by Will Durant
It was his fatality that if he disbanded his army it might create havoc and rebellion; if he kept it in force it would have to be clothed and fed; his conclusion was that war would be cheaper than peace if the war could be fought on foreign soil. Whom should he attack next? He remembered the Uzbek raids on northeast Persia, and his own enslavement, and his mother’s death in slavery. In 1740 he led his troops into Uzbekistan. The Emir of Bokhara had no force or stomach to dispute Nadir’s advance; he submitted, paid a huge indemnity, and agreed that the River Oxus should, as of old, be the boundary between Uzbekistan and Persia. The Khan of Khiva had put Nadir’s emissary to death; Nadir slew the Khan, and released thousands of Persian and Russian slaves (1740).
Nadir was all soldier, with no mind left for statesmanship. Peace became for him an intolerable bore. His spoils made him avaricious instead of generous. Enriched by Indian treasure, he declared a three years’ moratorium on taxes in Persia; then he changed his mind and ordered the accustomed payments; his tax collectors impoverished Persia as if it had been a conquered land. He suspected his son of plotting to depose him; he had him blinded. “It is not my eyes that you have put out,” said Riza Kuli, “but the eyes of Persia.”24 The Persians began to hate their savior, as the Russians had learned to hate Peter the Great. The religious leaders roused against him the resentment of a nation offended in its religious faith. He tried to suppress the rising rebellion by wholesale executions; he built pyramids from the skulls of the victims. On June 20, 1747, four members of his own bodyguard entered his tent and attacked him; he killed two of them; the others cut him down. All Persia breathed a sigh of relief.
After him the country fell into worse disorder than under the Afghan domination. Several provincial khans claimed the throne; a contest of assassination ensued. Ahmed Khan Durani contented himself with founding the modern kingdom of Afghanistan; Shah Rukh—handsome, amiable, humane—was blinded shortly after his accession, and retired to rule Khurasan till 1796. Karim Khan emerged victorious from the contest, and established (1750) the Zand dynasty, which held power till 1794. Karim made Shiraz his capital, adorned it with handsome buildings, and gave South Persia twenty-nine years of moderate order and peace. Upon his death the scramble for power took again the form of civil war, and chaos was restored.
With the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty by the Afghans, Persia ended the last of her great periods in art, and only some minor productions graced this century. The Madrasa-i-Shah-Husein (1714) at Isfahan, a college for training scholars and lawyers, was described by Lord Curzon as “one of the stateliest ruins in Persia”;25 Sir Percy Sykes marveled at its “exquisite tiles … and lovely stenciling.”26 The tilemakers were still the ablest in the world, but the impoverishment of the upper classes by protracted wars destroyed the market for excellence, and compelled the potters to lower their art into an industry. Splendid book covers were made of lacquered papier mâché. Textile workers produced brocades and embroidery of consummate finesse. Persian rugs, though they had seen their last supremacy under Shah Abbas I, were still woven for the fortunate of many nations. Especially at Joshagan, Herat, Kerman, and Shiraz, the weavers produced carpets that “suffer only by comparison with their classical predecessors.”27
The Afghan conquest broke the heart of Persian poetry, and left it almost voiceless through the ensuing servitude. Lutf ‘Ali Beg Adar, about 1750, compiled a biographical dictionary of Persian poets, concluding with sixty contemporaries; despite this apparent abundance, he deplored what seemed to him the dearth of good writers in his time, and ascribed it to the prevalent chaos and misery, “which have reached such a point that no one has the heart to read poetry, let alone compose it.”28 Typical was the experience of Shaykh ‘Ali Hazin, who wrote four diwans (collections) of verse, but was caught in the siege of Isfahan by the Afghans; all the dwellers in his household died then except himself; he recovered, fled from the ruins of the once beautiful city, and spent the last thirty-three years of his life in India. In his Memoirs (1742) he commemorated a hundred Persian poets of his time. Accounted greatest of these was Sayyid Ahmad Hatif of Isfahan; probably the most praised of his poems was an ecstatic reaffirmation of faith in God despite doubt and desolation:
In the church I said to a Christian charmer of hearts, “O thou in whose net the heart is held captive!
O thou to the warp of whose girdle each hair tip of mine is separately bound!
How long wilt thou miss the way to the Divine Unity?
How long wilt thou impose upon the One the shame of the Trinity?
How can it be right to name the One True God “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”?
She parted her sweet lips and said to me, while with sweet laughter she poured sugar from her lips:
“If thou art aware of the secret of the Divine Unity, do not cast upon me the stigma of infidelity!
In three mirrors the Eternal Beauty casts a ray from His effulgent countenance.” . . .
Whilst we were so speaking, this chant rose up beside us from the church bell:
“He is One and there is naught but He;
There is no God save Him alone!” . . .
In the heart of each atom which thou cleavest thou wilt behold a sun in the midst.
If thou givest whatever thou hast to love, may I be accounted an infidel if thou shouldst suffer a grain of loss! . . .
Thou wilt pass beyond the narrow straits of dimensions, and wilt behold the spacious realms of the Placeless;
Thou shalt hear what ear hath not heard, and shalt see what eye hath not seen;
Until they shall bring thee to a place where, of the world and its people, thou shalt behold One alone.
