We left the consecrated ground in a strange intoxication after a tiring struggle with the densely packed crowd that would move neither forward nor backward. "It is not the business of the police to maintain order, but only to keep people under surveillance." I have been astonished to this very day that no one was trampled to death in the crowd.
I heard a few days later that the statistician Annenski, an old man of sixty-five, was arrested for having delivered one of those impassioned speeches at the grave. A number of men of irreproachable character, among them the historian who was the first speaker there, testified that Annenski was not one of the speakers. I could have testified to that myself, for I stood among the speakers, and each one was named to me. But the police would not give up its victim. Annenski was still in confinement when I left Russia. Now he is banished to Reval for four years, because they had found in his house a few numbers of Struve's periodical.
I, however, carried away with me from Mikhailovski's grave the certainty that the coming generation is lost to the reaction. Young Russia, in so far as it possesses an academic education, is liberal, both the men and the women. And thus that funeral day was for me the most hopeful day that I had lived in Russia.
Czar Nicholas I. is known to have been a great admirer of Gogol's "Revizor." Yet a more bitter satire on Russian officialdom than this realistic comedy does not exist. Plenty of utterances of the czars who have followed Nicholas are quoted to show that none of the supposedly unlimited monarchs of Russia has been in the least hazy as to the qualities of his most trustworthy servants. When, nevertheless, fifty years after the death of Nicholas I., the camorra of officials makes more havoc than ever, and obstructs all development of the Russian nation with the close meshes of its organization, as with a net of steel wire, this strange phenomenon is to be explained only in two ways. Either the czars who so clearly recognized the evil must have been unscrupulous cynics, who only laughed at corruption and had no feeling for the sufferings of their people, or else their power was not sufficient to break that of their servants. The omnipotence of autocracy must have found its limits in the omnipotence of the oligarchy of functionaries. The first of the possible explanations may be set aside without further consideration. The autocrats, without exception, have desired the good of their people, and have been personally upright men and lovers of justice. If they had been strong enough to create a trustworthy and industrious official service, instead of their idle and corrupt one, they would certainly have done so. Only the second explanation, then, is possible. The power of the czardom has had to capitulate to that of the oligarchy of officials.