ocracy in Russia. These secret orders, the
Southern, the Northern, the United Slavonian, and the Polish, Alexander
I had endeavored in vain to suppress, and the drastic measures taken by
Nicholas I against the Dekabrists (1825) proved of no avail. Nor did the
reforms of Alexander II help to heal the breach. On the contrary, seeing
that the constitution they expected from the Liberator Czar was not
forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being
realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights
by force. The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the
figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of
their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the
emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the
bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto
cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife with
discontent, and disaffection assumed a national range. The cry was
raised for a "new freedom." A certain Anton Petrov impersonated the
czar, and gathered around him ten thousand Russians. Pamphlets entitled
_Land and Liberty_ (_Zemlya i Volya_) were spread broadcast among the
masses, the mind of the populace was inflamed, and attempts on the life
of the czar ensued.

The extreme reactionaries, consisting mostly of nobles who had become
impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs, grasped the opportunity
to point out to the bewildered czar the evil of his liberal policy.
Slavophilism was rampant. Men like Turgenief, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi,
were condemned as "Westernists," or German sympathizers, the enemies of
Russia. At the recommendation of Princess Helena Petrovna, the czar
engaged as the teacher of his children a comparatively unknown professor
of history, Pobyedonostsev, who later became the soul of Russian
despotism. This man, meek as a dove and cunning as a serpent, easily
ingratiated himself with the czar, and soon there began "a war upon
ideas, a crusade of ignorance." "Karakazov's pistol-shot," as Turgenief
says, "drove back into the shade the phantom of liberty, the appearance
of which all Russia had hailed with acclamations. From that moment to
the end of his life, the emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all
he had accomplished. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the
glorious ukase that had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he
would have been only too glad t