Natasha's Dance (17 page)

    wrote to a friend on the eve of the revolt, ‘for the simple reason that I have my soldiers’ trust and love. Once the uprising commences they will follow my command.’
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    In the end, the Decembrist leaders carried with them only some 3,000 troops in Petersburg - far less than the hoped-for 20,000 men, but still enough perhaps to bring about a change of government if well organized and resolute. But that they were not. On 14 December, in garrisons throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear their oath and, with flags unfurled and drums beating, marched to Senate Square, where they thronged in front of the
Bronze Horseman
and called for ‘Constantine and a Constitution’. Two days earlier, Nicholas had decided to take the crown when Constantine had made it clear that he would not. Constantine had a large following among the soldiers, and when the Decembrist leaders heard the news, they sent out leaflets misinforming them that Nicholas had usurped the throne, and calling on them to ‘fight for their liberty and human dignity’. Most of the soldiers who appeared on Senate Square had no idea what a ‘constitution’ was (some thought it was the wife of Constantine). They displayed no inclination to capture the Senate or the Winter Palace, as envisaged in the hasty plans of the conspirators. For five hours the soldiers stood in freezing temperatures, until Nicholas, assuming the command of his loyal troops, ordered them to commence firing against the mutineers. Sixty soldiers were shot down; the rest ran away.

    Within hours the ringleaders of the insurrection had all been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (the police had known who they were all along). The conspirators might still have had some chance of success in the south, where it was possible to combine with the Poles in a march on Kiev, and where the main revolutionary forces (something in the region of 60,000 troops) were massed in garrisons. But the officers who had previously declared their support for an uprising were now so shocked by the events in Petersburg that they dared not act. Volkonsky found only one officer who was prepared to join him in the call for a revolt, and in the end, the few hundred troops who marched on Kiev on 3 January were easily dispersed by the government’s artillery.
⁵³
Volkonsky was arrested two days later, while

    on his way to Petersburg to see Maria one last time. The police had an arrest warrant signed in person by the Tsar.

    Five hundred Decembrists were arrested and interrogated, but most of them were released in the next few weeks, once they had provided evidence for the prosecution of the main leaders. At their trial, the first show trial in Russian history, 121 conspirators were found guilty of treason, stripped of their noble titles and sent as convict labourers to Siberia. Pestel and Ryleev were hanged with three others in a grotesque scene in the courtyard of the Fortress, even though officially the death penalty had been abolished in Russia. When the five were strung up on the gallows and the floor traps were released, three of the condemned proved too heavy for their ropes and, still alive, fell down into the ditch. ‘What a wretched country!’ cried out one of them. ‘They don’t even know how to hang properly.’
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    Of all the Decembrists, none was closer to the court than Volkonsky. His mother, the Princess Alexandra, could be found in the Winter Palace, smiling in attendance on the Dowager Empress, at the same time as he sat, just across the Neva river in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a prisoner detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. Nicholas was harsh on Volkonsky. Perhaps he felt betrayed by the man he had once played with as a boy. Thanks to the intervention of his mother, Volkonsky was spared the death sentence handed down to the other leaders. But twenty years of penal labour followed by a lifetime of compulsory settlement in Siberia was a draconian enough punishment. The prince was stripped of his noble title and all his medals from the battlefields of the wars against France. He lost control of all his lands and serfs. Henceforth his children would officially belong to the category of ‘state peasants’.
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    Count Alexander Benckendorff, the Chief of Police who sent him into exile, was an old school friend of Volkonsky. The two men had been fellow officers in 1812. Nothing better illustrates the nature of the Petersburg nobility, a small society of clans in which everybody knew each other, and most families were related in some way.* Hence the shame the Volkonskys felt on Sergei’s disgrace. None the less, it is

    * In 1859 Volkonsky’s son Misha would marry the granddaughter of Count Benckendorff. One of his cousins would marry Benckendorff’s daughter (S. M. Volkonskii, O
dekabristakh: po semeinum vospominaniiam,
p. 114).

