A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  The epic battle so memorably described by Tolstoy was also the bloodiest single day of combat in nineteenth-century Europe. By now Napoleon could only field some 120–135,000 troops out of the hordes he had brought with him and Kutuzov was able to put up the same. The Russians entrenched themselves behind field fortifications and let the French attack, with such resultant slaughter that some 40–50,000 men fell as casualties on each side – about 100,000 killed and wounded in one day. The French managed to capture some of the Russian fortifications and then returned to their camp. Kutuzov, whose main goal was to keep his army able to fight, decided to withdraw entirely and marched his men east toward Moscow. Napoleon, as usual, portrayed the battle as a great French victory, though in fact it ended his chances of success. He had too few troops left to control Russia if the Russians continued to resist.

  Kutuzov had no intention of surrender, and neither did the population. The Muscovites began to leave the city in the tens of thousands. Napoleon waited in vain on the Sparrow Hills (where Moscow University stands today) for a Russian delegation to offer him the surrender of the city. He entered a ghost town, with no resistance but also no people to greet him or supply his army. Kutuzov in the meanwhile had marched his army through the city and turned southeast along the main road. Then, contrary to everyone’s expectations, he crossed the Moscow River and moved west. He made his camp southwest of Moscow, sitting on Napoleon’s lines of communication and blocking the way to the rich agricultural provinces to the south and the Russian center of arms manufacturing at Tula. The conqueror of Europe was trapped like a rat.

  From that point on Napoleon had lost the initiative and could only stave off the inevitable. Fires started and Moscow burned to the ground while the French troops looted the empty palaces of the nobility. Henri Beyle, to be later known to world literature as Stendhal, stole books from the library of the Golitsyn mansion. The French emperor waited several weeks, hoping Alexander would surrender and trying to collect food from the countryside around Moscow. There was no surrender. Cossacks patrolled the countryside and the peasants massacred French soldiers sent to forage. Finally he did the only thing left to him, retreat. He tried to go farther south, realizing that the direct road to the west had been stripped of all provisions and nothing could come from France. Kutuzov stood in his way, blocking the road south, and Napoleon was canny enough to realize that he could not risk a major battle. Instead he turned directly west, with winter coming on, hoping to get away fast enough before his troops starved to death. He failed. The Russian army and bands of enraged local peasants followed the French all the way, picking off stragglers and further complicating the already catastrophic supply system. The winter came early and hard, and eventually the emperor of the French abandoned his army to its fate and escaped to Paris to try to start over. Only a few thousand men of his great army managed to get to the Polish border.

  The defeat of Napoleon in Russia transformed European politics in a few months. His unwilling allies began to desert, Prussia first of all and then Austria, joining Russia and Britain against France. The Russian army moved west into Poland and Prussia, providing the largest allied contingent at the giant battle of Leipzig (October 1813) and the subsequent campaign in France. By 1814 Napoleon’s empire had come to an end. The hopeless attempt at its restoration the next year only ended in disaster at Waterloo.

  Alexander, along with Britain, insisted that the restored French state have a constitution with some sort of legislature, rather than a return to absolute monarchy, and the two allies prevailed. Relations with Britain were not so smooth in other areas, as the Congress of Vienna showed. There were long battles about post-war boundaries for Prussia and Poland, primarily the result of British and Austrian fears that Russia was now too powerful. In the end, Russia’s ally Prussia retained large parts of Poland and received important new territories in the Rhineland. Alexander’s attitude to Poland was complicated: he wanted some sort of Polish political unit with the name Poland (no “Duchy of Warsaw”), but he wanted it under Russian influence. The result was the Kingdom of Poland, with the Russian tsar as its king – it was now part of the Russian Empire but with a constitution and its own government, similar to Finland.

  The Polish settlement suggested that Alexander would continue along his previous liberal path. He soon emancipated the Estonian and Latvian serfs in the Baltic provinces, albeit without land. In 1818 he even toyed with granting Russia a constitution, considering a text written by his old friend Novosil’tsev. At the same time his private views were becoming increasingly conservative. The explanation for his new found conservatism lay not only in disillusionment with liberalism or the rightward drift of European politics but also in his religious views. Alexander fell more and more under the influence of Baroness Julie von Krüdener, a Baltic German aristocrat who had evolved a mystical pietism all her own. Krüdener had believed Napoleon to be the Antichrist and Alexander the savior of the world, and she told him so. Alexander spent more and more time reading mystical tracts and talking to Krüdener and other seers. His mystical interests had a decidedly Protestant strain to them, and the tsar even sponsored the translation and circulation of the Bible, relying largely on the English Bible Society to set up a network in Russia. He merged the ministries of education, the Orthodox synod, and the administration of non-Orthodox denominations into a single ministry under Prince Alexander Golitsyn, thus concentrating wide power over religion and culture in the hands of an imperial favorite. Golitsyn required Russian universities to teach explicitly conservative doctrines, to expunge ideas of natural law from the curriculum, and to substitute the notion that law was the expression of divine will. Similarly the scientists were to teach only ideas in accord with the Bible and revelation. The professors could do little to oppose Golitsyn, but fortunately his policies also antagonized the Orthodox Church. To the church the religion that was to be taught was a mixture of Protestant evangelicalism and mysticism, not correct Orthodoxy. It was the church and secular conservatives who eventually managed to discredit Golitsyn by 1824, but not before his and Alexander’s notions put an indelible stamp on the Russian culture of those years.

