By the 1840s these cultural impulses, Official Nationality and Slavophilism, Westernizing liberalism and radicalism had crystallized into distinct ideologies with their more or less numerous followers. Most of them were centered in Moscow, while St. Petersburg remained rather quiet politically in the wake of the Decembrist defeat. Around the middle of the decade, however, new voices appeared, also small in number but which revealed some of the outlines of the future. These voices were heard in the St. Petersburg living room of a minor government official, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevskii.
Petrashevskii and his followers represented a different social type and a different ideology from the Decembrists or the Stankevich circle. None of them came from the aristocracy, and some were very recently noblemen. Petrashevskii himself was the son of a military doctor born into a family of Ukrainian priests. Only his father’s military rank conferred nobility on Petrashevskii, and this background was virtually identical to that of his most famous listener, Russia’s great writer Fyodor Dostoevskii. Yet the Petrashevskii group did not include marginal outsiders. Most of the members had attended the Lycée in Tsarskoe Selo, the same institution that had earlier produced many Decembrists, Pushkin and his aristocratic friends, and a large number of aristocrats and dignitaries of the empire. In the late 1840s they were young men serving at the beginning level in government offices, but rather than climbing the career ladder they were spending their time reading economic and political tracts under Petrashevskii’s leadership. Very soon they turned to the works of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and declared themselves socialists. Fourier was not a revolutionary, as he believed that the foundation of utopian colonies without private property and based on joint labor would quickly spread to found a new social order. As many American followers proved, this idea was an illusion, but in 1845 that conclusion was still in the future. Petrashevskii’s group was convinced it would work but they realized that in Russian conditions they could not operate, and they needed first to secure legal order and political freedom. Debates and divisions over tactics soon surfaced, with some of the group favoring a concentration on propaganda while others looked to organize a revolt. The European revolutions of 1848 provided a stimulus to the idea of revolt, but also to government surveillance. The Third Section planted three spies in the group and in April 1849, they were all arrested.
The government’s treatment of the Petrashevskii group differed sharply from the general legality with which it had treated the Decembrists twenty-four years earlier. After months of interrogation, during which the accused were not informed of the charges against them until very late, they were placed before a military court though there were only a few officers among them. The court found them guilty of plotting against the life of the tsar, of organizing a secret society, and of planning a revolt. Only the last charge was substantiated in the evidence, and only for some of the accused. The point of the first charge, plotting to kill the tsar, was that it alone in Russian law carried the death penalty. Thus forty of the defendants were sentenced to death, including Petrashevskii and Dostoevskii. They were then taken to the place of execution, and the first three were tied to stakes before a firing squad. At that point, an officer appeared with the announcement that the death sentences had all been reduced to hard labor in Siberia, and the prisoners were taken on the spot to the road east. This gratuitous piece of cruelty had been part of the traditions of the monarchy – the clemency of the tsar instead of death – but by 1849 this was out of place with the culture of the times.
Thus Russia reached the middle of the century with autocracy and serfdom intact, but there was ever-growing ferment under the surface, both in society at large and among the ruling elite. Change was inevitable, but Nicholas was immoveable. The downfall of his system came from the area he considered his greatest success, foreign policy.
Russia’s foreign policy was intimately bound up with its imperial structure and its overall imperial aims. Along the Western boundary, Russia was a status quo power; its only aim was to maintain control over what it already held. In Finland and the Baltic provinces, this aim was easily satisfied. Though Nicholas never called the Finnish diet, the rest of the autonomous Finnish government remained in place and built up the country, the new capital in Helsinki with its modern university and other institutions. The Baltic provinces were quiet as well, with a newly free peasantry and a combination of imperial central and local noble government. The problem in the west was Poland, for the 1815 Constitution provided for a diet, a Polish army, and a local government only generally subject to Russian control. Increasing conflict between Warsaw and St. Petersburg and the impact of the July Revolution of 1830 in France led to an uprising in November 1830 and a full-scale war. The Russian army crushed the Polish revolt and Nicholas abolished the constitution, retaining only the Polish legal system under Russian administrators. Nicholas warned the Poles that they must give up the idea of separate statehood. Eighteen years later the revolution in Germany and Hungary brought the tsar back to the fray, for the Habsburgs, defeated by the Hungarian rebels, called on him to rescue them. Nicholas marched his army into Hungary, the first Russian military expedition in Europe since 1814, and the Hungarians had to surrender. Nicholas would pay dearly for this act of monarchical solidarity.
