The Russian Album (9 page)

Ignatieff put his signature to the Law on Extraordinary and Temporary Measures, which gave provincial governors the power to suspend normal legal procedure and individual civil rights wherever a strike, an attack or a riot required it. The decree also empowered the government to hand suspects over to summary courts martial, to order house arrests and domestic searches, and to outlaw any meetings, close any institution, or suspend any newspaper as it saw fit. Until 1917, these measures were to remain the key statutes of the autocracy, its chief legal weapon in its losing struggle for survival. It was from their heavy hand that the young Lenin and Stalin were to acquire their contempt for legality and due process.

Ignatieff also balanced repression with reform. He agreed on a plan with the representatives of local government, the
zemstvos,
to reduce the head taxes and redemption payments which had burdened the peasantry since Emancipation and to establish an agricultural bank to assist wealthier peasants to consolidate their holdings.

As Minister of the Interior, he was in charge not only of the great lines of domestic policy – the repression of the terrorists and the building of support among the peasantry – but also of the grinding minutiae of an overcentralized imperial bureaucracy. Everything came across his desk, from the issuing of passports to the regulation of veterinary surgeons. He was incapable of delegation and an omnivorous devourer of dossiers. Followed by a posse of note-taking assistants, he made the rounds of the assembly room outside his office every morning at eleven, listening personally to requests for pensions, concessions, clemency and jobs, dispensing rewards and punishments like an Asiatic grandee. The crazed and the discontented found their way to his office too, and in November, he had to duck when an assassin took aim at him. The bullet missed and killed his assistant instead.

Young Paul saw next to nothing of his father in that frantic year at the Ministry of the Interior. They lived in the family house at the junction of the Moika and Fontanka canals in a Petersburg gripped by rumours and plots and policed by soldiers at every corner. Paul was eleven that winter, just beginning his lessons at the gymnasium. One cold November afternoon, he was returning home from school in a little horse-drawn sleigh when he noticed that the Troitski Bridge, usually thronged with the carriages of the gentry and workers streaming home on foot, was strangely deserted. The police waved him onto the empty bridge and he began to cross. Halfway across, a magnificent carriage overtook him, and he just had time to spring to his feet and snap to attention as the imperial couple rolled past. The Tsarina smiled broadly at the little boy's frozen salute, but the Tsar was not amused. At his next meeting with his Minister of the Interior, he was not entirely mollified when told that the boy on the bridge had been the minister's son.

By the winter of 1882, Paul's father was at the pinnacle of his influence, the master of a vast apparatus of governors, spies, police agents and informers, the Tsar's chief source of information on the fevered state of his dominions. The immediate crisis of the autocracy seemed over. There were still some peasant pogroms against Jewish merchants in the southern provinces, but since these posed no direct threat to the regime itself, and since the peasants' grievances at Jewish millers, traders, bankers and merchants in the towns found sympathy in anti-Semitic ruling circles, the local police were less than assiduous in putting a stop to them.

Throughout the southern Ukraine and Bessarabia, Jewish shops were smashed and burned and crowds carrying icons, sometimes with priests at their head, were allowed to rampage through the Jewish quarters of the towns beating and cursing, looting and burning. Delegations of Jewish leaders came to see Ignatieff at the Ministry of the Interior. They told him they were in bondage as under Pharaoh. ‘So when is your Exodus, and where is your Moses,' he is supposed to have asked them in reply. The western borders of the empire were open, he insisted. If they wanted to leave for their promised land, he would not stop them. And they did, by the hundreds of thousands over the next decade, streaming across Europe to the boats which took them to Ellis Island or to Palestine.

