On the other side, the advanced parties in Russia saw that no hope could any longer be placed in Alexander’s reformatory initiative: he wasclearly drifting into the reac- tionary camp. To men of forethought it was evident that the liberation of the serfs, under the conditions of redemp- tion which were imposed upon them, meant their certain ‘Tuin, and revolutionary proclamations were issued in May, ‘at St. Petersburg, calling the people and the army to a ‘yeneral revolt, while the educated classes were asked to in- sist upon the necessity of a national convention. Under such circumstances, to disorganize the machine of the goy- ‘ernment might have entered into the plans of some revolu- tionists. _ Finally, the indefinite character of the emancipation had : produced a great deal of fermentation among the peasants, ‘who constitute a considerable part of the population in all Russian cities; and through all the history of Russia, every 164 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST time such a fermentation has begun, it has resulted in anonymous letters foretelling fires, and eventually in incen- diarism.
It was possible that the idea of setting the Apraxin mar- ket on fire might occur to isolated men in the revolutionary camp, but neither the most searching inquiries nor the wholesale arrests which began all over Russia and Poland immediately after the fire revealed the slightest indication that such was really the case. If anything of the sort had been found, the reactionary party would have made capital out of it. Many reminiscences and volumes of correspond- ence from those times have since been published, but they contain no hint whatever in support of this suspicion.
On the contrary, when similar conflagrations broke out in several towns on the Volga, and especially at Saratoff, and when Zhdanoff, a member of the Senate, was sent by the Tsar to make a searching inquiry, he returned with the firm conviction that the conflagration at Sardtoff was the work of the reactionary party. There was among that party a general belief that it would be possible to induce Alexander II. to postpone the final abolition of serfdom, which was to take place on February 19, 1863. They knew the weakness of his character, and immediately after the great. fire at St. Petersburg, they began a violent cam- _ paign for postponement, and for the revision of the eman- cipation law in its practical applications. It was rumored in well-informed legal circles that Senator Zhddnoff was in fact returning with positive proofs of the culpability of the reactionaries at Saratoff; but he died on his way back, his portfolio disappeared, and it has never been found.
Be it as it may, the Aprdxin fire had the most deplora- ble consequences. After it Alexander II. surrendered to the reactionaries, and — what was still worse —the public opinion of that part of society at St. Petersburg, and espe- cially at Moscow, which carried most weight with the REACTIONARY MOVEMENT 165 government suddenly threw off its liberal garb, and turned against not only the more advanced section of the reform party, but even against its moderate wing. A few days after the conflagration, I went on Sunday to see my cousin, the aide-de-camp of the Emperor, in whose apartment I had often seen the Horse Guard officers in sympathy with Chernyshévsky; my cousin himself had been up till then an assiduous reader of ‘‘ The Contemporary ” (the organ of the advanced reform party). Now he brought several numbers of “The Contemporary,’ and, putting them on the table I was sitting at, said to me, “ Well, now, after this I will have no more of that incendiary stuff; enough of it,’ — and these words expressed the opinion of “all St. Petersburg.” It became improper to talk of reforms. The whole atmo- sphere was laden with a reactionary spirit. “ The Contemporary” and other similar reviews were suppressed; the Sunday-schools were prohibited under any form; whole- sale arrests began. The capital was placed under a state of siege.
A fortnight later, on June 13 (25), the time which we pages and cadets had so long looked for came at last. The ‘Emperor gave us asort of military examination in all kinds of evolutions, — during which we commanded the compa- nies, and I paraded on a horse before the battalion, — and “we were promoted to be officers.
When the parade was over, Alexander IJ. loudly called out, ‘The promoted officers to me!” and we gathered ( ; p round him. He remained on horseback.
Here I saw him in a quite new light. The man who the next year appeared in the rdle of a bloodthirsty and vindictive suppressor of the insurrection in Poland rose ‘now, full size, before my eyes, in the speech he addressed to us. He began in a quiet tone. “I congratulate you: you 166 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST are officers.” He spoke about military duty and loyalty as they are usually spoken of on such occasions. ‘ But if any one of you,” he went on, distinctly shouting out every word, his face suddenly contorted with anger, —“‘ but if any one of you——which God preserve you from — should under any circumstances prove disloyal to the Tsar, the throne, and the fatherland, take heed of what I say, —he will be treated with all the se-veri-ty of the laws, without the slightest com-mi-se-ra-tion! ”’ His voice failed; his face was peevish, full of that expres- sion of blind rage which I saw in my childhood on the faces of landlords when they threatened their serfs ‘‘ to skin them under the rods.” He violently spurred his horse, and rode out of our circle. Next morning, the 14th of June, by his orders, three officers were shot at Médlin in Poland, and one soldier, Szur by name, was killed under the rods.
