Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 404, June, 1849

"He whom you call your sovereign is a monk who has usurped the crown," said Shusky to the officer.

"He is the son of the Czarina Mary," was the reply.

"The Czarina herself declares him an impostor."

"Show me her written declaration to that effect, and I will give him up; but only on that condition."

Shusky ran to the convent where Mary lived in a kind of semi-captivity, told her what was passing, – that the capital was in his power, and that she could not now refuse to proclaim the imposture of the wretch who had compelled her to recognise him as her son. Mary yielded the more easily that her timorous conscience reproached her with the falsehood by which she had confirmed an adventurer in the imperial dignity; she signed and sealed the declaration demanded, and Shusky hastened with it to the officer of Strelitz. Otrepief was given up. Shusky assembled some boyarins and formed a tribunal, of which he himself was president, and before which the Czar, thus rapidly cast down from the throne to which his address and courage had elevated him, was forthwith arraigned.

"The hour of expiation is come," said Shusky. "The head you so barbarously mutilated has never ceased to ponder vengeance. Monk Otrepief, confess yourself an impostor, that God, before whom you are about to appear, may have pity on your soul."

"I am the Czar Demetrius," replied Otrepief, with much assurance: "it is not the first time that rebellious subjects, led astray by traitors, have dared lay hands on the sacred person of their sovereign; but such crimes never remain unpunished."

"You would gain time," replied Shusky; "but you will not succeed; the Czarina Mary's declaration is sufficient for us to decide upon your fate, and, so doing, we doom you to die."

Thereupon four men seized the culprit and pushed him against a wall; two others, armed with muskets, went close up to him and shot him. He struggled an instant, and then expired. His corpse, dragged by the mob to the place of common execution, was there abandoned with outrage and mutilation. His death was the signal for the massacre of the Poles, whom Otrepief had always favoured, affecting their manners, and selecting them for his body-guard. Moscow just then contained a great number of those foreigners; for Marina, daughter of the voevóda of Sandomir, had arrived a few days before for her nuptials with the Czar, and had been closely followed by the King of Poland's ambassadors, with an armed and numerous suite. After an orgie at the palace, the Poles had committed various excesses, beating peaceable citizens and outraging women, which had greatly exasperated the people. Besides this, their religion rendered them odious; and scarcely had the false Demetrius fallen when the Russian priests and monks raised the cry of massacre. With shouts of "Down with the Pope!" and "Death to the heretics!" they spread through the city, pointing out to the people the dwellings of the Poles, whose doors were already marked by the conspirators. It was a St Bartholomew on a small scale. Blood flowed for six hours in the streets of Moscow: more than a thousand Poles were slaughtered; and, when the work was done, the murderers repaired to the churches to thank God for the success of their enterprise. Shusky was proclaimed Czar by the will of the people, which, at that moment, it would not have been safe to thwart.

The brilliant success of one impostor, temporary though it had proved, soon raised up others. Shusky was no sooner on the throne than the report spread that Czar Demetrius had not been shot – that a faithful adherent had suffered death in his stead. And a runaway serf, Ivan Bolotnikof by name, undertook to personate the defunct impostor. But although he collected a sort of army of Strelitz, Cossacks, and peasants, glad of any pretext for pillage, and although he was recognised by two powerful princes, one of whom, strange to say, was his former owner, Prince Téliatevski, his abilities and his success were alike far inferior to those of Otrepief. Astracan and several other towns revolted in his favour; but Shusky marched against him, won a battle, in which Téliatevski was killed, and besieged Toula, in which Bolotnikof and the other chiefs of the revolt had shut themselves up. "The besieged," says M. Blanc, "defended themselves vigorously"; but Shusky, by the advice of a child, who was assuredly born with the genius of destruction, stopped the course of the Oupa, by means of a dike made below the town, through which the river flowed. The topographical position of the town was such that in a few hours it was completely under water. Many of the inhabitants were drowned; defence became impossible; and Bolotnikof, seized by his mutinous followers, was given up to Shusky. This second false Demetrius was forthwith shot; but his fate did not discourage a third impostor, who, like his predecessor, commanded armies, but never reached the throne. From first to last, no less than seven candidates appeared for the name and birthright of Ivan's murdered son. Three of them were promptly crushed; the seventh audaciously asserted that he united in his person not only the true Demetrius, whom Godunof had assassinated, but also the one whom Shusky had dragged from the throne, and two of the subsequent impostors. This was rather a strong dose even for Cossacks to swallow; but these gentlemen rejoiced at the prospect of booty, affected to credit the tale, and bore the pretender's banner to within a short distance of Moscow. There his career terminated. A Cossack chief, who had often seen Otrepief, finding himself in the presence of the seventh Demetrius, declared aloud that he was not the Czar he had served, arrested the impostor with his own hand, and hung him on a neighbouring tree.

