Nicholas I did not dither. He had ordered his loyal troops to fire on the leaderless mutineers, by now shivering and demoralized. Hundreds died, the rest fled. Within hours the rebel leaders in St. Petersburg, known from that day on as the Decembrists, had been rounded up. Later Volkonsky was arrested in Kiev, following an abortive revolt in the south in which he was able to raise the support of a single officer. In all, five hundred Decembrists were interrogated and tried. It was the first Russian show trial. One hundred and twenty-one Decembrists were found guilty of treason and stripped of their ranks, estates, and titles. Most, including Trubetskoy, Volkonsky, and Bestuzhev, were given the penal sentence of katorga and sent to Siberia. Five men, including Pestel and Ryleev, were sentenced to hang in the courtyard of the Peter and Paul Fortress, though the death penalty had officially been abolished. The executioners botched the job as ropes broke and three of the condemned fell heavily through the trap doors, still alive. “What a wretched country,” one of them cursed from the ditch, “that can’t even hang men right.”
For Czar Nicholas, the first full day of his reign was his most memorable. It set the harsh tone for his rule. To the end of his life he kept the proud uniform he wore that day. On a separate table in his study lay the bound leather volumes of the Decembrists’ pretrial depositions. Years later he recalled the moment, that dark evening, when Nesselrode brought Trubetskoy to him in chains.
“What do you know about all this?” the emperor demanded.
“I am innocent. I know nothing,” Prince Sergey replied.
“You,” Nicholas declared flatly, “are a criminal. And I—am your judge.”
At that, Trubetskoy fell to his knees and begged for his life. “He fell at my feet,” Nicholas said, still indignant, years later. “He fell at my feet in the most shameful manner imaginable.”
• • •
But that day was a defining one, too, for Katyusha, Trubetskoy’s wife. She had no forewarning of her husband’s treason, but she took the shock as a divine challenge out of which good might come. She set to writing to the emperor, who granted her permission to send Trubetskoy letters and whatever he might need in prison. When, three months later, on Easter Monday, she was allowed to visit her husband for the first time, she promised to follow him to wherever in Siberia he would be sent. Then she pressed the emperor, in letter after letter, for permission to carry the promise out. By the end of the year she was in Irkutsk, after a grueling journey, and was already petitioning the governor-general there to be allowed to continue to Nerchinsk, where she had learned her prince had now been taken.
Katyusha was unaware, but Maria Volkonsky had determined to follow her husband too. His family had disowned him, and Maria’s family wanted to do the same. “Il n’ya plus de Serge,” his mother, Princess Alexandra, took to saying, hoping that there would be “no other monsters in the family.” A few days after the Decembrist executions, Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, Yakubovich, and five others were dispatched in a special convoy to Siberia. At the palace of Count Kochubei, the minister of the interior, a ball was in full swing that evening. Le tout St. Petersburg was there in a ballroom wreathed with flowers and lit by three thousand candles. All at once, four troikas hove into view, with a detachment of Cossacks for guards. “For one fleeting second,” one of the dancers recounted, “the same candelabrum illuminated, upstairs in the white ballroom, the Emperor Nicholas dancing with the old Princess Volkonsky, and her son Sergey in the street below, huddled tense, pale and in fetters between two gendarmes. Then the coachmen cracked their whips, the horses sprang forward, and the troikas were off again on their 4,500-mile journey to the east.”
Nothing her family said could dissuade Maria from following, though her father, Raevsky, the old hero of 1812, said it would break his heart. Throughout his trial, Sergey Volkonsky had behaved with dignity, unswerving in his beliefs. His bearing was the talk of St. Petersburg, and Maria longed all the more to be with him. Czar Nicholas reminded her that Volkonsky had lost his title and estates. He warned her that if he let her go to Siberia, on no account could she bring the couple’s one-year-old son, Nikolenka, whom the dowager empress had called “Cet enfant du malheur.” But Maria had made up her mind: “My son is happy, but my husband is most unhappy and needs me more.” She carried on petitioning the emperor. A reply came. Nikolenka played with the huge red seal of the imperial double-headed eagle. The czar had sent a similar letter to Katyusha:
I have, dear Princess, the letter you sent me on December 15th. It has pleased me to receive the expression of the feelings you so kindly have conveyed to me. You are undoubtedly aware of the particular interest I have always taken in your personal welfare and it is because of this interest that I feel it my duty to warn you again of the extreme danger that awaits you once you have decided to travel beyond Irkutsk. Having said that, I leave the decision to you.
