Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  When a stroll in the Summer Garden proved insufficiently rejuvenating, Alexander could always escape to one of his suburban palaces. Most often he went to Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles from Saint Petersburg. The imperial train sped through a flat and dreary country of stunted firs and dark-leaved birch. As soon as Alexander passed through the gates of “the Tsar’s village,” however, the prospect changed. The rulers of Russia, reluctant to acknowledge any limitation of their power, bid defiance to nature herself. Where she was stinting and ungenerous, they waved their wands, and the wasteland was transformed into a garden. Two palaces, wrought by the art of Rastrelli, stood in a park of 800 acres. There were obelisks, canals, artificial hills, Chinese pavilions, and secluded grottoes. A lake, dug by Turkish prisoners, could be emptied and refilled like a bathtub. Six hundred men labored each day to perfect the ornamental gardens. Tsarskoe Selo seemed, to one courtier, a “terrestrial paradise,” a “sort of enchanted fairy land.” A French diplomat told Catherine the Great that her pleasure dome wanted only one thing.

  “Indeed?” returned the Empress.

  “A glass case, Madame, to protect this unique masterpiece.”

  At Tsarskoe Selo the Tsar could relax with friends and go for walks with his favorite setter, Milord. He was sometimes seen sitting on the grass with his guests, talking and laughing. But beguiling though Tsarskoe Selo was, its charms were too intimately connected to Alexander’s official existence to afford him the solitude he craved. Accordingly it was the Tsar’s custom, each autumn, to travel much farther, to the southern extremity of his Empire. The imperial train enabled Alexander to indulge a luxury unknown to his predecessors, and in a few hours he was able to exchange the frosts of the Baltic for the perpetual garden of the Crimea.

  He detrained at Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, where a carriage was in readiness. From Simferopol he was driven along a winding road, through whitewashed Tartar villages, to Livadia, one of the imperial villas overlooking the harbor of Yalta. The residence was then a comparatively simple wooden structure; the palace of white limestone which now stands on the site would not be built until the reign of Alexander’s grandson, Nicholas II, the last Tsar. In the soft climate of the peninsula, washed by the waters of the Black Sea, the vine flourished, and the air was perfumed with the scent of lilacs and roses. Livadia was the Capri of the Romanovs; here they could shed the heaviness of the Russian winter and feel, for a moment, the lightness of a classical spring. Here, a thousand miles from Saint Petersburg, Alexander, dressed entirely in white, could forget the cares of the throne and come to life again amid saltwater and sunshine.

  Mark Twain, who visited the Tsar in the Crimea in 1867, thought it “a vision of the Sierras.” The slopes were “covered with the great parks and gardens of noblemen, and through the mass of green foliage the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there like flowers. It is a beautiful spot.” The Tsar emerged from his villa to greet Twain and the other Americans who had gathered in his garden. The “imperial family came out bowing and smiling, and stood in our midst,” Twain wrote. “A great number of dignitaries of the Empire, in undress uniforms, came with them. With every bow, His Majesty said a word of welcome.” “Good morning,” Alexander said in English, “I am glad to see you—I am gratified—I am delighted—I am happy to receive you!” There was, Twain said, “character” in Alexander’s courtesy, “Russian character—which is politeness itself, and the genuine article.” The American writer was struck by the “kind expression” on the Russian monarch’s face, and he judged him to be a sincere man. The Empress Mary also appeared. She wore a silk dress trimmed with blue, with a blue sash at her waist; her straw hat was edged with blue velvet, and she carried a parasol. Americans, she told her visitors, were favorites in Russia, and she hoped that Russians were similarly regarded in America. She and the Tsar then personally conducted their guests through the villa, showing them “the cozy apartments and the rich but eminently home-like appointments of the place.”

