The Russian press began printing amusing pro-Bonaparte articles. They said that destroying Napoleon I’s empire was an error on the part of Alexander I. Many people had recommended to the tsar that he chase Bonaparte out of Russia and stop at that, so that Bonaparte would have the opportunity to destroy the Germans and the English. Then, they should have concluded an agreement with the weakened Bonaparte to divide the world in two parts, as he had once offered. The entire East, Turkey, the Slavic nations, and Constantinople could have been Russia’s.
But Alexander I had dreamed of riding into Paris on a white horse as the liberator of Europe. “And what did Russia get for it?” wrote one columnist. “The day after the victory, Europe forgot everything that Russia did for it…. No, Europe will never be grateful to us. For Europe, Russians are always Scythians and barbarians. Russia saw that yet again in the Crimean War.”
He turned thirty-seven. The new emperor was at the height of his power and his Romanov good looks. The celebrated French Romantic Théophile Gautier, who saw him in the splendor of a palace ball, described the tsar with a poet’s delight: “Amazingly regular features, as if they had been carved by a sculptor. A high, handsome forehead…. A tender, gentle expression…big blue eyes…the line of the mouth is reminiscent of Greek sculpture.”
But others drew a completely different portrait. The eyes were “big and blue, but inexpressive.” And the facial features were off, too. “His regular features become unpleasant when he feels obliged to look solemn or majestic.” So said our constant eyewitness, lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva.
Why such a difference? The courtiers who had known the late tsar had their own concept of handsomeness in tsars. First of all, it was a “regal gaze,” Nicholas I’s merciless, icy stare that made the courtiers tremble. A Russian tsar always had to strike awe in the beholder. As the great Russian historian Klyuchevsky put it, “Our tsar is not a mechanic with a machine but a scarecrow in a field.” To the court’s disappointment, the new tsar did not have that regal gaze. When he tried to approximate it, he looked ridiculous. The court kept comparing him to the late emperor, and the new tsar did not live up to the standards. The tsar was “too kind, too pure to understand people and rule them,” Tyutcheva wrote.
The tsar’s very first steps elicited the hidden disagreement of the court. Its members discussed the rumors that the late emperor had wanted the emancipation of the serfs. They worried that the new tsar would seriously consider that dangerous madness.
But the court was not asked its opinion. His late father had taught Alexander that everything was to be decided in the royal apartment. Nicholas had trained the court well—no one dared to criticize or even discuss the tsar’s actions.
The court found someone else to blame: Aesop, Grand Duke Konstantin, the “demon-seducer of our kind Sovereign,” as Maria Frederiks called him. Anything the court did not like would be attributed to the bad influence on the kind and pure emperor and empress. That included the shameful peace treaty.
Thus the answer was found right away to the all-important question of the court: Against whom will we be friends? Hatred of Konstantin united them. The court had its enemy.
“Konstantin was angry at those who were unhappy with the peace,” wrote Tyutcheva. “As for the Sovereign and his wife, their belief in him is unlimited. And when they say, ‘Grand Duke Konstantin says so,’ they think they are adding a seal of approval to their decision!”
An invisible and dangerous “retrograde opposition,” as Konstantin called it, formed right after Nicholas’s death.
In the meantime, the “kind and pure” sovereign took care of military matters. Having finished the Crimean War, Alexander renewed the bloody war in the Caucasus. He wanted revenge for the defeat in the Crimea.
Russian troops expanded military action on a large scale and Shamil’s army found itself in a catastrophic position very quickly. Shamil’s fall was paradoxical. Islam had once been his greatest source of strength, but now religion was weakening his army. The central idea of a holy war with infidels was being replaced by a new religious movement. Zikrism, a variant of Sufism, was founded by the theologian Kishiev Kunta-Hadji. He called on the fighting Murids to transfer the holy war from an external to an internal struggle. They should fight not the Russians but the sins in their own souls. He called for humility. Of course, there were limits: “If your women are raped or if you are forced to forget your language and customs, rise up and fight to the death.” But the most important work was self-perfection.