The annals of this period of Russian history are painful from the atrocities they record; and M. Blanc is prodigal of horrors. The interval of a quarter of a century between the extinction of the line of Rurik and the accession of the Romanoff dynasty, still paramount in Russia, was occupied by constant struggles between usurpers and pretenders, none of whom dreamed of a milder fate than death for the foe who fell into their hands. And happy was the vanquished chief who escaped with a prompt and merciful death by axe or bullet. The most hideous tortures were put in practice, either for the extortion of confessions, or for the gratification of malice. Even Shusky, whom we have shown enduring with noble fortitude the agonising pressure of the iron crown, learned not mercy from suffering. His treatment of an enthusiastic boyarin, sent by the third false Demetrius to summon him to vacate the throne, was such as Red Indians or Spanish inquisitors might have shuddered to witness. It is recorded, in all its horrible details, at page 52 of the Histoire des Conspirations, &c. The torture of individuals, which was of frequent occurrence, was varied from time to time by the massacre of multitudes. We have mentioned that of the Poles. In 1611, after Shusky's dethronement, it was the turn of the Muscovites. The Poles having seized Moscow, insisted that Vladislaus, son of the King of Poland, should be elected Czar. The nobles consented, but the patriarch steadily refused his consent; and, by the law of the land, his opposition nullified the election. Thereupon the Poles ran riot in the city, plundering, murdering, and ravishing; and at last, unsheathing the sword for a general slaughter, twenty thousand men, women, and children fell in one day beneath the murderous steel. A Muscovite army then closely blockaded the place: and the Poles were reduced to the greatest extremity of famine. They at last surrendered on condition of their lives being spared, notwithstanding which compact many were massacred by the Cossacks. "And yet," says M. Blanc, "the aspect of the town was well calculated to excite compassion rather than hatred. In the streets the cadaverous and emaciated inhabitants looked like spectres; in the houses were the remains of unclean animals, fragments of repasts horrible to imagine; and what is still more frightful, perhaps unprecedented, salting tubs were found, filled with human flesh."

