Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/Russian ukases
RUSSIAN UKASES.[1]
“Ce que mon père a fait il a bien fait.” Such were the words with which Alexander II. commenced his reign as constitutional King of Poland. We have seen something of what that father did through the military dictatorship of the Czarowicz Constantine,[2] and it may not be uninteresting to observe the working of the Imperial system in the still more iniquitous tyranny of its so-called justice.
The belief in the possibility of freedom under the Romanoff dynasty, was the primary cause of failure in the November Revolution of 1830. The Constitution sworn to by Alexander I. in 1815, was still fondly dreamed of by the chiefs of the Polish aristocracy, both in the senate and the army. The traitor minister, Lubeckoi, who, whilst actually sold to the Czar, still retained the complete confidence of his countrymen during the first months of the revolution, had contrived that the command of the army should be given by popular acclamation to General Chlopici, a brave man and good patriot, but whose earlier energy and daring had been completely annihilated under Constantine’s paralysing system. Chlopici and Prince Adam Czartoriski possessed unbounded influence, but under the fatal glamour of a Russian constitutional monarchy their very patriotism did but ruin the cause they had at heart. The Poles had a Fairfax and an Essex, but no Pym or Cromwell, and those who might have fulfilled their mission were overpowered beneath the personal popularity of the “moderators.” The moderators declared the country still faithful to its constitutional king, discouraged all proposals of co-operation from the ancient provinces of the republic—Grodno, Kijow, Minsk, Wilna, Podolia, Mohilew, Witerbsk, Volhynia—filched from it by earlier dismemberments, and in their infatuated idea of propitiating Nicholas by proofs of loyalty, even discouraged the enlistment of the peasantry, and totally opposed any idea of guerilla warfare.
The loyal address sent by the Diet at Warsaw to St. Petersburg in January, 1838, in which the Emperor, though in the most respectful terms, was reminded of his engagements as a constitutional king, to observe the laws of the country, was answered with such insult and contumely, that those who had so blindly placed all their hopes in royalty, discovered too late the infatuation of demanding free institutions from a Germanised Tartar autocrat. In December the Polish army, aided by the innumerable reinforcements which would have joined it from the Western Guberniums, might have triumphantly carried the war into the enemy’s territory, but diplomacy imposed inaction on the gallant spirits to whom the revolution owed its origin. Ambassadors were sent from Warsaw to London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, endless despatches were written, and civilities exchanged at least with the two former capitals, but time advanced without regard to diplomacy, and the great army which was to have submerged the Monarchy of July crossed the Dnieper, and then the Vistula, and the Poles found themselves shut up within the narrow limits of the so-called kingdom, and reduced to defensive measures. The Polish generals, though at the head of but 45,000 men, whilst the enemy had 150,000, long discouraged any but regular warfare, and were resolved, since the contest was almost hopeless, that the country should die according to strict scientific rule. They concentrated the whole of their forces around the capital, and fatally induced the belief that the hopes of Poland were bound up with the safety of Warsaw.
But our concern is not with the military events of the campaign, with the desperate bravery of the rank and file and their subaltern officers, the honest incapacity of the two first generals-in-chief, the jealousies of the third, or the misfortunes of the fourth. It is the civil measures for restoring order adopted by the Emperor which claim our attention.
On the 20th of December, 1830, Nicholas published an ukase, by which all Poles resident in the eight former provinces of the republic were threatened with sequestration of their lands and goods if they in any manner implicated themselves in the revolt of the “kingdom.” Art. I. declared:—
The property of any of our subjects domiciled in the Western Guberniums, but now resident in the kingdom of Poland, shall be immediately sequestrated, together with all mortgages, &c., effected on it.
Art. II. All engagements, &c., entered into with regard to said property, after the date of the revolt, shall be null and void.
Art. III. All receivers and farmers upon such sequestrated property shall enter into a written engagement to forward neither money nor any other produce of said property to the absent proprietors, but faithfully to deliver all such produce to the proper imperial authorities—the General Commission of Supervision.
