The Story of Russia

The vast size of Siberia was the most difficult obstacle to overcome. The further east the conquerors went, the harder it became for Moscow to control or support them. It took the best part of a year for a messenger to travel from the capital to Yakutsk, the main town in the eastern sector of Siberia, and at least another year to reach Okhotsk, the Russian base on the Pacific, so that an exchange of messages could take four years. Getting food and military supplies to the advanced forces was a logistical nightmare. The Russians could not feed themselves from the tundra and mountainous forests between Yakutsk and Okhotsk, so, beginning in the 1640s, they turned south to the Amur valley, believing that its fertile fields and fish-filled rivers would feed 20,000 Russians every year. Under their commander Khabarov (who would give his name to Khabarovsk, the largest city in Russia’s Far East today), the Russian forces waged a ten-year war of terror, plunder and extermination against the Daurian tribes. In 1652, the Daurians called for help from the Chinese, the only power able and near enough to break the Russian hold on the Amur. Sporadic fighting between the Russians and Chinese continued until 1689, when by the Treaty of Nerchinsk the defeated Russians renounced all their claims to the Amur lands. They would not get them back until the age of steamships and railways.

Meanwhile, in the west, Russia was enlarged by its union with the Zaporozhian Host, a fledgling Cossack state ruled by a hetman or military commander, which in 1648 had called for Russia’s help in its war of liberation against Poland. There had been a number of Cossack uprisings against the Poles in the early decades of the century – mostly in reaction to the settlement of Polish service nobles on the steppelands controlled by Cossacks and the Poles’ promotion of a Greek Catholic or Uniate Church, subordinated to the pope in Rome, as a means of undermining Orthodoxy in Ukraine. A big revolt, in 1637–8, was brutally suppressed by Polish troops. The Poles clamped down on the rebellious Ukrainian and Cossack lands. Polish officials were brought in. They rode roughshod over Cossack freedoms and elected representatives. Predictably, this campaign of subjugation merely fanned the flames of the rebellion. The elite Cossacks, who might have been co-opted into Polish service, were turned into enemies. Bohdan Khmelnytsky is a case in point. A prosperous landowner and Cossack official, he had shown no sign of joining the rebellion until 1647, when his estate was confiscated, his manor burned, his wife abducted and his son badly beaten on the orders of the local Polish chief. The next year, Khmelnytsky was elected hetman of the Zaporozhian Host.

Under his command the Cossack rebels marched towards Kiev. On their way they easily defeated the Polish troops and attracted more Cossacks as well as peasant fighters wherever they appeared. For many of the rebels this was a war to defend the Orthodox against the Polish king, who had outlawed the Eastern Church and confiscated its buildings. As they advanced, Khmelnytsky’s army murdered Poles and Jews. Around 60,000 Jews were killed in 1648 alone – a level of killing that would not be equalled until the pogroms of the Russian Civil War.18

Khmelnytsky appealed to the tsar for military help against the Poles. Alexei was at first reluctant to become involved in a war against Poland. Although he wanted to regain the western borderlands (Smolensk, Seversk, Chernigov) previously ceded to the Poles, he also needed an alliance with the Polish king to beat the Crimean Muslims threatening Russia’s southern frontier. For five years he delayed his decision. But the patriarch Nikon persuaded him to intervene. This was, he argued, a religious war to liberate the Orthodox from infidels, not just in Polish-ruled Ukraine but in Moldavia and Wallachia, at that time under Ottoman control. Here was a golden opportunity for the Russians to make real gains in the west by fighting in the name of God.

Moscow’s backing for Khmelnytsky’s war came in the form of a 1654 treaty signed at Pereyaslav in Ukraine. As part of the treaty the Cossack hetman swore a unilateral oath of allegiance to the tsar, who promised to respect the autonomy of the hetmanate. What it meant for the Russian Empire and Ukraine is a subject of controversy. The treaty is regarded by Ukrainians as the founding of an independent ‘hetman state’, which many of them see as the basis of their modern nationhood. The Russians, by contrast, view the treaty as an act of union between Russia and Ukraine – the moment when these two groups of their race (the Great Russians and the Little Russians) became one nation and one state as a natural outcome of events. There are problems with both views. The hetmanate was a Cossack, not Ukrainian, state. It lacked the potential to become a nation state because the Cossacks’ links to the Ukrainian peasantry and other social classes were extremely weak. But contrary to the Russian view, the union between Russia and Ukraine was far from being preordained. In fact it was only one of several possible outcomes of the Cossack war against Poland. Ukraine might have become part of Poland, or have lost its south-west corner to the Turks.

The tsar’s commitment to Khmelnytsky involved thirteen years of costly war between Russia, Poland and Sweden. Between 1654 and 1656, the Russian troops made gains against the Poles – they captured Smolensk, Vilnius and Riga – not least because the Swedes attacked the Poles at the same time. Having taken Warsaw, the Swedes then marched on Lithuania, drawing Russia into war with Sweden between 1656 and 1661. The Poles took advantage of their struggle to recapture many of the territories they had lost to the Russians. By 1667, the three northern powers were exhausted from these wars. The Treaty of Andrusovo, in that year, divided Ukraine between Russia and Poland, the former gaining east (left-bank) Ukraine, along with Kiev, and the latter west (right-bank) Ukraine.

The treaty marked a fundamental shift in Russia’s foreign policy. By this time the Russians and the Poles had been brought together by their common enemy, the Turks, who were making inroads into west Ukraine with the help of Cossack forces under the command of Petro Doroshenko, hetman of the Zaporozhian Host. For a while the Poles were able to repel the Turkish raids on west Ukraine. But the long war against Russia had weakened Poland, and by the 1670s it was no longer strong enough to prevent the Turkish occupation of Ukraine. It took 100,000 Russian troops to drive the Turkish forces from Ukraine in 1681.

With this victory Russia had at last attracted the attention of the West, which had never seen it as a major power on the continent. Now the Europeans needed Russia to protect them from the Turks. In 1683 they had only just been able to repel the Turkish forces from the walls of Vienna. The Russians’ victory against the Turkish forces in Ukraine convinced the European powers of their need to get them on their side against the Turks in Europe. In 1686, Russia signed a Treaty of Eternal Peace with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In doing so, the Russians were committing to the Holy League, the anti-Turkish coalition made up of the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania, the Holy Roman Empire and Venice. The four powers agreed to coordinate their campaigns against the Turks: the Russians pledged to fight them in Crimea, the Poles in Moldavia, the Austrians in Transylvania and the Venetians in Dalmatia. Russia, for the first time in its history, had entered an alliance as an equal power with Europe. It had entered the European scene.

Europe’s first ambassadors to Russia arrived from Sweden, Holland, Poland, Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire in the 1680s and 1690s. At that time Russia was regarded as a backward and barbaric country, mainly on account of its lack of European civilisation. The dominant position of the Church had impeded the development of a secular culture. There were no universities, no academies of science or the arts, and no independent professions. The arts were frozen in the spirit of medieval times. Icons were the main form of painting. Secular portraits had only just begun to appear (Tsar Alexei is the first Russian ruler for whom we have a likeness). Known as parsuny, they had a flat iconic style. Landscapes, history and genre painting remained unknown in Russia. Instrumental music (as opposed to sacred singing) was stamped out by the Church wherever it appeared, mostly courtesy of wandering folk musicians and minstrels. Publishing was also controlled by the Church. Russia was the only country in Europe without private publishers, printed news sheets or journals, printed plays or poetry. When Peter the Great came to the throne, in 1682, no more than three books of a non-religious nature had been published by the Moscow press since its establishment in the 1560s.19

The growing influence of Europe began to be felt in Tsar Alexei’s reign. Alexei was a good deal more dynamic and intelligent than his father Mikhail, the founder of the Romanov dynasty. His tutor, Morozov, had educated him in European ideas, sciences and languages. Poland and Ukraine were the main channels for Western ideas, technologies, arts and entertainments to enter Russia at this time. The war with Poland was a turning-point. Alexei and his armies entered towns like Vilnius and Vitebsk, whose Gothic, Renaissance and baroque architecture was unknown to them. ‘Since His Majesty has been in Poland and seen the manner of the Princes’ houses there,’ observed Alexei’s English physician Samuel Collins, ‘his thoughts are advanc’d and he begins to model his court and edifices more stately, to furnish his rooms with tapestry and to contrive houses of pleasure.’20

Every kind of European luxury – from clocks and telescopes to musical boxes, singing birds and carriages – was imported for Alexei’s court. His childhood friend and close adviser Artamon Matveev introduced a court theatre, the first of its kind in Russia, where German baroque dramas were performed. Matveev held receptions at his Moscow home, completely furnished in the Western style, where guests came not to drink excessively, as in the old boyar parties, but to socialise in well-mannered company, where women, for the first time, were expected to appear and even act as hostesses. Previously women had been excluded from the court and boyar entertainments, kept apart in private quarters known as the terem, similar to an Islamic harem, where they lived, veiled from public view, until their wedding.

These were superficial signs of European influence – the mere borrowing of social customs and luxuries as markers of ‘civilisation’ without any meaningful change in Russian sensibilities or attitudes. A deeply pious man, Alexei favoured this limited exposure to Western ways. He thought that as long as Russia could import what it needed from Europe (first and foremost military weapons and technologies), it would not need to learn the science that had created them, nor give up its Orthodox beliefs. As Kliuchevsky put it, Alexei hoped that one could ‘wear a German coat and even watch a foreign entertainment while keeping intact such feelings and ideas as a pious fear at the very thought of breaking fast on Christmas Eve before the first star appeared in the sky’.21

The Church itself was changing, however. The Russian acquisition of Ukraine had opened Russia to Ukrainian ideas and modes of piety. A new type of religious education, derived from Jesuit models, had developed at the Kiev Academy, where priests were trained in Latin as well as Slavonic. Tsar Alexei was a strong supporter of reforms in the Russian Church. In 1649 he brought the first group of Ukrainian monks to Moscow to update the Russian service books and bring them into line with the modern Greek and Ukrainian versions printed in Europe. Three years later, when the old patriarch Iosif died, he backed the election of Nikon, a man of strong will and action determined to carry out reform, which he saw as a first step to the re-creation of a Universal Church, like the Orthodoxy of Byzantium, under his rule from Moscow.

Nikon’s reforms of the service books and rituals of the Church included making the sign of the cross in the Greek manner, with three fingers (a symbol of the Trinity), instead of the ancient Russian way with two fingers (symbolising the dual nature of Christ). This was the cause of a major schism in the Russian Church that also split the nation into two. Religious rituals were at the heart of the Russian faith and national consciousness. The liturgy was the content of the faith itself. To change it was to imply that the old belief had been wrong all along. Led by the archpriest Avvakum, a former ally of Nikon, a large number of the faithful refused to accept the liturgical reforms. Known as the Old Believers, they argued that the Russian rituals were holier than the rituals of the Greeks, who had fallen into heresy by allying with the Roman Church and had been punished by God for their sin when they lost Constantinople to the Turks. Nikon’s reforms, they feared, would lead the Russian Church to a similar catastrophe by exposing it to Western books and practices. To the modern reader these arguments may seem petty compared with the great doctrinal disputes of the Reformation period. But in Russia, where faith and ritual were so entangled, the schism assumed eschatological proportions. As the Old Believers saw it, the reforms were the work of the Antichrist, a sign that the end of the world was near.

Dozens of communities of Old Believers rose up in rebellion. At the Solovetsky Monastery, in 1668, the monks refused to recognise the tsar’s authority, locked themselves into the monastery and, supported by the local peasants, endured an eight-year siege before they were captured and massacred by the tsar’s forces. Elsewhere, as the soldiers of the tsar approached, the Old Believers shut themselves inside their wooden churches and burned themselves to death to avoid submitting to the Antichrist. Others fled to the remote lakes and forests of the north, to the Volga lands, to the Don Cossack regions in the south or to the forests of Siberia. They continued to follow the teachings of Avvakum, disseminated from his place of enforced exile in the Arctic fort of Pustozersk, where in 1680 he was burned at the stake.

The Old Believers’ struggle was about more than rituals. It was a protest against the burgeoning power of the Church and state, from which they felt a growing alienation as those institutions sought to control the daily lives of the people. It was a social protest in religious form. The Old Belief was most widespread in those regions where the central state was weak and the spirit of rebellion strong. It was the unifying banner for popular revolts from the 1670s to the 1770s. The religious schism was a deep divide running through society from top to bottom. It divided those who identified with the old Russia and those who would make it into something new on more European lines.

Peter the Great would bring this conflict to a head. He was only ten years old when he came to the throne in 1682, following the premature death of his sickly half-brother Fedor III, who had reigned since the death of their father Alexei in 1676. Born to Alexei’s second wife, Natalia Naryshkina, Peter had been chosen by the boyars over Ivan, Peter’s other half-brother, who was the son of Maria Miloslavskaya, Alexei’s first wife. Ivan was five years older than Peter but was considered too weak-minded to become the tsar. His sister Sophia was appointed regent to Peter instead. Supporters of Ivan’s claim stirred revolt among the streltsy musketeers of Moscow, who had grievances against their officers. They spread rumours that Ivan, whom they saw as the true tsar, had been strangled in the Kremlin by Peter’s family, the Naryshkins. It was a repeat of the Boris Godunov conspiracy.

The streltsy stormed the Kremlin and murdered all the boyars they suspected of the regicide, adding their commanders to the victim list. Many of the rebels were Old Believers. They wanted to reverse the Nikonian reforms. Convinced that Peter was a boyar puppet, they were motivated by the same belief in a true tsar as the rebels led by Razin and Bolotnikov. They were joined by Moscow’s poor, who rioted for several days. In an effort to end the violence a compromise was reached. Ivan and Peter would rule jointly with Sophia as regent.

This resolution of the succession crisis was not enough to satisfy the Old Believer contingent. Led by their commander Ivan Khovansky, they continued to demand the restoration of the old service books and rituals, threatening to put Khovansky on the throne if Sophia did not yield. Sophia fled with her two charges to Zvenigorod, where she rallied enough troops to re-establish control in the capital. Summoning Khovansky for negotiations, she had him executed for treason and heresy. That was the end of the Khovanshchina, as the uprising would be known, not least through Musorgsky’s opera of that name.

History on stage has its own rules. Musorgsky based his opera on three different uprisings – this one, in 1682, and two subsequent rebellions in which the streltsy were involved. The first took place in 1689, when Sophia tried unsuccessfully to recruit the musketeers against Peter and secure the throne in her own name. The second was in 1698, two years after the death of Ivan, making Peter the sole ruler, when the streltsy marched on Moscow in the false belief that Peter had died in Europe, where he had gone on a Grand Embassy, and that a ‘German’ would replace him on the throne. One of their petitions had ended, ‘we have heard that the Germans are going to Moscow and, following their customs of beard-shaving and smoking tobacco, will bring about the total overthrow of the faith’.22

Cutting short his tour of Europe, Peter rushed back to Moscow to suppress the uprising. He appeared in Western dress, sporting a moustache, but without a beard, seen as a symbol of holiness in Russia, where beards had been worn by all the previous tsars. In a declaration of his war against the archaic Russian rituals, Peter ordered all the boyars who had arrived to welcome him to shave their beards. Two thousand streltsy musketeers were imprisoned. Brutally tortured, some of them revealed a plot to depose Peter and put Sophia back on the throne. A thousand streltsy were subsequently hanged or beheaded. Sophia was imprisoned in the Novodevichy Convent on the outskirts of Moscow. To torture her, Peter had a hundred rebels hanged against the walls outside her window and left there to rot. The young Tsar Peter, then aged twenty-six, had asserted his power.

5

Russia Faces West

Until the eighteenth century, the Russians followed the Byzantine custom of counting years from the creation of the world, an event which they believed had occurred 5,508 years before the birth of Christ. But in December 1699 Tsar Peter decreed a calendar reform. Henceforth years were to be numbered from Christ’s birth, ‘in the manner of European Christian nations’, beginning on 1 January 1700 (7209 in the old system). To celebrate the start of the new century Peter organised a magnificent ceremony with fireworks, 200 cannon firing salvos simultaneously, and flame-throwers on the square in front of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. Muscovites were ordered by decree to join in the festivities by decorating the façades of their houses, shaving off their beards and exchanging their traditional kaftans for Western (‘German’ or ‘Hungarian’) dress, as modelled by the mannequins displayed for their guidance in the city’s squares.1

This was more than a calendar reform. It was the start of a cultural revolution in which the sense of time itself would be transformed. From this point Russia was to measure its progression on a European temporal scale. Its mission was to ‘catch up’ with the West, to speed up its development by casting off its old and ‘backward’ culture and following the lead of its advanced neighbours in Europe. This ‘catching up’ was to be the aim of governments in Russia for the next 300 years. But the emulation of the West posed numerous challenges.

Peter was a man in a hurry. Almost seven feet in height, he walked with giant, rapid strides, leaving his advisers far behind as he personally managed every aspect of his state’s affairs with boundless energy (an image captured wonderfully by Serov’s 1907 painting, Peter I, the Great). He was driven by his restless curiosity. As Pushkin wrote, in words once known by every schoolchild in Russia,

Now an academician, now a hero, Now a seafarer, now a carpenter, He with an all-encompassing soul,

Was on the throne an eternal worker.2

As a young man, Peter had developed a contempt for ‘medieval’ Muscovy. He despised its archaic and parochial culture, its superstitious fear and mistrust of the West. He was by temperament a revolutionary. Rejecting Orthodox traditions, he dressed in Western clothes, shaved his beard and spent a great deal of his time in the ‘German’ quarter of Moscow where, under pressure from the Church, the city’s foreigners were forced to live. He hosted all-night alcoholic feasts with jesters, giants, dwarfs and courtesans. To mock the Church he called these sessions of debauchery the ‘All Drunken Synod’. The carousers, sometimes numbering up to several hundred of his most important men of state, adopted titles such as ‘Patriarch Bacchus’ and ‘Archdeacon Thrust-the-Prick’.3

Among his most trusted drinking friends were two senior military men – Franz Lefort, a Swiss mercenary in Russian service since the 1670s, and the Scotsman Patrick Gordon, the Russian army’s quartermaster general – who persuaded Peter of the need to modernise his armed forces if Russia was to keep up with the European states. As so often in the country’s history, it was Russia’s military needs that prompted him to import Europe’s new technologies.

From 1696 he travelled incognito across northern Europe to see for himself what Russia needed to become a military power on the continent. He was the first ruling Russian sovereign to go abroad. In Holland Peter Mikhailov (as the tsar called himself) worked as a shipwright. In London he visited the Greenwich observatory, the Woolwich arsenal, the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. In Königsberg he studied the artillery.