    hard to comprehend their attempt to erase his memory. Sergei’s elder brother, Nikolai Repnin, disowned him altogether, and in the long years Volkonsky spent in Siberia he never sent him a single letter. A typical courtier, Nikolai was worried that the Tsar might not forgive him if he wrote to an exile (as if the Tsar was incapable of understanding the feelings of a brother). Such small-minded attitudes were symptomatic of an aristocracy which had been brought up to defer all values to the court. Sergei’s mother, too, put her loyalty to the Tsar before her own feelings for her son. She attended the coronation of Nicholas I and received the diamond brooch of the Order of St Catherine on the same day as Sergei, with heavy chains around his feet, began the long journey to Siberia. An old-fashioned lady of the court, Princess Alexandra had always been a stickler for ‘correct behaviour’. The next day she retired to her bed and stayed there, crying inconsolably. ‘I only hope,’ she would tell her visitors, ‘that there will be no other monsters in the family.’
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She did not write to her son for several years. Sergei was profoundly wounded by his mother’s rejection: it contributed to his own rejection of the mores and the values of the aristocracy. In his mother’s view, Sergei’s civil death was a literal death as well.
‘Il n’ya plus de Serge,’
the old princess would tell her courtly friends. ‘These words’, Sergei wrote in one of his last letters in 1865, ‘haunted me throughout my life in exile. They were not just meant to satisfy her conscience but to justify her own betrayal of me.’
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    Maria’s family was just as unforgiving. They blamed her for her marriage and attempted to persuade her to use her right to petition for its annulment. They had reason to suppose that she might do so. Maria had a newborn son to think about and it was far from clear whether she would be allowed to take him with her if she followed Sergei to Siberia. Besides, she did not appear to be entirely happy in the marriage. During the past year - only the first year of their marriage - she had hardly seen her husband, who was absent in the south and preoccupied with the conspiracy, and she had complained to her family that she found the situation ‘quite unbearable’.
⁵⁸
Yet Maria chose to share her husband’s fate. She gave up everything and followed Sergei to Siberia. Warned by the Tsar that she would have to leave her son behind, Maria wrote to him: ‘My son is happy but my husband is unhappy and he needs me more.

    It is hard to say exactly what was in Maria’s mind. When she made her choice she did not realize that she would be stripped of the right to return to Russia if she followed Sergei - she was told only when she reached Irkutsk, on the border between Russia and the penal region of Siberia - so it is possible that she was expecting to return to Petersburg. That indeed was what her father thought. But would she have turned back if she had known?

    Maria acted out of her sense of duty as a wife. Sergei appealed to this when he wrote to her from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the eve of his departure for Siberia. ‘You yourself must decide what to do. I am placing you in a cruel situation, but
chere amie,
I cannot bear the sentence of eternal separation from my lawful wife.’
⁶⁰
Such a sense of duty was ingrained in Maria by her noble upbringing. Romantic love, though by no means uncommon, was not a high priority in the conjugal relations of the early nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy. And nor does it seem to have played a major role in Maria’s decision. In this sense she was very different from Alexandra Muraviev, the wife of the Decembrist Nikita Muraviev, who came from a rather less aristocratic background than Maria Volkonsky. It was romantic love that compelled Alexandra to give up everything for a life of penal exile in Siberia - she even claimed that it was her ‘sin’ to ‘love my Nikitishchina more than I love God’.
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Maria’s conduct, by contrast, was conditioned by the cultural norms of a society in which it was not unusual for a noblewoman to follow her husband to Siberia. Convoys of prisoners were frequently accompanied by carts carrying their wives and children into voluntary exile.
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There was a custom, moreover, for the families of officers to go along with them on military campaigns. Wives would speak about ‘our regiment’ or ‘our brigade’ and, in the words of one contemporary, ‘they were always ready to share in all the dangers of their husbands, and lay down their lives’.
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Maria’s father, General Raevsky, took his wife and children on his main campaigns - until his young son was injured when a bullet pierced his breeches as he gathered berries near the battlefield.
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    It has also been suggested that Maria was responding to the literary cult of heroic sacrifice.
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She had read Ryleev’s poem ‘Natalia Dolgoru-kaya’ (1821-3), which may indeed have served as the moral inspiration for her own behaviour. The poem was based on the true story of a young princess, the favourite daughter of Field Marshal Boris Shereme-

    tev, who had followed her husband, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, to Siberia when he was banished there by the Empress Anna in 1730.*

