Culture and political thought in Russian empire from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 2

Plekhanov, the 'father of Russian Marxism', began his revolutionary career as a populist. In Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba (Socialism and the Political Struggle, 1883) and Nashi raznoglasiia (Our Differences, 1885) he explained his break with that movement. Both books criticised Lavrov for not understand­ing that the overthrow of the Russian monarchy by a bourgeois constitutional regime would be a progressive step. They also criticised Tkachev for imagin­ing that a revolutionary minority could initiate a socialist revolution in feudal Russia, and they warned that a premature socialist revolution would lead to monstrous dictatorship. For socialists the only realistic immediate goal was 'the conquest of free political institutions and making preparations for the for­mation of a future Russian workers' socialist party'.[128] Plekhanov assumed that skipping stages of historical development is impossible. Interpreting Marx as a historical determinist, he stressed the necessity of capitalism as a preliminary to socialism. Not surprisingly, he defined freedom as co-operation with the laws of history.

The Legal Marxists rejected Plekhanov's historical determinism and again unlike Plekhanov classified political freedoms as valuable in themselves, not just as stepping stones on the path to socialism. In the book Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (Critical Observations on the Eco­nomic Development of Russia, 1894), Struve made the case against Marx's the­ory of the inevitable impoverishment ofthe working class and in favour of evo­lutionary socialism - a position that anticipated the conclusions of the German revisionists. In his article, 'Die Marxsche Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung' (Marx's Theory of Social Development, 1899), he endorsed Eduard Bernstein's idea that socialism may emerge from capitalism non-violently, by slow degrees. By the turn of the century, under pressure from Lenin, Struve had begun to turn away from Marxism. In his essay for the anthology Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism, 1902) Struve criticised social democrats for their sim­plistic historical determinism and dismissal of universal ethics - a conclusion that signalled his transition to liberalism.

Lenin came to Marxism under the influence of Chernyshevsky's elitism and Tkachev's Blanquism. These sources reinforced his innate wilfulness, con­tributing significantly to his subsequent historical voluntarism. In his earliest Marxist work Lenin attacked Struve's book on Russian economic develop­ment by insisting that Marxism is not just a sociological hypothesis but a theory of revolutionary struggle. In Zadachi russkikh sotsial-demokratov (Tasks of Russian Social Democrats, 1898) he endorsed Plekhanov's strategy of mak­ing alliances with bourgeois opponents of the autocracy but emphasised that Social Democrats must take advantage of these alliances for their own pur­poses. He was impatient with Plekhanov's necessitarian Marxism, which linked social democracy too closely to the pursuit of bourgeois freedoms. His most important early book, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii (Development of Capital­ism in Russia, 1899), argued that, in rural Russia, capitalism had already led to the social differentiation of the peasantry. That simple conclusion was both a blow against neo-populists, who imagined that Russia might still avoid capi­talism, and a theoretical basis for a future revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and poor peasants against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin's pivotal book Chto delat'? (What Is to Be Done?, 1902), laid out his theory of the vanguard party. He stated: 'the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness'.[129] In his opinion, social democratic consciousness could only be brought to workers 'from without', by members of a tightly organised, centralised party of professional revolutionaries. Although other Marxists had advocated strong revolutionary leadership, Lenin was the first to contend that, absent the guidance of the revolutionary vanguard, the working class could develop only bourgeois consciousness. In the wake of What Is to Be Done?, Plekhanov accused Lenin of mocking Marx's belief in socialism's inevitability. Trotsky warned of the prospect that Lenin's theory of the party might lead Russia to permanent 'Jacobin' dictatorship: eventually, he wrote, the 'organization of the party takes the place of the party; the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee'.[130] Later it became clear that What Is to Be Done? was a first step toward a party ideocracy, a system of government in which the party, conceived as the source of historically privileged knowledge, imposed its will in all spheres of culture.

After he elaborated the theory of the vanguard party, Lenin developed two other crucial ideas. First, he moved toward a theory of national­ity policy in which he opposed 'any attempt to influence national self- determination [among non-Russian peoples of the empire] from without by violence or coercion', and simultaneously limited the expression ofthe right to self-determination to those cases in which self-determination was in the inter­ests of social democrats.[131] In effect, he made national self-determination con­tingent on permission from the party vanguard. Second, he incorporated into his own theory of socialist revolution Trotsky's idea of'permanent revolution', which held that, due to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Russian proletariat would have to lead the bourgeois revolution and that, therefore, the bourgeois revolution could be transformed into a socialist revolution in one continuous process. According to Trotsky, the Russian proletariat was numer­ically too weak to hold power for long unless it received assistance from the West, but he felt that the revolution in Russia might provide a 'spark' to ignite a general revolution in Western Europe. When combined with Lenin's idea of contingent national self-determination, Trotsky's idea of permanent revolu­tion produced the curious result that Russia was both a subordinate part of a universal process of historical change and the director/initiator of that process. In other words, revolutionary Russia could be understood simultaneously as 'of Europe' and as 'apart from Europe'.

