Even before the publication of Chaadaev’s letter, young Russians had been coming together in small groups, ‘circles’ as they were called, at regular weekly meetings to discuss literature, philosophy, and national purpose, but Chaadaev’s letter crystallized many issues and forced the young thinkers to define their stance towards Russia’s development. Some accepted the position that Russia was a European country whose social evolution lagged behind the rest of Europe and whose political institutions had been deformed by the unbridled power of autocracy. These ‘Westernizers’ saw Russia’s proper course in liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and Western enlightenment. Others adopted a nativist position that superficially resembled the government’s programme of Official Nationality. However, these thinkers, known as Slavophiles, regarded the government as an alien institution imposed by Peter the Great and responsible for breaking Russia’s natural evolution from the seventeenth-century tsardom, which the Slavophiles believed was characterized by a familial attachment of the people to their tsar, by Orthodox piety and a sense of community among the people and between the people and the ruler. Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were opposed to serfdom, bureaucratic supervision of social and intellectual life, and the militarism of Nicholas’s regime. In other words, the famous debate of the 1840s between the Westernizers and Slavophiles was a contest over the meaning of Russia’s past and Russia’s future. Both sides opposed the Russian present.
Our inherited narrative ends the era of more or less open discussion of these matters with a celebrated exchange in 1847 between Nikolai Gogol and the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii. In a work titled Selected Correspondence with Friends, Gogol gave a ringing endorsement to key propositions of Official Nationality advising Russians to love their ruler, accept their station in life, and spend more time in prayer. Belinskii, though unable to reply in print, responded with a letter that enjoyed wide circulation in manuscript copy. He lambasted Gogol for his obscurantism and betrayal of his own earlier writings, which had held government administrators up to ridicule and demonstrated the absurdity of serfdom. This exchange, plus the departure of Alexander Herzen (a major figure in the intellectual circles of the time) for Europe in 1847, marked the close of this period, except for a final act—the suppression of the Petrashevskii circle amidst a ferocious government crack-down provoked by the European revolutions of 1848. Although the members of this circle did little more than read forbidden writings and discuss socialist ideas, the government’s fears of sedition were so deep that twenty-one of the members of the circle received death sentences, which, however, were commuted to Siberian exile minutes before the executions were to be carried out. Among those made to suffer this death watch and personal psychological trauma was the later literary giant Fedor Dostoevsky
This story of the intellectual life of the era as a struggle between a severely repressive government and an increasingly alienated educated public, though enshrined in the literature by later revolutionaries, does not paint an accurate picture. The dissidents were a small minority. Most educated Russians took pride in the knowledge that their country was the strongest land power in the world and a respected member of the European concert of nations. They felt secure from outside threats and were enjoying a period of relative economic prosperity. Although the few dissidents and some foreign visitors lamented government supervision of intellectual life, most Russians recognized the need for censorship and were able to create and consume a rich and varied cultural life within its bounds. Over 200 new periodical publications were begun in Nicholas’s reign, and several dozen were on the market at any one time. The creative arts flourished; the Russian opera came into its own in the works of Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky the paintings of Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, and Ivan Aivazovskii shifted artistic style away from classicism to romanticism, while the genre painting of Pavel Fedotov and others captured characteristic moments of Russian life. A rapid growth of scientific literature and scientific investigation was evident. Official Nationality and Slavophilism were symptoms of educated Russians’ need for a clearer sense of national identity and their place in the world; the result was plans for historical and ethnographic museums to house representations of the people and culture of Russia. This was the period of the founding of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, which set out to map literally and figuratively the physical and cultural boundaries of the nation. Its establishment in early 1845 was followed by a major ethnographic research programme to discover the folklore, material life, and practices of the Russian and other peoples inhabiting the empire. Nicholas’s reign also saw an increasing effort by the Orthodox Church to raise the educational, religious, and moral level of the common people through a rapid growth of local schooling and printings of inexpensive editions of didactic literature. The Church likewise launched new efforts in the missionary field, including work in the Altai Mountain region, eastern Siberia, and Alaska that led to linguistic and ethnographic reports that corresponded to the work of the Geographic Society. Indeed, the Geographic Society could well stand as a symbol for an age whose leaders were intent on recording the economic, topographical, and human conditions of the empire. This process reflected Nicholas’s inductive approach to reform, the exhaustive study of conditions before acting, an impulse that helped prepare the Great Reforms of the 1860s while encouraging educated Russians to find a personal and national identity in service to the common people.
Close of the Reign
The final years of Nicholas’s reign effaced many of its most important achievements. The success with which a flexible censorship had allowed for important scientific and cultural growth while checking dissident opinion was lost in the orgy of repression that followed the news of revolution in Europe in 1848. The continuing expansion and democratization of the educational system and the opportunities for Russians to continue higher studies abroad succumbed to the same crack-down when, in the wake of the Petrashevskii circle’s arrest, Nicholas slashed university enrolments by two-thirds and ordered all Russians studying abroad to return home (unwisely, as it turned out, because the returning students brought with them detailed and accurate information about the upheavals occurring in their places of study). The progress being made on peasant reform came to a halt, as the tsar feared further social change of any kind. Even the success of the government in stabilizing the currency and promoting economic development was harmed by the expensive and futile war in the Crimea.
