The Russian army was nowhere in sight for a decisive battle, supplies were short and eventually ran out, and the capital, St. Petersburg, was out of reach for a tired and significantly diminished army. Winter was approaching in Moscow, while the army’s winter clothes were in Paris. In mid-October, Napoleon ordered the army to start retreating to the borders of Russia. The Russian commander, Mikhail Kutuzov, used his rested and well-supplied army to force Napoleon to follow the same route for the retreat that he had used for his advance on Moscow. That area had been burned and stripped of supplies during the original march. Hungry, cold, and harassed by Cossacks and partisan units, the conquerors of Moscow made their way out of Russia. In mid-December, three months after the capture of Moscow, a little more than 22,000 soldiers out of the Grand Army of 600,000 left Russia in regular formations. Others were killed, imprisoned, or retreated in small groups. The Grand Army was no more.
In December 1812, Emperor Alexander issued a manifesto in which he addressed the Poles as close relatives, almost brothers, offering amnesty to those who had fought against Russia in Napoleon’s army. “We hope,” declared Alexander, “that this philoprogenitive and altruistic forgiveness of Ours will bring the guilty to wholehearted repentance and prove to all residents of these regions in general that they, as a people of one language and kin with the Russians from ancient times, can nowhere and never be so happy and secure as in complete merging in one body with mighty and magnanimous Russia.” The pan-Slavic idea of Russo-Polish brotherhood, first presented by the Russian court poet Vasilii Petrov on the occasion of the second partition of Poland in 1793, was now reiterated and strengthened by the notion of linguistic affinity.
Alexander believed that he knew how to redeem the Poles. His solution was to establish the Kingdom (in Russian, Tsardom) of Poland, and it was approved by the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815)—the international conference that defined the borders of post-Napoleonic Europe. The kingdom was created out of the Polish lands taken over by Prussia, with its capital in Warsaw. Without renouncing his title of emperor of Russia, Alexander thus assumed the new title of tsar of Poland, thereby creating the semblance of a dynastic union to justify Russia’s continued domination of that country. This was also a step toward the realization of his old dream of becoming a constitutional monarch: if he could not become one in Russia, perhaps he could do so in Poland. He granted the kingdom quite a liberal constitution that provided for a Diet, a separate government and administrative structure, and even an army. Catherine’s notion of making all parts of the empire homogeneous was discarded in favor of particularism, now under the banner of the Polish constitution. Alexander hoped that one day the rest of the empire would get its constitution as well. As things turned out, it would have to wait another ninety years.
Alexander was hailed in Warsaw as a restorer of the Polish statehood. The Poles retained most of the territories given to them under Napoleon. But their enthusiasm for Alexander was short-lived, as the Polish government had no control over the kingdom’s budget, military forces, or international trade. Besides, the tsar’s officials exceeded their mandate, while the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, who was commander in chief of the Polish army, acquired a bad reputation among the Polish elites for his abusive behavior. On top of that, Warsaw had no authority over the former Polish lands acquired by Russia in the course of the partitions. The younger generation of Polish activists began to create clandestine organizations whose goals included the restoration of Poland in its pre-partition boundaries. The Russian authorities cracked down on the conspirators, adding to the general sense of dissatisfaction in the kingdom.
ALEXANDER’S CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERIMENT WAS NOT GOING well, either in the Kingdom of Poland or in the rest of the empire. Conservative sections of Russian society opposed the idea of constitutionalism as such. Progressives who wanted a constitution complained that the Poles had gotten one while the Russians had not. Persistent rumors about Alexander’s plans to transfer to the kingdom the territories annexed by Russia in the second and third partitions aroused protests from both camps.