On his return to Russia, in 1698, Peter established a new navy, military schools and industries, and rebuilt the army from the ground up. He set up a new system of conscription, unparalleled in Europe, in which units of twenty peasant households were each collectively responsible for sending one man for life into the army every year, and even more at times of war. This sweeping militarisation of society produced the largest standing army in the world – some 300,000 troops by Peter’s death, in 1725, and 2 million men by 1801.4 No other state could mobilise so many men. But size was not a guarantee of military efficiency. A pattern soon emerged in the history of the armed forces, namely Russia’s dependence on quantity because it lagged behind in quality. It was the only way the Russians could catch up with the Western powers in the military sphere. This was how Russia from now on would fight its wars – by expending more lives than its more advanced adversaries. It was why it lost so many troops in the two great wars of the twentieth century.

The cost of keeping such a large army placed a heavy burden on the state’s finances – perhaps three-quarters of its total spending during Peter’s reign. A share of the expenses was defrayed by making soldiers work for their upkeep. Each regiment was expected to make its own boots and uniforms. Soldiers formed artels (collectives) and worked for nearby landowners to earn money for their regiment. But the army’s costs were mostly met by taxation – indirectly from the sale of salt and vodka, two essentials of the peasant household, and directly by a poll or ‘soul’ tax on the peasants introduced from 1718.

If Russia was to be a European power it needed access to the Baltic Sea. The Baltic coast from Finland to Livonia had been ceded to the Swedes in 1617. Peter wanted these lands back. He needed access to the ports to export to Europe the goods that Russia could supply in abundance (timber, tar, grain, hemp, hides, furs and precious stones) – exports that would pay for Western military technologies. The conquest of the Baltic coast would also give to Russia a natural frontier.

Backed by an alliance with Poland and Denmark, Peter declared war on Sweden and led 40,000 men to attack the fortress town of Narva in 1700. They were badly beaten by a Swedish force of just 9,000 men, better trained, better supplied and stronger in artillery, under the command of Charles XII. A quarter of the Russians lost their lives and many more were captured by the Swedes.5 The defeat taught Peter two lessons, which would be the spur to his reforms: first, he would need a modern navy to conquer the coastline; and secondly, however large his army was, it stood little chance against the Swedes, at that time among the finest armies in Europe, unless it was equipped and organised to a comparable standard.

The Russians launched a new campaign in 1701, a year when the Swedes were distracted by another war against Poland. They captured Nöteborg Fortress (given the German name Shlisselburg by the Russians), strategically located on the Neva River’s outlet to Lake Ladoga. They also conquered Kotlin Island (renamed Kronstadt in the German style as well), which, along with Shlisselburg, secured the defences of St Petersburg (pronounced ‘Sankt Piterbourg’, another German-sounding name), the city Peter founded where the Neva runs into the Baltic Sea. Peter’s army also captured Narva and Dorpat (Tartu), conquests he proposed to give back to the Swedes if Charles would let him keep St Petersburg. Peter saw the latter as the most important of the Baltic ports, because from the Neva boats could reach the Volga River and the Caspian Sea, making Russia the main transit route between Asia and Europe. Charles rejected Peter’s compromise. He wanted to eliminate the Russians as a threat to Sweden’s Baltic lands, on which the Swedes depended for their grain. Once the Poles had been defeated, Charles led his armies against the Russians, who were then in Lithuania.

Charles was planning to attack Moscow, dethrone the tsar and partition Russia into petty fiefdoms shared out among the boyars. But instead of marching east, directly to the Russian capital, he turned his army south into Ukraine. There he was hoping to be joined by 20,000 Cossacks under the command of their hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had lost faith in the Russian pledge to protect the hetmanate and thought the Swedish king might help them gain their independence from Russia (in the end, just 3,000 Cossacks joined the Swedes). The Swedes were also driven south by their desperate need for food supplies. During their retreat through Lithuania the Russians had adopted a scorched-earth policy, destroying all the crops and animals that could be used to feed the enemy. Charles thought the situation would be better in Ukraine, but there too he found the same destruction. By the time they reached Poltava, on 27 June 1709, the invading troops were too weak and exhausted to match the improved Russian army that engaged them there. The Swedes were decisively defeated, with Charles, wounded, fleeing into Turkish territory on the other side of the Dnieper. The Russians seized their opportunity. They turned north-west, captured Riga and pushed on from there to take the rest of Sweden’s Baltic possessions. The Great Northern War, as it would be called, dragged on for twelve more years. The Russians attacked the Swedes in Finland and carried out a series of naval raids, pillaging and burning towns along the Swedish coastline, even threatening Stockholm itself. The Swedes were forced to sue for peace and sign the Treaty of Nystad (1721), by which their Baltic lands were ceded to Russia.

Victory over Sweden confirmed Russia’s status as a major European power, recognised as such by all the rulers of Europe. ‘We have come from darkness out into the light,’ Peter wrote to his son Alexei. ‘Before no one in the world knew us, but now they must respect us.’6 The respect of the West was not enough, however, to allay Russia’s fears about its western borderlands, Ukraine in particular, which had shown itself to be an open door for the armies of Europe. The Swedes’ invasion of Ukraine, aided by Mazepa’s treachery, sealed the fate of Ukraine as an independent hetman state, and over the next decades Russia tightened its control of the Ukrainian territories it had gained in 1654.

St Petersburg was conceived as a European capital – Russia’s ‘window on to Europe’, as Pushkin described it in The Bronze Horseman (1833). Planned as a series of classical ensembles linked by avenues, canals and squares, it was built to impress European visitors, demanding their respect for Russia as a power and a civilisation.

Peter was involved in every detail of the city’s early construction. He borrowed what he liked from other European capitals. Amsterdam (which he had visited) and Venice (which he knew only from pictures) were inspirations for the palace-lined canals and embankments. The classical baroque of the city’s churches was a stylistic mixture of St Paul’s in London, St Peter’s in Rome and the single-spired churches of Riga. From Europe Peter brought in architects and engineers, craftsmen, artists, furniture designers and landscape gardeners. St Petersburg became a home to Scots, Germans, Frenchmen and Italians. No expense was spared for Peter’s model capital. To make the Summer Gardens ‘better than Versailles’ he ordered peonies and citrus trees from Persia, ornamental fish from the Middle East and singing birds from India.7

Like the magic city of a Russian fairy tale, St Petersburg grew with such fantastic speed, and everything about it was so brilliant and new, that it soon became enshrined in myth. According to the legend of its foundation, Peter had been riding with a dozen horsemen across the soggy marshlands where the Neva meets the Baltic when he stopped, dismounted from his horse and with his bayonet cut two strips of peat and arranged them in a cross, pronouncing, ‘Here shall be a town!’8 His words echoed the divine command, ‘Let there be light!’, suggesting that St Petersburg had been created, like the world itself, ex nihilo. Eighteenth-century panegyrists elevated Peter to a tsar-creator equal in his powers to a god. In popular mythology, in illustrated ballads, oral tales and legends, the miraculous emergence of the city from the sea assigned to it a supernatural status from the start. It was said that Peter made his city in the sky and then lowered it, like a giant model, to the ground. Here was a new imperial capital without roots in Russian soil.

In his person, Peter sought to recall the emperors of ancient Rome. He gave himself the Latin title ‘Imperator’ and had his image cast on a new rouble coin, with laurel wreath and armour, in imitation of Caesar. It was a symbolic break from Muscovy, with its Byzantine mythology, in which the tsar had been portrayed as a divine agent and defender of the faith. Now he appeared in armour with a Western crown and cloak and imperial regalia. This was how he was depicted in a set of portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller for distribution to the sovereigns of Europe during his Grand Embassy.

The victory at Poltava was the point at which this military–imperial persona took firm root. In a famous print by Alexei Zubov, The Ceremonial Entry of the Russian Troops to Moscow on December 21, 1709 after their Victory in the Battle of Poltava, the tsar was pictured riding at the head of his triumphant soldiers into Moscow reimagined by the artist in the form of ancient Rome. None of the triumphant arches in the illustration existed. Moscow’s many churches with their onion domes were all removed from the cityscape. The soldiers bore their regimental colours, but there were no priests or icons in the procession to symbolise the role of divine intervention in their victory. It was an entirely secular depiction of imperial military power – a stark contrast to the icon painted for the conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible, The Church Militant, which had explained that triumph as the work of God.

Peter’s adoption of the title ‘Imperator’ entailed a change in the naming of Russia itself. Previously the country had been known as Rus, a common appellation for the ethnic homeland of Russians (russkie). Peter added the Hellenic term Rossiia which over the next century would replace Rus as the name of the Russian state. The noun Rossiia was meant to signify an imperial identity, uniting all the subjects of the Russian Empire regardless of ethnicity or nationality, albeit in a racial hierarchy that privileged those nationalities (Baltic Germans, Russians and so on) closest to the empire’s leadership. The empire was Rossiiskaya (the adjective derived from Rossiia), or sometimes Vserossiiskaya (meaning ‘All-Russian’) but never Russkaya (from Rus), an adjective applied to the Russian people (russkii narod), the Russian language (russkii yazyk) and the Russian Church (russkaya tserkov), but never to the institutions of the state. If Moscow was the ancient capital of Rus, a ‘mother to all Russians’, as Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, Petersburg was the capital of Rossiia, the administrative centre of a multi-ethnic empire stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

At the heart of this imperial government was a new conception of the Russian state. Until the Law Code of 1649, it had been conceived as the personal patrimony of the tsar. The concept of the state (gosudarstvo) had been inseparable from the person of the tsar (gosudar), who ruled Russia as his own domain. The Law Code had marked a shift away from this personal conception towards a law-governed realm. But Peter was the first tsar to think about the state as an impersonal machinery whose purpose was to the serve the public good or commonwealth. He had picked up this idea from the German cameralist thinkers, the jurists and officials who assigned the state an active and progressive role to serve the common good by imposing order on the people and stimulating the economy through policies developed from rational accounting and a detailed knowledge of society. Peter was attracted to their philosophy, perhaps because its equation of the common good with the interests of the state justified his use of coercion to push through his reforms. The well-being of society demanded a well-ordered police state.

Like other absolutist states, Peter’s regulated every aspect of society. He established colleges, or ministries, nine to begin with in 1718, responsible for its main areas of policy (Foreign Affairs, War, the Navy, Justice, Commerce, Manufacturing and so on). In 1721, he extended state control to Church affairs by establishing a Holy Synod, an organ of the clergy under his control, to replace the independent patriarch. This meant eradicating the Byzantine conception of a symphony between Church and state on which the political philosophy of Kievan Rus and Muscovy had been based. The tsar was now the sole authority.

Peter centralised provincial government by giving greater powers to appointed governors of new and enlarged provinces (guberniia). He made state service compulsory for the nobility, whose status was defined by the seniority of their office rather than by birth. The Table of Ranks, introduced in 1722, established fourteen ranks or categories of state service, in which hereditary nobility was conferred on office-holders in the top eight ranks. Commoners could enter at the bottom rank and earn noble titles by working up to the eighth rank (collegiate assessor in the government, major in the army or third captain in the navy). This ordering of the nobles by their service to the state lasted until 1917. It had a deep effect on the nobles’ way of life, further weakening their attachment to the land. Because promotion was normally by seniority, the system rewarded time-servers and encouraged bureaucratic mediocrity. It was in many ways a precursor of the Soviet Party-state and its nomenklatura, its system of appointing the top posts to loyal, long-serving officials.

The Petrine state pursued an active economic policy. It managed its own factories and mines, built roads and canals and conscripted the state peasants (a category created by Peter for those living on crown lands) as the workers on these sites. The state became the country’s main producer and the main consumer of industrial goods, a domination that hampered the emergence of an independent manufacturing class, as appeared in Europe at this time. Where private manufacturers did appear, they soon became dependent on the state for capital investment and help in tying workers down. In the Moscow region, for example, wool and linen factories were established in the early eighteenth century by merchants, artisans and even enterprising state peasants. Yet in the absence of investment banks or a labour market they could not operate without state aid. The government depended on these manufacturers to meet its needs for uniforms. So it created a new class of factory serfs for them, allowing the industrialists to buy entire villages whose peasants were then bound as indentured labour to these textile factories. Peter had intended to create a dynamic entrepreneurial society. But his statist methods reinforced the country’s backwardness, rooted in the culture of serfdom.9

Alongside its policies for industry, the Petrine state set much store by the spread of education and science, especially the learning of technologies for the military economy. In the early decades of his reign Peter paid for promising young men to visit Europe to study shipbuilding, metalwork, architecture, navigation, commerce and so on. Once the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences was founded, however, the training of young specialists could be carried on at home. Peter was inspired by his visit to the French Académie des Sciences in 1717, and by his meeting in 1716 with Gottfried Leibniz, whose ideas influenced the Academy’s focus on geography. It was Leibniz who persuaded him that Russia had a leading role to play in the exploration of Asia.

Geography was the first academic science in which Russia made an international mark. The two Kamchatka expeditions led by Vitus Bering between 1725 and 1743 made it known to Europe that there was no land connecting Asia and America – there were the Bering Straits instead. Sixteen scholars from the Academy went along on the second expedition to make a detailed study of the Siberian peoples, fauna, wildlife and geology under the direction of Gerhard Müller, whom we met at the beginning of this book. After ten years in Siberia, Müller returned to St Petersburg with a huge collection of materials on the ethnic history, languages and customs of its native tribes which he later published in his Description of the Siberian Kingdom (1750), a founding work in the field of ethnography.

St Petersburg was more than a city. It was Russia’s European school, a civilising project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European citizen. Everything in it was intended to encourage a more Western way of life. Peter told his nobles where to live, how to build their palaces, how to school their children, how to dress and conduct themselves, how to eat and entertain in polite society. A manual of etiquette, The Honourable Mirror of Youth (1717), compiled from Western sources, appeared in many editions over the next fifty years. It advised its readers, among other things, not to ‘spit their food’, nor to ‘use a knife to clean their teeth’, nor ‘blow their nose like a trumpet’.10 Nothing in this dragooned capital was left to chance. It was administered by the police – in the sense of tight controls on public order and safety, public hygiene and housing, as well as crime prevention – a system Peter modelled on the French lieutenants-généraux.

The most contentious part of Peter’s cultural engineering was his reform of language. He created a civil script, similar to Latin, to use instead of Church Slavonic for printing. His reforms imported a vast range of foreign words in the governmental, military and legal spheres, where there were no Russian words for most of the basic concepts. The use of French became a mark of civilised behaviour. Again, the problem was a lack of Russian words for the sort of thoughts and feelings that made up salon conversation: ‘gesture’, ‘sympathy’, ‘privacy’, ‘impulsion’ and ‘imagination’ – none could be expressed without the use of French. While this ‘salon style’ of literary Russian derived a certain refinement from its Gallicised syntax and phraseology, the excessive use of French expressions, which were really just clichés, made it clumsy and verbose. This was the language of social pretension that Tolstoy satirised in the opening passages of War and Peace: ‘Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe then being a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the élite.’11

There was resistance to these cultural reforms. It came partly from provincial nobles, who saw them as a threat to their old ‘Russian’ way of life, and partly from the merchants and Cossacks, many of them Old Believers, who saw Peter as the Antichrist. A Cossack-led revolt in Astrakhan was easily put down in 1708. But the popular dislike of Western customs, habits and ideas continued long afterwards. It was reflected in folklore, in satirical songs and in stories reproduced in woodcut prints (in Russian they are known as lubok prints). The most famous of these lubok prints, The Mice Are Burying the Cat, appeared in numerous editions and circulated widely throughout Russia in the eighteenth century. It shows the people (in the form of mice) celebrating the death of the Tsar Peter (the cat), whose godless reign had seen the introduction of shaving, smoking, drinking, dancing, even music at his funeral.12

From the middle of the eighteenth century we can see the emergence of a new national consciousness which found its first expression in an anti-Western ideology. It was based on the defence of Russian customs and morals against the corrupting impact of the West – a trope of the later Slavophiles. ‘When we began to send our youth abroad and entrusted their education to foreigners, our values changed entirely,’ wrote Ivan Boltin, a historian, in the 1780s.

There came into our hearts new prejudices, new passions, weaknesses, and desires that had remained unknown to our ancestors. These extinguished our love for our fatherland, destroyed our attachment to our ancestral faith and ways. We forgot the old before mastering the new, and while losing our identity, we did not become what we wished to be. All this arose out of hastiness and impatience. We wanted to achieve in a few years what required centuries, and began to build the house of our enlightenment on sand without having laid firm foundations.13

Alongside such highbrow treatises, there was a thriving industry of comic satires to drive home the same point to a broader audience. The gallomanic Petersburg dandy was the butt of these satires. His decadent and artificial manners were contrasted with the simple, natural virtues of the serfs, the material seductions of the European city with the spiritual values of the Russian countryside. Their moral lesson was simple: through their slavish imitation of the West, the Petrine elites had lost all sense of their own nationality. Striving to make themselves at home with foreigners, they had become foreigners at home.

Peter the Great divides the Russians like no other figure in their history. The Slavophiles maintained that he put Russia on to a false path: following the West and importing its materialist culture could be achieved only at the expense of national character, the spiritual values and traditions that distinguished Russia from Europe. But for the Westernist intelligentsia, who looked to Europe for their values and ideals, he established a new motherland, Petrine Russia, the only one in which they could believe. Their position was expressed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, who claimed that Peter had saved Russia from becoming ‘purely Asiatic’ in its character: ‘All the good and original that we have had in the sphere of thought and creativity emerged only as a result of the Petrine reforms; without them we would have neither Pushkin nor Glinka, neither Gogol nor Dostoevsky, neither Turgenev nor Tolstoy.’14

One thing can be said with certainty: the reforms created a deep cultural rift between the urban civilisation of the Westernised elites and the village world of the peasants, uneducated and unfree, worn down by serfdom, poverty, clinging to their time-worn communal traditions and interpreting the universe through pagan superstitions and Orthodox beliefs. This divide remained unbridged until 1917. It was the fault line along which the revolution would be fought.

The Bolsheviks took inspiration from Peter (the poet Max Voloshin called him ‘the first Bolshevik’). By grabbing hold of backward Russia and forcing it to catch up with the West he had set the example for their own forced programme of hyper-modernisation. But Peter’s methods of compulsion had in many ways the opposite effect to those he had intended. Rather than modernising the country, they reinforced the statist tyranny and servile customs of serfdom that had kept Russia – and would go on keeping Russia – in a relatively backward state compared to the West, where societies had more freedom. Here was the paradox of not only his but all the later reform projects led by Westernising Russian governments. Without a free society or active public sphere for enterprise, the state itself became the only motor of reform. And forcing changes from above could only drive a deeper wedge between the state and the people, reinforcing state coercion as the primary mechanism of reform.

In 1722, just three years before his death, Peter announced a new Law of Succession. He had no male heir. His first son Alexei had been executed on his orders for treason four years previously, after he had fled his bullying father and taken refuge in Vienna, while his younger son had died in 1719. Peter left it to himself to name his heir (a clear statement that he stood above the law). His choice fell on his second wife, a woman of lowly Polish origins, whom he crowned as Empress Catherine I in the Dormition Cathedral in 1724. In the coronation ceremony Peter stood in for the patriarch as the agent of divine blessing – another symbolic shift from the old Byzantine symphony of Church and state, which had appeared as equal partners in previous coronation rituals. Now the tsar’s will was enough to decide the fate of Russia and give sacred status to his successor.

