A Herzen Reader

Returning to Uman, Volkonsky took his wife, who was near her time, to her father, Nik. Nik. Raevsky, in the countryside, where she gave birth on January 2, i826, to a son, Nikolay. On January 7 he left his wife with the Raevskys, having told her that he was instructed to go around to all the regiments; he ignored the advice of old Raevsky, who tried to convince him to flee abroad, and set off for Uman. On

the way, he encountered a faithful servant with the news that a spe­cial courier had arrived from Petersburg, that the prince's study had been sealed up, and a guard placed at his house. Volkonsky contin­ued his journey, arriving at his quarters in Uman late in the evening, and the following morning was arrested by his division commander Kornilov, the same person who, three weeks earlier, upon returning from Petersburg, had said to him: "Ah! Sergey Grigorevich, I saw the ministers and other such people there who are governing Russia: what a country! one ass sits on top of another and urges on the other asses!"

Taken by the courier to Petersburg, directly to the Winter Palace, brought to the study of Nikolay Pavlovich, he had extremely vulgar abuse and swearwords heaped on him by the most exalted mouth! He was then taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress and imprisoned in the Alekseevsky ravelin. Upon entering the building, on the left were the rooms of the steward Lilienleker, a terrible bribe-taker, who fed those incarcerated miserably; to the right the solitary cells began, of which there were seventeen that round the entire ravelin, in the middle of which was a small courtyard with stunted greenery, and here was buried the false Tarakanova⁵ (she died after giving birth in December i775, and a made-up story was spread that she had drowned in a flood that took place two years later). In the first cell on the right sat Ryleev; next to him was Prince Yevgeny Obolensky; in the third corner cell was a Greek named Sevenis, who had stolen a pearl from another Greek, Zoya Pavlovich; Volkonsky was placed in the fourth cell; next to him was Ivan Pushchin; further along—although Volkon- sky couldn't recall the exact order—were Prince Trubetskoy, Pestel, Sergey and Matvey Ivanovich Muravyov, Prince Odoevsky, Vilhelm Kukhelbeker, Lunin, Prince Shchepin, Nikolay and Mikhail Alexan­drovich Bestuzhevy, Panov, and Arbuzov.

At the interrogations Volkonsky behaved with great dignity. Dibich, who, because of his passionate character was called the "samovar-pasha," at one session had the indecency to call him a traitor; the prince answered: "I was never a traitor to my fatherland, which I wish only good, which I served not for financial consider­ations, not for rank, but from the duty owed by a citizen!" Volkonsky, as we have said, commanded a brigade made up of the Azov and Dnepr regiments; of the nine officers of the Azov Regiment and the eight from the Dnepr who were brought into the plot by Volkonsky, only one staff-captain from the Azov Regiment, Ivan Fedorovich Fokht, was arrested and tried, and that as a result of his own care­lessness; the remaining sixteen completely escaped the government investigation thanks to the firm self-control of Volkonsky at the interrogations.

One day, during a confrontation between Volkonsky and Pestel, Pavel Vasilevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who in his youth was among the assassins of Paul I, said to him: "I am amazed, gentlemen, that you could decide on such a terrible business as regicide?" Pestel answered: "I am amazed at the amazement of your excellency; you should know better than us that this wouldn't be the first time!" Kutuzov not only turned pale, but turned green as well, while Pestel, turning to the other members of the commission, said with a smile: "It has happened in Russia that people were awarded Andreevsky rib­bons for this!"

Of the numerous members of the supreme criminal court only four were against capital punishment; Admiral Mordvinov, Infantry General Count Tolstoy, Lieutenant General Emmanuel, and Senator Kushnikov. As for Speransky, having taken part in the conspiracy, he agreed to everything and did not oppose capital punishment.⁶