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[1721 A.D.]

into houses, for the purpose of preventing or discovering infractions of their orders, so that the unfortunate people, finding that they had nought which they could call their own, and that everything, even to their industry, belonged to the czar, ceased to exert themselves for more than a mere subsistence, and lost that spirit which only a man's personal interest can inspire. Accordingly, the forests were peopled with men driven to desperation, and those who at first remained in the villages, finding that they were obliged to pay the taxes of the fugitives as well as their own, speedily joined their companions.

What can bear witness more strongly to the disordered state of those times than the facts themselves? They show us grandees, who were possessed of the highest credit, repeatedly convicted of embezzling the public money; others hanged or beheaded! and a vice-chancellor himself daring, without any authority, to give places and pensions, and, in so poor a country, contriving to purloin nearly a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It was not, therefore, the czar alone whom the people accused of their sufferings. But such is the tenure of despotism that, in depriving the people of their will, it takes upon itself the whole responsibility. All, however, agree that, about 1715, they beheld their czar astounded at the aspect of such numerous evils; they acknowledge the efforts which he had made, and that all of them had not been fruitless.

But, at the same time, to account for the inexhaustible abundance of the autocrat's treasury, they represent him to us as monopolising everything for his own benefit, giving to the current coin of his empire the value which suited his purpose, and receiving it from foreigners at no more than its intrinsic worth. They accuse him of having engrossed the purchase or sale of numberless native and foreign productions, either by suddenly taxing various kinds of merchandise or by assuming the right of being the exclusive purchaser, at his own price, to sell again at an exorbitant price when he had become the sole possessor. They say also that, forestalling everything, their czar made himself the sole merchant trading from European Russia to China and Siberia, as well as the sole mint-master, the sole trader in tobacco, soap, talc, pitch, and tar; that having also declared himself the only publichouse keeper in an empire where drunkenness held sovereign sway, this monopoly annually brought back into his coffers all the pay that had been disbursed from them.

When, in 1716, he wished to defray the expenses of his second journey to Holland, and at the same time avoid being a loser by the rate of exchange, what was the plan which he adopted? He laid hands on all the leather intended for exportation, which he paid for at a maximum fixed by himself, and then exported it on his own account, the proceeds being made payable in Holland, where it was purchased by foreigners.

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It is thus that many of his contemporaries explain the riches of a prince who was the principal manufacturer and merchant of a great empire the creator, the superintendent of its arts. In his eyes, his subjects were nothing more than workmen, whose labours he prompted, estimated, and rewarded according to his own pleasure; he reserved to himself the sale of the produce of their industry, and the immense profits which he thus gained he employed in doubling that produce.

What a singular founder of commerce in his empire was a monarch who drew it all within his own sphere and absorbed it in himself! We may, however, be allowed to believe that he sometimes became a merchant and manufacturer, as he became a soldier and a sailor, for the sake of example, and that the obstinate repugnance of his ignorant subjects to many branches

[1721 A.D.]

of industry and commerce long compelled him to retain the monopoly of them, whether he would or not. It is curious to remark how his despotism recoiled upon himself when he interfered with matters so impatient of arbitrary power as trade and credit. Soloviev is an example of this. Assisted by the privileges which Peter had granted to him, that merchant succeeded in establishing at Amsterdam the first commercial Russian factory that had ever been worthy of notice; but in 1717, when the czar visited Holland for the second time, his greedy courtiers irritated him against their fellow countryman. Soloviev had not chosen to ransom himself from the envy which his riches inspired. They therefore slandered him to their sovereign; he was arrested and sent back to Russia; his correspondents lost their advances; confidence was ruined, and the autocrat, by confiscating this source of riches, destroyed his work with his own hand. Yet he had a glimpse of something like free-trade principles. He would never impose any higher penalty on smuggling than confiscation. "Commerce," he said, "is like a timid maiden, who is scared by rough usage, and must be won by gentle means. Smuggle who will, and welcome. The merchant who exposes himself to the chance of having his goods confiscated runs a greater risk than my treasury. If he cheats me nine times and I catch him the tenth, I shall be no loser by the

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Peter had never been at any pains to conceal his indifference or contempt for the national church; but it was not until that culminating point in his history at which we are now arrived that he ventured to accomplish his design of abolishing the office of patriarch. He had left it unfilled for one-andtwenty years, and he formally suppressed it after the conclusion of the Peace of Nystad; when heaven had declared in his favour, as it seemed to the multitude, who always believe the Deity to be on the strongest side. In the following year, however, the synod, in spite of Theophanes, its president, whom we may consider as his minister for religious affairs, dared to desire that a patriarch might be appointed. But bursting into a sudden passion Peter started up, struck his breast violently with his hand and the table with his cutlass, and exclaimed, "Here, here is your patriarch!" He then hastily quitted the room, casting, as he departed, a stern look upon the panicstruck prelates.