To that One thou shalt give love with heart and soul, until with the eye of certainty thou shalt clearly see that
“He is One and there is naught but he;
There is no God save Him alone!”29
CHAPTER XVII
Russian Interlude
1725-62
I. WORK AND RULE
FREDERICK the Great wrote, about 1776: “Of all the neighbors of Prussia, Russia merits most attention, as being the most dangerous; it is powerful and near. Those who in the future will govern Prussia will, like me, be forced to cultivate the friendship of these barbarians.”1
Always, in thinking of Russia, we must remember its size. Under Catherine II it included Esthonia, Livonia, Finland (in part), European Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia. Its area expanded from 687,000 to 913,-000 square kilometers in the eighteenth century; its population grew from thirteen millions in 1722 to thirty-six millions in 1790.2 Voltaire in 1747 estimated the population of France or Germany to be slightly greater than that of Russia, but he noted that Russia was three times larger than either of those states. Time and Russian loins would fill those vast spaces.
In 1722, 97.7 per cent of the Russian population was rural; in 1790, still 96.4 per cent; so slow was industrialization. In 1762 all but ten per cent of the people were peasants, and 52.4 per cent of these were serfs.3 Half of the land was owned by some 100,000 nobles, most of the rest by the state or the Russian Orthodox Church, some by semifree peasants still owing services and obedience to local lords. A landlord’s wealth was reckoned by the number of his serfs; so Count Peter Cheremetyev was 140,000 serfs rich.4 The 992,000 serfs of the Church were a main part of her wealth, and 2,800,000 serfs tilled the lands of the Crown in 1762.5
The noble provided military leadership and economic organization; he was usually exempt from military service, but often offered it in hopes of favors from the government. He had judiciary rights over his serfs, he could punish them, sell them, or banish them to Siberia; normally, however, he allowed his peasants to govern their internal affairs through their village assembly, or mir. He was obliged by law to provide seed for his serfs, and to maintain them through periods of dearth. A serf might achieve freedom by buying it from his owner or by enlisting in the army; but this required his owner’s consent. Free peasants could buy and own
serfs; some of these freemen, called kulaki (fists), dominated village affairs, lent money at usurious rates, and exceeded the lords in exploitation and severity.6 Master and man alike were a tough breed, strong in frame and arm and hand; they were engaged together in the conquest of the soil, and the discipline of the seasons lay heavy upon them both. Sometimes the hardships were beyond bearing. Repeatedly we hear of serfs in great number deserting their farms and losing themselves in Poland or the Urals or the Caucasus; thousands of them died on the way, thousands were hunted and captured by soldiery. Every now and then peasants rose in armed revolt against masters and government, and gave desperate battle to the troops. Always they were defeated, and the survivors crept back to their tasks of fertilizing the women with their seed and the soil with their blood.
Some serfs were trained to arts and crafts, and supplied nearly all the needs of their masters. At a feast given to Catherine II (the Comte de Ségur tells us) the poet and the composer of the opera, the architect who had built the auditorium, the painter who decorated it, the actors and actresses in the drama, the dancers in the ballet, and the musicians in the orchestra were all serfs of Count Cheremetyev.7 In the long winter the peasants made the clothing and the tools they would need in the coming year. Town industry was slow in developing, partly because every home was a shop, and partly because difficulties of transportation usually limited the market to the producer’s vicinity. The government encouraged industrial enterprises by offering monopolies to favorites, sometimes by providing capital, and it approved participation by nobles in industry and trade. An incipient capitalism appeared in mining, metallurgy, and munitions, and in factory production of textiles, lumber, sugar, and glass. Entrepreneurs were permitted to buy serfs to man their factories; such “possessional peasants,” however, were bound not to the owner but to the enterprise; a governmental decree of 1736 required them, and their descendants, to remain in their respective factories until officially permitted to leave. In many cases they lived in barracks, often isolated from their families.8 Hours of labor ran from eleven to fifteen per day for men, with an hour for lunch. Wages ranged from four to eight rubles per day for men, from two to three rubles for women; but some employers gave their workers food and lodging, and paid their taxes for them. After 1734 “free”—non-serf—labor increased in the factories, as giving more stimulus to the workers and more profits to the employer. Labor was too cheap to favor the invention or application of machinery; but in 1748 Pulzunov used a steam engine in his ironworks in the Urals.9
Between the nobles and the peasants a small and politically powerless middle class slowly took form. In 1725 some three per cent of the population were merchants: tradesmen in the villages and towns and at the fairs; importers of tea and silk from China, of sugar, coffee, spices, and drugs from overseas, and of the finer textiles, pottery, and paper from Western Europe; exporters of timber, turpentine, pitch, tallow, flax, and hemp. Caravans moved to China via Siberian or Caspian routes; ships went out from Riga, Revel, Narva, and St. Petersburg. Probably more traffic went on the rivers and canals than on the roads or the sea.
