Russka

by Edward Rutherfurd

  ‘And that’s only the start,’ Sergei assured her. ‘When Russia itself gets a new constitution, we shall be like Britain, or even America!’

  The enthusiastic claim was not as wild as it sounded. The enlightened Tsar Alexander had in fact sought the advice of English diplomats, and of President Jefferson of the United States, on how to devise a new government. Years ago, his talented minister Speransky had drawn up a proposal which included separated powers, an elected parliament – a duma – and even elected judges. Even now, an official group had started to prepare a plan for dividing Russia into twelve provinces which would each have considerable autonomy. True, the Tsar was enigmatic – one could not be sure quite where he stood. But then this was Russia, where all change was slow and difficult.

  ‘And what will your part be, Seriozha, in this wonderful new Russia?’ Olga asked.

  Oh, he knew that. He was certain about his own life. ‘I’m going to be a great writer,’ he said boldly.

  ‘Like your friend Pushkin?’

  ‘I hope so. Do you realize,’ he went on, enthusiastically, ‘that until the time of Catherine, Russian literature hardly existed! There was nothing but a lot of mouldy old psalms and sermons in Church Slavonic – the devil to understand. People like us wrote verse or plays in French. No one wrote a thing worth reading in actual Russian until Lomonosov, when Father was young, and dear old Derzhavin the poet, God bless him, who’s still with us. So you see,’ he exclaimed happily, ‘it’s for us to begin. No one can tell us what to do. You should hear Pushkin’s verse. It’s extraordinary.’

  Olga smiled. She loved to watch her brother and his enthusiasms. ‘You’ll have to work hard at it, Seriozha,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘Of course.’ He grinned. ‘And what are you going to do, when you get out of this convent-prison?’ he asked playfully.

  ‘Get married, of course.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘A handsome officer in the guards.’ She smiled. ‘Who writes poetry in Russian.’

  He nodded thoughtfully and then, to his surprise, felt sad. I wish I could be that man, he thought.

  Soon afterwards, it was time to go.

  The afternoon was drawing in when, tired but happy, Sergei returned the horse and walked the last half mile through the cold slush towards the school. No one was about; he slipped inside and made his way towards his quarters where his friends would be waiting. With luck he would not even have been missed. There was the door. He opened it. And started with surprise.

  The high room was empty, except for a single, tall, slim figure in riding boots and uniform who stood by the grey light of the window and who now slowly turned towards him.

  ‘Alexis!’ His heart gave a jump; a little wave of joy swept over him. ‘How long have you been here?’

  And then, suddenly, his smile faded.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Alexis’s voice was cold, cutting as a razor.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Liar! They’ve been searching the school for you for two hours.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Sergei hung his head. There was nothing he could say.

  ‘Being sorry is useless,’ Alexis said with a cold rage. ‘I came to see you as I happened to be here on business. While I’ve been waiting I have heard a good deal about you. You drew cartoons of the minister and you’re under threat of expulsion. I suppose you know that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I persuaded them not to expel you. You ought to be whipped. I offered to do it myself – for the family honour.’ He paused, waiting it seemed, for this last statement to have its full effect.

  What was it, at that moment, that prompted Sergei to say something that he didn’t even mean? Was it irritation with Alexis’s lecturing tone, the shock of being caught, the fear of his punishment or, perhaps, a sudden impulse to strike out because the brother he loved and worshipped was seemingly turning against him? Whatever the cause, he suddenly blurted out: ‘To hell with the family honour!’

  Alexis gasped. He had not gone to a school like this: he had gone, and as soon as he could, into his regiment. Service to the Tsar, family honour – these were his gods. He had no idea how it was possible for this boy to be so disloyal. Yet what was it that now made Alexis do the unforgivable? Was it a row he had had with a superior officer the day before and his fear for his own career? Was it a mistress who had dismissed him contemptuously the week before? Was it a streak of cruelty in his nature that secretly had been awaiting an excuse to inflict pain ever since, six months before, he had heard for the first time a certain piece of information in Moscow? Whichever of these, in a voice that was both icy and venomous he hissed: ‘That may be. But to me, to the rest of us, it matters a great deal. And kindly remember that, though you are not one of us, you still carry our name and we expect you to behave accordingly. Do you understand?’

  ‘What do you mean, not one of us?’

  ‘I mean, you brown-eyed little interloper, that you are not – to our parents’ shame – a Bobrov. But, because we do care about honour, we treat you as if you were.’ And then, as if it were a head cold that she had caught one day and lost: ‘At a time when she was lonely, our mother committed an indiscretion in Moscow. Long ago. It was over at once. Nobody knows. You don’t belong but we pretend you do. And since we have lent you our name, you will honour it.’ He paused. ‘If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, I will kill you.’

  Then, having wantonly destroyed his brother, he left.

  Later that night, finishing his letters home which, through cold tears, he found difficulty in seeing, Sergei wrote:

  I am very happy here at school, my dear

  parents. Today I saw Alexis, who is also well,

  and this, too, made me happy. Give my love to

  Arina and her little niece.

