At the court, and in its circles, liberal ideas were in sorely bad repute. All prominent men of the sixties, even such moderates as Count Nicholas Muravyov and Nicholas Milútin, were treated as suspects. Only Dmitri Milútin, the minister of war, was kept by Alexander II at his post, because the reform which he had to accomplish in the army required many years for its realization. All other active men of the reform period had been brushed aside.
I spoke once with a high dignitary of the ministry for foreign affairs. He sharply criticised another high functionary, and I remarked in the latter’s defense, “Still, there is this to be said for him, that he never accepted service under Nicholas I.” “And now he is in service under the reign of Shuvalov and Trepov!” was the reply, which so correctly described the situation that I could say nothing more.
General Shuvalov, the chief of the state police, and General Trepov, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, were indeed the real rulers of Russia. Alexander II was their executive, their tool. And they ruled by fear. Trepov had so frightened Alexander by the spectre of a revolution which was going to break out at St. Petersburg, that if the omnipotent chief of the police was a few minutes late in appearing with his daily report at the palace, the Emperor would ask, “Is everything quiet at St. Petersburg?”
Shortly after Alexander had given an “entire dismissal” to Princess X., he conceived a warm friendship for General Fleury, the aide-de-camp of Napoleon III, that sinister man who was the soul of the coup d’état of December 2, 1852. They were continually seen together, and Fleury once informed the Parisians of the great honor which was bestowed upon him by the Russian Tsar. As the latter was riding along the Nevsky Prospekt, he saw Fleury, and asked him to mount into his carriage, an égoïste, which had a seat only twelve inches wide, for a single person; and the French general recounted at length how the Tsar and he, holding fast to each other, had to leave half of their bodies hanging in the air on account of the narrowness of the seat. It is enough to name this new friend, fresh from Compiègne, to suggest what the friendship meant.
Shuvalov took every advantage of the present state of mind of his master. He prepared one reactionary measure after another, and when Alexander showed reluctance to sign any one of them, Shuvalov would speak of the coming revolution and the fate of Louis XVI, and, “for the salvation of the dynasty,” would implore him to sign the new additions to the laws of repression. For all that, sadness and remorse would from time to time besiege Alexander. He would fall into a gloomy melancholy, and speak in a sad tone of the brilliant beginning of his reign, and of the reactionary character which it was taking. Then Shuvalov would organize a bear hunt. Hunters, merry courtiers, and carriages full of ballet girls would go to the forests of Nóvgorod. A couple of bears would be killed by Alexander II, who was a good shot, and used to let the animals approach within a few yards of his rifle; and there, in the excitement of the hunting festivities, Shuvalov would obtain his master’s signature to any scheme of repression or robbery in the interest of his clients, which he had concocted.
Alexander II certainly was not a rank-and-file man, but two different men lived in him, both strongly developed, struggling with each other; and this inner struggle became more and more violent as he advanced in age. He could be charming in his behavior, and the next moment display sheer brutality. He was possessed of a calm, reasoned courage in the face of a real danger, but he lived in constant fear of dangers which existed in his brain only. He assuredly was not a coward; he would meet a bear face to face; on one occasion, when the animal was not killed outright by his first bullet, and the man who stood behind him with a lance, rushing forward, was knocked down by the bear, the Tsar came to his rescue, and killed the bear close to the muzzle of his gun (I know this from the man himself); yet he was haunted all his life by the fears of his own imagination and of an uneasy conscience. He was very kind in his manner toward his friends, but that kindness existed side by side with the terrible cold-blooded cruelty—a seventeenth century cruelty—which he displayed in crushing the Polish insurrection, and later on in 1880, when similar measures were taken to put down the revolt of the Russian youth; a cruelty of which no one would have thought him capable. He thus lived a double life, and at the period of which I am speaking, he merrily signed the most reactionary decrees, and afterward became despondent about them. Toward the end of his life this inner struggle, as will be seen later on, became still stronger, and assumed an almost tragical character.
In 1872 Shuvalov was nominated ambassador to England, but his friend General Potapov continued the same policy till the beginning of the Turkish war in 1877. During all this time, the most scandalous plundering of the state exchequer, as also of the crown lands, the estates confiscated in Lithuania after the insurrection, the Bashkír lands in Orenbúrg, and so on, was proceeding on a grand scale. Several such affairs were subsequently brought to light and judged publicly by the Senate acting as a high court of justice, after Potapov, who became insane, and Trepov had been dismissed, and their rivals at the palace wanted to show them to Alexander II in their true light. In one of these judicial inquiries it came out that a friend of Potapov had most shamelessly robbed the peasants of a Lithuanian estate