It was under the reign of Alexis, the second Romanoff and father of Peter the Great, that there appeared in Russia the most extraordinary robber the world ever saw. He claimed not to be a Czar or the son of a Czar; the Demetrius mask was out of date, and one real and another pretended son of Otrepief and Marina had been executed by order of Alexis. The new adventurer was a common Cossack from the Don, who went by his own name of Stenka Razin, and to whom M. Blanc attributes, perhaps with a little exaggeration, the ambition, courage, and ferocity of a Tamerlane. In those days the Russian territory was by no means free from robbers, who pillaged caravans of merchandise, but generally respected the property of the Czar and the principal nobles, lest they should make themselves powerful enemies. Razin's first act was to throw down the glove to his sovereign. He seized a convoy belonging to the court, and hung some gentlemen who endeavoured to defend it. The fame of his intrepidity and success brought him many followers, and soon he was at the head of an army. "He embarked on the Caspian Sea, and cruised along its shores, frequently landing and seizing immense booty. At the mouth of the Yaik he was met by an officer of the Czar's, sent by the voevóda of Astracan to offer him and his companions a free pardon on condition of their discontinuing their robberies. Razin replied that he was no robber, but a conqueror; that he made war, and suffered none to fail in respect towards him. And to prove his words, he hung the officer, and drowned the men of his escort. A numerous body of Strelitz was then sent against him. Razin beat the Strelitz, seized the town of Yatskoi, massacred the garrison and the inhabitants, and passed the winter there unmolested. In the spring he marched into Persia." There he accumulated immense booty, but was at last expelled by a general rising of the population. On his return to Russia he was soon surrounded by troops; but even then, such was the terror of his name, the Russian general granted him a capitulation, by which he and his men were permitted to retire to their native provinces, taking their plunder with them; and their security was guaranteed so long as they abstained from aggression. This scandalous convention was ratified by Alexis, but was not long adhered to by the bandit with whom the Czar thus meanly condescended to treat as an equal. Stenka's next campaign was even more successful than the previous one. Bodies of troops deserted to him, and several towns fell into his power; amongst others, that of Astracan, where frightful scenes of violence and murder were enacted – Razin himself parading the streets, intoxicated with brandy, and stabbing all he met. He was marching upon Moscow, with the avowed intention of dethroning the Czar, when he sustained a reverse, and, after fighting like a lion, was made prisoner, and sent in fetters to the city he had expected to enter in triumph. Taken before Alexis, he replied boldly and haughtily to the Czar's reproaches and threats. The only anxiety he showed was to know what manner of death he was to suffer. He had heard that, in the previous year, an obscure robber and assassin, who pillaged convents and churches, had been cut into pieces of half a finger's breadth, beginning at the toes. This barbarous punishment, of which several instances are cited in M. Blanc's book, was known as the "torture of the ten thousand pieces." "But," exclaimed Stenka Razin, with a sort of terror, so horrible did this death appear to him, "I am no robber of monks! I have commanded armies. I have made peace with the Czar, therefore I had a right to make war upon him. Is there not a man amongst you brave enough to split my head with a hatchet?" The Strelitz guards, to whom these words were addressed, refused the friendly office, and Razin heard himself condemned to be quartered alive. He seemed resigned, as if he considered this death an endurable medium between the decapitation he had implored of his judges and the barbarous mincing he had been led to expect. But his energy forsook him on the scaffold, and the man who had so often confronted and inflicted death, received it in a swooning state.

The characters of few sovereigns admit of being judged more variously than that of Peter I. of Russia, surnamed the Great. According to the point of view whence we contemplate him, we behold the hero or the savage; the wise legislator or the lawless tyrant; the patient pursuer of science or the dissolute and heartless debauchee. In the long chapter given to his romantic and eventful reign, M. Blanc shows him little favour. In a work treating of conspiracies and executions, the characters of the sovereigns introduced are naturally not exhibited under their most amiable aspect, especially when those sovereigns are Russian czars and czarinas, to whom lenity has generally been less familiar than severity, and pardon than punishment. The pen of Voltaire has done much for the reputation of Peter the Great, who to us has always appeared an overrated personage. Historians have vaunted his exploits and good deeds, till his crimes and barbarities have been lost sight of in the glitter of panegyric. The monarch who could debase himself to the level of an executioner, beheading his rebel subjects with his own hand, and feasting his eyes with the spectacle of death when he himself was weary of slaying; who could condemn his wife, repudiated without cause, to the frightful torture of the knout, and sign the order, which it is more than suspected he himself executed, for the death of his own son – may have been great as a warrior and a legislator, but must ever be execrated as a man. Peter was certainly an extraordinary compound of vices and virtues. His domestic life will not bear even the most superficial investigation, and M. Blanc has ripped it up unmercifully. The great reformer – we might almost say the founder – of the mighty empire of Russia, the conqueror of Charles of Sweden, was a drunkard and gross sensualist, a bad father, a cruel and unfaithful husband. Indeed some of his acts seem inexplicable otherwise than by that ferocious insanity manifest in more than one of his descendants. Even his rare impulses of mercy were apt to come too late to save the victim. As illustrating one of them, an incident, nearly the last event of Peter's life, is given by M. Blanc, in more minute detail than we ever before met with it. Peter's whole life was a romance; but this is assuredly one of its most romantic episodes. A short time before his death, according to M. Blanc, although other writers fix the date some years earlier, Peter was violently smitten by the charms of a young girl named Ivanowa. Although tenderly attached, and about to be married to an officer of the regiment of Schouvaloff, she dared not oppose the Czar's wishes, but became his mistress. Peter, who took her repugnance for timidity, fancied himself beloved, and passed much of his time in her society, in a charming cottage in which he had installed her at one of the extremities of St Petersburg. He had enriched her family, who were ignorant, however, of her retreat. Her betrothed, whose name was Demetrius Daniloff, was in despair at her disappearance, and made unceasing efforts to discover her, but all in vain, until Ivanowa, having made a confidant of a Livonian slave, had him conducted to her presence. The lovers' meetings were then frequent, so much so, that Peter received intelligence of them. "His anger was terrible; he roared like a tiger.

