Russka (108 page)

In 1830, while Alexis was away at the crushing of another Polish uprising, Savva set up a small business for printing cottons. The profits were extraordinary. But when Alexis returned and saw what he had done, he tried to charge an
obrok
so high that it would almost have closed the business, and Savva told his wife grimly: ‘That fool doesn’t want to profit by me – he wants to ruin me.’

Only Tatiana, who ran the estate in Alexis’s absence, was able to restrain her son – and make it possible for Savva to operate. Thanks to her, and paying a reasonable
obrok
, he was able in ten years to build up a cloth mill with hired workers at Russka and to become richer than he had ever been before.

Yet despite this working arrangement, Alexis continued, each
year, to become a little poorer. The reason was very simple. For though Tatiana could talk some sense into him about the running of the estate, she could do nothing about his personal expenses. And severe though he was, Alexis liked to live well. As his son Misha, destined for the guards, grew up, Alexis insisted on providing lavishly for him too. ‘For the honour,’ he said, ‘of the family.’ The result was that the extra
obrok
from Savva’s activities, instead of being ploughed back into the estate, just encouraged him to spend more, and still his expenses often exceeded his income.

By contrast, Savva’s treatment of his own son was harsh. While he and Maria were sad that God had only granted them a single child, ‘one is enough,’ Savva would say. Young Ivan, though not of his father’s towering build, was a shrewd boy with a fine singing voice. Though Savva had no objection to this, he knew where his son’s interest in music must end. When Ivan, aged thirteen, foolishly appeared in the house with a violin he had just acquired, Savva took it from him, examined it, and then with a blow that almost stunned the boy, broke it over his son’s head. ‘You’ve no time for that,’ he said simply, by way of explanation.

There was another source of friction between Savva and his master. This was that the serf was an Old Believer. He had kept his contact with the Theodosians, and though he did not seek to convert others, it would be noticed that, when he ate in company, he did so in the Old Believers’ manner – apart, using his own wooden bowl, and a little wooden spoon with a cross upon it.

Strictly speaking the Old Believers sects were loyal at this time. But to Alexis, this quiet profession of Savva’s faith was deeply objectionable – partly because it seemed like a sort of personal defiance and also, ‘It’s against the good of Russia,’ he firmly declared.

For in 1832, the government of Tsar Nicholas had formulated a doctrine that, in a way, summarized the outlook of all Russian administrations that century and even beyond. This was the famous doctrine of Official Nationality. It was declared in government, in the army, and above all in school, and resoundingly dictated that the good of Russia lay in three things: Orthodoxy, the Tsar’s Autocracy, and Nationality, which last meant a sense of communal belonging to the Russian nation.

The idea was simple. It suggested a paternal relationship
between the Tsar and his people, entirely appropriate to a state that liked to refer to itself as Holy Russia. And to Alexis, the moment this doctrine of Official Nationality was announced, it was sacred.

The dour Old Believer, therefore, seemed to the authoritarian landowner to be vaguely treacherous, disloyal and disobedient. I should have thrashed him more, he thought, and if ever I get an excuse, I’ll thrash him again.

And still Savva’s real goal, his freedom, seemed elusive.

In 1837 he asked Alexis Bobrov what it would take to purchase his family’s freedom.

‘Nothing, because I will not free you,’ was the reply.

The next year he asked again and received the same reply. ‘May I know why, sir?’ he asked.

‘Certainly,’ Alexis said pleasantly. ‘It’s because, Suvorin, I prefer to keep you where you are.’

And bitterly, looking at his own son, Savva remarked to his wife: ‘He’s still just as I was at his age: a serf, and the son of a serf.’ And when Maria tried to comfort him and told him something would turn up, he only shook his head and muttered: ‘I wonder what.’

And then, starting in 1839, came the famine.

There had not been a crop failure for a number of years. Now the crops failed two years running. Alexis was away, down in the Ukraine. Though she was nearly seventy, the burden fell upon Tatiana.

For Russka, the two failures and the resulting famine were grim indeed. ‘The Riazan estate’s a complete wash-out,’ Ilya moaned. ‘The steward writes they’ve been slaughtering the livestock because there’s no winter feed.’ Numerous attempts were made to buy grain from other areas. ‘But even if we do find some,’ Tatiana remarked, ‘it gets lost on the way.’ By the winter of 1840 the situation was desperate.