  He had always supposed his mother was perfect and that his parents loved him. Perhaps, if he was not a Bobrov, if he was unwanted, it scarcely mattered what he did with his life.

  1822, January

  Tatiana gazed round the little market place. For the first time after a month of dull days the morning sky was clear and all around Russka the snow was shining. Savva the serf was about to get into his sled. He was returning to Moscow. How smart he looked in his new coat. He turned and made her a low bow, and she smiled.

  For they shared a secret.

  Though Russka was quiet that morning, there were many indications that nowadays it was a busier place than before. True, the walls frowning from the high river bank were still as stout as in the time of Ivan the Terrible; the tall, forbidding watchtower with its steep tent roof still rose into the sky; but within the walls there were two wide streets of wooden houses on each side of the market, intersected by three more. Behind the church, there was now a broad avenue with rows of trees down the centre and on one side three neat stone merchants’ houses, with classical features. At the end of this avenue was a small park, and past that the old fortification wall had been lowered and a small esplanade laid out with a pleasant view over the river and the surrounding countryside. Outside the walls, on the side away from the river, the scattered huts and smallholdings had grouped themselves into several lanes which petered out into fields about a quarter of a mile away. The total population was about two thousand. In short, though certainly not the city designated by Catherine, Russka had still managed to assume the character of a small town.

  Dear Savva: how close they had grown in the last four years. She was rather lonely sometimes. Alexander had become sick and this had made him rather uncommunicative. Sergei was employed in the Foreign Ministry nowadays, which kept him busy in St Petersburg and Moscow. Olga had recently married a handsome young guards officer with an estate near Smolensk, so she was absent. And Alexis, now married, had been posted down to the Black Sea, at the great port of Odessa. The previous month he had had a son, whom he had named Mikhail. But it might be years before Tatiana saw her first grandchild. So there’s only Ilya and me, really, she thought s
adly. And though Ilya was at home, his large, placid head was usually in a book; one couldn’t talk to him about anything practical.

  But Savva and his father were practical: that was what she liked about them. They ran two little factories in Russka now, each employing a dozen people. One wove woollen cloth, the other linen. And the two men were so well organized that they still had time to spare. Indeed, the previous year she had persuaded her husband to let Savva’s father go down to supervise the Riazan estate – with the result that its revenues immediately rose sharply. She often went into Russka to watch the Suvorins’ activities and talk to Savva about his business.

  And it was these talks that had first led to a great realization, and her present secret plan.

  For – though one would never have guessed it in the country houses of the gentry – Russia was slowly changing; and the change was taking place in the very region in which she lived.

  There had always been several sources of wealth in Russia. The salt beds and the furs in the huge northern wilderness, which had once made the merchants of ancient Novgorod rich; the wonderful black earth, the chernozem, of the warm Ukraine; and since the time of Ivan the Terrible there had gradually been added the minerals of the Ural Mountains, far to the east, and some very modest trade from the huge, barely colonized wastes of Siberia that lay beyond.

  Yet it was here, in the old Russian heartland around Moscow, where the weather was terrible and the land was poor, that the greatest strides were now being made. For here was the home of Russian manufacturing. Leather goods, metalwork, icon painting, cloth, linen, the printing of silks imported from the east, and most recently, cotton manufacture: these were light industries that could be set up in town or village. Then there were the old ironworks at Tula and the huge armaments factories of Moscow. The greatest market for iron, as well as many other commodities, lay only a few days to the east, where the Volga and the Oka met at the ancient frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod. In Catherine’s reign, an enterprising merchant family had even set up a glass factory in a village not twenty miles away from Russka. And above all, the provincial capital city of Vladimir, with a new industrial town called Ivanovo to the north of it, was becoming a huge new centre of the textile business.

  By the standards of western Europe this new industrial and commercial activity was unimpressive. Under five per cent of Russians lived in towns, against twenty per cent in France and over thirty in England. But it was a beginning.

  And to Tatiana, the more she understood it, the more exciting it became. Often Savva would remark to her: ‘Ah, Tatiana Ivanovna, what I could do if only I had more money to invest!’ She saw what huge opportunities there were and, having nothing else to occupy her active nature, brooded about them constantly.

  ‘If our serfs can set up little factories,’ she would challenge her husband, ‘we could set up big ones.’

  It was a perfectly reasonable statement. Though most of the gentry despised such merchant activities, there were others who did not. Indeed, some of the greatest magnates were also owners of large industrial enterprises which were worked by their serfs. Bobrov could have set up a plant like the nearby glass-making factory without loss of face.

  But he was not interested. ‘Who would run it after I am gone?’ he demanded. ‘Alexis? He’s a soldier. Ilya? He’d be incapable.’ He shook his head. ‘Far better to build up the estates for them than get into risky projects none of us understand. Besides,’ he would remind her, ‘it’s far simpler to let the serfs do it all: we get our reward by taking their profits in obrok payments.’ And when she was still unsatisfied, he remarked wearily: ‘You’re just a German.’

