The last of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov, again brought him success, with its family intrigue and philosophical ruminations, and finally established his position among Russian writers. His last important public appearance took place in 1880, as a speaker for the celebrations surrounding the erection of a statue of Pushkin in Moscow. Here he surprised his audience by praising Pushkin not as just a Russian writer, but one who embraced all of humanity. The speech went a long way to repairing his reputation with the intelligentsia, but did him little good with his conservative friends like Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev was by now the head of the Holy Synod, and as guardian of Orthodoxy he had begun to think Dostoevsky’s view of Christ much too vague and not sufficiently in accord with church teaching. Dostoevsky’s Christ had indeed come to resemble his Pushkin, a figure for humanity, not just for Russia. This was to be Dostoevsky’s ultimate fate as well.
The religious theme that was central to Dostoevsky’s work and thought also came to preoccupy the other of Russia’s greatest writers, Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a family of well-off landowners with lands in the rich provinces south of Moscow. Tolstoy was born in Iasnaia Poliana, the primary family estate, and it remained his principal home until his death. The family was not part of the great aristocracy that frequented the court and Petersburg salons, but was certainly of ancient date and with a distinguished record of service in the army and the civil service of the Russian empire. He grew up on the family estate under the guidance of various tutors and then spent some time as a student in the University of Kazan,’ all described in unforgettable detail in his autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. At the university he also participated in the normal life of the young nobleman, drinking, playing cards, and pursuing women far removed from polite society. He never took a degree at the university and so, restless at home, he took off for the Caucasus where he enlisted as a volunteer in an artillery unit. The outbreak of the Crimean War brought him a commission, and he saw serious fighting, not least at the siege of Sevastopol. His stories of that siege were published while it was still continuing and brought him instant fame as a writer. At war’s end he spent several years in Petersburg and Moscow, quarrelling with nearly all the important and unimportant literary figures of the time. Fundamentally he was not in sympathy with their ideas, neither with the progressivism and fascination with science and progress of the liberals nor the subservience to autocracy of the conservatives. The Slavophiles seemed to him nice people but hopelessly doctrinaire. Personally he remained a nobleman and country gentleman (not a courtier) and found most of the literati crude or self-serving or both.
In these years he made his first trip to Western Europe. Europe as a whole left him with much the same critical view as that of Dostoevsky, that Europe’s vaunted progress was just materialism, greed, and spiritual emptiness. The difference was that Tolstoy lacked Dostoevsky’s chauvinism, and had no great respect for Russian autocracy or Orthodoxy. He did not see any “Russian” answers to Europe’s dilemmas. His next project was a school for the peasant children on his estate, which he determined to run on lines derived from Rousseau’s pedagogical theories. That meant no compulsion, no punishments, work projects, and a determined attempt to engage the pupils in the subject matter. The school was eventually successful, though perhaps more due to Tolstoy’s charisma than to the efficacy of his theories. Tolstoy founded a magazine to propagate his views, in the process annoying most of the educational establishment. The school gave him considerable notoriety, and also inspired a second trip to Europe to meet famous pedagogues and inspect schools. He found European schools, especially the famous Prussian schools, to be depressing, regimented, and heavily dependent on memorization, all of which merely substantiated his prejudices. Returning from abroad early in 1861, just after the emancipation of the serfs, he found himself with a new occupation: Intermediary of the Peace for one of the districts of his home province of Tula. These were the men the assembled gentry were supposed to elect to deal with disputes between peasants and landlords over the implementation of the emancipation. The Tula gentry rejected Tolstoy as too sympathetic to the peasants, but the provincial governor, a general, overruled them and appointed Tolstoy. He served for nearly a year, most of the time in battles with his fellow intermediaries. The rumors of his unusual views caused him even more trouble, for the spreading revolutionary movement in the spring of 1862 led to a police raid on the estate. The police were looking for underground printing presses and revolutionary manifestoes, and found nothing of the sort. Tolstoy wrote to the tsar to complain of the insult to his honor and reputation, and received assurances from the ministers that there would be no consequences. Neither his neighbors in the gentry nor the government knew quite what to make of him.
The same year he married Sofya Bers, the daughter of one of his neighbors, and for the next twenty years devoted himself to his family, his school, his duties as Intermediary of the Peace, and to writing. The fruit of those years would be War and Peace, which appeared in 1865–1869, like many of Dostoevsky’s works, in Katkov’s Russian Messenger.
Tolstoy’s immense epic was devoted to Russia’s wars with Napoleon, and mainly to the French invasion of 1812. Though certainly patriotic in a general sense, Tolstoy was no nationalist. He hated Napoleon, not the French, and his view of Russia was far from rosy. He portrayed the tsar, the court, and the government as inept and removed from the realities of life and warfare. The many Germans in Russian service came in for contemptuous treatment, and only his hero Kutuzov stands above the crowd of cold and formalistic commanders. Though the book concluded with long reflections on the meaning of history (Tolstoy was particularly incensed by notions that “great men” determine the course of history), the book is not really about the events of 1812, it is about man and his fate, as Tolstoy understood it.
