We knew the kind of beast that had roused and teased the Poles with its demonstrations and gunshots, and we trembled for them and for Russia and pleaded to the very end with them to stop. We told them that in Russia everything was in preparation and yet nothing was prepared. That the movement that they observed was sincere and deep, but far from being the "organization" they dreamed about, and we repeated a hundred times that Europe would not lift a finger to save them, and that all the sympathy and big talk was just an "exercise in style." We said that the participation by Russian officers was negative more than anything else—they didn't want to be executioners. We knew this and together with them we implored the government and Konstantin Nikolaevich to spare Russian blood and Russian honor, and not tempt officers to go against duty and conscience. That was what we said on the eve of the Belopolsky conference, and by the next day blood was flowing in the Kingdom of Poland. [. . .]
The trouble erupted at full strength. villages and small towns burned, soldiers looted and killed, their superiors looted and executed, the Poles began to seek revenge, the Russian people were roused with rumors of another i8i2. Muravyov—hated by all Russia—went to Vilnius and society applauded his appointment. [. . .]
We protested, that is, we did everything that one person can do in the face of savage force, we added our voice so that in the future it would bear witness to the fact that such a perversion of public opinion and civic speech could not happen without resistance, without a weak, isolated, lost, but indelible veto.
There were moments when we wished to be silent, but neither the slander nor the constant repetition of these terrible crimes left us in peace. The insolence grew, and to submit to it was beyond our strength. [. . .]
And with all this it was absolutely impossible to keep silent. Along with the despair, another powerful voice stated loudly that our future would find its way out of this filth and blood.
II
[. . .] The vestiges of our servitude are shameful and striking, like the marks left by a birch rod, and like those marks, remain on the surface.
Neither the government, nor the gentry, nor the serfs, nor the clergy, nor the senate, nor the synod—no one in essence believes in the truth of their power or powerlessness. That is why everyone is afraid of everything. [. . .] And for all that, a printed leaflet from a secret press, a warehouse that unexpectedly goes up in flames horrifies them, and every young person who looks forward like a free human being, causes trepidations. They're afraid of Mikhailov, they're afraid of Chernyshevsky. Orlov-Davydov requests a constitution to ward off Buckle and Buntzen, while Bezobrazov publicly thanks Katkov for saving the fatherland and for trampling The Bell.10
The government, as if rejoicing at the Polish rebellion and the fires, from the end of i862 on began to lay siege on all fronts and all issues. Since that time it continuously fusses, crushes, shouts, erects barriers, fights, kills, forces the people back with its chest and a horse's rear end, i.e., the secret police and The Moscow Gazette. Obviously no one gets in its way and nothing moves backward—it just keeps vacillating, going first to the right and then to the left.
If each step in this chaos were not covered in blood, accompanied by executions, prison, hard labor, then the spectacle that Russia now presents would have been performed with comedy and irony on a world-historical scale, which not a single divine or demonic comedy had ever achieved. It is a kind of Babylonian chaos, an orgy, a geological cataclysm applied to the strata of civic life. Everything is strange, massive, and confused. The government is violently wringing its hands, the liberal gentry is becoming a painful obstruction to any solution, and the only conservative element is agrarian communism—all of this mixture is under the observation of the police, who do not interfere in anything, but ask "who should be beaten?" and then beat them.
It's a terrible muddle.
Yes, gentlemen, and long may it live! Let us give thanks for the blind man's bluff that we are playing. In this chaos, in this ferment, in this lime pit, new forms will solidify, different foundations will crystallize, those which are close to our heart and which would have greater difficulty breaking through with fixed conceptions, established procedures, and the belief that a soldier by rights draws a line in the sand.
In the West, reactionaries have unity and meaning.
[. . .] It is clear that we cannot have any proper kind of reactionary movement, because there is no actual necessity for it. And as soon as reactionary activity is meaningless, then it must carry that meaningless character that it has among us. Accidental causes, accidental measures, whims, incomprehension, state power unrestrained by reason and not fearing accountability, Asian customs and a barracks upbringing, with no kind of plan and no kind of system. The main resistance always concentrated on the external, the word and not the deed. In half of the cases of persecution, the cowardice of an uneasy conscience and government touchiness are mixed in. The model of Petersburg measures remains the shaving of beards, the cutting off of hair, the return of an official document from an office because it was not signed according to regulations. Nicholas himself, who for thirty years defended Russia from any progress and any revolution, limited himself to the system's fagade, not order, but the appearance of order. In exiling Polezhaev and Sokolovsky11 for their bold verses, removing the words "liberty" and "civic spirit" from print, he let Belinsky, Granovsky, and Gogol slip through his fingers, putting the censor in jail for empty hints, not having noticed that literature from two directions rapidly drifted toward socialism.
Embarking once again on the path of resistance and reaction, the government of "emancipation and reform" demonstrated that it had not gotten any wiser.
It ruined a huge number of people, which would have horrified any Ben- kendorf or Dubelt12—that's that. The movement was not stopped, it was not even driven underground, like it was under Nicholas.
Meanwhile, the government had never been more powerful. Everything served its purpose—the good and the bad, Sevastopol and the Peace of Paris, the emancipation of the serfs and the Polish insurrection, Europe's empty threats and the long-awaited reforms. Literature had changed and the journals turned into observation towers for the Third Department, while university departments turned into sentry booths for the police, the gentry paralyzed themselves with nostalgia for serfdom, and the peasants continued to expect genuine freedom from the tsar.
The government, in the way that it was set up, could have produced positive and negative miracles. What did it actually do?
Constantly frightened and on its guard, it punished and continues to punish on the right and on the left, which governments never do when they feel the earth firmly beneath their feet. They executed Poles, having already defeated them with weapons. They executed arsonists, later announcing that the arson about which their literary spies had written so extensively didn't exist at all; they alluded to appeals, to letters that had been intercepted, to the reading of The Bell, and beat indiscriminately every person who stood out not according to the wishes of the authorities and not in an acceptable way. The peasant Martyanov returned from abroad with a poetic faith in the earthly tsar, and with trust that would have moved not just an anointed ruler but a painted African king—and Martyanov is grabbed, hit in the head with a club, and sent off to hard labor.
And at the same time other forces were growing alongside it, both far away and close by, and were outstripping the official power that lived in the Winter Palace. Even those forces that the Winter Palace had itself summoned, bought, trained, and rewarded, turned out to be serpents who had warmed themselves on its breast.