Given how divisive Peter’s reign had been, it is perhaps surprising that his death did not give rise to a civil war, as there had been after Ivan the Terrible had died.15 The fact that Russia would be ruled by women for most of the remainder of the century – Catherine I (1725–7), Anna (1730–40), Elizabeth I (1741–62) and Catherine the Great (1762–96) between them occupied the throne for all but three of the seventy-one years between Peter’s death and Paul’s accession in 1796 – may be part of the answer. Female rulers were regarded as ‘humane’ and ‘wise’, softer and more yielding than the domineering Peter, which allowed for more court politics, stabilising the system. The leading families at court formed themselves into factions, which provided opportunities for the ruler to assert her domination through divide and rule, a strategy perfected by Elizabeth and Catherine the Great.16

The problem of establishing monarchical authority had less to do with gender than with nationality. With the exception of Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, all the eighteenth-century rulers following his death were either foreign-born (Catherine I, Peter III and Catherine the Great), born to German parents (Peter II and Ivan VI) or married into German families (Anna, Paul). On the two occasions when the throne was seized in a palace coup, the plotters would be motivated by hostility to foreign rulers or to foreign powers being served at the expense of Russia’s interests.

The first came after Anna’s death in October 1740. Anna was the daughter of Ivan, Peter the Great’s half-brother. Before becoming empress, she had been the Duchess of Courland, Courland being part of today’s Latvia. In Russia she had filled her government and elite regiments with Germans (Ostermanns, Münnichs and Lievens) whose barely concealed contempt for the Russians inflamed nationalist sentiments. The main hate-figure was her lover Ernst-Johann Bühren (Biron to the Russians), a German from Courland, who appeared to wield enormous power without occupying an official post. Discontent with Biron was limited at first to tiny groups of officers united by their desire for a Russian government. But it became more widespread when he forcibly imposed the collection of back-taxes that had been annulled by Russia’s previous rulers. When Anna died and Biron was appointed as regent to her heir, Ivan VI, the infant son of the Duke of Braunschweig-Mecklenburg, the Russian opposition, now with a stronghold in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, seized power, arrested Biron and put Elizabeth on to the throne. Biron and the other Germans in his circle were sent to Siberia, while the Russian soldiers killed their German officers.

The second anti-foreign coup was carried out by Catherine the Great (herself a foreigner) against Peter III, her own husband, in 1762. Born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor German state, Catherine came to Russia at the age of seventeen as the intended bride of her second cousin, Charles Peter Ulrich of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, a grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the empress Elizabeth. For their wedding, in 1745, Catherine converted from her Lutheran faith to Orthodoxy and took the name chosen for her by Elizabeth, whose mother had been Catherine I.

The marriage was a disaster. Catherine hated her husband. In her memoirs she described him as stupid, cruel and mean, a view challenged by historians, and claimed that he was impotent. The unhappy couple soon led separate lives. Catherine started an affair with Sergei Saltykov, a handsome chamberlain, and had two miscarriages before giving birth to a son, Paul, the heir to the throne, in 1754. Whether Saltykov was Paul’s father remains unknown, but Catherine’s memoirs hinted that he was, much to the horror of her nineteenth-century descendants, who censored any mention of his name.

Peter III was an admirer of Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia. He told Frederick he would rather be a general in the Prussian army than the Russian emperor. On his accession to the throne, in December 1761, he appointed Germans to the highest offices. He abandoned the alliance with Austria and France, on whose side Russia had been fighting since the start of the Seven Years’ War, and switched over to the Prussian side. His domestic policies offended Russian national feeling, especially his seizures of Church lands, his military conscription of priests’ sons and his order for the removal of all icons except those of the Saviour and the Mother of God from Orthodox churches – measures that displayed his contempt for the faith and raised fears of his intention to put Lutheranism in its place. Catherine justified her coup on the grounds of defending Orthodoxy from the ‘destruction of its traditions’.17 She knew her Russian history well enough to realise the power of religion to unite the Russians against foreign rule.

With the help of Count Orlov, her new favourite, who rallied the elite guards to her side, Catherine donned the green Preobrazhensky uniform and rode out from St Petersburg at the head of her troops to arrest her husband at his palace in Oranienbaum on 28 June. Peter meekly surrendered (on hearing of his overthrow, Frederick the Great said that he had ‘let himself be driven from the throne as a child is sent to bed’). Peter was exiled to one of his estates near St Petersburg, where he was murdered three weeks later by Orlov. It was announced that he had died of ‘haemorrhoidal colic’ – prompting one French wit to note that haemorrhoids must be very dangerous in Russia.18

The new empress faced an uphill task to establish her legitimacy. It wasn’t easy as a female and a foreigner – however much she tried to Russify herself by adopting Russian customs, studying Russian history and folklore and scrupulously observing the Orthodox rituals. Her son Paul, although only eight years old, was seen by many as the rightful heir, while Ivan VI, aged twenty-two, had a strong claim too, despite having been in custody since his deposition by Elizabeth in 1741. Secretly imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress, where he was known as ‘nameless prisoner no. 1’, Ivan had received little schooling, but he was aware of his imperial identity. When his jailers discovered who he was, in 1764, a plan was hatched to free him and proclaim him emperor. The plot was quickly thwarted and, on Catherine’s orders, Ivan was killed in his bed. News of his murder circulated widely, giving rise to the customary rumours that he was alive – most of them advanced by Cossack chancers and pretenders claiming to be him.

From the start of her reign, Catherine portrayed herself as Peter the Great’s political successor, the ruler who would carry on his transformation of Russia. That was the aim of her monument to Peter, Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue, unveiled in St Petersburg in 1782, and later known as the Bronze Horseman, which carried on its massive granite pedestal the inscription ‘To Peter I from Catherine II’. In the time that had elapsed since Peter’s death, his reforms had lost their controversial character, emerging even as a source of national consensus, which enabled Catherine to invoke them to legitimise her rule. She, like Peter, pledged to serve the common good. The medal issued on her accession depicted her as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, promising a reign of peace and progress through science and learning. Unlike Peter, however, Catherine rejected state coercion to impose reforms. A follower of the Enlightenment, she emphasised the need to educate the nobles as agents of enlightened government. She wanted to create a noble class that would serve the public good, not by compulsion but from a sense of obligation to society (noblesse oblige).

That was Catherine’s thinking behind her first major act – the emancipation of the nobles from compulsory service to the state. The decree had been announced by Peter III in 1762. It was a concession to the landowners, who had been lobbying for it for years. They complained that their service obligations were distracting them from the management of their estates. That was not the only reason for their liberation, however. The truth was that the state no longer needed as many noblemen in its service. A new class of permanent officials had been created since the introduction of compulsory service by Peter the Great. Catherine’s reform was as much about the state’s emancipation from its obligation to employ the nobles as it was about the freeing of the nobles from their service obligations to the state. The idea was to let those stay in service who had chosen to do so, and to let those leave who preferred to dedicate themselves to their estates, improving their economy. Catherine hoped that, like the English gentry or the Prussian Junkers, they would take up leading roles in their own communities, corporate bodies and provincial government. Released from their obligations to the state, the nobles would create the local institutions needed for effective government.

The idea did not work. The high nobility was too dependent on state service as a marker of status. Its young men liked the glamour of St Petersburg and the comradeship of regimental life, and delayed retiring to their estates until middle or retirement age, by which time they had little appetite for agricultural improvements or work in local government. They treated their estates as country homes, palaces of pleasure and culture, filling them with European artworks and employing vast staffs of household serfs – liveried chamberlains, maids, cooks, waiters, gardeners, coachmen, even musicians and artists – in numbers that astonished foreign visitors. Lower down the social scale, among the smaller landowners, the emancipation was welcomed, and they settled down on their estates. But they were unwilling, or too poor, to take up roles in the administration of the provinces.

The weakness of local government was made clear by the Pugachev revolt (1773–4), the last and largest of the Cossack-led rebellions that had rocked the state since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Like them it was carried out in the name of the true and holy tsar sent by God to liberate the people from the landowners. Emelian Pugachev, a Don Cossack and deserter from the army, had appeared in the Yaik Host, on the steppes between the southern Urals and the Caspian Sea. He claimed to be the true tsar, Peter III, who had not been killed by his whorish wife’s assassins but had escaped to reappear as the people’s saviour. The Yaik Cossacks were unhappy with a recruiting order from the government, issued on the outbreak of the war with Turkey in 1768, which had made them a regular unit of the Russian army, effectively reducing them to ordinary serfs. As Old Believers, they were outraged by the army’s order to remove their beards. Their revolt quickly spread to the Volga area, attracting the support of the Bashkirs, opposed to Russian domination, the urban poor and the peasants, who believed that the ‘Amperator Peter’ (as they called this ‘Godsent’ emperor) would abolish serfdom and transfer to them the gentry’s land. The popular belief in the tsar-liberator was reinforced by Pugachev’s commanders, who assumed the names and titles of the leading courtiers (there was a Cossack ‘Count Panin’, ‘Prince Potemkin’ and so on). Such was the enduring power of the myth of the holy tsar-protector who would deliver justice and freedom that even now, a century and a half since the appearance of the first pretender rebels in the Time of Troubles, the only way to garner mass support for a rebellion was in the name of that imagined tsar.

It took a large-scale military campaign to defeat the rebel army and capture Pugachev, who was brought back for his execution in Moscow (Catherine ordered the executioners to cut off his head before disembowelling him, rather than, as was usual, the other way around, so as not to offend her ‘love of humanity’).19 The memory of Pugachev remained in the popular imagination, inspiring future revolutionaries. Among the propertied classes, the term ‘Pugachevshchina’ became synonymous with peasant anarchy and violence, ‘cruel and merciless’ as Pushkin termed it in The History of Pugachev (1833).

An inquest into the revolt blamed the incompetence of local officials, who had allowed it to spread without hindrance. General P. I. Panin, who had led the punitive repressions, wrote to the governors of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod and Orenburg, the areas overwhelmed by the revolt, denouncing their provincial governments: ‘It is doubtful if the civil authorities know anything at all about the greater part of their duties or care very much … They carry out Her Majesty’s work complaining of red tape, taking bribes, quarrelling among themselves, and not knowing what to do.’20

The problem was that the administration was too thinly spread over this vast area – as it was over Russia generally. In the aftermath of the rebellion, in 1775, Catherine tried to remedy the situation by creating more but smaller provinces, divided equally by population size, and increasing the number of officials, mainly through election by the landowners and propertied townsmen. Around 15,000 new officials (two-thirds of them elected) joined the provincial administrations during the last quarter of the century. It was a start. But the fundamental problem of Russia’s under-government could only be resolved by creating genuine self-government, and that initiative would have to wait until the abolition of serfdom.

‘Russia is a European state.’ Thus Catherine wrote in the opening sentence of her most important treatise, the Nakaz or ‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission’, tasked by her with writing a new law code in 1767.21 What she meant by this simple statement was that, on account of its European character, Russia had a natural mastery over all the peoples of Asia.

It was Peter who had first conceived of Russia as a European empire with a civilising mission in Asia. Previously, the empire had been driven by profit. The Russians had moved east in search of fur and other precious raw materials. They had plundered the Siberian tribes. But they had not been much bothered with converting them to Orthodoxy or integrating them as subjects of the tsar. In this conquest for commercial gain the demarcation between ‘Russia’ and ‘Asia’ had not appeared important. But as Russia became conscious of itself as a European empire in Asia, its imperial identity required clearer ideological and cultural boundaries to demarcate the colonisers from the colonised.22

The first detailed maps of the Russian Empire were made in the 1720s, mostly by the Geography Department of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which published a general atlas in 1745. The line dividing Europe from Asia was drawn from this point at the Urals – a good deal further east than it had been on earlier maps – with ‘European Russia’ on the western side of the Urals and its ‘Asian’ empire to the east of them. The importance of the Urals for Russia’s European self-identity has persisted to this day (readers may recall the now utopian notion of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ advanced by Gorbachev). Yet, as we have seen, the Urals are not a real barrier between Europe and Asia. They are not like the oceans separating England, Spain or France from their overseas colonies. The Russian Empire was contiguous, a single territorial space, in which the Urals served not so much as a physical divide but rather as a cultural or conceptual marker separating ‘Europe’ from ‘Asia’. To root this division in geography, the Russians embarked on a whole range of scientific studies in a fruitless effort to prove that the flora, fauna and tribes on the Asiatic side of the Urals differed from their equivalents over on the European side. They called Siberia ‘our India’, or ‘our Peru’, to equate the Russian Empire with the European overseas empires.23

The European part of Russia grew in size in the eighteenth century. If in the east it stretched out to the Urals, in the west it was enlarged by the annexation of Polish territory. The three partitions of Poland (in 1772, 1793 and 1795) were agreed in alliance with the Habsburg Empire and Prussia. Catherine’s aim was not to conquer the ailing Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but to keep it weak and divided as a buffer state she could control – a foreign policy since pursued by all Russian governments towards neighbouring states. When the Polish king August III died, in 1763, she installed her own man on the throne, in fact her former lover, Stanisław Poniatowski. Backed by the pro-Russian party led by Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, Poniatowski forced the Sejm (the Polish parliament) to legislate against the persecution of minorities, the Orthodox and Protestants, by the Catholic majority. When, in protest, the Polish Catholic magnates raised an army and declared war against Russia, the Commonwealth descended into civil war between the pro-and anti-Russian groups. This allowed the Russians, Austrians and Prussians to occupy the Polish borderlands and impose a prearranged partition of Poland between themselves. Almost two-thirds of the Commonwealth was swallowed up by Russia between 1772 and 1795.

One of Catherine’s hopes of the partitions was to open Russia to the influence of her new subjects – Poles, Baltic Germans and Uniate Ukrainians – from the former Commonwealth. The only ethnic group that was not welcomed was the Jews. Around 100,000 Jews became subjects of the Russian Empire as a result of the first partition of Poland.24 The influx of skilled Jewish artisans and merchants gave rise to complaints from their competitors, who accused them of all sorts of evil practices, even blaming them for the pestilence that killed tens of thousands every year in Moscow in the first decade of Catherine’s reign. To prevent a pogrom Catherine banned the Jews from Moscow, denied them many rights and, in 1791, established a Pale of Settlement in the western part of the empire, where the Jews were forced to live. Aside from the Jews, however, Catherine was a firm believer in the progressive influence of European immigrants. She encouraged them to come from central Europe, where many farmers and traders had been ruined by the Seven Years’ War. German immigrants were given generous amounts of land in the Volga provinces, the location of a Volga German Autonomous Republic after 1917.

In the south, meanwhile, European Russia was expanding into Turkish lands, where Greeks and other immigrants were resettled by Catherine. Russia’s defeat of Turkey in the war of 1768–74 resulted in the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, which gave the Russians their first Black Sea port (Kherson) as well as the Crimean port of Kerch on the Azov Sea. Through this treaty the Russians also gained substantial rights (or so they believed) to interfere in Ottoman affairs to protect the sultan’s Orthodox subjects, the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians and Wallachians. Catherine was anticipating the demise of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. She believed that Russia could and should become the beneficiary by championing the Orthodox. She trained Greek officers in her military schools, invited Greeks to settle in her new towns on the Black Sea coast and encouraged Greeks in their belief that Russia would support their national liberation from the Turks. Her greatest dream was to reclaim Constantinople from the Ottomans, establishing a new Byzantine Empire under Russian protection. The French philosopher Voltaire, with whom she corresponded, addressed her as ‘votre majesté impériale de l’église grecque’, while Baron Friedrich Grimm, her favourite German correspondent, referred to her as ‘l’impératrice des Grecs’.25

It is unclear how serious she was about this ‘Greek project’. She had no concrete plan to expel the Turks from Europe. But there was a desire in her entourage to establish Russia as a major Black Sea power linked through trade and religion to the Orthodox world of the eastern Mediterranean, including Jerusalem.26

Catherine believed that Russia had to turn towards the south if it was to be a great power. It was not enough to export furs and timber through the Baltic ports, as in the days of Muscovy. To compete with the European powers it needed to develop trading outlets for the agricultural produce of its southern lands, to build its naval power in the Black Sea and so secure access to the Mediterranean for its military and merchant ships. The Black Sea was crucial, not just for the defence of the Russian Empire on its open southern frontier with the Muslim world, but also for its viability as a power on the European continent. Without the Black Sea, Russia had no sea access to Europe, except via the Baltic, which could easily be blocked by the other northern powers in the event of a European war.

The plan to develop Russia as a southern power had begun in the mid-1760s, when the Ukrainian territories once ruled by the Cossack hetmanate were turned into provinces of the Russian Empire ruled by military governors. But the southern project took off ten years later, when Catherine placed her close friend and former lover Prince Grigory Potemkin in charge of New Russia, the sparsely populated territories newly conquered from the Ottomans on the Black Sea’s northern coastline, and ordered him to colonise the area. Germans, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs were settled on these lands. New cities were established there – Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa – many of them built in the French and Italian rococo style. Potemkin personally oversaw the construction of Ekaterinoslav (meaning ‘Catherine’s glory’) as a Graeco-Roman fantasy to symbolise the classical inheritance that he and the supporters of the Greek project had envisaged for Russia. Shops were built in a semicircle like the Propylaeum of Athens; the governor’s house resembled a Greek temple, and the law courts a basilica.27

The climax of this Black Sea policy was the annexation of Crimea in 1783. As part of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, the Crimean khanate had been made independent of the Ottomans. Three years later, a new khan, Şahin Giray, was elected with the backing of Russia. Although he had the support of the Crimea’s sizeable Christian population, Şahin was opposed by the Ottomans. The Turks encouraged the Crimean Tatars to rise up against Şahin as an ‘infidel’, and sent a fleet with their own khan to replace him. The Christians and the Tatars soon became embroiled in a religious war. There were terrible atrocities on either side, prompting Russia to evacuate some 30,000 Christians to its Black Sea coastal towns. The departure of the Christians seriously weakened the Crimean economy. Şahin became dependent on the Russians, who persuaded him to abdicate, and then launched a quick invasion to secure the peninsula against the Turks. Forced to submit to Russian rule, the Crimean Tatars gathered with the mullahs in their mosques to swear an oath on the Koran to their new empress, 2,500 kilometres away.

From her teenage years, Catherine had been drawn to the ideas of the Enlightenment. On her accession to the throne she played the role of a philosopher-sovereign. Voltaire, Diderot and Baron Grimm were her long-time guides by mail. For her ‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission’ she drew upon the work of Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Cesare Beccaria and William Blackstone, and incorporated almost word for word entire sections of The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. Although she disputed Montesquieu’s conception of Russia as an oriental despotism, she accepted his idea that laws should be consistent with the spirit of a nation shaped by climate and geography. She applied that principle to the empire, envisaging a legal code to bring the customs and in time the laws of all its subject peoples into line with those of the Russians. The sheer size and diversity of the empire necessitated ‘autocratic rulership’, Catherine argued, but the rule of law would protect the welfare of society.

