What strange times these are: we have no secrets, and we passionately want to show the sovereign all there is to know. But the Dolgorukovs and Timashevs,9 his professional ears, keep many secrets from him and conceal everything except harmful gossip. And ever more carefully they conceal the fact that the highest layer of the Russian nobility is not only not the sole true support of the throne, but because of its sickly state is itself looking for something on which to lean. The era has passed in which the Petersburg government existed not only by the grace of God but with the help of boyar oligarchs and German generals. Back then there was joint management and a system of mutual guarantees: the government allowed the nobles to rob the people and beat them with a rod, and the nobility helped the government to gather up more lands and beat their inhabitants with a whip.
Since then everything has gradually changed. Since then the Russia of Biron and Osterman has grown old, and the Russia of Lomonosov has advanced.10 Since then we have seen 1812 and December 14, 1825. The new milieu snuck in imperceptibly, like a wedge between the people and the grandees, and in this milieu you will find atoms from all the different social layers, but crystallized differently. There are the children of counts and princes and the son of a Voronezh cattle-dealer.11 In this milieu you will find education, universities, all intellectual activity, books—and books now wield power.
Nothing is known about all this at court. [. . .] Nothing can reach the highest cells of the Winter Palace except people belonging to the first three ranks. It seems as if everything is proceeding as usual with the same uniforms sewn with gold thread, but what the uniform is filled with has rotted and shrunk, going out of its mind and out of its century, and has passed away, but has been magnificently embalmed. [. . .] Because of these bodies in gold-threaded uniforms on parade, the sovereign cannot see that the center of gravity and energy has changed, and that elements have entered the formula of Russian life that were unknown in the time of Peter I and barely heard of under Catherine II. He does not know that it is now impossible to forbid either science or literature, and that there are beliefs and convictions common to every educated person, except the majority of that higher nobility who in the oligarchs' books are depicted as the support of the throne.
[. . .] When has a Russian emperor had on his side—as is the case with the emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of open discussion—the Russian people and educated Russia, the common people and men of letters, the young clergy and all the Old Believers, and, finally, the opinion of the whole world from the greatest periodic outlets to the humble pages of The Bell?
It is only the throne's "sole support" that is against these changes; its slavish efforts extend no further than an easing of quitrent. [. . .]
But it is not the tsar who has been weakened by this opposition, but them; the earth is disappearing from beneath their feet. Supporting autocracy by its imperial shoulder, in essence they themselves leaned on it. Leave them to their own devices and in a quarter hour they will tumble from their "beautiful heights" and become "Comme tout le monde," as Susanna Figaro said. [. . .]
Can the sovereign really be afraid that these made-up counts, who remind one of Soulouque's aristocracy, these impoverished princes with ar- cheological names, who with the help of the provincial Dobchinskys and local Bobchinskys, will force him—like Norman barons—to sign a Magna Carta of genuine liberties for the higher ranks of the civil service and the military or be led off to prison like Louis XVI?12 [. . .]
All this is impossible because our Norman barons possess no power of their own or any from the people or from any contemporary idea—all their strength lies in the tsar's support.
There is only one thing they can do—spring from a corner and kill the tsar, because for this no strength is needed, you just have to be a villain. [. . .]
One could say to us that they are not the ones the sovereign fears. Then whom?
A popular uprising? It is difficult to imagine that the Russian peasant, who for centuries has put up with his disastrous state, would rebel because he was being liberated and begin to demand the return of serfdom!
Civil servants? People who take bribes will never rebel.
The merchants? What profit is in it for them? Tax-farmers would be the first to fall in battle for a paternalistic government.
You can look wherever you like in Russia—everywhere there are shoots and buds, everywhere grain is ripening, everywhere something is asking to come out into the light and develop, everything wishes to stretch its limbs after a long, long captivity, and nowhere is there any element of an uprising. One question that the people might raise concerns the liberation of the serfs with land, but that lies in the hands of the government.
[. . .] The government's harshest and most sadly despotic orders were directed against literature and now against students. That is what frightens them, that is where they see danger! It is strange, painful, and shameful, but that's how it is! The sovereign has been fussing over the censorship for, I think, three years—he curtails it, prolongs it, simplifies it, and then makes it more complex.
Cut off from any possibility of receiving journals in a timely fashion by the repulsive postal arrangements for book parcels in Russia, we thought for a long time that in Russia they were printing incendiary appeals, like the heretical books of Luther and the erotic works of Barkov.13
Not at all. When we received the March issues in November, and the February issues in December, we were able, little by little, to read through almost everything. The change from the Nicholaevan age is enormous. Thought that was repressed has revived, language has returned, and human thoughts and interests have found their reflection in the "Reviews." All journals without exception have energetically and enthusiastically supported this reign's most important idea—the liberation of the serfs with land. [. . .]
The problem, unfortunately, is that high above the ups and downs of everyday existence a humane word is considered impertinent and thought is suspicious in and of itself. Thinking and speaking (i.e., giving orders) should be done by the government; for a subject this is a luxury and leads only to gossiping about matters that do not concern him, for example, whether he can rightfully be confined to the Peter Paul Fortress without a trial, be sent hundreds of miles away without being told the reason, and so on. The ideal of government order and civilization for this ultra-first-class sphere is an eastern seraglio and a Prussian cavalry parade.14 It is a seraglio in which people, renouncing their zoological dignity, got down on all fours in the sovereign's presence, and a military formation in which a man attached to a rifle butt is reduced to being a wax figure with four thousand legs rising at the same angle and descending at the same instant. [. . .]
In the most recent instructions to the Moscow censorship committee, it was stated that the government considers it beneath its dignity to turn its attention to facts uncovered by the press. During the past decade, replete with stupidities, I do not think that anything stupider than this has been said. It is wondrously stupid. As if there is only one noble means of uncovering the truth—spying!
It is the same in regard to the students. The civilizing government must have universities and students but it wishes the students to resemble soldiers in punishment battalions. [. . .]