Exhausted by decades of bloody warfare, the steady loss of their men, and the sense of the futility of fighting a gigantic empire with its ever-replenished army, the mountain tribes listened closely to his strange call. He was undermining discipline and destabilizing Shamil’s army.
Shamil punished the adherents of this movement harshly, but he soon had to accept the fact that they were no longer with him, neither the masses nor the elite, which Shamil had in fact created. Over the years of struggle, a wealthy class of officials arose in the imamate. They did not wish to sacrifice their newfound gains to a losing battle. Shamil was interfering with their desire to stay rich.
The Russian army moved on the offensive. The territory controlled by Shamil contracted rapidly. By the summer of 1859, Shamil lost Chechnya for good and almost all of Dagestan. The forces of the Murids melted away. By the end of July, Shamil holed up high in the mountains in the village of Gunib, with only four hundred men. That was all that was left of his enormous army. In the middle of August, the Russians surrounded Gunib.
Commander in chief Prince Baryatinsky understood the cost of storming the village, how many of his soldiers would die in these mountains, right under the sky. The prince offered Shamil the opportunity to lay down his arms in exchange for a guarantee of safety for the imam, his family, and all the Murids with him. He even promised free passage to Mecca, if that was what Shamil wanted.
The imam did not trust the idea of forgiveness. He never forgave his own enemies. He decided to fight to the end, but saw that there was no one on his side. Not his sons, not the Murids, not the villagers—they did not want to die. The wailing of the women, pleading with him not to kill them, let him save face. He surrendered for them. After a chat with Allah, Imam Shamil came out to Prince Baryatinsky. He said briefly, “I recognize the power of the White Tsar and I am prepared to serve him faithfully.”
With his harem, the imam was brought to St. Petersburg. The journey stunned Shamil, as he saw the extent of the empire. It was only then that he understood whom he had been fighting.
He was brought to the palace. In his snow white turban, he stood in the middle of the formal palace room. With an athletic body, narrow face, and beaked nose, he seemed younger than his age despite his nineteen wounds. His hair was a reddish brown only lightly touched by gray, and his fair-skinned face was framed by a luxuriant beard dyed dark red. For a quarter century, this man had made Russia bleed. More than a hundred thousand Russian soldiers had died in the war. Despite the promises made him, Shamil expected to be sent to Siberia or thrown into a cell or publicly executed.
Alexander kept his word. He embraced the prisoner, that great warrior. He ordered that he be given money and a coat of black bear. Shamil’s wives and children all received gifts. Shamil was conquered by Alexander’s generosity, and it was then that he truly became his prisoner.
The emperor had him sent to the small town of Kaluga, along with his relatives, sons, and harem. Among his wives was a Jewish woman of incredible beauty. Alexander was told that Shamil, thunderstruck by her loveliness, stole her from her father’s house. At the request of her father and brother, the tsar had someone inquire whether she would want to return home. She replied that she could have left the master of the Caucasus, but she would never leave her vanquished husband.
Shamil was held as an honored prisoner of war. He traveled around Kaluga in an open carriage with four horses. He was an incredible sight in that provincial town in his white turban, bea
rskin coat, and yellow calfskin boots.
A few years later, Shamil asked permission to go to Mecca. He wrote to Alexander: “Being frail and in weak health, I do not wish to leave my earthly life without performing my sacred duty.” He was given permission, but not right away. Death found the old warrior on the way to Mecca.
In the five years after the capture of Shamil, the entire Northern Caucasus was annexed by Russia.
The capture of Shamil sweetened the bitterness of the Crimean defeat. There had been an earlier success, as well. Alexander got back the priceless Ussuria region, which Russia had lost, from China. Now the entire territory between the Pacific Ocean and the borders of Siberia, the age-old taiga with tall cedars and forests full of wildlife, was part of Russia. The newly annexed Caucasus fit very nicely in the empire’s underbelly.