Catherine’s attraction to the Enlightenment was based on education and science, which she saw as progressive forces for Russia, rather than on its political ideas. She patronised the arts, allowed private publishing, promoted agricultural improvement and broadened access to schooling. In St Petersburg she founded the Smolny Institute for noble girls, the first girls’ school in Russia (and in October 1917 the headquarters of the Soviet). She was not so liberal in her political philosophy. She rejected the doctrine of popular sovereignty adopted by thinkers such as Diderot, whose advice she sought on buying art for her collection at the Hermitage in the Winter Palace rather than on government. She paid lip-service to the idea of liberty, but did not believe that everybody should have it.

She had no intention of granting freedom to the millions of serfs. Although she believed that freely hired labour was better than bondage, and perceived the serfs as human beings worthy of their liberty, she ruled out any thought of reforming serfdom, let alone of ending it, for fear of the reaction that it would provoke from the aristocracy. In the wake of the Pugachev revolt she increased the powers of the landowners to exploit their serfs, who were left in their control, beyond the legal reach of the state and its officials. Without restraints on their treatment of the serfs, the worst landowners burdened them with higher labour and cash dues, sold them off like slaves to work in factories and had them flogged or even banished to Siberia (a punishment encouraged by Catherine to promote its settlement) for minor misdemeanours and infractions of the rules. Young serf women were always at the mercy of their master’s whims and appetites, many ending up in serf harems, which became fashionable during Catherine’s reign, when Turquerie was all the rage across Europe. In short, as Catherine explained to Diderot, the landowners were ‘free to do on their estates whatever appeared best to them, except to kill their serfs by the death penalty’.28

Catherine’s commitment to Enlightenment ideas was broken irrevocably by the French Revolution of 1789. ‘You were right in not wanting to be counted among the philosophes,’ she wrote to Grimm at the height of the Jacobin terror in 1794, ‘for experience has shown that all of that leads to ruin; no matter what they say or do, the world will never cease to need authority. It is better to endure the tyranny of one man than the insanity of the multitude.’29

To prevent the ‘French madness’ from spreading to Russia, she tightened censorship, banning the publication of French works (Voltaire’s works were burned), closing down the private presses and imprisoning the radical adherents of the Enlightenment in Russia. Among them was Alexander Radishchev, a nobleman inspired by the Freemasons’ humanist ideals, whose Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790), an exposure of the country’s social evils, was denounced by Catherine as an attempt ‘to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against their government’.30 Radishchev was banished to Siberia, where he was sentenced to ten years of hard labour, and all but thirty pre-sold copies of his book destroyed. The ban on it would last until 1905.

Russia’s idealisation of Europe was shaken by the violence in France. The once Francophile nobility became Francophobes – ‘the French’ a byword for inconstancy and godlessness. In St Petersburg, where the aristocracy was totally immersed in French culture, the reaction posed some problems for those liberal noblemen (like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace) who retained their sympathy for revolutionary France. But even here there was a conscious effort to break free from the intellectual empire of the French. The use of Gallicisms became frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg (in the streets it was positively dangerous). Nobles gave up Clicquot and Lafite for kvas and vodka, haute cuisine for cabbage soup. ‘Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French,’ wrote Princess Dashkova, president of the Russian Academy. ‘Let us remain patriots and retain the character of our ancestors.’31

But what did it mean to ‘be Russian’? How could the Russians become Europeans without merely imitating them? Could they be Europeans and Russians? These were the questions many Russians asked as their country battled with Napoleon.

6

The Shadow of Napoleon

Catherine died in 1796. Contrary to rumours, she was not killed while copulating with a horse – a legend that endured until the twentieth century – but died simply from a stroke. Absurd myths about the ‘nymphomaniac empress’ had been circulated by her enemies at court. Catherine’s love of sex was not exceptional by the promiscuous standards of eighteenth-century kings, but she was judged more harshly for it because of her sex.

On his accession to the throne Paul restored the principle of primogeniture to the law of succession, effectively ensuring that his mother would be the last female ruler of Russia. Determined to reverse her policies, he revoked many of the freedoms she had granted to the aristocracy, reduced the elective element in provincial government, and imposed a military order on society, issuing a series of decrees to stamp out any sign of moral laxity, from French books, music and fashions to socialising after 10 p.m., when a curfew was imposed in St Petersburg. Appalled by his tyranny, a small group of drunken officers broke into the Mikhailovsky Palace and strangled Paul to death on the night of 23–24 March 1801. The officers were acting on the orders of a court conspiracy with close links to Alexander, son of Paul and heir to the throne, who had set the date for the killing. ‘In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by assassination,’ Madame de Staël remarked.1

Handsome, tall and gracious in demeanour, Alexander had been raised by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, in the spirit of the French Enlightenment. His Swiss tutor Frédéric Laharpe was a convinced republican and supporter of the Jacobins. According to his childhood friend the Pole Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (son of Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski), who joined the inner circle of his government, Alexander ‘took the liveliest interest in the French Revolution, and while disapproving of its terrible abuses, wished for the success of the Republic’.2

In the first years of his reign Alexander enacted a series of political reforms: a new liberal code of censorship was introduced in 1804; the judicial powers of the Senate, Russia’s highest court, were strengthened as a counterbalance to the tsar’s authority; and government was modernised with the establishment of eight new ministries and an upper chamber (the State Council) modelled on Napoleon’s Conseil d’État. In 1809, the emperor instructed his adviser Mikhail Speransky to draw up plans for a constitution based on the Code Napoléon with a national parliament elected on a property franchise. Speransky was a liberal. His analysis of the Russian state – which he described as a despotism based on the enslavement of society – was so devastating that it was not published in Russia until 1961. Had Speransky got his way, Russia might have turned into a constitutional monarchy. But Alexander hesitated to enact his minister’s reforms and, once Russia went to war with France, they were condemned by the conservative nobility for being ‘French’. Accused of treason by his enemies, Speransky was forced out of office and sent into exile in March 1812.

Three months later, the French imperial army, the Grande Armée, began its invasion of Russia. Napoleon’s aim was straightforward – to force the Russians to honour their commitments to France in the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) which had followed the French defeat of Russia’s forces at the Battle of Friedland. Alexander had agreed to join Napoleon’s Continental System, a Europe-wide embargo against British trade, but all along the Russians had been flouting it. Britain purchased more than half of Russia’s exports, especially its primary materials (wood, hemp, linen, wheat, potassium and wax), so the blockade, if implemented fully, would have entailed an economic and financial crisis for Russia. This was not a cause enough for war. Alexander could have backed down over it and avoided a conflict. But he chose to fight instead. He had for a long time been convinced that a showdown with Napoleon was unavoidable. He saw it as an ideological struggle. Napoleon had to be defeated if Europe was to be rebuilt as an international legal order based on constitutional monarchies. One might think there was a contradiction between his support for constitutionalism in Europe and his reluctant opposition to it in Russia. But in his view there was no inconsistency: Russia was not yet mature enough for the freedoms Europe ought to have.3

The Grande Armée began its invasion on 24 June. Starting from the Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish client state created by Napoleon in 1807, it crossed the Neman River into Russia’s Polish territories. The Grande Armée was the largest army ever assembled, well over 600,000 men, mainly French, but also Germans, Poles and other European nationalities. By mid-August it was in Smolensk. Napoleon had thought that he could bring the Russians to their knees in one devastating victory like the one he had achieved against the Russians and the Austrians at Austerlitz in 1805. But Alexander had since learned that the only way to save his empire was not to fight Napoleon’s forces in an open battle but to retreat and draw them into Russia, where they would be beaten by the winter frost and problems of supply created by his scorched-earth policy. Determined to engage the Russian army, Napoleon pushed on to Moscow. The Russians made a bloody stand at Borodino on 7 September, before their commander General Kutuzov gave the order to abandon Moscow to the French. When Napoleon entered Moscow, on 14 September, he found only empty houses, many of them burned in fires started by the Muscovites themselves to rob the French of warm accommodation and supplies. Exhausted and demoralised, the French had thought the fighting would be over when they took Moscow, but now that they had got there they could not even find the enemy.

Had Napoleon retreated at this point, he might have reached his base in Poland before the winter took its toll. But he stayed in Moscow for a month, waiting for the tsar to answer his peace terms. The reply never came. The French attacked Kaluga to the south in a desperate bid to take its warehouses with their supplies. But they were blocked by the Russians. In mid-October they began their return to Poland, now only possible by the same route they had already trodden, across fields and villages stripped bare of food. As the French retreated, the snowfall became heavier. The temperature fell to minus 30 degrees by early December. Thousands died from cold, starvation and disease. The retreating columns were constantly attacked by Cossack cavalry and peasant volunteers, the latter often stirred up by their priests into believing that Napoleon was the Antichrist, while Alexander was the holy tsar, their saviour. Barely 10 per cent of the invasion force would make it back alive.

Alexander might have let Napoleon run away and lick his wounds, but he pursued him back to France. He committed a large force to the coalition army that defeated the Grande Armée at the crucial Battle of Leipzig, in 1813, from which the French limped back across the Rhine. The tsar saw himself as the liberator of the continent. The Patriotic War, as it was already being called, had displayed the glory of Russia, whose military might had ‘saved’ Europe. At the Congress of Vienna, convened in November 1814 to secure a long-term peace through the Concert of Europe, Alexander thought he could dictate the new continental balance of power. He had half a million troops on European soil; his Cossacks were the masters of Paris.

Alexander demanded an enlarged Poland – with a liberal constitution under his authority – as ‘just’ compensation for the sacrifices Russia had made in the war. He wanted Poland as a buffer state, a sphere of influence where he could intervene to prevent the Poles from ever again joining with the French or any other power to invade Russia. The Polish alliance with Napoleon was connected in his mind to the 1612 invasion of Russia by the Poles – an event commemorated by his promotion of the Minin and Pozharsky cult, which served to remind the Russians of their patriotic duty to defend their western frontier. He also saw the longer-term advantages of a Russian-oriented Polish state, which could serve as a cultural and economic intermediary between Russia and Europe. Without Poland, Alexander thought, Russia would become an Asiatic power, excluded from the European continent, as Napoleon had intended it to be by giving independence to the Poles. Alexander’s demands for Poland were rejected by the British and the Austrians, who feared Russia’s expansionist ambitions on the continent. But a compromise was reached by which the Russians kept around two-thirds of the Polish lands, ceding Poznań to the Prussians and Galicia to the Austrians.

Alexander believed that his empire had been saved by God. The victory reinforced his belief in the myth of Holy Russia as the providential saviour of humanity. From 1815, the tsar became increasingly religious, even mystical in his outlook, as he fell under the influence of Baroness de Krüdener, a Baltic German pietist. She helped him draft the founding text of the Holy Alliance, a union of Christian powers to secure the peace in line with the principles of Holy Scripture, which Alexander managed to persuade the Prussians and the Austrians to join, but not the pragmatic British, who saw it as a ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’.4 At the time of its conception the Holy Alliance was not wholly incompatible with Alexander’s liberal principles. Its stress was on the defence of traditional Christian values against the secular materialism of the Jacobins. But it soon became a force of political repression in the name of religion, an ideology for the defence of divinely ordained and ‘legitimate’ (that is, monarchical) authorities against revolutionary threats.

Religion underpinned the tsar’s reactionary politics during the last decade of his reign. It was from this point that Russia first appeared as the champion of Christian principles against secular democracy and nationalist movements in Europe (a role Russia would play on and off until 1917). The tsar’s turn to political reaction was a panicky response to the carbonari and other revolutionary societies that surfaced across Europe in the postwar years and were behind the uprisings in Italy and Spain during 1820–1. Alexander was convinced that all these groups were connected to a secret international Bonapartist organisation. He urged the Holy Alliance to root them out and destroy them before they spread to Poland and Russia. At home, he silenced any further talk of constitutional reform, tightened censorship and took counsel only from conservatives. One of his main advisers was Karamzin, the historian, whose Memorandum on Ancient and Modern Russia (1811) had persuaded him that Russia was best suited to autocracy, its ‘traditional’ form of government. The liberal influence of Speransky was now replaced by the harsh disciplinarianism of General Arakcheyev, sometime minister of war, who turned entire villages into military colonies in which the peasants, put in uniform, were dragooned into farming and military duties for the state. Alexander hoped the colonies would teach the peasants discipline and self-sufficiency, but they functioned more like prototypes of the corrective-labour camps of the Gulag.

The tsar’s reactionary turn was a bitter disappointment for those officers who came back from the war with liberal reformist hopes. Their encounter with the peasant soldiers in the army (who had fought with a patriotic spirit that shamed the noble class) had turned them into democrats, enemies of serfdom and autocracy. They had marched to Paris in the hope that Russia would become a modern European state, with a constitution where every peasant would enjoy the rights of citizens, but had returned to an unchanged country where the peasant was still treated as a slave. As one officer recalled, going back to Russia from Paris ‘felt like returning to a prehistoric past’.5

The officers began to organise themselves in secret circles of conspirators, like those in Spain and Italy, often building on the networks of the Freemasons, banned by Alexander in 1822, to which most of them belonged. All were in favour of a liberal constitution and the abolition of serfdom, but they were divided over how to bring this end about. Some wanted to wait for the tsar to die, whereupon they would refuse to swear allegiance to his successor unless reforms were introduced. But others thought this wait would be too long. Alexander was just forty years of age, and in good health. They called for revolutionary action.

By 1825, Colonel Pavel Pestel had emerged as the boldest organiser of an army insurrection. A charismatic hero of the wars against Napoleon, he had a small but committed band of followers in the southern army who planned to arrest the tsar during his inspection of the troops in Kiev in 1826. They would then march to Moscow, and with the help of their allies in the north and the Polish nationalists, who agreed to join the movement in exchange for independence, seize power in St Petersburg. Pestel’s manifesto Russian Truth (1824) was a strange mix of Jacobin ideas and Russian Orthodox fervour. It called for regicide, the establishment of a revolutionary republic (by means of a temporary dictatorship if necessary) and the abolition of serfdom. But it also wanted the creation of a nation state ruling in the interests of the Great Russians: the other national groups (Finns, Ukrainians and so on) would be forced to ‘become Russian’. Only the Jews were beyond assimilation. Pestel thought they should be expelled from Russia.

Pestel’s plan was hastily brought forward by Alexander’s sudden death from typhus on 19 November 1825. Alexander had no sons, so the Grand Duke Konstantin, his first brother, was the natural heir. Konstantin, however, had renounced the throne because of his marriage to a Polish woman not of royal blood. His younger brother Nicholas did not announce his decision to take the crown instead until 12 December. Pestel resolved to seize the moment for revolt and hurried to St Petersburg to organise it with his fellow officers – the Decembrists as they would be known. They conceived of the uprising as a military putsch, instigated by orders issued by the officers, without even thinking whether the soldiers (who showed no inclination for an armed revolt) would go along with them. In the end, the Decembrist leaders rallied the support of 3,000 troops in Petersburg – far fewer than the hoped-for 20,000 men, but still enough perhaps to bring about a change of government if well organised and resolute. But that they were not.

On 14 December, in garrisons throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing their allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear their oath and marched to Senate Square, where they thronged in front of the Bronze Horseman and called for ‘Konstantin and a Constitution’. The grand duke was popular among the soldiers, who had been told by their leaders that he had been usurped by Nicholas, cause enough for them to fight perhaps. But few had any idea what a constitution was (some of the troops thought it was the wife of Konstantin). For several hours the soldiers stood around in freezing temperatures, until Nicholas, assuming command of his loyal troops, ordered them to fire on the mutineers. Sixty soldiers were shot down; the rest ran away. Within hours the leaders of the rising had been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At their trial, the first show trial in Russian history, 121 conspirators were found guilty of treason, stripped of their noble titles and sent as convict labourers to Siberia. Pestel and four others were hanged in the courtyard of the fortress, even though officially the death penalty had been abolished in Russia. When the five were strung up on the gallows and the floor traps were released, three of the condemned proved too heavy for their ropes and, still alive, fell into the ditch. ‘What a wretched country!’ cried one of them. ‘They don’t even know how to hang properly.’6

Nicholas was twenty-nine when he ascended to the throne. Tall and imposing, with a large balding head, long sideburns and an officer’s moustache, he was every inch a military man. From an early age he had developed an obsessive interest in military affairs. He learned by heart the names of all his brother’s generals, designed uniforms and watched army parades and manoeuvres with a childlike excitement. Having missed out on his boyhood dream of fighting in the war against Napoleon, he prepared for a soldier’s life, and in 1817 received his first appointment, inspector-general of engineers. He loved the routines of army life: they appealed to his strict and pedantic character as well as to his spartan tastes (throughout his life he insisted on sleeping on a military camp-bed). He saw the army as the ideal model for his state – ordered, disciplined, based on dutiful obedience and subordination to a single goal set by the autocracy. He filled his government with military men (all but one of his ministers of the interior had held the rank of general) and treated his officials as soldiers. Nobles in state service were forced to wear a uniform.

To strangers he seemed cold and stern, the personification of autocratic strength, but to the empress Alexandra and those at court who knew him well his firmness and insistence on strong action were based, not on confidence, but on insecurity. Throughout his reign he lived in fear of a revolution in Russia. The Decembrist uprising would long continue to haunt him. Coming as it did from the army he had so revered, it left him with a mistrust of society, especially those elements in it that took their ideas from Europe. He was never sure how many more Decembrists there were ready to rise up, should he loosen his police controls. For years he ordered regular reports on the activities of the Decembrists in Siberia. He kept tabs on their relatives and friends, always looking for signs of a new revolt. Any questioning of autocracy was in his view subversive.

To hunt down potential revolutionaries, Nicholas established a new political police. Generally known as the Third Department (its official designation was the Third Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery), it was set up in 1826 under the direction of Count Alexander Benckendorff, a general of Baltic German origin who had played a leading role in the suppression of the Decembrists. Although it had a small central staff, the Third Department had at its disposal an investigative force in the Corps of Gendarmes, which had around 2,000 officers, along with powers to spy on every aspect of people’s lives (opening their mail, following their movements, acting on denunciations by informers, and so on). It was the start of a long policing tradition in Russia.

Mistrustful of his own bureaucracy, Nicholas surrounded himself with his security forces, who fed his fears by giving him reports of ‘Jacobin’ societies and secret groups in Russia, mainly among noble youths, with links to foreign revolutionaries. The Poles were often singled out as the main intermediaries between Paris and St Petersburg.7

No wonder, then, that Nicholas reacted with such panic to the 1830 revolutions that broke out in Paris, Belgium and Warsaw. He feared that they would spread to Russia, unless checked by his forces. On the outbreak of the Belgian revolution against the Dutch, Nicholas had mobilised the Russian army and, in the face of British opposition, would probably have used it to restore the Dutch king to the throne, had it not been for the Polish uprising, which came to a head at the same time, demanding his attention first.

