Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
Page 5
Derzhavin’s breakthrough came in 1773 when a peasant named Emiliyan Pugachev raised the standard of revolt on the eastern borderlands of the empire. Claiming to be Catherine’s murdered husband Peter III, Pugachev and his army of Cossacks and outlaws moved west, burning noble estates and hanging all army officers they captured. In 1774, when the rebels took Kazan, Catherine grew seriously alarmed and sent the full might of her forces against the rebels. Derzhavin, serving under General Alexander Bibikov, was one of the young officers to emerge with glory. He also showed the poetic prowess which was to make him remembered as one of the greatest poets of pre-Pushkin Russia, penning his ‘Ode on the Death of General Bibikov’ after his chief died of typhus while pursuing the rebels across the Orenburg steppes.
Certainly by 1775, after Pugachev had been brought to Moscow in a cage and publicly executed, it was clear that Major General Derzhavin was a coming man. That year the eleven-year-old Nikolai Rezanov wrote to Derzhavin in a neat copperplate hand, addressing his uncle Ivan’s influential friend in his best schoolboy German. ‘Mein Herr! That you condescend to take an interest in my fate I am most humbly grateful,’ wrote the boy. ‘I have heard from my mother that you wish to take me from the Izmailovsky Guards to the Preobrazhensky Guards under your patronage, for which consideration I am most delighted.’2 Rezanov had been put down for his grandfather’s regiment – the Izmailovsky – as an infant. Whether this mention of a transfer to Derzhavin’s Preobrazhensky Guards was a tactful request or thanks for an offer already made isn’t clear. In any case, though Derzhavin remained Rezanov’s patron and friend for life, the change of regiment never happened. In the late summer of 1778, at the age of fourteen and a half, Officer Cadet Rezanov joined the Izmailovsky Guards after all.
The guards regiments of the Russian army were modelled, socially as well as militarily, on their Western European prototypes. Most socially prestigious were the three Life Guard regiments created by Peter the Great, who named them after the ‘toy armies’ of boys he had recruited as a teenager from villages around his father’s palace outside Moscow – Izmailovo, Preobrazhenskoye and Semyonovskoye. Guards officers were drawn largely, but not exclusively, from the nobility. In any case, thanks to Peter’s table of ranks, all officers above the rank of captain became hereditary nobles ex officio. When Rezanov joined the Izmailovsky Guards his regiment was officered by the empire’s top people. The commanding officer was General Prince Nikolai Repnin, while its recently formed cadet corps was commanded by Major Prince Golitsyn. Among his fellow cadets was Alexander Alexandrovich Bibikov, son of the regiment’s former commander who had died putting down Pugachev’s revolt. Rezanov’s generation of cadets would go on to command the Russian army during the war against Napoleon in 1812.*
Unfortunately, young Rezanov soon found that he had been born at exactly the wrong moment for a glittering military career – just like his father before him. Early in her reign the Empress Catherine had set to projecting Russian naval power across the Mediterranean. A brilliant victory over the Ottoman navy by a newly built Russian fleet in the Turkish port of Cesme in 1770 astonished Europe. A series of land campaigns in the Balkans followed, eventually forcing the Sultan to cede swathes of modern Moldavia and Ukraine to Russia in 1774. That same year the suppression of Pugachev’s revolt also provided opportunities for military glory – and the massacre of superior officers necessary for the promotion of ambitious young subalterns. But all this was no good for Rezanov, who had the misfortune to join the army right at the beginning of what was to be a fourteen-year outbreak of peace.