'Betrayed! betrayed everywhere and always!' cried he, striding wildly about the room, and striking his brow with his clenched fist. 'Oh! revenge! revenge!'

Before the close of day he left the palace, alone, wrapped in a coarse cloak, his feet in nailed shoes whose patches attested their long services, his head covered with a fox-skin cap which came down over his eyebrows and half concealed his eyes. He soon reached Ivanowa's house, where the lovers deemed themselves perfectly secure, for the Czar had spread a report of his departure for Moscow. Moreover, the faithful Livonian slave kept watch in the antechamber, to give an alarm at the least noise. Peter knew all this, and had taken his measures accordingly. Opening an outer door with a key of his own, he bounded into the anteroom, upset the slave, and, with a kick of his powerful foot, burst the door that separated him from the lovers. All this occurred with the speed of lightning. Daniloff and Ivanowa had scarce time to rise from their seats, before the Czar stood over them with his drawn sword in his hand. Ivanowa uttered a cry of terror, fell on her knees, and fainted. Prompt as the Czar, Daniloff bared his sabre and threw himself between his mistress and Peter. The latter lowered his weapon.

'No,' he said, 'the revenge were too brief.'

He opened a window and cried hourra! At the signal, a hundred soldiers crowded into the house. Mastering his fury, the Czar ordered the young officer to be taken to prison, there to receive one hundred blows of the battogues or sticks. Ivanowa was also confined until the senate should decide on her fate. The next day Daniloff received his terrible punishment. Before half of it had been inflicted, his back, from, the loins to the shoulders, was one hideous wound," &c. &c. We omit the revolting details. "Nevertheless the executioners continued to strike, and the hundred blows were counted, without a complaint from the sufferer. The unfortunate Daniloff had not even fainted; he got up alone,5 when untied, and asked to have his wounds carefully dressed.

'I have need to live a short time longer,' he added."

Meanwhile Ivanowa was brought before the senate, and accused of high treason and of trying to discover state secrets – a charge of Peter's invention. The supple senate, created by the Czar, condemned her to receive twenty-two blows of the knout in the presence of her accomplice Daniloff, already punished by the emperor's order. On the day appointed for the execution, Peter stood upon the balcony of his winter palace. Several battalions of infantry marched past, escorting the unfortunate Demetrius, who, in spite of the frightful sufferings he still endured, walked with a steady step, and with a firm and even joyful countenance. Surrounded by another escort, was seen the young and lovely Ivanowa, half dead with terror, supported on one side by a priest and on the other by a soldier, and letting her beautiful head fall from one shoulder to the other, according to the impulse given it by her painful progress. Even Peter's heart melted at the sight. Re-entering his apartment, he put on the ribbon of the order of St Andrew, threw a cloak over his shoulders, left the palace, sprang into a boat, and reached the opposite side of the river at the same time as the mournful procession which had crossed the bridge. Making his way through the crowd, he dropped his cloak, took Ivanowa in his arms, and imprinted a kiss upon her brow. A murmur arose amongst the people, and suddenly cries of "pardon" were heard.