Lenin's crowning work was Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia (State and Revolution, 1917). Taking the experience ofthe Paris Commune as his guide, Lenin asserted that a socialist revolution should entail the ruthless destruction of the old, bourgeois administrative machinery by the armed masses and the insertion in its place of a proletarian dictatorship. He imagined that, in the socialist state, workers themselves would execute most governmental functions, for simple 'bookkeeping' could be done by any literate person. For as long as the proletarian state remained in power it would exercise the strongest possible control over production and consumption and would maintain its vigilance over the remnants ofthe bourgeoisie. Only at the end ofthe socialist stage, after an equitable scheme of economic distribution had been established and after class antagonism had been annihilated, would the state begin to 'wither away', as Marx had predicted. Nowhere in State and Revolution did Lenin enumerate protections for individual liberty, for he was interested only in the workers' collective freedom from want.

It is valuable to compare Lenin's view of the socialist state to that of Bog- danov, the most prolific philosopher among the early Bolsheviks. In his science fiction novel Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star, 1908) Bogdanov imagined commu­nism as a stateless order wherein individual workers would select their jobs based on statistical employment projections, and citizens would be clothed androgynously, be fed manufactured rations and be offered free medical care.

Simultaneously, however, Bogdanov projected a desperate collective effort to keep social production ahead of population growth, technology ahead of nature, and the human spirit ahead of satiation and depression. He was sug­gesting that communism would not constitute the end of history after all. Moreover, Red Star depicted within 'stateless' communism a directorate of intellectuals, an exclusive group of scientific experts, who would make soci­ety's most crucial decisions. In Bogdanov's prophetic reckoning, the socialist state as a formal legal entity might dissolve only to re-emerge in a new, supra- legal form.

Russia and the legacy of 1812

ALEXANDER M. MARTIN

Russia stood at a historical crossroads when it experienced the trauma of the 1812 Napoleonic invasion. Like Germany's 1813 Befreiungskrieg and Spain's 1808-14 Guerra de independencia, Russia's Otechestvennaia voina - War for the Fatherland - became the stuff of ambiguous patriotic legend.

Speaking for many who saw 1812 as a unique opportunity to transcend Russia's bitter internal divisions, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace that the heroes of the war had been the Russians of all social classes whose deep roots in Russian culture and spirituality made them selflessly patriotic and intolerant of social injustice, but also generous towards their nation's defeated enemies. Tolstoy's villains, by contrast, were 'Westernised' aristocrats, cynical cowards whose shrill wartime xenophobia reflected the same spiritual rootlessness and disdain for their own people that had also conditioned their pre-war Francophilia. According to this vision, the 'War for the Fatherland' had proved the Russian people's civic maturity and ought to have been followed by Russia's transformation into a liberal nation-state. Tolstoy's original idea for the novel had actually centred on the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825 against the autocracy, a blow for freedom that he and many others regarded as a natural outgrowth of 1812. Of course, that coup had failed, and Russia remained a dynastic, autocratic, serf-based empire; as collective memories, however, the war and the Decembrist revolt raised Russians' national consciousness and created an impetus to expand the realm of human freedom and dignity that was often suppressed but never snuffed out.

This liberal nationalist reading of the war contains an element of historical truth and is itself a part of history thanks to its place in Russian society's cultural consciousness, but it should not hide from view the more illiberal aspects of the legacy of 1812. Like the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s, it gave Russians the heady sensation of witnessing a turning point in history, thereby encouraging a sense of empowerment and a long-term quest for emancipation. However, also like those other traumas, it too convinced many Russians of their own vulnerability in the face of vast, malevolent forces, and that only a stern, authoritarian order could shield them against foreign hostility and the brittleness of their own social order. This chapter will develop that argument by discussing the challenges Russia faced on the eve of the war; the war's contribution to a xenophobic and reactionary nationalism, a reflexive social conservatism, and what might be called (to borrow Richard Hofstadter's phrase) 'the paranoid style in Russian politics';[132]and the efforts to use an authoritarian religiosity and militarism as tools for post-war state-building and for closing the social fault lines exposed by the war.

Russian culture and society before 1812

At the turn of the century, Russian elite culture faced three main challenges.

One involved the meaning of'Russianness'. Cultural Europeanisation had given the elite an identity separate from everyone else's; as Richard Wortman has argued, 'by displaying themselves as foreigners, or like foreigners, Russian monarchs and their servitors affirmed the permanence and inevitability of their separation from the population they ruled'.² The regime had also sketched out ambitious imperial projects, from Peter I's dream of making Russia the trade route between Europe and the Orient to Catherine Il's 'Greek Project' of creating a Greco-Slavic empire that would give Russia hegemony in south­eastern Europe and - in a bold non sequitur - identify Russia, qua successor to Orthodox Byzantium, to be the true heir to pagan classical Greece and hence a senior member in the family of European cultures.³ The Russian elite thus had to come to terms with both its own national identity and an ill-defined imperial destiny, issues that became all the more urgent once the French Revolution crystallised modern nationalism and shattered the old international system.