Every year, from 1 May to 1 September, the Izmailovsky Guards would take part in manoeuvres in the countryside around St Petersburg, tramping the roads of the Baltic coast in their green uniforms with red cuffs and collar, red waistcoat and breeches. In the winter the men retired to their log barracks at the regimental headquarters in the village of Kalininskoye, south of the capital, while the officers repaired to the city for the winter social season. This leisurely rhythm was doubtless a well-earned rest for the veteran senior officers, but for their ambitious juniors it must have been a tragic bore. The official regimental history is a perfect blank from the regiment’s return from putting down Pugachev in 1774 to the start of Catherine’s war against the Swedes in 1788.3
Just before his twentieth birthday, in the spring of 1784 after five years of peacetime soldiering, Rezanov decided he had had enough and resigned. He was a sergeant in the cadet corps – in fact the highest rank a cadet could reach, but nonetheless humiliating for an adult with years of soldiering experience. Yet promotion proceeded strictly by seniority, and with no enemies to kill off his superiors Rezanov would have to wait till they died of old age. Rather than waste any more of his life, the restless young former Guardsman struck out into the civilian world with few qualifications other than a good pedigree and some decent family connections.
On retirement from the regiment Rezanov was promoted to the rank of captain. It was a kind of consolation prize to get him started in civilian life. A captain was eighth in the table of ranks, the equivalent of a collegiate assessor and entitled to be addressed as ‘Your High Nobleness’. The rank alone, however, carried no salary. Like many young men suffering career setbacks, Rezanov was forced to return to his mother’s house in the country to compose himself for the next stage of his life.
During the summer months, when the court was absent from the capital, the nobility of St Petersburg habitually fled the malodorous, mosquito-filled and malarial city for their country estates. We can assume that the young Nikolai and his three siblings spent their summers among the orchards and hayfields of Demyaninskoye, their mother Alexandra Okuneva’s estate. Demyaninskoye, near Pskov, had been part of her dowry when she married Rezanov’s father.*
Pskov was a backwater in 1784. It remains a backwater today. The Empress, who visited in 1776, deemed it the ultimate in Russian backwardness and decline. ‘Inoculate someone with your talent for development and send him here,’ she wrote to her friend and confidant, the German author Friedrich Melchior Baron von Grimm, from Pskov. ‘Perhaps he will be able to bring on its industry from its present sorry state.’4 The town had enjoyed a heyday in the fifteenth century, when its burghers joined the Hanseatic League and traded amber, pine pitch, furs and lead up and down the Baltic. These merchant princes erected handsome, solidly built cathedrals and squat manor houses with steeply pitched roofs. The city’s thick-walled kremlin withstood twenty-six sieges mounted by Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Teutonic Knights and Russians from Novgorod, all eager to seize its wealth for themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Pskov had been bypassed by the currents of the world. Since Peter the Great had conquered neighbouring Estonia from the Swedes eighty years before Rezanov’s arrival, Pskov’s strategic value had been comprehensively eclipsed. Its commerce had been swallowed by St Petersburg, two hundred miles to the north, and Königsberg to the west. According to parish records the town’s population in the 1780s was around 7,000, less than half of what it had been in the Middle Ages.
After the social whirl of a young guards officer’s life in the fast-growing capital Rezanov must have felt that he had returned to an older, slower Russia. In Petersburg the papers were full of the latest ballet performances at the new Mariinsky Theatre. Literary types were buzzing about Derzhavin’s newly published ‘Ode to Felitsa’, a witty and avant-garde work which addressed the Empress in a bantering tone which made gentle mockery of stilted literary classicism. In Pskov the big news was that work was starting on a new courthouse. Finished in 1790, it still stands today, a mediocre provincial echo of the capital’s elegant neoclassical colonnades.
Everything about Pskov, from the architecture to the society, must have seemed stolid, squat and plain. To the young Rezanov it may have felt like failure. Or perhaps, more rationally, he considered it a necessary provincial apprenticeship before a triumphant return to the capital. Derzhavin, after all, himself recently retired from the guards,
had just accepted the governorship of Olonets, a dreary northern province recently won from the Swedes.* Derzhavin would later be moved to the governorship of grain-rich Tambov, earning a steady reputation as an administrator as he bided his time for the wheel of fortune at court to turn in his favour. The young Rezanov must have fervently hoped that the same would apply to his own fledging career.
