Travels in Siberia (43 page)

Sergei Volkonsky, a leader in the Southern Society, did not know what to do after the arrest of Pestel. After some confused attempts to rally his soldiers, and further zigging and zagging, Volkonsky realized the rebels’ cause was lost, and he decided to see his wife and family on his estate not far away one last time before the government caught up with him. When
he arrived home, he found a sleigh with two police officers and a government official waiting for him. They had come all the way from St. Petersburg. He was arrested immediately and taken to prison there.

Generally incompetent and corrupt as the tsar’s government tended to be, it did a thorough job with the subsequent inquest, trial, and punishment. All of its highest pomp and dignity was brought to bear. True, when the mostly elderly and occasionally drowsy officials who conducted the trial proceedings assembled in full plenum and announced the conspirators’ sentences, some of the culprits spoiled the mood by starting to laugh. But that was just a minor hitch. Bureaucracy had seen to it that all prisoners were questioned, depositions taken, confessions made, lists of additional suspects drawn up, and priests dispatched to the jail cells of individuals whose spiritual condition seemed particularly in need. Yevgenii Obolensky went through a religious epiphany that called upon him to provide the investigators with the names not only of the members of the society whom he had associated with personally but also of members he had heard of from years in the past. Tsar Nicholas conducted many of the questionings himself. Prince Trubetskoy, whose uncle had turned him in, threw himself at the tsar’s feet and pleaded for his life:
“Ma vie, sire!”
(this according to Nicholas’s memoirs). Kakhovsky, the cold killer of Gen. Miloradovich, entered into a correspondence with the tsar and through it discovered a deep love, understanding, and respect for his sovereign.

Ivan Yakushkin, whose head seemed always to stay on straight, described an exchange early in his own inquisition, when he was refusing to name names:

After about ten minutes the door opened and Levashev made a sign to me to come into the hall in which the interrogation had been. By the card table stood the new emperor. He told me to come closer, and he began in this manner:

“You broke your oath?”

“I am guilty, sovereign.”

“What awaits you in the next world? Damnation. You can despise the opinion of people, but what awaits you in the next world must terrify you. However, I do not want to completely destroy you: I will send you a priest. How is it you do not answer me?”

“What would you wish from me, sovereign?”

“I, it seems, am speaking to you fairly clearly; if you do not want to ruin your family and be treated as a swine, then you must unburden yourself of everything.”

“I gave my word not to name anybody; everything that I know on my own, I already told to his excellency,” I answered, indicating Levashev who was standing a ways off in a respectful posture.

“Don’t give me ‘his excellency’ and your vile word of honor!”

“I cannot name anybody, sovereign.”

The new emperor recoiled three steps back, gestured toward me with his hand, and said, “Put him in irons so that he cannot budge.”

Per Nicholas’s orders, Yakushkin was held in leg and arm fetters while locked in his cell in the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress. Mikhail Lunin, for similar defiance, was not only chained but also forbidden to have anything with him in his cell. Baron Andrei Rozen was allowed no books for his first four months in prison. During the blank hours, Rozen suffered at the sound of the man in the cell next to him, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, turning the pages of his French-Russian dictionary. Bestuzhev-Ryumin did not speak his country’s language well and needed the dictionary to compose a full confession in Russian as the court required.

He, Kakhovsky, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, Pestel, and Ryleev were sentenced to be drawn and quartered. Trubetskoy and thirty other lesser offenders were to have their heads cut off. After review, the tsar, in his clemency, reduced the sentence of the first group to hanging and of the second to prison labor followed by exile for life in Siberia. A ceremony in which the guilty officers’ uniforms were burned in a pile and their swords broken over their heads did not come off as impressively as hoped, and again was marred by laughter; the hanging, conducted in a drizzle of rain, did not go smoothly, either, and Muraviev-Apostol, Ryleev, and Kakhovsky had to be hanged twice. In July of 1826, small groups of those sentenced to Siberia began to depart on their journey east. Histories say that as the wagon carrying Sergei Volkonsky rolled out of St. Petersburg past the palace, his mother was inside at a ball, dancing with the tsar.