I send you my affectionate greetings.
Nicholas
Maria set off immediately. In Moscow, her sister-in-law, Princess Zenaida, a former mistress of the late Czar Alexander, showed Maria all the warmth that the rest of her family had withheld. She pressed on Maria a bearskin rug, wool, knitting needles, books, and rubles, sewn by Zenaida’s maids into the lining of her traveling gown, hidden from the authorities. Zenaida had a small pianoforte strapped to the back of the kibitka (Maria discovered this piano when she got to Irkutsk). Pushkin was there, too, holding Maria’s hand all evening. He gave her this poem for her friends:
In the depths of the Siberian mines
Keep that proud patience.
The heavy chains will fall,
The prison gates will open wide.
Outside, freedom awaits you.
Only later, when Katyusha and Maria had made the long, long journey to Irkutsk, did they learn of the “extreme danger” that Nicholas was keeping from the wives. For all that they were allowed to follow their husbands, once they passed beyond Irkutsk they lost all rights. Future children would be peasant serfs, property of the state. The wives would lose all previous positions. And they would never be allowed again to return to European Russia, even after the deaths of their husbands. “Let the thought of the fate of their wives,” said the czar, “torture the criminals in their lifetime.”
Maria liked Irkutsk, with its wide streets and handsome merchant houses. She arrived at the time of the maslenitsa, the Russian pre-Lenten winter carnival celebrated here with an Oriental flavor thanks to Chinese and Mongols in the bazaars. She went straight to a church and asked for a service of thanksgiving. She delighted over the discovery of her piano, unharmed by the journey—only the second piano in all of Siberia. With her music, she was no longer alone. But still Maria’s husband was five hundred miles to the east, in Nerchinsk, on the far side of Transbaikalia. The governor of Irkutsk was doing his utmost to frustrate her efforts to reach him. He had done the same to Katyusha who, unknown to Maria, had left Irkutsk for Nerchinsk only the day before Maria arrived. He dragged out granting a permit for onward travel and meanwhile sent the notoriously corrupt chinovniks, customs inspectors, to filch cases of tea, flour, and sugar from her. They would have seized the piano, had they not thought it was part of the hotel furniture.
At last the governor let Maria go. Her sleigh glided across the Angara and along pine trails toward the frozen immensity of Lake Baikal and the ring of high mountains beyond. The horses crossed sure-footedly over almost transparent ice. Maria had never seen a scene like it. Five days later, as taiga and meadow gave way to the northernmost reaches of the Mongolian steppe, the snow gave out on the thin, sandy soil. The heady thrills of the kibitka ride were exchanged for the jaw-knocking experience of a telega, a four-wheeled, springless open cart. From time to time Maria had to beg the driver to stop so that she could get back her breath. On the tenth day out of Irkutsk, in January 1827, Maria reached Nerchinsk. The settlement, by the Shilka, was a raw place: some Buryat tents, a Cossack cluster of peasant cottages
, a few respectable houses for the governor and officers of the mines. And then at the far end of the town, by the Shilka just below where the Onon River meets it, the dominating prison stockade.
As the telega lurched along the frozen ruts into town, Maria heard her name being called. The round potato figure of Katyusha Trubetskoy, in plumed hat and fur coat, was rushing toward her. The two women fell into each other’s arms. This was the start of a lifetime’s friendship, different though the women were. Katyusha had a room in a Cossack’s hut that Maria could share. The windowpanes were made of fish skin, and the stove smoked. Spreading their furs on the floor, they slept with their heads propped up against the wall, their feet at the door. The next morning, Katyusha took Maria to the prison mine where the two husbands worked. Its name was Blagodatsk, or Bliss. Nerchinsk was by no means the worst of the mine complexes to which the Decembrists had been scattered. To the southwest lay Akatui, in an “inexpressibly dreary glen” where the birds did not sing on account of the lead fumes. “The architect of Akatui,” wrote a Decembrist, “was without doubt the inheritor of Dante’s imagination. My other prisons were boudoirs by comparison.”