The Okunevs were, as prominent local landowners, inevitably close to the provincial administration, and a job was quickly found for the young Nikolai. His complete lack of legal training notwithstanding, Rezanov was appointed assessor to Pskov’s recently opened civil court. As a favour to this promising local nobleman, a year of service was added to boost him up the bureaucratic hierarchy, qualifying him for an immediate judicial position. Two weeks before his twentieth birthday Rezanov took his place on the bench of the province’s central court, one of five court officers who sat as judge and jury on the affairs of the thieving, philandering, foul-mouthed and light-fingered citizens of Pskov.
The records of Rezanov’s time as a civil servant show a court roster of mind-boggling provincial tedium. About the time Rezanov joined the bench, some tragic proto-Gogolian clerk made a minute inventory of every piece of furniture in Pskov’s courthouse. Worthy of record, in the clerk’s view, were ‘two brass inkstands, one bell, one sand scatterer, one Dutch stove with iron doors, eight brass candlesticks’ as well as ‘windows and several doors’.5 The court met every day but Sundays and holidays from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. Rezanov dutifully signed his name in the roster almost without fail every working day for four years. The president of the court, his two deputies and two assessors would process into the courtroom wearing their newly designed uniform of light blue kaftans with red trimmings, buff waistcoats and buff breeches. They all wore swords to signify their noble status. All morning they would hear a series of petitions, presented in descending order of social rank of the appellants, concerning extortion, debts, inheritance, the liberation of serfs, family feuds, slander and the complaints of prisoners in the town jail.
Before Catherine the Great the Russian judicial process had been simplified by the routine use of torture, usually branding and racking, which produced either neat confessions or dead suspects. The Empress’s ban on such barbarous practices in 1767 attracted the praise of European liberals like Voltaire but made for messy hearings and interminable cases. Another, more welcome, innovation of Catherine’s was the introduction of salaries for state employees. Previously the state’s servants were expected to exist ‘from their affairs’, as an ukaz of Peter the Great coyly put it, or in plainer terms from the bribes of petitioners.6 It is highly doubtful that Catherine’s newfangled salaries eliminated the deeply ingrained habit of bribery – indeed using their official powers to extract money remains the universal practice of Russian bureaucrats today. Nonetheless, under the new system Rezanov’s pay was 300 rubles a year. It was no fortune, but enough to keep a decent table and a modest household. The parish records of the church of St Sergius Zaluzhia in central Pskov for 1786 record Nikolai Rezanov living with his mother, two younger brothers Dmitry and Alexander and his patriotically named sister Ekaterina with just eighteen servants, rather modest by local standards. A goose at the Pskov market cost twenty-five kopecks, a pike or a pound of flour two kopecks. The court’s watchman, an ex-soldier, got eighteen rubles a year; its president received twelve hundred.
The Hannibal family of Mikhailovskoye made regular appearances at the Pskov court both as defendants and plaintiffs for sword fighting, slander and assault as well as various petty territorial disputes with their neighbours. They were the litigious and unruly descendants of Abram Petrovich Hannibal, born Ibrahim Hannibal in Eritrea and sold as a slave to Constantinople. He was bought and rescued by the Russian ambassador’s deputy, who brought him to St Petersburg in 1704. Peter the Great took a shine to the bright African boy and adopted him; Hannibal married into the Russian aristocracy and rose to the rank of major-general. The family’s most famous son was Alexander Pushkin, Hannibal’s grandson and still noticeably African of feature. Pushkin was to continue the hell-raising tradition by conducting public affairs with other men’s wives and fighting twenty-nine duels, including his last one against Frenchman George D’Anthès over an insult to the honour of Pushkin’s wife, in which the poet was killed.7
Such entertaining cases as the turbulent Hannibal clan provided were however relatively rare. Rezanov seems to have had a good head for figures and a certain pedantic flare for the nuts and bolts of administration. These talents landed him with an even more boring job, if that were possible, than that of court assessor. For six months a year he was seconded to the Pskov provincial treasury, housed in the mansion of the merchant Postnikov. The house still stands, a stolid seventeenth-century building which is now the town’s historical library. Its domed ceilings, tiny barred windows and thick walls breathe the oppressive heaviness of medieval Russia, an impression reinforced by the fact that the house has sunk below the level of the modern street like a waterlogged barge. One imagines the young Rezanov, surrounded by brass inkwells and massy medieval treasure chests left over from the town’s more prosperous days, staring out of these windows towards the dripping pine forests and dreaming of escape.
