The rigidity of Nicholas’s regime was reflected not only in its slowness to reform but also in its suffocating control of education. Pupils were quarantined from subversive Western influences by limits to the curriculum. At university, philosophy was no longer offered, and religious truth replaced rational thought as the standard by which arguments were tested.85 Uniforms – which Herzen observed, were ‘passionately loved by despotism’ – became obligatory, emblematic of the stuffy conformity in the capital. Herzen suggested that if one were to show an Englishman ‘the battalions of exactly similar, tightly buttoned frock coats of the fops on the Nevsky Prospekt’, he would take them for a ‘squad of policemen’.86
With the government keeping a tight rein on the capital after the Decembrist uprising, the intellectual initiative and impetus for change moved – temporarily – to Moscow. During the 1830s, the revolutionary thinkers Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, Timofey Granovsky and Mikhail Bakunin attended its university. They formed a circle around Nikolai Stankevich, a young philosopher attracted by the idea – proposed by Friedrich von Schiller – that it was in the private arena of the soul that mankind achieved freedom. These young rebels were sensitive, educated members of a class whose days were numbered. They became known as ‘superfluous men’ who could find no place for themselves in Russia even though they strove, through the printed word, to advance radical thought and action. Attracted by Western ideas and freedom, most of them moved to St Petersburg, which – despite the rigour of the tsar – was always more open than Moscow. Others went into exile abroad, in a search for the freedom to proclaim radical thought.87
Belinsky converted to French utopian socialism in the early 1840s and set out – for the rest of his brief life – to expose the social evils of his society through his work as a literary critic and sociological commentator. He was an early champion of Dostoevsky, whose first story, Poor Folk, ‘revealed the life of the grey, humiliated, Russian minor official as nobody had ever done before’.88 Famously, Belinsky took Gogol to task for the writer’s late conversion to mystical conservatism. In the course of his incendiary letter, Belinsky – protesting against autocracy and serfdom – claimed that Russia needed an awakening of ‘human dignity lost for so many centuries amid the dirt and refuse’.89 Dying of consumption in 1848, he avoided imprisonment or exile for promulgating such unpatriotic ideas.
This generation of thinkers, in its search for solutions to Russia’s impasse, split into Slavophils and Westerners – two groups with distinct methods and opinions, but who, nonetheless, shared a good number of ideas. Hating the bureaucracy of the state, the Slavophils sought solutions through the Orthodox Church and in the rejection of European ideas. For them, Peter the Great had been gravely mistaken in turning his back on Moscow and looking westwards. One of their number, Ivan Aksakov, suggested that the only way to revive the nation was to ‘spit in the face’ of St Petersburg.90 While the Slavophils were devout, Westerners tended to be atheists. Vissarion Belinsky went so as far as to say that the Orthodox religion was ‘the handmaid of despotism”91 and was infuriated by its desire to block scientific progress with superstition. But there was one traditional structure which attracted both Westerners and Slavophils – the village commune, or obshchina, where people met in a high street peace meeting to settle matters.92
Herzen was the illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat and a humble German woman. Frequently in trouble with the authorities, he eventually fled to England, where he set up the Free Russian Press with which to attack the Russia of Nicholas I. Reacting against idealists such as Hegel and spurning historicists such as Marx, Herzen declared that nature and history were not subject to schemes and plans. The duty of people was to the present and to the freedom afforded by ‘the labourer’s wage or pleasure in the work performed’. History was an incoherent teacher, a senseless tale of ‘chronic madness’. Progress meant respecting and ameliorating the present. The realisation of personal potential should triumph over tyranny, and political freedom should protect human dignity. To sacrifice such dignity in striving for the ghost of a future was delusional. Increasingly Herzen came to believe that socialism could be achieved through the collectivism of the obshchina.93 By virtue of its backwardness, Herzen believed that Russia could avoid capitalism and succeed in becoming truly socialist – an idea that proved influential to the succeeding generation, the narodniki, or ‘populists’, of the 1860s and 1870s.94
Nicholas Ogarev, Herzen’s friend and Bakunin’s publisher, went beyond mere words and freed the serfs on his estate in 1838 – more than twenty years before the botched emancipation edict of 1861. Sadly, his intention that the village commune would successfully administer the estate ended in failure, and Ogarev – coping with his heavy drinking – left Russia in the mid-1850s to join Herzen.95 The most extreme of all the ‘superfluous men’, Mikhail Bakunin, also fled to Europe after being exiled to Siberia. Bakunin advocated unreserved destruction in order to allow fresh ideas to take root. He shared with Herzen a belief in the supreme importance of individual liberty.
