While the tsar prepared to charm the Frenchman, customs agents at the border roughly searched the marquis and confiscated all his books in French. His pleasures continued in St. Petersburg, where he stayed at the best hotel (today’s Hotel Evropa), where he was kept awake all night by hordes of bedbugs.
The emperor received the marquis. Expecting sympathy, Nicholas laid out his principles to Custine, monarchist to monarchist. “Russia has despotism, because only it suits the spirit of the people. As for a constitution, I would sooner retreat to China than permit that kind of government in Russia.”
Custine liked Nicholas’s appearance: “The most handsome monarch in Europe.” Custine’s sexual orientation made him particularly sensitive to masculine beauty. But the conversations with the tsar did not inspire the marquis. Custine was a monarchist, yes, but he was a proponent of enlightened monarchy. Police despotism, which he saw at every step, did not please him.
Visiting the place where the emperor’s father and grandfather had been killed, Custine noted the Russian paradox: Ruthless despotism in Russia did have limitations, imposed by ruthless murder.
Other Russian paradoxes struck the marquis throughout his journey. For example, at the Kremlin in Moscow he was proudly shown the two greatest points of interest. The Tsar Bell, “the biggest bell in the world, weighing 200 tons, from which unfortunately a piece had broken off and it never rang. And the Tsar Cannon, the world’s largest cannon, which had, unfortunately, never been shot.”
While in Moscow he met with the period’s greatest dissident, Chaadayev. Custine borrowed one of Chaadayev’s famous bon mots for his book. Chaadayev said, “What a lovely city Moscow is: They keep showing people historical absurdities, a cannon that was never shot and a bell that fell and does not ring. A bell without a tongue is the perfect symbol for my beloved Russia.”
Custine’s book Russia in 1839 was published in 1843. The marquis painted his portrait of Russia in it: “You have to live in that desert called Russia in order to feel all the freedom of life in other European countries.” “Here everything is oppressed, cowering in fear, everything is grim, silent, and blindly obedient to the invisible rod.” “Stupid and iron army discipline has shackled one and all.” “In France you can achieve everything using the orator’s tribune. In Paris the ability to speak will elevate you to the heights of power. In Russia, the ability to be silent will elevate you.” “The most insignificant person, if he manages to please the tsar, can become the most important one in the state. As one of the emperors said, ‘An aristocrat in Russia is someone with whom I am now conversing and for only as long as I converse with him.’” “There are slaves in many countries, but to see so many court slaves you must travel to Russia.”
This applied not only to the emperor’s court. Custine described the heir’s court, where he was struck by the “toadying spirit that united nobles with their own servants” and the astonishing combination in courtiers of “servility and arrogance.”
Custine, like many foreigners, had not understood Russian traditions. Ambassador Herberstein, who came to Russia in the reign of the father of Ivan the Terrible, was stunned by the servility of Russian boyars. Even if the tsar meted out the most horrible punishment, impalement, the boyar who sat on the pike continued to praise the tsar.
“We serve our tsars not in your manner,” they explained, proud of their slavery.
This was a country where noblemen in petitions called themselves serfs, that is, slaves. Ivan the Terrible formulated those relations: “We are free to pardon and to execute our serfs.”
Universal lying came out of the slavery. “Until now I had thought that the truth was as necessary to man as air and sunshine. My travels in Russia have shown me otherwise. Lying here means preserving the throne, telling the truth means shaking the foundations,” wrote the marquis.
Custine made a remarkable prediction. Observing the gigantic empire cemented by fear, slavery, lies, the Third Department, church, and autocracy, the Frenchman wrote, “In less than fifty years, Russia will have a revolution.” He was off by only a decade. In 1905, in the reign of Nicholas I’s great-grandson and namesake, the revolution began.
When Nicholas I read Custine’s book, he threw it on the floor. “It’s my own fault! Why did I ever speak to that scoundrel!”
The book was banned, carefully confiscated from foreigners at the border, and yet, it was read by everyone in Russia. “The tsar barricaded the country with a fence, but the fence has cracks and the wind blows through them harder than a free wind,” wrote Alexander Herzen scornfully. In the country stifled by the Third Department, books smuggled in from the West circulated in great numbers.
