Russka (101 page)

They were Old Believers. This was, nowadays, the name usually given to the sectarians – the old
Raskolniki
, – who had split off from the Church a century and a half before. There had been none in Russka since the burning of the church, and most had fled to the outer provinces during that period of persecution. But during the reign of Catherine they had been officially tolerated and there was now a sizeable community in Moscow. There were several rival groups: some who had their own priests, some who did without. And of all these there were none more remarkable than the group to which the fellows who ran this store belonged.

The Theodosian sect was rich and powerful. Its headquarters were by their cemetery in what had once been the village and was nowadays the outlying suburb of Preobrazhensk. They had numerous communes inside and outside the city. They owned public baths. They engaged in manufacturing and trading enterprises, and thanks to monopolies granted them by Catherine,
it was the Theodosians who sold all the best icons. But the most striking thing about the sect was its curious economic organization.

For the Theodosians ran what were, in effect, cooperatives. Members of the sect could obtain loans from their coffers at low interest rates to start businesses. In all their enterprises – some of which were quite large textile factories – the poor were cared for by the community. And though some successful members grew extremely rich in their lifetimes, their assets at death were taken over by the community. Puritan, upright, its stricter members even celibate, this strange, almost monastic mixture of capitalist factory and village commune was a uniquely Russian solution to the challenges of the early industrial revolution.

Many times, since he had encountered them in Moscow, the Theodosians had urged Savva to join the sect. They could certainly have financed him. But each time he passed the high walls of the community’s compound he had thought: No, I do not want to give all I have to them. I want to be free.

He left the Theodosians in their store at last and made his way across Moscow to his own modest lodgings. This was a pleasant wooden house in a dusty street. On the door was a little sign with a name upon it – not his own, for being still a serf he could not legally own anything, but that of his landlord: Bobrov. Soon, he thought, that sign will say: Suvorin. And he went inside contentedly.

It was five minutes later that a messenger arrived with the letter from Tatiana.

She told him everything. That his father was already on his way to Siberia in chains; that he had lost all he had; that Bobrov was sending a man to take him back to Russka where, once again, he would be a poor serf. It ended with an act of generosity and a none too subtle hint.

Whatever you think fit to do, the
money I lent you is yours – I do not
wish to be repaid and will be glad
only to know that you are well.

His landlord’s wife was telling him to run away and keep the money. It was, he knew, an astonishing act for a member of the gentry towards a serf.

But he only sighed. It was no use. If I take the money and I’m caught, they’ll only say I stole it. Her letter won’t do me any good. Carefully he wrapped up notes to the value of her loan. He would leave them with a merchant he could trust who would get them to her. Then he considered what to do.

He would not go back. Not to the Bobrovs after what they had done. He would sooner die. As I dare say I shall, he thought. No, he would run away. There were ways of doing it. Men pulled the barges down the Volga. Backbreaking work. Several thousand men died at it every year. But you could get away like that – far away to the south and east with few questions asked. Or perhaps head east, for the distant colonies of Siberia where they wanted men, no matter who. Perhaps he would even try to find his father. It’s lucky, he considered, that I’m strong.

It seemed that, after all, he had lost his duel with the Bobrovs. But even so, he would not give up – not in a thousand years.

One thing at least was certain: he would never see that cursed place Russka again.

It was on the very day his father sent poor Suvorin away from Russka that, far away in the north-eastern province of Novgorod, Alexis Bobrov made a remarkable discovery.

The day was bright, with a sharp, damp wind blowing when he arrived at the place. The three young officers who rode with him were in cheerful spirits. ‘Though I’m sure I shall hate anything devised by that oaf,’ one remarked scornfully. But Alexis, as he passed through the gates and along the well-kept road, was filled with curiosity.

The oaf was the famous general Arakcheyev.

It was one of the strange features of the reign of the enlightened, even poetic, Tsar Alexander that he should have come to choose General Arakcheyev as his closest adviser. Perhaps it was an attraction of opposites. The general was half-educated and bad-tempered; his face was coarse, his hair close-cropped, his body perpetually stooped forward as though under the weight of the stern tasks he set himself. Alexis had come to admire him for the brilliant way he had directed artillery in the great campaign of 1812. ‘He may be crude,’ he told his companions, ‘but he is loyal to the Tsar and he gets things done.’ Like many straightforward soldiers – that was how Alexis liked to
see himself – he had been delighted when the Tsar made Arakcheyev his closest councillor.