1 See. R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).

2 R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth andCeremonyinRussianMonarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995-2000), vol. I, p. 5.

3 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 57; E. V Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh reform (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), p. 418; A. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla... Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII-pervoi treti XlXveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), pp. 35-8.

Furthermore, Russia's sociopolitical order was neither stable nor just. Sen­sitive, educated Russians worried that their vast empire, with its oppressive serfdom, corrupt officials and nouveaux riches aristocrats, represented - to borrow Robert Wiebe's description of the United States in the Gilded Age - 'a peculiarly inviting field for coarse leadership and crudely exercised power'.[133]The dynastic turmoil of the eighteenth century and the parade of unaccount­able favourites who dominated court politics, together with the threat of popular revolts like the one led by the Cossack Emelian Pugachev in 1773-5, also rendered the system disturbingly unpredictable.

Lastly, the Russian elite faced conflicting cultural imperatives as they alter­nated schizophrenically between exercising untrammelled power on their estates and suffering the most pedantic regimentation in their own service as army officers or civilian officials. Religion and state service demanded ascetic self-discipline, while the fashionable 'Voltairean' scepticism of the Enlighten­ment, combined with the social pressure to flaunt one's wealth and the atmo­sphere of legal impunity created by serfdom, made it acceptable to indulge one's whims with little regard to the consequences. One manifestation of the conflicts this bred was a sexual morality torn between conservative modesty and unbridled hedonism, as we see in the pious noblewoman Anna Labzi- na's bitter tale of her marriage to the libertine Karamyshev.[134] Another was the quasi-suicidal propensity of many noblemen in state service for staking their well-being on a literal or figurative roll of the dice, for example, in high-stakes card games or lethal duels; thus wilfully abandoning one's fate to chance was also a form of rebellion against the stifling power of the regime.[135]Hesitating between conflicting models of individual conduct, Russian nobles remained deeply uncertain about what it meant to live a good and honourable life.

The 1812 war and Russian nationalism

To understand the war's psychological impact, it is important to recall the drama and speed with which it unfolded. Napoleon invaded Russia in June. By September, he was in Moscow. And by Christmas, his Grande Armee had been annihilated, at the cost to Russia of hundreds of thousands of lives and immense economic losses; in Moscow, the devastation and carnage were such that the sheer stench was unbearable even from miles away.[136] Countless nobles found themselves on the run as they fled east or south from the war zone. For many, this brought eye-opening new thoughts and experiences.

Not surprisingly, many conceived a bitter hatred for the French, but Napoleon's alliance with other states also led many to blame Europeans in general. The young aristocrat Mariia A. Volkova was typical in her out­rage at the French 'cannibals' and their allies for daring to call the Russian people 'barbarians': 'Let those fools call Russia a barbarous country, when their civilisation has led them to submit voluntarily to the vilest of tyrants. Thank God that we are barbarians, if Austria, Prussia, and France are con­sidered civilised.'[137] Aside from the fear and loathing spawned by the invasion itself, these comments reflected the agreeable discovery that lower-class and provincial Russians, whom the educated elite had traditionally despised and feared but among whom many noble refugees and army officers perforce now found themselves, were in fact capable of patriotism, humanity and good sense, even though - or more likely, to a generation reared on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, because - they had been little exposed to European 'civilisation'.

Educated Russians' long-standing love-hate relationship with France had taken a turn for the worse in the decade preceding the war, when cultural Francophobia had become an all-purpose device for criticising the decadence of aristocratic mores, the liberal reform plans attributed to Alexander I's advisers (especially Mikhail M. Speranskii), and Russia's defeats in the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalistic writers and officials fostered a climate of opinion that regarded absolute monarchy, the old-regime social hierarchy, the Orthodox faith and cultural Russianness as the core of a national identity whose antithesis was post-revolutionary France.[138]

The only other country at which such venom was directed was Poland. Russia and Poland shared a complicated history, including a protracted strug­gle for hegemony in present-day Belarus and western Ukraine; Poland's intervention in Russia's Time of Troubles; Russia's part in the parti­tions of Poland and the extremely bloody suppression of its constitution­alist movement in 1794; and the 1812 war, when Russian eye-witnesses singled out Napoleon's Polish auxiliaries as having been especially brutal occupiers.[139]