The knights of St Andrew then enjoyed the singular privilege that a kiss given by them to a condemned person, deprived the executioner of his victim. This privilege has endured even to our day, but not without some modification.

Daniloff had recognised Peter. He approached the Czar, whose every movement he had anxiously watched, stripped off his coat, and rent the bloody shirt that covered his shoulders.

"'The man who could suffer thus,' he said, 'knows how to die. Czar, thy repentance comes too late! Ivanowa, I go to wait for thee!' And drawing a concealed poniard, he stabbed himself twice. His death was instantaneous. Peter hurried back to his palace, and the stupified, crowd slowly dispersed. Ivanowa died shortly afterwards in the convent to which she had been permitted to retire."

If we are frequently shocked, in the course of M. Blanc's third volume, by the tyrannical and brutal cruelty of the Russian sovereigns, we are also repeatedly disgusted by the servility and patient meanness of those who suffered from it. We behold Muscovite nobles of high rank and descent, cringing under the wanton torments inflicted on them by their oppressor, and submitting to degradations to which death, one would imagine, were, to any free-spirited man, fifty times preferable. As an example, we will cite the conduct of a Prince Galitzin, who, after long exile in Germany, where he had become a convert to the Romish church, solicited and obtained permission to return to his country. This was in 1740, under the reign of the dissolute and cruel Czarina Anne. The paramours and flatterers who composed the court of that licentious princess, urged her to inflict on the new-made papist the same punishment that had been suffered by a noble named Vonitzin, who had turned Jew, and had been burned alive, or rather roasted at a slow fire. Anne refused, but promised the courtiers they should not be deprived of their sport.

"The same day, Galitzin, although upwards of forty years old, was ordered to take his place amongst the pages: a few days later he received a notification that the empress, contented with his services, had been pleased to raise him to the dignity of her third buffoon. 'The custom of buffoons,' says an historian, 'was then in full force in Russia; the empress had six, three of whom were of very high birth, and when they did not lend themselves with a good grace to the tomfooleries required of them by her or her favourites, she had them punished with the battogues.' The empress appeared well satisfied with the manner in which the prince fulfilled his new duties; and, as he was a widower, she declared she would find him a wife, that so valuable a subject might not die without posterity. They selected, for the poor wretch's bride, the most hideous and disgusting creature that could be found in the lowest ranks of the populace. Anne herself arranged the ceremonial of the wedding. It was in the depth of one of the severest winters of the century; and, at great expense, the empress had a palace built of ice. Not only was the building entirely constructed of that material, but all the furniture, including the nuptial bed, was also of ice. In front of the palace were ice cannons, mounted on ice carriages.

Anne and all her court conducted the newly-married pair to this palace, their destined habitation. The guests were in sledges drawn by dogs and reindeer; the husband and wife, enclosed in a cage, were carried on an elephant. When the procession arrived near the palace, the ice cannons were fired, and not one of them burst, so intense was the cold. Several of them were even loaded with bullets, which pierced thick planks at a considerable distance. When everybody had entered the singular edifice, the ball began. It probably did not last long. On its conclusion, Anne insisted on the bride and bridegroom being put to bed in her presence: they were undressed, with the exception of their under garments, and were compelled to lie down upon the bed of ice, without covering of any kind. Then the company went away, and sentinels were placed at the door of the nuptial chamber, to prevent the couple from leaving it before the next day! But when the next day came, they had to be carried out; the poor creatures were in a deplorable state, and survived their torture but a few days."

