Peste! was succeeded at Tobolsk by Kaptsevich, a man of the school of Arakcheyev. Thin, bilious, a tyrant by nature and a tyrant because he had spent his whole life in the army, a man of restless activity, he brought outward discipline and order into everything, fixed maximum prices for goods, but left everyday affairs in the hands of robbers. In 1 824 the Tsar wished to visit Tobolsk. Through the Perm Province runs an excellent, broad high-road, which has been in use for ages and is probably good o-..ving to the nature of the soil. Kaptsevich made a similar road to Tobolsk in a few months. In the spring, in the time of alternate thaw and frost, he forced thousands of workmen to make the road by levies from villages near and far; sickness broke out and half the workmen died, but 'zeal can overcome anything'the road was made.
Eastern Siberia is still more negligently governed. It is so far away the news hardly reaches Petersburg. At Irkutsk, Bronevsky, the Governor-General, was fond of firing off cannon in the town when 'he was merry.' And another high official when he was drunk used to say mass in his house in full vestments and in the presence of the bishop. At least the noisiness of the one and the devoutness of the other were not so pernicious as Pestel's blockade and Kaptsevich's indefatigable activity.
It is a pity that Siberia is so rottenly governed. The choice of its governors-general has been particularly unfortunate. I do not know what Muravev is like ; he is well known for his intelligence and his abilities; the others were good for nothing. Siberia 1 Congresses of the Holy Alliance were held in Aachen in 1 8 1 8 and Verona in 1 822. (A.S.)
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has a great future: it is looked upon merely as a cellar, in which there are great stores of gold, fur, and other goods, but which is cold, buried in snow, poor in the means of life, without roads or population. This is not true.
The dead hand of the Russian government, which does everything by violence, everything with the stick, cannot give the vital impetus that would carry Siberia forward with American rapidity. We shall see what will happen when the mouths of the Amur are opened for navigation and America meets Siberia near China.
I said long ago that the Pacific Ocean is the Mediterranean of the future. 5 In that future the part played by Siberia, the land that lies between the ocean, Southern Asia, and Russia, will be extremely important. Of course Siberia is bound to extend to the Chinese frontier. Why freeze and shiver in Berezov and Yakutsk when there are Krasnoyarsk, Minusinsk, and other such places?
Even the Russian immigrants into Siberia have elements in their nature that suggest a different development. Generally speaking, the Siberian race is healthy, well-grown, intelligent, and extremely steady. The Siberian children of settlers know nothing of the landowners' power. There is no upper class in Siberia and at the same time there is no aristocracy in the towns; the officials and the officers, who are the representatives of authority, are more like a hostile garrison stationed there by a victorious enemy than an aristocracy. The immense distances save the peasants from frequent contact with them; money saves the merchants, who in Siberia despise the officials and, though outwardly giving way to them, take them for what they aretheir clerks employed in civil affairs.
The habit of using firearms, indispensable for a Siberian, is universal. The dangers and emergencies of his daily life have made the Siberian peasant more war-like, more resourceful, readier to offer resistance than the Great Russian. The remoteness of churches leaves his mind freer from fanaticism than in Russia ; he is phlegmatic about religion and most often a schismatic. There are remote hamlets which the priest visits only three or four times a year and administers baptism wholesale, buries, marries, and hears confessions for the whole time since he was there last.
5 I have seen with great pleasure that the New York papers have several times repeated this.
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Before the end of my time at Vyatka the Department of Crovvn Property was stealing so impudently that a commission of inquiry was appointed over it, which sent inspectors about the provinces. With that began the introduction of the new administration of Crown peasants.
Governor Kornilov was to appoint two officials frQm his staff for this inspection. I was one of those appointed. What things it was my lot to read!-sad, funny and nasty. The very headings of the cases struck me with amazement.
'Relating to the disappearance of the house of the Parish Council, no one knows where to, and to the gnmving of the plan of it by mice.'
'Rela ting to the loss of twenty-two government quit-rent articles,' i.e., of fifteen versts of land.
'Relating to the registration of the peasant boy Vasily among the female sex.'
This last was so good that I at once read the case from cover to cover.
The father of this supposed Vasily \'\Tote in his petition to the governor that fifteen years earlier he had a daughter born, whom he had wanted to call Vasilisa, but that the priest, being 'in liquor,' christened the girl Vasily and so entered it in the register. The circumstance apparently troubled the peasant very little; but when he realised that it \'\"ould soon come to his family to furnish a recruit and pay the poll tax, he reported on the matter to the mayor and the rural police superintendent. The case seemed very odd to the police. They began by refusing the peasant's request, saying that he had let pass the ten-year limitation. The peasant went to the governor; the latter arranged a solemn examination of the boy of the female sex by a doctor and a midwife . . . . At this point a correspondence suddenly sprang up with the Consistory, and a priest, the successor of the one who, wlwn 'in liquor.' had chastely failed to makP fleshly distinctions, appeared on the scene, and the case went on for years and the girl \vas nearly left under the suspicion of being a man.
Do not imagine that this is an absurd figment made up by me for a joke; not at alclass="underline" it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Russian autocracy.
In the reign of Paul a colonel in the Guards in his monthly report entered as dead an officer who was dying in the hospital.
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Paul struck him off the list a s dead. Unluckily the officer did not die, but recovered. The colonel persuaded him to withdraw to his country estate for a year or two, hoping to find an opportunity to rectify the error. The officer agreed, but unfortunately for the colonel the heirs who had read of the kinsman's death in the Orders refused on any consideration to acknowledge that he was a live and, inconsolable at their loss, demanded possession of the property. When the living corpse saw that he was likely to die a second time, not merely on paper but from hunger, he went to Petersburg and sent in a petition to Paul. The Tsar wrote with his own hand on the petition: 'Forasmuch as His Majesty's decree has been promulgated concerning this gentleman, the petition is to be refused.'