At the center of that internal commerce was Moscow. Physically it was the largest city in Europe, with long, broad streets, 484 churches, a hundred palaces, thousands of hovels, and a population of 277,535 in 1780;10 here Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Greeks, Italians, English, Dutch, and Asiatics talked their own languages and freely worshiped their own gods. St. Petersburg was the citadel of government, of a Frenchified aristocracy, of literature and art; Moscow was the hub of religion and commerce, of a half-Oriental, still-medieval life, and of a jealously and conscientiously Slavic patriotism. These were the rival foci around which Russian civilization revolved, sometimes tearing the nation in two like a dividing cell, sometimes making it the tense complexity that would, before the end of the century, become the terror and arbiter of Europe.
It was impossible that a people so used up and brutalized by the conflict with nature, so lacking in facilities of communication or in security of life, with so little opportunity for education and so little time for thought, should enjoy, except in the isolated villages, the privileges and perils of democracy. Some form of feudalism was inevitable in the economy, some mode of monarchy in central rule. It was to be expected that the monarchy would be subject to frequent overturns by noble factions controlling their own military support; that the monarchy should seek to make itself absolute; and that it should depend upon religion to help its soldiery, police, and judiciary to maintain social stability and internal peace.
Corruption clogged every avenue of administration. Even the wealthy nobles who surrounded the throne were amenable to “gifts.” “If there be a Russian proof against flattery,” said the almost contemporary Castéra, “there is not one who can resist the temptation of gold.”11 Nobles controlled the palace guard that made and unmade “sovereigns”; they formed a caste of officers in the army; they manned the Senate which, under Elizabeth, made the laws; they headed the collegia, or ministries, that ruled over foreign relations, the courts, industry, commerce, and finance; they appointed the clerks who carried on the bureaucracy; they guided the ruler’s choice of the governors who managed the “guberniyas” into which the empire was divided, and (after 1761) they chose the voevodi who governed the provinces. Over all branches of the government loomed the mostly middle-class Fiscal, a federal bureau of intelligence, authorized to discover and punish peculation; but, despite its large use of informers, it found itself foiled, for if the monarch had dismissed every official guilty of venality the machinery of the state would have stopped. The tax collectors had such sticky fingers that scarcely a third of their gleanings reached the treasury.12
II. RELIGION AND CULTURE
Religion was especially strong in Russia, for poverty was bitter, and merchants of hope found many purchasers. Skepticism was confined to an upper class that could read French, and Freemasonry had many converts there.13 But the rural, and most of the urban, population lived in a supernatural world of fearful piety, surrounded by devils, crossing themselves a dozen times a day, imploring the intercession of saints, worshiping relics, awed by miracles, trembling over portents, prostrating themselves before holy images, and moaning somber hymns from stentorian breasts. Church bells were immense and powerful; Boris Godunov had set up one of 288,000 pounds, but the Empress Anna Ivanovna outrang him by having one cast of 432,000 pounds.14 The churches were filled; the ritual was more solemn here, and the prayers were more ecstatic, than in half-pagan papal Rome. The Russian priests—each of them a papa, or pope—wore awesome beards and flowing hair, and dark robes reaching to their feet (for legs are an impediment to dignity). They seldom mingled with the aristocracy or the court, but lived in modest simplicity, celibate in their monasteries or married in their rectories. Abbots and priors governed the monks, abbesses the nuns; the secular clergy submitted to bishops, these to archbishops, these to provincial metropolitans, these to the patriarch in Moscow; and the Church as a whole acknowledged the secular sovereign as its head. Outside the Church were dozens of religious sects, rivaling one another in mysticism, piety, and hate.
Religion served to transmit a moral code that barely availed to create order amid the strong natural impulses of a primitive people. The nobles of the court adopted the morals, manners, and language of the French aristocracy; their marriages were transactions in realty, and were alleviated with lovers and mistresses. The women of the court were better educated than the men, but in moments of passion they could erupt in hot words and murderous violence. Among the people language was coarse, violence was frequent, and cruelty corresponded with the strength of the frame and the thickness of the skin. Everyone gambled and drank according to his means, and stole according to his station,15 but everyone was charitable, and huts exceeded palaces in hospitality. Brutality and kindness were universal.
Dress varied from the fashions of Paris at the court to the fur caps, sheepskins, and thick mittens of the peasantry; from the sil
k stockings of the noble to the woolen bands that encased the legs and the feet of the serf. In summer the common people might bathe nude in the streams, sex ignored. Russian baths, like the Turkish, were heroic but popular. Otherwise hygiene was occasional, sanitation primitive. Nobles shaved; commoners, despite the ukases of Peter the Great, kept their beards.
Nearly every home had a balalaika, and St. Petersburg, under Elizabeth and Catherine II, had opera imported from Italy and France. Here came famous composers and conductors, and the finest singers and virtuosi of the age. Musical education was well financed, and justified itself in the outburst of musical genius in the second half of the nineteenth century. From all Russia promising male voices were sent to the leading churches to be trained. As the Greek rite allowed no instruments in choirs, the voices had free play, and attained such depths of unison and harmony as were hardly equaled elsewhere in the world. Boys took the soprano parts, but it was the bassos that astonished many a foreigner with their nether reach, and their range of feeling from whispers of tenderness to waves of guttural power.