This patient submission to a long series of indignities on the part of a man of Galitzin's rank and blood is incomprehensible, and pity for his cruel death is mingled with contempt for the elderly prince who could tamely play the page, and caper in the garb of a court jester. But the Russian noble of that day – and even of a later period – united the soul of a slave with the heart of a tyrant. To the feeble a relentless tiger, before the despot or the despot's favourite he grovelled like a spiritless cur. The memoirs of the eighteenth century abound in examples of his base servility. We cite one, out of many which we find recorded in an interesting Life of Catherine II. of Russia, published at Paris in 1797. Plato Zouboff, one of Catherine's favourite lovers, had a little monkey, a restless, troublesome beast, which everybody detested, but which everybody caressed, by way of paying court to its master. Amongst the host of ministers, military men, and ambassadors, who sedulously attended the levees of the powerful favourite, was a general officer, remarkable for the perfection and care with which his hair was dressed. One day the monkey climbed upon his head, and, after completely destroying the symmetry of his hyacinthine locks, deliberately defiled them. The officer dared not show the slightest discontent. There are not wanting, however, in the history of the eighteenth century, instances of heroism and courage to contrast with the far more numerous ones of vileness afforded by the aristocracy of Russia. The dignity and fortitude of Menzikoff – that pastrycook's boy who became a great minister – during his terrible exile in Siberia, are an oft-told tale. Prince Dolgorouki, the same to whom Anne owed her crown, and whom she requited by a barbarous death, beheld his son, brother, and nephew broken on the wheel. When his turn came, and the executioners were arranging him suitably upon the instrument of torture: "Do as you please with me," he said, "and without fear of loading your consciences, for it is not in human power to increase my sufferings." And he died without uttering a complaint. But perhaps the most extraordinary instance of coolness and self command, at the moment of a violent and cruel death, to be found in the annals of executions, is that of Pugatscheff, who, however, was no nobleman, but a Cossack of humble birth, who deserted from the Russian army after the siege and capture of Bender by General Panim, and fled to Poland, where he was concealed for a time by hermits of the Greek church. "Conversing one day with his protectors," says a French writer already referred to, "he told them, that once, during his service in General Panim's army, a Russian officer said to him, after staring him very hard in the face, 'If the emperor Peter III., my master, were not dead, I should think I now stood before him.' The hermits paid little attention to this tale; but some time afterwards one of their number, who had not yet met Pugatscheff, exclaimed, on beholding him, 'Is not that the emperor, Peter III.?' The monks then induced him to attempt an imposture they had planned." M. Blanc's account differs from this, inasmuch as it asserts the resemblance to the defunct Czar to have been very slight. Whatever the degree of likeness, Pugatscheff declared himself the husband of Catherine II. (murdered some time previously, by Prince Bariatinski and by Alexis Orloff, the brother of Catherine's lover), and thousands credited his pretensions. The Cossacks of the river Yaik (afterwards changed to the Ural by Catherine, who desired to obliterate the memory of this revolt) were just then in exceedingly bad humour. After patiently submitting to a great deal of oppression and ill usage, they had received orders to cut off their beards. This they would not do. They had relinquished, grumbling but passive, many a fair acre of pasturage; they had furnished men for a new regiment of hussars; but they rebelled outright when ordered to use a razor. The Livonian general, Traubenberg, repaired to Yaitsk with a strong staff of barbers, and began shaving the refractory Cossacks on the public market-place. The patients rose in arms, massacred general, barbers, and aide-de-camps; recognised Pugatscheff as Peter III., and swore to replace him on his throne, and to die in his defence. The adventurer was near being as successful as the monk Otrepief. Catherine herself was very uneasy, although she published contemptuous proclamations, and jested, in her letters to Voltaire, on the Marquis of Pugatscheff, as she called him. It was rather a serious subject to joke about. The impostor defeated Russian armies, and slew their generals; took towns, whose governors he impaled; burned upwards of two hundred and fifty villages; destroyed the commerce of Siberia; stopped the working of the Orenberg mines; and poured out the blood of thirty thousand Russian subjects. At last he was taken. On his trial he showed great firmness; and, although unable to read or write, he answered the questions of the tribunal with wonderful ability and intelligence. He was condemned to death. According to the sentence, his hands were to be cut off first, then his feet, then his head, and finally the trunk was to be quartered. When brought upon the scaffold, and whilst the imperial ukase enumerating his crimes was read, he undressed quickly and in silence; but when they began to read the sentence, he dexterously prevented the executioner from attending to it, by asking him all manner of questions – whether his axe was in good order, whether the block was not of a less size than prescribed by law, and whether he, the executioner, had not, by chance, drank more brandy than usual, which might make his hand unsteady.