The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (52 page)

But does the identity of Junius
matter
? The answer must be yes, for he appeared at a vital moment in history. When George III came to the throne, British politics was notoriously corrupt; it was taken for granted
that a man went into the House of Commons to make his fortune. He expected to take money in exchange for favours. It was not even regarded as reprehensible – merely as normal and natural. The King himself spent his vast “privy purse” – more than a million pounds – in bribing Members of Parliament. (At least he was not, like some of his European counterparts, an absolute monarch who could merely order them to vote as he pleased.) Junius lost no opportunity to jeer at this corruption.

Newspapers had begun in the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), but they were little more than entertainment. Junius changed all that. His outrageous letters revealed that you did not have to be a King or a Member of Parliament to exert pressure on the government. Under Queen Elizabeth or Charles I, such attacks would have been regarded as high treason; there would have been torture and executions by the dozen. Woodfall’s trial and acquittal (1770) revealed that even Parliament lacked the power to silence criticism.

Newspapers began to report Parliamentary debates and laid themselves open to prosecution. In 1771 a newspaper referred to a Member of Parliament, Colonel George Onslow, as “the little scoundrel” and “that paltry, insignificant insect”. When he complained, the House ordered the arrest of the printers. The printers fought back, arrested the men sent to arrest them, and hauled them in front of the Lord Mayor and two aldermen (one of whom was Wilkes, recently out of jail). When the Lord Mayor countermanded the arrest order, Parliament ordered that he be committed to the Tower of London. His supporters rose up and rioted; they hissed the King, invaded Parliament, and attacked the carriages of MPs. The Lord Mayor was hastily released. And the newspapers took advantage of this triumph to resume their reports of Parliamentary debates.

Parliament itself was forced to order publication of its debates in full – the first “Hansard” (named for Luke Hansard, the publisher) appeared in 1774. From then on, a free press was taken for granted, and the opinions of the people became as important as the opinions of the King and his ministers. Bribery and corruption became the exception rather than the rule.

Junius, of course, cannot take all the credit for this revolution; Wilkes had started it with his
North Briton
article, which in turn was inspired by Pitt and his brother-in-law. But Junius added yeast to the mixture; he stirred up the issues and raised a spirit of rebellion that looked, at one point, as if it would lead to a revolution like the one that swept France two decades later.

It is difficult to feel much sympathy for Junius as a man; he was obviously a thoroughly unpleasant character: mean, envious, and paranoid. His rage was not generous but vindictive. But his formidable literary talent, comparable to that of Swift, changed the course of British history, creating a spirit of freedom that went on to change the course of world history. It is impossible to think of any historical figure of comparable influence whose identity has remained unknown. But then, as Junius himself remarked smugly: “The mystery of Junius increases his importance”.

30

Fedor Kuzmich

Did the Tsar Die an Unknown Monk?

In 1836 a sixty-year-old beggar named Fedor Kuzmich was arrested as a vagrant near the town of Krasnophinsk, in the province of Perm, Russia, and was sentenced to twenty blows of the knout (whip). Then he was sent to Siberia – Russia’s penal colony. There, at Nerchinsk, near Tomsk, he became a hermit and acquired a reputation for saintliness.

Fedor Kuzmich impressed all who saw him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and of majestic appearance, producing in everyone a sense of awe and veneration. His voice, too, seems to have been that of an educated man, and his speech was gentle and deliberate. In spite of his gentleness, however, there were times when he became impatient and imperious, and the peasants who approached him felt the urge to fall to their knees.

Kuzmich always turned aside inquiries about his early life. But occasionally, he made some remark that suggested he had fought in the Russian Army against Napoléon; he spoke of the campaign of 1812 and of the victorious entry into Paris of the Russians and their allies on 31 March 1814. The meticulous tidiness of his cell suggested army training.

Kuzmich had remarkable powers as a healer, and people came to see him from all over Siberia. And according to his biographer, Schilder (author of a pamphlet that became immensely popular in the 1890s), two former servants from the Tsar’s palace were among these visitors – they had been exiled to Siberia, and when one of them fell ill, his companion decided to go and see the healer, to ask if he could help his sick comrade. According to Schilder, the man entered the cell alone, leaving a guide – probably a monk – outside; and when he saw the hermit, he felt obliged, like so many others, to fall to his knees. The old man raised him to his feet and began to speak; with astonishment, the man recognized the voice of Tsar Alexander I. And as he stared at the white-bearded
features, he recognized the face of his former master. He fell down in a swoon. The guide outside heard his cry and came in; Fedor Kuzmich told him gently, “Take him back home. And when he regains his senses, warn him not to tell anybody what he saw. Tell him that his friend will recover”. Kuzmich proved to be right.

