The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary circles, and we went occa- sionally to their friendly gatherings; but the moment the conversation began to lose its frivolous character, or my brother, who had a great talent for raising serious ques- tions, directed it toward home affairs, or toward the state of France, where Napoleon III. was hastening to his fall in 1870, some sort of interruption was sure to occur. “ What do you think, gentlemen, of the latest performance of ‘ La Belle Héléne’? ” or “ What is your opinion of that cured fish?”? was loudly asked by one of the elder guests, — | and the conversation was brought to an end.
Outside the literary circles, things were even worse. In. the sixties, Russia, and especially St. Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that ‘still cherished the hope that Alexander IJ. would once © time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. ‘‘ What has — become of them?” I asked myself. I looked up some of — them; but, “ Prudence, young man!” was all they had to say. ‘Iron is stronger than straw,” or “ One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead,” and similar proverbs, un- fortunately too numerous in the Russian language, consti- tuted now their code of practical philosophy. ‘ We have { EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION 251 fone something in our life: ask no more from us;” or ‘“‘ Have patience: this sort of thing will not last,” they told us, while we, the youth, were ready to resume the struggle, to act, to risk, to sacrifice everything, if necessary, and only asked them to give us advice, some guidance, and some intel- lectual support.
Turguéneff has depicted in “Smoke” some of the ex-re- formers from the upper layers of society, and his picture is disheartening. But it is especially in the heart-rending novels and sketches of Madame Kohandévsky, who wrote under the pseudonym of “ V. Krestdévskiy ” (she must not be con- founded with another novel-writer, Vsévolod Krestévskiy), that one can follow the many aspects which the degrada> tion of the ‘liberals of the sixties’? took at that time. “The joy of living”? — perhaps the joy of having survived —became their goddess, as soon as the nameless crowd which ten years before made the force of the reform move- ment refused to hear any more of “all that sentimentalism.” They hastened to enjoy the riches which poured into the hands of “ practical ’? men. on Many new ways to fortune had been opened since serf- dom had been abolished, and the crowd rushed with eager- ness into these channels, Railways were feverishly built in Russia; to the lately opened private banks the landlords went in numbers to mortgage their estates; the newly established private notaries and lawyers at the courts were in possession of large incomes; the shareholders’ companies multiplied with an appalling rapidity and the promoters flourished. A class of men who formerly would have lived in the country on the modest income of a small estate cul- tivated by a hundred serfs, or on the still more modest salary of a functionary in a law court, now made fortunes, or had such yearly incomes as in the times of serfdom were possible only for the land magnates.
The very tastes of ‘“ society ” sunk lower and lower. The.
QyZ MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST Italian opera, formerly a forum for radical demonstrations, was now deserted; the Russian opera, timidly asserting the rights of its great composers, was frequented by a few en- thusiasts only. Both were found “ tedious,” and the cream of St. Petersburg society crowded to a vulgar theatre where the second-rate stars of the Paris small theatres won easy laurels from their Horse Guard admirers, or went to see “ La Belle Héléne,” which was played on the Russian stage, while our great dramatists were forgotten. Offenbach’s music reigned supreme.
It must be said that the political atmosphere was such that the best men had reasons, or had at least weighty ex- cuses, for keeping quiet. After Karakdzoff had shot at Alexander II. in April, 1866, the state police had become omnipotent. Every one suspected of “radicalism,” no matter what he had done or what he had not done, had to - live under the fear of being arrested any night, for the sympathy he might have shown to some one involved in this or that political affair, or for an innocent letter intercepted in a midnight search, or simply for his “‘ dangerous”’ opinions; and arrest for political reasons might mean anything: years of seclusion in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, trans- portation to Siberia, or even torture in the casemates of the fortress. | This movement of the circles of Karakézoff remains up to this date very imperfectly known, even in Russia. I was at that time in Siberia, and know of it only by hearsay. It appears, however, that two different currents combined in it. One of them was the beginning of that great movement “toward the people,” which later took on such formidable dimensions; while the other current was mainly political. Groups of young men, some of whom were on the road tc become brilliant university professors, or men of mark as historians and ethnographers, had come together about 1864, ATTEMPT ON THE TSAR’S LIFE 253 with the intention of carrying to the people education an knowledge in spite of the opposition of the government. They went as mere artisans to great industrial towns, and started there codperative associations, as well as informa schools, hoping that by the exercise of much tact and patience they might be able to educate