"I hate thee and thy race, Thou autocratic villain,"
does not lack in allusive clearness. Secretly printed abroad, his writings were largely propagated at Alexander the Second's accession. Again, men like Lawroff--who, ten years later, was imprisoned as a suspect, after Karakasoff's attempt against the life of the Czar--had celebrated the advent of the successor of Nicholas with such ironically questionable sentiments as this:--
"Be proud, ye Russian men, Of being the slaves of a Czar!"
Writers of comedies, novelists, delineators of the life of the people, ultra-realistic and cynical describers of the criminal classes arose in rapid succession, whose tendency, one and all, was to show to what a state of corruption Russian society, from top to bottom, had come under the famous "Champion of Order," the dreaded Nicholas. That Czar had been in the habit of speaking of Turkey as the Sick Man. Russia was now shown to be the Sick Man. Neither did St. Petersburg, Moscow or the other chief towns, alone serve as a theme for this kind of semi-political literature. "Provincial Sketches" also came out in a similar strain. These publications obtained an ever-increasing success among those classes--few in number, it is true--which were able to read. A whole "Revelation Literature" sprang up, dealing with cases of governmental corruption. The censorship could not be upheld any longer against these writers with the strict severity of the previous reign. A beaten Absolutism had to do things a little more cautiously; and the watchful eyes of men hitherto treated like slaves quickly found out, with the rapid glance and intuition of the oppressed, that it was safe to "dare it on" a little more than they would have dreamt of doing before the end of the Crimean War. Truly, those Liberals in this country who now denounce that war as a mistake and even a crime, do not know, or do not care to remember, what a relief it brought to Russian Liberals themselves.
Soon after the death of Nicholas, desires, until then only muttered, were publicly expressed for the recall and the amnesty of the Martyrs of the Conspiracy and the Insurrection of December, 1825. Pestel, Ryleieff, Bestujeff-Rumin, and the other leaders, had been strung up on the gallows. Many of those transported to Siberia had died a miserable felon's death in the lead-mines. Brought up in the lap of luxury, they ended like galley-slaves, because they had loved freedom more than wealth and ease. It is reported of one of the political prisoners, a nobleman, that he died in Kamtschatka with a chain round his neck, fastened to the wall. Others had been sent to the Caucasus, which in Russia was long ago said to be "not so much a frontier as a grave-yard." There they had fallen in a hateful war against brave, independent mountain tribes, as the unwilling tools of an aggressive tyranny. Still, some of the sufferers were yet alive--among them men of the foremost families of the country. They had to be allowed to come back. They came--mere shadows and ruins of their former selves. But their decrepit condition was the most telling evidence of the infamy of the Tyrant who had fortunately passed away.