A new map of Russia was brought to his office. The endless empire lay spread out before him. It was not enough: He wanted to move farther. As long as his hands were tied in Europe, his path had to lie in Central Asia: He would conquer the khanates, the land of a thousand and one nights, and then move on toward India, Afghanistan, and Persia. Let the British remember in horror how they had dared to defeat his father. Then, after taking Central Asia, he would concentrate on taking back the Black Sea. After that, Turkey and the liberation of the Slavs. Then the mirage of the great Slavic empire, his father’s dream, would become reality. The cross placed in his father’s coffin lay on his heart as well.
Those were grand dreams. Once upon a time Napoleon had warned Europe about Russia. He coarsely explained how terrible it would be if “a tsar with a big cock was born.” Had that victorious time come? A great time first needed great reforms. He started them.
Dostoevsky has a description of how couriers carried the royal mail. The coachman sat on the box, in full song. When the courier hit him on the head from behind, the troika ran faster. The courier, as if beating sense into the coachman, kept bopping him on the head. The docile, subordinate coachman transferred the ferocity of the blows to the miserable horses.
The whipped troika galloped forward, turning into a bird from the constant blows.
Gogol called Russia a flying troika. It was driven forward in exactly that way by the great reformers Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. But Alexander lacked the harsh character of those Russian reformers, who killed thousands and exiled the opponents of their innovations. For the time being, he didn’t need it. His father had made fear, obedience, and toadying to the tsar the norm. That fear and universal obedience were enough to bring about the most daring transformations—at the start.
Alexander II was a reformer of a new kind for Russia—a two-faced Janus, one head looking forward while the other looked back longingly. Mikhail Gorbachev was this kind of reformer.
Alexander’s first reform would be truly incredible—he intended to emancipate the serfs. His great-grandmother, Catherine, had known that serfdom had to be eliminated. But she also knew and said that in Russia “the better is the enemy of the good.” She did not eliminate it. His uncle, Alexander I, also knew it had to go. It was his favorite project. He thanked the great poet Pushkin for his poem “The Village,” for the line, “And slavery, fallen by the tsar’s will.” He thanked him, but did not do away with slavery. Because he believed not the fiery poet but the very wise diplomat Joseph de Maistre. The ambassador from Piedmont, who spent many years in Russia, said, “Giving the Russian peasant freedom is like giving wine to a man who had never had alcohol. He will go mad.”
Alexander’s father, Nicholas I, also knew that the serfs had to be emancipated, but he went no further than the banning the sale of individuals without their families, and he did not do away with serfdom.
They all understood the economic benefit of emancipation, but they worried about the political damage. An autocratic empire needed harmony. The last tsar, Nicholas II, correctly described the role of the Russian tsars: “Master of Russia.” Everyone was a slave of the master. At bottom, the slavery of serfs, and above them was the slavery of courtiers and officials. As the philosopher and writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a contemporary of Alexander II, said, “Everyone’s a slave from bottom to top.”
Alexander II decided to blow up this thousand-year harmony. He wanted to get rid of the slavery, the backbone of Russian life. The enlightened Russian landowners, those admirers of Voltaire and Rousseau, who collected priceless libraries in their country homes, bought, sold, and gambled away their serfs, sometimes even trading them for hunting dogs, and whipped them mercilessly in the stables.
As a poet, the Hussar Denis Davydov, wrote:
Old Gavrila [the serf] is struck by our Mirabeau
For not ironing the master’s wrinkled jabot.
The laws of religion and marriage were flouted every day. Sex with peasant beauties and harems of serf girls were quite usual. The children of these relationships were rarely adopted. As a rule, the illegitimate children became the slaves of their legitimate siblings.
But at least the state did not need courts or a large police force to handle the peasants. The landowner was judge and policeman—he took care of his own serfs. The peasants were the source of the million-strong army. It had beaten Napoleon, but now it was a vanquished army.
