The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff

coachman and Monsieur Castellot would use him as a bird-dog on their hunting expeditions in the marshes. They would run him to exhaustion in search of game and then take turns carrying him home asleep in their arms.
    When Paul was old enough to harness the pony and trap he would set out on the bright cool mornings and race through the oak woods to Bossibrod, the little wooden station built specially for the family on the Kiev–Odessa railway line. He would pick up his father’s mail at the station and bowl along home with Le Figaro, The Times and Novoe Vremie from St Petersburg jouncing on the seat beside him. His father would be pacing the veranda in his dressing gown, sipping his coffee, waiting to pore over the papers for signs of the political climate back in Petersburg. He bore his banishment fretfully and longed for a return to power.
    For several months in 1879 he was recalled, but only to serve as temporary governor for the annual commercial fair and market at Nizhni Novgorod. With his usual energy, he ordered the old bidonville of wooden and tin shacks that had served the market for centuries to be knocked down and replaced with vaulted steel and glass hangars of the kind he had seen in Les Halles in Paris. But this was not the work he longed for and he was soon back on the veranda in Kroupodernitsa, pacing and brooding and then making furious visitations to buy up vacant properties nearby. He plunged into speculation as he had once plunged into Asian adventure. Speculators came to him with propositions and he was soon deep in the Caspian caviar business and the Volga steamboat trade. His interest in these concerns was fitful and erratic and he turned them over to an ingratiating young steward, Grinevetsky. The family soon had its doubts about Grinevetsky, who was to be found living in the best hotel in Kiev, profiting from what he could skim off the Ignatieff enterprises. Nicholas’s wife tried to get her husband to restrain his financial impulsiveness, but he never tolerated her interference. If they wouldn’t let him serve his country, he grumbled, he could at least improve his neighbourhood. Dilapidated estates were purchased and done up, steamboats named after General Ignatieff began plying the Volga, and for the moment at least there was money enough to pay for this balm to wounded pride.
    The call back to service in Petersburg finally came in March 1881, at a time of national crisis. Nicholas’s old master, Alexander II, who had freed the serfs in 1861 and had triumphed over the Turks in 1878, was assassinated by terrorists in a Petersburg street. His successor, the massive and dim-witted Alexander III, began a search for men ruthless enough to put down what he believed was a conspiracy that threatened the future of the dynasty itself. The new Tsar had served at Plevna in the Turkish campaign and remembered late-night conversations with General Ignatieff in which he had asked for advice about his future reign and had been told with gruff decisiveness: ‘Draw closer to the people.’ Alexander III consulted his uncle the Grand Duke Nicholas and was told that Ignatieff was often a ‘liar in small things’, but might be truthful with big things. This equivocal recommendation was good enough for the new monarch. In May 1881, Ignatieff was named Minister of the Interior. All of the energies dammed up since San Stefano were now poured into the task of mastering the most serious crisis the autocracy had faced since the Decembrist uprising of 1825. He masterminded the arrest and deportation of agitators, the infiltration of émigré groups in Zürich and Paris and student clubs and salons at home. He reorganized the secret police, the Okhrana, and turned them loose on the People’s Will, the terrorist group that had struck down Alexander II.
    Ignatieff put his signature to the Law on Extraordinary and Temporary Measures, which gave provincial governors the power to suspend