The uprising had begun in November, after the viceroy of Poland, Grand Duke Konstantin, conscripted Polish troops for the suppression of the revolution in Belgium. A group of Polish officers rebelled against the order, took the Belvedere Palace and with the help of Polish soldiers and civilians forced the Russian troops to leave Warsaw. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, now turned rebel against the reactionary tsar, was appointed at the head of a Provisional Government, a national parliament was called and Polish independence was proclaimed in January 1831. Within days, the Russian army crossed the Polish border and advanced towards Warsaw, which fell after eight months of fierce fighting. The Russians carried out a number of atrocities against civilians – retribution for the Poles’ participation in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

Nicholas continued punishing the Poles, whom he saw as the main revolutionary threat to his regime. Their liberal 1815 constitution was replaced by the Organic Statute of 1832, which made Poland ‘an indivisible part’ of the Russian Empire. The statute promised civil liberties, separate legal systems, local government and Polish-language rights. But these were seldom honoured by the new viceroy, Field Marshal Paskevich, the leader of the Russian war against Warsaw, who ruled Poland with an iron fist, closing universities, confiscating the estates of the rebels and imposing Russian as the sole permitted language in high schools and offices. Nicholas was obsessed by the Polish rebels who had fled abroad. At Münchengrätz in 1833, he secured an agreement with the Austrians and Prussians to exchange intelligence and combine their police efforts against these ‘Bonapartists’, as Benckendorff described them in his frequent correspondence with Count Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, over the next fifteen years.8

The uprising had made it clear that the empire needed an ideology to counteract the subversive influence of Western revolutionary and nationalist ideas. In 1833, the minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, defined that ideology in a circular to schools instructing them to teach the people ‘in the spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’.9 This trinity of national principles – Uvarov’s answer to ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ – would, he claimed, save Russia from the ‘crisis’ of the West, by which he meant the democratic challenge to monarchical authority and the erosion of Christian values by secular ideas. Known as ‘official nationality’, this new ideology was based on the old myth that the Russians were distinguished from the Europeans by the strength of their devotion to the Church and tsar and by their capacity for sacrifice in the service of a higher patriotic goal.

Similar ideas about the Russian character and mission in the world were developed by the Slavophiles, who emerged as an intellectual circle in Moscow at this time. If Uvarov’s national ideology was rooted in the institutions of the Church and state, the Slavophiles’ conception of the national identity was based in the peasants’ folk culture. They had a romantic notion of the village commune as a uniquely Russian institution, beyond which the country need not look for guiding moral principles. ‘A commune’, declared Konstantin Aksakov, one of the leading Slavophiles, ‘is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act.’10

The key to this communal harmony, the Slavophiles maintained, was the principle of sobornost, a spiritual union (from sobor, the Russian for ‘cathedral’ and ‘assembly’) in which the individual found a moral purpose in the collective – a concept foreign to the individualistic West. Because sobornost had to be a voluntary communion, the peasants needed to be free to join it in the right spirit, and on this basis the Slavophiles were committed to the abolition of serfdom.

The Slavophiles were opposed to the Westernising reforms begun by Peter the Great. They feared that these changes, imposed by a state that was ‘foreign’ to the peasants, would result in the loss of Russia’s national character, its native customs and traditions. The latter, they believed, were based on higher principles – on the Christian harmony, humility and willingness to sacrifice which, in their imagination, had animated Muscovite society before Peter’s reign. The Slavophiles were building on the myth of Russia as the defender of Christian principles against Western secular materialism, the same myth developed by ‘official nationality’. If Russia lagged behind the West in its material development, it was superior to it in its spiritual principles. The simple, peasant ‘Russian soul’ was more truly Christian than the egoistic spirit of the Western bourgeois citizen.

In the fictions of Nikolai Gogol (and the later Dostoevsky) Slavophile ideas gave rise to a mystical conception of the Russian soul – a universal spirit of Christian love and brotherhood innate only in the Russian people, whose providential mission was to save the world from egotism, greed and all the other Western sins. Here, in this myth of the Russian soul, was a messianic concept of Russia as an empire of the Orthodox without territorial boundaries, a spiritual empire linking Moscow, the Third Rome, with Constantinople and Jerusalem. For Slavophiles like Fedor Tiutchev, a diplomat and poet, it was Russia’s soul that made it different from the West – unknowable by any Western measure, as he put it in this famous quatrain, known by almost every Russian:

Russia cannot be grasped by the mind,

No yardstick will measure her,

She is of a special kind –

In Russia you can only believe.

Gogol tried to develop this conception in a three-part novel called Dead Souls, in which the providential plan for Russia was at last to be revealed. The grotesque imperfections of provincial Russia exposed in the first and only finished (1842) volume of the novel – where the adventurer Chichikov travels through the countryside swindling a series of moribund squires out of the legal title to their deceased serfs – would be transcended by Gogol’s lofty portrait of the Russian soul, living in a realm of Christian brotherhood, which he was intending to reveal in the second and third parts. The trouble was that Gogol could not picture this idealised Russia in a living human form. He, the most pictorial of all the Russian writers, could not conjure up an image of the actual Russia that satisfied his Slavophile ideals. His observations of reality were such that he could not help but burden all his characters with the faults and imperfections derived from their natural habitat. As he himself wrote despairingly, ‘this is all a dream and it vanishes as soon as one shifts to what life is really like in Russia’.11 Sensing he had failed in his fictional endeavour, he sought instead to drive his message home in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1846), a moral sermon on the divine nature of Russia in which he preached that salvation lay in the spiritual reform of every individual citizen. He said nothing about reforming serfdom or the autocratic state, claiming that both were morally acceptable if combined with Christian principles. The intelligentsia was outraged.

‘Intelligentsia’ is in origin a Russian word. In Russia it refers to an educated stratum of society sharing certain principles – namely, opposition to autocracy and commitment to the ‘people’s cause’. The Russian intelligentsia had its roots in the institutions and ideas of the nobility in the eighteenth century. But its politics were rooted in the uprising of 1825. After the suppression of the Decembrists, entering the military or civil service became unthinkable for those noble sons who shared their democratic principles. Where state service had defined their fathers’ class, they themselves would be defined by their service to society. Acutely conscious that their wealth and privilege had been achieved by the exploitation of their fathers’ serfs, they sought to redeem their guilt by becoming doctors, teachers, statisticians or agronomists to improve the people’s lives, or else by becoming writers, journalists and critics, whose mission was to the raise the educated public’s awareness of Russia’s social ills. The task of literature was not to entertain but to portray Russia as it really was, so that its readers might change it. Realism was the creed that united all the writers, among them Dostoevsky and Turgenev, who emerged on the literary scene in the 1840s – the ‘extraordinary decade’, as Pavel Annenkov, the critic, described it.12

Their intellectual guide and inspiration was the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who did more than anyone to define the moral principles of Russian literature. In his ‘Letter to Gogol’ (1847), a passionate rejection of Selected Passages, Belinsky wrote what could serve as a manifesto of the Westernist intelligentsia. In the absence of a parliament, Belinsky wrote, the public looked to writers for moral leadership against the autocracy, and they judged their writing on this principle: ‘That explains why every so-called liberal tendency, however poor in talent, is rewarded with universal attention, and why the popularity of great talents that sincerely or insincerely give themselves to the service of orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality declines so quickly.’ Gogol had betrayed the moral duty of the writer by siding with the Church and state against reform. This explained his literary failure:

you failed to realise that Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or asceticism or pietism, but in the successes of civilisation, enlightenment and humanity. What she needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse; she needs rights and laws conforming not to the preaching of the Church but to common sense and justice, and their strictest possible observance. Instead of which she presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without even having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man; a country where people call themselves not by names but by nicknames such as Vanka, Vaska, Steshka, Palashka; a country where there are not only no guarantees for individuality, honour and property, but even no police order, and where there is nothing but vast corporations of official thieves and robbers of various descriptions.13

Words still relevant today.

The tsar’s fear of revolution reached new heights in 1848, another year of revolutions across Europe. They began in Paris, where the monarchy was replaced by a republic towards the end of February, followed by revolts in Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Milan, Venice, Prague, Budapest and Bucharest. Everywhere the crowds demanded civil freedoms, democratic parliaments, national liberation from empires.

The French Republic was a direct challenge to the legitimist principles established at the Congress of Vienna and upheld by the Holy Alliance. The main republican leaders at once declared their support for an independent Poland and the liberation of northern Italy from Habsburg rule. Nicholas was in no doubt that the revolution of 1789 had ‘arisen from the ashes’, as he put it to the Prussian king, and that military measures would be needed to prevent it spreading east.14 Within two weeks of receiving news of the events in Paris, he had mobilised 400,000 troops. They occupied the empire’s western borderlands, the most susceptible to revolution, where martial law was soon declared. Together with the army, the gendarmes of the Third Department raided homes in a frantic hunt for weapons, illegal literature and any other signs of revolutionary activity.15

Nicholas did not intend to send his troops to France or Italy. But he was prepared to use them against revolutions in Austria or Prussia, if asked to by their rulers, because they bordered on Russia. Where he was the quickest to intervene, however, was in Moldavia and Wallachia, where he barely recognised the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. The principalities had gained their autonomy in 1829, but had since fallen under Russian domination, against which their revolutions broke out in the spring of 1848. In Bucharest, a Wallachian republic was declared by the revolutionary government, whose leaders called for the union of the principalities as an independent national state (Romania). Alarmed by these developments, Nicholas sent 14,000 troops to occupy Moldavia, and then 30,000 more to conquer Bucharest and crush the revolution there. ‘A system of espionage has been established here,’ the British consul in Bucharest reported. ‘No person is allowed to converse on politics. German and French newspapers are prohibited.’16

The intervention in Romania encouraged Nicholas to do the same in Hungary. The Hungarian revolution had begun in Budapest in March 1848. Inspired by events in France and Germany, its leaders formed a democratic parliament and government, declared their independence from Austria and passed a series of reforms in which serfdom was abolished, freedom of the press was established and the Hungarians assumed control of their own units in the Habsburg army. The Austrian imperial government declared war on the Hungarians, who, with the Slovaks, Ruthenians and other minorities opposed to Habsburg rule, proved more than a match for the Austrian forces. The newly installed eighteen-year-old emperor Franz Joseph appealed to the tsar to intervene.

Defending ‘legitimate authorities’ was sufficient cause for intervention according to the principles of the Holy Alliance. But for Nicholas there was more at stake than that. He could not afford to stand aside and watch the spread of revolutionary movements in central Europe that might lead to a new uprising in Poland. The Hungarian army had many Polish exiles in its ranks. Some of its best generals were Poles, including General Jozef Bem, one of the main military leaders of the 1830 Polish uprising and in 1848–9 the commander of the victorious Hungarian forces in Transylvania. Unless the Hungarian revolution was defeated, there was every danger of it spreading to Galicia, a largely Polish territory controlled by Austria, which might reignite the Polish problem in Russia. Galicia also had a sizeable Ukrainian minority, the ‘Ruthenians’ as they were called by the Austrians, with a thriving centre of Ukrainian culture in its capital Lemberg (called Lviv by the Ukrainians), so Nicholas had reason to be fearful that a revolution in Galicia might provide the springboard for a broader nationalist movement in tsarist Ukraine. In June 1849, some 190,000 Russian troops crossed the Hungarian frontier under the command of Paskevich, the leader of the punitive campaign against the Poles in 1831. Vastly outnumbered by the Russians, most of the Hungarian army surrendered in August, but around 5,000 soldiers fled to the Ottoman Empire, where under pressure from the British and the French the sultan gave them sanctuary. In London and Paris, the Hungarian rebels were hailed as freedom-fighters against Russian tyranny. Among their champions was one Karl Marx, then in exile in London, who in a series of articles attacked Russia as the enemy of liberty.

Nicholas, meanwhile, began an all-out war against any sign of potential opposition, real or phantom, in Russia. Foreign citizens were watched by the police; the universities were barred from teaching philosophy or constitutional law; and while the regime did not stop the press reporting on events abroad, it ordered the arrest of anyone discussing them, even in their homes, lest such conversations should give the wrong ideas to their servants, as Nicholas explained to the Petersburg nobility. The Gendarme Corps of the Third Department was massively increased. Its agents donned civilian dress instead of their sky-blue uniforms to infiltrate the circles of suspected revolutionaries.

The one ‘plot’ they uncovered was a weekly gathering of students, teachers and minor civil servants hosted by a young official in the Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Petrashevsky, in St Petersburg. The writers Dostoevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin were regulars at these Friday evenings, begun in 1846, where the works of foreign socialists were earnestly discussed alongside other ideas of reform. In April 1849, the group was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress on false charges that it was preparing for a revolution in cities across the empire. Twenty-one of the accused, including Petrashevsky and Dostoevsky, were condemned to death; fifty others were sent into exile or conscripted by the army as privates. Just before their execution on Semenevsky Square the men were spared by Nicholas, who had planned this cruel torture. Some were sent to prison, others to hard labour in Siberia. Dostoevsky spent four years in the Omsk prison camp, where he came face to face with the most brutal criminals. It was an experience that formed his vision of the human psyche in The House of the Dead (1862), a fictionalised memoir of his prison years.

Dostoevsky’s crime had been to read aloud Belinsky’s letter to Gogol which by then had become famous, in part because it had been banned. The revolutions in Europe led to even tighter laws of censorship. The monthly list of books forbidden by the Third Department grew from 150 titles before 1848 to 600 in that year. A new board of censors, the Buturlin Committee, was appointed by the tsar with extensive powers of preventive censorship. Its vast army of censors pored over every manuscript submitted to the board for approval. They were now told to flag up any work that could potentially be deemed subversive, even if that had not been the author’s intention. The results were often farcical. One censor banned a new edition of Shakespeare’s Richard III because it dealt with themes that were ‘dangerous in a moral sense’. Another disallowed a reprint of Catherine the Great’s letters to Voltaire. On this basis, as a censor noted, ‘even the Lord’s Prayer could be interpreted as a Jacobin speech’.17

One book that slipped through the censors was to have a powerful effect in changing attitudes towards serfdom, the most crucial and explosive issue of the day. Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852) had been passed for publication. Most of the stories had already been published in the journal The Contemporary so the censor no doubt thought there was no harm in passing them. None of them contained a single sentence that could be read as an overt attack on the tsarist system or serfdom – although the whole book was suffused with a subtle condemnation of both. For the first time the peasants were portrayed not as simple ‘rustic types’ but as thinking, feeling, complicated individuals. By simple observation of the way that serfdom shaped their lives, Turgenev had aroused the moral indignation of his readers more effectively than any socialist manifesto could have done. Published in the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Sketches had as big an impact in swaying Russian views against serfdom as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book had on the anti-slavery movement in America. Infuriated by the publication of the Sketches, Nicholas had Turgenev arrested, not for the book, but for an obituary of Gogol he had since published in the Moscow Herald. Turgenev was imprisoned and then placed under house arrest. One night in prison he was visited by the chief of police, who was curious to meet the famous writer. The police official brought champagne. After a few glasses and some amiable talk, the visitor proposed to drink a toast: ‘To Robespierre!’18

*

The shadow of Napoleon returned in the form of his nephew, Louis Napoleon, elected president of France in December 1848. Four years later, a national referendum made him emperor of the French, Napoleon III. Nicholas was the only European sovereign not to recognise the new Napoleon. Emperors, he claimed, were made by God, not elected in a plebiscite. To show his contempt for him, he addressed Napoleon as ‘mon ami’ rather than ‘mon frère’, the customary greeting to another sovereign. Some of his advisers wanted the French emperor to seize on the insult and force a break with Russia, but Napoleon passed it off with the remark, ‘God gives us brothers, but we choose our friends.’19

Napoleon III aimed to restore France to a position of respect and influence abroad, if not to the glory of his uncle’s reign, by revising the 1815 settlement and reshaping Europe as a family of liberal nation states along the lines envisaged by Napoleon I. Russia was the biggest obstacle to this ambition. Its defeat would be revenge for 1812.

A long-running dispute in the Holy Lands brought that conflict to a head. The dispute involved the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, then ruled by the Ottomans. It turned on which side should control them – the Orthodox, who were backed by Russia, or the Catholics, defended by the French? The Ottomans, who did not really care, could be swayed one way or another by French or Russian bullying. The Russians had maintained the upper hand since the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774), which they claimed had given them the right to represent the interests of the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire. But all that changed in 1851, when the Marquis de La Valette, a zealous Catholic, was appointed by Napoleon, keen to curry favour with the Church, as the French ambassador in Constantinople. La Valette declared that the Latin claims had been ‘clearly established’ and threatened war against the Turks if they refused to enforce them.20 The Turks gave in to the French demands in November 1852.

Nicholas was furious. More than any recent tsar he placed the defence of the Orthodox at the centre of his foreign policy. He was devoted to the Russian Church, which sent more pilgrims to the Holy Lands than any other church, and shared their intense passion for the sacred shrines. Like many Russians, he saw the Holy Lands as an extension of Holy Russia, a mystical idea that had never been defined by territorial boundaries, and he was prepared to go to war, against the whole of Europe if need be, to protect Orthodox interests. He mobilised his forces for a lightning strike on Constantinople to force the Turks to reverse their ruling for the Catholics, and sent ahead Prince Menshikov, a veteran of the wars against the French, to impose a treaty on the sultan. Encouraged by the British, who feared Russia’s expansion, the Turks held firm, rejecting Menshikov’s bellicose threats. Large and angry crowds in the Turkish capital called for holy war against Russia.

The failure of the Menshikov mission convinced the tsar to send his troops into Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia once again. The invasion started in June 1853. Nicholas was counting on uprisings by the sultan’s Slavs to help the advance of Russian troops. He thought the Slavs would welcome the Russians, their co-religionists, as their liberators from the Turks. ‘There is no other way for us to move ahead,’ the tsar wrote in November, ‘except through a popular uprising for independence on the widest and most general scale.’21

His thinking had come a long way from the defence of legitimate authorities. He was now calling for a Balkan revolution to promote his aims against the Turks. In his mind the call was justified by the religious nature of the war. It was his sacred duty to free the Orthodox from Muslim rule. In any case the sultan could not count as a legitimate ruler because he was not Christian. Pan-Slav ideas also influenced the tsar’s thinking. Of particular importance was a memorandum written by the leading Pan-Slav ideologist, Mikhail Pogodin, in December 1853. The memorandum clearly struck a chord with Nicholas, who shared Pogodin’s sense that Russia’s role as the protector of the Orthodox had not been recognised or understood by the French or the British and that Russia was unfairly treated by the West. Nicholas especially approved of the following passage, in which Pogodin railed against the double standards of the Western powers, which conquered distant colonies but forbade the Russians to intervene in neighbouring countries to protect their co-religionists. It is worth quoting at length, because it says a lot about Russia’s grievances against the West.