During Ivan Yakushkin’s removal to Siberia, the authorities allowed him to meet his family at a stop in Yaroslavl and spend six hours with
them. He had had little contact with home, and when he learned from his wife that she had been given permission to join him in exile, but only if she left the children, he made a quick decision that she should stay behind. He thought the children too young to be without their mother—wisely, as it turned out, because young children of women who did go off to join their husbands did, in several cases, die. Yakushkin and his wife never saw each other again. He wrote that when he parted from her and his children, “I wept like a child from whom they have taken his last and favorite toy.”

His simile was well chosen; the failure of the uprising, and the experience of being arrested, jailed, tried, and sentenced, seemed to reduce most of the bold and dashing Decembrists to the psychological status of boys. For a modern observer this is perhaps the most painful aspect of their story. Tsar Nicholas treated the men who had tried to overthrow him the same way he would treat miscreant sons gone terribly astray. And the Decembrists, for all their energy, sophistication, and idealism, somehow couldn’t help but accept that narrative. They loved their country, it was their fatherland, the tsar was the father of Russia . . . In prison and in exile, their high-flown plans of bringing justice and freedom to Russia disappeared. Of all the Decembrist prisoners, only Mikhail Lunin kept objecting and resisting, and as a result he endured punitive downgrades in his imprisonment, until he ended his days at the horrid silver mines at Akatui.

Deep down, they simply could not imagine themselves the equals of the tsar. Everything in their upbringing, religion, military training, and sense of duty obstructed that idea. During the uprising, Nicholas brought out his seven-year-old son, presented him to a battalion of loyal troops, and let some of them hold him: how strongly that act would have resonated with his honorable young adversaries, and shaken their will to follow through! With the Decembrists as a point of comparison, I have increased my respect for America’s Founding Fathers and the men they led, who seem to have believed even in their unconscious that King George III of England really was no better than they were. They were fortunate, perhaps, that to them King George was kind of a theoretical idea, being so distant from them physically. True equality is a difficult concept to hold in the mind. I believe we Americans have lost our grip on it today. I know that in my case, I can tell myself that I’m just
as good as a billionaire and even believe that it is true. But when I’m in the actual presence of a powerful person, my own concept of equality gets blurry, and I have a regrettable tendency to truckle, if only to be polite.

To drive his paternalistic point home even further, Nicholas put the Decembrists in Siberia under the immediate command of a respected, experienced, and quite old general named Stanislaus Leparski. After a large number of Decembrists had been concentrated at a prison in Chita, General Leparski arrived to run it and see to their rehabilitation. The principle here was analogous to sending a difficult teenager to live under the supervision of his stern but lovable grandpa. Leparski reported that he had little trouble controlling the men, but he did say that dealing with the wives of the Decembrists who had found dwellings near the prison became a dreaded part of his job.

Though the Decembrists had fallen into political helplessness, and the reforms they had dreamed of were probably dead for the rest of their lives, they resolved to treat one another decently in their imprisonment, at least. Indeed, these idealists’ true greatness may be said to have emerged most clearly during their time in Siberia. To begin with, they threw out all recriminations about anyone’s behavior under questioning. As N. V. Basargin wrote, “Though many of us had made careless statements, and had this or that ‘lack of firmness’ on one of our comrades’ part to thank for our present state, no one allowed himself even a comment as to how others had behaved during the trial and enquiry. It was as though all hostile thoughts had been left behind us in the cells, and only mutual liking remained.” In Yakushkin’s memoir, he spends pages explaining the “artel” system the prisoners devised whereby everybody, those receiving generous stipends from home as well as those receiving little, contributed to a common account to ensure that no prisoner ever had to be in need.

The “hard labor” of the Decembrists’ sentences not being all that hard, the convicts also had time to write letters and poetry, give lectures to their comrades on subjects of personal expertise, cultivate a vegetable garden, play musical instruments, tinker with mechanical ideas. After they had been released from prison and assigned to their places of exile, some of them started schools, experimented with new crops, studied the native peoples. Nikolai Bestuzhev taught the Buryats how to grow tobacco,
and in the early twentieth century there were still old Buryat men who could recall studying in Bestuzhev’s school. In general, the Decembrist exiles greatly raised the tone of Siberia. Travelers through the region sought them out; though under police supervision, and still forbidden to do things like attend a public concert, they became Siberia’s unofficial first citizens.