And it was here in Novgorod province that the general, upon the Tsar’s command, had now undertaken one of the greatest social experiments in Russian history.

The moment they entered the huge estate, Alexis sensed something strange about the place. The peasants looked odd; the road had no ruts in it; but only when they came to the village itself did the party gasp with astonishment.

It was not a Russian village at all. The haphazard collection of peasant
izbas
that had once stood there had been completely razed; in their place, row upon row of neat cottages. They were identical – each painted blue with a red porch and white fence. ‘Good God,’ Alexis muttered, ‘it’s like a barracks.’ Then he noticed the children.

They were little boys, some no more than six years old. They came swinging by, in perfect step and singing, under orders from a sergeant. They were in uniform. And then Alexis realized what had seemed so strange since he arrived: everyone was identically dressed, and none of the peasants had a beard.

‘Yes, you’ll find perfect order,’ explained the young officer who showed them round. ‘We have three sizes of uniform for the children – quite enough. They wear uniforms at all times. The men are cleanshaven: it’s neater. Iron discipline – we beat a drum when it’s time to work in the fields.’ He grinned. ‘We can almost make them mow a meadow in step!’

And a few minutes later, when they were shown inside the cottages, Alexis was even more astonished. They were all spotless. ‘How do you do it?’ he asked.

‘Inspections. See,’ the young man pointed to a list hanging on a wall. ‘That’s an inventory of everything in the house. Everything has to be checked and clean as a whistle.’

‘How do you keep discipline?’ one of the officers asked.

‘The cane is enough. Any slip and they get it. We salt the cane, actually,’ he added.

Alexis soon noticed something else. Unlike a normal village, there seemed to be as many men of all ages as women.

‘Everyone has to marry,’ their guide explained, then laughed. ‘Whether they want to or not. The women should be grateful, actually. No widows or old maids here – we give them a man.’

‘You must have plenty of children then,’ Alexis remarked.

‘We certainly do. If the women don’t produce regularly, we fine them. The empire needs people to serve it.’

‘Are they happy?’ one of the others enquired.

‘Of course. Some of the old women wept,’ the young man conceded. ‘But the system is perfect, don’t you see? Everyone works, everyone obeys, and everyone’s looked after.’

For this was General Arakcheyev’s Military Colony. It covered a huge area in the province, where the army settled and the local peasants were forcibly converted into reservists and militarized state workers. Further colonies were already being set up down south in the Ukraine. ‘Within three years,’ their guide said, ‘a third of the entire Russian army will be settled like this.’ There was no doubt, it was impressive.

But why should the enlightened Tsar Alexander have encouraged his henchman to set up these totalitarian districts? Was it just for convenience? For they were certainly a cheap way of keeping a standing army occupied and fed in time of peace. Was it, as some suspected, that the Tsar – hoping one day to weaken the grip of a conservative gentry upon the army and the land – was experimenting with these colonies as a way of doing so? Or was it perhaps that Tsar Alexander, imbued with a military streak like his father, and frustrated almost beyond endurance by the chaotic, refractory nature of the endless Russian land, had resolved – like Russian reformers before and after – to impose order somewhere at least, whatever the cost? Whichever explanation comes nearest, it was certainly true that the military colonies with their iron discipline, terrible symmetry and their complete dedication to the state, would have delighted old Peter the Great himself if only he had thought of them.

To Alexis Bobrov, the colony was a revelation. Hadn’t he dedicated his life to military service? Arakcheyev’s creation was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. How far it was from the shabby chaos of Russka and a thousand estates like it. Just as the army was, for him, a relief from the ineptitude of his own family, this place seemed an escape from everything that irritated him in Russia. He saw only that the people here were industrious and well fed: he saw what he wanted to see. For just as one man will be attracted to power, another will be fascinated by order. He was quite seduced.

