A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Three years after that last gambling disaster in the Caucasus, Tolstoy was back at his estate, learning to live in the diminished house – the hole where the central section stood is now covered by trees but must then have been a daily embarrassment.

  Tolstoy had taken part in the Russian defence of Sebastopol during the eleven-month siege in 1854/5 that would decide the outcome of the Crimean war. The conflict between Czarist Russia on the one side, and Britain, France and Turkey on the other, was really about Russia’s ambitions to drive ever further south through Asia, threatening other imperial powers. It had been a shock for all the armies involved. Great bravery on each side had failed to disguise the incompetence, poor equipment and outdated tactics of the British cavalry, the French infantry and the Russian forces too – but it was the Russians who eventually lost and the Czar’s prestige that fell furthest.

  Russia had a new Czar, Alexander II, brought up by comparatively liberal intellectuals. He realized that from now on it was impossible to argue that Russia, having lost a war on her very doorstep, had successfully modernized. The Russian soldiers who had fought and died to defend their motherland were, for the most part, also serfs. That is, they were tied to the land and could be treated as chattels by their owners. The same had been true of the Russian armies that had defied Napoleon in 1812 and then defeated him in 1813. Then, some of the officers felt they had earned their freedom in battle. They were ignored; but the same feeling resurfaced with greater force after the Crimea.

  Wars often radicalize, and defeats do so more than do victories. In March 1856, Alexander gave a speech in which he warned the landowners that he intended to abolish serfdom from above, by law, rather than wait for it to abolish itself from below in some kind of uprising. Alexander and his advisers knew it would be difficult. Many landowners would be outraged. There were practical problems, such as creating a new system of law and local government in the countryside to replace the serf system. Then there was the embarrassing fact that many landowners were already broke: their lands and their serfs were mortgaged and technically owned by banks in Moscow and St Petersburg. Most land was useless and valueless without the serf labour that kept it fertile. The serfs would starve without land of their own, and they had no money. So this was a huge and convoluted project, and would be one of the most dramatic attempts at reform from above ever made. It was also awesome in scale. A census of 1857, four years before the serfs were freed, showed that more than a third of Russians, some twenty-three million people, were serfs. That compares with some four million black American slaves at the time.

  Serfdom went back to feudal, even classical, times and originally meant simply agricultural labour that was tied to land, with a surplus to be handed over to the owner – church, baron or city. As we have seen, it had slowly died out in Western Europe, getting a hefty shove from the labour shortages caused by the Black Death. Even there, a few forms of serfdom remained until quite late – Scottish coalminers were serfs until 1799. To the east, serfdom was far more widespread. It had arrived later but was successfully imposed by landowners and monarchs for far longer. In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, serfs could be found in Poland, Prussia, Austria, Hungary and many of the smaller German states. Russian serfdom, however, was of a different scale and order.

  The Russian serfs were not quite slaves (though the word ‘serf’ comes from the Latin for ‘slave’). Their owners could not kill them, or sell them abroad. Outright slavery, which mainly existed for house servants, had been abolished by Peter the Great in 1723. But from the 1550s onwards, the laws of Muscovy had given landowners ever greater powers over their peasants. A century later, full serfdom became general in the agricultural ‘black soil’ regions of central Russia. Serfs were tied to their landowners’ fields and villages, and harsh penalties were imposed for trying to escape. Often they were forbidden to marry anyone from outside their estate. As Tolstoy had demonstrated, they could be bought and sold along with the land; those needed to farm the land were kept, while ‘surplus’ serfs could be sent to work for others. They could be freely punished by their owners: this included beating. Serf girls and women were often raped by their owners. Very few serfs were literate.

  The gap between the grander Russian landowners, who spoke French and enjoyed frequent trips to St Petersburg, or abroad, and their serfs was as large as that between English rulers of the Raj and ordinary Indians, or Caribbean sugar plantation owners and African slaves. The closest parallel is with the American plantations where, just as on the Russian estates, entire communities lived cut off from city life, with their own bakeries, orchards, accommodation, stables, granaries and justice system. So Russian serfdom was hardly unique in the oppressive atmosphere it generated. For near-subsistence farmworkers, in any part of the world, who had to send some of their crop and livestock to owners, degrees of freedom were largely theoretical. The rise of Russian serfdom coincided, after all, with that of full-blown absolutism in France. Peasants led lives not much freer under the Bourbons than those of Russian serfs under the Romanovs.

  Yet Russian serfdom had unique aspects that made Russia feel fundamentally different from Western European societies. For a start, there was no ethnic divide in Russia between owner and serf. They were all the same mix, mostly Slav with some Tatar and sometimes some German. Master, mistress and servants looked alike and had similar names. Serfs, living for generations on the same dark soil, sharing the old stories and the old music, devoutly adhering to the Orthodox religion, seemed to many liberal Russian landowners more ‘real’, more authentically Russian than they were themselves. To numerous writers and intellectuals Russia seemed uniquely cursed, but when at times radicals tried to ‘go towards’ the serfs and befriend them, these sceptical, conservative-minded peasants regarded them with bafflement or hostility.