‘‘ Reaction, full speed backwards,” I said to myself, as we made our way back to the Corps.
I saw Alexander II. once more before leaving St. Peters- burg. Some days after our promotion, all the newly ap- pointed officers were at the palace, to be presented to him. My more than modest uniform, with its prominent gray trousers, attracted universal attention, and every moment I had to satisfy the curiosity of officers of all ranks, who came to ask me what was the uniform that I wore. The Amur Cossacks being then the youngest regiment of the Russian army, I stood somewhere near the end of the hun- dreds of officers who were present. Alexander II. found me, and asked, ‘So you go to Siberia? Did your father consent to it, after all?” I answered in the affirmative. ‘Are you not afraid to go so far?’ I warmly replied, ‘No, I want to work. There must be so much to do in Siberia to apply the great reforms which are going to be made.” He looked straight at me; he became pensive; at DEPARTURE FOR SIBERIA 167 last he said, ‘‘ Well, go; one can be useful everywhere; ”’ and his face took on such an expression of fatigue, such a character of complete surrender, that I thought at once, “Fe is a used-up man; he is going to give it all up.”
St. Petersburg had assumed a-gloomy aspect. Soldiers marched in the streets, Cossack patrols rode round the pal- ace, the fortress was filled with prisoners. Wherever I went I saw the same thing, — the triumph of the reaction. I left St. Petersburg without regret.
I went every day to the Cossack administration to ask them to make haste and deliver me my papers, and as soon as they were ready, I hurried to Moscow to join my bros ther Alexander.
i i Tue five years that I spent in Siberia were for me a genuine education in life and human character. I was brought into contact with men of all descriptions: the best and the worst; those who stood at ‘the top of society and those who vegetated at the very bottom, — the tramps and the so-called incorrigible criminals. I had ample opportunities to watch the ways and habits of the peasants in their daily life, and still more opportunities to appreciate how little the state administration could give to them, even if it was animated by the very best intentions. Finally, my extensive jour- neys, during which I traveled over ae in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on horseback, had a wonderful effect in strengthening my health. They also taught me how little man really needs as soon as he comes out of the enchanted circle of conventional civiliza- tion. With a few pounds of bread and a few ounces of tea in a leather bag, a kettle and a hatchet hanging at the side of the saddle, and under the saddle a blanket, to be spread at the camp-fire upon a bed of freshly cut spruce twigs, a man feels wonderfully independent, even amidst unknown mountains thickly clothed ‘with woods, or capped with snow. <A book might be written about this part of my life, but I must rapidly glide over it here, there being so much more to say about the later periods.
Siberia is not the frozen land buried in snow and peopled with exiles only, that it is imagined to be, even by many Russians. In its southern parts it is as rich in natural productions as are the southern parts of Canada, which it resembles so much in its physical aspects; and beside half ARRIVAL AT IRKUTSK 169 a million of natives, it has a population of more than four millions of Russians. The southern parts of West Siberia are as thoroughly Russian as the provinces to the north of Moscow. In 1862 the upper administration of Siberia + was far more enlightened and far better all round than that of any province of Russia proper. For several years the post of governor-general of East Siberia had been occupied by a remarkable personage, Count N. N. Muravidff, who annexed the Amur region to Russia. He was very intelli- gent, very active, extremely amiable, and desirous to work for the good of the country. Like all men of action of the governmental school, he was a despot at the bottom of his heart; but he held advanced opinions, and a democratic republic would not have quite satisfied him. He had sue- ceeded to a great extent in getting rid of the old staff of civil service officials, who considered Siberia a camp to be plundered, and he had gathered around him a number of young officials, quite honest, and many of them animated by the same excellent intentions as himself. In his own study, the young officers, with the exile Bakunin among them (he escaped from Siberia in the autumn of 1861), dis- cussed the chances of creating the United States of Siberia, federated across the Pacific Ocean with the United States of America.
