A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  The new tsar could now turn to ruling the country, which he did with an iron hand. Nicholas was nearly twenty years younger than Alexander, for he was born in 1796. Thus he entirely missed the reign of his grandmother Catherine, and his formative years were those of the defeat of Napoleon. His upbringing was narrowly military and he was not educated as a future ruler. Personally he was convinced that only autocracy could prevent the spread of revolution, liberalism, and constitutional government, all of these essentially the same in the minds of European and Russian conservatives. He relied on the ministries to provide his government with a trained staff to execute the laws, but increasingly he centralized decision making and in particular directed any new initiatives from his personal chancellery using men, mostly with military backgrounds, who were personally close to the tsar himself.

  One of his first acts was to add a “Third Section” to his personal chancellery, one that was to keep track of potential political opponents through the Corps of Gendarmes and their network of agents. The new organ removed political police from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and subordinated it directly to the tsar through its head, General Alexander Benckendorf. The Third Section reflected in its actions the conceptions of the tsar, for in addition to looking for “secret societies” of revolutionaries it was to track insults to the tsar and imperial family, counterfeiters, and religious sects, especially the Old Believers. It was also supposed to collect news of peasant discontent and rebellion, a new note from a government hitherto only concerned about liberal ideas among the nobility. The Gendarmes who were its main agents were also to look out for corruption among government officials, especially in the provinces. In the mind of Nicholas, paternalism and the repression of revolution were two sides of the same coin. Though the actual agents of the Third Section were few and it continued to rely heavily on denunciations, it was large enough to become a major factor in the life of Russia’s small political and cultural elite.

  Nicholas was not in theory opposed to all reform, and he set up a series of committees to consider the needs of the country and even to wrestle with the issue of serfdom. None of the reform programs came to anything, for the tsar believed serfdom to be an evil, but also that any attempt to change the system would lead to a massive revolt like that led by Pugachev in the previous century. Perhaps the only important positive measure of the reign was the codification of Russian law, a massive task entrusted to the capable hands of Michael Speranskii. In 1835 his committee published a code of law derived from carefully collected Russian precedent. Speranskii and his staff also compiled codes of local law from Finland, the Baltic provinces, and the formerly Polish provinces in the western part of the empire. Speranskii’s code remained the basis of Russian law until 1917. Nicholas was himself enthusiastic about the project, as it fitted his image of himself as the stern yet just monarch, careful of the law as well as of his own authority.

  The utter stagnation of government was not matched by stagnation in Russian society, slow as it was to develop. The colonization of the southern steppe continued, and Odessa emerged as a major port, exporting the growing surplus of Russian grain to Europe. In the interior of Russia all was not stagnant either, for within and around the serf system industrial capitalism made its first appearance. In the villages of Ivanovo and Voznesenskoe, Sheremetev estates northeast of Moscow, textile factories powered by steam engines were built starting from the 1790s. The entrepreneurs who bought and imported English steam engines, however, were themselves serfs who only gradually bought themselves out in the course of the early nineteenth century. The workers were also mostly Sheremetev serfs, though they worked for the factory owners and only paid the count, their owner, a yearly rent. Peasant entrepreneurs, some of them serfs, and townsmen began to start small enterprises in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other towns and villages of the Russian interior. In St. Petersburg many of the businessmen were foreign or non-Russian citizens of the empire – Germans, Swedes, Finns, Englishmen. In Moscow many of the richest textile manufacturers came from Old Belief groups, and thus for religious reasons were treated with some suspicion by the authorities. By the standards of Western Europe all this activity was small, labor was expensive, and industry was usually technically backward, but it was a beginning. The overall prosperity of the Russian Empire also benefited from the beginnings of industrialization in Russian Poland, the Baltic provinces and Finland.

  Figure 9. A village council from John Augustus Atkinson, A Picturesque View of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London, 1803–04.

  The attitude of the tsar and his government toward industrialization was highly ambiguous. On the one hand he supported it, if modestly, establishing the first commercial high schools and maintaining a protective tariff. Nicholas played a major role in the construction of Russia’s first railroad, the line from the capital to the Tsarskoe Selo (1837) and then in a much more important project, the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow that opened in 1851. Russia acquired its first engineering school in 1828 with the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but the builder of the Moscow-Petersburg railroad was the American engineer, G. W. Whistler, the father of the famous painter. Russia simply did not have the trained specialists for the project. Nicholas supported the railroad, but at the same time he did not want Russia to acquire a large industrial base, as he saw that as the seedbed of revolution as well as fundamentally unnecessary. The most basic issue was, of course, serfdom, for as long as that lasted Russia was saddled with increasingly backward agriculture, a highly restricted labor market, and capital tied up in serfs and noble estates. Russia could not hope to move forward until that system was removed, but that act would entail fundamental change in society, the legal system and the state. Nicholas would not have that.

