurd law, which is equally severe on the honest man who gives a bribe and the official who pockets it, the affair looked bad, and I resolved at all costs to save the bailiff.

I went at once to the Governor, but he refused to interfere. The President and Councillors of the Criminal Court shook their heads: the aide-de-camp was interested in the case, and that frightened them. I went to Count Essen himself, and he was very gracious—he had no wish that the bailiff should suffer, but thought he needed a lesson: “Let him be tried and acquitted,” he said. When I repeated this to the inspector of police, he remarked: “The fact is, these gentlemen don’t understand business. If the Count had simply sent him to me, I should have warmed the fool’s back for walking into a river without asking if there was a ford; then I should have sent him about his business, and all parties would have been satisfied. But the court complicates matters.”

I have never forgotten what the Count said and what the inspector said: they expressed so neatly and clearly the view of justice entertained in the Russian Empire.

Between these Pillars of Hercules of our national jurisprudence, the bailiff had fallen into the deep water, in other words, into the Criminal Court. A few months later the court came to a decision: the criminal was to be flogged and then banished to Siberia. His son and all his relations came to me, begging me to save the father and head of the family. I felt intense pity myself for the sufferer, who was perfectly innocent. I called again on the President and Councillors; again I tried to prove that they were injuring themselves by punishing this man so severely. “You know very well yourselves,” I said, “that no lawsuit is ever settled without bribes; and you will starve yourselves, unless you take the truly Christian view that every gift is good and perfect.”^[105] By begging and bowing and sending the bailiff’s son to bow still lower, I attained half of my object. The man was condemned to suffer a certain number of lashes within the prison walls, but he was not exiled; and he was forbidden to undertake any business of the kind in future for other peasants.

When I found that the Governor and state-attorney had confirmed this remission, I went off to beg the police that the flogging might be lightened; and they, partly flattered by this personal appeal, and partly pitying a martyr in a cause so near to their own hearts, and also because they knew the man was well-to-do, promised me that the punishment should be merely nominal.

A few days later the bailiff came to my house one morning; he looked thin, and there was more grey in his beard. For all his joy, I soon perceived that he had something on his mind.

“What’s troubling you?” I asked.

“Well, I wish I could get it all over at once.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“What I mean is—when will the flogging be?”

“But haven’t you been flogged?”

“No.”

“But they’ve let you out, and I suppose you’re going home.”

“Home? Yes, I’m going home, but I keep thinking about the flogging; the secretary spoke of it, I am sure I heard him.”

I was really quite puzzled. At last I asked him if he had a written discharge of any kind. He handed it to me. I read there the original sentence at full length, and then a postscript, that he was to be flogged within the prison walls by sentence of the court and then to be discharged, in possession of this certificate.

I burst out laughing. “You see, you’ve been flogged already.”

“No, bátyushka, I’ve not.”

“Well, if you’re not content, go back and ask them to flog you; perhaps the police will take pity upon you.”

Seeing me laugh, he too smiled, but he shook his head doubtfully and said, “It’s a very queer business.”

A very irregular business, many will say; but let them reflect that it is this kind of irregularity alone which makes life possible in Russia.