'simulating emotions and feelings for nature'.145 Even Turgenev, an ardent Westernizer, described them in A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859) as civilized and charming yet without any spiritual depth or intellectual seriousness. The persistence of these cultural stereotypes illustrates the mythical proportions of 'Europe' in the Russian consciousness. This imaginary 'Europe' had more to do with the needs of defining 'Russia' than with the West itself. The idea of 'Russia' could not exist without 'the West' (just as 'the West' could not exist without 'the Orient'). 'We needed Europe as an ideal, a reproach, an example,' Herzen wrote. 'If she were not these things we would have to invent her.'146
The Russians were uncertain about their place in Europe (they still are), and that ambivalence is a vital key to their cultural history and identity. Living on the margins of the continent, they have never been quite sure if their destiny is there. Are they of the West or of the East? Peter made his people face the West and imitate its ways. From that moment on the nation's progress was meant to be measured by a foreign principle; all its moral and aesthetic norms, its tastes and social manners, were defined by it. The educated classes looked at Russia through European eyes, denouncing their own history as 'barbarous' and 'dark'. They sought Europe's approval and wanted to be recognized as equals by it. For this reason they took a certain pride in Peter's achievements. His Imperial state, greater and more mighty than any other European empire, promised to lead Russia to modernity. But at the same time they were painfully aware that Russia was not 'Europe' - it constantly fell short of that mythical ideal - and perhaps could never become part of it. Within Europe, the Russians lived with an inferiority complex. 'Our attitude to Europe and the Europeans,' Herzen wrote in the 1850s, 'is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capital: we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them.'147 Yet rejection by the West could equally engender feelings of resentment and superiority to it. If Russia could not become a part of 'Europe', it should take more pride in being 'different'. In this nationalist mythology the 'Russian soul' was awarded a higher moral value than the material achievements of the West. It had a Christian mission to save the world.
7
Russia's idealization of Europe was profoundly shaken by the French Revolution of 1789. The Jacobin reign of terror undermined Russia's belief in Europe as a force of progress and enlightenment. 'The "Age of Enlightenment"! I do not recognize you in blood and flames,' Karamzin wrote with bitterness in 1795.148 It seemed to him, as to many of his outlook, that a wave of murder and destruction would 'lay waste to Europe', destroying the 'centre of all art and science and the precious treasures of the human mind'.149 Perhaps history was a futile cycle, not a path of progress after all, in which 'truth and error, virtue and vice, are constantly repeated'? Was it possible that 'the human species had advanced so far, only to be compelled to fall back again into the depths of barbarism, like Sisyphus' stone'?150
Karamzin's anguish was widely shared by the European Russians of his age. Brought up to believe that only good things came from France, his compatriots could now see only bad. Their worst fears appeared to be confirmed by the horror stories which they heard from the emigres who had fled Paris for St Petersburg. The Russian government broke off relations with revolutionary France. Politically the once Francophile nobility became Francophobes, as 'the French' became a byword for inconstancy and godlessness, especially in Moscow and the provinces, where Russian political customs and attitudes had always mixed with foreign convention. In Petersburg, where the aristocracy was totally immersed in French culture, the reaction against France was more gradual and complicated - there were many liberal noblemen and patriots (like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace) who retained their pro-French and Napoleonic views even after Russia went to war with France in 1805. But even in the capital there was a conscious effort by the aristocracy to liberate themselves from the intellectual empire of the French. The use of Gallicisms became frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg. Russian noblemen gave up Cliquot and Lafite for kvas and vodka, haute cuisine for cabbage soup.
In this search for a new life on 'Russian principles' the Enlightenment ideal of a universal culture was finally abandoned for the national way. 'Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French', wrote Princess
Dashkova; 'let us remain patriots and retain the character of our ancestors'.151 Karamzin, too, renounced 'humanity' for 'nationality'. Before the French Revolution he had held the view that 'the main thing is to be, not Slavs, but men. What is good for Man, cannot be bad for the Russians; all that Englishmen or Germans have invented for the benefit of mankind belongs to me as well, because I am a man'.152 But by 1802 Karamzin was calling on his fellow writers to embrace the Russian language and 'become themselves':
Our language is capable not only of lofty eloquence, of sonorous descriptive poetry, but also of tender simplicity, of sounds of feeling and sensibility. It is richer in harmonies than French; it lends itself better to effusions of the soul… Man and nation may begin with imitation but in time they must become themselves to have the right to say: 'I exist morally'.'153
Here was the rallying cry of a new nationalism that flourished in the era of 1812.
2
overleaf: Adolphe Ladurnier: View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace,
St Petersburg, 1838
1
At the height of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, in August 1812, Prince Sergei Volkonsky was delivering a report to the Emperor Alexander in St Petersburg. Alexander asked the young aide-de-camp about the morale of the troops. 'Your Majesty!' the prince replied. 'From the Supreme Commander to the ordinary soldier, every man is prepared to lay down his life in the patriotic cause.' The Emperor asked the same about the common people's mood, and again Volkonsky was full of confidence. 'You should be proud of them. For every single peasant is a patriot.' But when that question turned to the aristocracy, the prince remained silent. Prompted by the Emperor, Volkonsky at last said: 'Your Majesty! I am ashamed to belong to that class. There have been only words." It was the defining moment of Volkonsky's life - a life that tells the story of his country and his class in an era of national self-discovery.