The Decembrist Dmitri Zavalishin described their local appeal in this way: “We [Decembrists] were the first to appear in Siberia as people of the higher class, entirely approachable and . . . with rules totally opposite to those which the inhabitants were accustomed to see in their superiors and officials: in us they saw sympathy and the performance of good instead of oppression and extortion. For this reason no one ever kept a secret from us . . . Therefore we could study the country in its true light.”

Not surprisingly, the wives who followed their husbands to Siberia and became pregnant there had a lot of children who died. The seven wives of Decembrist prisoners in the trans-Baikal prisons lost twenty-two children among them. But many Siberian-born children survived, as well. Paulina Gueble, who married Ivan Annenkov while he was imprisoned in Chita, bore him eighteen children, of whom six survived. The Volkonskys had a healthy son, Mikhail, in 1832, and then a daughter, Elena, in 1834. Yakushkin’s wife back in western Russia died in 1845 or ’46, but both his sons survived to adulthood and eventually came to Siberia and joined him.

In various places of exile throughout Siberia, the aging Decembrists endured their sentences and carried on their reduced and humbled lives. Meanwhile, the affection their fellow citizens had for them began to grow. These men had acted only out of love of their country, after all. And unlike so many other important figures in Russia’s past, they were not horribly drenched in blood. They had been passionate young men, and their passions had cost them their youth. The ideas they had fallen in love with remained hopeful and deserving of men’s devotion. Over the years, the Decembrists’ reputations rose and rose; Russians still think of them fondly today. Streets named after them during the serious revolutionary times of the twentieth century were not renamed when that era had passed. In a country where icons are built up and smashed down with regularity, the Decembrists’ position seems secure.

Tsar Nicholas never forgave his antagonists of December 14 for what he saw as a family betrayal, but late in his life even he allowed himself some sentimentality about them. Discovering the corruption of members of his administration during the disastrous Crimean War, he was reported to have said, “Pestel and Bestuzhev would never have treated me in this fashion.”

Nicholas became bitter and depressed toward the end and died in March 1855. His son, Alexander, was believed to have a kind regard for the Decembrists. During his triumphal national tour as tsarevitch in 1837, he had let it be known, as he passed through western Siberia, that he wished local Decembrist exiles to be present when he worshipped at a church in Kurgan. They came, and he looked at them during the service with tear-filled eyes. When he became Alexander II after Nicholas’s death, many people thought he would pardon the Decembrists right away. Months passed, though, and Alexander took no action. Then on the occasion of his coronation in August 1856, Alexander issued a Proclamation of General Amnesty for all those who had been convicted in connection with the December uprising. In Siberia, only thirty-four of the original hundred-some sent there were still alive.

Sergei Volkonsky, still living in Irkutsk, was now an eccentric old man with a long beard. His son, Mikhail, now twenty-four, had been allowed to go to officers’ school in Moscow, and at the time of the tsar’s amnesty was living there. He and his sister Elena attended Alexander’s coronation and sat in the official section because of Mikhail’s recent appointment to the famous Governor-General Muraviev-Amursky’s staff. After the ceremony, Mikhail and Elena returned to her apartment. At about six o’clock in the evening the doorbell rang. A messenger had come to summon Mikhail to the Kremlin. There, Prince Dolgoruky, the tsar’s chief military officer, handed Mikhail a parchment copy of the Manifesto of Amnesty: the tsar had requested that Mikhail’s father be the first Decembrist exile to receive the news. Mikhail left for Siberia that night in a tarantass (a springless carriage) and covered the distance from Moscow to Irkutsk in fifteen days.

No doubt Mikhail traveled with a courier’s
podorozhnaya
, a pass that gave the bearer the highest priority on the road and the first pick of horses at every way station. Fifteen days is remarkably fast nonetheless. Had Mikhail started not from Moscow but from St. Petersburg, as Sergei
and Volodya and I did, the extra distance would have cost him another day or two. And of course my companions and I had also gone on side journeys, and visited people, and waited out breakdown delays. Still, in a horse-drawn vehicle on nineteenth-century roads, feeling so happy he barely stopped to rest, Mikhail Volkonsky made the journey from western Russia to Irkutsk five or six days faster than we did in our van.