  While Alexander reclined in his Crimean vineyard, the grand design of his reforms continued to unfold in the capital. The acts of the red brigades had slowed but not stopped the liberal revolution. By the fall of 1862 liberal bureaucrats known as “Constantine’s Eagles,” protégés of Grand Duke Constantine, were directing the departments of education, justice, finance, and war. At the same time, Alexander undertook a more momentous reform, the reorganization of the Russian legal system. For almost a year a commission had been at work with a mandate to reform the laws. The commissioners proposed, among other things, that judges be made independent of the executive; that judicial proceedings be opened to the public; and that trial by jury be instituted in criminal cases. They recommended, too, that cumbersome legal procedures be simplified; under the existing system, it was difficult for a creditor to enforce payment of a debt, a circumstance which impeded the progress of commerce.

  Alexander approved the proposals, and the country rejoiced. Russia’s new legal system was to be “public, adversarial, and open to all estates of the realm.” The country moved a step closer to embracing the free-state ideal, the faith that men and women at liberty to choose their destinies for themselves, subject only to laws that apply equally to all, will do more to make a state great than the most thoughtful commands of the most benevolent despot.

  To many it seemed as though Russia stood “on the threshold of a new life.” The country, the Rector of the Seminary in Kazan said, “is striving to be born again.” The “Great Reforms,” as they were called, were “designed to renovate” the ancien régime and “create the framework for a grazhdanskoe obshchestvo (citizen society) in place of the rigidly defined sosloviia (society of classes) in which autocratic politics and aristocratic class interests ruled the lives of Russians.” The reforms had an anti-paternalist thrust: they were intended to transform “a body of passive subjects into one of active citizens.” As such they were “decisive” in the “sphere of civil and personal rights,” and “opened the way for peasant participation in other institutions that emerged from the reform process,” among them juries.

  Nor were the Tsar’s domestic reforms his only contribution to the cause of liberty at this time. Alone among the rulers of the great powers, Alexander unequivocally took the side of Lincoln in the American Civil War. In the fall of 1862 Lincoln wrote a personal letter to Alexander. Where, the President asked, did the Tsar stand on the question of foreign intervention in America’s Civil War? Alexander replied to Lincoln’s inquiry through his Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov, who told Bayard Taylor, the American chargé at Saint Petersburg, that “Russia, alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. . . . We desire above all things the maintenance of the American Union as one ‘indivisible nation.’” The Prince assumed a confidential tone. “Proposals will be made to Russia to join some plan of interference. She will refuse any invitation of the kind. Russia will occupy the same ground as at the beginning of the struggle. You may rely upon it, she will not change.” Gorchakov closed the interview by taking Taylor’s hand. Giving it strong pressure, he said, “God bless you!”

  The American was greatly moved.

  Such communications, Lincoln said, were the most loyal he received from any European government. While England and France found ways to encourage the South, Alexander was true to his word: he steadfastly supported the Union. His policy was by no means purely humanitarian; Alexander was motivated in part by his desire to gain an advantage over Britain, which was determined both to counter the Asiatic ambitions of Russia and to thwart the rise, in America, of a potential threat to her commercial and naval supremacy. The enemy of my enemy, the Tsar reasoned, is my friend. But Alexander’s demonstrations of support for Lincoln went beyond traditional great-power maneuvering, and at an imperial ball he went out of his way to praise the President’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  Yet. . . something was missing. On paper, all of Alexander’s reforms were correct; they conformed to the m
ost up-to-date methods; every decision was right. But the whole impression is of a waxwork rose, flawless in its technical craftsmanship, but without instinct of life. Alexander’s tutor, the romantic poet Zhukovsky, had taught his pupil to be a liberal, but he had not been able to make him a poet. Lacking an inspiration, the Tsar’s revolution was stillborn. Alexander had not, as yet, been corrupted by authority, but he had been rendered complacent by it. He did not exert himself to wring from the pulp of power the last quintessence of nectar.

  A revolution, if it is successful, invents a new language. The task of the revolutionary statesman is to find the fresh accent. The Greek statesman Solon reduced his statecraft to poetry, and through his verses reconciled Athens to the revolution he made there. Lincoln and Bismarck were learning, through trial and error, to do something similar in their own countries; they succeeded in turning the romantic influences of their youth to account in their mature statesmanship. Alexander never did.