When I came to Irkutsk, the capital of East Siberia, the wave of reaction which I saw rising at St. Petersburg had not yet reached these distant dominions. I was very well received by the young governor-general, Korsdkoff, who had just succeeded Muravidff, and he told me that he was delighted to have about him men of liberal opinions. As to the commander of the general staff, Kukel, —a young general not yet thirty-five years old, whose personal aide- de-camp I became, — he at once took me to a room in his house, where I found, together with the best Russian 170 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST reviews, complete collections of the London revolutionary editions of Hérzen. We were soon warm friends.
General Kukel temporarily occupied at that time the post of governor of Transbaikdlia, and a few weeks later we crossed the beautiful Lake Baikal and went further east, to the little town of Chita, the capital of the province. There I had to give myself, heart and soul, without loss of time, to the great reforms which were then under discussion. The St. Petersburg ministries had applied to the local authorities, asking them to work out schemes of complete © reform in the administration of the provinces, the organiza- tion of the police, the tribunals, the prisons, the system of exile, the self-government of the townships, — all on broadly liberal bases laid down by the Emperor in his manifestoes.
Kukel, supported by an intelligent and practical man, Colonel Pedashénko, and a couple of well-meaning civil service officials, worked all day long, and often a good deal of the night. I became the secretary of two committees, — for the reform of the prisons and the whole system of exile, and for preparing a scheme of municipal self-government, —and I set to work with all the enthusiasm of a youth of nineteen years. I read much about the historical devel- opment of these institutions in Russia and their present condition abroad, excellent works and papers dealing with these subjects having been published by the ministries of the interior and of justice; but what we did in Transbaiké- lia was by no means merely theoretical. I discussed first the general outlines, and subsequently every point of detail, with practical men, well acquainted with the real needs and the local possibilities; and for that purpose I met a considerable number of men both in town and in the pro- vince. Then the conclusions we arrived at were re-dis- cussed with Kukel and Pedashénko; and when I had put the results into a preliminary shape, every point was again very thoroughly thrashed out in the committees, One of REFORM ACTIVITIES 171 these committees, for preparing the municipal government scheme, was composed of citizens of Chita, elected by all the population, as freely as they might have been elected in the United States. In short, our work was very seri- ous; and even now, looking back at it through the per- spective of so many years, I can say in full confidence that if municipal self-covernment had been granted then, in the modest shape which we gave to it, the towns of Siberia would be very different from what they are. But nothing came of it all, as will presently be seen. | There was no lack of other incidental occupations. Money had to be found for the support of charitable insti- tutions; an economic description of the province had to be written in connection with a local agricultural exhibition; or some serious inquiry had to be made. “It is a great epoch we live in; work, my dear friend; remember that you are the secretary of all existing and future committees,” Kiikel would sometimes say to me, —and I worked with doubled energy.
An example or two will show with what results. There was in our province a ‘district chief”? —that is, a police officer invested with very wide and indeterminate rights — who was simply a disgrace. He robbed the peasants and flogged them right and left,—even women, which was against the law; and when a criminal affair fell into his hands, it might lie there for months, men being kept in the meantime in prison till they gave him a bribe. Kukel would have dismissed this man long before, but the governor- general did not like the idea of it, because he had strong protectors at St. Petersburg. After much hesitation, it was decided at last that I should go to make an investigation on the spot, and collect evidence against the man. This was _ not by any means easy, because the peasants, terrorized by him, and well knowing an old Russian saying, ‘‘ God is far _ away, while your chief is your next-door neighbor,” did not 172 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST dare to testify. Even the woman he had flogged was afraid at first to make a written statement. It was only after I had stayed a fortnight with the peasants, and had won their confidence, that the misdeeds of their chief could be brought to light. I collected crushing evidence, and the. district chief was dismissed. We congratulated ourselves on having got rid of such a pest. What was, however, our astonish- ment when, a few months later, we learned that this same man had been nominated to a higher post in Kamchatka! There he could plunder the natives free of any control, and so he did. A few years later he returned to St. Petersburg arich man. The articles he occasionally contributes now to the reactionary press are, as one might expect, full of high “patriotic ’”’ spirit.