The outbreak of this war nullified one of Nicholas’s greatest achievements: his reversal of the constant warfare of the previous two reigns and maintenance of a long period of peace and security for his country. Armed conflict occurred during his reign, but it involved pacification of the borderlands of the Caucasus and Poland and did not threaten the security or livelihoods of most Russians. When Russian troops did venture abroad, they stayed close to their borders, for example, brief sorties into Persia and the Danubian principalities early in the reign and an expedition to Hungary in 1849 to suppress a nationalist insurgency. Even the Crimean War at the end of his reign was not a conflict Nicholas consciously sought out for the aggrandizement of Russia or himself. Indeed, he very much wished to avoid a war provoked by an assertive French government claiming rights over sacred institutions in Palestine. These demands raised questions about Russia’s protectorate over Christians in the Ottoman Empire, a position affirmed in the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji (1774) but disputed by the Turks. As the diplomatic conflict escalated in early 1853, the Russian government counted on the support of Austria (which it had rescued from dismemberment four years before) and Britain (which had recently been in conflict with France over their respective positions in the Middle East). But Nicholas badly miscalculated. Austria threatened to join the Ottomans if Russia attacked through the Balkans; Britain played a double game, urging the Ottomans to avoid war but also indicating that they could expect British support if war broke out. With Russia seemingly isolated but still making stiff
demands for the right to protect Ottoman Christians, the Turks decided to resist and force an armed conflict.
For want of a better place to engage (Austria blocked an invasion of the Balkans and Russia could not challenge the allies at sea), the two sides fought the decisive battles in the Crimea and nearby port cities on Russia’s Black Sea coastline. Though a strong force on paper, the army on which Nicholas had lavished much of his attention was no match for the allies. Much of its strength had to be deployed elsewhere to protect against possible attacks on other borders, the forces sent to the Crimea were supplied by ox cart because of Russia’s late start into railway building, Russian weapons (not upgraded since earlier wars) had far shorter effective range than the enemy’s, sanitary conditions were appalling, and disease claimed far more men than did battle. The result was demoralization and defeat. In the midst of this ruin of his diplomacy, army, finances, and record of peace and security, Nicholas took ill and died of pneumonia in early February 1855.
Conclusions
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian government and society changed in a number of important respects. Though threatened by French power at the beginning of this era, Russians met the challenge of an invading force much superior in numbers to their own and went on to conquer and occupy Napoleonic France. For the next forty years, Europeans regarded Russia as the continent’s most formidable power. But as often happens, victory brought complacency. Russian leaders failed to recognize the need for technological development and left the country poorly prepared for the next great struggle. Russia lagged in weapons development, logistical support, education, and industry—all the things that constitute the strength of a state. It is enough to observe that on the eve of the Crimean War, when railways had already spread their tentacles through much of Western Europe, Russia was just completing its first major line between Moscow and St Petersburg. Russia’s military in the century before 1850 had defeated Prussia and France when each was at the height of its power; for nearly another century Russians would prove incapable of defeating any country but Ottoman Turkey. Japan defeated the Russians in 1904–5, Germany in 1914–18, and Poland in 1920; and even little Finland in 19 39–40 held off an immeasurably superior Soviet force for more time than anyone could have believed possible. A decisive shift in Russia’s international position had occurred in the reign of Nicholas I.
Domestic affairs proved more successful. Although the nineteenth century began with promises of constitutional government and serf emancipation, these goals were incompatible and unrealizable. Constitutional government would have turned legislative power over to the very landed élite who opposed the reform of serfdom. This élite resisted even the timid reform initiatives that the autocrats were ultimately able to enact. Substantive change in the serf order required the co-operation of the landed nobility, and this was not forthcoming until the shock of defeat in the Crimean War caused the élite to recognize the need to end agrarian bondage and move towards a modern economy capable of meeting the challenge of Western power. The government did nevertheless make important improvements that prepared the ground for the revolutionary changes of the next era. Among these improvements were the growth and differentiation of government administration, creation of a law code and regulation of legal practice, a disciplined economic policy and stable currency, and the expansion of educational opportunity.
The growth of education, so necessary for the building of economic and military strength, also brought two developments that threatened the imperial state: nationalism and the desire for political participation. Both of these impulses found powerful expression in the Decembrist rebellion of 1825. Despite the government’s attempt to co-opt the nationalist spirit through the imperialist doctrine of Official Nationality, a specific Russian nationalism continued to evolve in the writings of Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, and even the Westernizers. Soon it was joined by other nationalist programmes emerging first in Poland, Ukraine, and Finland, an impulse that by the twentieth century spread to other non-Russian peoples of the empire and destroyed the hold of a centralizing imperial ideology. The desire for political participation and its frustration by periodic government repression drove a wedge between government and some members of educated society as early as the 1820s. Thereafter the divide widened. The dissidents, though few at first and never a threat to the government in this period, exercised great symbolic force by challenging a fundamental tenet of tsarist ideology: the notion that the ruler was a good father who cared for and was at one with his children, the people of Russia. When many of the nation’s most talented sons and daughters were being repressed by the regime and half the tsar’s ‘children’, the peasant serfs, continued in bondage, the dissidents could well ask what kind of fatherly care was the ruler providing? The failure of the regime to draw many of the country’s best people into its service or to provide them with a national mission they could support augured ill for the future.