In the hands of the nationalist writers associated with the influential Alek­sandr S. Shishkov, as the historian Andrei Zorin argues, this painful past became raw material for a compelling mythopoesis of Russian national identity. Poland had all the attributes of both a national and an ideological enemy: it was an old religious rival; it was a traditional ally of France, and associated in Russian eyes with similar revolutionary attitudes; and the presence of many ethnic Poles in the Russian Empire created fears about a Polish 'fifth col­umn'. After Napoleon's victories over Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1805-7 had crushed Russian national pride and led to the creation of the irredentist and pro-Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw, even while the Polish patriot Prince Adam Czartoryski figured prominently among Alexander I's liberal advisers and Russia reluctantly allied itself with France, 'Shishkovist' writers took to celebrating the Time of Troubles - which, fortuitously, had occurred exactly two centuries earlier - in poetry and on stage. In so doing, Zorin contends, they initiated a fundamental shift in Imperial Russia's sense of his­tory. Two hundred years earlier, they argued, a divided Russia had been con­quered by Polish aggressors with the complicity of domestic traitors, but in the end the nobility and the people had come together under the aegis of the Orthodox Church, restored Russian liberty and freely invited the House of Romanov to rule over them. This patriotic, anti-Western movement 'from below' in 1612-13 - and not, as had been proclaimed in the eighteenth cen­tury, Peter I's Westernising reforms 'from above' - was the true founding moment for the Russian nation, whose essence lay not in a European des­tiny achieved by a Westernised nobility and emperor, but in the unity of the Orthodox under a traditional Russian tsar, and in their selfless struggle against foreign (especially Polish) invaders and vigilance against domestic traitors.[140]

The regime was slow to endorse these views. Alexander I's entourage remained as multiethnic as ever after the war, and his conception of Russia's imperial destiny had no strong ethnic component. Internationally, he sought to stabilise the post-war order (and Russia's dominant place in it) by uniting the monarchs of Europe in a cosmopolitan, ecumenical 'Holy Alliance'; and in cases where his domestic policies were innovative and liberal - as when he issued constitutions to Finland and Poland or abolished serfdom in the Baltic Provinces - it was often in ways that privileged the empire's 'European' periphery relative to Russia proper. He disliked Moscow, the symbolic historic capital ofthe Great Russians, and while he enjoyed commemorating the cam­paigns of 1813-14 in Europe, he ignored sites and anniversaries associated with the 1812 war in Russia (when his own role had been considerably less heroic). However, Alexander's effort to impose a non-nationalist reading of the events of 1812-15 failed, and his post-war attempt to build a new European system and imperial culture on an ecumenical Christian basis crumbled within a few years under the weight of its own contradictions. Instead, the revival of elite interest in religion ultimately benefited Orthodoxy while Russian thinkers grew increasingly preoccupied with exploring the historical roots and ethno- cultural specificity of the Great Russian nation. At the same time, the alliance with Berlin and Vienna increasingly derived its resilience not from the Chris­tian faith but a shared pragmatic interest in preventing a restoration of Polish independence and a recurrence ofthe sort of international anarchy associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon.

By the 1830s, the regime and its supporters had clearly embraced the nation­alist conception of history. Alexander's post-war attempt to reconcile Russians and Poles collapsed amidst the 1830-1 Polish revolt and the subsequent sup­pression of Polish autonomy; in 1833, Nicholas I's minister of education, Sergei S. Uvarov, famously defined the essence of Russian identity as being 'Ortho­doxy, Autocracy, Nationality'; Mikhail I. Glinka's patriotic, anti-Polish opera A Life for the Tsar, set in the Time of Troubles, premiered in 1836; and in 1839, Aleksandr I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii published the official history of 1812, An Account ofthe War for the Fatherland in 1812, whose very title helped canonise the interpretation, and the name, of the conflict as a 'patriotic' war of the Russian nation. The notion of a centuries-old unity of altar, throne and Russian ethnos, adumbrated by writers after the defeats of 1805-7 and preached by regime and Church in 1812, had become official ideology by the 1830s and remained so until the end of the Romanovs.

Not all the implications ofthis theory enjoyed universal acclaim. The regime itself remained ambivalent about its anti-Western ramifications, while many educated Russians believed that, by defeating Napoleon's tyranny and uphold­ing Russian independence, the nation in 1812 had won the right to a freer, less authoritarian sociopolitical order. Yet most accepted the nationalist concep­tion's key propositions - the focus on Muscovite history and Russian eth­nicity, the sense of Russian national uniqueness, the moral valorisation of the common folk and the importance attributed to their spiritual bond with the regime. Perhaps aided by the growth of the education system and the propaganda campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, these views also reached the general population, as is apparent from the notebook into which the provincial goldsmith Dmitrii S. Volkov in the 1820s copied readings that were particu­larly meaningful to him: a patriotic, anti-French diatribe by the nationalist Fedor V Rostopchin, a primer on how to behave in church, a sermon by an Orthodox Greek preacher and a text cataloguing Russia's monarchs from the legendary Riurikto Peter I.[141] 'Orthodoxy', 'Autocracy' and 'Nationality' were all represented.

The war and Russian political culture

Russians by 1800 had recently experienced two very different models of monarchy: Catherine II had presented herself as a consensus-builder who welcomed input from 'society' and favoured an embryonic form of electoral politics - exemplified by the Legislative Commission of 1767 and by her sup­port for noble and municipal self-government - that pointed in the direction of political liberalism, while her son Paul I had favoured the opposite role of authoritarian, militaristic commander-in-chief. Alexander I was torn between these two options, but ultimately political liberalism suffered disastrous set­backs under his reign. Aside from the court politics of the time, this was due to the convergence of two forces whose growth was fatefully accelerated by the Napoleonic Wars. One was the nationalist conception of history that added a powerful layer of ideological armour to autocracy by depicting it as the indispensable corollary to Orthodoxy, Russianness and national unity. The other was the way in which the political culture was poisoned by the growing tendency to imagine politics as a succession of malicious conspiracies.