By 1788 Rezanov, now twenty-four, had again decided that he had had enough. As in the army, Rezanov had served nearly five years without promotion. Unlike the army, however, there was no inbuilt mechanism for the wholesale slaughter of his superiors in the line of work. Furthermore, in 1763 the Empress had decreed that advancement in the civil service would come automatically through length of service rather than merit. It was a perfect formula for the institutionalization of mediocrity.
Given the remarkable imagination, energy and diplomatic skills Rezanov was to demonstrate later in his career, it seems likely that his talents had simply been buried under the dead hand of his placeman superiors. In any case, in February 1788 Rezanov applied to the court for a leave of absence and an internal passport for travel to St Petersburg. In May he wrote again for an extension of his leave – on full pay, collected weekly by his younger brother Dmitry – claiming that he was planning to rejoin his old regiment. This seems unlikely. The Izmailovsky Guards had been mobilized the previous autumn when the Ottoman empire declared war in an ultimately futile attempt to recover territories lost to Rezanov’s swashbuckling grandfather, General Gavriil Rezanov. By spring 1788 the great fortress of Ochakov, on the shores of the Black Sea in modern Bulgaria, had fallen to a desperate Russian assault, and the regiment was moving on to further glories before the Ottoman fortresses of Bendery and Brailov. Rezanov had definitively missed them.
Instead the young nobleman-judge-treasury-secretary was busy advertising himself in the ministerial waiting rooms and salons of the capital, paying court, as contemporary Englishmen would call it, to the great and the good in search of a vacancy commensurate with his and his family’s social traction. In this regard Rezanov had several obstacles to overcome. His first and most serious handicap was that his maternal grandfather General Gavriil Okunev, the old soldier who had been in charge of all shipbuilding on the Baltic, had died in 1781. Another was that his uncle Ivan Rezanov had inconveniently and quite suddenly fallen from royal favour.
Uncle Ivan had risen up the bureaucracy with giddying speed, first in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later as secretary to the chief procurator of the Senate, Prince Alexander Vyazemsky. Political decision-making in Russia rested solely with the Empress, but the Senate – essentially a talking shop for the senior nobility – drafted laws and petitions for Her Majesty’s approval and controlled a network of judicial and bureaucratic appointments second only to the Palace itself.
Ivan Rezanov’s social and, he doubtless hoped, political ace in the hole had been his beautiful daughter Maria. She soon became the mistress of Prince Vyazemsky, who was certainly powerful but, unfortunately for the Rezanovs, already married. This arrangement was not as pre
stigious for Ivan Rezanov as having Vyazemsky as an official son-in-law. But Vyazemsky’s wife was wise enough to ignore the liaison, and the prince, in due course, did the right thing and found a wealthy and well-heeled husband for his pretty young mistress. In 1783 the girl became engaged to Lieutenant General Ivan Yakobi, the governor-general of Irkutsk. Thus Ivan Rezanov was poised to set up his daughter with a powerful and rising nobleman and advance his own career to boot.
Alas, the Empress disagreed. Despite having a vast and unruly empire to run, Catherine took an intense interest in the love lives of Russia’s aristocracy and devoted a remarkable amount of time to matchmaking and, in the case of the Rezanova–Yakobi engagement, match-breaking. She seems to have wanted to punish Vyazemsky, who had incurred the Empress’s disfavour by dragging his feet over her proposed Code of Laws. ‘I don’t want this Vyazemsky to give his Rezanova to Yakobi and present her with all Siberia as her dowry,’ the Empress wrote at the beginning of the winter season of 1783. Catherine intended to offer Yakobi, a dashing and wealthy widower, as a marital prize to a more loyal courtier.
Both Vyazemsky and Yakobi survived this minor social debacle; only Ivan Rezanov’s fortunes waned in the wake of the embarrassment. By the time his nephew came looking for a job in 1788 Ivan had disappeared from the Senate’s records and retired from the civil service into genteel obscurity.