  For tens of thousands of poorer landowners there was not even a big cultural divide between them and their human ‘property’. Serfs cooked in the master’s kitchen, suckled and brought up his children, told stories around the fire and taught the lore of the countryside to the little nobles growing up amongst them. They shared hunting trips. Serfs could be the talented craftworkers, musicians, decorators and builders that their owners relied on for goods and services, as better-off Western Europeans relied on free, waged workers. Landowners could be asked by the patriarchs of serf families to resolve family disputes. So there was an intimacy in Russian serfdom as experienced in houses and villages remote from the cities, that some Russian landowners felt to be both more embarrassing and more emotionally touching than rural servitude in some other places.

  Russian serfdom was not in any sense a form of early capitalism. The slavery of the sugar and cotton plantations came about because humans were used as field machinery in a new system of trade and capital accumulation. Russian agriculture was actually held back by serfdom, since nobody – not the landlord, worried about revolt, nor the serf, who did not own the land he worked on – had an urgent interest in investment for agricultural improvement. Above all, serfdom in Russia cannot be understood without bearing in mind that the Russian autocratic system, which we saw beginning to harden as far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible, felt dangerously unstable.

  The Czars were at the top of the pile, but they were regularly murdered in palace coups, often led by senior officers; or later, assassinated. The nobility, which had been organized in strict order of rank – according to the Table of Ranks of 1722 – were formally the servants, even the slaves, of the Czar; and for much of this period they owed him service, to be conducted in state offices – the army, the law and local government. They often depended on the Czar for their incomes, since the Russian agricultural output was so low; and ultimately, on the Czar’s authority to keep them above the serfs. Protests and peasant rebellions were frequent enough – nearly eighteen hundred outbreaks of ‘disorder’ were recorded between 1826 and 1856 – to keep them on their toes.14 Yet the Czar could not possibly rule Russia withou
t the nobility. Even after Czar Peter III freed them from their obligation to serve him, in 1762, the formal system of serfs-serve-nobles-then-nobles-serve-Czar remained the idea behind the Russian state. At times it seems to have felt more like a three-way stand-off.

  The great rebellion against this state of affairs had happened after the Russians’ war with Napoleon, which during 1812–14 brought many young Russian aristocrats deep into Western Europe. In Paris they imbibed the new spirit of the Enlightened age. It tasted better than vodka. When they marched home again, they felt newly ashamed and embarrassed by the archaic, fossilized nature of the Czarist state.

  In December 1825 rebel officers, later known as the ‘Decembrists’, launched a revolt in St Petersburg against a new Czar, Nicholas I, after his brother Constantine had refused to accept the throne. After a five-hour confrontation between rebel and loyalist troops in the centre of the city, the Czar ordered his men to begin firing, and the rebellion collapsed. Five conspirators were hanged, and 121 were stripped of their titles and sent into exile in Siberia. There, many were joined by their wives and families and lived not as landowners but as simple farmers. The sons of one were described by their mother as playing with the local peasants, fishing for trout, trapping rabbits, hunting for birds’ nests and ‘camping in the woods with the wild boys’. Their father also went native, growing a long beard, ceasing to wash and working in the fields. His name was Sergei Volkonsky and he was a cousin of Tolstoy’s, who met him when he finally returned from exile; he based one of his central characters in War and Peace on the admirable older man.15

  These ‘Decembrists’ were in general a great inspiration to the younger generation of Tolstoy’s time. Remorse for his gambling, shame about his position as an owner of serfs, and admiration for the liberal exiles of 1825, all fused in Tolstoy’s mind. It was the same, or similar, for many other liberal landowners and writers. Among the less likely liberals in 1856 was the new Czar Alexander II himself. After the failure in the Crimea he began to work on widespread reforms, including reform of the army, the civil service and the criminal code, and a loosening of censorship. But his most dramatic move related to serfdom. It would go, outright. Even the serfs were suspicious about that. How much land would they get for themselves? Would it really be something for nothing?

  Tolstoy got an early glimpse of what might happen when, in 1856, after Alexander’s announcement of forthcoming reform but before the emancipation law had been agreed, he decided to give all his serfs their personal freedom, and to sell them land cheaply over the next thirty years. He called a meeting at Yasnaya Polyana (which translates, roughly, as ‘Bright Meadow’), but found them highly suspicious. A recent biographer of Tolstoy says: ‘The peasants were convinced they would be given their freedom when the new czar was crowned, and so believed Tolstoy’s offer of a contract was just a cunning ruse to swindle them. After several more meetings they refused all his revised offers.’16 Tolstoy travelled abroad, meeting the former exile Volkonsky, before settling down at Yasnaya Polyana again to write and enjoy a spot of domestic bliss. (Though his wife, producing thirteen children and spending her spare time copying out his near-illegible manuscripts, found life rather less blissful.)