Did Alexander read Custine’s book? Most likely. There is no better advertising than a ban. “Banned goods are like forbidden fruit: The price doubles with the ban. Custine’s book was read by all of educated Russia,” wrote Alexander Turgenev.
There was another power in Russia: Along with the power of the emperor, there was the power of the bribe. As a contemporary joked, “I could bring in not only French books but a French guillotine—I just have to settle on how much it will cost.”
The military were not good executives, and corruption began to rule. The military became part of it. It took place in the back alley of the regime; along the façade, everything looked good.
Nicholas demanded that the “scoundrel” Custine be paid back. The Third Department organized articles against Custine in Russia and abroad. Zhukovsky wrote to Alexander Turgenev and asked him to reply to Custine. He warned him that “the reply to Custine should be brief; you should not attack the book, for there is a lot of truth in it, but Custine.”
“Why attack it, if it’s true?” wondered Turgenev.
Alexander Herzen is the greatest figure in the history of liberal Russia. All the famous radicals of Europe—Proudhon, Garibaldi, Owen, Kohut, Hugo—knew and respected that fantastic Russian. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner and a German woman his father brought back to Moscow from his European trip. The love child was given a surname based on the German word for “heart.” At university, Herzen contracted a rare disease in imperial Russia—a love of liberty. It ended with the arrest of the twenty-two-year-old student, exile, and emigration. Once abroad, Herzen did an incredible thing: He declared war on the empire.
In the silent country, oppressed by censorship, the truth resounded only from abroad. Herzen founded the Free Russian Printing Press outside Russia, and with another émigré, his friend the poet Nicholas Ogarev, began publishing the famous newspaper Kolokol (The Bell), with its motto, “I toll for the living.” Despite the strict ban, Kolokol was smuggled into the country, to be read by all of educated Russia. A lone émigré became the mighty empire’s greatest foe.
Scandalous financial affairs of influential Russian officials and secret government decrees appeared in the pages of Kolokol. Who informed Herzen? Officials. When one wanted to damage another, he wrote a denunciation. Not to the tsar, who might not pay heed, but to a more powerful source—Kolokol. That got the tsar’s attention right away, because Nicholas read the despised newspaper closely.
Alexander knew this.
The years passed. It was not easy for Nicholas to love Alexander, for their characters were so different. Nicholas’s temper erupted frequently. He could not bear tardiness, and the very first time the heir’s wife was late for a ceremony, although Nicholas was a true knight who could not scold a woman, Alexander was called a “sluggish cow” publicly. His constant docile apathy irritated Nicholas.
His brother was quite unlike him. Konstantin unfurled furious activity at the Naval Department. He founded the Russian Geographical Society, where he gathered other energetic young men. Many of his ideas seemed foolish and even dangerous to the tsar. Kostya suggested building steamships, but Nicholas did not like newfangled things. Stubborn Kostya then offered to build them with his own money. Nicholas still believed in sails, but he was enchanted by Konstantin’s wild
energy. He saw himself in him.
To rouse his heir a bit, the tsar sent his son to war in the Caucasus. The Caucasus was a Babylon with dozens of ethnic groups that spoke forty languages. From the cloudy peaks of Ossetia, Kabardia, Chechnya, and Dagestan, militant mountain raiders attacked Russian lands. The Caucasus was in constant turmoil, and the peoples there allied themselves with Russia’s ancient foes, the Turkish Empire and the Persians.
In 1828, Nicholas began a war on the Caucasus with the aim of uniting the northern area with the previously annexed Transcaucasus—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. But the sons of militant Islam did not want to follow in the footsteps of the Orthodox Georgians and Armenians. Mullah Mohamed declared a jihad against Russia. It was in Dagestan and Chechnya that Muridism, the militant branch of Islam, was born. It provided the prototype for the Islamic warriors of the twentieth century.