Blagodatsk’s jailers, on the other hand, were worse. Burnashev, the boor of a commandant, inhabited a miasma of vodka and cheap cigars. His assistant, Rieck, was a psychopath. Orders from St. Petersburg to look after the prisoners’ health enraged the commandant. “The devil take them! What stupid instructions! Keep them working, but at the same time watch over their health? They are useless as workers. Without that catch, I would shoot them within two months. But how can I act with my hands tied like this?” The commandant made Maria sign a sheaf of papers, promising not to attempt to visit her husband more than twice a week, not to bring Volkonsky alcohol, not to leave the settlement without permission. At times during her exile, Maria wrote later, the bureaucratic mire seemed bottomless, as she signed away layer after layer of her existence—maids and the servants who had attended her at every moment, estates, titles, children, and, even after the death of her husband, the right to return to the Russia she knew. “But had I balked at signing a single paper, my whole journey would have been in vain. And so I went on signing and signing, until I found myself on the floor, having fainted from exhaustion.”
Now the commandant let her see her husband. Prepare yourself for the worst, Katyusha had warned. Maria stepped down into total darkness. The door to her husband’s tiny cell was opened, and Sergey rushed toward her, clanking his chains. She had never imagined her prince would be shackled. “The vision of his shackles so enraged and overwhelmed me,” she recalled later, “that at once I fell down to the floor and kissed the chains.”
• • •
The nadir for the two Decembrist wives was the spring of 1827 in Nerchinsk. Gone was Maria’s sense of elation, “half fantasy, half expectation,” that sustained her all the time that she sought to rejoin her husband. Now, for Maria and Katyusha in this raw town, there was no room for illusions. With no servants, for the first time in their lives they attempted to cook, clean, and sew. Their husband-heroes were no longer dashing, but spare shadows, covered in vermin. Volkonsky, with bad lungs, was coughing up blood.
Soon, though, they understood what their presence meant to the eight Decembrist prisoners. Within days of arriving in Nerchinsk, Maria won the admiration of the men by sneaking into the mine where the men were working. Underground, as the guards above bawled at them to put the ladder back up, Maria distributed letters that she had brought from families in European Russia. One of the convicts described her little adventure as “Maria’s descent into hell.” Daily, the two women sat on a boulder outside the prison, hoping to snatch a few words with the “gentlemen princes,” as the locals called them.
Slowly, the women’s presence tempered Burnashev’s arbitrary rule. They won over the guards, bribing them to give the men better rations. In fur hats and long veils, they drove a cart delivering sacks of flour and potatoes. They washed and repaired the men’s rags, and wrote letters to their families on their behalf, since the men were forbidden to write themselves. Within months packages and money began arriving from relatives. The two women, the Decembrists said, were their window on the world. They helped the common criminals too. “You have no right,” shouted Burnashev, “to dress serfs, who are property of the crown!” “Well, monsieur,” said Maria, “you had better dress them yourself, for I am not in the habit of seeing naked men about me.” The princess, Burnashev admitted, was “frank as a child.” He was beginning to soften.
• • •
Nicholas I remained obsessed with the Decembrists, “villainous traitors” now living, he intended, as specters on the fringes of his empire. From the start, he involved himself with the minutiae of their lives: their transport to Siberian exile, their food, how their prison guards were to be selected. The governor of Eastern Siberia put it to his czar that there was merit in consolidating the scatter of Decembrist prisons into one: one group of prisoners was easier to guard than ten, he said; and isolating them in a remote part of Transbaikalia would keep them from “poisoning the minds of other Russians with their liberal heresies.” The idea took hold in Nicholas’s small, tidy mind. An old Polish general, Stanislav Leparsky, a Romanov family retainer, was put in charge of the project. As a commander, Leparsky had never had a soldier court-martialed. Now no cause must be given to turn the group of aristocratic prisoners into martyrs. Chita was chosen as their collective place of prison and exile, a remote frontier settlement, just a few dozen shacks, strung along the meadows of the Ingoda River. In 1827, as autumn approached, most of the Decembrists were moved there. Nicholas intended the move to reinforce the Decembrists’ purgatory. Instead, as one of them put it, bringing the Decembrists together “reunited us in one place, drawing strength from one another, and giving us life after political death.”
