The girl, terrified by what lay before her, began writing one petition after another; the matter reached the ears of the Tsar; he ordered it to be investigated, and sent an official from Petersburg. Probably l\1adame Yaryzhkin's means \Vere not equal to bribing the Petersburg, the ministerial and the political police investigators, and thf' case took a different turn. The lady was relegated to Siberia and her husband was put under ward. All the members of the Criminal Court were tried ; how their case Pnded I do not know.
In another placeG I have told the story of the man flogged to death by Prince Trubetskoy and of the Kammerherr Bazilevsky who was thrashed by his own S<'rvants. I will add one more story of a lady.
The maid of the wife of a colonel of gendarmes at Penza was carrying a tea-pot full of boili ng water. Her mistress's child ran G Property in Serfs.
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against the servant, vvho spilt the boiling water, and the child was scalded. The mistress, to exact her vengeance in the same coin, ordered the servant's child to be brought and scalded its hand from the samovar. . . .
Panchulidzev, the governor, hearing of this monstrous proceeding, expressed his heartfelt regret that his relations with the colonel of gendarmes were somewhat fragile, and that consequently he felt it improper to start proceedings which might be thought to be instiga ted by personal motives!
And then sensitive hearts wonder at peasants murdering landowners with their whole families, or at the soldiers of the military settlements at Staraya Russai massacring all the Russian Germans and all the German Russians.
In halls and maids' rooms, in villages and the torturechambers of the police, are buried whole martyrologies of frightful villainies; the memory of them works in the soul and in course of generations matures into bloody, merciless vengeance which it is easr to prevent, but will hardly be possible to stop once it has begun.
Staraya Russa, the military settlements! Frightful words! Can it be that history (bribed beforehand by Arakcheyev's pourboire8) will never pull away the shroud under which the government has concealed the series of crimes coldly and systematically perpetrated at the introduction of the military settlements?
There have been plenty of horrors everywhere, but here there was added the peculiar imprint of Petersburg and Gatchina, of German and Tatar. The beating with sticks and flogging with rods of the insubordinate went on for months together . . . the i In July 1 8 3 1 . ( A .S.) The military settlements were entirely the idea of Alexander I. They were foreshadowed in a manifesto of 1 8 1 4. [For the term of milita ry 'sprvice in Russia during his reign see p. 1 49, fn. 1 .
(D.M. ) l He wished the soldiers, i n peace time. to l ive with their famili!'s on thP l and and work it. The project started when one battalion of Grenadier Guards was settled in the Novgorod PrO\·ince in 1 8 1 5, but nothing was made public then about the settlements. 'It was a healthy, practical idea . . .' says E. l\1. Almedingen in Thr Emprror Alriandcr I (The Bodley Heacl. 1 964. p. 1 i6) . 'a mixture of humaneness and economic foresight. . . . A poisonous plant grew out of that good seed.' (R.)
" A mkcheyev left. I bcli<'w. a hundred thousand roubles in a bank to be paid a hundred years Iiller. togcthPr with the accumulated interest. to the man who should write the best history of the reign of Alexander I.
[ I t was '"iO.OOO roubles that Arakcheyev deposited in a bank for this purpose in 1 8.33. ( A .S. ) l
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blood was never dry on the floors of the village offices every
crime that may be committed by the people against their executioners on that small tract of land is justified beforehand.
The Mongolian side of the Moscow period \vhich distorted the Slav character of the Russians, the flat-of-the-sword inhumanity which d istorted the period of Peter were embodied in the full splendour of their hideousness in Count Arakcheyev. Arakcheyev was undoubtedly one of the most loathsome figures that rose after Peter I to the heights of the Russian government. That
'sneaking thrall of the crowned soldier,' as Pushkin said of him, was the model of an ideal corporal as he floated in the dreams of the father of Frederick the Second ; he \vas made up of inhuman devotion, mechanical correctness, the exactitude of a chronometer, routine and activity, a complete lack of feeling, just as much intelligence as was necessary to carry out orders, and just enough ambition, spleen and envy to prefer power to money.
Such men are a real treasure to Tsars. Only the petty resentment of Nicholas can explain the fact that he made no use of Arakcheyev, but confined himself to his underlings.
Paul had discowred Arakcheyev through sympathy. So long as Alexander's sense of shame lasted he kept him at some distance; but, carried away by the family passion for discipline and drill, he entrusted to him the secretariat of the army. Of the victories of thi s general of artillery we have heard little9; he rather performed civilian duties in the military service: his battles were fought on the soldiers' backs ; his enemies were brought to him in chains: they had been conquered beforehand. In the latter years of Alexander I, Arakcheyev governed all Russin.. He meddled in everything, he had a right to everything, carte blanrhe, in fact. As Alexander grev1; fePbler and sank into gloomy melancholy, he wavered a little between Prince A. N.
Golitsyn and Arakcheycv and in the end na turally inclined towards the latter.
At the time of Alexander's Taganrog visit the house-serfs on
!I Arakcheyev was a pitiful coward, as Count Toll tells us in his Memoirs, and the Secretary of State Marchenko in a l ittle story of the Fourteenth of December published in The Pole Star. I V. R. Marchenko's account appeared not in Pol)·amaya Zveda but in the lstoriclz('sky sbornik volnoy russkoy tipografii v Londone ( London. 1 859) . pp. 70- 1 . ( A .S.) ] I have heard that he was in hiding during the Staraya Russa rising, and was in deadly terror of Reikhel. the general oi Engineers.
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Arakcheyev's estate in Gruzino killed the Count's sweetheart; this murder gave rise to the investigation of which to this day, seventeen years later, that is, the officials and inhabitants of Novgorod speak with horror.
The sweetheart of Arakcheyev, an old man of sixty, was one of his serf-girls; she persecuted the servants, fought with them and told tales, and the Count thrashed them according to the information she laid. When their patience was completely exhausted, the cook killed her. The crime was committed so adroitly that there was no clue to the culprit.
But a culprit was needed for the vengeance of the doting old man ; he threw a side the affairs of the whole Empire a nd galloped to Gruzino. In the midst of tortures and blood, in the midst of groans and dying shrieks, Arakcheyev, with the blood-stained kerchief round his neck which had been taken from his concubine's body, wrote touching letters to Alexander, and Alexander replied : 'Come a nd find rest from your unhappiness on the bosom of your friend.'
The baronet Wylie10 must have been right when he declared that the Emperor had water on the brain before his death.