Of the two conquests which Peter consummated about the same time that over Sweden and that by which he annihilated the independence of the Russian clergy-it is hard to say which was the more gratifying to his pride. Someone having communicated to him the substance of a paper in the English Spectator, in which a comparison was made between himself and Louis XIV, entirely to his own advantage, he disclaimed the superiority accorded to him by the essayist, save in one particular: "Louis XIV," said he, "was greater than I, except that I have been able to reduce my clergy to obedience, while he allowed his clergy to rule him."

Soon after the abolition of the patriarchate, Peter celebrated the marriage of Buturlin, the second kniaz papa of his creation, with the widow of Sotov, his predecessor in that mock dignity. The bridegroom was in his eightyfifth year, and the bride nearly of the same age. The messengers who invited the wedding guests were four stutterers; some decrepit old men attended the bride; the running footmen were four of the most corpulent fellows that could be found; the orchestra was placed on a sledge drawn by bears, which

[1721 A.D.] being goaded with iron spikes made with their horrid roarings an accompaniment suitable to the tunes played on the sledge. The nuptial benediction was given in the cathedral by a blind and deaf priest with spectacles on. The procession, the marriage, the wedding feast, the undressing of the bride and bridegroom, the ceremony of putting them to bed were all in the same style of repulsive buffoonery. Among the coarse-minded courtiers this passed for an ingenious derision of the clergy.

The nobles were another order in the state whose resistance, though more passive than that of the clergy, was equally insufferable to the czar. His hand had always been heavy against that stiff-necked race. He had no mercy upon their indolence and superstition, no toleration for their pride of birth or wealth. As landed proprietors he regarded them merely as the possessors of fiefs, who held them by the tenure of being serviceable to the state. Such was the spirit of the law of 1715 relative to inheritances, which till then had been equally divided; but from that date the real estate was to descend to one of the males, the choice of whom was left to the father, while only the personal property was to pass to the other children. In this respect the law was favourable to paternal authority and aristocracy; but its real purpose was rendered obvious by other clauses. It decreed that the inheritors of personal property should not be permitted to convert it into real estate until after seven years of military service, ten years of civil service, or fifteen years' profession of some kind of art or of commerce. Nay, more, if we may rely on the authority of Perry, every heir of property to the amount of five hundred roubles, who had not learned the rudiments of his native language or of some ancient or foreign language, was to forfeit his inheritance.

The great nobles had ere this been shorn of their train of boyar followers, or noble domestics, by whom they were perpetually attended, and these were transformed into soldiers, disciplined in the European manner. At the same time several thousand cavalry were formed out of the sons of the priests, who were free men, but not less ignorant and superstitious than their fathers. Against the inertness of the nobles, too, Peter made war even in the sanctuary of their families. Every one of them between the ages of ten and thirty, who evaded an enlistment which was termed voluntary, was to have his property confiscated to the use of the person by whom he was denounced. The sons of the nobles were arbitrarily wrested from them; some were placed in military schools; others were sent to unlearn their barbarian manners and acquire new habits and knowledge among polished nations; many of them were obliged to keep up a correspondence with the czar on the subject of what they were learning; on their return, he himself questioned them, and if they were found not to have benefited by their travels, disgrace and ridicule were their punishment. Given up to the czar's buffoon, they became the laughing-stocks of the court, and were compelled to perform the most degrading offices in the palace. These were the tyrannical punishments of a reformer who managed that he might succeed in doing violence to nature by beginning education at an age when it ought to be completed, and by subjecting grown-up men to chastisements which would scarcely be bearable for children.

It is with reason that Mannstein reproaches Peter with having expected to transform, by travels in polished countries, men who were already confirmed in their habits, and who were steeped to the core in ignorance, sloth, and barbarism. "The greatest part of them," he says, "acquired nothing but vices." This it was which drew upon Peter a lesson from his sage; for such was the appellation which he gave to Dolgoruki. That senator

[1722 A.D.]

having pertinaciously, and without assigning any reason, maintained that the travels of the Russian youth would be useless, made no other reply to an impatient and passionate contradiction from the despot than to fold the ukase in silence, run his nail forcibly along it, and then desire the autocrat to try whether, with all his power, he could ever obliterate the crease that was made in the paper.

At last, by his ukase of January 24th, 1722, Peter annihilated the privileges of the old Russian aristocracy, and under the specious pretext of making merit the only source of social distinction, he created a new order of nobility, divided into eight military and as many civil grades, all immediately and absolutely dependent on the czar. The only favour allowed to the old landed aristocracy was that they were not deprived of the right of appearing at court; but none of them could obtain the rank and appointments of an officer, nor, in any company, the respect and distinctions exclusively belonging to that rank, until they had risen to it by actual service. Such was the fundamental principle of that notorious system called the tchin; and plausible as it may appear upon a superficial view, it has been fruitful of nothing but hideous tyranny, corruption, chicanery, and malversation. The modern nobility of Russia is in fact but a vile bureaucracy. The only thing truly commendable in the ukase of 1722 is that it degrades to the level of the rabble every nobleman convicted of crime and sentenced to a punishment that ought to entail infamy. Previously, as the reader has already seen, a nobleman might appear unabashed in public, and claim all the privileges of his birth, with his back still smarting from the executioner's lash.

