Concerning the Assaults on Students [1861]
One of the most difficult moments for a person investigating a criminal act is that moment when he enters a room where an evil deed has taken place: everything is quiet and peaceful. the drops of blood, the broken furniture, an overturned chair, broken glass. noise can be heard from outside where wheels are creaking, a barrel organ is playing, children laugh, and peddlers shout—while just a few hours earlier, here, in this place, muffled blows, a howl, swearing, moaning, and a heavy fall could be heard. and inside you experience a hysterical tremor. Meanwhile there is no choice, the investigation must be carried out while the tracks are fresh. If only one can find sufficient peace of mind to avoid heaping on the shoulders of the criminal even more guilt than he in fact ought to be carrying.
We are those investigators.
Before us sadly stand massive buildings that have lost their significance, cold, empty auditoriums, mute lecterns: a senseless force passed through here, blindly crushed young lives, then unrepentantly quieted down, and everything went back to its old routine, only there are no students and there is no learning.
Who is to blame? Where are the guilty parties? The good-humored emperor or the soulless Putyatin? Shuvalov or Stroganov? The Moscow police or those from the Preobrazhensky district?
Everyone is guilty, they all played the role of voluntary executioners, cruel executioners; but with that they enjoy the benefits connected with the title of masters of the rod: they are only responsible for carrying out the sentence. Let their conscience torment them, let society's contempt torment them. Finally, let them be punished on the same basis on which in England beasts that cause a person's death are punished. To hell with them. Neither their guilt nor their punishment explains the matter.
The university incident is not an accident, not a whim, but the beginning of an inevitable battle. This battle must arise in one place or another, and it arose on the most natural soil. The contradictions that lie at the basis of our political life have moved so far apart that [. . .] either the established order in Petersburg will perish or Russia will perish.
That feverish feeling of being not quite right, which has taken control of all Russia—above, below, in the peasant hut and in the Winter Palace itself, directly reveals how the organism works and by what means it seeks to get rid of something dead, something poisonous and rotting.
The battle will come out one way or another, but eliminating the battle is impossible. The inhuman efforts made by Nicholas delayed its discovery for thirty years.
[. . .] For the Petrine empire, which survived, there remained one living matter, and with this matter it can redeem the past, heal the wounds suffered by the people, and be revitalized—with this matter it tied a rope around its neck. "You cannot force anyone to be saved," said Marshal Bugeaud to Louis Philippe.1
First there was a loss of strength, and then of sense. The optical illusion of indestructibility dispersed along with the smoke of Sevastopol as everyone saw that this was the scenery of power, but not power itself.2 The government was horrified by its own insignificance and its own absurdity; that accounts for its frantic readiness to change everything, to do repairs and restructuring, and, together with this, to desperately defend itself by every possible means—the shooting of peasants, the bayoneting of worshippers, the Preobrazhensky rifle butts, by gendarmes dressed like peasants, by the police use of public women. this is a sick person's internal fear of death, the overwhelming realization that there is insufficient reason for his existence. That is why they rush in one direction then another, that is why there is this uneasy feeling. that is why the empress prays at night before a Byzantine icon and reads the story of Marie Antoinette, that is why they tremble for their dynasty when hundreds of young people do not want to submit to wearing humiliating uniforms, that is why they hold onto their Preobrazhensky troops and their gendarmes, like a loaded revolver under a pillow. They know—and this is the worst thing that a person can know—that they are no longer needed!
Eight or ten years ago I preached to a frightened Europe, which gazed at the gloomy figure of an emperor in jackboots and the uniform of a cavalry guards officer, who stood like some kind of snowy scarecrow on the other side of the Baltic ice floes, and were horrified that this snow was melting, that the Petersburg throne was not at all as strong as people thought, that it had outlived its reason for being and had not had anything creative or constructive going for it since the war of i8i2, that Nicholas, from an instinct of self- preservation, had gathered all his forces together for a single negative move against the foundations of a new life that were arising.
No one believed me—it was before the Crimean War.
It's an old story, that people are convinced only by piles of corpses, captured burial mounds, and burnt cities. MacMahon was more fortunate than me.3
But it was not only Europe that saw the light due to the Crimean War; Nicholas also saw the light and, when he looked about him and saw the chaos and emptiness he had nurtured, his lungs ceased to breathe.
His entire reign was a mistake. A despot of limited abilities, uneducated, he didn't know Europe and he didn't know Russia. More ferocious than clever, he ruled with only the police, with only oppression. Frightened by December i4th, he recoiled from the nobility, from the single milieu linked in life and death to the Petersburg throne by the criminal mutual surety of serf law. He wanted to crush those simple, necessary strivings toward civil rights on which every Prussian and Austrian crown had yielded, at no loss to themselves. But, while surreptitiously untying the imperial barge from the landowners' raft, he did nothing for the people. He would have liked to take away serfdom from the gentry in order to weaken that class without giving freedom to the peasants. He saw them from an ordinary officer's point of view and was not afraid of them, because the people didn't know the word "constitution," did not demand rights, and considered only the land that was due to them; in any case it was easy to control them and the mute masses could be crushed noiselessly, without an echo.
The successor to Nicholas received a difficult inheritance: an unnecessary and inglorious war, shattered finances, widespread theft, grumbling, mistrust, and expectation. Before him—as in our fairy tales—lay three roads: to give genuine rights to the nobility and begin to resolve with them the lunar freedom of representative government; to free the serfs with land and begin a new era of popular and economic freedom; or, instead of one or the other of these, to continue trampling every manifestation of life until the muscles of the one who is trampling or the one who is being trampled are exhausted. What road did our Ivan Tsarevich travel?4