Leparsky was a man of old-fashioned manners, with bowed legs, side whiskers, and a bottomless supply of wigs. In Chita, he laid down a humane regime that encompassed tobacco and Madeira. The new jail had four large, bright rooms for the Decembrists, with stoves. Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, and the six others from Blagodatsk moved into one room together. The setting was starting to seem picturesque. “From the top of the hill,” wrote Maria, “we could see the little village of Chita and the jail, and the tall picket fence.” Over time other women jolted into town in carts—eight other wives of Decembrists, one mistress, and a sister. One of the wives took Katyusha and Maria up to her attic window to peer into the prison yard. Below, the husbands tended a vegetable patch. The youngest Decembrists, scarcely out of their teens, looked almost cheerful as they smoked and walked about with shovels or with books under their arms.
Compared with Nerchinsk, the penal labor in Chita was light. In winter, the men ground flour for themselves and the district bakery. In summer, Leparsky had them excavate soil from a giant ditch. The convicts shuffled out of the prison singing the banned “Marseillaise,” an unwitting favorite of the guards. Sometimes the women were allowed to come too. Then, the guards carried the ladies’ samovars, rugs, and hampers and laid out their picnic at the forest edge.
One day, with a beam on his face, Leparsky announced that the czar had given in to his requests to have the men’s leg irons removed, more than two years after they had been hammered on. Later, he allowed twice-weekly conjugal visits to take place in the wives’ lodgings. The secret police in St. Petersburg read all mail from Chita before it was sent on to Decembrist families. When Leparsky learned that one of the women had praised his kindliness, he was distraught: “I am undone!” Later, he learned that some of the women were expecting babies. “Allow me to say, mesdames, that you have no right to be pregnant!” Composing himself, he added: “Why, when the births begin, well, that is a different matter.” The couples had been busy. In one week in March 1829, three babies were delivered. Decembrists were at last allowed to leave the prison and live among their women. Maria, who had been distraught to learn of
Nikolenka’s death, soon found that she was pregnant. The little girl died soon after childbirth, though a healthy boy, Misha, was born later.
• • •
A curious and unconscious transformation was taking place among the Decembrists. The men formed an artel, a cooperative, as if they were a true peasant commune. Money was shared out equally, the rich subsidizing the poor. Tasks—hut building, gardening—were divvied up. They put up a joinery shop and a shed for the tailor and cobbler princes. The kitchen garden prospered during Chita’s clear, glorious summers, with beds bulging with asparagus, watermelons, and tomatoes. Sixty thousand cucumbers were put down to salt each season in cedar barrels. The men ate the simple—the “biblical”—Russian fare of black bread, yogurt, kasha, and summer fruit. The women, brought up on haute cuisine, learned to cook the Russian way. In other respects, too, they became more Russian. At home, the Decembrist circles had been brought up to speak French. As officers, the men had used Russian in the army, but now the prison regime insisted that they use it with their wives, so that nothing escaped the guards. At first the result was merely comical, as the women attempted to communicate in nursery Russian. Soon, most had a better grasp at last of their native language. Meanwhile, the children of aristocrats were growing up “à la Rousseau, like little savages,” hunting rabbits and ferreting for bird’s nests with the local boys, speaking Russian in the thick local dialect. Volkonsky, for one, was immensely proud. His son, Misha, was growing up “a true Russian in feeling.”
The curious transformation, then, was this: few Decembrists had lost their ideals, but the change now was that their penal lives were coming to resemble their ideals and the peasant virtues that they had elevated all those years before.
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