The pillage which went on in all the ministries, especially in connection with the railways and all sorts of industrial enterprises, was really enormous. Immense fortunes were made at that time. The navy, as Alexander II himself said to one of his sons, was “in the pockets of So-and-So.” The cost of the railways, guaranteed by the state, was simply fabulous. As to commercial enterprises, it was openly known that none could be launched unless a specified percentage of the dividends was promised to different functionaries in the several ministries. A friend of mine, who intended to start some enterprise at St. Petersburg, was frankly told at the ministry of the interior that he would have to pay twenty-five percent of the net profits to a certain person, fifteen percent to one man at the ministry of finances, ten percent to another man in the same ministry, and five percent to a fourth person. The bargains were made without concealment, and Alexander II knew it. His own remarks, written on the reports of the comptroller-general, bear testimony to this. But he saw in the thieves his protectors from the revolution, and kept them until their robberies became an open scandal.
The young grand dukes, with the exception of the heir apparent, afterward Alexander III, who always was a good and thrifty paterfamilias, followed the example of the head of the family. The orgies which one of them used to arrange in a small restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt were so degradingly notorious that one night the chief of the police had to interfere, and warned the owner of the restaurant that he would be marched to Siberia if he ever again let his “grand duke’s room” to the grand duke. “Imagine my perplexity,” this man said to me, on one occasion, when he was showing me that room, the walls and ceiling of which were upholstered with thick satin cushions. “On the one side I had to offend a member of the imperial family, who could do with me what he liked, and on the other side General Trepov menaced me with Siberia! Of course, I obeyed the general; he is, as you know, omnipotent now.” Another grand duke became conspicuous for ways belonging to the domain of psychopathy; and a third was exiled to Turkestan, after he had stolen the diamonds of his mother.
The Empress Marie Alexándrovna, abandoned by her husband, and probably horrified at the turn which court life was taking, became more and more a devotee, and soon she was entirely in the hands of the palace priest, a representative of a quite new type in the Russian Church—the Jesuitic. This new genus of well-combed, depraved, and Jesuitic clergy made rapid progress at that time; already they were working hard and with success to become a power in the state, and to lay hands on the schools.
It has been proved over and over again that the village clergy in Russia are so much taken up by their functions—performing baptisms and marriages, administering communion to the dying, and so on—that they cannot pay due attention to the schools; even when the priest is paid for giving the Scripture lesson at a village school, he usually passes that lesson to someone else, as he has no time to attend to it himself. Nevertheless, the higher clergy, exploiting the hatred of Alexander II toward the so-called revolutionary spirit, began their campaign for laying their hands upon the schools. “No schools unless clerical ones” became their motto. All Russia wanted education, but even the ridiculously small sum of four million dollars included every year in the state budget for primary schools used not to be spent by the ministry of public instruction, while nearly as much was given to the Synod as an aid for establishing schools under the village clergy—schools most of which existed, and now exist, on paper only.
All Russia wanted technical education, but the ministry opened only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from reading and thinking. In these gymnasia, only two or three percent of the pupils succeeded in completing an eight years’ course—all boys promising to become something and to show some independence of thought being carefully sifted out before they could reach the last form; and all sorts of measures were taken to reduce the number of pupils. Education was considered as a sort of luxury, for the few only. At the same time the ministry of education was engaged in a continuous, passionate struggle against all private persons and all institutions—district and county councils, municipalities, and the like—which endeavored to open teachers’ seminaries or technical schools, or even simple primary schools. Technical education—in a country which was so much in want of engineers, educated agriculturists, and geologists—was treated as equivalent to