the people, and thus to cre- ate the first centres from which better and higher concep- tions would gradually radiate amongst the masses. Their zeal was great; considerable fortunes were brought into the service of the cause; and I am inclined to think that, com- pared with all similar movements which took place later on, this one stood perhaps on the most practical basis. Its/7 initiators certainly were very near to the working-people. Be On the other side, with some of the members of these circles — Karakdzoff, Ishutin, and their nearest friends — the movement took a political direction. During the years from 1862 to 1866 the policy of Alexander II. had assumed a decidedly reactionary character; he had surrounded him- self with men of the most reactionary type, taking them as his nearest advisers; the very reforms which made the glory of the beginning of his reign were now wrecked wholesale by means of by-laws and ministerial circulars; a return to manorial justice and serfdom in a disguised form was openly expected in the old camp; while no one could hope at that time that the main reform —the abolition of serfdom — could withstand the assaults directed against it from the Winter Palace itself. All this must have brought Karak6- zoff and his friends to the idea that a further continuance of Alexander II.’s reign would be a menace even to the little that had been won; that Russia would have to return to the horrors of Nicholas IJ., if Alexander continued to rule. Great hopes were felt at the same time — this is “‘an often Tepeated story, but always new”’—as to the liberal incli- nations of the heir to the throne and his uncle Constantine, I must also say that before 1866 such fears and such cone xq ° > 254 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST siderations were not unfrequently expressed in much higher circles than those with which Karakdzoff seems to have been | in contact. At any rate, Karakdzoff shot at Alexander II. | one day, as he was coming out of the summer garden to take | his carriage. The shot missed, and Karakdézoff was arrested | on the spot.: Katkoff, the leader of the Moscow reactionary party, and| a great master for extracting pecuniary profits out of every | ;political disturbance, at once accused of complicity with | Karakozoff all radicals and liberals, — which was certainly untrue, —and insinuated in his paper, making all Mos-| cow believe it, that Karakozoff was a mere instrument in the hands of the Grand Duke Constantine, the leader of the reform party in the highest circles. One can imagine| to what an extent the two rulers, Shuvaloff and Trépoff, | i exploited these accusations, and the consequent fears of | Alexander II. | Mikhael Muravidff, who had won during the Polish in- surrection his nickname “ the hangman,” received orders to make a most searching inquiry, and to discover by every possible means the plot which was supposed to exist. He made arrests in all classes of society, ordered hundreds of searches, and boasted that he “‘ would find the means to render the prisoners more talkative.”? He certainly was not the man to recoil even before torture, — and public opin in St. Petersburg was almost unanimous in saying that! Karakozoff was tortured to obtain avowals, but made none, | State secrets are well kept in fortresses, especially in that huge mass of stone opposite the Winter Palace, which has seen so many horrors, only in recent times disclosed by his-, torians. It still keeps Muravidff’s secrets. However, the following may perhaps throw some light on this matter.
In 1866 I was in Siberia. One of our Siberian officers, who traveled from Russia to Irktitsk toward the end of that year, met at a post station two gendarmes. They had ac | TORTURE OF KARAKOZOFF 255 eompanied to Siberia a functionary exiled for theft, and were now returning home. Our Irkutsk officer, who was a very amiable man, finding the gendarmes at the tea table on a cold winter night, joined them and chatted with them, while the horses were being changed. One of the men knew Karakozoff.
‘‘He was cunning, he was,’’ he said. ‘ When he was in the fortress, we were ordered, two of us, —we were relieved every two hours, —not to let him sleep. So we kept him sitting on a small stool, and as soon as he began to doze, we shook him to keep him awake...What will you? — we were ordered to do so!...Well, see how cunning he was: he would sit with crossed legs, swinging one of his legs to make us believe that he was awake, and himself, in the meantime, would get a nap, continuing to swing his leg. But we soon made it out and told those who relieved us, so that he was shaken and waked up every few minutes, whether he swung his leg or not.” ‘And how long did that last?”? my friend asked. “Oh, many days, — more than one week.”
The naive character of this description is in itself a proof of veracity: it could not have been invented; and that Karakdézoff was tortured to this degree may be taken for granted.
When Karakézoff was hanged, one of my comrades from the corps of pages was present at. the execution with his regiment of cuirassiers. ‘ When he was taken out of the fortress,’ my comrade told me, “ sitting on the high plat- form of the cart which was jolting on the rough glacis of the fortress, my first impression was that they were bring- ing out an india-rubber doll to be hanged; that Karakozoff was already dead. Imagine that the head, the hands, the whole body were absolutely loose, as if there were no bones in the body, or as if the bones had all been broken. It was a terrible thing to see, and to think what it meant.
