The debate over Dead Souls was a harbinger of the future: literature was fast becoming a battleground of political and cultural ideology. It was changing in other respects, for Zhukovskii left for Europe in 1842 in search of better health and never returned to Russia. He had no replacement at the court, and Russian literature no longer had a patron with the ear of the tsar himself. By the 1840s the “fat journals” pioneered by Senkovskii and Pushkin fought lively and vituperative battles over Gogol’, Lermontov, Goethe, and Georges Sand. The most powerful of the younger writers was Fyodor Dostoevskii, whose early works took up the thread of Gogol’ in his Petersburg stories, with his own tales of impoverished seamstresses and other little people of the great metropolis. The commanding figure of the decade in criticism was the critic Vissarion Belinskii, the main spokesman of the Westernizers.
Belinskii came to be seen in Russia as the archetypical “committed” critic who judged works of art by largely utilitarian standards and by their significance for the reformation of Russian society. This judgment placed him in the straightjacket of the conceptions of a later generation, for Belinskii’s view of art was essentially historical, a view derived from his Hegelian youth. Belinskii got from Hegel the idea that art was one of the many manifestations of the Idea in history, alongside philosophy or the development of the state. Art was, in his words, “thinking in images,” and thus was the equivalent of political or social thought in another form. Since the development of the Idea in society was the progress of freedom, art in Russia should reflect the movement of the country toward that ideal. Art that did not was condemned to ultimate insignificance and was considered bad art to boot. This theoretical framework gave him a basis for his total rejection of older Russian culture, his qualified approval of the eighteenth century, and his enthusiastic approval of Pushkin, Lermontov and particularly Gogol’. In Gogol’ he saw a relentless critic of the existing order of Russian society, the satirist of nobility and state alike. His appreciation of Gogol’ was only partly correct, for Gogol’s satire came from a conservative position with a religious basis, the idea that Russia was not yet living up to its potential to create a society profoundly different from the West. Here Belinskii parted company with Gogol’ entirely, for the critic was a firm Westernizer. To him Russian society was only acceptable insofar as it approached the standard of an idealized West, a West that itself needed to be transformed by the French utopian socialism that became Belinskii’s credo.
The discussion of literature was to a large extent a discussion of political and social issues that could not otherwise be aired in print. Eventually they broke out into the open, or partly so. Gogol’s publication of his conservative manifesto, Selections from Correspondence with Friends, in 1847 created huge controversies, muffled by censorship, for he seemed to be not just supporting the existing state and church but losing faith in literature itself. Belinskii’s response, the letter to Gogol’ in 1847, became a classic example of liberal and radical thought in Russia for the next two generations. “The public…looks upon Russian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality.” In Belinskii’s mind, “Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism…but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity.” The Russia of his day needed to start with the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment and the establishment of legal order. Belinskii’s life was perhaps as important as his views, for he was the first important example of the Russian intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society that took Russian culture out of the hands of the nobility. Himself the grandson of a priest and the son of a military doctor, he was only technically a noble because of his father’s promotion in the army. He survived, and survived very poorly on his income from his articles and editiorial work in the journals where he published, most importantly The Contemporary, originally Pushkin’s journal and a publication that would have a remarkable future.
Belinskii’s literary tastes and views pointed to the future in other ways. One of his early friendships was with Ivan Turgenev, again a writer of noble origins and some wealth. Turgenev had come to Moscow from his provincial estate and made acquaintance with the Stankevich circle that included Herzen and Bakunin, whom Turgenev came to know better when he studied in Berlin. On his return to Russia in 1841 Turgenev became close friends with Belinskii, a friendship that lasted until the critic’s death in 1848. Turgenev shared Belinskii’s support of Western culture and his critical view of Russia, if not the critic’s radicalism. The great event of Turgenev’s youth was his meeting with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot in 1843, who came to St. Petersburg as one of the stars of the Italian company that was to have a major effect on Russian opera. The passion seems to have been mainly on Turgenev’s side, but it unlocked his creative powers. In his middle thirties he found his voice, first in his play “A Month in the Country,” and then in his series of stories of rural life, A Hunter’s Sketches (1847–1852). The Sketches, with their portraits of eccentric and domineering nobles and their very human (but unsentimentalized) serfs, caused a sensation. Turgenev’s were the not the first attempts to describe the life of the peasantry, but they were both the most effective by far and under their mild surface they conveyed the poverty and humiliation in which the great mass of the Russian people, the peasants, lived. The son of a despotic and sadistic mother who mistreated her serfs as well as her children, Turgenev knew what it meant to live under arbitrary power. The publication of such work in the darkest period of the reign of Nicholas was a major act of civil courage, but ironically it was not the Sketches that earned him his first brush with the authorities.