The wave of reaction, as I have already said, had not then reached Siberia, and the political exiles continued to be treated with all possible leniency, as in Muravidff’s time. When, in 1861, the poet Mikhdiloff was condemned to hard labor for a revolutionary proclamation which he had issued, and was sent to Siberia, the governor of the first Siberian town on his way, Tobdlsk, gave a dinner in his honor, in which all the officials took part. In Transbaikdlia he was not kept at hard labor, but was allowed officially to stay in the hospital prison of a small mining village. His health being very poor, — he was dying from consumption, and did actually die a few months later, — General Kuikel gave him permission to stay in the house of his brother, a mining engineer, who had rented a gold mine from the Crown on his own account. Unofficially that was well known all over Siberia. But one day we learned from Irkttsk that, in consequence of a secret denunciation, the general of the gendarmes (state police) was on his way to Chita, to make a strict inquiry into the affair. An aide-de-camp of the governor-general brought us the news. I was dispatched in great haste to warn Mikhailoff, and to tell him that he must THE WAVE OF REACTION 173 return at once to the hospital prison, while the general of the gendarmes was kept at Chitd. As that gentleman found himself every night the winner of considerable sums of money at the green table in Kukel’s house, he soon decided not to exchange this pleasant pastime for a long journey to the mines in a temperature which was then a dozen degrees below the freezing-point of mercury, and eventually went back to Irkutsk, quite satisfied with his lucrative mission.
The storm, however, was coming nearer and nearer, and it swept everything before it soon after the insurrection broke out in Poland.
Ill In January, 1863, Poland rose against Russian rule. Insurrectionary bands were formed, and a war began which lasted for full eighteen months. ‘The London refugees had implored the Polish revolutionary committees to postpone the movement. They foresaw that it would be crushed, and would put an end to the reform period in Russia. But it could not be helped. ‘The repression of the nationalist manifestations which took place at Warsaw in 1861, and the cruel, quite unprovoked executions which followed, exas- perated the Poles. The die was cast.
Never before had the Polish cause so many sy mips icon in Russia as at that time. I do not speak of the revo- lutionists; but even among the more moderate elements of Russian society it was thought, and was openly said, that it would be a benefit for Russia to have in Poland a friendly neighbor instead of a hostile subject. Poland will never lose her national character, it is too strongly developed; she has, and will have, her own literature, her own art and industry. Russia can keep her in servitude only by means of sheer force and oppression, —a condition of things which has hitherto favored, and necessarily will favor, oppression in Russia herself. Even the peaceful Slavophiles were of that opinion; and while I was at school, St. Petersburg society greeted with full approval the ‘‘dream’”’ which the Slavophile Ivan Aksdkoff had the courage to print in his paper, ‘‘ The Day.’’ Huis dream was that the Russian troops had evacuated Poland, and he discussed the excellent results which would follow.
When the revolution of 1863 broke out, vee Russian THE POLISH INSURRECTION 175 officers refused to march against the Poles, while others openly took their part, and died either on the scaffold or on the battlefield. Funds for the insurrection were collected all over Russia, — quite openly in Siberia, —and in the Russian universities the students equipped those of their comrades who were going to join the revolutionists.
Then, amidst this effervescence, the news spread over Russia that, during the night of January 10, bands of in- surgents had fallen upon the soldiers who were cantoned in the villages, and had murdered them in their beds, although on the very eve of that day the relations of the troops with the Poles seemed to be quite friendly. There was some exaggeration in the report, but unfortunately there was also truth in it, and the impression it produced in Russia was most disastrous. The old antipathies between the two nations, so akin in their origins, but so different in their national characters, woke once more.
Gradually the bad feeling faded away to some extent. The gallant fight of the always brave sons of Poland, and _the indomitable energy with which they resisted a formidable army, won sympathy for that heroic nation. But it became known that the Polish revolutionary committee, in its demand for the reéstablishment of Poland with its old frontiers, included the Little Russian or Ukrainian pro- _Vinees, the Greek Orthodox population of which hated its Polish rulers, and more than once in the course of the last three centuries had slaughtered them wholesale. Moreover, Napoleon ITI. began to menace Russia with a new war, — a vain menace, which did more harm to the Poles than all other things put together. And finally, the radical elements of Russia saw with regret that now the purely nationalist elements of Poland had got the upper hand, the revolution- /ary government did not care in the least to grant the land to the serfs, —a blunder of which the Russian government did not fail to take advantage, in order to appear in the 176 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST position of protector of the peasants against their Polish landlords.
When the revolution broke out in Poland, it was gener- ally believed in Russia that it would take a democratic, republican turn; and that the liberation of the serfs on a broad democratic basis would be the first thing which a revolutionary government, fighting for the independence of the country, would accomplish.