And from that day there was rooted in his mind a single, unalterable precept which, whatever difficulties he encountered, seemed to make sense of everything. It was simply this: the Tsar would be served by imposing order. And from this principle derived a second: that which is most conducive to order must be right. ‘Good enough,’ he told himself, ‘for a straightforward soldier like me.’

It was in the summer of the following year, when Ilya had already departed with a family friend on his tour abroad, that Alexis, visiting Russka, chanced one day to take down the battered volume of Derzhavin’s verse. When he discovered the bank-notes, he guessed at once what had happened. But there was nothing to be done. Suvorin was in Siberia. His son had run away, God knew where. Alexander Bobrov was unwell.

Besides, to suggest Suvorin’s sentence was a mistake would look bad for everyone: bad for the family, bad for their class, not congenial to order.

He put the money in a safe place, and said nothing.

If a Russian is asked for the date of the most memorable event before the present century, he or she will almost invariably reply: December 1825.

For this was the date of the first attempted Revolution.

The Decembrist conspiracy – so named after the month in which it took place – is almost unique in human history on account of its curious character. For it was an attempt – a very amateurish one – on the part of a handful of nobles, acting from the highest motives, to secure freedom for the people.

To understand how this came about it is necessary only to go back to the reign of Catherine, when in Russian noble circles, the ideas of the Enlightenment and of liberty had first taken root. Despite the shock of the French Revolution and the fear of Napoleon, the idea of reform in Russia had continued to grow under the enlightened Tsar Alexander. And God knew there was much to reform: a legal system that might have come from the Dark Ages, the institution of serfdom, a government that, despite the nominal existence of a judicial Senate, was in reality a
primitive autocracy. Yet what was to be done? No one could ever agree. The representatives of the gentry, merchants and serfs called together by Catherine had simply quarrelled with each other. There were no ancient institutions, as in the west, to build upon. Tsar Alexander had found the same thing: great schemes were drawn up, but any attempt to introduce them promptly foundered upon the great Russian sea of obstruction and inefficiency. The gentry were loyal, but would not hear of freeing their peasants: by 1822 the Tsar had even restored their official right to send serfs to Siberia. Everyone feared another Pugachev uprising. The government found in practice that it could only tinker with the system, try to maintain order, and conduct experiments like the military colonies, to seek new forms that might lift the country out of its ancient social stagnation.

It was not surprising then, as the years went by, if some liberal young nobles began to feel that their angelic Tsar had cheated them. Their minds were opened by the Enlightenment; the great patriotic victory over Napoleon and, in some cases, contact with mystical Freemasonry, had filled them with a romantic fervour towards the fatherland. Yet while Tsar Alexander’s Holy Alliance might inspire them as they looked outward, at home Russia seemed increasingly dominated by the stern authoritarianism of General Arakcheyev. So it was, in the years after the Congress of Vienna, that a loosely knit group began to form, dedicated to change and even revolution.

They were quite alone. Within their own class, an idealistic few. The middle, merchant class, still small, was conservative and uninterested; the peasants completely ignorant.

Nor had they an agreed plan. Some wanted a constitutional monarchy on the English pattern; some, led by a fiery army officer, Pestel, down in the south, wanted to kill the Tsar and set up a republic. In secret they planned, plotted, hoped, and did nothing.

And then, quite unexpectedly, in November 1825, Tsar Alexander was no more. A sudden fever had apparently carried him off, and he had left behind no son. The succession fell to the Tsar’s two brothers: Constantine, the grandson Catherine had hoped would rule in Constantinople, and a younger brother, a well-intentioned but unimaginative fellow named Nicholas.

While the conspirators wondered what they should do, a series of bizarre events took place. Grand Duke Constantine,
commanding the army in Poland, had already married a Polish lady and renounced his rights to the throne. Tsar Alexander had accepted this and issued a manifesto designating Nicholas the heir – which was so secret that not even poor Nicholas had been told. Now, therefore, Constantine immediately swore allegiance to young Nicholas; while Nicholas and the Russian army naturally swore allegiance to him! When at last the confusion was sorted out, it was agreed that everyone should, in December 1825, swear allegiance all over again, this time to the bemused Nicholas.