France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality: none of this disturbs the balance of power; but when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power … The English declare war on the Chinese [the Opium Wars] who have, it seems, offended them: no one has a right to intervene; but Russia is obliged to ask Europe for permission if it quarrels with its neighbour. England threatens Greece to support the false claims of a miserable Jew and burns its fleet [a reference to the Don Pacifico affair]: that is a lawful action; but Russia demands a treaty to protect millions of Christians, and that is deemed to strengthen its position in the East at the expense of the balance of power. We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice, which does not understand and does not want to understand (comment in the margin by Nicholas I: ‘This is the whole point’).

Who are our allies in Europe? (comment by Nicholas: ‘No one, and we don’t need them, if we put our trust in God, unconditionally and willingly’). Our only true allies in Europe are the Slavs, our brothers in blood, language, history and faith …

If we do not liberate the Slavs and bring them under our protection, then our enemies, the English and the French … will do so instead (comment by Nicholas: ‘Absolutely right’) … Then we will have ranged against us not one lunatic Poland but ten of them (comment by Nicholas: ‘That is right’).22

As the Russian troops advanced towards Constantinople there was no uprising by the Balkan Slavs. Their love for Russia was a Pan-Slav myth. But the invasion stirred the British to action. The impetus for intervention came from the home secretary, Lord Palmerston, an outspoken advocate of an aggressive offensive to bring Russia to its knees, who was loudly supported by the Russophobic British press. For years the press had presented Russia as a threat to ‘British principles’ – liberty, free trade and civilisation – and to the empire’s interests in India. Once the British had decided on a war, Napoleon concluded that his best bet was to join them so as not to lose out on the spoils.

This was the start of the Crimean War. The allies planned to destroy the Russian naval base at Sevastopol to force the Russians to withdraw from the principalities, although Palmerston had more ambitious plans to break up the Russian Empire by giving independence to the lands which it had conquered during the past century and a half. The allied forces landed on the Crimean peninsula on 8 September 1854. Heavily defeating the Russian forces at the Alma Heights, they began the siege of Sevastopol, a year-long industrial bombardment of the city’s defences which in its intensity would not be matched until the First World War. In September 1855, the allied forces stormed the Malakhov Redoubt, the key to the defence of the city, forcing the exhausted Russians to evacuate Sevastopol and sue for peace. Palmerston proposed continuing the war in the Baltic and the Caucasus to liberate these territories from the Russians. But the French had had enough.

Under the terms of the Paris Treaty (1856), the Russians renounced any claims to Moldavia or Wallachia, now placed under the protection of the European powers, and agreed to dismantle their Black Sea Fleet, a humiliation for Russia. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a defeated great power. Not even France had been disarmed after the Napoleonic Wars. The way Russia was treated was unprecedented for the Concert of Europe, which was supposed to be guided by the principle that no great power should be humbled by others. But the allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They equated it with China, on which they had imposed similar humiliating conditions after the First Opium War.23

The humiliation was to leave a deep and lasting sense of resentment towards the West. It continues to this day. All Putin’s talk of Western ‘double standards’ and ‘hypocrisy’, of Western ‘Russophobia’ and ‘disrespect’ for Russia, goes back to this history. In the 1860s, these complaints were amplified by writers such as Tyutchev, Danilevsky and Leontiev, who twisted earlier Slavophile ideas about Russia’s role as the protector of Christian principles against the materialism of the West to argue that the latter was an existential threat to it. ‘Europe’, Danilevsky argued in Russia and Europe (1869), ‘is not only alien to us but even hostile; its interests cannot be the same as ours, and in most cases they will be opposed to ours.’24 Putin would develop these and other similar ideas about Russia’s conflict with the liberal West in the wake of his war in Crimea.

The defenders of Sevastopol had fought with courage and tenacity, as Tolstoy had revealed in Sevastopol Sketches (1854–5), written when he was an army officer. These stories made his name as a writer. A quarter of a million Russians gave their lives, their bodies buried in mass graves all around Sevastopol. Their heroism would allow Russian nationalists to claim a moral victory in the Crimea by retelling the story of the war as a tale of Russia fighting on its own, against all the powers of Europe, for its Orthodox beliefs. The city’s spirit of defiance became central to the myth of Russia as the last defender of truly Christian values against the materialism of the West.

The war had brutally exposed the country’s many weaknesses: the corruption and incompetence of the command; the technological backwardness of the army and navy; the poor roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply; the poverty of the army’s serf conscripts; the inability of the economy to sustain a state of war against the industrial powers; the weakness of the country’s finances; and the failures of autocracy. Critics focused on the tsar, whose arrogant and wilful policies, as they now seemed, had led the country to defeat and sacrificed so many lives. Even within the governing elite the bankruptcy of the Nicholaevan system was coming to be recognised. ‘My God, so many victims,’ wrote the tsarist censor Alexander Nikitenko in his diary. ‘All at the behest of a mad will, drunk with absolute power … We have been waging war not for two years, but for thirty, maintaining an army of a million men and constantly threatening Europe. What was the point of it all?’25

Nicholas died on 2 March 1855. He had been in bed with influenza but had gone out in freezing temperatures to inspect his troops without a coat. He died from pneumonia. Rumours circulated that the tsar had killed himself. Probably untrue, they were believed by his enemies, who saw it as a recognition of his sins. Whether true or not, Nicholas was broken morally, filled with remorse for the military disaster he had brought about. All his reign he had been fighting with the shadows of Napoleon, waging war against the liberal Western forces which he saw as a threat to his beloved Holy Russia, only to discover that it was a fight he could not win. Holy Russia was a myth.

The new tsar Alexander II was no less committed to autocracy, but, unlike his father Nicholas, he understood that reforms were needed to save it. Defeat in the Crimea had persuaded him that Russia could not compete with the Western powers until it abolished serfdom. The economic case was irrefutable. The gentry had never learned to make a profit from their own estates. They were heavily indebted to the state, itself bankrupted by the war, which knew that abolition was essential for a market-based agrarian economy. The moral argument for abolition was also indisputable. No one had the will to defend serfdom any longer, least of all the noble service class, immersed as it was in the cultural and moral values of Europe.

On top of all these arguments there was an urgent need to prevent another Pugachevshchina – a serf war against the state. The soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War had been led to expect their freedom; when it did not come they organised rebellions – some 500 of them in the first five years of Alexander’s reign.26 In March 1856, not long after signing the Treaty of Paris, the new tsar warned the Moscow nobles: ‘You know yourselves that the existing order of ruling over living souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to await the day when it will begin to abolish itself from below.’27 But would the end of serfdom solve the problems of the peasantry?

7

An Empire in Crisis

The Emancipation Decree was proclaimed on 19 February 1861. It was not read to the peasants until 7 March, the first day of Lent, when, it was assumed, they could be counted on to listen to their priests, charged with its communication, in a sober and submissive mood. Expectations had been running high. The peasantry believed that they would gain their freedom from the landowners: they would no longer have to work for them or pay them dues because they would be given all their land. As the authorities were well aware, the decree fell a long way short of such utopian hopes. The gentry had battled to limit the reform at every stage of its legislative journey from the Editing Commission of 1859 to its final passage through the State Council in January 1861. The result was a compromise, which satisfied no one, least of all the peasantry.

The decree removed the peasants from bondage to the landowners, but tied them legally to the commune, which received a share of the gentry’s land in communal ownership. The land did not come free, as the peasants had expected, but for a sum the commune had to pay through a sort of mortgage with the state. The commune’s household members were collectively responsible for these redemption payments, as they were for all taxes. For the next nine years, while the land to be transferred to the communes was determined by the local gentry committees, the status quo was not to change.

When the statutes were read out by the priests, the peasants scratched their heads in disbelief. Where was their land and freedom? In the village of Bezdna, near Kazan, the peasants reasoned, as they did in many villages, that the failure of the priest to mention them must mean either that he could not read correctly or that he had been instructed by the gentry to leave those provisions out. The peasants went in search of more reliable readers. They found one, a semi-literate peasant and Old Believer called Andrei Petrov. After studying the proclamation for three days, he managed to interpret the statutes in a way that told the peasants what they had wanted to hear all along. News of his discovery spread rapidly. Peasants came from all around to hear the long-awaited ‘golden charters’ in which their land and freedom were awarded to them by the tsar-batiushka, who in the popular imagination was still the same divine and paternal figure, the embodiment of their ideals of justice, invoked and impersonated by the Cossack rebel leaders of the past. The landowners were alarmed. Troops were sent to Bezdna, where they found 5,000 peasants, six times the population of the village, defending Petrov’s house to prevent his arrest. The peasants would not listen to the officer’s demands to give Petrov up. Chanting ‘volia, volia’ (freedom, freedom), they said they would rather die. After several warnings, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd: sixty-one people were killed and hundreds more were wounded before Petrov surrendered.1

There were similar disturbances in other provinces. Troops were sent to put down peasant protests in 718 villages between March and May.2 The threat of revolution quickly passed. But the peasants’ disappointment dealt a mortal blow to the tsar-batiushka myth, which died a slow death over the next fifty years, the period we are covering in this chapter. After the Emancipation, moreover, the peasants never fully recognised the gentry’s landed property. They fell so far behind in their mortgage payments – a sign of their rejection of the settlement as much as a marker of their poverty – that the debt was cancelled by the government in the revolutionary year of 1905.

The commune emerged from the Emancipation as the basic unit of administration in the countryside. The mir, as it was called, a word that also means ‘world’ and ‘universe’, regulated every aspect of the peasants’ lives: it decided the rotation of the crops (the open-field system of strip farming necessitated uniformity); took care of the woods and pasture lands; saw to the repair of roads and bridges; established welfare schemes for widows and the poor; organised the payment of redemption dues and taxes; fulfilled the conscription of soldiers; maintained public order; and enforced justice through customary law.

In the central agricultural zone, where the land was overpopulated, the commune tried to share it equally by repartitioning the strips of arable between the peasant households every few years according to their size (usually determined by the number of ‘eaters’ but sometimes by the number of male adult labourers). The origins of this egalitarian practice are probably related to the collective payment of taxes, most likely starting with the poll tax introduced in 1718.3 It made sense for the commune to give more land to the bigger families, which had to pay a larger share of the collective tax burden, and which also had more mouths to feed. Changes over time in the households’ size necessitated changes in the distribution of the strips to optimise the village’s ability to pay its tax and feed itself. If its origins were practical, the repartitioning was also a reflection of the peasant ideology, a form of primitive socialism, which would guide the agrarian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Three ideas were at the centre of this peasant ideology. They can be seen in customary law, which was codified by jurists after 1861. The first was the concept of family ownership – that all the household assets (livestock, tools, crops and buildings but not the women’s dowries) remained in common ownership, inherited by all the sons with provisions made for unmarried daughters and widows. Membership of the peasant household was defined by participation in its economic life (‘eating from the common pot’) rather than by blood or kinship ties. Second was the labour principle – basically a peasant version of the labour theory of value. The peasants attached rights to labour on the land. They believed in a sacred link between the two. The land belonged to God. It could not be owned by anyone. But every peasant family should have the right to feed itself from its own labour on the land. On this principle the landowners did not fairly own their land, and the hungry peasants were fully justified in claiming their right to farm it. A constant battle was thus fought between the state’s written law, framed to defend property, and the peasants’ customary law, which they used to defend their transgressions of the landowners’ property.

The third idea was articulated in the way the peasants applied customary law. They judged the merits of a case according to the position of the parties concerned. In this way of thinking stealing from a rich man was less serious than stealing from a man who could barely feed his family. Swindling a neighbour was immoral, but cheating on a landlord or government official was not subject to any moral censure under customary law. The peasantry rejected the state and its laws. Centuries of serfdom had bred in them a deep mistrust of all authority outside their mir.4

The Emancipation failed to resolve the fundamental question: how could the peasants’ growing need for land be reconciled with the landowners’ rights of property? The problem was most acute in the central agricultural zone, where the landowners’ estates were historically located. The practice of communal repartitioning encouraged the peasants to have bigger families – the main criterion for receiving land. The birth rate in Russia was nearly twice the European average in the latter nineteenth century. The rapid growth of the peasant population (from 50 to 79 millions between 1861 and 1897) resulted in a worsening land shortage. By the turn of the century 7 per cent of the peasant households in the central zone had no land at all, while one in five had less than one hectare. Although the average peasant allotment (at 2.9 hectares in 1900) was comparable in size to the typical smallholding in France or Germany, Russian peasant farming was much less intensive, with grain yields at barely half the level reached by farmers in Europe. The light wooden scratch plough used by Russian peasants with a single horse, or pair of oxen, was vastly inferior to the heavy iron ploughs used in western Europe with a four-or six-horse team.5

Lacking the capital to modernise their farms, the easiest way the peasants had to feed themselves was by ploughing more land at the expense of fallow and other pasture lands. But this made the situation worse. It meant reducing livestock herds (the main source of fertiliser) and the exhaustion of the soil. By 1900, one in three peasant households did not have a horse.6 To cultivate the land they dragged their ploughs themselves.

Such was the peasants’ demand for land that many were prepared to pay excessive rates to rent it from the landowners. Land rents increased seven-fold between 1861 and 1900.7 The easy profits the landowners made from renting out their land reduced their interest in farming it themselves. World grain prices were depressed in any case. But that changed in the 1890s, when prices rose sharply, encouraging the gentry to take the land back into cultivation by themselves. Large commercial farms employing new machines instead of peasant labour began to appear in the fertile steppelands of the south, where the railways and steamships opened up the channels for export through the Black Sea. The impact on the peasantry was disastrous. It hit them hardest in a band of provinces, running from Saratov to Voronezh, Kursk and Poltava, between the overpopulated centre and the new commercial farms of south Russia – areas, in other words, where the peasants suffered from both shortages of land and the loss of jobs to the machines. These were the regions where the peasant revolution was most violent in 1905 and 1917.

The Emancipation was the first in a series of reforms in the 1860s, the so-called Great Reforms. Their main aim was to energise society by granting freedoms within the framework of autocracy. One of the problems of the tsarist system was the absence of provincial institutions it could entrust to extend its influence and run local government. We have already reviewed this problem, most recently in Catherine the Great’s reign when the weaknesses of the provincial government were exposed by the Pugachev rebellion. The Great Reforms were meant to prevent that from happening again.

A law of 1864 established a new system of self-government, the rural councils or zemstvos, in most Russian provinces. Elected on a property franchise, the zemstvos (whose name derived from the word for land, zemlia) were dominated by the landowners. They were set up only at the provincial and district levels (below that the peasant communes ruled themselves under the loose supervision of gentry magistrates and police constables). The judicial reforms of the same year set up an independent legal system with public jury trials. There were new laws granting more autonomy to universities (1863), expanding primary schooling (1864), relaxing censorship (1865) and introducing universal military conscription (for up to seven years) in place of the old system of conscripting only serfs (1874). The aim of these reforms, in the words of a progressive jurist, was ‘to put a repressed and humiliated society on its feet and let it flex its muscles’.8

Had the spirit of the 1860s continued to pervade the work of government, Russia might have become a more liberal society. During Alexander’s reign (1855–81) there was also a growing ‘public sphere’ (to adopt the concept of Jürgen Habermas).9 Civil society began to organise and represent itself through institutions of its own making – professional organisations, voluntary societies and charities, zemstvo bodies, universities and a proliferating press, including the ‘thick journals’, the intelligentsia’s literary parliament, through which public opinion appeared as a force the state could not ignore. Russia was at last developing the civic institutions that any country needs to build a political democracy.

The zemstvos had the most potential for this liberal development. Run by squires of the sort who fill the pages of Tolstoy and Chekhov – well-meaning men who dreamed of bringing civilisation to the countryside – they founded schools and hospitals, provided veterinary and agronomic services, built roads and bridges, aided local trades and industries, financed rural credit and carried out statistical surveys into every aspect of the agricultural economy with a mission to improve the welfare of the peasantry.

The ‘small deeds liberalism’ of the provincial zemstvos was not a challenge to the central state. Indeed, in so far as the crucial weakness of the tsarist system was the under-government of the localities, they were a vital supplement to it. The presence of the state stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals. Neither the district towns nor the volost rural townships had any standing tsarist officials. There was only a series of magistrates who appeared from time to time on some specific mission, usually to sort out local conflicts and then disappear again. The common image of the tsarist regime as omnipresent and all-powerful was largely an invention of the revolutionaries, who spent their lives in fear of it, living in the underground. The reality was different. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only four state officials at the turn of the twentieth century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements scattered across 5,000 square kilometres.10

In this space the zemstvos had a huge amount of work to do. They were limited, however, by the taxes they could raise from the local landowners, whose more reactionary members were opposed to paying for the welfare of the peasantry. They also faced increasing opposition from the Ministry of the Interior, which came to see them as a breeding ground for revolutionaries. The main concern was the zemstvo employees (teachers, doctors, statisticians, engineers and agronomists) known as the Third Element. In contrast to the first two elements, the administrators and elected officials, who were mostly landowners, these employees were predominantly from the towns. Many had indeed been exiled to the countryside because of their involvement in student demonstrations and other radical activities. Through their work in the zemstvos they hoped to serve the people’s cause.

This was the environment in which Populism emerged as an ideology. It entailed a belief in the peasantry and its egalitarian customs as the model for a socialist society, which could be reached in Russia, the Populists believed, without going through the negative effects of industrial capitalism experienced in the West. At its heart was a new myth to reshape the country’s history: the simple Russian people as the carrier of socialist ideals. The Populist intelligentsia idolised the peasantry. They filled their libraries with books about folklore, studied Russian peasant myths, proverbs, songs and customary laws. Riddled with the guilt of privilege, they dedicated their lives to the service of the people’s cause.

From this loosely defined ideology Populism evolved into a political movement, the first real socialist movement in Russia. Students took the lead. During the ‘mad summer’ of 1874, thousands of students left their lecture halls and arrived in the countryside hoping to convert the peasants to their revolutionary struggle. Dressed like peasants, they learned rural trades to make themselves more useful to the peasantry, and brought books to help teach them how to read. The students were met with suspicion by the villagers. ‘Socialism’, one of the Populists later wrote, ‘bounced off the peasants like peas from a wall. They listened to our people as they do to the priest – respectfully but without the slightest effect on their thinking or actions.’11 Most of the activists were rounded up by the police, sometimes tipped off by the villagers themselves.

These sobering encounters led to a split in the movement. Some remained committed to the task of winning over the peasants through propaganda and ‘small deeds’. It was, they said, the only way to build a democratic social movement, the only guarantee against the use of violence. Others feared that this process was too slow – the police would always have the upper hand. They argued for a tighter party structure to organise political revolt, acts of terror and a coup against the state. Only when the police state had been paralysed would the peasants join their cause.