Alexander was going to blow up Russian life that had been blessed by the ages and the Russian Orthodox Church. He knew he would have to create everything anew—a new way of managing the peasants, a new court system, and a new army. Dangerous uncertainty lay ahead. But 23 million serfs awaited his decision hopefully. Rumors were circulating, even though all royal deliberations were surrounded by strict secrecy.
He even got a letter on the subject from Alexander Herzen, his father’s bête noire. The new emperor had already had a taste of Herzen’s power. When he became tsar, he had Catherine the Great’s “Notes” brought to him. His father had not allowed him to read them, and now Alexander and his wife were bursting with curiosity about the scandalous work that had delighted the “family scholar,” Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna.
The manuscript was kept in a secret vault in Moscow. It was delivered to St. Petersburg. Alexander read it and understood his father’s rage. He sealed it again, with his own seal, and gave orders to keep it locked up. But soon after his own reading of it, Herzen published the carefully guarded manuscript. (Later it was learned that while the manuscript was being transported to St. Petersburg and then back to Moscow, the young archivist Bartenev had made a copy, which he took to London, to Herzen. He wanted the work to be accessible to historians.)
Now Herzen, the enemy of his empire, called on the tsar to act. “Wash away the shameful spot from Russia. Heal the scars from the whip on the backs of your brothers. Spare the peasants from the blood they will inexorably have to spill.” This was no empty threat. Nothing had started yet, but the peasants, awakened by the rumors, had become agitated and demanded their freedom. The Third Department reported that the nobility was agitated, too. He made his decision. He began to speak.
In March 1856 in Moscow at the Assembly of the Nobility the tsar spoke to a full house. “I’ve decided to do it, gentlemen. If we don’t give the peasants freedom from above, they will take it from below.” Thus the emperor of all of Russia repeated the thought of the most hated of émigrés and the words once written to his father by the chief of the secret police. Alexander added that it would happen “not at all today.”
He was vacillating.
This was one of his main personality traits. Once he decided on something of extreme importance, he indulged himself in vacillation. He needed people around him to beg him to do what he had already decided to do. This relieved him of the responsibility for the consequences. He transferred it to the shoulders of those who persuaded him and, thereby could, if needed, blame them for the failure of his decision.
The trio of his advisors and allies tried to persuade him. This holy trinity were his brother Kostya-Aesop, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, and naturally, the empress, who knew his c
haracter very well after fifteen years of marriage.
The empress was charming. Despite the onset of her lung disease and dire warnings from Dr. Botkin, she laughed and prayed. She was a mass of contradictions: laughter and tears, rationality and extravagance, German penny-pinching and prodigality, kindness and a constant need to mock, prayers, fasts, and spiritualist séances. And through it all, there was her indomitable German willpower. She passionately executed everything that was expected of her in Russia, and she would not let Sasha, as she called the tsar, retreat. She insisted that he had to end serfdom.
The tsar’s brother, Kostya, would not let up, either. He saw him daily. Alexander could not find respite even in Germany, in the quiet spa of Bad Ems, where he took the waters. Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna went there, too. She offered to set an example and free her fifteen thousand serfs before the law was passed.
At last, in late 1856, he announced that he had been persuaded. Now the “vacillating” Alexander could become as firm as a rock. Now he was an implacable as his father.
Kostya was to run all the work on the reform. But who would help him? All the dignitaries of his father were retrogrades. He called them the “lost generation,” because nothing could be expected of them without an order from the tsar. Yet now, a circle of “liberal bureaucrats” appeared, ready to implement reforms. Many of Nicholas’s dignitaries made it seem as if they had dreamed of becoming liberals, but the old tsar would not permit it. The new one did, and they immediately changed.
This was exactly what happened under Gorbachev.
The old grandee Lanskoy, appointed minister of internal affairs, and Count Rostovtsev, who had hated the idea of emancipation, and governor-general of St. Petersburg Prince Suvorov, and even the chief of the Third Department Prince Vassily Dolgorukov were all suddenly liberal bureaucrats. It was fashionable to be liberal, for that was what the tsar wanted.
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