It has often been said that Alexander II committed a great fault, and brought about his own ruin, by raising so many hopes which later on he did not satisfy. It is seen from what I have just said—and the story of little Chitá was the story of all Russia—that he did worse than that. It was not merely that he raised hopes. Yielding for a moment to the current of public opinion around him, he induced men all over Russia to set to work, to issue from the domain of mere hopes and dreams, and to touch with the finger the reforms that were required. He made them realize what could be done immediately, and how easy it was to do it; he induced them to sacrifice whatever of their ideals could not be immediately realized, and to demand only what was practically possible at the time. And when they had framed their ideas, and had shaped them into laws which merely required his signature to become realities, then he refused that signature. No reactionist could raise, or ever has raised, his voice to assert that what was left—the unreformed tribunals, the absence of municipal self-government, or the system of exile—was good and was worth maintaining: no one has dared to say that. And yet, owing to the fear of doing anything, all was left as it was; for thirty-five years those who ventured to mention the necessity of a change were treated as suspects; and institutions unanimously recognized as bad were permitted to continue in existence only that nothing more might be heard of that abhorred word “reform.”
IV
Seeing that there was nothing more to be done at Chitá in the way of reforms, I gladly accepted the offer to visit the Amúr that same summer of 1863.
The immense domain on the left (northern) bank of the Amúr, and along the Pacific coast as far south as the bay of Peter the Great (Vladivostók), had been annexed to Russia by Count Muravyov, almost against the will of the St. Petersburg authorities and certainly without much help from them. When he conceived the bold plan of taking possession of the great river whose southern position and fertile lands had for the last two hundred years always attracted the Siberians; and when, on the eve of the opening of Japan to Europe, he decided to take for Russia a strong position on the Pacific coast, and to join hands with the United States, he had almost everybody against him at St. Petersburg: the ministry of war, which had no men to dispose of; the ministry of finance, which had no money for annexations; and especially the ministry of foreign affairs, always guided by its preoccupation of avoiding “diplomatic complications.” Muravyov had thus to act on his own responsibility, and to rely upon the scanty means which thinly populated Eastern Siberia could afford for this grand enterprise. Moreover, everything had to be done in a hurry, in order to oppose the “accomplished fact” to the protests of the West European diplomatists, which would certainly be raised.
A nominal occupation would have been of no avail, and the idea was to have on the whole length of the great river and of its southern tributary, the Usurí—full 2,500 miles—a chain of self-supporting settlements, and thus to establish a regular communication between Siberia and the Pacific coast. Men were wanted for these settlements, and as the scanty population of East Siberia could not supply them, Muravyov was forced to unusual measures. Released convicts who, after having served their time, had become serfs to the imperial mines, were freed and organized as Transbaikálian Cossacks, part of whom were settled along the Amúr and the Usurí, forming two new Cossack communities. Then Muravyov obtained the release of a thousand hard-labor convicts (mostly robbers and murderers), who were to be settled as free men on the lower Amúr. He came himself to see them off; and as they were going to leave, addressed them on the beach: “Go, my children, be free there, cultivate the land, make it Russian soil, start a new life,” and so on. The Russian peasant women nearly always, of their own free will, follow their husbands, if the latter happen to be sent to hard labor in Siberia, and many of the would-be colonists had thus their families with them. But those who had none ventured to remark to Muravyov: “What is agriculture without a wife! We ought to be married.” Whereupon Muravyov ordered the release of all the hard-labor convict women of the place—about a hundred—and offered them their choice of the men. But there was little time to lose; the high water in the river was rapidly going down, the rafts had to start, and Muravyov, asking the people to stand in pairs on the beach, blessed them, saying: “I marry you, children. Be kind to each other; you men, don’t ill-treat your wives—and be happy.”
I saw these settlers some six years after that scene. Their villages were poor, the land they had been settled on having had to be cleared from under virgin forests; but,
