The very tastes of “society” sunk lower and lower. The Italian opera, formerly a forum for radical demonstrations, was now deserted; the Russian opera, timidly asserting the rights of its great composers, was frequented by a few enthusiasts only. Both were found “tedious,” and the cream of St. Petersburg society crowded to a vulgar theatre where the second-rate stars of the Paris small theatres won easy laurels from their Horse Guard admirers, or went to see La Belle Hélène, which was played on the Russian stage, while our great dramatists were forgotten. Offenbach’s music reigned supreme.
It must be said that the political atmosphere was such that the best men had reasons, or had at least weighty excuses, for keeping quiet. After Karakozov had shot at Alexander II in April, 1866, the state police had become omnipotent. Everyone suspected of “radicalism,” no matter what he had done or what he had not done, had to live under the fear of being arrested any night, for the sympathy he might have shown to someone involved in this or that political affair, or for an innocent letter intercepted in a midnight search, or simply for his “dangerous” opinions; and arrest for political reasons might mean anything: years of seclusion in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, transportation to Siberia, or even torture in the casemates of the fortress.
This movement of the circles of Karakozov remains up to this date very imperfectly known, even in Russia. I was at that time in Siberia, and know of it only by hearsay. It appears, however, that two different currents combined in it. One of them was the beginning of that great movement “toward the people,” which later took on such formidable dimensions; while the other current was mainly political. Groups of young men, some of whom were on the road to become brilliant university professors, or men of mark as historians and ethnographers, had come together about 1864, with the intention of carrying to the people education and knowledge in spite of the opposition of the government. They went as mere artisans to great industrial towns, and started there cooperative associations, as well as informal schools, hoping that by the exercise of much tact and patience they might be able to educate the people, and thus to create the first centres from which better and higher conceptions would gradually radiate amongst the masses. Their zeal was great; considerable fortunes were brought into the service of the cause; and I am inclined to think that, compared with all similar movements which took place later on, this one stood perhaps on the most practical basis. Its initiators certainly were very near to the working-people.
On the other side, with some of the members of these circles—Karakozov, Ishútin, and their nearest friends—the movement took a political direction. During the years from 1862 to 1866 the policy of Alexander II had assumed a decidedly reactionary character; he had surrounded himself with men of the most reactionary type, taking them as his nearest advisers; the very reforms which made the glory of the beginning of his reign were now wrecked wholesale by means of bylaws and ministerial circulars; a return to manorial justice and serfdom in a disguised form was openly expected in the old camp; while no one could hope at that time that the main reform—the abolition of serfdom—could withstand the assaults directed against it from the Winter Palace itself. All this must have brought Karakozov and his friends to the idea that a further continuance of Alexander II’s reign would be a menace even to the little that had been won; that Russia would have to return to the horrors of Nicholas I, if Alexander continued to rule. Great hopes were felt at the same time—this is “an often repeated story, but always new”—as to the liberal inclinations of the heir to the throne and his uncle Constantine. I must also say that before 1866 such fears and such considerations were not unfrequently expressed in much higher circles than those with which Karakozov seems to have been in contact. At any rate, Karakozov shot at Alexander II one day, as he was coming out of the summer garden to take his carriage. The shot missed, and Karakozov was arrested on the spot.
Katkov, the leader of the Moscow reactionary party, and a great master for extracting pecuniary profits out of every political disturbance, at once accused of complicity with Karakozov all radicals and liberals—which was certainly untrue—and insinuated in his paper, making all Moscow believe it, that Karakozov was a mere instrument in the hands of the Grand Duke Constantine, the leader of the reform party in the highest circles. One can imagine to what an extent the two rulers, Shuvalov and Trepov, exploited these accusations, and the consequent fears of Alexander II.
Mikhael Muravyov, who had won during the Polish insurrection his nickname “the hangman,” received orders to make a most searching inquiry, and to discover by every possible means the plot which was supposed to exist. He made arrests in all classes of society, ordered hundreds of searches, and boasted that he “would find the means to render the prisoners more talkative.” He certainly was not the man to recoil even before torture—and public opinion in St. Petersburg was almost unanimous in saying that Karakozov was tortured to obtain avowals, but made none.
State secrets are well kept in fortresses, especially in that huge mass of stone opposite the Winter Palace, which has seen so many horrors, only in recent times disclosed by historians. It still keeps Muravyov’s secrets. However, the following may perhaps throw some light on this matter.
In 1866 I was in Siberia. One of our Siberian officers, who traveled from Russia to Irkutsk toward the end of that year, met at a post station two gendarmes. They had accompanied to Siberia a functionary exiled