For such sequestrations to take effect, it was not necessary that the victim should have taken any overt part in the revolt: the fact of being present in the disaffected country was quite sufficient to politically contaminate him. If Nicholas really issued this as a repressive measure, the result must have disenchanted him. For, notwithstanding the worldly ruin imminent, and the discouragement which the volunteers from the western Guberniums had at first met from the Provisional Government at Warsaw, as soon as their services were accepted by it, they hastened in multitudes to enlist under the White Eagle; and in March, 1831, when the Russian army had already entered Poland, the insurrection spread far and wide through the dismembered provinces. Then came another ukase, still more to the point. After referring to the provisions of the last, it proceeds:
A question has arisen, if the aforesaid decree is applicable in the case of persons who have remained within Russia proper, whilst their children have taken an active part in the revolt. We therefore ordain:—
Art. I. When a landed proprietor remains in Russia, and his sons or daughters are absent in Poland, the whole of his property, real and personal, shall be sequestrated. If certain of his sons or daughters only are absent in the kingdom, then such part shall be sequestrated as would fall to their share at the father’s or mother’s death.
Art. II. When the proprietor himself (or herself) is absent in Poland, then the whole property shall be sequestrated, though his or her children and next of kin remain in Russia.
Art. III. If a landed proprietor residing in Russia have no children, and his next of kin are resident in Poland, the latter forfeit all right to his inheritance.
Art. IV. As soon as sentence of sequestration has been pronounced, strict care shall be taken that no part of the revenues of the property concerned, pass into the hands of any member of the family in any foreign country.
Thus the wife and children of a proprietor might be deprived of support, though he had left Russia to visit a sick parent, or attend to the simplest personal interests. Parents, though never so submissive to Muscovite tyranny, were equally victimised, if their children had been guilty of any act that could be tortured into an appearance of patriotism. We need not seek for political purpose in such ukases: the reaction inevitable from them must have been evident, even to the obtuse Romanoff brain; they were but a financial contrivance, an admirable scheme for turning the resources and wealth of the country against herself. Nicholas soon found, indeed, they drove into open resistance many who, from the desperate nature of the struggle, might have else held back. He, therefore, issued another ukase on March 22, 1831:—
Art. I. All nobles of the Western Guberniums who shall have implicated themselves in the revolt, or who have offered resistance to the imperial constituted, authorities, shall be delivered over to the military tribunals, and the sentence pronounced on them executed without delay, under the authority of the respective commanders of detachments.
Art. II. The real and personal property of such criminals to be sequestrated and applied to the use of our military pensioners.
During hostilities with the eight Guberniums, sentence of sequestration was passed upon all who had been directly or indirectly concerned in the national movement. After the fatal battle of Warsaw, in September, 1831, by which the triumph of Russia was ensured, courts-martial were appointed to determine the fate of the rebels. The sentences included decapitation, hanging, hard labour in chains, imprisonment for life in chains, the mines, exile in Siberia, and enrolment in the Siberian army. Thousands suffered this last penalty, which, in its life-long, hopeless degradation and misery, is far more cruel than death. As these sentences involved the loss of all civil rights to the offender, they necessarily brought confiscation of all his worldly possessions. As an appendix to the courts-martial, the Czar appointed a “Commission of Liquidation” in each Gubernium, charged with the valuation of forfeited property, and satisfaction of the legal claims upon it.
In June, 1832, appeared another ukase with reference to sequestrated property; it contained among its thirty-nine clauses, two which are singularly characteristic. Clause 13 declared, that “no debts, contracts, incumbrances, mortgages, &c., not formally registered before the proper authorities, and bearing date after the outbreak of the revolution, could be discharged by the Commission of Liquidation; and no debts, &c., &c., contracted in the kingdom of Poland, or in foreign countries, were reclaimable from the Commission, under any pretence whatever, even if made before the revolt had broken out in the Western Guberniums, and legitimated by official registration and seal.”