The Murids sought salvation in shedding the blood of Christians. They fought fearlessly, a contemporary wrote, because they were filled with “fantasized descriptions of paradise with beautiful houris and other earthly delights. Dead warriors immediately were sent to this picturesque paradise. It was Allah’s generous reward for the blood of the infidels. Thus death itself was conquered by these wild beliefs, which helped them kill fearlessly and die joyfully.”
The Murids hid in the woods, like animals, and attacked from there. In order to move forward, Nicholas’s soldiers had to try a new tactic—chop down the forests and build fortresses in their place. The cruelty of the Murids elicited cruelty in response, in an ever-spiraling escalation of violence. Peaceful villages that had sheltered Murids were burned down.
Things came to a head when the Caucasian tribes found a great leader, the imam Shamil. He managed the impossible: He united the various tribes that spoke different languages and that often fought among themselves under his authoritarian rule. He created a strong state in the wild mountains, a new system of relations in an anarchic milieu.
Shamil created a religious state (imamate) uniting Chechnya, Dagestan, and Avaria, headed by himself as the imam, the military and religious leader. The conflation of spiritual and earthly power is in the tradition of Islam, and it gave Shamil absolute power over the souls and lives of his subjects. He was a typically ruthless eastern dictator. He armed the entire male population between fifteen and fifty. The men now lived in military camps, where they were trained in using rifles.
Throughout the 1840s, Shamil terrorized Nicholas’s army. This period revealed the impotence of the huge Russian army in fighting the imamate. Partisan war—the sudden raids by the tribesmen—brought larger casualties to the Russians than ordinary battles. It was impossible to fight in Chechnya in the summer, when the mountains were covered by forests that hid the Murids. In the winter, the Russians could not fight in Dagestan, where the mountain passes became impenetrable. Shamil’s troops had much more room for maneuver.
Shamil always led his men into battle. Always in front, he was wounded nineteen times.
The war had dragged on for over twenty years, with no end in sight. In 1850, the tsar sent Alexander to Chechnya, “to smell gunpowder.” As usual, away from his father, Alexander was completely transformed. He was full of energy and looked forward to combat.
The first real battle for Alexander took place near the fortress of Achkhoi, where a Chechen company was discovered in the forest. The battle began early in the morning. We can imagine the officers’ tent, heated by burning coals. He slept a heavy but restless sleep, as to be expected before battle. It was still dark when his adjutant woke him, with candlelight in his sleepy eyes and the respectful announcement, “Your Imperial Highness, we are attacking.”
The mountain range drowned in the sunrise. Smoke rose from the villages on the mountainside, a small river glistened. The Russian army was going up the heavenly mountain when two dozen Chechens burst out of the woods above. One, in a dark beshmet, a quilted coat, stood in his stirrups and juggled his whip, then tossed it to his left hand and seemingly plucked his rifle out of the air like a magician. He twirled it, tossed it up, caught it, and shot. This was the first time Alexander heard a bullet whiz by at such close range. A young orderly clutched his chest and slipped from his horse.
Alexander galloped at the Chechens, bringing the convoy and Cossacks after him. The Chechens headed for the woods, where they hid behind fallen trees. All that showed was the glint of their rifles, catching in the sun. Jumping down from their horses, ahead of Alexander, the Cossacks and the retinue attacked the log barriers. They began hand-to-hand combat, while other Chechens shot at them from the trees. Many soldiers were buried after Alexander’s bold but irrational attack. They killed all the Chechens and he was given their leader’s saber. His father awarded him the Cross of St. George, but recalled him to the capital.
This is all that can be told about his dashing time in the Caucasus. But in the early 1850s Count Leo Tolstoy arrived in the Caucasus. He was twenty-three and of a notable aristocratic family. His celebrated ancestors had been military leaders and had taken part in very bloody events. His great-grandfather, Peter Tolstoy, was a comrade-in-arms of Peter the Great and had been head of the terrible Secret Chancellery, the secret police. He managed to lure the tsarevich Alexei back to Russia. Peter I’s son, who had dared to take a stand against his father, had fled abroad. Peter Tolstoy got him back and took part in killing him—killing the tsar’s son on the father’s orders.