  Tatiana had long supposed that she knew Savva; yet it was only a year before that she had fully realized the secret passion that drove him. It came to light one day when she was quizzing him gently about his personal life. The two Suvorins, as well as being entrepreneurs, were highly unusual in another way too: they were both single. Savva’s father was a widower. But Savva himself, though thirty-three now, was still unmarried. It was unheard of. The priest at Russka had spoken to him about it many times; Bobrov had threatened to force him to marry. But he had been strangely evasive. And only then had he at last confessed to Tatiana: ‘I’ll never marry until I’m free. I’d sooner go into the monastery.’

  ‘Who will you marry?’ she had asked.

  ‘A merchant’s daughter,’ he replied. ‘But no merchant will let his daughter marry a serf, since then she becomes a serf too.’

  So that was it. He wanted to buy his freedom. Several times already he had approached Bobrov on the subject, but the landlord had waved him away. ‘Every landlord has a price though,’ he told Tatiana. ‘And then …’ Then she suspected he would do great things.

  And so Tatiana had formed her plan. It was very simple, if somewhat unusual. And it rested on the perfect understanding which she now reached with Savva.

  At first Alexander Bobrov was puzzled by his wife’s desire that he should sell Savva and his father their freedom. ‘What’s it to you?’ he would enquire. But weeks and months went by, and she continued to badger him: ‘Let them go, Alexander Prokofievich. You say you want to put money by. Take your profit now then, and sell them their freedom.’

  ‘I sometimes think you prefer those serfs to your own family,’ he would remark drily.

  But still she had persisted until, just a week ago, and in order to get some peace, he had at last promised wearily: ‘Very well. But if they want their freedom, they can pay me fifteen thousand roubles for it and nothing less.’ After bleeding them white for so many years, he calculated, there was no possibility of their raising such a sum.

  At which Tatiana only smiled.

  Her understanding with Savva was very straightforward. ‘I shall persuade Alexander Prokofievich to sell you your freedom, Savva. I will also lend you the money you need, free of any interest. A year after you get your freedom, however, whenever that may be, you will repay me exactly twice what I lent you. Is that agreed?’ He had bowed low. ‘Very well then,’ she had told him. ‘Leave it to me. But tell no one.’

  It might be highly unorthodox for a lady to concern herself with a serf like this – especially behind her husband’s back – but the plan was entirely sensible. Suvorin would get his freedom; Bobrov a substantial sum of money to pass on; and she would discreetly increase the little nest-egg she was building up for Sergei.

  And though the sum Bobrov had demanded for the Suvorins’ freedom was huge, she had faith in the serf. It might take time, but he would find it.

  Already she had lent him a thousand roubles. Now, this bright January morning, she had come into Russka with more – another thousand. ‘Take it to Moscow and use it well,’ she told him.

  And as he mounted the sled and bowed again, she did not know that Savva had another secret, that he was concealing from her. He would have enough money now, to buy his freedom by the end of that very year.

  The duel between master and serf was nearly over.

  July

  Olga gazed at her husband fondly. They had spent the last month together on the estate near Smolensk and, it seemed to her, she had never known such happiness. There was a glow upon her skin, a softness when she came near him, which made even the serfs on the estate smile and declare: ‘Truly they are man and wife.’

  Then, with a laugh, she passed him Sergei’s letter.

  He had always written to her regularly, ever since his schooldays, often enclosing a poem too, or some funny drawings. She kept the letters and loved to go over them again, when she had nothing to do. This one was characteristic.

  My dear little Olga,

  No doubt your husband is beating you

  regularly, in the old-fashioned way –

  so I send you news to cheer you up.

  I have found a charming group of

  friends. We meet in the Archives of

  the Foreign Ministry in Moscow and

  call ourselves the Lovers of Wisdom.
<
br />   (For that goddess, you know, like all

  women, needs many lovers.) We read

  the great German philosophers,

  especially Hegel and Schelling. And

  we discuss the meaning of life and

  the genius of Russia; and we are

  ardent and altogether pleased with

  ourselves.

  Do you know that the universe is in

  a state of becoming? It is so. Each

  idea has an opposite. When they

  combine, they produce a new and

  better idea, which in turn finds its

  opposite and so on until in this

  wonderful way the whole universe

  approaches perfection. Our human

  society, here on earth, is just the

  same. We are all of us just evolving

  ideas in the great cosmic order. Is

  that not wonderful?

  Do you feel the grand cosmic forces,

  my little Olga – or does your husband

  beat you too much? Sometimes I feel

  them. I see a tree and I say:

  ‘That’s the cosmos, evolving.’ But

  then sometimes I don’t. I hit my

  head against a tree the other day and

  didn’t feel cosmic at all. Perhaps

  if I’d hit it harder …

  I must stop now. My friends and I

  have to follow our cosmic destiny and

  go out drinking. Then I shall seek

  the cosmos with a certain lady of my

  acquaintance.

  I will now tell you an interesting

  fact. Our esteemed Minister of

  Education is so suspicious of

  philosophy that no chair in that

  subject is allowed in St Petersburg.

  I know of one man who discreetly

  lectures on philosophy in the botany

  department, another who teaches from

  his chair in agriculture. Only in

  our beloved Russia can the nature of