Mikhail Petrashevsky, a young official working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had been stunned by a series of political economy lectures that explored the ideas of the French utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Louis Blanc. As a result, in 1845 Petrashevsky initiated his informal Friday gatherings, where ‘everybody spoke loudly about everything, without any reservation whatsoever’. Three years later, these meetings were formalised and lectures were given. Some of these proved to be of an extremely contentious nature. In 1848 – when, from all over Europe, news arrived of reforms, uprisings and revolts – such meetings were seen as dangerous. Nicholas I, keeping revolution at bay by vigilance, placed undercover agents in the Petrashevsky circle.
One of the most dangerous speakers was a ruthless, strong-willed and wealthy landowner called Nikolai Speshnev. Having learned the ways of revolutionaries from European groups, Speshnev wanted the members of the Petrashevsky circle to produce and circulate propaganda that incited peasants to rise up against landlords and then to massacre the army units sent to subdue them.96 Increasingly anxious about the radicalisation of the fringes of the circle, the authorities rounded up and questioned more than 250 suspects, exiled fifty-one of them and sentenced twenty-one – including Fyodor Dostoevsky – to death. The writer was accused of a conspiracy to overthrow the state. His crime? Reading Belinsky’s letter to Gogol to a meeting of the circle.
On 22 April 1848, Dostoevsky awoke to find a policeman and an agent of the Third Section standing in his bedroom. They had come to arrest him. Along with other members of the circle who complained of torture while they were in captivity, Dostoevsky was locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At dawn on zz December 1849, the condemned were led through the gently falling snow to the place of execution in Semyonovsky Square. Prisoners who had been kept in solitary confinement were madly chattering – their sallow faces and straggled black beards ghoulish against the jewel-white snow. As Dostoevsky wrote to his brother, ‘the sentence of death was read to us, we were all made to kiss the cross, a sword was broken over our heads, and we were told to don our white execution shirts. Then three of us were tied to the stakes in order to be shot . . . For me, only one minute of life remained.’97 But, strangely, the drum roll beat a retreat. The sentence of execution delivered in mid-November had been commuted, but in order to impress upon the miscreants the gravity of their crimes, Nicholas insisted that it be kept from them until they had suffered the ordeal of the execution ceremony. Dostoevsky was carted off to penal servitude in Siberia until, in February 1854, he was released to be a soldier. In his sadistic act of clemency, Nicholas made his greatest gift to the arts. One of the world’s major writers had been spared.98
An official history of the Third Section compiled in 1876 admitted that the Petrashevsky circle had consisted only of ‘corrupt youths who dreamed of spreading socialism to Russia’.99 Nevertheless, the authorities placed further restrictions on reading matter,
there were rumours of university closures and increased surveillance – measures that only served to fire the next generation of radicals. Just as Custine, in summarising Russia, suggested that fear was paralysing thought, so the writer and critic Alexander Nikitenko protested that there were ‘more censors than books’. There were so many government agents in the press that no story could be given straight. And even these plants were subject to censure. One of the journalists employed by the Third Section, Faddei Bulgarin, was taken to task for complaining about Petersburg weather, for daring to be negative about the climate of the capital of the tsar. For the most part, Bulgarin denounced writers, planted stories in periodicals and – as a steady contributor to the Vedomosti – helped turn that publication of the Academy of Sciences into a propaganda sheet for the government. Vissarion Belinsky railed against the ‘venal journalism’ of Bulgarin, who edited The Northern Bee, a publication subsidised by the Third Section in order to provide a rosy picture of life under Nicholas. It proved very popular, with circulation rising from 7,000 in the 1830s to 10,000 during the Crimean War in the early 1850s.100 As censorship took the bite out of much that was published, Nikolai Chernyshevsky – who would become the mouthpiece of the revolutionary movement in the next decade – noted that among the writers of the capital in the early 1850s, apathy triumphed. Nikolai Nekrasov, leader of the literary investigation into Petersburg’s middle and lower depths, lost heart and became addicted to cards. Others, in order to make money, wrote pornography.101 In his celebrated 1851 letter to Jules Michelet that same year, Herzen provided a chilling image of the repressive tsar: ‘Nicholas tries to forget his isolation, but grows gloomier, more morose and uneasy with every passing hour. He sees he is not loved; the silence that reigns near him seems all the more deadly because of the distant murmur of the impending tempest.’102