  He did eventually manage to free all his serfs to till their own land. He built a school at his own expense for the peasants’ children (a rather high proportion of them, his own illegitimate sons) and taught them himself, by now dressing in peasant clothes. He wrote children’s books to help spread literacy throughout Russia. As a local magistrate he would help the peasantry against his own class, and he told the local children he was determined to become a peasant himself. He was, however, a rotten farmer, managing to starve his pigs to death. After he had dismissed his stewards, the historian Orlando Figes writes, ‘The experiment was a complete failure . . . He did not know how to cure hams, how to make butter, when to plough or hoe the fields, and he soon became fed up and ran away to Moscow.’17

  While Tolstoy was struggling with his pigs and his conscience, Alexander’s ministers were struggling with hostile landowners and foot-dragging committees, as the Czar tried to find a way of freeing Russia’s serfs without making the nobles rebel against him. The result was the Emancipation of Serfdom manifesto of March 1861. It was a noble-sounding document, published two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing US slaves, but it would satisfy almost nobody. Tolstoy heard about it while he was abroad, during his only visit to London, where he had just heard Charles Dickens give a public reading, visited some schools, and made use of the library at the new Victoria and Albert Museum. He realized at once that the manifesto’s high-flown language and tone would not be understood by the peasantry.

  What he did not know was just how limited emancipation would be. The landowners fought doggedly to keep as much as possible of their status, with the result that for nearly half a century to come, the freed serfs would have to make huge payments to the government for land they regarded as their own. The government, in turn, compensated the landowners. These payments were based on inflated estimates of the value of the land, while to further compensate the nobility the peasants’ share overall was cut, by up to a quarter. Though freed to marry who they liked, to trade and own property, they would stay under the control of their own local courts, would need passports to travel, and would continue to be subject to corporal punishment.

  This was so far from what the Russian peasantry had hoped for, such a bitter disappointment that there were nearly nineteen hundred outbreaks of disorder in 1861, some involving bloody repression by troops. Landowners bemoaned their new relative poverty, and the loss of their ability to directly punish ‘their’ peasants in the old way. Over time, many peasants left the land and migrated to the cities, where they would become the new factory workers and where their children would one day become the raw proletarian material for Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution.

  The Czar continued to try to reform the censorship laws, education, the law, the military and local government. A well informed newspaper reader in Paris or London in the early 1860s might well have compared the terrible civil war tearing the United States apart with the comparatively orderly reform programme being run from St Petersburg, and assumed that Russia would become the stronger power. Czarist Russia had started far behind the USA in its industrial development, but was growing fast by the 1880s. In truth, Russian autocracy had no answer to the growing demands of people who were freed, but freed to be poor, or to those of intellectuals who wanted full democracy. During the later years of Alexander II’s reign, revolutionary and terrorist groups spread. Terrible famines underlined the continuing backwardness and weakness of Russian agriculture and society. When the Czar was blown up by a terrorist bomb in 1881, his successor Alexander III abruptly ended the period of reforms and restored the censors and the secret police.

  Tolstoy watched the condition of Russia with mounting despair. He was no enthusiast for urbanization or industrialization. Moscow he found a place of ‘stench, stones, luxury, poverty, debauchery’, in which the displaced peasants ‘wax our floors, rub our bodies in the bath and ply as cabmen’.18 After the huge success of his novels he buried himself in country pursuits – beekeeping, growing orchards, hunting – as well as fathering his huge family and looking after his school, and all interspersed with more writing and some satisfyingly vicious literary quarrels. By the later 1870s he was talking of becoming a monk. Artists and writers came to pay homage to this apparent secular saint, who advocated Christian rural simplicity and seemed to offer a third way between Czarist repression and socialist revolution.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, Tolstoy was a globally famous guru, a lifetime’s journey away from the brash young artillery officer who had lost his home, his villages and his serfs at the card table. He may also have become something of an egomaniac and a bore (gurus mostly are), but his life story still shows a satisfying arc of learning and redemption, which his Russia never managed. His home remai
ns a monument to a lost Eden, with its plain rooms, its library of elevating books, orchards, schoolhouse, granaries and woodland, where Tolstoy lies buried in a simple earth mound. Around the estate, however, the impoverished, ugly Russia of a century of war and political failure is all too close at hand. Had the 1860s seen a convulsion there as dramatic as the American Civil War – to which we now turn – then perhaps the old Russia could have evolved into a country of middle-class business, prosperous cities and democracy. We cannot know.

  Liberty’s Victory, by the Skin of Her Teeth

  They were days of exhaustion and relief, of sadness and delight. On 4 April 1865, a steamer called the Malvern was making her way upriver from Washington, capital of the United States of America, to Richmond, Virginia, former capital of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate, or rebel, states, had been attending church when a cavalry officer arrived with a note from his top general, Robert E. Lee, telling him to flee. As Richmond resounded to the explosions of powder magazines and the noise of hungry crowds looting food stores and slurping whisky – which was also running in the gutters – the town’s bridges were blown up and its governing body, huddled in carts and carriages, disappeared in a haze of dust. The Malvern chugged on up the James River, past dead horses, wrecked boats and flotsam, until she ran aground. A twelve-oared boat was lowered and into it clambered a leathery, whiskery man with a buzzard’s nose and a beard like a hearth-brush. Abraham Lincoln had come to see for himself the capital of the rebellion that had come so close to destroying America’s republican dream.