In 1819, these concerns were voiced by Russia’s most prominent historian of the day, Nikolai Karamzin. In a letter titled The Opinion of a Russian Citizen, Karamzin warned the tsar against what he saw as tantamount to a partition of Russia: “Will they say that she [Catherine] divided Poland illegally? But you would act even more illegally if you should think of smoothing over her illegality by partitioning Russia itself.” He then pointed out how tricky the use of historical argument could be. “There are no old fortresses in politics,” wrote Karamzin. “Otherwise we would be obliged to restore the kingdoms of Kazan and Astrakhan, the republic of Novgorod, the grand principality of Riazan, and so on. Moreover, even by virtue of their old fortresses, Belarus, Volhynia, and Podolia, along with Galicia, were once original possessions of Russia. If you give them back, they will also demand Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Smolensk of you: after all, they, too, belonged to hostile Lithuania for a long time.”
Karamzin, the author of the multivolume History of the Russian State, published in St. Petersburg between 1816 and 1826, did not confine himself to historical arguments in his letter. He maintained that the tsar who ruled both Russia and Poland had to choose and take the side of “your true Fatherland—good, strong Russia.” With reference to the Polish elites of the annexed territories, he wrote: “Lithuania and Volhynia want the Kingdom of Poland, but we want one Russian Empire.” Ceding those territories to the Kingdom of Poland would create a threat to Russia: “Poles legally recognized as a separate and sovereign people are more dangerous to us than Pole-Russians.” Finally, Karamzin wanted no part of the pan-Slavic discourse that was popular at the time: “No, Sire, the Poles will never be true brothers to us, nor faithful allies. Now they are weak and insignificant: the weak do not love the strong, and the strong hold the weak in contempt; if you strengthen them, they will want independence, and their first step will be to draw away from Russia—not in your reign, of course, but look beyond your own lifetime, Sire!”
Karamzin turned out to be a prophet of sorts. There was no revolt in the Kingdom of Poland as long as Alexander was alive. But five years after his death, which came in 1825, the Poles were up in arms. In November 1830, young Polish cadets tried to assassinate their Russian military commander, Grand Duke Constantine, sparking a revolt that would become known as the November Uprising. The grand duke survived the attempt, fleeing his residence in women’s clothes, but the façade of dynastic union between Russia and Poland was now gone. The Polish Diet convoked by the rebels not only declared the secession of the Kingdom of Poland from the Russian Empire but also sought to regain the pre-partition Polish territories that were not part of the kingdom. The rebels sent troops and reinforcements to Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine and chose delegates to go to St. Petersburg to demand those territories.
Emperor Nicholas I, the new ruler of Russia, succeeded Alexander I in 1825 in the midst of the Decembrist revolt against the monarchy, which was led by liberal-minded Russian officers. Seeing the Polish revolt as a new threat to his authority and power, Nicholas refused to negotiate; instead, he sent his army against the rebels. To his surprise, the Polish army turned out to be a formidable opponent. After months of fighting, the Russian troops failed to take Warsaw. In Lithuania, the Russian army was barely holding Vilnius as it repelled Polish attacks. In Belarus, as well as in the Podolia and Volhynia regions of Ukraine, the Polish nobility waged partisan warfare, harassing Russian detachments and breaking lines of communication.
In June 1831, Nicholas appointed a new commander of the Russian army on the Polish front—General Ivan Paskevich-Yerivansky (he acquired that honorific title for the capture of Yerevan from the Ottomans in 1827), a descendant of a Cossack officer family from the Hetmanate and commander in chief of Russian troops in the Caucasus. Paskevich, who had Nicholas’s personal trust and received additional troops, managed to change the course of the war. In August 1831, he besieged W
arsaw. The Poles showed heroic resistance and refused to surrender the city. One of their generals responded to Russian demands by saying, “A cannonball of yours tore off one of my legs at Borodino, and now I cannot take a single step backwards.” He was referring, of course, to his participation in the Battle of Borodino on Napoleon’s side. But Paskevich penetrated one line of Polish defenses after another, finally entering Warsaw on September 8, 1831. He wrote to the tsar: “Warsaw is at Your Majesty’s feet.” A month later, the last Polish military unit had been defeated. The question was what to do next. If the authorities could hope before the November Uprising that by bribing the Poles with broad autonomy and a constitution they could do away with their sovereignty, those illusions were now gone.