Each day Tatiana would go down into the village and move from house to house. There were still some reserve supplies at the manor, though only enough to help the worst cases, and she used her judgement as best she could. She had two particular calls she always made. One was to the Romanovs, because their son Timofei had always been the playmate of little Misha; the second was to the
izba
where young Arina now lived with her husband and children. She owed it to old Arina, who had died five years before,
to help her niece. It was a wretched business. Except for the eldest, a homely girl called Varya, the children were sickly. In the space of four weeks, she saw three of them die. And almost worse, she could not persuade Arina to eat. Anything she gave her finished up with Varya. Desperate to preserve at least one child, the mother was sacrificing herself. For a long time, Tatiana was certain, Arina had subsisted off a single turnip. And if these deprivations hurt the peasants, her sharing in their pain, she was sure, had damaged the health of Tatiana herself. In the summer of 1841 when, thank God, the crop did not fail, she said sadly to Ilya: ‘Something has happened inside me. I don’t think I shall make old bones.’

It was in the early spring of 1840, when things were at their worst, that the curious rumour started. It was Ivan Romanov who told her about it when she came to the
izba
one morning. Both he and all his sons were looking excited. ‘It’s the Tsar,’ he said. ‘The Tsar is coming here.’ He smiled. ‘Then everything will be all right.’

‘You mean Tsar Nicholas is coming?’

‘Oh no,’ he said with a smile. ‘The last Tsar. Tsar Alexander. The Angel.’

It was one of the many strange rumours in Russian history that Tsar Alexander I did not die in 1825, but instead went wandering, as a monk – usually by the name of Fedor Kuzmich. No one knows quite when it began. It is even claimed to this day that a certain English private family have papers to prove that this was true.

Each morning now, when she went down to the village, Tatiana saw people hopefully looking out for the former Tsar, in the belief that somehow he would bring food. And on one occasion, a monk from the monastery was stopped and carefully examined to make sure he was not the Tsar in disguise.

While she smiled sadly at all this, it also offended Tatiana’s practical nature. And it was this hopeful waiting for Tsar Alexander, as much as anything, that gave her a new idea. She summoned Savva Suvorin. ‘What we need here in future,’ she told that practical man, ‘is not a Tsar, but an alternative crop. I want you to make enquiries and see what you can find.’

It was not until three months later that Suvorin reported to her, but when he did, it was, for once, with a faint grin. In his hand he held a small sack, from which he now drew out a dirty grey-brown
object. ‘This is your answer,’ he said. ‘The German colonists have been growing these down in the south for a long time, but we haven’t any up here.’

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘A potato, my lady,’ he replied.

And so it was, some time before it became usual on the private estates in the province, that one of modern Russia’s most important crops was first planted at Russka.

But for Savva Suvorin, though he regretted the suffering, it was hard not to take a grim pleasure in the failures of 1839 and ’40. For they gave him his chance.

‘That’s two years of income he has lost,’ he said to his wife and son. ‘That damned Alexis Bobrov can’t hold out much longer.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s time to make them an offer they cannot refuse.’ And in the spring of the following year, he requested a passport from Tatiana, to visit Moscow.

And now, in May 1844, Savva Suvorin stood before Alexis Bobrov and made his astonishing offer.

‘Fifty thousand roubles.’

Even Alexis was struck dumb. It was a fortune. How the devil had Savva found it?

‘I will return tomorrow, lord, in order that you may consider the matter.’ And he discreetly withdrew, while Alexis could only stare after him. This time, the serf thought, I have him.

The plan of Savva Suvorin was hugely ambitious. It centred on the gigantic loan he had negotiated, free of interest for five years, from the Theodosians. This loan would allow him to buy his freedom and also to make a single, enormous investment which would transfer the Suvorin enterprises into his own hands for ever.