When the Jews asked why they were not entitled to the same protection by the police as other Russian subjects, Ignatieff replied that they were not like other Russian subjects. In May 1882, he signed new legislation forbidding Jews to move into the countryside outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, to acquire land, to trade in alcohol, or to open their shops on Sundays. When Jewish leaders came to him and protested, pointing out that the measures reversed the slow, incremental liberalization of restrictions on Jews introduced by Tsar Alexander II during the 1860s, Ignatieff insisted that he had taken the new measures to ‘protect' the Jews from peasant pogroms in the countryside. To the Tsar himself, Ignatieff justified the decrees with memos that painted a familiar fantasy of a Jewish–Polish conspiracy with its hands on ‘the banks, the stock exchange, the bar, and a great part of the press', a conspiracy that plundered the state treasury and preached ‘blind imitation of Europe'. The new legislation would remove ‘the abnormal conditions which exist between Jews and natives and protect the latter from the pernicious activity … which was responsible for the disturbances'.

This was the dark side of Ignatieff's pan-Slavism, the unacceptable face of the Orthodox nationalism that had made him an empire builder in Asia and a supporter of the Slavic Christian cause against the Turks. He gave respectability to the prejudices of his time and class, hoping that he could build himself an unassailable position with the Tsar in a Petersburg milieu seething with intrigues against him. But by May 1882 it became more and more difficult to keep his balance in the infighting of the court. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Tsar's former tutor and chief confidant, once Ignatieff's champion, became jealous of his influence and began to plot his downfall, scheming openly with the prefect of the Petersburg police. The Tsar himself, large, cautious and stupid, became resentful of the elegant verbal turns of a minister who seemed to think of himself as the autocracy's saviour.

Sensing that his time might be running out, Ignatieff chanced everything on a final throw of the dice. He drafted a statute for the convocation of a
zemski sobor,
an assembly which would bring together representatives from the peasantry, the merchant guilds and the landed proprietors to listen obediently to the Tsar's plans for his empire, to offer respectful advice and to join with him in healing the rift between the autocracy and society. It was not to be a parliament with legislative or deliberative powers. Ignatieff shared the Slavophile suspicion of European democracy, with its unseemly popular clamours and open political discussion. Instead, the convocation of the
zemski sobor
was conceived of as a romantic gesture of political reconciliation, an attempt to meet the universal demand for political renewal by bringing back the good old days when Muscovite tsars met their boyars in a
zemski sobor
upon their coronation.

Ignatieff begged the Tsar to keep his plans secret from Pobedonostsev and the court clique plotting against him. But when he came to the Cabinet room to discuss his proposals one May morning in 1882, he found a draft of the document open before every place and understood from the triumphant looks of Pobedonostsev and his clique that the game was up. When the Tsar asked him to begin discussion of the document, Ignatieff rose and left the room. He was never to return. At exactly fifty years of age, on the eve of an action that he believed would save the autocracy, he was dismissed by the Tsar and sent packing to his estates.

For a man whose blood needed the oxygen of power, banishment was like a stroke. It aged him overnight. For a decade more, he schemed and struggled to return to the centre of power. He sat in his study with his Khivan swords, his Chinese silks and the portrait of William Ewart Gladstone and wrote up his memoirs of his Asian adventures and long defences of his achievements in Constantinople. He gave interviews to foreign journalists and used their columns shamelessly to promote his own return to power. The Slavonic Society made him president of their association and they provided him with a platform for orotund addresses. Afterwards they always carried him shoulder high to his carriage. But he was not fooled. By 1890, he knew he was finished.

In his feverish way, he turned some of his vagrant energies loose upon his children. He was a disciplinarian in the home and banned cards, liquor, swearing and cigarettes. His son Paul remembered the night in his teens when two grand dukes came to a dance at the family house and set out after dinner to test his father's insistence that no pack of cards was to be found in the place. The dukes set off down the dark servants' passage, rummaging through closets, opening doors, peeking into darkened rooms. Monsieur Castellot went into a boxer's crouch when they burst into his bedroom and they backed away down the passage. Eventually they found a greasy old deck in a janitor's office across the courtyard and returned triumphantly to the drawing room, one of them holding it between thumb and finger.

Paul's father enforced a spartan regime on his children: Bible lessons with his mother, lean food, cold baths, riding, fencing, and cold winter walks in the streets of Petersburg to build up the legs and the lungs. Paul became so cold on one of these enforced winter outings that Monsieur Castellot had to pick him up, bundle him inside his coat and carry him all the way home.