  Even more powerful than Golitsyn was General A. A. Arakcheev, originally a favorite of Alexander’s father Tsar Paul. Alexander had recalled him from exile in 1803 to head Russia’s artillery, and in 1809–10 he was Minister of War. Politically very conservative, Arakcheev was an extremely competent military administrator, but with a narrow education and a powerful streak of arrogance and cruelty. In 1814 Alexander made him the head of his personal chancellery, which meant that all the ministers, generals, and courtiers had to approach the tsar through Arakcheev. He was also largely responsible for hare-brained schemes like the military-agricultural settlements. The idea was to turn some of the villages of state peasants into military units with the aim of reducing costs and encouraging discipline and better agricultural practices among the peasantry. Instead the result was discontent and rebellion among the peasants that resulted in a series of revolts, which Arakcheev suppressed with savage cruelty. There were other measures. In 1817 Alexander turned the Gendarmes, originally a military police force designed to deal only with soldiers, into a militarized police force charged with the preservation of internal order, the first such police force in Russian history. The Special Department of the Ministry of the Interior also began to look for internal dissent.

  Abroad Alexander’s initial liberalism in France quickly faded as he and the Austrian chancellor Metternich became the prime movers behind the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance included Prussia and France as well as some lesser states in an agreement with Russia and Austria to fight the hydra of revolution wherever it appeared, such as the revolutions in Spain and southern Italy in 1822–23. French and Austrian troops suppressed these attempts at constitutional order, but for Russia the greatest challenge came when the Greeks rose in revolt against their Ottoman masters in 1821. Catherine and even Paul had encouraged Greek revolts against the Turks
earlier on in expectation of Russian territorial gains in the Balkans, and now the occasion presented itself to satisfy Russian aims in the area. Alexander hesitated, even though many of the Greek leaders were politically quite conservative. Metternich finally convinced him that the Turks were the legitimate rulers of the Balkans, and that the Greeks deserved no more support than the Spanish rebels who fought against their king. The Greeks were left to fight on alone, in defiance of obvious Russian interests in weakening the Turks and supporting an Orthodox people.

  The conservative turn in Alexander’s thinking came in the wake of the 1812 victory over Napoleon, but in other sectors of Russian society the same events had the opposite effect. Among the officers of the Russian army – young noblemen with European education – the great victory brought an enormous pride in their country and its people, and gave them tremendous confidence in themselves. As the army moved west in 1813–14, many of them saw Western Europe for the first time, and with an almost universal knowledge of French and German were able to observe and investigate unfamiliar phenomena in detail. They dined in Parisian cafes, read newspapers, attended lectures, and met their counterparts in French and German salons. They came prepared, for their education had familiarized them with the basis of European thought – Kant and Montesquieu, Goethe and Rousseau. They read the latest works of the French liberal leaders Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant, the conservatives Chateaubriand and de Maistre, and they learned about English experiments in popular education. Some followed the debates of the English parliament in the French press, and others looked at more exotic systems by studying the constitutions of the United States and the state of Pennsylvania.

  After the heady years of victory and fuller acquaintance with Western European life and thought, the return home was a cold bath for many. They knew that serfdom had been a matter of debate and condemnation since the mid-eighteenth century and that Napoleon had abolished it in Poland and the Prussian reformers in their own land. Russia was now for the first time the only European country to have such an institution. Furthermore, their own tsar, as everyone knew, had insisted on a constitution for the French, and within his own empire for Poland and Finland. What about Russia?

  From about 1816–17 groups of young officers began to form more or less secret literary and debating societies with the aim of continuing the intense dialogue and reading of the war years. The first was the Union of Salvation, with only some thirty members, utilizing rituals imitated from the Freemasons to keep their actions deeply secret. There were already serious political discussions at this stage, and soon there were even more. In 1818 they founded a larger secret society, the Union of Welfare, which even had a literary society associated with it, the Green Lamp. Reading poetry, writing theater reviews, and drinking parties were as much part of the movement among these young officers as politics, but by 1821–22 they began to move toward more concrete plans of action and to write constitutions for the future. By 1825 there were two centers of this activity. In St. Petersburg, where most of the guards regiments were stationed, several hundred officers formed the Northern Society, with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and proclaiming a constitutional state. The majority, led by Nikita Murav’ev, a captain in the Guards General Staff, wanted a constitutional monarchy and a legislature elected on a property-based franchise. More radical was the poet and ex-guards officer Kondratii Ryleev, an official in the Russian-American company that administered Alaska, who moved toward republicanism. Farther south, a similar radicalism inspired Pavel Pestel’, colonel of the Viatka Infantry regiment, and other officers of the army stationed in the Ukraine close to the Ottoman frontier. Pestel’ compiled an elaborate constitution for a democratic republic along Jacobin lines. Tactically there were many disagreements as well: should the army be the basis of a revolt? How much should they tell the troops? Was it enough to just remove the tsar, or did they need to kill him? And was that right? The disagreements were never resolved because they seemed too distant. The conspirators were still actively recruiting and expected Alexander to live a long time.