The emancipation law, as it had been enacted at St. Petersburg in 1861, provided ample opportunity for such a course of action. The personal obligations of the serfs to their owners came to an end only on the 19th of February, 1863. Then, a very slow process had to be gone through in order to obtain a sort of agreement between the landlords and the serfs as to the size and the location of the land allotments which were to be given to the liberated serfs. The yearly payments for these allotments (disproportion- ally high) were fixed by law at so much per acre; but the peasants had also to pay an additional sum for their homesteads, and of this sum the maximum only had been fixed by the statute, —it having been thought that the landlords might be induced t6 forego that additional pay- ment, or to be satisfied with only a part of it. As to the so-called ‘redemption’? of the land, — in which case the government undertook to pay the landlord its full value in state bonds, and the peasants, receiving the land, had to pay in return, for forty-nine years, six per cent. on that sum as interest and annuities, — not only were these pay- ments extravagant and ruinous for the peasants, but no time was fixed for the redemption. It was left to the will of the landlord, and in an immense number of cases the redemption arrangements had not even been entered upon, twenty years after the emancipation.
Under such conditions a revolutionary government had EMANCIPATION OF eget: SERFS 177 ample opportunity for immens%y improving upon the Rus- | sian law. It was bound 00 accomplish an act of justice towards the saMs— whose condition in Poland was as bad as, and often worse than in Russia itself — by granting them better and more definite terms of emancipation. But nothing of the sort was done. The purely nationalist party and the aristocratic party having obtained the upper hand in the movement, this fundamentally important matter was left out of sight. This made it easy for the Russian gov- ernment to win the peasants to its side.
Full advantage was taken of this mistake when Nicholas Milutin was sent to Poland by Alexander II. with the mission of liberating the peasants in the way he intended doing it in Russia, — whether the landlords were ruined in consequence ornot. ‘‘Go to Poland; apply there your Red programme against the Polish landlords,” said Alexander II. to him; and Milutin, together with Prince Cherkassky and many others, really did their best to take the land from the land- lords and give good-sized allotments to the peasants.
I once met one of the Russian functionaries who went ‘to Poland under Milttin and Prince Cherkdssky. ‘“ We ‘had full liberty,’ he said to me, ‘‘to turn over the land ‘to the peasants. My usual plan was to go and to convoke ‘the peasants’ assembly. ‘Tell me first,’ I would say, ‘what land do you hold at this moment?’ They would point it out to me. ‘Is this all the land you ever held?’ I ‘would then ask. ‘Surely not,’ they would reply with ‘one voice. ‘Years ago these meadows were ours; this ‘wood was once in our possession; these fields, too,’ they ‘would say. I would let them go on talking all over and then would ask: ‘ Now, which of you can certify under oath ‘that this land or that land has ever been held by you?’ Of ‘course there would be nobody forthcoming, — it was all too long ago. At last, some old man would be thrust out from ‘the crowd, the rest saying: ‘ He knows all about it; he can swear to it? The old man hey begin a long story about what he knew in his youth, ois. ‘ad ‘jeard from his father,: but I would cut the story short...‘ sute “n oath what ’ you know to have been held by tlie gmina (the village community), and the land is yours.’ And as soon as he took the oath —one could trust that oath implicitly — 1 wrote out the papers and declared to the assembly: ‘ Now, this land is yours. You stand no longer under any obli- gations whatever to your late masters: you are simply their neighbors; all you will have to do is to pay the redemption tax, so much every year, to the government. Your home- steads go with the land: you get them free.’ ” One can imagine the effect which such a policy had upon the peasants. A cousin of mine, Petr Nikolaevich Kro- pétkin, a brother of the aide-de-camp whom I have men- tioned, was in Poland or in Lithuania with his regiment of uhlans of the guard. ‘The revolution was so serious that even the regiments of the guard had been sent from St. Petersburg against it, and it is now known that when Mikhael Muravidff was sent to Lithuania and came to take leave of the Empress Marie, she said to him: “ Save at least Lithuania for Russia!”? Poland was regarded as lost. - “The armed bands of the revolutionists held the coun- try,’’ my cousin said to me, “‘and we were powerless to defeat them, or even to find them. Small bands over and over again attacked our smaller detachments, and as they fought admirably, and knew the country, and found support in the population, they ‘often had the best of the skirmishes.