In the south, Russia confronted a situation infinitely more complicated if ultimately less dangerous. In Alexander’s reign Russia had taken control of Georgia and then conquered Azerbaidzhan from Iran. An Iranian attempt at revenge in 1826 led to a short war that brought Russia a more defensible border that included the khanate of Erevan, an Iranian vassal state on part of the territory of medieval Armenia. After the end of the war in 1828 Russian policy varied in each of these areas. The most obvious partner was the numerous Georgian nobility, and the Russians set out to include them in the empire’s elite. To do this, the new rulers first had to reorganize the Georgian nobility along more “European” lines, abolishing the various types of dependency and vassalage within the nobility, making all nobles equal. New schools appeared, with curricula the same as Russian gymnasia, and the higher Georgian aristocracy entered the elite schools in St. Petersburg. The viceroys of the Caucasus even set up operas and introduced other European entertainments and forms of sociability to Europeanize the “oriental” Georgians. Russian rule affected the Armenians of Georgia as well. The small Armenian nobility of Georgia acquired the same status as Russian and Georgian nobles, and Russian administrators freed the largely Armenian townspeople from serfdom. In the khanate of Erevan, as in the Azeri khanates, most land belonged to the khans and now came under the Russian state. Thus the peasantry continued on their lands, paying taxes to the tsar rather than the khans, while much of Muslim elite left for Iran. The khanate of Erevan was unique in all the lands once under the Armenian kings, for on its territory was the great monastery at Echmiadzin and the residence of the Katolikos (head) of the Armenian Church. The Russian administration granted the Armenian Church, in spite of its dogmatic disagreements with Orthodoxy, the right to maintain an extensive system of schools under its own supervision, a privilege highly unusual in the Russian empire. Even more important, the khanate in 1828 was only about twenty percent Armenian: most of the population were Kurdish or Turkic nomads. Under Russian rule Armenians from Ottoman and Iranian territories migrated to the Erevan area, so that they formed a majority by the end of the century. In other words, in Transcaucasia the Russian Empire once again relied on the local nobility where it could find one, and in its absence on the Armenian Church and the local notables of the Azeri towns.
Transcaucasia was fairly quiet once Russia established control. The lands on the north slopes of the Caucasus range, however, were another story. The North Caucasus was the domain of a series of semi-nomadic mountain peoples, the most important of whom were the Circassians and the many tribes of Dagestan. Starting in 1817 the Russian army began to build new lines of forts and move south toward the high mountains, encountering continuous resistance from the
Circassians. Around 1830 the center of warfare shifted east to Dagestan, to the Murids, the “disciples” of a purified Islam. In 1834 the Avar warrior Shamil became their leader, taking the war against the Russians into Chechnia and the northern parts of Dagestan while conflict with the Circassians still continued farther west. By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 the Russian army had pushed Shamil into his stronghold in the high mountains of Dagestan, but had subdued neither him nor the Circassians. This was not a war of great engagements and Russia never had more than 60,000 troops in the entire area before 1856. It was a guerilla war of raids and counter-raids, of kidnapping and the siege of small remote forts and villages. In many ways its importance came not from local events but from its proximity to the main front of Russian foreign policy, the Ottoman Empire.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had been the main direction of Russian expansion. By the time of the Greek revolt of 1821, however, Russian policy faced a number of dilemmas. The new Russian boundaries in the West created the need to defend a vast expanse that had few roads and no natural defenses along the frontier. Russia had an army of 800,000 men – the largest army in Europe – but most of it was deployed on the western border and could not be easily moved south in case of war. Further territory in the Balkans would be very far away from Russia’s home bases and even more difficult to control and defend. Prudence dictated a stationary policy and the maintenance of existing boundaries in the south. At the same time, the Christian subjects of the Turks were becoming increasingly restive, and all of them were Orthodox, potential allies in any imaginable conflict. Yet they were also influenced by the political events in Western Europe and the Greek rebels imagined their future under some type of constitutional monarchy, anathema to both Alexander and Nicholas. Russia could also not afford to let the Ottoman Empire collapse, for it was not the only power interested in the area. France had long possessed major commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean and in 1830 began the conquest of Algeria. Even more serious was British rivalry, for Britain, completing the conquest of India, had become the first world superpower and considered itself privileged to dictate the shape of the world wherever it chose. The Anglo-Russian rivalry began to turn into a long-standing conflict, an early “cold war” that lasted until 1907. A collapse of the Ottomans could lead to British or French control of the Balkans, so Nicholas preferred to maintain a weak neighbor under Russian influence, rather like Catherine’s policy toward Poland before 1788.
In this situation Russia tried to work with its potential rivals. Britain agreed to help the Greeks and an Anglo-Russian naval force sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino (1827). Turkey then declared war on Russia, and in 1828–29 the Russian army moved into the Balkans, going nearly to Constantinople. The resultant treaty forced Turkey to recognize Greek independence and autonomy for Serbia and the Rumanian principalities. Russian influence in Turkey now seemed predominant, a situation that was not to the liking of either France or Britain. For the time being the rise of Mohammed Ali in Ottoman Egypt and his establishment of a de facto independent state were more important as they threatened the collapse of the whole empire. Thus Russia supported Britain against France in 1840 to uphold the Ottoman Sultan against his subject in Egypt. For one last time Russian and British interests in the Ottoman Empire coincided.
A new element entered the scene with the 1848 revolutions in Europe, for Louis Napoleon was elected president of the new French republic. He soon proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, and set out to restore the grandeur of France as it had been under the rule of his great uncle. He also needed the support of Catholic conservatives in France who were loyal to the Bourbons and suspicious of the Bonapartes. Looking for areas to affirm French power, Napoleon III elevated an obscure dispute over the control of the holy places in Palestine between Catholics and Orthodox into a major international issue. Nicholas was contemptuous of Napoleon III and slow to recognize the seriousness of British interests in the Ottoman Empire. Thus he presented the Turks with an ultimatum early in 1853 that led to war.