The story that Alexander had been recognized by one of his former servants soon spread all over Russia and was the subject of some official correspondence. Alexander’s biographer, Maurice Paleologue, described (in
The Enigmatic Tsar
, 1938) how an old soldier who had been sent to the prison of Nerchinsk saw the hermit and instantly stiffened to attention, saying, “It’s our beloved Tsar Alexander Pavlovich”!

Fedor Kuzmich died in 1864 at the age of eighty-seven – precisely the age Alexander I would have been if he had lived.

Is it conceivable that a modern Tsar of Russia, the man who defeated Napoléon, should have quietly vanished and become a hermit? It is true that Ivan the Terrible abdicated in his mid-thirties and retired to a monastery; his subjects had to go and beg him to return. But that was in 1564, in a Russia that was still virtually medieval, not in the enlightened nineteenth century. To understand how it might be possible, we need to know a little of Russia’s appallingly bloody and violent history.

The first absolute Tsar was Ivan the Terrible, who came to the throne in 1547 and who was a paranoid maniac. He began his reign by having his chief adviser torn apart by his hunting dogs – Ivan was in his teens at the time. He then embarked on a career of rape, murder, and torture – he regarded every woman in Moscow as a member of his private harem. Marriage seemed to reform him, but when his wife died, he became more paranoid than ever and went on to perpetrate some of the most appalling cruelties in history. While besieging the city of Novgorod, he had a timber wall built around it so that no one could escape. When the city fell, he directed a massacre that went on for five days; husbands and wives were forced to watch one another being tortured; mothers saw their babies ill treated before they themselves were roasted alive. Sixty thousand people were executed. When he besieged Weden, in Livonia, hundreds of citizens preferred to blow themselves up in a castle rather than fall into his hands; he had all the remaining townsfolk tortured to death.

Ivan was the worst of the Tsars, but only just. Even rulers we like to think of as “enlightened” – Peter the Great, Catherine the Great – were capable of ordering mass executions and torture. Peter the Great’s niece earned herself the title of Anna the Bloody, while Catherine’s son Paul – the child of her first lover, Saltykov – was a madman who oppressed the
peasantry in a way that made them feel Ivan the Terrible was back. (Since 1649 – the year Charles I was executed in England – Russian peasants were not allowed to leave their owners’ estates and were merely “property”.)

By 1801 the paranoid Tsar Paul was living in seclusion in a newly built palace that was surrounded by canals and had imposed a nine o’clock curfew on St Petersburg – whose reaction to it was much as it would have been in London or Paris. On March 23 the regiment of his son Alexander was guarding the palace. Alexander had suffered greatly from his father’s arbitrary despotism and had imbibed liberal ideas from Europe; he agreed with his father’s chief adviser, Count Pahlen, that Paul had to be deposed. He is supposed to have insisted that Paul’s life should be spared, but few historians believe that he meant it. A group of conspirators was admitted to the palace after dark and entered the Tsar’s bedroom; he was ordered to abdicate, then strangled with a scarf. The people of Russia went mad with joy when Alexander became their Tsar; they felt that a nightmare was over.

It certainly looked as if it was. The handsome, charming young Tsar met every day with a group of liberal friends to discuss over coffee the way to regenerate his country through freedom of the individual. He quickly made peace with the English – to the disgust of Napoléon. He had no doubt that the first major step was the abolition of serfdom; but that was easier said than done. His minister Speransky, the son of a village priest, was asked to draft a constitution for a democratic Russia; but even he advised against freeing the serfs at one blow. Alexander had to be contented with a decree that allowed anyone to own land, a right that had previously been restricted to the nobility. He also made a determined effort to increase the number of schools and universities. He allowed students to travel abroad, lifted the ban on the import of foreign books, and closed down the secret police department.