  Of course only an unusually creative, one might almost say artistic, nature could have succeeded in finding a way to talk to a nation in which the different classes were, as in Russia, separated by such wide and almost unbridgeable chasms. How to explain the importance of an independent judiciary to peasants who believed, whenever they heard a peal of thunder, that the Prophet Elijah was crossing the sky in his chariot? Alexander might be forgiven his inability to touch the Russian soul; the task was difficult. What is less excusable is that he seems not to have tried.

  London and Newcastle, October 1862

  WITH THE VICTORY at Antietam and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln appeared to have saved his revolution. For a moment, it seemed, freedom had gotten the upper hand. After an interval of suspense, Henry Adams breathed easier. Surely the Americans were out of danger now; not even Lord Palmerston would dare to oppose a government that had defeated Lee and promised to emancipate the slaves.

  Adams, for all his perspicacity, did not reckon on the influence, in Lord Palmerston’s government, of William Ewart Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. During the summer months, when the debate over whether to intervene in the American Civil War raged most fiercely, Mr. Gladstone had been preoccupied with the budget. Parliament, however, had adjourned in August, and while flocks of legislators went forth to slaughter grouse and other forms of indigenous fauna, the Chancellor, freshly liberated from the labors of the Exchequer, set himself to examine the burning public questions he had neglected during his efforts to produce a budget.

  After an interval of studious retirement, Mr. Gladstone went off, at the beginning of October, on a tour of the north of England, intent on sharing with the world the fruits of his solitary meditations. He was fifty-two years old. His gifts were altogether out of the range of ordinary human nature. At Christ Church, Oxford, he had outshone myriads though bright. His activities during the very vacations of the university, duly recorded in his diary, must be the despair of lesser scholars:

  July 6 [1830] . . . —Up after 6. Began my Harmony of Greek Testament. Differential calculus, etc. Mathematics good while, but in a rambling way. Began Odyssey. Papers. Walk with Anstice and Hamilton. Turned a little bit of Livy into Greek. Conversation on ethics and metaphysics at night.

  July 8.—Greek Testament. Bible with Anstice. Mathematics, long but did little. Translated some Phœdo. Butler. Construed some Thucydides at night. Making hay, etc., with S., H., and A. Great fun. Shelley.

  Such a young man was unlikely to be long overlooked by the world; and before he was twenty Mr. Gladstone had a name and a reputation. At Eton he proved himself a skillful antagonist in the debates of the Literati, or “Pop” as it was sometimes called, and in the Oxford Union his performances so astonished his auditors that the Duke of Newcastle gave him a pocket borough on the strength of one of his speeches.

  In the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone rose fast, and he was early marked out as a likely Prime Minister. He was undoubtedly a prodigy; but his intellect, prodigious though it was, was perpetually at the mercy of his enthusiasms. As a young man just entering the House of Commons, he was offended by the impiety of his fellow legislators, who in the profane transactions of temporal politics neglected the spiritual duties of their office. Did not their acts betray “a certain element of the Antichrist”? That the House of Commons bore little resemblance to a Bible society was a revelation unlikely to disturb the repose even of scrupulous churchmen; but the young Member for Newark could not accept this state of affairs, and in hours stolen from his parliamentary avocations he composed a large book, The State in its Relations with the Church, in which he elaborated the duty of the secular government to transform itself into a holy synod, to sift the claims of religious and spiritual truth, and to eject heretics from public office.

  Two decades after The State in its Relations with the Church appeared, the House of Commons was still unregenerate; but in the mind of Mr. Gladstone a new enthusiasm had supplanted the preoccupations of the pious novice. He had forsaken the doctrines of the Tories and the High Church mandarins of Oxford; he was now entering on his liberal phase. But his liberalism was marked by the same disordered zeal that had previously characterized his Toryism. Mr. Gladstone learned, in 1858, that the peoples of the Ionian Islands, then administered by a British protectorate, were agitating for liberty and reunion with the Greek nation. His imagination was transfixed by the vision of Homer’s children struggling for freedom, and he startled the cognoscenti of Westminster, who had supposed him thoroughly broken to the House of Commons, by seeking appointment as Extraordinary High Commissioner for the islands. Disraeli, who was only too delighted to consign so formidable an adversary to a Mediterranean oblivion, volunteered to facilitate the commission.

