Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [339]
It was Pushkin, however, who had led Sergei into serious trouble. It had begun with a cartoon – scandalous but light-hearted – which Pushkin had drawn after the final defeat of Napoleon. It showed the angelic Tsar Alexander returning in triumph – but having grown so fat in the west that the triumphal arches were hastily being widened for him! It was some months later that Sergei followed his hero. His target, however, was the new and intensely pious Minister of Education – one of the noble Golitsyn family. And his cartoon showed the Minister making a detailed personal inspection of the girls at the Smolny School, to ascertain their morals! It was outrageous, and though few of the teaching staff at the school had any love for the authoritarian minister, he was solemnly warned: ‘Any more trouble from you, Bobrov, and you’ll be expelled.’
Whatever the risk of trouble, however, Sergei knew what he must do. It’ll be all right, he told himself. And anyway, I won’t let Olga down.
The early morning was still dark when Sergei slipped out. A groom was waiting for him with a horse half a mile from the school and soon he was clattering down the road to St Petersburg. The road was empty. Sometimes he passed between long, dark lines of trees that seemed about to come together and smother him. Then the land would open out into a wasteland of desolate brown traversed by grey gashes of unmelted snow. More than once, he half-expected to hear the cry of a wolf. The icy wet air stung his face.
And yet he was happy. A day before, he had sent a message to Olga, telling her where to meet him, and in his mind’s eye he could see her pale face and hear her voice saying: ‘I knew you would come.’ It made him feel warm inside. How lucky he was to have such a beautiful sister. How happy he was to be a Bobrov.
And how fortunate to be alive – and a Russian – at such a time! Never had the world looked so exciting. The great threat of Napoleon had finally been laid to rest in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. Now the British had put the aggressor of Europe on the distant Atlantic island of St Helena, from which there would be no escape. Russia, meanwhile, was now stronger than ever before in her history. Down in the south-east, in the Caucasus Mountains, the ancient Kingdom of Georgia had at last been joined to Russia’s empire. In the north, Finland, long under Swedish control, had also been taken over by the Tsar. In the distant east, across the sea, Russia not only possessed Alaska but had now established a fort in California too. And, most splendid prize of all, at the great Congress of Vienna where, after Napoleon, the assembled powers had redrawn the map of Europe, Russia had been given almost the whole of her ancient rival Poland, with her lovely capital of Warsaw.
But what really excited young Sergei was Russia’s new place in the world. No longer the barbarous Asiatic kingdom cut off from the western world; no longer the backward pupil of Dutch and German adventurers, English and French. At the congress, it was the Russian Tsar who took the lead. More even than this, Russia had proclaimed her own, special mission.
‘Let us put a final end to these terrible wars and bloody revolutions,’ the Tsar had proclaimed to the governments of Europe. ‘Let the European powers come together in a new and universal brotherhood, founded solely on Christian charity.’
This was the famous Holy Alliance. It was, by any standards, an astonishing document. Russia even proposed a shared, European army – the first international peace-keeping force – to police this universal order.
Admittedly such grand ideas had existed before, in