There were many officers who lost their pride in class but found their countrymen in the ranks of 1812. For princes like Volkonsky it must have been a shock to discover that the peasants were the nation's patriots: as noblemen they had been brought up to revere the aristocracy as the 'true sons of the fatherland'. Yet for some, like Volkonsky, this revelation was a sign of hope as well - the hope that in its serfs the nation had its future citizens. These liberal noblemen would stand up for 'the nation' and the 'people's cause', in what would become known as the Decembrist uprising on 14 December 1825.* Their alliance with the peasant soldiers on the battlefields of 1812 had shaped their democratic attitudes. As one Decembrist later wrote, 'we were the children of 1812'.2
Sergei Volkonsky was born in 1788 into one of Russia's oldest noble families. The Volkonskys were descended from a fourteenth-century prince, Mikhail Chernigovsky, who had attained glory (and was later made a saint) for his part in Moscow's war of liberation against the Mongol hordes, and had been rewarded with a chunk of land on the
* They shall be referred to here as the Decembrists, even though they did not gain that name until after 1825.
Volkona river, to the south of Moscow, from which the dynasty derived its name.3 As Moscow's empire grew, the Volkonskys rose in status as military commanders and governors in the service of its Grand Dukes and Tsars. By the 1800s the Volkonskys had become, if not the richest of the ancient noble clans, then certainly the closest to the Emperor Alexander and his family. Sergei's mother, Princess Alexandra, was the Mistress of the Robes to the Dowager Empress, the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul, and as such the first non-royal lady of the Empire. She lived for the most part in the private apartments of the Imperial family at the Winter Palace and, in the summer, at Tsarskoe S
elo (where the schoolboy poet Pushkin once caused a scandal by jumping on this cold and forbidding woman whom he had mistaken for her pretty French companion Josephine). Sergei's uncle, General Paul Volkonsky, was a close companion of the Emperor Alexander and, under his successor Nicholas I, was appointed Minister of the Court, in effect the head of the royal household, a post he held for over twenty years. His brother Nikita was married to a woman, Zinaida Volkonsky, who became a maid of honour at Alexander's court and (perhaps less honourably) the Emperor's mistress. His sister Sophia was on first name terms with all the major European sovereigns. At the Volkonsky house in Petersburg - a handsome mansion on the Moika river where Pushkin rented rooms on the lower floor - there was a china service that had been presented to her by the King of England, George IV. 'That was not the present of a king,' Sophia liked to say, 'but the gift of a man to a woman.'4 She was married to the Emperor's closest friend, Prince Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who rose to become his general chief-of-staff.
Sergei himself had practically grown up as an extended member of the Imperial family. He was educated at the Abbot Nicola's on the Fontanka, an institute established by the emigres from France and patronized by the most fashionable families of Petersburg. From there he graduated to the Corps des Pages, the most elite of the military schools, from which, naturally, he joined the Guards. At the battle of Eylau in 1807 the young cornet was wounded by a bullet in his side. Thanks to his mother's lobbying, he was transferred to the Imperial staff in St Petersburg, where he joined a select group of glamorous young men - the aides-de-camp to the Emperor. The Tsar was fond of
the serious young man with charming manners and softly spoken views, even though his idol-worship of Napoleon - a cult shared at that time by many noblemen (like Pierre Bezukhov at the start of War and Peace) - was frowned upon at court. He called him 'Monsieur Serge', to distinguish him from his three brothers (who were also aides-de-camp) and the other Volkonskys in his entourage.5 The prince dined with the Emperor every day. He was one of the few who were permitted to enter the Emperor's private apartments unannounced. The Grand Duke Nicholas - later to become Tsar Nicholas I - who was nine years younger than Sergei, would, as a boy, ask the aide-decamp to position his toy soldiers in the formation of Napoleon's armies at Austerlitz.6 Two decades later he sent his playmate to Siberia.