    I have forgotten my native city, Wealth, honours, and family name To share with him Siberia’s cold And endure the inconstancy of fate.
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    Maria’s doting father was convinced that the reason she followed Sergei to Siberia was not because she was ‘a wife in love’ but because she was ‘in love with the idea of herself as a heroine’.
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The old general never stopped suffering over his beloved daughter’s voluntary exile - he blamed Sergei for it- and this led to a tragic break in their relationship. Maria felt her father’s disapproval in his infrequent letters to Siberia. No longer able to suppress her anguish, she wrote to him (in the last letter he received before his death) in 1829:

    I know that you have ceased to love me for some time, though I know not what I have done to merit your displeasure. To suffer is my lot in this world - but to make others suffer is more than I can bear… How can I be happy for a moment if the blessing which you give me in your letters is not given also to Sergei?
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    On Christmas Eve Maria said farewell to her son and family and left for Moscow on the first leg of her journey to Siberia. In the old capital she stopped at the house of her sister-in-law Princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a famous beauty and close friend of the late Emperor Alexander, called by Pushkin the ‘Tsarina of the arts’. Zinaida was the hostess of a dazzling literary salon where, unusually for that time, no Fench verses were declaimed. Pushkin and Zhukovsky, Viazemsky and Delvig, Baratynsky, Tiutchev, the Kireevsky brothers and the Polish poet Mickiewicz were all
habitues.
On the eve of Maria’s departure there was a special evening where Pushkin read his ‘Message to Siberia’ (1827):

    *Allowed to return to St Petersburg in the 1730s, Natalia Dolgorukaya became the first woman in Russian history to write her memoirs.

    In deep Siberian mines retain A proud and patient resignation; Your grievous toil is not in vain Nor yet your thought’s high aspiration. Grief’s constant sister, hope, is nigh, Shines out in dungeons black and dreary To cheer the weak, revive the weary; The hour will come for which you sigh,

    When love and friendship reaching through Will penetrate the bars of anguish, The convict warrens where you languish, As my free voice now reaches you.

    Each hateful manacle and chain Will fall; your dungeons break asunder; Outside waits freedom’s joyous wonder As comrades give you swords again.
⁶⁹

    One year after Maria had arrived in Siberia, her baby boy Nikolenka died. Maria never ceased to grieve for him. At the end of her long life, after thirty years of penal exile, when someone asked her how she felt about Russia, she gave this reply: ‘The only homeland that I know is the patch of grass where my son lies in the ground.’
⁷⁰

    Maria took eight weeks to travel to Nerchinsk, the penal colony on the Russian-Chinese border where her exiled husband, Sergei Volkonsky, was a convict labourer in the silver mines. It was about 6,000 kilometres across the snow-bound steppe by open carriage from Moscow to Irkutsk, at that time the last outpost of Russian civilization in Asia, and from there a hazardous adventure by cart and sledge around the icy mountain paths of Lake Baikal. At Irkutsk the governor had tried to dissuade Maria from continuing with her journey, warning her that, if she did so, she would be deprived of all her rights by a

    special order of the Tsar for all the wives of the Decembrists. By entering the penal zone beyond Irkutsk, the Princess would herself become a prisoner. She would lose direct control of her property, her right to keep a maid or any other serfs, and even on the death of her husband, she would never be allowed to return to the Russia she had left. This was the import of the document she had signed to join her husband in Nerchinsk. But any doubts she might have had about her sacrifice were immediately dispelled on her first visit to his prison cell.

    At first I could not make out anything, it was so dark. They opened a small door on the left and I entered my husband’s tiny cell. Sergei rushed towards me: I was frightened by the clanking of his chains. I had not known that he was manacled. No words can ever describe what I felt when I saw the immensity of his suffering. The vision of his shackles so enraged and overwhelmed my soul that at once I fell down to the floor and kissed his chains and feet.
⁷¹