We were thus compelled to march in large columns only. We would cross a region, marching through the woods, without finding any trace of the bands; but when we marched back again, we learned that bands had reappeared in our rear; that they had levied the patriotic tax in the country; and if some peasant had rendered himself useful in any way to our troops, we found him hanged on a tree ~ EFFECTS OF THE REVOLT 179 by the revolutionary bands. So it went on for months, with no chance of improvement, until Milutin and Cher- kassky came and freed the peasants, giving them the land. Then —all was over. The peasants sided with us; they helped us to capture the bands, and the insurrection came to an end,” I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the mistake that had been made. A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards “the downtrodden and the op- ¢ pressed,’ not a promise of such reparation later on; other- wise it is sure to fail. Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing. For revolutionists not to succeed in proving to the masses that a new era has really begun for them is to insure the certain failure of their cause.
The disastrous consequences for Poland of this revo- lution are known; they belong to the domain of history. How many thousand men perished in battle, how many hundreds were hanged, and how many scores of thousands were transported to various provinces of Russia and Siberia is not yet fully known. But even the official figures which were printed in Russia a few years ago show that in the Lithuanian provinces alone —not to speak of Poland proper — that terrible man, Mikhael Muravidff, to whom the Russian government has just erected a monument at ' Wilno, hanged by his own authority 128 Poles, and tranms- ported to Russia and Siberia 9423 men and women. Offi- 1 } cial lists, also published in Russia, give 18,672 men and “women exiled to Siberia from Poland, of whom 10,407 were sent to East Siberia. J remember that the governor- general of East Siberia mentioned to me the same number, about 11,000 persons, sent to hard labor or exile in his 180 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST domains. I saw them there, and witnessed their sufferings. Altogether, something like 60,000 or 70,000 persons, if not more, were torn out of Poland and transported to different provinces of Russia, to the Urals, to Caucasus, and to Siberia.
For Russia the consequences were equally disastrous. The Polish insurrection was the definitive close of the re- form period. True, the law of provincial self-government (Zémstvos) and the reform of the law courts were promul- gated in 1864 and 1866; but both were ready in 1862, and, moreover, at the last moment Alexander II. gave preference to the scheme of self-government which had been prepared by the reactionary party of Valueff, as against the scheme that had been prepared by Nicholas Milutin; and imme- diately after the promulgation of both reforms, their im- portance was reduced, and in some cases destroyed, by the enactment of a number of by-laws.
Worst of all, public opinion itself took a further step backward. The hero of the hour was Katkoff, the leader of the serfdom party, who appeared now as a Russian ‘‘ patriot,” and carried with him most of the St. Petersburg and Moscow society. After that time, those who dared to speak of reforms were at once classed by Katkoff as “traitors to Russia.’
The wave of reaction soon reached our remote province. One day in March a paper was brought by a special messenger from Irkutsk. It intimated to General Kukel that he was at once to leave the post of governor of Transbaikalia and go to Irkutsk, waiting there for further orders, and that he was not to reassume the post of commander of the general staff.
Why? What did that mean? There was not a word of explanation. Even the governor-general, a personal friend of Kukel, had not run the risk of adding a single word to * REACTION IN SIBERIA 181 ‘the mysterious order. Did it mean that Kukel was going to be taken between two gendarmes to St. Petersburg, and immured in that huge stone coffin, the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul? All was possible. Later on we learned that such was indeed the intention; and so it would have been done but for the energetic intervention of Count Nicholas Muravidff, “the conqueror of the Amur,” who personally implored the ‘T’sar that Kukel should be spared that fate.
Our parting with Kikel and his charming family was \ like a funeral. My heart was very heavy. I not only lost | in him a dear personal friend, but I felt also that this part-. ing was the burial of a whole epoch, full of long-cherished | hopes, — “full of illusions,” as it became the fashion to say.
So it was. A new governor came,—a good-natured, ¢‘Jeave-me-in-peace’’? man. With renewed energy, seeing that there was no time to lose, I completed our plans for the reform of the system of exile and municipal self-gov- ernment. The governor made a few objections here and there for formality’s sake, but finally signed the schemes, and they were sent to headquarters. But at St. Petersburg reforms were no longer wanted. There our projects lie buried still, with hundreds of similar ones from all parts of Russia. A few “improved” prisons, even more terrible than the old unimproved ones, have been built in the cap- itals, to be shown during prison congresses to distinguished foreigners; but the remainder, and the whole system of exile, were found by George Kennan in 1886 in exactly the same state in which I left them in 1862. Only now, after thirty-five years have passed away, the authorities are intro- ducing the reformed tribunals and a parody of self-govern- ment in Siberia, and committees have been nominated again to inquire into the system of exile.
When Kennan came back to London from his journey te 182 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST