To be sold, three coachmen, well-trained and handsome; and two girls, the one eighteen and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking and well acquainted with various kinds of handiwork. In the same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one twenty-one years of age can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair. In the same house are sold pianos and organs.

Advertisement in the Moscow Gazette, 1801.

Peter Kropotkin's father was a general and a prince. His family originated with a grandson of Rostislav Mstislavich the Bold. His ancestors had been Grand Princes of Smolensk. He was a descendant of the house of Rurik, and judged from the standpoint of heredity, had more right to the throne than the Romanoffs. Incidentally he was like most military men—barbarous, pitiless, merciless. He owned twelve hundred male serfs. We do not know how many maids. Neither do we know how many were scarred by the knout, how many were flogged till the breath of life left them, nor how many hanged themselves under his window.

If this brave warrior—who received the cross of Saint Anne for gallantry, because his servant Froll rushed into the flames to save a child—became imbued with the notion that there was not sufficient hay in the barn, he would call one of his serfs, strike him in the face, and accuse him of overfeeding the horses. In order to prove he was right he would make another calculation, and come to the conclusion there was too much hay. So he would bang his slave again for not giving the equidae enuf. Suddenly he would sit down and write a note: Take So and So to the police station, and let 100 lashes with the birch rod be administered to him.

On such occasions Peter would run out—his rosy cheeks wet with weeping—catch the unhappy soul in a dark passage, and try to kiss his hand. The serf would tear it away, and say bitterly, "Let me alone; you too, when you grow up, will you not be just the same?"

"No, no, never!" cried the child, while the hot tears choked him and made him cough for breath.

The females of all animals, having dislikes and preferences, exercise the right of selection; rejecting one and receiving another; sending away a male who is repulsive to them, and accepting a wooer they find attractive.[5]

Such absurd liberty was never allowed the serfs. They married when, where and whom the master wished. The Kropotkins owned a woman named Polya—intelligent and artistic—an exceptional serf. Her body was bound; her hands were doomed to labor; her talents brought benefits not to herself; her skill was at the service of others; her industry profited her owners; she was a chattel, chained and confined—but her heart could not be controlled. She deeply loved a neighboring servant, and was with child from him. The lover, forgetting the Russian proverb, "One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead," implored permission to marry her.... The Kropotkins owned also a dwarf called 'bandy-legged Filka.' Because of a terrible kick which he received in his boyhood, he ceased to grow. His legs were crooked, his feet were turned inward, his nose was broken, his jaw was deformed. It was the General's will that the refined Polya should wed this unsightly imp. She was forced to obey. The 'happy couple' were sent to the estate of Ryazan.[6]

During the sixth year of the reign of Alexander II., a servant dashed wildly into Peter Kropotkin's room. It was early in the morning, and Kropotkin was still in bed. But the servant brandished the tea tray and babbled excitedly, "Prince, freedom! The manifesto is posted on the Gostinoi Dvor." In a moment Kropotkin was dressed and began to run out. Just then a friend came running in. "Kropotkin, freedom!" he shouted, "Here is the manifesto!"

Kropotkin read it. His eyes beamed. He stamped his feet. O happy day! No more slavery—serfdom was abolished—the muzhiks were free. Not the dark ghosts of reaction, but the luminous sons of light had triumphed. Not Shuvaloff, Muravioff, and Trepoff, but Herzen, Turgenev and Chernishevsky.[7]

That afternoon Kropotkin attended the last performance of the Italian Opera. Baveri, the conductor of the band, raised his baton; the musicians began to play, but human voices drowned the notes, for the people were shouting for their czar—Redeemer!—Deliverer! Then Baveri stopped, but the hurrahs did not. Again Baveri waved his stick wildly in the air, the fiddlers grasped tightly their bows, the drummers beat with all their strength, the players inflated their lungs and blew the brazen instruments with might and main, but from that powerful band not a bar of music could be heard, for the people were shouting for their czar—Immanuel!—Illustrious! Strangers met in the streets, embraced, kissed each other thrice on the cheek, and shouted for their czar—Father!—Messiah! In front of the royal palace, peasants and professors mingled, and shouted for their czar—Emancipator!—Liberator! When he really appeared, crowds eager and immense, ran after the carriage and shouted for their czar—Tsar Osvoboditel!

As a dream disappears at dawn, so died this enthusiasm. The brief moment of promise was followed by an eternal hour of despair; the short day was succeeded by the endless night. Hell may not be Hell, but a Romanoff is a Romanoff. Only one year later, the despot in Alexander awoke—mature and monstrous. If the dead could touch the living, Nicholas would have hugged his son. The steps of the scaffold became slippery with the blood of the best. The rope of the hangman was jerked day and night, and the key of the jailer creaked in a thousand locks. Reaction had won, and liberalism lay covered with a crimson shroud.

The Valuev volcano vomited its smothering lava as far as Siberia, and General Kukel who with Kropotkin's help was preparing a long list of necessary reforms, was dismissed from his post because another place had been found for him—in prison.

On the other hand there was a district chief who robbed the peasants and whipped their wives, and whose brutality and dishonesty were so unanswerably exposed by the energetic Kropotkin that this officer was also transfered—to a higher position in Kamchatka where he found more roubles for his purse and more women for his knout.

When Kropotkin returned to St. Petersburg on an official commission, a high functionary said to him, "Do you know that Chernishevsky has been arrested? He is now in the fortress."

"Chernishevsky? What has he done?"

"Nothing in particular, nothing! But mon cher, you know—state considerations!... Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a government cannot tolerate that: that's impossible! intolerable mon cher, dans un Etat bien ordonnÉ!"[8]

For these mad acts of a drunken despotism, there was neither shadow of excuse nor shade of reason, except that a Romanoff was hungry and thirsty for victims, satisfying the blood-craving spirit that cried within him, demanding that the brightest youths and the noblest girls be changed to lifeless corpses.

Is it any wonder that men who on the great day of emancipation quoted with tears in their eyes the beautiful article by Herzen,[9] "Thou hast conquered, Galilean," now recited these other words by the same exile: "Alexander Nikolaevich, why did you not die on that day? Your name would have been transmitted in history as that of a hero."