There was at this time no more booming business in Russia than the manufacture of cotton from the imported raw material – so much so that the area above Vladimir was becoming known as ‘Calico country’. Savva’s plan was not only to convert his wooden plant over to cotton, but also to speed production hugely by the purchase of a large, steam-driven jenny from England. One or two of the more powerful Russian entrepreneurs had already done this a few years before and the results, he knew, had been spectacular. ‘But I won’t do it unless I’m free,’ he told his family. ‘I’m not
setting up a big enterprise like that just to have those accursed Bobrovs steal it all on some pretext like they did before.’

Fifty thousand roubles. It was an extraordinary offer that the landlord had to consider.

Alexis Bobrov, at the age of fifty-one, was an impressive figure who looked rather older. His body was heavyset. His grey hair was cut short; his cheeks had filled out with age so that his long, hawkish face had become squarer, more massive. His nose had thickened at the bottom and curved down over his mouth so that, with his long, drooping grey moustache, he put one in mind of some Turkish pasha of unshakable authority. Upon his uniform were numerous medals and orders including that of Alexander Nevsky.

Having been widowed a second time, and suffering from an old wound acquired in the Polish rising, which gave him a slight limp, he had taken an honourable retirement that year and had come to live permanently on the Bobrovo estate.

When he told his mother and brother Ilya about the offer, they were both adamant: he should take it. In Tatiana’s case, the argument was simple. As well as her private sympathy for Savva, it was clear to her that the money was needed. ‘With that,’ she reasoned, ‘you could clear all the debts we’ve incurred from the crop failures, make the necessary improvements in the estate, and have plenty to spare.’ For a generation at least, the Bobrovs would be out of trouble.

Ilya’s argument was slightly different. Though he had never realized his mistake over the stolen money, he had always a vaguely guilty feeling over the way his family had treated the Suvorins. But even aside from that, there was another consideration. ‘For the fact is – forgive me putting it like this, my dear brother – but every civilized man in Russia finds serfdom repulsive. Even our Tsar, who most people think of as reactionary, is known to think that serfdom should be abolished. A major committee has already sat on the subject for years, and each season there’s a new rumour from the capital that something is going to be done. One day, I think that rumour will be true. A proposal, at least, will be made. And what will Suvorin offer you then, if he believes that in a year or two he may get his freedom anyway? Quite apart from my own feelings about serfdom, I say your own self-interest should make you take his offer.’

Yet as Alexis listened, he was not convinced. Ilya’s argument he rejected out of hand. ‘People have been talking about freeing the serfs all my life,’ he said, ‘but it never happens. The gentry won’t allow it: not in my lifetime. Perhaps not in Misha’s either.’

There was also something else that he found offensive about the business. He was shrewd enough to guess at once the likely source of Savva’s finance. Even he couldn’t come up with that much. It must be those damned Theodosians, he thought. And he remembered something the red-headed priest at Russka had told him the previous year. ‘You know, Alexis Alexandrovich, wherever these Old Believers set up factories, they start converting all the local peasants and the Orthodox Church loses its flock.’ Alexis could imagine just what might happen if Suvorin were free of his authority. The whole place would be riddled with Schismatics. As an upholder of the doctrine of Official Nationality he was appalled by the idea.

And thirdly, most important of all, he was secretly convinced of something else. My mother, he told himself, is admirable in her way, but now I’m here to manage the estate full-time, things are going to change. All that was needed to increase the income dramatically, he believed, was the bringing of what he called ‘a bit more discipline’ to things. Moreover, while his respect and affection for Tatiana would not allow him to offend her by doing so yet, she would not always be there; and when she was gone, he faithfully promised himself: I’ll squeeze that schismatic Suvorin until the pips squeak. He might not get fifty thousand roubles out of him, but over the years, he’d surely get enough. Let him make money, he vowed, but I’ll see he dies poor.

And so, when Savva appeared the next day, Alexis Bobrov looked at him coldly and declared: ‘I thank you for your offer, Suvorin, but the answer is no.’ And when the dumbfounded serf – who knew that this decision could not possibly be in Bobrov’s own interest – asked him when he might discuss the matter again, Alexis gave a smile and replied: ‘Never.’

That night, therefore, when Savva discussed it with his wife, he told her: ‘That obstinate fool is immune to reason.’ And when she suggested that perhaps, one day, something would change his mind, Savva grimly replied: ‘He’ll never give in, until he’s ruined.’