Before Herzen fled to Europe, he was hauled up before the Third Section. Accused of not ‘effacing the stains left from . . . youthful errors’, the pretext for his arrest concerned the gossip that circulated about a sentry on the Blue Bridge, who had allegedly killed and robbed a passer-by in the middle of the night. But Herzen’s was a spurious charge, occasioned by the fact that the tsar had seen his file, noticed that he had been exiled to Siberia and thought he should be sent back. Herzen was accused by a secret force ‘outside the law and above the law’, which possessed the ‘right to meddle in everything’. The Third Section had become such a part of Russian life that – although its name changed – its methods persisted in the perennial drive to secure the Russian state.An English lady visiting in the 1850s noted that it ‘is no exaggeration to say that a Russian subject scarcely dares to utter his true sentiments, even to his own brother’. She had often witnessed ‘conversations in which perhaps four or five would be taking part each knowing’ – absurdly – ‘that his neighbour was telling a lie’. The visitor ascertained that ‘besides the secret police’, there were ‘80,000 paid agents in the country’, including ‘some of the French milliners in St Petersburg’. The tsar, quipped Custine, was ‘the only man in his empire with whom one can converse without fear of informers’.103 And Derzhavin’s lines of 1808 revealed the capital’s true character:
Why venture to Petropolis, if uncompelled,
change space for closeness, liberty for locks and latches.104
When the London Times broke the news of Nicholas I’s death in March 1855, Alexander Herzen broke open the champagne.105 The tsar had acted as the ‘gendarme of Europe’106 through three decades of political unrest and revolution, crushing rebellion in Poland, revolt in Hungary and forcing Prussia to accept Habsburg domination. His foreign policy, however, ended with the miscalculation that Russia could successfully combat an Anglo-French alliance in the Crimea. When Sebastopol fell, there were Russians who rejoiced, hoping that defeat would result in the fall of the Romanovs.107 Under the tsars, Russia was stagnating. It was uncompetitive. It was a place – observed Custine – where people had two coffins, ‘the cradle and the tomb’. It was a prison to which the tsar alone held the key. Writing a few years before Nicholas died, the Russian historian Timofey Granovsky saw Russia as ‘nothing but a living pyramid of crimes, frauds and abuses, full of spies, policemen, rascally governors, drunken magistrates and cowardly aristocrats’."108
There were police scams in the capital, such as the slowly accumulating profit to be made from lighting two, instead of three, wicks in the city’s oil lamps. There was ‘disturbing and unnecessary police brutality’ – one visitor regarding the police ‘as wolves instead of the watch-dogs of the community’.109 Yet, as the population grew, crime increased and during these years the Petersburg police faced greater challenges. In the early 1840s, about 20,000 petty criminals and drifters were arrested each year and carted off in long, squat boxes – most of them being released within days. In order to curb crime and illegal prostitution, there were raids on suspicious establishments. In 1843, the regulation of prostitutes began. Medical Police Committees issued prostitutes with a licence known as the ‘yellow ticket’ and impounded their passports.110 To control infection, prostitutes were instructed to wash their genitals with cold water and to change bed linen between clients. Soliciting when menstruating was forbidden, as blood was thought to transmit disease. With the shift from moral outrage to recognition that prostitution was unavoidable, and hence tolerable, brothels were given strict guidelines. They were to be kept clean, alcohol was to be served with moderation and they were to be closed on Sundays and only opened after the midday meal on holy days. The workers had to be over sixteen, could accept no custom from minors or students and were responsible for inspecting the genitalia of their clients. Nicholas was, of course, happy to tolerate brothels. Madams were well placed to act as agents and informers.111
