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[Illustration: CONVENT OF SOLOVETSK IN THE FROZEN SEA.]


[Illustration: RUSSIAN INFANTRY ON EASTERN STEPPE ESCORTED BY KOZAKS
AND KIRGHIZ.]




FREE RUSSIA.

BY

WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON.

AUTHOR OF

"FREE AMERICA." "HER MAJESTY'S TOWER." &c.

[Illustration]

 _NEW YORK_:

 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
 FRANKLIN SQUARE.

 1870.




PREFACE.


_Svobodnaya_ Rossia--_Free_ Russia--is a word on every lip in that
great country; at once the Name and Hope of the new empire born of the
Crimean war. In past times Russia was free, even as Germany and France
were free. She fell before Asiatic hordes; and the Tartar system
lasted, in spirit, if not in form, until the war; but since that
conflict ended, the old Russia has been born again. This new
country--hoping to be pacific, meaning to be Free--is what I have
tried to paint.

My journeys, just completed, carried me from the Polar Sea to the Ural
Mountains, from the mouth of the Vistula to the Straits of Yeni Kale,
including visits to the four holy shrines of Solovetsk, Pechersk, St.
George, and Troitsa. My object being to paint the Living People, I
have much to say about pilgrims, monks, and parish priests; about
village justice, and patriarchal life; about beggars, tramps, and
sectaries; about Kozaks, Kalmuks, and Kirghiz; about workmen's artels,
burgher rights, and the division of land; about students' revolts and
soldiers' grievances; in short, about the Human Forces which underlie
and shape the external politics of our time.

Two journeys made in previous years have helped me to judge the
reforms which are opening out the Japan-like empire of Nicolas into
the Free Russia of the reigning prince.

 _February, 1870._
 _6 St. James's Terrace._




CONTENTS.


    CHAP.                                           PAGE

       I.--UP NORTH                                   11

      II.--THE FROZEN SEA                             16

     III.--THE DVINA                                  20

      IV.--ARCHANGEL                                  24

       V.--RELIGIOUS LIFE                             29

      VI.--PILGRIMS                                   34

     VII.--FATHER JOHN                                40

    VIII.--THE VLADIKA                                46

      IX.--A PILGRIM-BOAT                             51

       X.--THE HOLY ISLES                             57

      XI.--THE LOCAL SAINTS                           62

     XII.--A MONASTIC HOUSEHOLD                       68

    XIII.--A PILGRIM'S DAY                            73

     XIV.--PRAYER AND LABOR                           78

      XV.--BLACK CLERGY                               84

     XVI.--SACRIFICE                                  91

    XVII.--MIRACLES                                   96

   XVIII.--THE GREAT MIRACLE                         103

     XIX.--A CONVENT SPECTRE                         110

      XX.--STORY OF A GRAND DUKE                     114

     XXI.--DUNGEONS                                  118

    XXII.--NICOLAS ILYIN                             124

   XXIII.--ADRIAN PUSHKIN                            130

    XXIV.--DISSENT                                   135

     XXV.--NEW SECTS                                 142

    XXVI.--MORE NEW SECTS                            146

   XXVII.--THE POPULAR CHURCH                        151

  XXVIII.--OLD BELIEVERS                             158

    XXIX.--A FAMILY OF OLD BELIEVERS                 161

     XXX.--CEMETERY OF THE TRANSFIGURATION           167

    XXXI.--RAGOSKI                                   173

   XXXII.--DISSENTING POLITICS                       179

  XXXIII.--CONCILIATION                              183

   XXXIV.--ROADS                                     187

    XXXV.--A PEASANT POET                            192

   XXXVI.--FOREST SCENES                             197

  XXXVII.--PATRIARCHAL LIFE                          202

 XXXVIII.--VILLAGE REPUBLICS                         208

   XXXIX.--COMMUNISM                                 213

      XL.--TOWNS                                     218

     XLI.--KIEF                                      222

    XLII.--PANSLAVONIA                               225

   XLIII.--EXILE                                     229

    XLIV.--THE SIBERIANS                             235

     XLV.--ST. GEORGE                                241

    XLVI.--NOVGOROD THE GREAT                        246

   XLVII.--SERFAGE                                   250

  XLVIII.--A TARTAR COURT                            254

    XLIX.--ST. PHILIP                                257

       L.--SERFS                                     262

      LI.--EMANCIPATION                              267

     LII.--FREEDOM                                   272

    LIII.--TSEK AND ARTEL                            278

     LIV.--MASTERS AND MEN                           284

      LV.--THE BIBLE                                 289

     LVI.--PARISH PRIESTS                            294

    LVII.--A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION                 299