Because of the absence of a civil society and the vast power wielded by small, secretive groups of unaccountable individuals, conspiracy had long played an important role in Russian government. Conspiracies traditionally involved lower-class pretenders who claimed to be the 'true tsar', or else power strug­gles within the dynasty. However, the mischief by pretenders faded after the Pugachev revolt, and the last dynastic coup took place in 1801 when Paul I was assassinated and replaced with Alexander I. Instead, from the late 1780s onwards, conspiracy theories increasingly centred on ideologically or ethni­cally motivated opposition to the regime as such, especially by freemasons, liberals or socialists, and Poles or (later) Jews, often at thebehest of Russophobic foreigners. Two factors accounted for this. First, the upheavals of the era - Paul's capricious oppressiveness, Alexander's stabs at liberal reform and, of course, the shock waves radiating from France - made clear how much more was now at stake in politics than in the past. Second, it came to be widely believed across Europe that the upheavals that began in 1789 and continued far into the nineteenth century were caused by a conspiracy to overthrow monar­chy, religion and the existing order everywhere.[142] This notion originated in the West, particularly France, and came to Russia largely through the influence of francophone conservatives such as abbe Augustin Barruel and Joseph de Maistre.

Fuelled by Russia's military defeats in the wars against Napoleon and by the fact that Alexander I's entourage - as opposed, for example, to Catherine II's - contained a conspicuous numbers of foreigners with agendas driven by the interests of their homelands, the Russian version of this conspiracy theory imagined traitors to be present at the very top of the regime. It focused on social and ethnic outsiders: Alexander's liberal adviser Mikhail Speranskii was attacked as a priest's son out to undermine noble rights, while the Baltic Ger­man Mikhail Barclay de Tolly (the hapless commander of the Russian army during its retreat in 1812) and the liberal Pole Czartoryski were presumed to be disloyal to Russia. 'In the Russian interpretation', Zorin points out, 'the anti- masonic mythology fused almost immediately with time-honoured notions of a secret conspiracy against Russia that was being hatched beyond its bor- ders.'[143] The suspected wire-puller was Napoleon, whom - according to a verse making the rounds in 1813 - 'the first Mikhail (that is, Speranskii) summoned, the second Mikhail (Barclay) received, and the third Mikhail (Prince Kutu- zov) drove out'.[144] To pacify public opinion, Alexander had to send Speranskii into ignominious exile and replace Barclay with the popular General Kutu- zov, while Fedor Rostopchin, the governor-general of Moscow during the 1812 war, demonstratively deported foreign residents, purged freemasons from the bureaucracy and turned over the merchant's son Vereshchagin, accused of serving the masonic conspiracy, to a lynch mob. According to Zorin, whose chapter on this subject bears the chillingly evocative title 'The Enemy of the People', Rostopchin's real target had been Speranskii; only when that prize proved beyond his reach did he fall back on the wretched Vereshchagin as a substitute scapegoat whose killing by the 'people' would symbolically restore the unity of the nation.¹⁶

After 1814, Alexander I and his entourage were convinced that the con­tinuing troubles in Europe and subversion in Russia were co-ordinated by a nefarious 'comite directeur' based in Western Europe, while Alexander's conservative critics regarded his own beloved Russian Bible Society as part of an Anglo-masonic plot against Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, ironi­cally, no one took action against the real conspiracy that almost overthrew Alexander's successor in December 1825. Spooked by the Decembrist revolt and the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the regime of Nicholas I offered an even more inviting field for conspiracy theories; thus, it seems that the disgraced ex-official Mikhail Leont'evich Magnitskii, in a secret 1831 memorandum, was the first to claim that Jews and freemasons were collaborating in a grand anti-Russian plot.¹⁷ By the 1860s, stereotypes of this sort were sufficiently entrenched to convince the satirist Mikhail E. Saltykov-Shchedrin that his hilarious 'history' of the town of Glupov - a ludicrous compilation of the cliches of eighteenth-century Russian society and politics set in the microcosm of an imaginary provincial backwater - required a few absurd 'Polish intrigues' to be complete.¹⁸

How deep into the population these fears reached is difficult to tell. How­ever, the common Muscovites who lynched Vereshchagin apparently accepted Rostopchin's notion of a masonic plot; as for the longer-term impact, Vladimir Dal's authoritative dictionary ofthe late nineteenth century defines the popu­lar colloquialism farmazon (freemason) as 'pejor. freethinker and atheist', and in Saltykov-Shchedrin's satirical novel, a Glupov craftsman declares with a kind of naive cynicism that as a 'false priest' in the 'sect offarmazony', he is of course an atheist and adulterer. Maxim Gorky writes that his merchant grandfather around 1870 called an artisan whose craft he found disturbingly mysterious a 'worker in black magic' and a 'freemason',¹⁹ and at least as late as 1938 - when, in the film adaptation of Gorky's book, the grandfather unselfconsciously uses farmazon as the rough equivalent of 'troublemaker' - Soviet audiences could evidently be expected to know the word's connotations.