Despite the tone of Nicholas I’s reign, in which ‘procedure and regularity’ ruled, the infrastructure of the capital developed erratically. In late 1850, the Nevsky Bridge – the first permanent structure to span the Neva – was opened. Its 331-metre length made it the longest bridge in Europe. But, while several central streets were lit by gas, others languished in the dim light of two-wick oil lamps. As illumination was necessary as early as three o’clock in the freezing fogs of winter afternoons, the city – away from the Nevsky Prospekt – remained gloomy. The slums of the city remained grimy and unhealthy, while on the Nevsky, where pedestrians were fined for smoking in the street, crinolines fluttered and French was the dominant language. In the houses of the well-to-do there were flowers on the tables and in every alcove so that, while it froze outside, there was an illusion of temperate paradise. For the wealthy, food was plentiful, with fresh produce harvested throughout the year from the numerous hothouses around the city. Gautier described a luncheon of zakuski ‘taken standing and washed down with vermouth, Madeira, Dantzig brandy’ and cognac. Yet there was evidence of a society not quite adapted to the European customs they sought to emulate. Gautier remarked on the fact that halfway through a dinner, people would switch from Bordeaux and champagne to porter, ale and levas, suggesting that Custine was right to observe that Petersburgers ‘confuse . . . luxury with refinement’.112 There was still a native insecurity when it came to questions of style. The Russian Boris Efremov advertised himself – in French, for credibility – as a Parisian tailor.113 And while the gostiny dvor boasted ‘luxurious shop windows’, like those seen in London or Paris, the experience of shopping was quite different. An Englishwoman asked for French ribbon. The merchant showed her Russian. She patiently demonstrated that she knew what she wanted and, at length, French ribbon was produced. But that was only the start of the tortuous process. Bargaining ensued, which resulted in her storming out of the shop, only to be recalled by an offer only a few kopeks above what she had proposed. After threatening to go next door, she obtained what she wanted for the sum she expected. But still that was not the end. A shopkeeper never had the correct change. It was his way of recouping the losses of bargaining. But, at the end of it all, the cu
stomer prevailed. What should have taken a few minutes, or a couple of sentences to describe, dragged out into a paragraph.114
By the time Nicholas I died in 1855, booksellers were routinely being visited by the police. In one bookshop in the capital they discovered more than 2,500 banned books, suggesting the size of the market for revolutionary ideas and their continued availability, despite the crack-down.115 As Custine observed, everywhere ‘I hear the language of philosophy and everywhere I see oppression as the order of the day’. Indeed, taken all in, Custine perceived Russia as ‘a tightly sealed boiler on a mounting fire’. He added, ‘I fear an explosion.’116
9
DISCONTENT
1855–94
In 1850, employees at the Stieglitz cotton factory were denied a wage rise and 700 of them downed tools. The police isolated sixty-six leaders, six of whom were beaten publicly and returned to their villages. St Petersburg was experiencing the first effects of an industrial revolution. The cotton-spinning industry was thriving, and heavy industry was stimulated by the Crimean War. In the middle years of the 1850s, revenue rose by 50 per cent across the city’s 367 factories and by 100 per cent in its iron foundries. But expansion was compromised by growing unrest among workers and by the post-war economic crisis of 1857. A questionnaire submitted to manufacturers revealed their exploitation of the i,z8z minors who were employed in the capital’s factories – some as young as eight years old. It appeared acceptable that foremen chastised children who were lodged in filthy conditions and forced to work nights.1 Yet – despite a growing perception of the appalling circumstances under which workers laboured – police generally sided with the owners. When, in 1861, a seventeen-year-old girl was killed by steam-driven machinery in one of the larger cotton mills, the owners installed rails around the machinery – and that was that. Despite nearly 3,000 complaints lodged by workers between 1858 and 1861, reform was left to fester from below, as bread shortages, rising prices and an endless stream of new arrivals from the countryside exacerbated the misery of St Petersburg’s working poor.
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