In 1808 Volkonsky returned to the army in the field and, in the course of the next four years, he took part in over fifty battles, rising by the age of twenty-four to the rank of major-general. Napoleon's invasion shook the Prince from the pro-French views he had held in common with much of the Petersburg elite. It stirred in him a new sense of 'the nation' that was based upon the virtues of the common folk. The patriotic spirit of the ordinary people in 1812 - the heroism of the soldiers, the burning-down of Moscow to save it from the French, and the peasant partisans who forced the Grande Armee to hurry back to Europe through the snow - all these were the signs, it seemed to him, of a national reawakening. 'Russia has been honoured by its peasant soldiers,' he wrote to his brother from the body-littered battlefield of Borodino on 26 August 1812. 'They may be only serfs, but these men have fought like citizens for their motherland.'7
He was not alone in entertaining democratic thoughts. Volkonsky's friend (and fellow Decembrist), the poet Fedor Glinka, was equally impressed by the patriotic spirit of the common folk. In his Letters of a Russian Officer (1815) he compared the serfs (who were 'ready to defend their motherland with scythes') with the aristocracy (who 'ran off to their estates' as the French approached Moscow).8 Many officers came to recognize the peasant's moral worth. 'Every day,' wrote one, 'I meet peasant soldiers who are just as good and rational as any nobleman. These simple men have not yet been corrupted by the absurd conventions of our society, and they have their own moral ideas which are just as good.'9 Here, it seemed, was the spiritual
potential for a national liberation and spiritual rebirth. 'If only we could find a common language with these men', wrote one of the future Decembrists, 'they would quickly understand the rights and duties of a citizen.'10
Nothing in the background of these officers had prepared them for the shock of this discovery. As noblemen they had been brought up to regard their fathers' serfs as little more than human beasts devoid of higher virtues and sensibilities. But in the war they were suddenly thrown into the peasants' world: they lived in their villages, they shared their food and fears with the common soldiers, and at times, when they were wounded or lost without supplies, they depended on those soldiers' know-how to survive. As their respect for the common people grew, they adopted a more humanitarian approach to the men under their command. 'We rejected the harsh discipline of the old system,' recalled Volkonsky, 'and tried through friendship with our men to win their love and trust.'11 Some set up field schools to teach the soldiers how to read. Others brought them into discussion circles where they talked about the abolition of serfdom and social justice for the peasantry. A number of future Decembrists drew up 'army constitutions' and other proposals to better the conditions of the soldiers in the ranks. These documents, which were based on a close study of the soldier's way of life, may be seen as embryonic versions of the ethnographic works which so preoccupied the Slavophile and democratic intelligentsia in the 1830s and 1840s. Volkonsky, for example, wrote a detailed set of 'Notes on the Life of the Cossacks in Our Battalions', in which he proposed a series of progressive measures (such as loans from the state bank, communal stores of grain and the establishment of public schools) to improve the lot of the poorer Cossacks and lessen their dependence on the richer ones.12
After the war these democratic officers returned to their estates with a new sense of commitment to their serfs. Many, like Volkonsky, paid for the upkeep of the soldiers' orphaned sons on their estates, or, like him, gave money for the education of those serfs who had shown their potential in the ranks of 1812.13 Between 1818 and 1821 Count Mikhail Orlov and Vladimir Raevsky, both members of the Union of Welfare out of which the Decembrist conspiracy would evolve, established schools for soldiers in which they disseminated radical
ideas of political reform. The benevolence of some of these former officers was extraordinary. Pavel Semenov dedicated himself to the welfare of his serfs with the fervour of a man who owed his life to them. At the battle of Borodino, a bullet hit the icon which he had been given by his soldiers and had worn around his neck. Semenov organized a clinic for his serfs, and turned his palace into a sanctuary for war widows and their families. He died from cholera in 1830 - an illness he contracted from the peasants in his house.14
For some officers it was not enough to identify themselves with the common people's cause: they wanted to take on the identity of common men themselves. They Russified their dress and behaviour in an effort to move closer to the soldiers in the ranks. They used Russian words in their military speech. They smoked the same tobacco as their men; and in contravention of the Petrine ban, they grew beards. To some extent such democratization was necessary. Denis Davydov, the celebrated leader of the Cossack partisans, had found it very hard to raise recruits in the villages: the peasants saw his glittering Hussar uniform as alien and 'French'. Davydov was forced, as he noted in his diary, to 'conclude a peace with the villagers' before he could even speak to them. 'I learned that in a people's war it is not enough to speak the common tongue: one must also step down to the people's level in one's manners and one's dress. I began to wear a peasant's kaftan, I grew a beard, and instead of the Order of St Anne, I wore the image of St Nicholas.'15 But the adoption of these peasant ways was more than just a strategy of quick-thinking officers. It was a declaration of their nationality.
Volkonsky took command of a partisan brigade and pursued Napoleon's troops as far as Paris during 1813-14. The next year, with 20,000 roubles in his chest, a carriage and three servants provided by his mother, he travelled to Vienna for the Peace Congress. He then returned to Paris, where he moved in the circles of the political reformers Chateaubriand and B
enjamin Constant, and went on to London, where he saw the principles of constitutional monarchy in operation as he watched the House of Commons discuss the lunacy of George III. Volkonsky had planned to go to the United States - 'a country that had captured the imagination of all Russian youth because of its independence and democracy' - but the resumption of the war
with Napoleon's escape from Elba obliged him to return to Petersburg.16 None the less, like those of many Decembrists, Volkonsky's views had been deeply influenced by his brief encounter with the West. It confirmed his conviction in the personal dignity of every human being - an essential credo of the Decembrists which lay at the foundation of their opposition to the autocratic system and serfdom. It formed his belief in meritocracy - a view strengthened by his conversations with Napoleon's officers, who impressed him with their free thought and confidence. How many Neys and Davouts had been stifled by the rigid caste system of the Russian army? Europe made him think of Russia's backwardness, of its lack of basic rights or public life, and helped him focus his attention on the need to follow Europe's liberal principles.
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