News of the fall of Warsaw caused jubilation in St. Petersburg, not just at the tsar’s court or in government circles. The leading Russian poets took part, celebrating this major victory with the brochure Na vziatie Varshavy (On the Taking of Warsaw). It included a contribution by Russia’s most respected poet, Vasilii Zhukovsky, and two poems by his younger colleague Aleksandr Pushkin, who was much more talented but also far less reliable from the official viewpoint. Before publication, Pushkin’s poems were read and approved by Tsar Nicholas.
Zhukovsky praised the conquest of Warsaw by putting it into the context of previous Russian imperial triumphs. For him, the seizure of Warsaw was similar to the victories over Persia and the Ottoman Empire achieved by General Paskevich in the Caucasus a few years earlier. Pushkin’s poems “To the Slanderers of Russia” and “The Anniversary of Borodino” had a different leitmotif, or, rather, two. The first was an attack on France and Europe as instigators of hatred toward Russia; the second had to do specifically with Poland. For Pushkin, the Polish question was also the Russian question. As far as Pushkin was concerned, the Polish rebels were claiming inalienable parts of Russian history and territory. These included Kyiv, imagined as the ancient Rus’ capital and the mother of Rus’ cities, and the Ukrainian lands attached to Muscovy in the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the rebellious hetman who became a symbol of Russian unity. Pushkin asked his reader a number of questions:
Whose will Volhynia be?
And Bohdan’s legacy?
Right of rebellion recognized,
Will Lithuania spurn our rule?
And Kyiv, decrepit, golden-domed,
This ancestor of Russian towns—
Will it conjoin its sainted graves
With reckless Warsaw?
Pushkin defined the November Uprising and the Russian suppression of it as “a quarrel of Slavs among themselves.” At the center of that conflict was the Russian program of the unification of the Slavs. “Will the Slavic streams merge in the Russian sea? Will it dry up?”—that is how Pushkin formulated the main question to be resolved in the conflict between the “bumptious Pole” and the “faithful Russian.” Unlike Zhukovsky, Pushkin was not just building the empire but also defending the pan-Russian nation and creating a pan-Slavic one. For him, the Russo-Polish struggle was about the future of Slavdom in general: all the Slavs eventually had to become politically Russian. In that regard, he echoed Vasilii Petrov’s poetry from the times of the second partition—according to Petrov, the Poles were only the first to enter what Pushkin had called “the Russian sea.”
THE POLISH NATIONAL MOBILIZATION OF THE NAPOLEONIC ERA, followed by the Polish revolt of 1830–1831, prompted the Russian search for the political, cultural, and ethnic roots of the empire’s new identity. That process began during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, gained speed in the course of Alexander’s constitutional experiment in the Kingdom of Poland, and received new impetus with the formulation of what historians subsequently called the “theory of official nationality” by the new imperial minister of education, Count Sergei Uvarov. Uvarov claimed that Russian education, and indeed Russian identity itself, should be based on three main principles: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. It was nationality (narodnost’) that represented Uvarov’s principal innovation and eventually gave its name to the triad.
Uvarov formulated the main principles of Russian political ideology and of the country’s new imperial identity in a memorandum first presented to Tsar Nicholas I in March 1832, when Uvarov was a deputy minister of education. Uvarov presented the final version of his text in November 1833, a few months after he was appointed to the post. In his memorandum, he formulated his goal as being nothing less than that of saving Russia from the same kind of collapse of social and religious institutions that Europe had experienced, which he associated with the French Revolution and its consequences. Russia had to restore and maintain its national values, which had allegedly been marginalized, if not actually destroyed, in the preceding decades. Those values also had to be adjusted to suit the “current intellectual disposition.”
Where did Uvarov find his inspiration? A former Russian diplomat stationed in Paris before the Napoleonic Wars, he was an admirer of François Guizot, a key figure in the July Revolution of 1830 in France, which overthrew King Charles X and brought to power Louis Philippe I, and one of the leaders of the conservative wing in the French liberal camp. If Catherine II looked to Voltaire and other French philosophes for guidance on transforming her empire according to the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment, Uvarov found inspiration in Guizot for developing a position between the extremes of conservatism and revolution. He followed with great interest Guizot’s efforts to establish a national system of education in France (the two happened to be ministers of education at the same time), but rejected what he considered the French claim to have produced a universally valid educational model.