Leo Tolstoy had not come to the Caucasus as a tourist; he was feeling the vapidity of high society and of himself—his gambling and drinking sprees. This flight from his previous life is the start of his great biography, just as another would be its culmination. At the end of his life, the old man tried to flee his previous life, leaving behind his family and his house in Yasnaya Polyana. The great refugee died along the way, in a small railroad station.
In 1852, Tolstoy was an army cadet taking part in the war on Chechens. (Three of his serfs came as cadets with the count.) In combat, Leo Tolstoy earned the rank of officer. Through the eyes of a brave officer and great writer we can see that side of the war in the Caucasus. In the manuscript of “The Raid,” Tolstoy describes an ordinary scene: A general cheerfully allows his soldiers to loot a captured village.
“Well, colonel,” said the general, smiling, “let them go burn and pillage, I can see that they really want to do it.” Dragoons, Cossacks, and infantry scattered across the village. A roof collapses there, a door is broken in, here a fence burns, a house, a haystack…. Here’s a Cossack dragging a sack of cornmeal, a soldier a carpet and two chickens, another, a wash basin and a jar of milk, a third has loaded up a donkey with all kinds of goods; others are leading an almost naked, frightened, decrepit old Chechen, who had not managed to run away.
Here is another description, from Tolstoy’s Khadji Murat. “Returning to the village, Sado found his house looted. His son, a handsome boy with shining eyes, had been brought dead to the mosque. He had been bayoneted in the back. Women wailed in all the houses. Small children wailed with their mothers. The hungry cattle wailed, too, and there was no food for them.”
Had Alexander seen that side of the war? How could he not? It was side by side with the romance. It was a bloody and ruthless war. His father left as his legacy a war that dragged on for a quarter century. Alexander would have to bring it to an end, as he would another war, humiliatingly lost by his father, which would become a catastrophe for Russia.
Count Leo Tolstoy would be in that war, too.
Following the traditions of Catherine, whom he disliked, Nicholas regarded his growing grandson with hope. There was someone who could be a true tsar. But the boy was not growing fast enough. Something had changed in Nicholas’s health. He was weary and an unconscious anxiety wore away at him. As Herzen put it, “Animals worry this way before an earthquake.”
He turned seriously to preparing Alexander for the throne. He spent hours taking walks with him, talking. Later, Alexander would say that “we always used t
he informal ‘Thou’ with each other.” But how it differed in usage. Alexander addressed his father as a god, and his father treated him like a milksop.
In 1848, Europe was shaken by an earthquake when revolution came. Nicholas said with some exulting that he had foreseen it. When the monarchy fell in France, he appeared at a ball and allegedly said to the officers: “Saddle up, gentlemen, France is a republic!”
He thought his hour of glory had come: Russia would return order to a crazed Europe. He called on Austria, England, and Prussia to recollect the principles of the Holy Alliance that had been created against revolutions. No one heeded his call, yet. Nicholas was lucky. A Hungarian uprising began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Nicholas offered his aid to the Austrian emperor. Franz Josef gladly accepted. At last, they really could saddle up. Once again, Nicholas’s most talented general, the conqueror of Poland, Field Marshal Paskevich, crushed the revolution. Rebel Hungarians were hanged mercilessly. But for some reason, instead of being grateful, Europe called Nicholas a despot and a cannibal.
After the revolution in Europe, Nicholas instituted total supervision in literature. Almost everything was banned. The great writer Nikolai Gogol, once a favorite of the tsar, was banned. When another great writer, Ivan Turgenev, wrote a powerful obituary after Gogol’s death, he was imprisoned for a month and then banished from the capital. Another celebrity, the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, was placed under police surveillance for one of his comedies (It’s a Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Ourselves), as was the renowned satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.
Not long before, the Westernizers (writers and pundits who believed in a European path of development for Russia and were therefore particularly enamored of the reformer Peter the Great) and the Slavophiles (who believed in Russia’s special, national path and therefore did not like Peter) had debated furiously in literary “holy battles.” Now both sides were silent, because both tendencies were banned. Any thought at all was persecuted.
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