Thus, not only were the unhappy insurgents pillaged, but those also who were totally ignorant of their intentions—peaceable traders, minors whose money had been lent on mortgages, or even the very faithful subjects of his Imperial Majesty who had any business transactions with his victims even before the rebellion, whose approach had been so totally unforeseen. Article 28 of the same ukase directs, that in estimating the value of confiscated lands, the usual rate granted by the Bank of Credit in its loans, should be taken, and fifty roubles added per head, for each male serf when the said land was under cultivation.
This clause was ingeniously contrived so as to defraud the creditors on heavily-encumbered estates. In Russia, the value of cultivated land was always estimated by the number of male serfs occupied on it—on an average, 175 silver roubles for each male serf. The Bank of Credit lent at the rate of sixty roubles per serf; for of course, in mortgages, it took care not to exceed a third of the actual value represented. Thus the June ukase in adding an additional fifty roubles per serf, making in all 110 silver roubles, deducted just sixty-five roubles on each, from the real value of the property confiscated. Estates were thus registered at less than two-thirds of their worth, all debts on them exceeding this, of course, refused liquidation, and the Government having effected a fraudulent insolvency, the defrauded creditors were left to divide the amount abandoned to them as they best could, whilst the Czar quietly absorbed the remainder. For the most part, the claimants were Poles, and thus the spoliation became not only profitable, but politic.
The ukases of April, 1831, and June, 1832, opened a brilliant perspective for the legions of Muscovite officials, who were ready to swoop down on the sequestrated and confiscated property. The green-coated Tchinowniks found a veritable Eldorado, and contrived that the rich yield of the placers should give them a liberal per-centage before passing to their master. Proprietors whose possessions had escaped complete escheatment, but were involved in temporary sequestration, were obliged to content themselves with a miserable dole from the hands of the Commission of Liquidation, and this was still further reduced before it reached their hands.
Sequestration was no mere temporary measure; the system was too profitable to be soon abandoned. Where the children of a proprietor had been implicated in the revolt, it was maintained during the lifetime of both parents. Nor was it employed merely to prevent the guilty son from inheriting the ancestral property; for, by the civil law of Russia, all political criminals become necessarily dead in law, and are incapable of either inheriting or transmitting any property whatever: whether exiled to Siberia, or living as an emigrant in Western Europe, the very existence of the offender is ignored by Russian law, except when punishment can be inflicted on him.
Sequestration became actual forfeiture under all the abuses entailed by it, in the falsification, theft, and trickery of those charged with carrying out the law. The proprietor, while suffering for the acts of his relations, though nominally allowed the revenue of his lands, could not sell or mortgage any part of them. He lived under the constant supervision of those whose enmity would involve him in irretrievable ruin; he was subject to a thousand petty irritations and annoyances; his peasants might be cruelly overworked; the Imperial Commissioner in charge of the estate could order any one of them to be beaten to death, but the master must look on powerless to help the victim; if he interfered, he would be at once denounced as disaffected, and have to expiate the crime in a Russian dungeon. If he remonstrated with his petty tyrants, he made them at once his sworn enemies; and, then, a few days would suffice to consign him in chains to the kibitka, which would bear him from wife and home, to the snows of Berezof, or the mines of Nertchinsk.
Perhaps the Tchinowniks made their best harvest from the ukase of June, 1832; for, however just and equitable might be the claims on sequestered estates, the Commission could always find sufficient demurrers, unless its members were furnished with solid persuasions for a favourable verdict. Nicholas was obliged to wink at, or at least discreetly ignore, the various peccadilloes of his underlings. Their complete demoralisation was a necessary part of his “system,” for honest men would have been unfitted for the work required. Of course, this necessity frequently had its disadvantages, both for his Majesty and his Majesty’s subjects who had claims on the confiscated estates. These claims were often enough returned to the Central Administration as valid; but the money never passed beyond the hands of the Commissioners.