16 Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, pp. 234-7.

17 A. Iu. Minakov, 'M. L. Magnitskii: K voprosu o biografii i mirovozzrenii predtechi russkikh pravoslavnykh konservatorov XIX veka', in Konservatizm v Rossii i mire: proshloe i nastoiashchee. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vyp. 1 (Voronezh: Izd. Voronezhskogo gos. universiteta, 2001), pp. 83-4.

18 M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriiaodnogogoroda: Skazki (Moscow: Olimp, Izd. AST, 2002), pp. 44, 47, 49.

19 M. Gorky, My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 116; Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriia, p. 37.

1812 and the problem of social stability

Concern about treason in high places reflected a deep-seated awareness of the brittleness of Russia's social order, which had faced no assault comparable to 1812 since the Time of Troubles. The army's failure to stop Napoleon's advance came as a shock and contributed to the proliferation of conspiracy theories, while upper-class Russians feared that the masses would now run riot or even, egged on by Napoleon, rise up in revolt. Forty years earlier, state authority had crumbled before the illiterate Cossack Pugachev's lightly armed rabble, whom the peasantry in some places had joined en masse. What, then, to expect from the most powerful army in European history, led by a brilliant general who advocated revolutionary ideas?

While the army was reeling, the stress on the administration was immense. As Janet Hartley has shown,

although provincial government [in the war zone] continued to function throughout the period of invasion it proved impossible to carry out to the full all the demands made of it in respect of provision of supplies and the care of the sick and wounded. Furthermore, the administration was unable to prevent disorder from breaking out and ultimately could not protect the inhabitants from the ravages of war.[145]

In Moscow, government authority was maintained through the summer thanks to a clever if distasteful combination of demagogy and repression that culminated in the lynching of Vereshchagin, but collapsed once the army had withdrawn. Hordes of peasants then joined the Grande Armee in picking the abandoned city clean, while terrified Muscovites fleeing the city faced the prospect of crossing a possibly hostile and anarchic countryside. Cossacks looted some villages and burned others astride the invasion route, while the police (at least in Moscow) apparently enriched themselves on a grand scale while 'restoring order' after the French had left. Russian society appeared to be coming apart at the seams.

Yet, mysteriously, the empire held. Napoleon did not try to incite a popu­lar revolt,[146] and the systematic pillaging and coarse anticlericalism practised by his multinational army deeply alienated the population, creating a last­ing resentment against the 'twenty nations' (a phrase popularised by the

Orthodox hierarchy and repeated in many memoirs) that composed it. What Teodor Shanin has written of 1905 also applies to the year 1812: it was a 'moment of truth' that offered Russians 'a dramatic corrective to their understanding of the society in which they lived'.[147] Russia suffered an unexpected series of shocking setbacks, but even in the direst of circumstances, the army and administration held. Napoleon's huge army with its pan-European composi­tion and revolutionary ideology - the quintessence of the West's aggressive rationalism - invaded Russia, abused its people and violated its shrines, but ultimately imploded under the pressure of its own indiscipline and overreach­ing. Vast numbers even of'Europeanised' Russians, on the other hand, became implicated in a form of all-out warfare that they came to regard as distinctly Russian: abandoning or even burning their homes and possessions - as he had earlier with his Francophobic propaganda and anti-masonic campaign, Rostopchin again set an example by demonstratively burning both his own estate and (most likely) Moscow itself - peasants, urban people and nobles fought or fled rather than live under enemy occupation. They watched in awe as the primordial forces of Russian life - vengeful peasants and Cossacks, fire- prone cities, and the empire's vast spaces and unforgiving climate - ground up the presumptuous Grande Armee. All in all, it was a tremendous display of elemental 'Russianness' that confirmed, in the educated classes, a deep and increasingly proud sense of national uniqueness.

Patriotic pride notwithstanding, however, most found these experiences more terrifying than exhilarating, at least at the time when they occurred. As the noblewoman Karolina K. Pavlova later recalled, 'the news of the fire of Moscow struck us like lightning. It was fine for Pushkin to exclaim with poetic rapture, a dozen years later: "Burn, great Moscow!" But the general feeling while it was burning, as far as I know, was not enthusiastic at all.'[148] Nearer the other end of the social scale, the Moscow printer's widow Afim'ia P. Stepanova had this to say about 1812:

Owing to my modest means and because my children and I were sick, I stayed in my house, but during the invasion by the enemy army all my possessions and my daughter's trousseau . . . they took all of it before my eyes, carried it away and smashed it, and while threatening to kill me as well as my children they beat and tormented [me], causing me and my whole family to fall ill for six months.