Figure 14. Lev Tolstoy Plowing a Field, drawing by Ilya Repin. Tretyakov Museum.
For Tolstoy the real issues of life were not political, they were moral. Pierre Bezukhov and his spiritual pilgrimage in particular incarnated the desire to act in a moral manner and to find what meaning might be hidden behind the rush of everyday life and the mindless acceptance of inherited values and institutions. Prince Andrei Bolkonskii is his opposite, the rational analyst of warfare, events, and human beings. Ultimately it is Pierre who finds happiness, first learning from the peasant Platon Karataev and his humility and faith in God, and then in family life with Natasha Rostova. Much of Tolstoy was in Pierre, not only his experiments with schemes to benefit the peasants on his estate but also in his spiritual search.
After the success of War and Peace Tolstoy turned again to pedagogy and several schemes for new novels. The outcome was Anna Karenina in 1875–1877. This was the story of the aristocratic Anna, her lover Vronskii and her bureaucrat husband, contrasted with Levin and his wife Kitty, again a portrait of Tolstoy, a happy family life contrasted with Anna’s disastrous affair. While he was writing the book, however, Tolstoy went through the final and deepest spiritual crisis of his life.
Tolstoy’s was a religious crisis. Haunted by death and the problem of the meaning of life, he turned to philosophy and religion, but could not make out which religion he should follow. He first turned to Orthodoxy, the religion in which he had been brought up, mainly on the grounds that it was the religion of the peasantry and he wanted to remain close to them and their wisdom. Orthodoxy, however, did not satisfy him. The liturgy left him cold, and he disliked the enthusiastic support of the church for the state and all its doings – warfare, oppression, and capital punishment – all already unacceptable in his mind.
Finally in 1879–80 he began to read the Bible intensively, particularly the Gospels, and came to the conclusion that the core of the teaching of Christ was non-resistance to evil. (“I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matt. 5:39) In Tolstoy’s mind, everything flowed from tha
t principle. It meant that the state, in fighting crime or foreign enemies, was basically un-Christian, and that the only proper stance was radical pacifism and a sort of Christian anarchism. He developed these ideas in a series of long tracts, the Confession that recounted his inner development toward these views as well as accounts of what he saw as true Christianity. Needless to say, none of these works could be published in Russia though they circulated widely underground and attracted to him a small but devoted following.
Tolstoy did not abandon literature, in 1899 he published his last major novel, Resurrection, about a prostitute wrongly convicted of a murder and her spiritual rebirth (this book was banned in Russia) and he wrote Khadji Murat, a novella of the Caucasian Wars. Shorter works like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilich as well as innumerable articles on public issues gradually made him the most famous person in the country, and the most famous Russian in the world.
Tolstoy’s views and his stubborn defense of them created problems with the church and the state and with his family as well. His wife thought that he was neglecting their welfare, though by the 1890s the changing book market in Russia meant that he, like other authors, began to realize more substantial returns on his many works. The Revolution of 1905 was a hard time for him as well, since he was opposed to the autocracy but did not believe in the violence used against it, much less the violence of the state against strikers, revolutionaries, and peasant rebels. Finally in 1910, at the age of eighty-two, he decided to leave everything and lead the life of a religious recluse. His trip on an unheated third class carriage in winter proved too much for him. He died in the house of the railroad stationmaster in a small town only a few hundred miles south of Iasnaia Poliana.
By the time of Tolstoy’s death Russian literature and culture had passed into new phases, with which he had little sympathy. He was the last survivor of the greatest age of Russian literature, and perhaps of Russian culture in general. The arts as well as the sciences had put Russia on the map of world culture. For the first time the vast Russian empire was known for something other than size and military power.
14 Russia as an Empire
The Russian Empire’s foreign wars over the centuries laid the foundation for its expansion to include the whole of northern Eurasia. Of course by British standards, the results were not impressive. Most of the Russian Empire lay in Siberia, the largest part of which was seemingly impenetrable forest and tundra. Russia’s newest acquisitions in Central Asia were small in population and were poor – no equivalent to India or even Burma. The resultant state included extensive areas on its borders with non-Russian populations, effectively two empires, a traditional land empire in Europe and an attempted imitation of the British example in Central Asia. In both west and south internal and foreign politics were inextricably intertwined.
Nicholas I had understood that Russia’s empire had very limited possibilities for expansion. After 1828 its main effort went into subduing the Caucasian mountain peoples already within Russia rather than the conquest of new territory. In Central Asia the army also concentrated on strengthening the existing frontier and control of the Kazakhs of the steppe while making no serious attempt at expansion. Even in the Balkans, Nicholas had pursued a status quo policy, preferring to maintain Russian influence in a unitary Ottoman state rather than run the risks of partition schemes. Even this modest policy had been too much for Britain and France, but it reflected the tsar’s strategic prudence as well as his tactical blunders. The new situation after Crimea brought different possibilities.