Claiming that the French did not know or care about the rest of Europe, Uvarov turned to Germany for an alternative to French universalism. He found it in the works of the historian, philologist, and poet Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, who emphasized national culture and tradition. Schlegel was among the first writers to promote a model of the nation based on common language and customs. He was influenced in that regard by the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, the creator of the Romantic concept of the nation, according to which the legitimacy of the state was based on the national spirit (Volksgeist), and every ethnic group had the right to a polity of its own. Schlegel envisioned a German national state united around Austria, which had best preserved the medieval institutions of dynasty, aristocracy, and religion. Uvarov and Schlegel had met in Vienna when Uvarov was stationed there in 1807–1809, a period in which Russia and Austria were closely allied against Napoleonic France.
Inspired by Guizot’s creation of the French national educational system and by Schlegel’s view of the particularity of ethnic nations, Uvarov set about formulating the principles of national education in Russia. Uvarov sought a formula whereby the best elements of the European tradition could be assimilated to Russia’s benefit. “How to establish popular education here that corresponds to our sense of things but is not alien to the European spirit?” he wrote to the tsar. “What rule should we use in dealing with the European Enlightenment, with European ideas that we can no longer do without, but that threaten us with inevitable demise unless we adapt them skillfully?” Uvarov told the tsar that “in searching out the sources that constitute the essence of Russia (every land and every people has such a Palladium),” he had found them in the Orthodox faith, political autocracy, and nationality.
“Without love of its ancestors’ faith, a people, like an individual, must perish,” wrote Uvarov. This struck him as obvious and incontrovertible. He developed a much more elaborate argument concerning autocracy, a principle that was under attack not only abroad but also at home, especially in light of Alexander’s idea of constitutional monarchy: “Autocracy is the basic condition of Russia’s political existence in its current state. Let dreamers deceive themselves and find obscure manifestations of some order of things corresponding to their theories and prejudices: they may rest assured that they do not know Russia, do not know its condition, its needs, i
ts desires.” Uvarov claimed that attempts to limit the power of the tsar destabilized relations within the state and created obstacles to Russia’s development. He was convinced that most Russians shared his views on the danger of tampering with the principle of autocracy.
While nationality was introduced as a new element of the official Russian belief system, it came in as a distant third in Uvarov’s own thinking as expressed in his memorandum to the tsar, and he did not conceive of it as an equivalent of modern nationalism. He understood “nationality” as native tradition rooted in Russia’s historical development, linking the throne and the church in order to ensure their stability.
Ironically, from today’s standpoint, but quite normally for Uvarov’s time, his program of Russian nation-building was written in French, which was still the prevailing idiom of the Russian elites. Uvarov defined his new principle as nationalité, which his clerks subsequently translated as narodnost’. The Russian term is best rendered in English as “national way of life.” As far as we know today, the term narodnost’ first appeared in 1819 in a letter from the Russian poet Petr Viazemsky, who wrote: “Why not translate nationalité as narodnost’? After all, the Poles have said narodowość. The Poles are not as squeamish as we are, and if words do not leap into their language of their own accord, they drag them in by the hair, and that is the end of the matter.” The letter was sent from Warsaw, where Viazemsky was working on the constitutional projects of Alexander I.
The term narodnost’ soon found acceptance in Russia. In 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin wrote about both the popularity of the term and its lack of a clear definition. “For some time we have been used to speaking of narodnost’, demanding narodnost’ and complaining of the lack of narodnost’ in literary works, but no one has thought to define what he means by the word narodnost’,” he observed. “One of our critics seems to think that narodnost’ consists in choosing objects from our country’s history; others see narodnost’ in words, that is, they are glad that in expressing themselves in Russian, they use Russian expressions.”
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