256. MEMOIRS. OF A REVOLUTIONIST However, when two soldiers took him down from the cart, I saw that he moved his legs and made strenuous endeavors to walk by himself and to ascend the steps of the scaffold. So it was not a doll, nor could he have been in a swoon. All the officers were very much puzzled at the circumstance and could not explain it.” When, however, I suggested to my comrade that perhaps Karakdézoff had been tortured, the color came into his face and he replied, ‘‘So we all thought.” | Absence of sleep for weeks would alone be sufficient to explain the state in which that morally very strong man was at the time of the execution. J may add that I am absolutely certain that — at least in one case — drugs were administered to a prisoner in the fortress, namely, Adrian Saburoff, in 1879. Did Muravioff limit the torture to this only? Was he prevented from going any further, or not? Idonotknow. But this much I know: that I often heard from high officials at St. Petersburg that torture had been resorted to in this case.
b Muravidff had promised to root out all radical elements /in St. Petersburg, and all those who had had in any de- gree a radical past now lived under the fear of falling into the despot’s clutches. Above all, they kept aloof from the younger people, from fear of being involved with them in some perilous political associations. - In this way a chasm was opened not only between the “fathers” and the “sons,” as Turguéneff described it in his novel, —not only between the two generations, but also between all, men who had passed the age of thirty and those who were | jin their early twenties. Russian youth stood consequently | ‘in the position not only of having to fight in their fathers | the defenders of serfdom, but of being left entirely to | themselves by their elder brothers, who were unwilling to) join them in their leanings toward Socialism, and were A TRAGIC STRUGGLE 257 afraid to give them support even in their struggle for more political freedom. Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life, the intellectual in- heritance of these same fathers and brothers? Was there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these?
VI Tue only bright point which I saw in the life of St. Petersburg was the movement which was going on amongst the youth of both sexes. Various currents joined to pro-’ duce the mighty agitation which soon took an underground and revolutionary character, and engrossed the attention of Russia for the next fifteen years. I shall speak of it in a subsequent chapter; but I must mention in this place the movement which was carried on, quite openly, by our women for obtaining access to higher education. St. Petersburg was at that time its main centre.
Every afternoon the young wife of my brother, on her return from the women’s pedagogical courses which she followed, had something new to tell us about the animation which prevailed there. Schemes were laid for opening a medical academy and universities for women; debates upon schools or upon different methods of education were organ- ized in connection with the courses, and hundreds of women took a passionate interest in these questions, discussing them over and over again in private. Societies of transla- tors, publishers, printers, and bookbinders were started in order that work might be provided for the poorest members of the sisterhood who flocked to St. Petersburg, ready to do any sort of work, only to live in the hope that they, too, would some day have their share of higher education. <A vigorous, exuberant life reigned in those feminine centres, — in striking contrast to what I met elsewhere.
Since the government had shown its determined inten- | tion not to admit women to the existing universities, they had directed all their efforts toward opening universities of fi / THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 259 their own. They were told at the ministry of education that the girls who had passed through the girls’ gymnasia (the high schools) were not prepared to follow university lectures, ‘Very well,” they replied, “ permit us to open intermediate courses, preparatory to the university, and im- pose upon us any programme you like. We ask no grants from the state. Only give us the permission, and it will be done.” Of course, the permission was not given.
Then they started private courses and drawing-room lectures in all parts of St. Petersburg. Many university professors, in sympathy with the new movement, volun- teered to give lectures. Poor men themselves, they warned the organizers that any mention of remuneration would be taken as a personal offense. Natural science excursions used to be made every summer in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg, under the guidance of university professors, and women constituted the bulk of the excursionists. In the courses for midwives they forced the professors to treat each subject in a far more exhaustive way than was required by the programme, or to open additional courses. They took advantage of every possibility, of every breach in the fortress, to storm it. They gained admission to the an- ‘atomical laboratory of old Dr. Gruber, and by their admir- ‘able work they won this enthusiast of anatomy entirely to their side. If they learned that a professor had no objec- tion to letting them work in his laboratory on Sundays and at night on week days, they took advantage of the : opportunity. At last, notwithstanding all the opposition of the minis- ‘try, they opened the intermediate courses, only giving them ‘the name of pedagogical courses. Was it possible, indeed, to forbid future mothers studying the methods of educa- tion? Butas the methods of teaching botany or mathemat- les could not be taught in the abstract, botany, mathematics, and the rest were soon introduced into the curriculum of 260 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST | the pedagogical courses, which became preparatory for the | university. | Step by step the women thus widened their rights. As | soon as it became known that at some German university a | certain professor might open his lecture-room to a few wo- | men, they knocked at his door and were admitted. They | | studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics at | Berlin; at Ztirich, more than a hundred girls and women | worked at the university and the polytechnicum. There they won something more valuable than the degree of | Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of the most | learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times. | When I came to Ziirich in 1872, and became acquainted | with some of the students, I was astonished to see quite | young girls, who were studying at the polytechnicum, solv-| ing intricate problems of the theory of heat, with the aid of the differential calculus, as easily as if they had had years | of mathematical training. One of the Russian girls who’ studied mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie) Kovalévsky, became a mathematician of high repute, and | was invited to a professorship at Stockholm; she was, I believe, the first woman in our century to hold a professor-| ship in a university for men. She was so young that in Sweden no one wanted to call her by anything but her. diminutive name of Sdnya. | In spite of the open hatred of Alexander II. for educated women, — when he met in his walks a girl wearing spec: tacles and a round Garibaldian cap, he began to tremble, thinking that she must be a nihilist bent on shooting at) him; in spite of the bitter opposition of the state police, who represented every woman student as a revolutionist in spite of the thunders and the vile accusations which Katkoff directed against the whole of the movement in al. most every number of his venomous gazette, the women succeeded, in the teeth of the government, in opening é SUCCESS OF THE WOMEN 261 series of educational institutions. When several of them had obtained medical degrees abroad, they forced the gov- ernment, in 1872, to let them open a medical academy with their own private means. And when the Russian women were recalled by their government from Ziirich, to prevent their intercourse with the revolutionist refugees, they forced the government to let them open in Russia four universities of their own, which soon had nearly a thousand pupils. It seems almost incredible, but it is a fact that notwithstanding all the prosecutions which the Women’s Medical Academy had to live through, and its temporary closure, there are now in Russia more than six hundred and seventy women practicing as physicians.
It was certainly a grand movement, astounding in its success and instructive in a high degree. Above all, it was through the unlimited devotion of a mass of women in all possible capacities that they gained their successes. They had already worked as sisters of charity during the Crimean war; as organizers of schools later on; as the most devoted schoolmistresses in the villages; as educated midwives and doctors’ assistants amongst the peasants. They went after- ward as nurses and doctors in the fever-stricken hospitals during the Turkish war of 1878, and won the admiration of the military commanders and of Alexander II. himself.
I know two ladies, both very eagerly ‘ wanted” by the state police, who served as nurses during the war, under assumed names which were guaranteed by false passports; _one of them, the greater ‘criminal ” of the two, who had taken a prominent part in my escape, was even appointed head nurse of a large hospital for wounded soldiers, while her friend nearly died from typhoid fever. In short, women took any position, no matter how low in the social scale, and no matter what privations it involved, if only they could be in any way useful to the people; not a few of 262 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST them, but hundreds and thousands. They have conquered their rights in the true sense of the word.
Another feature of this movement was that in it the chasm between the two generations — the older and. the younger sisters — did not exist; or, at least, it was bridged over to a great extent. Those who were the leaders of the move- ment from its origin never broke the link which connected them with their younger sisters, even though the latter were far more advanced in their ideals than the older women were. They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof from any political agitation; but they never committed the fault of forgetting that their true force was _ in the masses of younger women, of whom a great number | finally joined the radical or revolutionary circles. These | leaders were correctness itself, —I considered them too | correct; but they did not break with those younger students who went about as typical nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their behavior. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there was friction, but they never repudiated them, —a great thing, I believe, in those times | of madly raging prosecutions. They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people: ‘‘ We shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, | because we have to deal with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of ‘ political reliability;’_ but you, girls, remain free in your tastes and inclina- | tions.”” When the women who studied at Ziirich were or- dered by the Russian government to return, these correct ladies did not turn against the rebels. They simply said to the government: ‘ You don’t like it? Well, then, open — women’s universities at home; otherwise our girls will go | abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter | into relations with the political refugees.” When they THE SECRET OF SUCCESS 263 were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, ‘‘ Yes, many students become revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?”? How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party!
The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that move- ment were mere ‘ feminists,” desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the state. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stasova, the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in 1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls, the interest they manifested in the hard life of these girls outside the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical courses, in the village schools, and in the work of those few who, like Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that direction, and the social spirit which permeated those courses. The rights they strov for — both the leaders and the great bulk of the women — were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses. This is why they succeeded to such an extent.
VII VII For the last few years the health of my father had been going from bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old style, in the Staraya Kontishennaya, but around him everything in this aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and remortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by “the intruders,’ —rich merchants, railway builders, and the like, — while in nearly every one of the old families — which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarter a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the old one. 4 A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and — relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and — speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now. | Out of our many relatives, numbering nearly a score of | families at Moscow alone in my childhood, two families only | had remained in the capital, and these had joined the cur- ) rent of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls — and boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s © universities. My father looked upon them with contempt.