   LVIII.--SECRET POLICE                             306

     LIX.--PROVINCIAL RULERS                         312

      LX.--OPEN COURTS                               318

     LXI.--ISLAM                                     324

    LXII.--THE VOLGA                                 330

   LXIII.--EASTERN STEPPE                            336

    LXIV.--DON KOZAKS                                341

     LXV.--UNDER ARMS                                346

    LXVI.--ALEXANDER                                 351




FREE RUSSIA.




CHAPTER I.

UP NORTH.


"White Sea!" laughs the Danish skipper, curling his thin red lip; "it
is the color of English stout. The bed may be white, being bleached
with the bones of wrecked and sunken men; but the waves are never
white, except when they are ribbed into ice and furred with snow. A
better name is that which the sailors and seal-fishers give it--the
Frozen Sea!"

Rounding the North Cape, a weird and hoary mass of rock, projecting
far into the Arctic foam, we drive in a south-east course, lashed by
the wind and beaten by hail and rain, for two long days, during which
the sun never sets and never rises, and in which, if there is dawn at
the hour of midnight, there is also dusk at the time of noon.

Leaving the picturesque lines of fiord and alp behind, we run along a
dim, unbroken coast, not often to be seen through the pall of mist,
until, at the end of some fifty hours, we feel, as it were, the land
in our front; a stretch of low-lying shore in the vague and far-off
distance, trending away towards the south, like the trail of an
evening cloud. We bend in a southern course, between Holy Point
(Sviatoi Noss, called on our charts, in rough salt slang, Sweet Nose)
and Kanin Cape, towards the Corridor; a strait some thirty miles wide,
leading down from the Polar Ocean into that vast irregular dent in the
northern shore of Great Russia known as the Frozen Sea.

The land now lying on our right, as we run through the Corridor, is
that of the Lapps; a country of barren downs and deep black lakes;
over which a few trappers and fishermen roam; subjects of the Tsar and
followers of the Orthodox rite; but speaking a language of their own,
not understood in the Winter Palace, and following a custom of their
fathers, not yet recognized in St. Isaac's Church. Lapland is a tangle
of rocks and pools; the rocks very big and broken, the pools very deep
and black; with here and there a valley winding through them, on the
<DW72>s of which grows a little reindeer moss. Now and then you come
upon a patch of birch and pine. No grain will grow in these Arctic
zones, and the food of the natives is game and fish. Rye-bread, their
only luxury, must be fetched in boats from the towns of Onega and
Archangel, standing on the shores of the Frozen Sea, and fed from the
warmer provinces in the south. These Lapps are still nomadic; cowering
through the winter months in shanties; sprawling through the summer
months in tents. Their shanty is a log pyramid thatched with moss to
keep out wind and sleet; their tent is of the Comanche type; a roll of
reindeer skins drawn slackly round a pole, and opened at the top to
let out smoke.

A Lapp removes his dwelling from place to place, as the seasons come
and go; now herding game on the hill-sides, now whipping the rivers
and creeks for fish; in the warm months, roving inland in search of
moss and grass; in the frozen months, drawing nearer to the shore in
search of seal and cod. The men are equally expert with the bow, their
ancient weapon of defense, and with the birding-piece, the arm of
settlers in their midst. The women, looking any thing but lovely in
their seal-skin tights and reindeer smocks, are infamous for magic and
second sight. In every district of the North, a female Lapp is feared
as a witch--an enchantress--who keeps a devil at her side, bound by
the powers of darkness to obey her will. She can see into the coming
day. She can bring a man ill-luck. She can throw herself out into
space, and work upon ships that are sailing past her on the sea. Far
out in the Polar brine, in waters where her countrymen fish for cod,
stands a lump of rock, which the crews regard as a Woman and her
Child. Such fantasies are common in these Arctic seas, where the waves
wash in and out through the cliffs, and rend and carve them into
wondrous shapes. A rock on the North Cape is called the Friar; a group
of islets near that cape is known as the Mother and her Daughters.
Seen through the veil of Polar mist, a block of stone may take a
mysterious form; and that lump of rock in the Polar waste, which the
cod-fishers say is like a woman with her child, has long been known to
them as the Golden Hag. She is rarely seen; for the clouds in summer,
and the snows in winter, hide her charms from the fishermen's eyes;
but when she deigns to show her face in the clear bright sun, her
children hail her with a song of joy, for on seeing her face they know
that their voyage will be blessed by a plentiful harvest of skins and
fish.