Then came the ukase of April, 1834, to complete that of June, 1832. The latter had not been found sufficiently stringent. We quote its contents as briefly as possible:
Clause I. All contracts, wills, &c., respecting property in the empire or kingdom drawn by persons subsequently concerned in the revolt, are, and remain, null and void.
II. Contracts, &c., made in Russia by Russian subjects present in the kingdom of Poland during the revolt, are null and void.
III. All gifts, endowments, &c., within the interior of the empire, drawn by persons afterwards concerned in the revolt, are null and void.
IV. The validity of all sales of real property, leases, &c., made by rebels—Russian subjects—shall be determined by the date of the outbreak of the revolt in the districts inhabited by the persons concerned.
V. All such sales, &c., shall be invalid (and the property forfeited to the Crown), when either of the contracting parties have been previously implicated in the revolt.
VI. Any uncertainty in the dates in question to be decided by the imperial authorities.
All contracts, wills, bequests, and endowments were thus annulled, no matter in what part of the empire they had been made, and the property was escheated to the Crown, if any of the persons concerned had but set foot over the Polish frontier during the rebellion.
To give some indication of the wide-spread ruin which must have resulted, we need but cite an official report published in 1843, which refers to certain escheated domains, 459 in number, 228 of which were declared liquidated from all claims upon them; the claims which had been allowed amounted to 1,707,000 silver roubles, those disallowed reached 3,572,414. Thus half of the incumbrances were swept off for the benefit of His Imperial Majesty’s treasury.
With confiscation came utter destitution for the family of the victim; the wife’s jewels or the simplest little heirlooms, though they might fetch but a few kopeks from a Jew broker, were relentlessly seized. The widowed wife, the orphaned children (for a Russian subject involved in treasonable acts forfeits alike all family ties and civil rights), all those dependent on the victim, were turned forth to live or die as best they might—the matter was no concern of Russian justice. The same penalties fell on those who were self-exiled, as on those who had committed overt acts of rebellion. Here is an ukase of 1832:
Property, real and personal, in the Western Guberniums, of rebels who have left the dominions of the Czar, and have given no account of their proceedings, shall be confiscated for the benefit of the Crown.
Another ukase of 1834 declared in addition,
All inhabitants of the Western Guberniums who have left the empire for complicity in the revolt, and who, up to this date, have made no application for pardon, can never return to Russia, whatever be their rank, degree of culpability, or actual place of residence, and all their property shall be confiscated.
I use the word confiscated, though it is inaccurate, “resumed” being the more euphonious term affected by Russian legislature. The number of emigrants from the Western Guberniums thus pillaged amounted to upwards of 2500.
Yet all these measures were not only in direct contravention of the ancient Polish law, and the constitution of Alexander I., which declared: “The penalty of general confiscation is for ever abolished—it can never be re-enacted,” but they were in direct defiance of former Russian ukases. I would instance here one passed in 1785, providing that the property of all state offenders among the Dvoramin (nobles) should immediately pass to the natural heirs; and another of 1802, which extended the privilege to the other classes of the community. To Poland a very different justice was meted out than that with which the Russian subjects of the Czar were blessed.
By an act of Imperial grace in May, 1837, Nicholas removed the sequestration from the property of innocent persons whose relations only had been involved in the Revolution, but at the same time prohibited them from disposing of it by will, fearing they might thus contrive that some part should pass to a disinherited rebel. Though an offender should subsequently have been fully pardoned, still no bequest in his favour effected during the period of his civil non-existence, could be held good in law. Lawsuits commenced previously to his offence and concluded in his favour, after his restoration to rank and country by the Emperor’s grace were null and void for him; they had been carried on during his “death,” and therefore the benefits accruing lapsed to his only heir, the Czar.