  Mr. Gladstone sailed for the south, but no sooner had he made a tour of Corfu and Ithaca than the dream of Homeric warriors hurling their lances in the sun began to fade. The first transports of enthusiasm were tempered by the discovery that the degenerate inhabitants were incapable of admiring or even comprehending the virtues of their ancestors; and Mr. Gladstone learned with dismay that in the birthplace of Ulysses it was by no means easy to obtain a copy of the Odyssey. “The whole impression is saddening,” he wrote in his diary, “it is all indolence, decay, stagnation; the image of God seems as if it were nowhere.” On Cephalonia he was received as a hero and a champion of liberty; but the approbation of the Ionians quickly changed to disgust when they learned that the man they called “Greek-loving Gladstone” had no authority either to join their islands to greater Greece or grant them a genuine independence. The islanders were indifferent to the constitution Mr. Gladstone dictated to them, offended by his tone of superiority, and perhaps repelled by his pedantry. When, during one of the assemblies, a question arose as to the meaning of the word thelesis (will or wish), Mr. Gladstone insisted, with learned references to the literature of ancient Greece, that the Ionians did not understand their own language.

  Unchastened by his Mediterranean adventure, Mr. Gladstone returned to England and cast about for new objects on which to exercise his rich and fantastic dogmatism. In Lincoln’s revolution he found a topic irresistible to the lover of high-minded declamation, and his journey to the north soon became another of what Disraeli called his “pilgrimages of passion.” He arrived at Newcastle flushed with the success of his tour; The Times compared his progress down the Tyne to a Roman Triumph. He visited the Church of Saint Nicholas; a photographer took his picture. He then repaired to the Town Hall, where a banquet was held in his honor. After dinner the cloth was removed, and a toast to Mr. Gladstone’s health was proposed and drunk to applause. The Chancellor himself then rose to speak.

  What Mr. Gladstone said shocked men and women on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Chapter 14

  “BAD TIMES, WORSE COMING”

  Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, August-December 1862

  HOWEVER MANY DECREES Tsar Alexander might issue in Saint Petersburg, a new idea of liberty could flourish
in Russia, if it could flourish at all, only if men like Tolstoy were prepared to help it grow. Men who lived close to the people, and who could talk to them in a language they understood.

  Tolstoy had thrown himself into the work of liberation; he had administered the emancipation law; he had tried to waken Fedka, Semka, and little Pronka to the possibilities of their existence. Yet what had he gotten for his pains, other than a visit from the secret police? He had once, perhaps, overestimated the usefulness of reform; he now succumbed too casually to the reverse delusion, and dismissed the value of all such labor.

  He went to Moscow and personally presented his indictment of the Third Section to the Tsar, whom he encountered in the Alexandrovsky Gardens. But he soon forgot all about it. He fell in love with his doctor’s daughter, and a short time later he married her.

  When Tolstoy drove down the alley of Yasnaya Polyana with his bride that autumn, the period of reforming liberalism in his life was over. He ceased to be a teacher and a Justice of the Peace. “Have said good-bye to the students and the common people,” he wrote a few days after his return to the manor. A short time later he dismissed Fedka, Semka, and little Pronka for the last time. They “are going away,” he wrote. “And I feel sorry for them.”

  The sorrow, however, was short-lived, for in the earliest hours of his marriage to Sofya Andreyevna, née Behrs, Tolstoy was intensely happy. “I have lived to the age of thirty-four,” he said, “and I didn’t know it was possible to be so much in love and so happy . . . I’m calm now and serene, as never before in my life.” Yet connubial bliss was not quite as he had painted it to himself during his bachelorhood. “Living two together is such a frightening responsibility. ... I find it terribly frightening to live now: one feels so intensely, one feels that every second of life is in earnest, and not as it was before.”