  As Russian society slowly grew in complexity with some hallmarks of modernity and began to move away from state tutelage, the government began to sense the need for a newer conception of itself. Autocracy alone was not enough, as it implied only obedience by the public, including the upper classes, and society outside the peasantry was by now too sophisticated for simple obedience. In the early years Nicholas relied on the traditions of cosmopolitan monarchism inherited from his brother and the Holy Alliance. The main government spokesman in the press (and a major informer for the Third Section) was Faddei Bulgarin, journalist and author of moralizing novels of Russian life. Bulgarin, however, was actually the Pole Tadeusz Bułharyn, who had even fought against Russia in 1812. His support of Russia over his native country was the result of firmly anti-revolutionary views and loyalty to the idea of monarchy: Russia’s greatness lay in its adherence to these ideas. Another note entered the chorus of conservative ideas with count S. S. Uvarov. Uvarov was also cosmopolitan in education, more comfortable in French than in Russian, and Nicholas appointed him Minister of Education. In 1832 he sent around a rescript to the ministry’s institutions informing them that their task was to encourage “autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality,” and thus was born the doctrine of official nationality, as it came to be called. Autocracy was not new, and Alexander and others had believed religion was the natural prop to the throne, but Uvarov specified Orthodoxy and added nationality to the mix. For the time this notion remained mainly the ideology of his ministry; for Nicholas, whose ministers and entourage included generals Benckendorff and Dubelt in the police, Karl von Nesselrode as foreign minister, and whose court included numerous Baltic Germans, Finns, and even conservative Polish aristocrats, could hardly advocate a purely Russian state. Russian nationality was still more a vague idea than a strict ethnic principle. The result was a contradictory mix of ideas, a mix that remained until the death of Nicholas and to a large extent until the end of the old regime in 1917. The mix was perfectly incarnated in the architecture of Konstantin Toon, the builder of the Kremlin’s Grand Palace and the Church of Christ the Savior – the two great projects of the later reign of Nicholas. To provide the tsar with a modern Moscow residence Toon, consult
ing the tsar at every step, produced an essentially classical building that, seen from a distance, was no different from dozens of St. Petersburg palaces. At the same time decorative details like the window frames and décor were adapted from the older Russian architecture still visible in the Kremlin. The Church of Christ the Savior was much more Russian looking, but Toon took the style of the much smaller twelfth-century churches and simply blew it up to colossal size and placed it on a high platform with classical (or at least non-Russian) decorative elements such as massive lions.

  Not just the architecture of church buildings but the church itself became an integral part of the autocratic regime. Nicholas put a final end both to the mild enlightenment of the eighteenth-century church and the fascination with Biblical evangelicalism of Alexander’s time. In 1836 he appointed to the post of ober-procurator the Most Holy Synod Count N. A. Protasov, a general of hussars. Protasov’s task was to make the church more “Orthodox,” to restore its doctrinal purity and eliminate practices and intellectual trends from the West. He continued to manage the affairs of the church until 1855, and in the process he succeeded in making the church into a consciously conservative and obedient instrument of autocracy. In his time the church also absorbed a large dose of nationalist ideology, a combination that endured to the end of the old regime. Protasov’s church was not the whole of Orthodoxy. Paradoxically the secularization of monastic lands in the eighteenth century led to a revival of monasticism, the “elders” (startsy), becoming the most charismatic figures of Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. The elders were monks whose asceticism included a large element of spiritual service to the surrounding society. In the 1820s the most famous was Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and at mid-century Makarii and Amvrosii of the Optina Monastery in southern Russia. Famous writers and intellectuals as well as ordinary laymen of all classes came to visit the monks and seek their guidance, a practice that formed a new element alongside the more traditional pilgrimages to the shrines with the relics of the saints. In spite of all these efforts, however, some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry followed the various versions of Old Belief rather than the Orthodox Church.

  Uvarov’s ideological experiments and the commitment to autocracy that lay behind them probably reflected the sentiments of most of the gentry, but they did not have universal success, even in the government and the imperial family. Mildly liberal circles existed even at the pinnacle of Petersburg society. The salon of the tsar’s sister-in-law Elena Pavlovna (1806–1873) was one such place. Born Princess Frederike Charlotte Marie of Württemberg, she came to Russia in 1824 to marry the younger brother of the tsar, Mikhail Pavlovich (1798–1849). Grand Duke Mikhail was mainly interested in his military duties, and Elena became one of St. Petersburg’s most important figures. Her drawing room in the Michael Palace, still carefully preserved in the building that became the Russian Museum, was an important artistic salon, especially for music and art. In the 1840s the emphasis was artistic, but the Thursdays with the Grand Dutchess also saw discussion of issues that never appeared in the press and were frowned upon in other aristocratic houses.

  In Russian society at large the absence of political discussion in the press or any public forum did not imply that everything was calm below the surface. By this time a whole generation of young men, mostly of gentry origin, had finished a university or one of the elite schools like the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. This education was supposed to fit them for state service, and indeed most of them with such an education chose that path, if only as a livelihood rather than an avocation. If public political discussion did not exist, however, literature and philosophy flourished. To some extent they served as an outlet for otherwise frustrated reflection on Russian life, but the absorbing interest in art and thought was also a response to cultural trends in Western Europe, especially Germany.