One of the most important theorists of this putschist strategy, Petr Tkachev, was to have a major influence on Lenin, who owed as much to him as he did to Marx. After the failure of the ‘Going to the people’, as the events of 1874 were known, Tkachev argued that such methods were too slow. Before a social revolution could be organised a class of richer peasants, whose interests lay in the status quo, would appear as a result of capitalist development and assert its domination in the countryside. Tkachev argued for a putsch by a disciplined vanguard, which would set up a dictatorship before engineering the creation of a socialist society by waging civil war against the rich. He claimed the time was ripe to carry out this coup, since as yet there was no major social force, just a weak landowning class, prepared to defend the monarchy. Delay would be fatal, Tkachev argued, because soon there would be such a force, a bourgeoisie, supported by the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry, which would be formed by the new market forces in Russia.

The immediate consequence of this turn to putschist methods was a wave of terrorist attacks on government officials, many by a group, the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volia), which killed the tsar in 1881. It had made a number of attempts on Alexander’s life before one of its agents threw a bomb into his carriage in St Petersburg, killing one of the Cossack riders flanking it. When the emperor emerged unhurt, a second bomb was hurled by another agent which blew away his legs and ripped open his stomach. Taken in a sleigh to the nearby Winter Palace, he died shortly afterwards from his wounds.

It is hard to think of a more momentous turning-point in Russian history. On the day the tsar was killed, 1 March, he had agreed to a reform that would include elected representatives from the zemstvos and town councils in a new consultative assembly. Although it was a limited reform, by no means implying the creation of a constitutional monarchy, it showed that Alexander was prepared to involve the public in the work of government. On 8 March, the proposal was rejected by his son and heir, Alexander III, in a meeting of grand dukes and ministers. The most reactionary and influential critic, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod, warned that accepting the reform would represent a first decisive step on the road to constitutional government. At this time of crisis, he maintained, Russia was in need not of a ‘talking shop’ but of firm actions by the government. From that point, the new tsar, who would rule from 1881 to 1894, pursued an unbending course of political reaction to restore the autocratic principle.

Alexander was a giant of a man, who liked to entertain his drinking friends by crashing through locked doors and bending spoons in his fingers. He looked like a Russian tsar should look, stern and fierce with a thick beard framing his square head. He openly despised not only the zemstvos but all levels of bureaucracy, which he saw as a wall between the tsar and his people. He introduced a series of reactionary ‘counter-reforms’ to strengthen forms of personal rule (‘power verticals’, as Putin would call them) and weaken representative bodies. The provincial governors received new powers over the zemstvos and town councils. They capped their budgets and obstructed their activities by subjecting them to frequent police raids and arrests of their employees as suspected revolutionaries. The governors appointed gentry land captains, who ruled the countryside like ‘little tsars’. Among their many powers were the rights to overturn the communes’ decisions, to discharge elected peasant officials and to act as judges in communal disputes. Until 1904, they could even have the peasants flogged for minor crimes. The impact of such corporal punishments – decades after the Emancipation – cannot be overstressed. It made it clear to the peasantry that violence was the basis of state power – and that violence was the only way to remove it. One peasant wrote that his fellow villagers had seen the appointment of the land captains as a ‘return to the days of serfdom, when the master squire had lorded it over the village’. There could not have been a less effective way of asserting the tsar’s power in the countryside.

The same could be said of the regime’s policies towards the national minorities. Before 1881, the government pursued a varied policy towards the nationalities. It ranged from loose controls to full-scale Russification. Finland, for example, enjoyed more self-rule and cultural autonomy than any other part of the empire (more indeed than the Irish enjoyed under British rule) because on its capture from Sweden, in 1808–9, the Russians had confirmed its substantial rights and privileges granted under Swedish rule. In the Baltic provinces the loyalty of the German elites was rewarded by the tsars, who upheld their rights against the nascent nationalist movements in Estonia and Latvia. In Central Asia, conquered by the Russians in the 1860s, the imperial government was likewise careful to avoid offending local Muslim sensibilities. It ruled through Islamic institutions, mosques and madrasas, and incorporated tribal customs into law, enabling it to govern relatively peacefully.12 In the Caucasus, by contrast, the Muslim population was never pacified, following the region’s gradual conquest by the Russians from the reign of Catherine the Great. The Russians fought a constant war against the mountain tribes. Poland too was a battleground, particularly after the Polish uprising of 1863, when Alexander II intensified the Russification of the empire’s western provinces, areas where the Polish landowners remained strongly nationalist. Russian was made compulsory in schools and public offices. Polish students at Warsaw University had to suffer the indignity of studying their national literature in Russian translation. There were even signs forbidding the use of Polish in railway stations, restaurants and shops.

The assassination of the tsar led to more repressive policies. Now, more than ever, certain nationalities (Poles, Armenians, Jews) were branded as disloyal, identified with the revolutionary movement and subjected to further language bans and prohibitions that became ever more absurd. In Stalin’s church school in Gori, which he began attending at the age of nine, in 1888, the boys were forced to speak in Russian at all times and were beaten by their masters when they lapsed into Georgian. During the 1907 cholera epidemic in the Kiev area, doctors were forbidden to publish warnings not to drink the water in Ukrainian. But the peasants could not read the Russian signs, and many died as a result.

Of all the empire’s national minorities, the Jews suffered most. They were at the bottom of the empire’s racial hierarchy. Since their incorporation into Russia during the partitions of Poland, the Jews had been subjected to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discriminations which by the end of the nineteenth century embraced some 1,400 different statutes and regulations. They were forbidden to own land, to hold civil service posts or to serve as officers in the army; there were strict quotas on Jewish admissions into higher schools and universities; and they were forced by law to live within the empire’s fifteen western provinces, which made up the Pale of Settlement. Blamed by Russian ‘patriots’ for the assassination of Alexander II, the Jews were victims of hundreds of pogroms in 1881. There would be many more pogroms, especially in 1905–6 and 1917–21, as anti-Jewish violence became a major part of counter-revolutionary activity. The last two tsars encouraged this. Nicholas II, in particular, saw the pogroms as an act of loyalty by the ‘good and simple Russian folk’. He became a patron of the Union of the Russian People, formed in 1905, which instigated more than one pogrom.

Little wonder, then, that Jews were prominent in the revolutionary underground. The Marxist movement, in particular, was attractive to the Jews. The Jewish Labour Bund was the first mass-based Marxist party in Russia. Formed in 1897, it had 35,000 members by 1905. Jews occupied a visible position in the leadership of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the two main factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the SDs). The Jews were drawn to the Marxist cause above all by its European character. Whereas Populism had proposed to build a socialism based on peasant Russia, the land of pogroms, Marxism was based on a modern Western vision of Russia. It promised to assimilate the Jews into a movement of universal human liberation based on internationalism.

It was not just the Jews who were radicalised after 1881. Throughout the empire the Russification campaign was to drive non-Russians into nationalist parties: the Social Democrats in Finland and the Baltic lands; the Socialists in Poland; the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party; the Georgian Social Democrats (the young Stalin among them); and the Dashnaks in Armenia. In all these societies national divisions were reinforced by class divides: the native labouring class and peasantry were ready to be set against the foreign landowners, businessmen and officials. The most successful nationalist movements combined the peasants’ struggle for the land, especially where it was owned by foreigners, with the demand for native language rights, enabling the peasants to gain full access to schools, the courts and government. This combination was the key to the success of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which organised the peasants against foreign (mainly Polish and Russian) landowners. It is no coincidence that the peasant uprisings of 1905 erupted first in those regions of Ukraine where the nationalist movement was also most advanced.

A revealing survey was carried out in Russia’s village schools in 1903. The researchers asked the children what they wanted to become when they grew up. Less than 2 per cent said they wanted to be peasant farmers, as most of their parents were. Almost half had set their hearts on a city job. ‘I want to be a shop assistant,’ said one boy, ‘because I do not like to walk in the mud. I want to be like those city people who are cleanly dressed.’13 Their desire for social betterment was synonymous with employment in the town. Virtually any urban job seemed desirable compared with the hardships and routines of peasant life.

Millions of peasants came into the towns, some drawn by ambition, others forced to leave the countryside because of overpopulation on the land. Between 1861 and 1914 the empire’s urban population grew from 7 to 28 million people. First came the young men, then the married men, then unmarried girls, who worked mainly in domestic service, and finally the married women with children. The rural migrants tried to keep their farms alive for as long as possible by waged labour in the towns. They sent their earnings to their villages, where they themselves returned at harvest time. As in all developing societies, there was a constant to and fro between the city and the countryside.14

Factory conditions were atrocious. According to Count Witte, the finance minister who oversaw the growth of industries in the 1890s, the worker ‘raised on the frugal habits of rural life’ was ‘much more easily satisfied’ than his counterpart in Europe or North America, so that ‘low wages appeared as a fortunate gift to Russian enterprise’.15 There was little regulation of the factories. The gains made by British workers in the 1840s, and by the Germans in the 1880s, remained out of reach of Russian workers at the turn of the century. The two most important factory laws – one in 1885 prohibiting the night-time employment of women and children, the other in 1897 restricting the workday to eleven and a half hours – had to be wrenched from the government. Small workshops were excluded from the legislation, although they employed the majority of the country’s workforce, especially its female contingent. Unventilated working areas were filled with noxious fumes, shopfloors crammed with dangerous machinery. Strikes were illegal. Trade unions banned. Yet there were more strikes in Russia than in any other country of Europe.

Many of these strikes were led by workers with links to Marxist propaganda circles, mostly organised by intellectuals. This was the context in which Lenin, or Ulianov as he was then known, entered revolutionary politics.

Contrary to the Soviet myth, in which Lenin was a Marxist theorist from his infancy, he came late to politics. He was born in 1870 into a respectable and prosperous family in Simbirsk, a typical provincial town on the Volga. His father was inspector of the Simbirsk district’s primary schools. In Lenin’s final year at secondary school, a middle-class gymnasium, he was highly praised by his headmaster, who by one of those strange historical ironies was the father of Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister Lenin would overthrow in October 1917. Kerensky père described Lenin as a ‘model student … never giving cause for dissatisfaction, by word or by deed, to the school authorities’, and put this down to his ‘moral and religious upbringing’. The young man was accepted to read law at Kazan University. All the indications were that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, making a distinguished career for himself in the imperial bureaucracy.16

The charmed life of the Ulianovs came to an abrupt halt in 1887 when Lenin’s elder brother, Alexander, was executed for his involvement in an abortive plot to kill the tsar. The conspiracy was hatched by a group of seventy-two students at St Petersburg University, where Alexander had been studying sciences since 1883. He had made the bombs they were meant to throw at the tsar’s carriage on 1 March, the sixth anniversary of Alexander II’s assassination by the People’s Will, an organisation he had idolised. The plot ended Lenin’s hope of graduating with a law degree (he was expelled from Kazan University) and catapulted him into the revolutionary movement in St Petersburg.

His first inclination was, like his brother’s, to adopt the violent methods of the People’s Will. They were suited to his personality, which was angry, fiery and dogmatic, hardened by a hatred for the tsarist system and anyone who went along with it (this was a man who once admitted after a performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata that he could not listen to music too often because ‘it makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy’).17 Lenin came to Marx already armed with set ideas. All the main components of his ideology – his stress on the need for a disciplined ‘vanguard’; his belief that action (the ‘subjective factor’) could alter the objective course of history; his defence of terror and dictatorship; his contempt for democrats (and for socialists who compromised with them) – stemmed not just from Marx but from Tkachev and the People’s Will. He injected a distinctly Russian dose of conspiratorial politics into a Marxist dialectic that might have remained passive otherwise, tied down by a willingness to wait for the revolution to develop socially rather than bringing it about through political action. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.

Marxist groups had been in operation for at least a dozen years when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the SDs, was formed in 1898. It was a party led by intellectuals, and the focus of its efforts was to educate a politically conscious vanguard of the working class which would organise their factory comrades for the revolutionary struggle. The problem was that literate workers tended to be focused more on bargaining for better pay and conditions than on political activity and were represented by a group of Marxists known as the Economists. Lenin attacked them with the sort of violence that would become the trademark of his rhetoric. He argued that their peaceful tactics would undermine the revolutionary movement, which depended on a workers’ party that was ready for the fight.

The type of party Lenin had in mind was revealed in his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? He wanted followers who would devote their whole lives to the Party’s cause. It had to be a small but secret party made up of committed revolutionaries (be they workers or, more likely, intellectuals) who understood ‘the fine art of not getting arrested’.18 At that time no one fully realised the implications of this principle. They became clear only at the Second SD Party Congress, which met in London in 1903. The Party was divided on the obligations of its membership. Lenin wanted all its members to be activists, whereas Yuli Martov, his ally in the fight against the Economists, thought that anyone should be allowed to join the Party if they subscribed to its policies. Here were two opposing views of what the Party ought to be: a conspiratorial organisation or a broad-based parliamentary party like the labour parties of the West. Lenin won by a small majority, enabling his faction to call themselves the Bolsheviks (Majoritarians). Their opponents became known as Mensheviks (Minoritarians). It was a mistake by the Mensheviks to accept these names. It made them look like losers from the start.

Other parties were appearing by this time. A major famine in 1891 had politicised society, which was angered by the failure of the government to deal with the crisis, blamed by many on its over-taxing of the peasantry. The zemstvos expanded their activities to deal with the catastrophe. Effectively becoming a shadow government, they called for a national assembly to be involved in framing policies. The professions, for their part, set up unions, Russia’s first trade unions (hence they were known as profsoiuzy, professional unions), and demanded greater influence over public policy. The universities were rocked by student demonstrations between 1899 and 1901. Students and professors joined the Union of Liberation, formed in 1903 to campaign for a constitution, from which the Kadet Party (Constitutional Democrats) would be formed in 1905. Others joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), established in 1901. The SRs carried on the Populist tradition but sought to lead the ‘labouring poor’, meaning both workers and peasants.

Nicholas II was not inclined to compromise with these demands for political reform. On his accession to the throne, in 1894, he had sworn to uphold his father’s autocratic principles. He was a firm believer in the medieval myth of the tsar as an instrument of God, divinely sanctioned to rule over Russia as his personal domain. From his tutor, the arch-reactionary Pobedonostsev, Nicholas had learned to see his sovereignty as absolute, unlimited by bureaucracy, parliaments or public opinion, and guided only by his conscience before God. He did not see the need to adapt his rule to the demands of the modern world.

Here were the roots of the revolutionary crisis – in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and society, on the one hand, and, on the other, a reactionary monarchy, fossilised in its medieval concept of autocracy, which resisted, until it was too late, the demands of this emerging public sphere for a greater role in government.

On Sunday, 9 January 1905, a large crowd of workers marched towards the Winter Palace to hand in a petition to the tsar – a custom of the Russian people going back for centuries, as we have seen. They were led by a priest, Father Gapon, who had made a name for himself as a preacher in the factory districts of St Petersburg. He had told his followers in simple terms, with quotations drawn from the Bible, that the tsar-batiushka, the littlefather tsar, would answer their demands if they went to him in supplication: that was his obligation before God. The petition humbly asked for an improvement in their working conditions, which had become intolerable. ‘SIRE,’ it began: ‘We, the workers and inhabitants of St Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished, we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated [by our employers].’19

The tsar was absent from the capital. He had gone to his palace at Tsarskoe Selo for his usual weekend break of country walks and family games of dominoes. On his orders soldiers blocked the main approaches to the city centre and fired at the crowds to turn them back. On Palace Square a huge body of cavalry and several cannon were placed in front of the Winter Palace to stop those who had managed to get through, some 60,000 protesters. The guards tried to clear the crowds by using whips. When this failed, they took up firing positions. The demonstrators fell to their knees, took off their caps and crossed themselves. A bugle sounded and the firing began. Around a thousand people were killed or wounded on Bloody Sunday, as these events became known.

When the firing finally stopped and the survivors looked around at the dead and wounded bodies on the ground, there was a decisive moment of truth, the starting-point of any revolution, when their mood changed from disbelief to anger and hatred. In that moment, the folk myth of the tsar-batiushka – an idea that had underpinned the monarchy for centuries – was finally destroyed.20 The people had discovered that there was no holy tsar.

Society was outraged by the massacre. Students turned the universities into bastions of opposition to the government, which closed them down. The professional unions organised a national Union of Unions, joined by the first workers’ unions. Strikes and protests took place everywhere. Barricades went up in Warsaw and Łódź, where nationalists seized their opportunity to organise a revolt against Russian rule. The peasants also took their chance. They attacked the estates, seizing property, burning manor houses, forcing landowners to flee. Nearly 3,000 manors were destroyed, most of them in the central agricultural zone, during the peasant jacquerie of 1905.

The army was deployed to put down the rebellions, but the best troops were in Manchuria, fighting a disastrous war against Japan which had begun in 1904 over the two powers’ rival claims in Manchuria and Korea. The reservists left behind were inexperienced. Most of them were peasant sons. They resented being used against their fellow peasants, and refused to carry out orders. Mutinies spread through the army, and then broke out in the Black Sea Fleet, where famously the sailors of the battleship Potemkin rebelled in June.

The strikes became more organised and militant, as socialists became involved. In September there was a general strike, begun by the printers of Moscow but soon joined by the railway workers and millions of others – shop workers, bank and office clerks, teachers, lecturers, even the actors of the Imperial Theatre of St Petersburg. It was a national strike against the government. In St Petersburg the strike was directed by a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies – an ad hoc council of socialists and workers dominated by the Mensheviks and led by Leon Trotsky (at that time a Menshevik) which published its own newspaper, Izvestiia.

So far the regime had responded to the crisis with incompetence and blindness to reality. Nicholas refused to recognise the danger he was in. He thought the protests had been organised by foreign revolutionaries and were not supported by the Russian people, who were of course loyal to him. But the general strike at last forced him to listen to his ministers, who warned him he would lose his throne unless he made political reforms. On 17 October he reluctantly agreed to sign a Manifesto, drawn up by Count Witte, the prime minister, granting freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, and establishing a legislative parliament, or Duma. The electoral law for the Duma, passed in December, gave the vote to most men (but not women) over the age of twenty-five but set up six electoral colleges to weight the votes in favour of the landowners.

The Manifesto’s proclamation was received with jubilation in the streets. There was a sense of national unity, a feeling that all social classes would be brought together by this ‘people’s victory’. It was expressed by Repin’s painting, Manifesto of 17 October. But this feeling was illusory. The people’s unity was one more myth. For the propertied elites, whose interests were political, the Manifesto was a real breakthrough, perhaps an end to their struggle. But for the workers and peasants political reforms were no solution to their social grievances. Where was the workers’ eight-hour day, the better treatment they deserved? Where was the land for the peasants? Their struggle, surely, had only just begun.

Russia’s parliamentary era started with a ceremony celebrating the creation of the Duma in the Coronation Hall of the Winter Palace on 27 April 1906. On one side of the hall stood the great and good of autocratic Russia: ministers, state councillors, old and grey court dignitaries, all turned out in their brilliant dress uniforms. Confronting them were the Duma deputies, a motley collection of professionals, peasants dressed in cotton shirts and tunics, but almost no workers. The two sides faced each other with hostility.

The confrontation was a taste of things to come. The so-called Duma period between 1906 and 1917 should be understood as a battle between the competing principles of autocracy and parliamentary control. Much depended on the willingness of Nicholas II to allow the Duma more powers, and on the Duma’s willingness to work with the government in shaping the reforms needed to stabilise the country. It was a test that both sides failed.