In February, 1832, Nicholas published an ukase especially with reference to emigrants from the kingdom of Poland, of whom more than 25,000 had left the country. It promised that those sentenced in default should not be deprived of their property, which would be administered as in the case of persons legally absent. Fortunately this bait did not induce the return of those it was the Czar’s object to secure, and shortly afterwards the property was confiscated in due form. Another ukase, without any false gloss of benignity, followed in June, 1833, which summarily escheated all the possessions of all persons who on any pretence had quitted the kingdom of Poland since the first of January of that year, for other than the Russian territory, and who had not returned up to the date of the decree. Thus persons who had left the country to avoid being compromised, were by a retrospective act involved in all the penalties of actual rebellion. Curiously enough, among the 1315 persons in the Gubernium of Wilna who thus suffered, there were five (or rather the heirs of five) individuals who had been put to death by the insurrectional government for treasonable practices in connection with Russia. Their sentiments might have been loyally Russian, but as they were Poles, and their descendants possibly less “well-disposed,” the government made good the booty. We cannot better conclude this sketch of the Imperial Ukases than by a brief enumeration of the number of victims supplied to the vengeance of Nicholas, and severally condemned to hard labour, the mines, hanging, or decapitation, and forfeiture of all civil rights. Many of these victims escaped, but their worldly possessions in no instance were saved. In the Western Guberniums no less than 2889 landed proprietors have thus suffered, under sentences dated between 1832 and 1856; but all these cases bore reference to the Revolution of 1830. Many have since been added, but I cannot give the actual number. Of these domains only 355 were officially valued; yet the male serfs alone on these numbered 180,734, who with 13,098 drawn away from the church lands, amounted to 193,832 male serfs. These unfortunates were either drafted into the army or placed at the disposal of the local administration, and their fate was not less pitiable than their masters’. The amount of money seized, of which any official account was given, though that was perhaps but a moiety of the actual sum, reached 33,920,600 silver roubles; yet there were 2534 proprietors whose forfeitures are not included in these returns.
In the kingdom of Poland serfage had ceased since 1807; and in the reports published by the government the names of the proprietors who suffered escheature are given without any indication of the actual money value of that wholesale forfeiture. We therefore can give only the bare enumeration of the number of the victims.
In 1834, 287 were thus condemned to forfeiture, with various penal sentences, though happily these latter could not always take effect, as the persons concerned had escaped. Between June and July, in 1835, 2338 were condemned; between 1835 and 1856, 551 were added to the list; thus making a total of 3176 proprietors, who, with their families, were reduced to penury, even if they escaped Siberia.
The “well-intentioned Emperor” very solemnly and tersely expressed his adherence to his father’s policy, so far as Poland was concerned, as we have already seen; and therefore we are not surprised to find that the much be-praised amnesty, published by him at his coronation, in August, 1856, and which recalled from Siberia those of the victims of the November revolution, who had survived their twenty-five years of suffering there, is rather unsuited for close inspection. It pompously declared that all then suffering penal sentences for the revolt of 1831, should be immediately restored to their hereditary rights and titles—always excepting their forfeited property. Princes might abandon the wheel-barrow at Nerchintsk; nobles might throw down the trowel with which they had been labouring at the walls of Omsk; the chains might be struck from their ankles, and they might return to the land of their birth, to be addressed as “your highness” and “your grace,” and if strength enough were left to them, to secure perhaps the place of steward or huntsman under the German parvenu or Russian Dvoramin, to whom their hereditary domains had passed in the interval. But that was all.
We have still to cite another of the Second Alexander’s decrees, perhaps more insulting in its irony than those fulminated by Nicholas himself. After referring to the confiscations which had taken effect during his own and his father’s reign, in consequence of the rebellion in 1830, his Imperial Majesty proceeds, “as there may be still property legally liable to forfeiture, we, wishing to give a new proof of our clemency on the anniversary of our beloved son, Nicholas Alexandrovitch attaining his majority, ordain: that all state prosecutions with reference to the “resumption” (escheature) of forfeited property shall from henceforth cease, and only those actually commenced prior to the present date (the 8th of September, 1859), concluded in the usual manner . . . . . All such property shall pass to the natural heirs without even excepting those persons actually incriminated in the rebellion: always provided they have since obtained pardon, and have returned to our domains.”