A first step toward the liberation of the serfs was left in suspension while Russia went to war with Persia over Russia’s annexation of Georgia – a war Russia eventually won. But Alexander’s chief problem, of course, was Napoléon, with whom his father, Paul, had been on friendly terms. In 1805 Alexander joined England, Austria, and Sweden in an alliance against Napoléon. Britain defeated Napoléon’s fleet at Trafalgar, but the Russians and Austrians were defeated by Napoléon at Austerlitz. A series of treaties with Napoléon followed, and Alexander became Napoléon’s ally under the Treaty of Tilsit (1807). Alexander went on to fight successful wars against Turkey and Sweden, acquiring Bessarabia and Finland. The starry-eyed liberal was becoming a conquering hero.

By 1812 it was obvious that Napoléon and Alexander disliked each other too much to remain allies; in June Napoléon’s Grand Army, strengthened by Italians, Poles, Swiss, Dutch, and Germans, invaded Russia. It looked like the end for Alexander. Smolensk fell; the Russians were defeated at Borodino; in mid-September the French entered Moscow. The next day the city burst into flames. Alexander declined to make terms, and a month later, Napoléon began his disastrous retreat. Besieged by the Russians and by the Russian winter, the French troops died in droves; Napoléon fled to Paris, leaving behind half a million corpses. The Prussians now deserted Napoléon and joined the Russians. And although Napoléon raised another army and had some remarkable victories, he could not prevent the allies from entering Paris in March 1814. In April, Napoléon abdicated and was exiled to Elba.

Alexander had defeated the “Corsican monster”; he was adored by all his subjects. If history were predictable, he would have completed his reforms and become the most popular monarch in Europe. Unfortunately, Alexander’s ten years of war had turned him into a realist and made him repent of the liberal delusions of his youth. Under the influence of a dubious visionary named Julie de Krüdener, he dreamed up an idea called the Holy Alliance, in which the heads of Europe would unite under Christian principles of faith and justice; British statesman Castlereagh called it “sublime mysticism and nonsense”. Yet it was deeply typical of Alexander. He had always struck those who knew him well as a self-divided man, and it is said – although it is not clear with how much truth – that he never ceased to reproach himself for the murder of his father. Alexander was a famous charmer, as well as a man of sentiment; but the continual exercise of his charm must have made him wonder sometimes whether he was a man or a mouse. To begin with, he continued to live up to his liberal pledges, conferring a constitution on Poland and emancipating the serfs in the Baltic provinces. But in Russia itself, he took care to maintain the status quo. He began to tighten the screws on education, placing conservatives in charge of universities. Censorship was introduced and liberal professors were purged.

One of Alexander’s chief problems was the army. Understandably, he felt that a huge standing army was necessary. But this was enormously expensive. He devised what he considered a brilliant solution to the problem: military colonies. Local peasants had to maintain the army units, and the soldiers had to work the land like peasants. These units were a combination of barracks, collective farms, and concentration camps. They were the most hated feature of Alexander’s reign.

Yet, oddly enough, he encouraged the flowering of literature that was taking place, becoming the personal patron – and in some ways the jailer – of the great romantic poet Alexander Pushkin. (One reason for this may have been his desire to get Pushkin’s lovely wife into bed – Alexander, like most of the Russian Tsars, lost no opportunity to seduce a pretty girl.) Under Alexander, Russian literature began to develop into one of the great literatures of the world.

It was this combination of freedom and repression that nurtured the Decembrist revolution that would break out three weeks after his death.
¹⁵
Young officers who had imbibed liberal ideas in Europe joined together in 1816 to form a literary discussion group called the Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. It struck them as outrageous that Russia should be drifting back into despotism, and they began to talk revolution. In 1820 Alexander’s own Semyonovsky regiment mutinied against a harsh commander; Alexander proceeded to post its officers to other parts of Russia. Alexander soon became aware that his officers were conspiring against him, yet he seemed oddly indifferent and disillusioned. In his mid-forties, he felt the irony of the situation: a liberal Tsar who had conquered Napoléon, he had become a symbol of oppression to the very officers who had once regarded him as Russia’s brightest hope. For many years, his marriage to the beautiful Empress Elizabeth had been a marriage in name only; they were childless, and he took a succession of mistresses. Life seemed curiously empty. When told of the proliferation of secret societies he said wearily, “I myself have shared and encouraged these errors and delusions . . . I have no right to punish them”. A stronger and more ruthless man would have had all the conspirators arrested and tried; Alexander had no stomach for a bloodbath. He began to speak longingly of abdicating, of becoming a private citizen in Switzerland, or a botanist on the Rhine.