The Crimean War was actually rather inglorious for most of the participants. Though the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turkish navy at Sinop right at the start, it was no match for the British and French navies. The Russian army did well against the Turks in Asia Minor, but in the Crimea it was pushed back and forced to defend the main base at Sevastopol. The Russian Black Sea fleet had to be sunk to close the harbor to enemy ships. Russia had massive forces in theory but could not get them to the Crimea quickly and could not release enough of them in any case with long frontiers to defend. Obsolete weapons further complicated their task.
In spite of these obstacles, the Russian army and navy managed to hold Sevastopol for 349 days under intense bombardment. The Anglo-French forces were able to beat off Russian attempts to relieve the siege albeit with numerous catastrophes of which the charge of the Light Brigade was only the most famous. Sanitation and medical care were appalling on both sides, relieved only by the English hospitals reorganized by Florence Nightingale and the surgical work of the great Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. As the slaughter continued at Sevastopol, the British navy tried to penetrate Russian defenses in the Baltic, but, frustrated by the powerful Russian fortresses at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, all it could do was burn Finnish coastal towns and capture the unfinished fort at Bomarsund in the Aland Islands. Other British ships attacked Russian monasteries in the White Sea and even tried to take Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. A squad of Cossacks beat them off.
During the war Austria’s open support of Russia’s enemies surprised Nicholas in view of his actions in 1849 and contributed to Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Normally friendly Prussia took an ambiguous position. Then in February, 1855, Nicholas I died. In September 1855, Sevastopol fell after the French army took the Malakhov kurgan, the heights overlooking the city, and in November the key Turkish fort of Kars in Asia Minor fell to the Russians. These events and the death of Nicholas set the stage for a peace conference in Paris, which ended the war.
As a military defeat, the outcome was hardly catastrophic for the Russians. Russia agreed to give up its claim of a legal right to protection of the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, to give up its Black Sea fleet (in any case at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor), and to surrender a small strip of land on the Danube delta to Rumania. Only the second was a major concession, and naturally Russia made it its eventual aim to acquire the right to rebuild the fleet. For the time being there were more pressing issues, for the real defeat was in the revelation that the system of Nicholas I had failed to preserve Russia’s position as supreme land power in Europe that seemed guaranteed in 1815. The huge army could not move, it was too expensive for the treasury and its cost meant that it could not be modernized. Serfdom prevented the army from going over to a reserve system, as no one wanted serfs with military training. Nicholas’ army, his navy, and the state that maintained them had failed. This was the signal for reform, the most basic upheaval in Russian life between the time of Peter the Great and 1917.
10 Culture and Autocracy
One of the ironies of the reign of Nicholas I is that his unrelenting autocracy presided over the first great age of Russian culture. Nicholas realized to some extent the growing importance of Russian culture and the extremely high level it achieved in a short time, but he was more concerned to direct it in the proper conservative channels than to celebrate it. He abrogated the more tolerant censorship system of Alexander I in favor of one with the emphasis on combating subversion in religion and politics while retaining the paternalistic aspects of the older laws. The new structure remained under the Ministry of Education, but included a greater role for the bureaucracy and the more ominous Third Section. Its head, Alexander von Benckendorff, exercised erratic and arbitrary authority over publications while clumsily trying to encourage the appearance of pro-government material. Even with writers and artists well disposed toward the state, this policy was l
argely a failure, for Russian society was beginning to grow away from court and state tutelage, a process too fundamental for the actions of the tsar to stop. Some of the changes were even the result of state policy, particularly the support of the universities and the gymnasia, which produced a much larger and educated public, eager for the products of the new Russian culture. Another factor was the growth of commercial capitalism, which gradually brought into being a market for books and journals, concentrated in Petersburg and Moscow but slowly spreading to the provinces as well.
The cultural explosion took place in a number of areas. Painting and the visual arts remained largely bound to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and thus indirectly to the court and its network of patronage. The Academy continued to favor large historical, classical, and Biblical canvases over the increasingly popular landscape and genre painting. It continued to supply paintings for official building projects like St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, or the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Nevertheless the Academy also offered for its students and graduates some possibility of travel and long residence in Italy, and many painters and sculptors took advantage of the opportunity. Karl Briullov, the best of the academy painters, returned from Italy and obtained many contracts for the decoration of churches and palaces as well as acquiring court and aristocratic patrons. Alexander Ivanov, in contrast stayed in Italy to avoid the halls of the Academy and fell under the influence of German romantic painting in its religious guise (the “Nazarenes”). The main result of his Italian years was an enormous painting, “Christ Appearing to the People,” which showed Nazarene influence but rejected the pseudo-medievalism of the Germans to depict the people whom Christ saved rather than a hieratic portrait of the Savior. Ivanov’s innovations seem minor today, but in the world of Nicholas I he had a great impact.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 21