Woe to the mariner tossed upon their coast!

The land on our left is the Kanin peninsula; part of that region of
heath and sand over which the Samoyed roams; a desert of ice and snow,
still wilder than the countries hunted by the Lapp. A land without a
village, without a road, without a field, without a name; for the
Russians who own it have no name for it save that of the Samoyeds'
Land; this province of the great empire trends away north and east
from the walls of Archangel and the waters of Kanin Cape to the
summits of the Ural chain and the Iron Gates of the Kara Sea. In her
clefts and ridges snow never melts; and her shore-lines, stretching
towards the sunrise upwards of two thousand miles, are bound in icy
chains for eight months in the twelve. In June, when the winter goes
away, suddenly the <DW72>s of a few favored valleys grow green with
reindeer moss; slight specks of verdure in a landscape which is even
then dark with rock and gray with rime. On this green moss the
reindeer feed, and on these camels of the Polar zone the wild men of
the country live.

Samoyed means cannibal--man-eater; but whether the men who roam over
these sands and bogs deserve their evil fame is one of the questions
open to new lights. They use no fire in cooking food; and perhaps it
is because they eat the reindeer raw that they have come to be accused
of fondness for human flesh. In chasing the game on which they feed,
the Samoyeds crept over the Ural Mountains from their far-off home in
the north of Asia, running it down in a tract too cold and bare for
any other race of men to dwell on. Here the Zarayny found them,
thrashed them, set them to work.

These Zarayny, a clever and hardy people, seem connected in type and
speech with the Finns; and they are thought to be the remnant of an
ancient colony of trappers. Fairer than the Samoyeds, they live in log
huts like other Russians, and are rich in herds of reindeer, which
they compel the Samoyeds to tend like slaves. This service to the
higher race is slowly changing the savage Samoyed into a civilized
man; since it gives him a sense of property and a respect for life. A
red man kills the beast he hunts; kills it beyond his need, in the
animal wantonness of strength. A Samoyed would do the same; but the
Zarayny have taught him to rear and tend, as well as to hunt and
snare, his food. A savage, only one degree above the Pawnee and the
Ute, a Samoyed builds no shed; plants no field; and owns no property
in the soil. He dwells, like the Lapp, in a tent--a roll of skins,
sewn on to each other with gut, and twisted round a shaft, left open
at the top, and furnished with skins to lie on like an Indian lodge.
No art is lavished on this roll of skin; not so much as the totem
which a Cheyenne daubs on his prairie tent. Yet the Samoyed has
notions of village life, and even of government. A collection of tents
he calls a Choom; his choom is ruled by a medicine-man; the official
name of whom in Russian society is a pope.

The reigning Emperor has sent some priests to live among these tribes,
just as in olden times Marfa of Novgorod sent her popes and monks into
Lapland and Karelia; hoping to divert the natives from their Pagan
habits and bring them over to the church of Christ. Some good, it may
be hoped, is done by these Christian priests; but a Russ who knows the
country and the people smiles when you ask him about their doings in
the Gulf of Obi and around the Kara Sea. One of these missionaries
whom I chanced to meet had pretty well ceased to be a civilized man.
In name, he was a pope; but he lived and dressed like a medicine-man;
and he was growing into the likeness of a Mongol in look and gait.
Folk said he had taken to his bosom a native witch.