7. Reform and Counter Reform 1855–1890
GREGORY L. FREEZE
Stunned by the Crimean War débâcle, Russian statesmen rebuilt basic institutions and even abolished the linchpin of the old order, serfdom. But these ‘Great Reforms’ had serious shortcomings, generated widespread discontent, and ignited an organized revolutionary movement. By the 1880s the regime embarked on ‘counter-reforms’ to rebuild a powerful state based on autocratic state power.
THE period 1855–90 marks Russia’s transition from counterrevolution to revolution—from the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ to the bastion of revolutionary forces. That transition reflected the profound impact of the ‘Great Reforms’, which brought not only far-reaching changes (the emancipation of serfs and a host of other Westernizing, modernizing reforms), but also a new kind of politics and relationship between state and society. In so many respects, the epoch of reform and counter-reform encapsulated the fundamental processes at work in the history of Russia: the dangerous and unpredictable consequences of reform, the awakening of unfulfilled expectations, the unleashing of liberal and revolutionary movements, and the powerful, implosive impact of borderland minorities on politics in the central heartland.
Why Reform?
Despite its odious reputation as the bulwark of brutal reaction, the Russia of Nicholas I had incessantly, if clandestinely, pondered the prospects and process of reform. From the very first years of his reign, and partly in response to the Decembrist uprising, Nicholas I (1825–55) did not fail to discern the fundamental problems afflicting his land—from its corrupt bureaucracy to the serfdom that seemed so similar to slavery. Although the state under Nicholas recognized the need for reform, even in the case of serfdom, it had resisted taking decisive and especially public measures and, instead, contented itself primarily with cautious and (above all) secret reforms. Fear of uncontrolled social disorders, an unquestioning belief in the power and omniscience of bureaucracy, a smug assurance of Russia’s military prowess despite its markedly un-Western system and economic backwardness—all this encouraged the conceit that Russia could be a great power and maintain its traditional social and political order. That order alone seemed immune to the revolutionary bacillus that had infected the rest of Europe in 1830 and 1848; Russia’s very distinctiveness (samobytnost) seemed responsible for its unparalleled stability at home and its military power abroad.
With Nicholas’s death, however, the regime soon embarked on wide-ranging reform, including the Gordian knot of serf emancipation. To explain why the Russian state finally embarked on reform, historians have advanced a number of theories. One explanation, popular among pre-revolutionary and Western historians, emphasized the triumph of liberal humanitarian ideas within the higher ranks of state and society: imbued with Western values and culture, these élites could not fail to recognize the contradiction to their own status as serf-owners. While the influence of Western ideas can hardly be denied for some parts of the élite, it certainly did not extend to the nobility as a whole; most, in fact, vehemently opposed emancip
ation. Some Marxist historians, chiefly Soviet, have emphasized the economic factor:as the nobility found their estates becoming less productive, as their debts and the spectre of bankruptcy increased, the serf-owners themselves supposedly came to recognize the inefficiency of serfdom and the validity of criticism by Western liberal economists. Again, although isolated expressions of these views can be found, such sentiments were hardly prevalent among most members of the government or the nobility. A third interpretation stresses fear of peasant unrest: cognizant of the statistics on murder and the incidence of peasant rebellion (which swelled from 990 disorders in 1796–1826 to 1,799 disorders in 1826–56), nobles and bureaucrats purportedly came to realize that emancipation alone, not procrastination, could ensure social stability in the countryside. While fear certainly did grip many members of the provincial nobility, it did not figure significantly in the calculations of the high-ranking state officials who actually engineered emancipation. The latter, the emperor concluded, were indeed wont to exploit noble fears, but they themselves did not evince real concern for their own safety.
Why, then, did the regime finally take the fateful step towards emancipation? Although the factors cited above to some degree did abet the process, the key linchpin in fact was the débâcle of the Crimean War. That foreign fiasco led to domestic reconstruction, for it exposed the real backwardness and weakness of the old servile order and all that it connoted. The Crimean War not only exacted a high cost in lives, resources, and prestige, but also vitiated the main impediment to reform—the belief that the existing order was consonant with stability and power. As a liberal Slavophile Iurii Samarin wrote in 1856: ‘We were vanquished not by the foreign armies of the Western alliances, but by our own internal weaknesses’. The same year a liberal Westernizer Boris Chicherin wrote that, without the abolition of serfdom, ‘no questions can be resolved—whether political, administrative, or social’. Even before the war had been irrevocably lost, conservatives as well as liberals had come to much the same conclusion.
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