My stepmother and my younger sister, Pauline, who had not DEATH OF MY FATHER 268 changed, did their best to comfort him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.
My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge against any one. When he entered our father’s sick-room, with the deep, kind look of his large blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick- chair, and did it as naturally as if he had left the sick-room only an hour before, my father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; the nursing became brighter; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves, grew more animated, and my father felt the change.
One thing worried him, however. He had expected to see us come as repentant sons, imploring his support. But when he tried to direct conversation into that channel, we stopped him with such acheerful ‘ Don’t bother about that; we get on very nicely,’’ that he was still more bewildered. He looked for a scene in the old style, — his sons begging pardon —and money; perhaps he even regretted for a mo- ‘ment that this did not happen; but he regarded us with a greater esteem. We were all three affected at parting, He ‘seemed almost to dread returning to his gloomy loneliness amidst the wreckage of a system he had lived to maintain. But Alexander had to go back to his service, and I was leaving for Finland.
When I was called home again from Finland, I hurried to Moscow, to find the burial ceremony just beginning, in that same old red church where my father had been bap- tized, and where the last prayers had been said over his mother. As the funeral procession passed along the streets, of which every house was so familiar to me in my child- hood, I noticed that the houses had changed little, but I knew that in all of them a new life had begun.
266 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST In the house which had formerly belonged to my father’s mother and then to Princess Mirski, and which now was the property of General N, an old inhabitant of the quar- ter, the only daughter of the family maintained for a couple of years a painful struggle against her good-natured but obstinate parents, who worshiped her, but would not allow her to study at the university courses which had been opened for ladies at Moscow. At last she was allowed to join these courses, but was taken to them in an elegant carriage, under the close supervision of her mother, who courageously sat for hours on the benches amongst the students, by the side of her beloved daughter; and yet, notwithstanding all this care and watchfulness, a couple of years later the daughter joined the revolutionary party, was arrested, and spent one year in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.
In the house opposite, the despotic heads of the family) Count and Countess Z, were in a bitter struggle agains! their two daughters, who were sick of the idle and uselesi existence their parents forced them to lead, and wanted t« join those other girls who, free and happy, flocked to the university courses. The struggle lasted for years; thi parents did not yield in this case, and the result was tha’ the elder girl ended her life by poisoning herself, whereupor her younger sister was allowed to follow her own incli) nations. | In the house next door, which had been our family resi| dence for a year, when I entered it with Tchaykdovsky t( hold in it the first secret meeting of a circle which wi founded at Moscow, I at once recognized the rooms whiel had been so familiar to me in such a different atmosphere il my childhood. It now belonged to the family of Nathalii Armfeld, —that highly sympathetic Kara “convict,” whon George Kennan has so touchingly described in his book 01} Siberia. And in a house within a stone’s throw of tha) in which my father had died, and only a few months afte NEW LIFE IN MOSCOW 267 his death, I received Stepnidk, clothed as a peasant, he having escaped from a country village where he had been arrested for spreading socialist ideas among the peasants.
Such were the changes which the Old Equerries’ Quarter had undergone within the last fifteen years. The last stronghold of the old nobility was now invaded by the new spirit.
ee Vit THE next year, early in the spring, I made my first | journey to Western Europe. In crossing the Russian fron- | tier, | experienced what every Russian feels on leaving his | mother country. So long as the train runs on Russian | ground, through the thinly populated northwestern provinces, one has the feeling of crossing a desert. Hundreds | of miles are covered with low growths which hardly deserve | the name of forests. Here and there the eye discovers a | small, miserably poor village buried in the snow, or an im- practicable, muddy, narrow, and winding village road. Then everything — scenery and surroundings — changes all of a sudden, as soon as the train enters Prussia, with its cleanlooking villages and farms, its gardens, and its paved roads; | and the sense of contrast grows stronger and stronger as one | penetrates further into Germany. Even dull Berlin seemed animated, after our Russian towns. And the contrast of climate! Two days before, I had SS So a left St. Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in ~ middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers. Then came the Rhine, and further on Switzerland bathed in the rays of a bright sun, with its small, clean — hotels, where breakfast was served out of doors, in view of | the snow-clad mountains. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the | history of the Russian nation had been influenced, by the | fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high | latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland.
Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction | RUSSIAN STUDENTS AT ZURICH 269 which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists south- ward, further into Manchuria.