Sabres on the Steppes
Page 26
But for many of them there was another, second sentiment which was, if not equal, at least an important strand in their motivation, and which was briefly referred to in the introductory chapter. This was their concept of their own country and their very different concept of Russia. Nineteenth-century English gentlemen – whether soldiers, writers, merchant-adventurers or explorers – saw themselves as part of a great liberal tradition, fuelled by the writings of Macaulay and the politics of Gladstone, with a mission to bring these enlightened principles to the service of less fortunate peoples. The khanates and emirates of Central Asia and the independent-minded highlanders of the Caucasian mountains came into the category of such peoples in their minds.
When they turned to their concept of Russia, the picture was very different. There was no liberal tradition: quite the opposite. Count Munster quoted in 1868 an anonymous Russian who had remarked to him: ‘Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination’. And it was not only in metropolitan Russia that this applied: as the tsar’s land-bound empire expanded, so this domestic claustrophobia was extended. Baron Brunnow (a diplomatic adviser to the Russian foreign minister Nesselrode) had written in the 1830s: ‘The English always remember that countries taken under the protection of Russia have all ended by losing their independence [. . .] she freed the Georgian tribes from Ottoman dominion only to subjugate them to herself [. . .] she recognized the independence of the Crimea in order to annex it to her empire’. And it was clear to all – particularly to liberal Englishmen – that the Russian Empire was run on very different lines from the British.
In fact, the Russian autocracy was the very antithesis of those English standards of liberty and independence which meant so much to the British. For the first half of the century, the tsar was Nicholas I, who tended to view his people as a regiment and his country as a parade ground. He had been badly shaken by the mutiny against him by the so-called Decembrists at the moment of his assuming power, particularly as many of the leaders of that movement were members of the aristocracy or officers in the elite corps of Guards – the very people on whom he had thought he could rely for support. He had been savage in his retribution: many of the leaders had been hanged, most of the rest sent for indefinite exile in Siberia, and the rank and file who had meekly followed their orders were mercilessly flogged. These facts were known to the British adventurers who feature in this book; many of them, as recounted earlier, had encountered former exiles who were working or fighting their way back to favour.
Already in England there was a tradition of free expression in speech or writing, which dated back at least to Milton’s diatribe in defence of unlicensed printing – his ‘Areopagitica’ published in 1644. But in Nicholas I’s Russia, two hundred years later, censorship was almost total: not only was criticism of the government or the administration prohibited, but even favourable remarks were not allowed on the grounds that it was disrespectful to the tsar to comment on his decisions. Social commentary from abroad equally fell under censorship; among the authors whose works were not allowed to be imported or read were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame.
Nor, as the century progressed, did things get much better in Russia. When Nicholas I died in 1855, a man disappointed and broken by the failure of the Crimean War, he was succeeded by his son Alexander II. Although it was Alexander who presided over the legislation for the abolition of serfdom in 1861 (one year before Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation of slaves in the United States) it was some time before the beneficial effects of this were widely felt. And instead of an independent and politically aspiring middle class as in England, in Russia the social gulf between the landowning aristocracy and the peasantry was largely filled by a class of bureaucrats and military officers who were the instrument of the tsar and his hierarchy. Whatever his credentials as a reformer, this did not save Alexander II from being the victim of an anarchist assassination in 1881. With the ascent to the throne of his son, Alexander III, a period of resistance to progress was the reaction against the revolutionaries who had killed his father. As the historian Hugh Seton-Watson was to comment, his reign was characterized by ‘russification of the non-Russian half of the empire’s population, and an overall attitude of nostalgic, obscurantist, and narrowly bureaucratic paternalism’. There are echoes of this world in the plays of Chekhov. So this was the Russia of Alexander II and III which the later protagonists in my book – Vambery, O’Donovan and Elias among others – were confronting. It was little wonder that they saw it as an alien world deeply different from their own and meriting their opposition.
The third motive was perhaps more introspective. They were not only resisting Russian aggrandizement and Russian obscurantism, but they were also trying to live up to an ideal of Victorian manhood which was reflected in the literature, particularly the boys’ literature, of the period. Although G. A. Henty only started his prolific career of writing military adventure stories for boys in 1868 (he was to write eighty such novels in all), the ethos of adventure and empire-building that was to characterize these novels was already well established. Sir Henry Newbolt in his famous poem telling of a young ex-public-schoolboy rallying his troops with the cry of ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ was speaking for a generation of young Victorians who were intent on seeking honour, preferably coupled with excitement and glory. Many had been weaned on Tennyson’s poem ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and the retelling of the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. This was their ideal. They may seem strangely one-dimensional figures to the twenty-first-century eye, but they were instantly recognizable to their nineteenth-century contemporaries. It was from the ranks of such characters that the protagonists of this book are selected. Their spirit was to be invoked by later writers such as John Buchan, whose novel The Half-Hearted, about just such a hero, was first published in 1900, only three years after the death of Nye Elias and while Buchan himself was still an undergraduate at Oxford.
To those who may ask themselves what therefore is the mainspring motive and common denominator between the British adventurers confronting tsarist Russia in this book, I would say not only their objection to Russian expansion, not only their missionary zeal to bring British standards of freedom and decency to a superpower which sadly lacked these qualities, but also a desire to emulate and replicate the heroic qualities that Victorian England most admired and celebrated.
These were the reasons for the risks they took: these were the Why and Wherefore.
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