Yet she was among the lucky ones, for all members of her family had at least survived, as had (apparently) their house.[149] The scale of the misery, and the expectation at least among the urban population that the state would provide redress, is illustrated by the fact that in Moscow alone, over 18,000 house­holds - a substantial majority of all Muscovites who were not serfs - filed such petitions for assistance.[150]

Michael Broers argues that in the lands of Napoleon's 'inner empire' - e.g. the Rhineland or northern Italy - where his rule had been comparatively long-lived and stable, 'the Napoleonic system left a powerful institutional heritage', and after 1815 '[the] restored governments were expected to meet French standards' on pain of losing the support of influential constituencies. By contrast, in the restless 'outer empire' of Spain, southern Italy and elsewhere, 'Napoleonic rule was traumatic and destabilizing. It was ephemeral, in that it left few institutional traces, yet profound in the aversion to the Napoleonic state it implanted at so many levels of society.'[151]

While Russia was never formally a part of the Napoleonic empire, its experi­ence comes closest to that of the outer empire. Like the peoples of that region, common Russians' encounter with Napoleon's regime endowed them with lit­tle understanding of, let alone sympathy for, the revolutionary Enlightenment principles he supposedly represented. Instead, many viewed his invasion of Russia through a pre-modern religious and ideological lens that could inspire great kindness but also terrible cruelty. For example, a poor midwife in Orel reportedly took five prisoners of war from the Grande Armee into her home. After exhausting her own savings, she even went begging to feed the men. But when, at last, 'her' prisoners were removed by the authorities, 'this simple- hearted woman smashed all the crockery from which they had eaten and drunk at her home, because she believed these people - whom she had cared for so attentively and aided so selflessly - to be unclean heathens'. Educated Russians proudly seized on such episodes as evidence that their common people resem­bled the indomitable Spaniards in the emotional, combative patriotism and religiosity with which they resisted aggressors who claimed to represent a superior civilisation.[152]

A different interpretation that also took root among the people in 1812 and the succeeding decades recognised that Napoleon was a revolutionary but situated him, and the entire notion of'republicanism', in the native tradition of anarchic jacqueries that many Russians had learned to fear. Thus, Gorky's grandfather recalled that Napoleon

was a bold man who wanted to conquer the whole world and he wanted everyone to be equal - no lords or civil servants but simply a world without classes. Names would be different, but everyone would have the same rights. And the same faith. I don't have to tell you what nonsense that is . . . We've had our own Bonapartes - [the Cossack rebels] Razin, Pugachov [sic ] - I'll tell you about them some other time.

A similar outlook shines through the recollections, also from the 1870s, of a former house serf who in 1812 had witnessed a riot behind Russian lines - 'they were all getting drunk, fighting, cursing', she recalled: 'it was a republic all right, absolutely a republic!'[153]

The legacy of the war

In Russia, as in the lands ofthe 'outer empire', Napoleon's regime thus enjoyed little support. Yet across Europe, his empire had aroused intense ideological partisanship, created a form of state that reached new heights of power while plumbing depths of aggression and exploitation, and encouraged a synthesis of militaristic elitism and popular mobilisation, imperialistic chauvinism and the romantic myth of the 'career open to talent' exemplified by the 'little Corsican' himself. Post-war society had to contend with this legacy, finding ways to replicate his regime's ability to integrate, control and mobilise the nation, but without contracting its socially egalitarian tendencies or its self- destructive imperialism.

One response was religious; it was centred in the masonic movement, pietist circles and the newly created Russian Bible Society, and drew heavily on German and British influences. It gained tremendous momentum from the seemingly miraculous manner of the destruction of Napoleon's army in 1812: 'The fire of Moscow lit up my soul', Alexander I would later explain, 'and the Lord's judgment on the ice fields filled my heart with a warmth of faith that it had never felt before. Now I came to know God as He is revealed by the Holy Scriptures.'[154] The manifestation of this ideology in for­eign policy was the effort to unite Europe in the 'Holy Alliance', while domesti­cally, a newly created Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Popular Enlightenment was charged with reforming the moral tenor of Russian culture. The goal was to make Russians into ecumenically minded Christians in whom better education, Bibles in the vernacular (a controversial innovation) and partic­ipation in organised philanthropy would instil benevolence, self-discipline, a sense of social responsibility and a heightened civic consciousness. The state's authority over the people would henceforth be rooted in mutual respect, not fear, and Russia would become the kind of cohesive, authori­tarian, mildly progressive polity that Napoleon had modelled, but at peace with others and without the socially explosive notion of 'careers open to talent'.

