Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [375]
The idea was simple. It suggested a paternal relationship between the Tsar and his people, entirely appropriate to a state that liked to refer to itself as Holy Russia. And to Alexis, the moment this doctrine of Official Nationality was announced, it was sacred.
The dour Old Believer, therefore, seemed to the authoritarian landowner to be vaguely treacherous, disloyal and disobedient. I should have thrashed him more, he thought, and if ever I get an excuse, I’ll thrash him again.
And still Savva’s real goal, his freedom, seemed elusive.
In 1837 he asked Alexis Bobrov what it would take to purchase his family’s freedom.
‘Nothing, because I will not free you,’ was the reply.
The next year he asked again and received the same reply. ‘May I know why, sir?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ Alexis said pleasantly. ‘It’s because, Suvorin, I prefer to keep you where you are.’
And bitterly, looking at his own son, Savva remarked to his wife: ‘He’s still just as I was at his age: a serf, and the son of a serf.’ And when Maria tried to comfort him and told him something would turn up, he only shook his head and muttered: ‘I wonder what.’
And then, starting in 1839, came the famine.
There had not been a crop failure for a number of years. Now the crops failed two years running. Alexis was away, down in the Ukraine. Though she was nearly seventy, the burden fell upon Tatiana.
For Russka, the two failures and the resulting famine were grim indeed. ‘The Riazan estate’s a complete wash-out,’ Ilya moaned. ‘The steward writes they’ve been slaughtering the livestock because there’s no winter feed.’ Numerous attempts were made to buy grain from other areas. ‘But even if we do find some,’ Tatiana remarked, ‘it gets lost on the way.’ By the winter of 1840 the situation was desperate.
Each day Tatiana would go down into the village and move from house to house. There were still some reserve supplies at the manor, though only enough to help the worst cases, and she used her judgement as best she could. She had two particular calls she always made. One was to the Romanovs, because their son Timofei had always been the playmate of little Misha; the second was to the izba where young Arina now lived with her husband and children. She owed it to old Arina, who had died five years before, to help her niece. It was a wretched business. Except for the eldest, a homely girl called Varya, the children were sickly. In the space of four weeks, she saw three of them die. And almost worse, she could not persuade Arina to eat. Anything she gave her finished up with Varya. Desperate to preserve at least one child, the mother was sacrificing herself. For a long time, Tatiana was certain, Arina had subsisted off a single turnip. And if these deprivations hurt the peasants, her sharing in their pain, she was sure, had damaged the health of Tatiana herself. In the summer of 1841 when, thank God, the crop did not fail, she said sadly to Ilya: ‘Something has happened inside me. I don’t think I shall make old bones.’
It was in the early spring of 1840, when things were at their worst, that the curious rumour started. It was Ivan Romanov who told her about it when she came to the izba one morning. Both he and all his sons were looking excited. ‘It’s the Tsar,’ he said. ‘The Tsar is coming here.’ He smiled. ‘Then everything will be all right.’
‘You mean Tsar Nicholas is coming?’
‘Oh no,’ he said with a smile. ‘The last Tsar. Tsar Alexander. The Angel.’
It was one of the many strange rumours in Russian history that Tsar Alexander I did not die in 1825, but instead went wandering, as a monk – usually by the name of Fedor Kuzmich. No one knows quite when it began. It is even claimed to this day that a certain English private family have papers to prove that this was true.
Each morning now, when she went down to the village, Tatiana saw people hopefully looking out for the former Tsar, in the belief that