Paul was an anxious, sickly child, given to asthma attacks, gastric pains and the occasional dead faint. He had learned to sail during summers on the Bosphorus and in the Crimea and had wanted to take up a career in the navy, but his father gruffly ruled out a sea career on the grounds that his constitution would not stand it.

Seen in the glare of Freudian retrospect, Paul's adolescent symptoms – the shortness of breath, the fainting – seem to be his body's protest at his father's suffocating presence. For the father was an awesome figure and the stories he now told in peevish middle age were of just the kind to reduce a loving son to suffocated silence: how he had ridden across Asia in six weeks, how he had bested Bismarck, dined with Disraeli. Hemmed in on the one side by older brothers who were beginning their careers in the Guards, and on the other by this father whose relentless energy seemed to mock his own quieter, more reflective disposition, Paul grew into his teens an anxious, earnest boy, happiest in the estate in the Ukraine, away from the pressures of his lessons, society dances and his father.

Paul's mother was a warmer presence, but she too was a formidable figure. Her children were never allowed to forget that she was Marshal Kutuzov's great-granddaughter. Characteristically, Paul's strongest memory of her from childhood was of her on a horse. During the summers at Kroupodernitsa, whenever she announced that she wished to go riding, Paul would race down to the stables to help the grooms saddle up her favourite bay, Djirid. He helped the grooms saddle-train the horse, riding side-saddle with rags tied to his belt to accustom the animal to the rustle of her riding costume against its flanks. He always remembered how she strode up to the horse in her riding costume, whip in hand, placed her boot in the cupped hands of the coachman and gracefully vaulted up into the saddle. In his earliest memory, she is seated daintily on her side-saddle, whip in hand, looking down at him with tender amusement.

During his first term at the law faculty in Petersburg Paul came down with an asthma attack which forced him to withdraw. It occurred again when he enrolled in the second year. It was as if his breath failed him scaling the heights set out for him by his father. In November 1889, the family despatched him to Paris, to the clinic of Europe's leading specialist in nervous diseases, Jean-Martin Charcot. ‘
La chose génitale, toujours, toujours!
', Sigmund Freud remembered Charcot muttering during a consultation on the causes of hysteria in women at the Salpêtrière Hospital. There were male hysterics as well, and it is possible that some part of Paul's symptoms was hysterical. In any event, for six months Paul, then nineteen, lived in Charcot's rest home in Passy. For company he had his old tutor Monsieur Castellot, himself recovering from a buckshot wound in his backside incurred while out on one of his hunting expeditions. They went to the theatre at night and by day followed the regime of plain food, bed rest and quiet walks designed to calm the nervous system. But when Paul took his leave in the spring of 1890, Charcot examined him and confessed that he had only managed a partial cure. ‘Spasmodic symptoms', he warned, were bound to recur. Stay away from Petersburg and all city excitements, he ordered. Bury yourself in the country.

Paul did exactly that. He rented one of his father's dilapidated estates near Kroupodernitsa and after purchasing some worn-out nags and second-hand machinery, he hired some local peasants to plant him his first crop. The beasts rolled over and went to sleep at the end of the furrows and had to be beaten to their feet, and the first crop that spring was miserable, but he persevered and by the end of the next year, he could reasonably claim to have made himself into a gentleman farmer. He lived like this for several years, wintering in Petersburg to complete his law studies, and then spending spring and summer at the estate, often working side by side with his hired hands in the fields.

He had discovered Tolstoy during those winter months in the rest home in Passy. When the Tolstoyan impulse of getting back to the people was fused with the pan-Slavist nostalgia for the peasantry he had inherited from his father, the result was a new set of convictions that were to remain with him all his life. Russian society was sick with the divide between aristocrat and peasant, and the Russian aristocrat himself was sick from his fatal divorce from the soil. Paul's father at first approved these sentiments but eventually became alarmed at how far his son seemed prepared to take them. Actually guiding a plough through the furrows side by side with his peasant employees seemed to be carrying conviction too far.