The treaty of Paris not only ended the Crimean War but put an end to hopes of Russian influence on the Ottomans, leaving Russia with only the local nationalist movements in Serbia and Bulgaria as potential allies. Bands of insurgents with plans for democratic republics, the Balkan nationalists were unlikely allies for the Russian empire, and the international and military position of Russia, weakened by defeat and saddled with debts and an enormous deficit, rendered Russia’s European policy essentially passive. The need for stability on the European border also arose from the feeling that the Russian Empire’s boundary in the west was very difficult to defend, running an enormous length through territories poorly served by communications. The answer would be railroads, but they took a long time to build. Threatening noises from Britain and France during the Polish revolt in 1863–64 caused nightmares in St. Petersburg, but they came to nothing, in large part because of the firm Russian alliance with Prussia, now under its new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian alliance meant that the western boundary was largely secure, especially as Bismarck defeated Russia’s rivals, Austria and then Napoleon III, establishing in the process a powerful new state in the unified imperial Germany, for the time being Russia’s friend.
Preoccupation in Europe with Germany and Italy and the pacific policies of Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, secured peace in the 1860s. Russia could gradually reform itself and also begin to rebuild its army on more modern lines, but crisis in the Balkans soon created a new dilemma. The Serbian and Bulgarian revolutionaries had repeatedly attempted insurgencies inside Ottoman territories, calling on the Slavic and Orthodox peoples to rise against their Turkish masters. The response was increasingly savage reprisals, until in 1875 the Serbs of Bosnia revolted again and were able to hold their own for several months before the Ottomans crushed the revolt, in the process perpetrating the largest genocide in modern European history up to World War I. The next year the Bulgarians rose as well, and Turkish irregular units exterminated entire villages, causing even English public opinion to waver in its support of the Turks. Here was a chance for Russia to reassert itself and secure influence in the Balkans, and in 1877 Russia proposed to the Turks an autonomous status for the rebel areas. The Ottomans refused, and Russia declared war. The war that ensued was bloody but relatively short. The Turks had first-class fortresses, were well supplied with European weapons, and fought with their usual courage and determination. The Russian army, though larger, was still in the process of reformation and hampered by old-fashioned and unimaginative generals. After a series of bloody assaults on the Turkish forts, the Russians finally pushed their way over the mountains and arrived near Istanbul in 1878. They then made a treaty with the Turks that established Bulgaria as the main Slavic state in the Balkans, one that would presumably become a Russian client. This alarmed Britain and Austria, and the result was the treaty of Berlin, which created a much smaller Bulgaria with a German monarch. Austria was allowed to take Bosnia as a protectorate. This was Bismarck’s work, and it was a qualified defeat for Russia after all the sacrifices and heroism of the war.
The Russian Empire had become a conglomerate of two very different sorts of empire, each posing its own problems for St. Petersburg. At the same time as the failure in the Balkans, a new empire arose in Central Asia, where Russian generals overwhelmed the local khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The first was entirely annexed to the empire, while the latter, much reduced in territory, became Russian protectorates. By the 1880s all of Central Asia was directly or indirectly under Russian rule. In explicit imitation of British India, Russia set out to build a modern colonial empire.
On the western border, the issues were mainly those of nationality, not colonialism. The Poles posed the chief national issue throughout the nineteenth century and, after mid-century, it was the Jews. For quite different reasons, neither Poles nor Jews fit well into the imperial structure. The Poles were seen in the government as a hostile element, and for many government officials the Jews were not able to assimilate and exploited the local peasantry. The Polish revolts and the pogroms directed against Jews added an element of violence absent in relations with the other European minorities of the empire. Finland, in contrast, was quiet and largely loyal to the tsar until the 1890s. Both Poland and Finland were important to a large extent for military reasons, as they both formed part of the crucial western frontier. The economies of both western borderlands contributed to the ov
erall prosperity of the empire, but Russians had few investments there in either land or industry. In population together the Poles and Finns were less than ten percent of the total population of the empire. The largest non-Russian group in the European part of the empire was actually the Ukrainians (about seventeen percent), whose ambiguous ethnicity and national consciousness kept them on the margins of Russian politics until 1905.
The integration of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire had depended since the eighteenth century on the inclusion of local elites in the imperial power structure. The ruling circles of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg were very far from uniformly Russian. Prominent Germans included Nicholas’ minister of finances Georg Kankrin, his foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode and the head of the Third Section, Alexander von Benckendorf. Among the Ukrainians in the imperial elite were minister of internal affairs Viktor Kochubei and the victorious field marshal Ivan Paskevich, the viceroy of Warsaw after 1830. Finlanders were important in the army and navy, and two of them (Arvid Adlolf Etholén and Johan Hampus Furuhjelm) were governors of Alaska in its Russian period. The diplomatic core had several princes Lieven, Baron Nicolai, and a host of others, as did the court and the army. Only the Polish nobility, loyal to its traditions of Polish statehood, held back from Russian service, aside from a few prominent exceptions.
The reliance on noble supporters of the Romanov dynasty, so successful earlier on, had one shortcoming. In the course of the century the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism, however slow by European standards, changed the society of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declining economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the empire. Businessmen, on the other hand, in Finland, Poland, and other western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all went down to destruction together in 1917.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 30