This is even better than my Vasilisa-Vasily. Of what consequence was the crude fact of life beside the decree of His Majesty? Paul \vas the poet and dialectician of autocracy!
Foul and muddy as this morass of officialdom is, I must add a few words more about it. To bring it into the light of day is the least poor tribute one can pay to those who have suffered and perished, unknown and uncomforted.
The government readily gives the higher officials uncultivated lands by way of reward. There is no great harm in that, though it would be more sensible to keep these reserves to provide for the increase of population. The regulations that govern the fixing of the boundaries of these lands are fa irly detailed ; forests containing building timber, the banks of navigable rivers, indeed both the banks of any river, must not be given away, nor under any circumstances may lands be so assigner! that have been cultivated by peasants, even though the peasants have no right to the land except that of long usage . . . .6
All these restrictions of course are only on paper. In reality the assignment of land to private owners is a fearful source of plunder to the Treasury and of oppression to the peasants.
Great noblemen in receipt of lands usually either sell their rights to merchants, or try through the provincial authorities to gain some special privilege contrary to the regulations. Even G In the province of Vyatka the peasants are particularly fond of moYing to new settlements. Very often three or four clcarinf(S are suddenly discovered in the forest. The immense lands and forPsts ( now half cut down) tempt the peasants to take this res nullius which is left unused. The Ministry of Finance has se,·eral times llePn obliged to confirm these squatters in possession of the land.
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
1 92
Count Orlov himself was by chance assigned a main road and lands on which flocks and herds are pastured in the province of Saratov.
It is therefore no wonder that one fine morning the peasants of Darovsky volost1 in Kotelnichesky district had their land cut away right up to their woodyards and houses and given as private property to merchants who had bought them from some kinsman of Count Kankrin. The merchants fixed a rent for the land. This led to a lawsuit. The Court of Justice, bribed by the merchants and afraid of Kankrin's kinsman, confused the issues of the case. But the peasants were determined to persist with it.
They chose two hard-headed peasants from amongst themselves and sent them to Petersburg. The case was brought before the Senate. The land-surveying department perceived that the peasants were in the right, but did not know what to do, so they asked Kankrin. He simply admitted that the land had been irregularly cut away, but considered that it would be difficult to restore it, because it might have changed hands since then, and its present owners might have made various improvements. His Excellency proposed, therefore, that advantage should be taken of the vast amount of Crown property available, and that the peasants should be assigned a full equivalent in another place.
Everybody liked this except the peasants. In the first place, it is no light matter to bring fresh land under cultivation, and, in the second, the fresh land turned out to be swampy and unsuitable.
Since the peasants of Darovsky volost were more interested in growing corn than in shooting snipe, they sent another petition.
Then the Court of Justice and the Ministry of Finance made a new case out of the old one and, finding a law in which it was said that, if the land that was assigned turned out to be unsuitable, it was not to be cancelled, but another half of the amount was to be added to it, they ordered the Darovsky peasants to be given another half swamp in addition to the swamp they already had.
The peasants once more petitioned the Senate, but, before their case came up for investigation, the land-surveying department sent them plans of their new land, bound and coloured, as is usual, with the points of the compass in the form of a star and appropriate explanations for the lozenge marked R.R.Z., and the lozenge marked Z.Z.R., and, what was most important, a demand for so much rent per acre. The peasants, seeing that far from 1 An administrative district which included several villages. (R.)
Prison and Exile
1 93
giving them land they were trying to squeeze money out of them for the bog, refused point-blank to pay.
The police-captain reported it to Tyufyayev, who sent a punitive expedition under the command of the Vyatka politsmeyster.
This man arrived, seized a few persons, flogged them, restored order in the volost, took the money, handed over the guilty parties to the Criminal Court, and was hoarse for a week afterwards from shouting. Several men were punished with the lash and sent into exile.
Two years later, when the Heir to the Throne passed through the volost, the peasants handed him a petition; he ordered the case to be investigated. It was upon this occasion that I had to draw up a report on it. \Vhether any sense came of this reinvestigation I do not know. I have heard that the exiles returned, but whether the land was returned I have not heard.
In conclusion, I must mention the celebrated story of the potato revolt8 and how Nicholas tried to bring the blessings of Petersburg civilisation to the nomad gypsies.
Like the peasantry of all Europe at one time, the Russian peasants were not very keen on planting potatoes, as though an instinct told the people that this was a trashy kind of food which would give them neither health nor strength. However, on the estates of decent landowners and in many Crown villages 'earth apples' had been planted long before the potato terror. But anything that is done of itsel f is d istastPful to the Russian government. Everything must be done under threat of the stick and the drill-sergeant, and by numbers.
The peasants of the Kazan and of part of the Vyatka Province planted potatoes in thPir fields. "•Jwn the potato<>s were harvested, the idea occHITPd to the lVIinistry to set up a central potato-pit in each volost. Potato-pits were ratifiPd, potato-pits were prescribPd, potato-pits \Wr<' dug; and at the beginning of winter the peasants, much against their \viii, took the potatoes to the central pits. But whPn in tlw follo\ving spring the authorities tried to make them plant fro::.cn potatoes, they r<>fused.
There cannot, indeed, b<• a morp flagrant insult to labour than a command to do something obviously absurd. This refusal was represented as a rPvolt. The ;\Iinistpr Kiseli;v SPilt all official from Petersburg; he, being an intellig<>nt and practical man, 8 Herzen appears to be speaking of the 'p0tato rPvolt' of 1 8-1-2; there had been an earlier one, less wide-spread. in 1 83-1-. ( A.S. )
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
1 94
exacted a rouble apiece from the peasants of the first volost and allowed them not to plant the frozen potatoes.
He repeated this proceeding in the second volost and the third; but in the fourth the head-man told him point-blank that he would neither plant the potatoes nor pay him anything. 'You have let off these and those,' he told the official. 'It's clear you must let us off too.'