Commerce with the East

Peter had always encountered great difficulty in attracting to St. Petersburg the commerce of central Russia, which the merchants obstinately persisted in throwing away upon Archangel. Yet at St. Petersburg they enjoyed several privileges, and a milder climate allowed of two freights a year, while at Archangel the ice would admit of only one. To this must be added the advantage of a calmer sea, a better port, lower duties, a much shorter distance, and a much larger concourse of purchasers; but no persuasion could make the Russians abandon the old routine, until at last Peter treated them like ignorant and stubborn children, to whom he would do good in spite of themselves. In 1722 he expressly prohibited the carrying of any goods to Archangel but such as belonged to the district of that government. This ordinance at first raised a great outcry among the traders, both native and foreign, and caused several bankruptcies; but the merchants, accustoming themselves by degrees to come to St. Petersburg, at last found themselves gainers by the change.

The trade with the Mongols and Chinese had been jeopardised by the extortions of Prince Gagarin, the governor of Siberia, and by acts of violence committed by the Russians in Peking and in the capital of Contaish, the prince pontiff of a sect of dissenters from Lamaism. To check the growth of this evil, Peter sent Ismailov, a captain in the guards, to Peking, with presents to the emperor, among which were several pieces of turnery, the work of his own hands. The negotiation was successful; but the Russians soon lost the fruits of it by fresh acts of indiscretion, and were expelled from China by order of Kam-hi. The Russian court alone retained the right of sending a caravan every three years to Peking; but that right again was subsequently lost in

1 The men who have no tchin, the tchornii narod, that is, the black people, or blackguards.

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consequence of new quarrels. The court finally renounced its exclusive privilege, and granted the subjects leave to trade freely on the Kiakhta.

WAR WITH PERSIA (1722-1724 A.D.)

Peter's attention had long been directed to the Caspian Sea with a view to making it more extensively subservient to the trade of Russia with Persia and central Asia, which as yet had been carried on at Astrakhan alone, through the medium of Armenian factors. Soon after the Peace of Nystad had left the czar free to carry his arms towards the East, a pretext and an opportunity were afforded him for making conquests on the Caspian shores. The Persian Empire was falling to pieces under the hand of the enervated and imbecile Husain Shah. The Lesghiians, one of the tributary nations that had rebelled against him, made an inroad into the province of Shirvan, sacked the city of Shemakha, put the inhabitants to the sword, including three hundred Russian traders, and plundered Russian property to the amount of 4,000,000 roubles. Peter demanded satisfaction; the shah was willing to grant it, but pleaded his helpless condition, and entreated the czar to aid him in subduing his rebellious subjects.

This invitation was promptly accepted. Peter set out for Persia on the 15th of May, 1722, his consort also accompanying him on this remote expedition. He fell down the Volga as far as the city of Astrakhan, and occupied himself in examining the works for the canals that were to join the Caspian, Baltic, and White seas, whilst he awaited the arrival of his forces and material of war. His army consisted of twenty-two thousand foot, nine thousand dragoons, and fifteen thousand Cossacks, besides three thousand sailors on board the several vessels, who, in making a descent, could do the duty of soldiers. The cavalry marched by land through deserts, which are frequently without water; and beyond those deserts, they were to pass the mountains of Caucasus, where three hundred men might keep a whole army at bay; but Persia was in such anarchy that anything might be attempted.

The czar sailed above a hundred leagues southward from Astrakhan, as far as the small fortified town of Andreeva, which was easily taken. Thence the Russian army advanced by land into the province of Daghestan; and manifestoes in the Persian and Russian language were everywhere dispersed. It was necessary to avoid giving any offence to the Ottoman Porte, which besides its subjects, the Circassians and Georgians, bordering on this country, had in these parts some considerable vassals, who had lately put themselves under its protection. Among them, one of the principal was Mahmud D'Utmich, who styled himself sultan, and had the presumption to attack the troops of the emperor of Russia. He was totally defeated, and the public account says "his country was made a bonfire."

In the middle of September, Peter reached Derbent, by the Persians and Turks called Demir-kapu, i.e. Iron Gate, because it had formerly such a gate towards the south; it is a long narrow town, backed against a steep spur of the Caucasus; and its walls, at the other end, are washed by the sea, which, in stormy weather, is often known to break over them. These walls may be justly accounted one of the wonders of antiquity; they were forty feet high and six broad; flanked with square towers at intervals of fifty feet. The whole work seemed one single piece, being built of a kind of brown free-stone, and a mortar of pounded shells, the whole forming a mass harder than marble itself; it was accessible by sea, but, on the land side, seemed impregnable. Near it were the ruins of an old wall, like that of China, unquestionably built

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