Through the gateway held by these tribes we enter into Russia--Great
Russia; that country of the old Russians, whose plains and forests the
Tartar horsemen never swept.

Why enter Russia by these northern gates? If the Great Mogul had
conquered England in the seventeenth century; if Asiatic manners had
been paramount in London for two hundred years; if Britain had
recovered her ancient freedom and civil life, where would a foreign
observer, anxious to see the English as they are, begin his studies?
Would he not begin them in Massachusetts rather than in Middlesex,
even though he should have to complete his observations on the Mersey
and the Thames?

A student of the Free Russia born of the Crimean War, must open his
work of observation in the northern zones; since it is only within
this region of lake and forest that he can find a Slavonic race which
has never been tainted by foreign influence, never been broken by
foreign yoke. The zone from Onega to Perm--a country seven times
larger than France--was colonized from Novgorod the Great, while
Novgorod was yet a free city, rich in trade, in piety, in art; a rival
of Frankfort and Florence; and, like London and Bruges, a station of
the Hanseatic League. Her colonies kept the charter of their freedom
safe. They never bent to the Tartar yoke, nor learned to walk in the
German ways. They knew no masters, and they held no serfs. "We never
had amongst us," said to me an Archangel farmer, "either a noble or a
slave." They clung, for good and evil, to their ancient life; and when
the Patriarch Nikon reformed the Church in a Byzantine sense (1667),
as the Tsar Godunof had transformed the village in a Tartar sense
(1601), they disowned their patriarch just as they had denied their
Tsar. In spite of every force that could be brought against them by a
line of autocrats, these free colonists have not been driven into
accepting the reformed official liturgies in preference to their
ancient rites. They kept their native speech, when it was ceasing to
be spoken in the capital; and when the time was ripe, they sent out
into the world a boy of genius, peasant-born and reared (the poet,
Michael Lomonosof), to impose that popular language on the college, on
the senate, on the court.




CHAPTER II.

THE FROZEN SEA


At Cape Intsi we pass from the narrow straits dividing the Lapp
country from the Samoyed country into this northern gulf.

About twice the size of Lake Superior in the United States, this
Frozen Sea has something of the shape of Como; one narrow northern
bay, extending to the town of Kandalax, in Russian Lapland; and two
southern bays, divided from each other by a broad sandy peninsula, the
home of a few villagers employed in snaring cod and hunting seal.
These southern bays are known, from the rivers which fall into them,
as Onega Bay and Dvina Bay. At the mouths of these rivers stand the
two trading ports of Onega and Archangel.

The open part of this inland gulf is deep--from sixty to eighty
fathoms; and in one place, off the entrance into Kandalax Bay, the
line goes down no less than a hundred and sixty fathoms. Yet the shore
is neither steep nor high. The gulf of Onega is rich in rocks and
islets; many of them only banks of sand and mud, washed out into the
sea from the uplands of Kargopol; but in the wide entrance of Onega
Bay, between Orlof Point and the town of Kem, stands out a notable
group of islets--Solovetsk, Anzersk, Moksalma, Zaet and others; islets
which play a singular part in the history of Russia, and connect
themselves with curious legends of the Imperial court.

In Solovetsk, the largest of this group of islets, stands the famous
convent of that name; the house of Saints Savatie and Zosima; the
refuge of St. Philip; the shrine to which emperors and peasants go on
pilgrimage; the haunt of that Convent Spectre which one hears
described in the cod-fisher's boat and in the Kozak's tent; the scene
of many great events, and of one event which Russians have agreed to
sing and paint as the most splendid miracle of these latter days.

Off the Dvina bar stands the new tower and lighthouse, where the
pilots live; a shaft some eighty feet high, not often to be seen above
the hanging drapery of fog. A pilot comes on board; a man of soft and
patient face, with gray-blue eyes, and flow of brownish hair, who
tells us in a bated tone--as though he feared we might be vexed with
him and beat him--that the tide is ebbing on the bar, and we shall
have to wait for the flow. "Wait for the tide!" snaps our Danish jarl;
"stand by, we'll make our course." The sun has just peeped out from
behind his veil; but the clouds droop low and dark, and every one
feels that a gale is coming on. Two barks near the bar--the "Thera"
and the "Olga"--bob and reel like tipsy men; yet our pale Russ pilot,
urged by the stronger will, gives way with a smile; and our speed
being lowered by half, we push on slowly towards the line of red and
black signals floating in our front.