A curious example of magnanimity! After twenty-nine years of unremitting prosecutions and persecutions, aided by all the supple machinery of Russian police and Russian espionage, the Czar declared he would stay his hand—would spare the vanquished; would, in short, be “un bon prince,” and as every one was beggared, would, in fact, wait for a more profitable employment of his severity.
Many emigrants in France and elsewhere applied to the Russian embassies for authorisation to return home after the publication of this amnesty. Four among them, whose names had escaped the lynx eyes of Russian justice, became thus unhappily the cause of their own ruin; three out of the four were refused permission, but their property in Poland was seized without delay: the third obtained a full and complete pardon; but, a few weeks after his return, the administration in like manner confiscated all he had possessed in Poland before enjoying the imperial clemency, which thus reduced him from affluence to poverty. Those who return are the especial objects of police surveillance, and must hold themselves constantly prepared to be awakened at midnight, without previous warning, and to depart for Siberia—as a precautionary measure.
At the coronation of Alexander, pardon was also granted to all Russians sent to Siberia between 1826—29, for participation in Pestal’s conspiracy: twenty-six of the whole number were still living. The same decree further declared that political offenders from the Western Guberniums, who were suffering penal sentence in Siberia in consequence of the revolt of 1831, and “who, by their good conduct have obtained the approval of the local authorities to return to their homes, . . . should be permitted to do so, and further receive restitution of all their previous rights and immunities, always excepting those affecting real or personal property.”
Another decree, published August, 1856, extended this amnesty to the same class of prisoners from the kingdom of Poland; but the apparent generosity vanishes wofully when we learn the conditions imposed on the recipients.
Clause VI. declares: “If the aforesaid persons, condemned for political offences, satisfactorily prove their repentance by irreproachable conduct, they shall receive a diminution of their sentence, or be exempted from exile in Siberia, and allowed to reside in certain localities appointed them in Russia proper. Others shall be at liberty to settle in any part of the empire, except Petersburg and Moscow.”
Those who were allowed to avail themselves of this amnesty, after an expiation of twenty-five years, had still to endure strict police surveillance for another five years, in whatever district of the imperial dominions they might dwell; when this period of probation had passed, worn out with age and sufferings, they might crawl back to their desolate homes; and, if very submissive and grateful, they were allowed to die on Polish soil.
On the 19th of February, 1860, Alexander gave a supplementary ukase to the admiring world. It was the same in character as that for the Western Guberniums, which appeared in September, 1859. His Majesty declared that his joy at the majority of the young Czarowicz needed further demonstration, and that he would therefore benignly extend the clemency accorded to the ancient Polish possessions to the kingdom itself. He decreed that all escheatures, founded on the revolt of 1831, should thenceforth cease, and that only those offenders should be prosecuted whose delinquencies had been discovered prior to September 8th, 1859. Of course, in the kingdom of Poland, just as in the Lithuanian provinces, the number of victims obtainable from the revolt decreased in inverse ratio as time advanced, and Alexander was merciful at very little cost.
Such are the moral characteristics of Russian ukases. We may learn by those of the present Emperor how to estimate his generosity. His justice was aptly illustrated but a short time since by a massacre of unarmed men and women in the streets of Warsaw; his wisdom by a midnight conscription which brought on the present rebellion; and his magnanimity by those orders which made the officers, charged with their execution, rather die by their own hand than incur the infamy of obedience.
Decade has succeeded decade, bringing no amelioration to the fall of this unhappy country; but the day approaches when the warning spoken by Edmund Burke, in 1798, will be justified: the nations of Europe will repent the great iniquity consummated in the dismemberment of Poland, and those who profited by that dismemberment will repent the most bitterly.