In 1852, just as the publication of the Hunter’s Sketches was proceeding, Gogol’ died. Turgenev had been acquainted with Gogol’ but was not a close friend. As a fellow writer, however, he admired him intensely, and was so moved by his death that he quickly wrote a short essay about Gogol’ and his significance for Russia and its literature. In St. Petersburg the publisher was afraid it would not pass censorship for there were many conservative officials who did not share the tsar’s approval of Gogol’. Turgenev sent the essay to Moscow, where it was approved and appeared in print. Turgenev was then arrested for violating the censorship rules, a charge that was legally dubious, but convincingly presented to Nicholas by the Third Section. The punishment was a month in prison followed by exile to his estate, time that he used to write another novella. The incident only confirmed Turgenev’s oppositional attitude to the autocracy.
Turgenev was extremely sensitive to the trends of Russian society and thought and his stories of peasant life prefigured by only a few years the great debate over serfdom that erupted after the Crimean War. He was also aware of another trend in Russian culture, the turn away from philosophy, German or otherwise, toward a fascination with the natural sciences, a trend that would also come to the surface only after Crimea. This fascination did not grow in sterile soil, for the universities founded under Alexander I were fully equipped with faculties of the natural sciences. Until the middle of the nineteenth century they competently taught the achievements of European science adding nothing of importance to that body of learning, with one enormous exception: mathematics. In 1829–30, the same years as the publication of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Nikolai Lobachevskii inaugurated a revolution in geometry in a series of articles in the official journal of the University of Kazan’, where he taught and eventually became rector. Lobachevskii’s idea was very simple: all geometry since the time of Euclid had included the assumption that two parallel lines do not meet. Suppose you reverse the assumption: what sort of geometry would you construct? This Lobachevskii proceeded to do, a discovery so bizarre that it earned him no recognition in his lifetime. Europeans with similar ideas, Christian Gauss and the young Hungarian Janos Bolyai, had never developed them, for Gauss thought them too odd to publish. He did not want to risk his own reputation and discouraged Bolyai from taking steps to make his suggestions better know
n. It was left to Lobachevskii, in the obscurity of provincial Russia, to work out the notion. Unknown to almost everyone, Russia had its first major scientific discovery, but Russian science would not come into its own until the 1860s, and it would be Turgenev who would bring science and its implications to the public for the first time. The new fascination with the natural sciences also brought a new current of thought into Russian radical politics.
11 The Era of the Great Reforms
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War caused a tremendous political shock in the country. It was not the scale of the defeat but its revelation of the weakness of a political system that prized its unique conservatism on the European scene and its supposed military might above all. It was the autocracy that was defeated, all the more so because the long siege of Sevastopol demonstrated to many Russians that the army still had the spirit to fight, a spirit hampered by the backwardness of society and government. Russia’s backwardness was not only the result of the slow evolution of economy and society under the tutelage of Tsar Nicholas. The greatest problem was that the world was changing very quickly in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the most rapid changes were taking place in Great Britain, Russia’s primary imperial rival. Railroads were transforming the landscape in all of Western Europe and the United States, building on and stimulating the rapid modernization of iron and steel production, thereby raising output to new heights. Besides railroads, all sorts of machines came into existence – improved steam engines, telegraph equipment, and huge metal-hulled ships. Britain and other powers imported increasing amounts of food and raw materials from colonies and distant countries in the Western hemisphere, sending out masses of cotton and wool cloth, machinery, and innumerable consumer goods. Society evolved to support all this growth, with high-speed presses to produce daily newspapers and rapidly expanding educational systems to produce engineers, lawyers, politicians, and an educated public to use the new products. In this new world, Russia was lagging behind. The reformers in the government realized all this and saw that Russia needed the new production techniques and a new economy simply to survive as a major power. They also realized that technology alone was not enough: Tsar Nicholas had built railroads, but had not succeeded in transforming the Russian economy. Russia would need a new legal system, a modernized and expanded educational system, and even some forms of public discussion of major issues. What Russia could not stand, the reformers believed, was a new political system. Most of them admired the emerging constitutional regimes in Europe, but believed that Russia was far too primitive with its illiterate peasantry, outmoded agriculture, and thin layer of educated people. Such a society could not sustain a free, constitutional government. For the foreseeable future, it would have to remain an autocracy.
With the death of Tsar Nicholas in February 1855, a new regime came to power with his son Alexander. Alexander II would preside over the greatest changes in Russia since the time of Peter the Great – changes that brought the country into the modern world, hesitantly and only partially, but nevertheless across the threshold toward industrial capitalism and the beginnings of a modern urban society. The new tsar was as often against as for these changes, and had to be pushed all the way, but nevertheless he did allow himself to be convinced and to make the decisive moves. Ultimately the tsar decreed the reforms, but like the reformers he intended to preserve autocracy intact and keep society, even upper-class society, out of political decisions. This was a difficult and ultimately impossible goal, for Russian educated society emerged now for the first time as a force in the political and social process, even if it was a force of limited power. Its emergence, even if modest, was a revolution in Russian politics and a revolution with wide implications.