The "Thera" and the "Olga" are soon behind us, shivering in all their
sheets, like men in the clutch of ague--left in our wake to a swift
and terrible doom. In half an hour we pass the line of buoys, and gain
the outer port.

Like all great rivers, the Dvina has thrown up a delta of isles and
islets near her mouth, through which she pours her flood into the sea
by a dozen arms. None of these dozen arms can now be laid down as her
main entrance; for the river is more capricious than the sea; so that
a skipper who leaves her by one outlet in August, may have to enter by
another when he comes back to her in June. The main passage in the old
charts flowed past the Convent of St. Nicolas; then came the turn of
Rose Island; afterwards the course ran past the guns of Fort Dvina:
but the storms which swept the Polar seas two summers since, destroyed
that passage as an outlet for the larger kinds of craft. The port
police looked on in silence. What were they to do? Archangel was cut
off from the sea, until a Danish blacksmith, who had set up forge and
hammer in the new port, proposed that the foreign traders should hire
a steamer and find a deliverance for their ships. "If the water goes
down," he said, "it must have made a way for itself. Let us try to
find it out." A hundred pounds were lodged in the bank, a steamer was
hired, and a channel, called the Maimax arm, was found to be deep
enough for ships to pass. The work was done, the city opened to the
sea; but then came the question of port authorities and their rules.
No bark had ever left the city by this Maimax arm; no rules had been
made for such a course of trade; and the port police could not permit
a ship to sail unless her papers were drawn up in the usual forms. In
vain the merchants told them the case was new, and must be governed by
a rule to match. They might as well have reasoned with a Turkish bey.
Here rode a fleet of vessels, laden with oats and deals for the Elbe,
the Maas, and the Thames; there ran the abundant Maimax waters to the
sea; but the printed rules of the port, unconscious of the freaks of
nature and of the needs of man, forbade this fleet to sail.

Appeal was made to Prince Gagarine, governor of Archangel: but
Gagarine, though he laughed at these port rules and their forms, had
no deals and grain of his own on board the ships. Gospodin Sredine, a
keen-witted master of the customs, tried to open the ports and free
the ships by offering to put officers on the new channel; but the
police were--the police. In vain they heard that the goods might
spoil, that the money they cost was idle, and that every ruble wasted
would be so much loss to their town.

To my question, "How was it arranged at last?" a skipper, who was one
of the prisoners in the port, replies, "I will tell you in a word. We
sent to Petersburg; the minister spoke to the Emperor; and here is
what we have heard they said. 'What's all this row in Archangel
about?' asks the Emperor. 'It is all about a new mouth being found in
the Dvina, sir, and ships that want to sail down it, sir, because the
old channel is now shoaled up, sir.' 'In God's name,' replied the
Emperor, 'let the ships go out by any channel they can find.'"

Whether the thing was done in this sailor-like way, or by the more
likely method of official report and order, the Maimax mouth was
opened to the world in spite of the port police and their printed
rules.

A Hebrew of the olden time would have called this sea a whited
sepulchre. Even men of science, to whom wintry storms may be summed up
in a line of figures--so many ships in the pack, so many corpses on
the beach--can find in the records of this frozen deep some show of an
excuse for that old Lapland superstition of the Golden Hag. The year
before last was a tragic time, and the memory of one dark day of wrack
and death has not yet had time to fade away.

At the end of June, a message, flashed from the English consul at
Archangel--a man to represent his country on these shores--alarmed our
board of trade by such a cry for help as rarely reaches a public
board. A hundred ships were perishing in the ice. These ships were
Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and English; luggers, sloops, corvettes, and
smacks; all built of wood, and many of them English manned. Could any
thing be done to help them? "Help is coming," flashed the wires from
Charing Cross; and on the first day of July, two steamers left the
Thames to assist in rescuing those ships and men from the Polar ice.
On the fifteenth night from home these English boats were off Cape
Gorodetsk on the Lapland coast, and when morning dawned they were
striving to cross the shallow Archangel bar. They could not pass; yet
the work of humanity was swiftly and safely done by the English crews.