  Starting in the late 1820s more and more young Russians fell under the influence of the metaphysical idealism of Friedrich Schelling, whose popularity in Germany was then at its peak. Schelling’s appeal was the result of his extensive writing on religion, art, and the philosophy of nature and his desire to find a single unifying spirit in them all. For the esthetically inclined Russians of this moment, Schelling, for all his murky abstraction, seemed a real guide to understanding the world of culture and thought. By the 1830s Schelling’s thought seemed so restricted to that sphere that some of the students at Moscow University turned to the more all-embracing and more rigorous world of G. F. W. Hegel. Their leader was Nikolai Stankevich (1813–1840). From 1831 until his departure for Europe in a vain search for a cure for his tuberculosis, Stankevich included in his circle nearly everyone who would make a difference in Russian thought for the next generation.

  Stankevich’s patience, wide reading, and gentleness attracted widely disparate personalities, at that time all united by a fascination with German philosophy and literature. The future anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), the critic Vissarion Belinskii, and the future socialist Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were all part of the circle. They would all in different ways form the Westernizer camp, which saw Russia’s destiny as a belated variant of European socio-political development. Also part of the circle were the future Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov and the conservative publicist M. N. Katkov. For the moment their common effort was to master Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and their idol Hegel, writing long letters to one another describing their understanding of their reading, turgid abstractions in Hegelian jargon. Yet out of the Stankevich circle came the major trends in Russian thought, ideas with echoes that have outlived the moment of their creation.

  For Belinskii the problem Hegel posed was that he saw the history of the world as the development of the idea of freedom, but also identified its outcome with the existing order of Europe in his time. Thus everything in the world had a place, leading to ultimate self-knowledge of the Idea. Belinskii at first concluded, as did many of his friends, that Russian conditions were therefore justified, they were part of the development of humanity. This was a very uncomfortable conclusion, and further reflection on Hegel’s dialectic took them in another direction: Hegel was right about Europe, it was the ideal toward which humanity headed, but Russia needed to catch up. Thus Hegelian idealism provided an intellectual foundation for thinking Russia needed to imitate the West, and that imitation could take two forms. Either Russia needed to imitate the existing Western societies, which seemed to be moving toward industrial capitalism and constitutional states, or Russia needed to follow the new trend that had emerged in the West, socialism.

  For Belinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin the choice of liberalism or socialism was not one that they yet had to make. Either was considered utopian by Russian standards, and it seemed more important to analyze the condition of Russia and form a theory for future action. Belinskii chose to analyze Russia on the basis of its literature, and became Russia’s most famous literary critic in the 1840s. This choice fitted well with Hegelianism, for Hegel had seen art and literature as another manifestation of the development of the Idea, whose political incarnation was the idea of freedom. Literary criticism also gave Belinskii, as a provincial doctor’s son and the most plebeian of the group, a modest means of livelihood. Herzen was a more complex story, as the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, part of the gentry and yet permanently an outsider. Arrested in 1834, he spent several years in exile, and back in Moscow he devoted himself to reading Hegel and writing novels. In 1847 he left Russia for Western Europe, wanting to see the society he had been so long praising. He never returned to Russia, constructing his own version of socialism in exile. Bakunin followed a similar trajectory. The son of wealthy nobles, he went directly from the Stankevich circle to the West in 1840, where he joined the left Hegelians. Bakunin moved quickly from an inchoate radicalism to anarchism, coining his famous slogan, “the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” By 1848 he had acquired a name in European radical circles.

  Other members of the Stankevich circle
interpreted Hegel in a liberal light; V. P. Botkin and M. N. Katkov remained typical liberals in their views, opponents of serfdom and autocracy and advocates of a constitutional monarchy. Konstantin Aksakov was another story, for his reading of Hegel and the Germans ultimately led him to a complete rejection of it as irrelevant to Russia. In his mind, Russia was fundamentally different from the West, with a unique Slavic national culture. Thus Slavophilism was born.

  The Slavophiles rejected the premise that Russia ought to follow Western models, for they believed that Russian civilization was fundamentally distinct from that of Europe. Europe was mired in egoism, whose results were evident in political strife and the impoverishment of the people in consequence of industrial capitalism. Religion offered the West no escape, for Protestantism only reinforced individualism and the Catholic Church strove mainly for political power and influence. Russia, with its traditions of the peasant community and the (supposed) harmony of noble and peasant, tsar and subject, had largely escaped from the evils that plagued the West. Peter’s westernization of Russia threatened to draw Russia into the morass, but a return to Russian values would reverse the process. Orthodoxy would continue to provide the spiritual cement, as it maintained a Christian community but refused to strive with the state for secular power. This heady mix of Orthodoxy and nationalism produced a vivid ideology but in practice was less significant, if only because it remained something of a sect. Most of the intelligentsia and the upper classes, however patriotic and sometimes even religious, remained to a greater or lesser degree Westernizers. Slavophilism was also much less conservative in practice than in theory. For all their romantic visions of the autocratic tsars of the age before Peter, the Slavophiles actually wanted autocracy tempered by a consultative legislature, as did the more moderate Westernizers. It was a different culture more than a different politics that inspired the Slavophiles.