At first the initiative for reform came from the government. During the Crimean War, however, Herzen and other émigré radicals had raised their voices, and inside the country even conservatives among the gentry and intelligentsia began to circulate memoranda proposing reforms of various kinds. None of this had any effect, as these groups were too small and had little echo even among the educated sectors of the social elite. The situation changed with the Peace of Paris in March 1856, which put an end to the war. The war had revealed that the unreformed autocracy was no longer capable of maintaining Russia’s position in the world, and would have to develop a more modern economy. Serfdom was the main obstacle. Soon after the signing of the peace, Tsar Alexander spoke to the assembled gentry of the province of Moscow (that is, to much of the top aristocracy) in his first major public pronouncement. The mere fact of such a pronouncement was unusual and the content even more so. He warned the nobles that the peasant question now had to be addressed. It was much better, he told them, that it be resolved from above than from below. In other words, the state had to reform the countryside or the nobles would face a peasant revolt.
The virtually simultaneous relaxation of censorship meant that the issues raised in the tsar’s speech as well as other pressing concerns could now be addressed, albeit cautiously. Debate appeared in unexpected places such as the publications of the Ministry of the Navy, headed by the tsar’s more liberal brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. While Alexander’s government, or at least part of it, was convinced of the need for reform, every step met opposition from conservatives within the corridors of power and also from the gentry, who now could express their views publicly and still had access to the court and the important ministries. The first committee appointed by the tsar in January 1857, to deal with the peasant questions was thus secret. The reformers in the government showed their hand only at the end of the year, when the Ministry of the Interior sent a memorandum to one of the provincial governors ordering him to require the local gentry to form committees to provide suggestions on the emancipation of the serfs, its desirability, and paths to achieve it. The Ministry published the memorandum in its official printed register, and now the gentry and the educated part of the population knew what was afoot.
Not surprisingly most noblemen were against the idea of emancipation, and hoped that if it did come, all the land would remain in the hands of the gentry. This would be a landless emancipation like that earlier in the Baltic provinces, and peasants would have to rent their land from the gentry or go to work as day laborers. The government reformers did not like this idea, for they feared that it would produce a vast landless proletariat that would be the source of endless revolts and upheavals. Instead the committee, blandly called the “Editorial Committee,” proposed that the peasants be freed with land, for which they would have to pay the landowners, and furthermore they would have to pass through a period of temporary obligation to the owners of the estates. The redemption payments would be spread over sixty years, the state giving the gentry a lump sum that the peasants were to repay to the treasury. This plan evoked intense hostility among the gentry, who thought it would undermine their livelihood and their place in Russian society. Throughout 1859–60 battles raged in the committee, in government ministries, and the court itself.
The reformers were a powerful and well-connected group. Much of the responsibility fell on the Ministry of the Interior, whose vice-minister was Nikolai Miliutin. Miliutin’s brother Dmitrii, a professor at the General Staff Academy and adjutant to the Minister of War, had come to the attention of Grand Dutchess Elena Pavlovna, and in the 1850s attended her “Thursdays,” the weekly gathering of her friends and allies. In the new atmosphere, the Grand Dutchess’s salon added political reform to its agenda, and Nikolai Miliutin, a well-educated and progressive younger official, joined his brother in the Grand Dutchess’s good graces. Both Miliutins had strong reformist views, and Nikolai was appointed to the Editorial Committee on its inception. In the committee Nikolai Miliutin could count on the support of its chairman, General Iakov Rostovtsev, an officer whose career had not been in the field but in the role of adjutant to Tsar Nicholas and who had been close to Alexander in his years as heir to the throne. During the Crimean War he rather unexpectedly be
came a strong reformer and exploited his access to the new tsar to the fullest. Grand Duchess Elena also monitored the progress of reform, and her network of informants at the palace insured that the reformers knew who was trying to influence the tsar and in what direction. Dmitrii Miliutin, after several years in the Caucasus, in 1860 went on to head the Ministry of War. With Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich in charge of the Navy, both military ministries as well the Minstry of the Interior were in the reform camp. The reformers were a tightly interconnected group, well educated, highly placed, and ready for action.
Figure 10. Alexander II and his dog Milord.
At the beginning of 1860 General Rostovtsev died suddenly, but the committee continued its work moving on toward a reformist solution. Then in September the tsar appointed his brother Konstantin to chair the committee, and by that act ensured an outcome favorable to emancipation. The result was a swift conclusion to support the original idea of emancipation with land for the peasants on the basis of redemption payments, as the reformers had proposed two years before. The proposal went to the Council of State, the highest body of government, which debated the proposal for several weeks. On February 17, it voted against the proposal. The majority wanted more land for the gentry and the Council sent the two opinions on to the tsar, the majority against and the minority for emancipation with land for the peasants. The fate of twenty million serfs hung in the balance, for Russia was an autocracy, and the tsar had no obligation to accept the majority of the Council of State, or the minority for that matter. After two days of deliberation, Alexander II chose to accept the minority report and signed the decree of emancipation. In the tsar’s mind, disaster loomed if he went with the majority: the peasants should not be made “homeless and harmful to the landowners as well as to the state.” The government decided to wait until the beginning of Lent to announce the decree, and it was read in churches everywhere in the country beginning on March 5/17, 1861. The hope was that the Lenten atmosphere would encourage a quiet response to the decree among the people. Whatever the reason, there were only a few minor disturbances among the peasantry.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 23