That fleet of all nations, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, left
the Dvina ports on news coming up the delta that the pack was breaking
up in the gulf; but on reaching that Corridor through which we have
just now come, they met the ice swaying to and fro, and crashing from
point to point, as the changing wind veered round from north to south.
By careful steering they went on, until they reached the straits
between Kanin Cape and Holy Point. The ice in their front was now
thick and high; no passage through it could be forced; and their
vessels reeled and groaned under the blows which they suffered from
the floating drifts. A brisk north wind arose, and blowing three days
on without a pause, drove blocks and bergs of ice from the Polar Ocean
down into the gut, forcing the squadrons to fall back, and closing up
every means of escape into the open sea. The ships rolled to and fro,
the helmsmen trying to steer them in mid-channel, but the currents
were now too strong to stem, and the helpless craft were driven upon
the Lapland reefs, where the crews soon saw themselves folded and
imprisoned in the pack of ice.

Like shots from a fort, the crews on board the stronger ships could
hear in the grim waste around them hull after hull crashing up, in
that fierce embrace, like fine glass trinkets in a strong man's hand.
When a ship broke up and sank, the crew leaped out upon the ice and
made for the nearest craft, from which in a few hours more they might
have to fly in turn. One man was wrecked five times in a single day;
each of the boats to which he clung for safety parting beneath his
feet and gurgling down into the frozen deep.

When the tale of loss was made up by the relieving steamers, this
account was sent home to the Board of Trade:

The number of ships abandoned by their crews was sixty-four; of this
great fleet of ships, fourteen were saved and fifty lost. Of the fifty
ships lost in those midsummer days, eighteen were English built and
manned; and the master mentions with a noble pride, that only one ship
flying the English flag was in a state to be recovered from the ice
after being abandoned by her crew.

It would be well for our fame if the natives had no other tales to
tell of an English squadron in the Frozen Sea.




CHAPTER III.

THE DVINA.


By the Maimax arm we steam through the delta for some twenty miles;
past low, green banks and isles like those in the Missouri bed; though
the loam in the Dvina is not so rich and black as that on the American
stream. Yet these small isles are bright with grass and scrub. Beyond
them, on the main-land, lies a fringe of pines, going back into space
as far as the eye can pierce.

The low island lying on your right as you scrape the bar is called St.
Nicolas, after that sturdy priest, who is said to have smitten the
heretic Arius on his cheek. No one knows where this Nicolas lived and
died; for it is clear from the Acta, that he had no part in the
Council of Nice. The Book of Saints describes him as born in Liki and
living in Mira; whence they call him the Saint of Mirliki; but not a
line of his writing is extant, and the virtues assigned to him are of
opposing kinds. He is a patron of nobles and of children, of sailors,
of cadgers, and of pilgrims. Yet, in spite of his doubtful birth and
genius, Nicolas is a popular saint. Poor people like him as one who is
good to the poor; a friend of beggars, fishermen and tramps. A Russian
turns to him as the hope of starving and drowning men; so that his
name is often heard, his image often seen, in these northern wilds;
more than all else, on the banks of rivers and on the margins of the
Frozen Sea. A peasant learns with delight from his Book of Saints (his
Bible, Epos, Drama, Code, and History all in one) that Nicolas is the
most potent saint in heaven; sitting on the right hand of God; and
having a cohort of three hundred angels, armed and ready to obey his
nod. A mujik asked a foreign friend to tell him who will be God when
God dies? "My good fellow," said he, smiling, "God will never die." At
first the peasant seemed perplexed. "Never die!" and then a light fell
on him. "Yes," he retorted, slowly; "I see it now. You are an
unbeliever; you have no religion. Look you; I have been better taught.
God will one day die; for He is very old; and then St. Nicolas will
get his place."

Though he is common to all Russians--adored on the Dnieper, on the
Volkhof, on the Moskva, no less than on the Dvina--he is worshipped
with peculiar zeal in these northern zones. Here he is the sailor's
saint, the adventurer's help; and all the paintings of him show that
his watchful eyes are bent in eager tenderness