ry. Although the Tsar was
reputed to be learned and was probably the most learned man in his
nation, and had always about him a coterie of distinguished scholars,
still there was no intellectual life in Russia, and owing to the
Oriental seclusion of the women there was no society. The men were
heavily bearded, and the ideal of beauty with the women, as they looked
furtively out from behind veils and curtains, was to be fat, with red,
white, and black paint laid on like a mask. It must have been a dreary
post for gay European diplomats, and in marked contrast to gay, witty,
gallant Poland, at that time thoroughly Europeanized.

Next to the consolidation of the imperial authority, the event in this
reign most affecting the future of Russia was the acquisition of
Siberia. A Cossack brigand under sentence of death escaped with his
followers into the land beyond the Urals, and conquered a part of the
territory, then returned and offered it to Ivan (1580) in exchange for
a pardon. The incident is the subject of a _bilina_, a form of
historical poem, in which Yermak says:

"I am the robber Hetman of the Don.
And now--oh--orthodox Tsar,
I bring you my traitorous head,
And with it I bring the Empire of Siberia!

And the orthodox Tsar will speak--
He will speak--the terrible Ivan,
Ha! thou art Yermak, the Hetman of the Don,
I pardon thee and thy band,
I pardon thee for thy trusty service--
And I give to the Cossack the glorious and gentle
Don as an inheritance."

The two Ivans had created a new code of laws, and now there was an
ample prison-house for its transgressors! The penal code was
frightful. An insolvent debtor was tied up half naked in a public
place and beaten three hours a day for thirty or forty days, and then,
if no one came to his rescue, with his wife and his children he was
sold as a slave. But Siberia was to be the prison-house of a more
serious class of offenders for whom this punishment would be
insufficient. It was to serve as a vast penal colony for crimes
against the state. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century it is
said one million political exiles have been sent there, and they
continue to go at the rate of twenty thousand a year; showing how
useful a present was made by the robber Yermak to the "Orthodox Tsar"!

This reign, like that of Louis XI. of France, which it much resembled,
enlarged the privileges of the people in order to aid Ivan in his
conf