Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [442]
Nicolai Bobrov was thirty-seven. The hair on his head and the neat, pointed beard he favoured were prematurely greying. His nose seemed to have grown more hooked, giving his face something of the Turkish cast of his ancestors; but the face had few lines and still often wore the same, open look it had possessed in the days when he was a student trying to persuade his father’s peasants to usher in a new world.
How far away those days seemed. Nicolai was a family man now. He had a daughter; an elder son, named Mikhail after his grandfather; and this last year there had been a new baby, a boy they had called Alexander. In his pocket now he was proudly carrying a photograph, pasted on board, of the little boy. If asked his politics nowadays, he would certainly reply, in a general way: ‘I am a liberal.’
If the revolutionary fervour of his student days had not lasted, it was not surprising. Nicolai had never forgotten the humiliation of 1874. ‘The peasants weren’t even interested,’ he had soon confessed. He had felt cheated by Popov too. ‘He was just an opportunist who made a fool of me,’ he told his parents. And a few years later, when the terrorists killed the Tsar, he had only shaken his head sadly. ‘Even a Tsar is better than chaos,’ he nowadays declared. To which he would add: ‘Russia will be a free democracy one day; but the truth is, we aren’t ready yet. It’ll take a generation, maybe two.’ Until then, thank God, Russia was quiet.
And quiet, nowadays, it certainly was. Immediately after the assassination of his reforming father, the new Tsar Alexander III had moved decisively. The murderous People’s Will inner circle had been discovered and smashed; that good old reactionary, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, had been brought back as Minister of the Interior and soon had a special police service of no less than a hundred thousand gendarmes. Most of the empire had been placed under martial law by the Tsar’s so-called Temporary Regulations. These had been in force for ten years now – but then, as Nicolai liked to say: ‘When our rulers do something good in Russia, they say it’s permanent and then revoke it; but when they do something bad, they say it’s temporary, and it stays for ever!’
There was censorship and internal passports; in the universities, all student bodies were forbidden; in the countryside, new officials called Land Captains had been appointed to deal out government justice to the peasants without benefit of independent law courts. And the most perfect expression of the official attitude came from the Procurator of the Holy Synod who, when asked the government’s role in education, replied: ‘To keep people from inventing things.’
It was a police state. And yet, Nicolai thought, perhaps it was for the best. At least there was order. True, there had been a few strikes; true, down in the south there had been some pogroms against the Jews. One could not approve of that. But there had been no more bombs. And as he looked out at the winter city a thought suddenly occurred to him, which made him smile.
For the truth is, he concluded, it’s as if the Russian empire has been under snow for the last ten years. Yes, that was it exactly. Winter was harsh and cold. Nothing could grow; the snow stifled everything. People might complain at this huge, Russian stasis, but the snow also protected the land; under it, delicate seeds could survive the howling winds above. Under the great snow-covering of tsarist rule, perhaps Russia could slowly prepare herself for her new and different future in the modern world. And when the time is right, he thought, our Russian spring will be beautiful. The idea pleased him.
Now the sled was crossing