From the Other Shore

XVIII

and German legislations, everything that could be transplanted from the municipally free Holland to a land of communal autocracy, was indeed transplanted. However, the unwritten, instinctual recognition of the rights of the individual, the rights of thought, and the truth—which morally restrained power—could not be transferred and was not transferred. Slavery increased among us along with education; the state grew and improved, but the individual did not benefit. On the contrary, the stronger the state became, the weaker the individual grew. European forms of administration and courts, of military and civil organization, developed among us into a kind of monstrous, inescapable despotism.

If Russia were not so vast, if the foreign structure of power were not so vaguely organized and so haphazardly executed, then it could be said without exaggeration that it would be impossible for any person with even the slightest sense of their own dignity to live in Russia.

The spoiled nature of a power that encountered no resistance reached, several times over, a level of unbridled excess that has no equivalent in any history. You know the measure of it from stories about the poet of his own trade, Emperor Paul. Strip away the capricious and fantastical elements from Paul, and you will see that he is not original at all, that the principle inspiring him is one and the same—not only in all reigns, but in every governor, in every