Its institutional armature allowed this ideology to reach Russians beyond the upper classes that had conceived it. Thus, Aleksandr V Nikitenko, although legally still a serf at the time, became the secretary of the Bible Society's chapter in the town of Ostrogozhsk (Voronezh Province) and embraced its commit­ment to the 'religious truths that the Gospel had given us' and 'their salutary influence on the morals of individuals and society' with 'sincere enthusiasm and youthful ardor'; and the headmaster of the church school in Kasimov (Riazan Province) - a corrupt petty tyrant who prospered by exploiting the students and clergy under his power - also joined the Bible Society, though his motives were probably more careerist than idealistic.[155] By the mid-i820s, however, the effort to ground the culture and politics of Russia and Europe in a Bible-centred Christianity had fallen so far short of its goals, and generated resistance from so many quarters, that it was scaled back and the Orthodox Church's pre-eminence within Russia was restored. Yet in an Orthodox and more emphatically 'Russian' guise, the ideological linkage between the regime and Christianity remained stronger in the nineteenth century than it had been before 1812.

A second emerging force that structured nineteenth-century Russian society was militarism, which, in Russia as in Napoleonic France, was associated with government that was hierarchical and centralised but also effective and inclined to social fairness. It acquired momentum under Paul I and touched broad social strata: 'My God!', exclaimed the merchant Nikolai F. Kotov in his reminiscences,

from the very outset of Emperor Paul I's accession [in 1796], what strictness, what meekness, what a martial spirit began to rule in Moscow! From being arrogant and unapproachable, the nobles became humble, for the law was the same whether one was a noble or a merchant. Ostentatious luxury came under suspicion. And among the common people, there appeared a kind of terror and obedience before a sort of martial or enlightened-authoritarian spirit, for the strictness and obedience extended to all classes of people.[156]

Russia was at war almost continually from the 1790s to 1814. These wars entailed a vast mobilisation of people and created new role models for society, ranging from dashing hussars to female peasant guerrillas, who demonstrated Russians' capability for both heroism and cruelty, for co-operation between social classes and disciplined, organised action. The end of the war brought the return of newly self-confident and worldly veterans who changed the tone of society, whether by bringing a whiff of European humanism to stale provincial backwaters or by abusing Russian peasants and small-town notables like conquered enemy populations.[157]

While the wars themselves contributed to the militarisation of Rus­sian life, Paul and his successors also saw militarism as a pedagogical tool for counteracting revolutionary ideology. However, while Napoleonic mili­tarism had favoured meritocratic egalitarianism as a way to unite France's post-revolutionary polity and create a powerful fighting force to serve an imperialistic foreign policy, its Russian incarnation instead focused on sym­bolic elements that might instil respect for the social hierarchy: drill and pageantry were emphasised, cadet schools for noble boys were founded, uni­forms became mandatory for university students, and even life at church academies was militarised;[158] while its actual combat readiness stagnated, the army became the preferred metaphor for a society that was orderly, disci­plined and committed to the regime's vision of carefully controlled societal progress.

However, even while it suggested ways to stabilise society and strengthen the state, the Napoleonic experience had also disrupted traditional social pat­terns and created expectations that would prove troublesome to the regime in the future. There are indications that Russian peasants understood their 'liberation' from Napoleon to mean freedom from serfdom as well, and like Spain, though to a far lesser degree, Russia had peasant guerrillas who might become a threat to the regime once the French were gone. A more fateful parallel with Spain was the creation of secret societies of disillusioned officers who were committed to radical political change and would attempt to over­throw the autocracy in December 1825.[159] Nikitenko met some of them when he was still a serf in Ostrogozhsk:

[participants in world events, these officers were not figures engaged in fruit­less debates, but men who . . . had acquired a special strength of character and determination in their views and aspirations. They stood in sharp con­trast to the progressive people in our provincial community, who, for lack of real, sobering activity, inhabited a fantasy world and wasted their strength in petty, fruitless protest. The contact the officers had had with Western Euro­pean civilization, their personal acquaintance with a more successful social system . . ., and, finally, the struggle for the grand principles of freedom and the Fatherland all left their mark of deep humanity on them. ... In me they saw a victim of the order of things that they hated.[160]

Like the proponents of militarism and the Holy Alliance - who were, after all, their friends and relatives - the Decembrists saw an opportunity to resolve the problems outlined at the opening of this chapter. They proposed to place progressive military men, whose moral authority rested on a patriotism tested in battle, at the head of a cohesive and mighty Russian nation-state. By lib­eralising the social and political order to a degree that even Alexander I and Speranskii had never seriously contemplated, they meant to confront tyranny and social injustice. In adopting for themselves the persona of austere, digni­fied, outspoken, emphatically moral men of action committed to the public good, they offered their own answer to the crisis of spiritual meaning and of the norms of individual conduct that beset the nobility.[161] By creating 'secret societies' as a framework for political action, they acknowledged the same absence of a viable civil society that prompted Alexander I and Nicholas I to foster religious associations, bureaucracy and militarism. And in seeking to gain power through a pronunciamiento, they joined nationalistic officers from San Martin to Nasser in following in the footsteps of General Bonaparte's Bru- maire coup, but they also helped to bring the violent, conspiratorial culture of eighteenth-century Russian politics into the ideologically polarised world of the nineteenth.