  The new police forces and the various repressive policies failed to detect the presence of the conspiracy until it was much too late. In the summer of 1825 the all-powerful Arakcheev was immobilized by personal disaster: his longtime housekeeper and mistress, a monster of sadism, was murdered by his serfs. The general was plunged into despair, increased by the discovery that she had been embezzling large sums of money and had convinced him that her son by one of her lovers was Arakcheev’s. In the southern army an officer of English origin named Sherwood sent in a secret report naming many of the conspirators, but it was too late.

  On November 19, 1825, the tsar suddenly died at the age of only forty-seven. Alexander had been on tour of the Crimea and died at Taganrog, far from the capital or any other large city and word did not reach St. Petersburg until December. The first consequence was confusion. By the succession law of 1797, the heir to the childless Alexander should have been his younger brother Konstantin, the tsar’s viceroy in Warsaw. Unknown to virtually everyone, Konstantin had abdicated the throne in 1822 by agreement with Alexander and left papers to that effect with the Council of State. Thus the heir would be the next brother Nicholas, but Alexander had never bothered to tell him about it. Thus the news came as a shock to Nicholas, who insisted on hearing formally from Konstantin himself. While couriers raced back and forth between St. Petersburg and Warsaw, Nicholas ordered the troops quartered in the city to swear the oath of allegiance to Konstantin and refused to take the throne. Finally a definitive answer came from Warsaw, and Nicholas ordered a new oath for December 14.

  The conspirators knew most of this, as they included in their ranks officers with frequent duty in the Winter Palace. They decided to forestall Nicholas and bring out the troops in revolt in the morning before the administration of the oath. The rebels assembled on the Senate Square, only a block from the Winter Palace, and demanded that the throne go to Konstantin, a tactic designed to give time for a seizure of power. Nicholas refused to budge now that he knew that he was legally the tsar, and he called in loyal troops. For most of the short December day the two bodies of soldiers faced one another in the falling snow, and several attempts to resolve the issue failed. Finally, as sunset approached in the afternoon, Nicholas gave the order to fire, and the artillery dispersed the rebels. The first attempt at revolution in Russian history was over. Nicholas now had to decide what to do with the rebels, and how to rule the country.

  9 The Pinnacle of Autocracy

  The first acts of the new reign were the capture, investigation, and trials of the Decembrists, as they were known immediately and for ever after. Several hundred officers and men of the rebel regiments, as well as a few civilians, were immediately arrested. Tsar Nicholas appointed a court of numerous officials and high officers, the most distinguished being Michael Speranskii, who had returned from exile and was now again in favor. The investigation was long and detailed, conducted in secret, and eventually ended in the execution of five of the rebels, including Pestel’ and the poet Ryleev, for the crime of plotting against the life of the tsar. Thirty-one others were sentenced to death as well for the same crime, but Nicholas decided to ignore their obvious guilt and commuted the sentences to labor and exile in Siberia. All together one hundred twenty-one of the rebels made the long journey east. Another four hundred fifty were either released without punishment or demoted and transferred to line regiments in the Caucasus.

  In Russian history the punishment of the Decembrists became a classic example of official cruelty, but the most striking aspect of their treatment was its lenience. The number of death sentences was about the same as in the reprisals for the Italian constitutionalist revolts of 1820–21 and far less than for similar actions in Spain. Nicholas chose to hold back, perhaps because he still held a very old-fashioned conception of the tsar as the stern father of his people. In any case the Decembrists in Siberia had various fates. Eight of the most “guilty�
� actually worked in an open-pit silver mine for several months, while others had lighter tasks. The labor sentences were lightened by the 1830s. A number of the Decembrists’ wives were allowed to join them, and as the years passed the labor sentences were entirely commuted to simple prison and eventually exile (outside of prison). Many of the former rebels were given positions in the local administration. In Siberian towns the Decembrists and their wives provided the first glimpse of European culture, for they set up schools and orphanages, put on amateur theatricals, and became the centers of local society. What they were not allowed to do is publish anything or even to return to European Russia. A blanket of silence descended around them, to remain until the death of Nicholas thirty years later.