Nicholas refused to accept the October Manifesto as a limitation of autocracy. He had granted it reluctantly to save his throne, but had not recognised it as a constitution which conferred any rights on the Duma. No mention of a constitution had been made in the Manifesto or the Fundamental Laws of April 1906 which formalised the new relationship between the crown and parliament. The omission ruled out any hope of the Kadets working with the government. They preferred to stay in opposition rather than compromise their constitutional principles. The Fundamental Laws left full power with the tsar. He appointed the prime minister and Council of Ministers. Under Article 87, he could dissolve the Duma and rule by emergency decree. Although it was a legislative parliament, the Duma could not pass its own laws without the endorsement of the tsar and the State Council, dominated by the court’s officials and the aristocracy.

The Duma was more radical than the government had bargained for when it drew up the electoral law. From its opening session in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, it became a revolutionary tribune, demanding radical political reforms, including the appointment of a government responsible to the Duma, the abolition of the State Council and universal adult male suffrage. The two largest parties, the Kadets and Trudoviks, a Populist grouping formed to compete in the 1906 elections when these were boycotted by the SRs and SDs, agreed on the need for land reform in which the estates would be expropriated by the state for the needs of the peasantry (unlike the Trudoviks, the Kadets proposed compensation for the landowners). Unwilling to consider such demands, the tsar dissolved the Duma on 8 July.

Two weeks later, Nicholas appointed Petr Stolypin as his new prime minister. Stolypin was one of the finest statesmen Russia ever had. His five years in office were the regime’s best chance to avert catastrophe. Tall, imposing and intelligent, fearless in authority, he had come to the attention of the tsar as the provincial governor of Saratov, whose peasants were the most rebellious in the whole of Russia during 1905. Stolypin restored order through repressive measures (hangings and mass exile to Siberia) that made him a hate-figure of the left. But he also realised that the land question could be resolved only by a profound reform. His model came from Kovno, a Polish–Lithuanian province where he had served for thirteen years. Like the empire’s other western provinces, Kovno did not have the peasant commune. The peasants owned their land, and as a result they farmed it more efficiently than the peasants did in central Russia where the commune gave them no incentive to improve their landholdings. Stolypin’s solution to the land question was to help the peasants break away from the commune and consolidate their landholding as private property.

By a law of 9 November 1906, the male head of a peasant family received the right to convert his land into an enclosed private farm (khutor) or privatise it inside the village (otrub). The state put its full weight behind the reform, employing thousands of agronomists and providing loans through a Peasant Bank to help the separators purchase and consolidate communal land. Stolypin called it a ‘wager on the strong’. Only by creating a new class of peasant landowners could the state prevent another revolution on the land.

A second Duma convened in February 1907. Stolypin had been hoping that the Octobrists, a ‘party of state order’ based on the political principles of the October Manifesto, would win a majority. His government relied on their support. But the fifty-four Octobrist deputies, even if supported by the ninety-eight Kadets, were outnumbered by the socialists, with 222 seats, now reinforced by the SRs and SDs, who had a clear majority for land reform based on expropriating gentry land without compensation. On 3 June, the tsar again closed down the Duma. This time he used his emergency powers to pass a new electoral law so that when the next assembly convened it would be dominated by conservatives. The electoral weight of the peasants, workers and national minorities was reduced, while the representation of the gentry was even more exaggerated than before. The Kadets and socialists denounced it as a coup. When the Third Duma assembled, in November 1907, the pro-government parties controlled 287 of the 443 seats. The opposition called it the ‘Duma of Lords and Lackeys’.

Even with this parliamentary backing, Stolypin failed to make much headway with his wide-ranging programme of reforms. His proposal to create a volost zemstvo was blocked by the United Nobility, a landowners’ organisation with powerful supporters in the court and State Council, which feared that the zemstvos would be swamped by the peasants. His attempt to expand the state system of primary schools was defeated by the Church, which had its own parish schools. His land reform lost momentum. Only 15 per cent of the peasants consolidated private plots – mostly in the face of bitter opposition by the rest of the commune.

There were good reasons for the peasants to oppose the break-up of the commune, which had been the focus of their lives for centuries. They feared that giving some the right to privatise their plots would deprive others of their customary rights of access to the land as their basic means of livelihood. What would happen if the household head bequeathed the land to his eldest son or sold it altogether? The younger sons and daughters would be forced to leave farming. The peasants were afraid that the government surveyors would give separators more than their share of the land. They had never learned to calculate the area of a piece of land. They divided it by pacing out the strips, making rough adjustments for their quality. They were suspicious of the modern methods employed by the surveyors. How would they make the necessary adjustments? How would they divide the meadows, woods and rivers, which were common property? Stolypin had misunderstood the peasantry’s attachment to the mir. He had assumed that they were poor because of it. But in fact it was the other way around: the commune served to share the burden of their poverty, and as long as they were poor they had no reason to leave it.

Stolypin was assassinated on 1 September 1911. A student revolutionary shot him at close range in the Kiev Opera. On hearing of his death, the tsar is alleged to have said, ‘Now there will be no more talk about reform.’ The empress was relieved to see the end of Stolypin, a principled opponent of the ‘holy man’ Rasputin, in whom she had placed her faith as a healer for her haemophiliac son, the tsarevich Alexei, a faith unshaken by the mounting evidence of Rasputin’s debauched lifestyle. It is not known if Stolypin’s killing was approved, facilitated or even organised by the police.

By the time of his assassination, Stolypin’s reforms had run aground and could not have gone much further. He had antagonised the old elites by challenging their vested interests, as well as the liberals by his high-handed tactics in the Duma. Like all reforming statesmen in Russia (Alexander II and Gorbachev are obvious parallels), he was too dependent on a small reformist segment of the state bureaucracy. He failed to mobilise a broader social base. There was a Stolypin but no Stolypinites.

After him no prime minister was able to prevent the empire’s drift towards catastrophe. All thoughts of reform were abandoned. Vladimir Kokovtsov, the prime minister until 1914, took his instructions from the court and sidelined the Duma. There were calls from right-wing groups to reduce the powers of the parliament – some even wanted to abolish it – and it was only Western pressure that restrained the tsar from doing so.

Nicholas was increasingly removed from political reality. He was retreating into a fantasy of popular autocracy, a communion of God, tsar and people, such as he imagined had existed in medieval Muscovy. That was why he tolerated Rasputin, despite the rumours of his sexual escapades. He saw in him ‘a good, religious, simple-minded Russian’, who could guide his conscience before God.

The fantasy was on display for the tercentenary celebrations of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. The imperial family appeared before their subjects and opened churches on the sites connected with the founding of the dynasty. At the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, where Mikhail Romanov had taken refuge from the Polish invaders in 1612, they received a peasant delegation that bowed down to the ground before Nicholas and posed for a photograph with the descendants of the boyars who had travelled from Moscow to offer the crown to the Romanovs in 1613. In Moscow they attended a grand costume ball where all the guests appeared in replicas of court dress from the seventeenth century. To symbolise the union between tsar and people the jubilee gave centre stage to the cult of Ivan Susanin, a peasant on the Romanov estate in Kostroma who, according to legend, had sacrificed his life to save Mikhail from capture by the Poles. The Susanin myth was endlessly retold, most famously in Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar, which was performed in theatres throughout Russia in the tercentenary. Military newspapers published features on Susanin, whose story, it was said, ‘should inspire every soldier how to serve his tsar and fatherland’.21

The threat of war in Europe was meanwhile increasing. The rise of nationalist movements in the Balkans, especially the Serbs’, destabilised the Austrian–Hungarian Empire, creating tensions between Russia and the German powers, as Berlin backed Vienna’s policies against the Slavs. For most of the nineteenth century, Russia had pursued its interests in Europe through an alliance with Germany and Austria. But the growing strength of Germany had pushed Russia into an alliance with the French in 1894. Thirteen years later, a Triple Entente was formed with Britain as a deterrent against German expansion.

It was no longer possible to limit the discussion of foreign policy to the narrow circles of the court, the tsar’s ministers and diplomats. Public opinion was growing in importance through the Duma and the press. Pan-Slav sentiment was particularly powerful. It had the support of senior members of the court, and a mouthpiece in Novoe Vremia (New Times), the country’s leading conservative newspaper. Calls for Russia to take a harder pro-Slav line grew in volume after 1908, when the Austrians annexed Bosnia, part of the Ottoman Empire, to prevent the Serbs from making territorial gains. The Pan-Slavs were outraged by Russia’s failure to oppose the Austrians, and equally determined not to let it fail the Serbs again. They believed that Europe was heading unavoidably towards a final struggle between the Teutons and the Slavs. They saw the Drang nach Osten, the Drive to the East, as part of a broader German plan to undermine Slavic civilisation, concluding that, unless it made a firm stand to defend its Balkan allies, Russia would suffer a long period of imperial decline and subjugation to Germany. ‘In the past twenty years,’ declared a 1914 editorial in Novoe Vremia, ‘our Western neighbour has held firmly in its teeth the vital sources of our well-being and like a vampire has sucked the blood of the Russian peasant.’22 The wealth of the Germans in Russia, their prominence in government and the growing presence of their exports in Russia’s foreign markets added to this sense of an existential threat from Germany.

Whether Russia’s interests were best served by coming to the aid of the Balkan Slavs was not clear at all. Despite the Pan-Slav myth, the Slavs had never shown much interest in Russian protection (if anything, they looked for inspiration to the West). To be sure, if Austria extended its power in the Balkans, it would pose a challenge to Russia, if that meant the growth of Ukrainian nationalism, not just in Galicia, where the Austrians encouraged it, but across the border in Russia, where the eight Ukrainian provinces produced one-third of the Russian Empire’s wheat, two-thirds of its coal and more than half its steel. If Russia lost Ukraine, it would no longer be a great power. But Russia also had a growing empire in Siberia, which it could develop without conflict in Europe, and it had substantial interests in the Black Sea area which could be defended without war with Germany. The Dardanelles were arguably more important than the Balkans for Russia’s security. The tsar certainly thought so, particularly after news leaked out that the Turks were buying dreadnought battleships from the Germans – ships the Russian navy could not match. The prospect of Turkey becoming a German military protectorate was alarming for Russia, fuelling the belief that the Germans were encircling Russia’s empire from the south.

Nicholas did not want war. Nor did his military chiefs. They told him that his forces needed time to rebuild after their defeat by Japan. The tsar was hoping that the Triple Entente would act as a deterrent against Austria and Germany – at least until Russia recovered its military strength. But everything was altered by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists on 28 June 1914. The murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne prompted Austria to declare war on Serbia. Under pressure Nicholas agreed to the partial mobilisation of his troops. He appealed to his cousin, the Kaiser, to restrain the Austrians. But Germany was backing Austria. It was preparing for a war with Russia which it needed to fight quickly, if at all. The Germans were hoping to knock out France in a lightning war (Blitzkrieg) before the Russian army could be mobilised – a process that took weeks longer because of Russia’s size and weak transport.

News of the German preparations forced the tsar to agree to a general mobilisation on 31 July – an order that was bound to trigger war with Germany. Nicholas was under intense pressure from his generals and ministers, Duma leaders and the press to go to war. Sergei Sazonov, his foreign minister, told him that ‘unless he yielded to the popular demand for war and unsheathed the sword on Serbia’s behalf, he would run the risk of a revolution and perhaps the loss of his throne’. Nicholas went pale. ‘Just think of the responsibility you’re advising me to assume,’ he said to Sazonov. But he was too weak to argue against him.23

Nicholas and his advisers were anticipating a short war. The tsar believed in the loyalty of his forces. ‘You see,’ he told his children’s tutor after appearing on the balcony of the Winter Palace to survey the cheering and flag-waving crowd that had assembled on the square to greet his declaration of war, ‘there will now be a national movement in Russia like that which took place in the great war of 1812.’24 It was an unrealistic hope. Nicholas had become a victim of his regime’s propaganda about the ‘simple’ people’s devotion to him. But that myth had been destroyed, not least by the actions of his troops on the same square on Bloody Sunday 1905. There was no national unity, no love of Russia that was strong enough to cross the deep divide between the social classes exposed in that revolutionary year. The cheering crowd on Palace Square was made up of well-dressed men and women of the middle classes, clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, not the peasants who would fight the war.

The soldiers, for the most part, were strangers to the sentiment of patriotism. With little direct knowledge of the world outside their villages, they had only a weak sense of their identity as Russians. They thought of themselves as natives of their village or region. ‘We are from here and Orthodox,’ they would say in response to questions about their nationality. As long as the Germans did not threaten to invade their area, they saw no reason to fight them. ‘We are Tambov men,’ the recruits would complain. ‘The Germans will not get to our village.’ A farm agent heard such comments from the peasant conscripts in Smolensk:

‘What the devil has brought this war on us? We are butting into other people’s business.’

‘We have talked it over among ourselves; if the Germans want payment, it would be better to pay ten roubles a head than to kill people.’

‘Is it not all the same what Tsar we live under? It cannot be worse under the German one.’

‘Let them go and fight themselves. Later we will settle our accounts with them.’25

Wiser men had tried to alert the tsar to the dangers of a war – among them Petr Durnovo, the interior minister, who in February 1914 had pleaded with him not to drag the country into a needless clash with Germany. This would be a long conflict, he had warned, a war of attrition, in which the main burden would be placed on Russia to break through the German defences. Economically the country was too weak to fight for long. The government would lose authority, and social revolution would follow:

The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters … The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.26

No one paid attention to the prophecy.

8

Revolutionary Russia

Durnovo’s warning soon proved justified. Under pressure from the British and the French, the Russians attacked the Germans in East Prussia to force them to withdraw troops from the Western Front. Heavily defeated by the Germans at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914, they fell back and dug in for the long defensive war of entrenched artillery positions in which Russia’s weaknesses began to show.

The country was not prepared for a war of attrition. Its single greatest asset, its seemingly inexhaustible supply of peasant soldiers, was not such an advantage as its allies had assumed when they had talked of the ‘Russian steamroller’ moving unstoppably towards Berlin. A large proportion of the population was younger than the minimum draft age. Where 12 per cent of the German population was mobilised for military service, Russia was able to call up only 5 per cent. More serious still was the weakness of the Russian reserves. To save money the army had provided little training for the Second Levy, which were soon called up to the front. By October, recalled General Brusilov, then commanding the Eighth Army in Galicia, the men sent to replace the casualties of the first disastrous battles ‘knew nothing except how to march … many could not even load their rifles, and, as for their shooting, the less said about it the better. Such people could not really be considered soldiers at all.’1

As the war dragged on through the winter the army began to experience terrible shortages of materiel. The transport system could not cope with the deliveries of munitions, food and medical supplies to the fronts. The War Ministry had reduced spending on the arms industries before the war, and now had to order shells and guns abroad which took ages to arrive. By 1915, new recruits were being trained without rifles. Thrown into battle, they were ordered to retrieve the guns dropped by men shot down in the line in front of them.

The army’s morale and discipline began to fall apart. In the summer of 1915, when the Germans and the Austrians broke through the Russian lines across the front, a million men surrendered to the enemy. Part of the problem was the loss of officers. Huge numbers were killed in the first months of the war. The NCOs who took their place were young peasants and workers: their sympathies lay firmly with the troops, who were reluctant to fight for a regime in which they did not believe. These NCOs would become the leaders of the army revolution during 1917.

The collapse of discipline was related to the spread of rumours about treason at the court. It was said that the empress and Rasputin were working for the Germans, that they were pushing for a separate peace (a myth encouraged by the German press which printed fake news of negotiations with the Russian government). The court had no idea how to counteract these damaging rumours. It had never attached any importance to public opinion and had not learned to manage it. To propagandise their patriotic credentials the imperial family arranged a photo opportunity for the empress and her daughters dressed in Red Cross uniforms. They had visited the wounded at military hospitals in Petrograd, as St Petersburg had been renamed to make it sound less German at the beginning of the war. What they did not realise was that a consignment of nurses’ uniforms had fallen into the hands of the city’s prostitutes, who dressed in them to work the streets.2

Anti-German sentiment could turn violent easily. In response to the German breakthrough at the front, angry crowds in Moscow burned and looted German shops and offices. In Red Square they shouted insults at the ‘German woman’, as they called the empress, and called for her to be locked up in a convent. It was hard to tell how much of this anger was patriotically motivated and how much based on hatred of the wealthy urban class in which the Germans were so prominent. The revolutionary mood was nationalist in character.

In September 1915, in a desperate attempt to restore morale, Nicholas took over supreme command from the Grand Duke Nikolai. He thought that his presence at the front would inspire the soldiers, that if they would not fight for Russia they would surely do so for their holy tsar. It was a terrible mistake. From this point, Nicholas was blamed for every defeat, prompting further rumours not only of his incompetence (he had no military experience) but also of his treacherous conduct of the war. To explain the unending sequence of defeats, it was said that he was informing the Kaiser about the movement of his troops, that the empress, left in control in the capital, was working for the Germans, and so on.

There was no truth in these rumours. But that was not the point. The fact that people were prepared to believe them made them politically dangerous. In a revolutionary crisis it is perceptions and beliefs, not realities, that count. Without trusted information from official sources and the press, the rumours gained wide credence in society. They were believed by politicians and even foreign diplomats. Through their ability to mobilise an opposition and give its protests meaning as a patriotic act against the ‘German’ court they contributed to the revolutionary mood.

The public, like the soldiers, blamed the government for the reverses at the front. It had responded to the supply crisis by springing into action with its own initiatives through the Duma and Zemgor, a national network of public bodies formed by the Zemstvo Union and the Union of Towns. Led by Prince Lvov, a veteran zemstvo activist, Zemgor was allied to the Duma’s Progressive Bloc, formed in 1915 by two-thirds of its deputies to demand a ‘ministry of national confidence’ (a government appointed by the tsar but approved by the Duma). The Bloc was supported by several generals and some members of the government who understood the need to involve the public in the war campaign. But it was opposed by the more reactionary ministers, urged on by the empress, who accused the Bloc of pushing for a Duma government. Bullied by his wife (‘Show your fist. You are the Autocrat’),3 the tsar closed the Duma and sacked his ministers if they showed any signs of working with the Bloc.

By the autumn of 1916 confidence in Nicholas had sunk so low that there were a number of conspiracies in the army’s high command, in Duma circles and in the court, to replace him with his younger brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail, or some other Romanov capable of working with a Duma government. The only action to succeed was the murder of Rasputin, on 16 December, by a circle of conspirators, including two grand dukes and one of Russia’s grandest princes, Felix Yusupov. Luring Rasputin to the cellar of the Yusupov Palace, the killers shot him in the heart, and, apparently, when he refused to die, fired at him four more times, the last from close range into his forehead, whereupon they wrapped his body in a coat and dumped it into the river. They had hoped that his removal would save the monarchy from imminent catastrophe. But it changed nothing.