Nineteenth-Century Russia

Opposition to Autocracy

Derek Offord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138835801
• eBook ISBN: 9781317879404
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This new Seminar Study provides students with a rewarding introduction to nineteenth-century Russia. This period of Russian history is, of course, characterised by the flowering of an enormously rich intellectual and cultural life, the origins of which lie in the intelligentsia¿s opposition to autocratic rule. Here, Professor Offord introduces the reader to the period while focusing particularly on the rise of radicalism.

The book opens with two scene-setting chapters: one looking at the political and social structure peculiar to Russia, and the second looking at the cultural and intellectual background. Then, within a chronological framework, the author examines all the great 'events' in the history of Russian radicalism - from the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, to the 'going to the people' in 1874, and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. However, throughout the text sustained attention is given to the intellectual dimension of nineteenth-century Russian history. Professor Offord examines all the major schools of thought and looks in detail at all the great thinkers of the day, including Chaadaev, Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin and Tolstoy.

This new book will provide essential reading for anyone studying nineteenth-century Russia. Lucid, accessible and immensely readable, it is a formidable achievement.

Part One: The Historical Setting

1 The Political and Social Structure

Autocracy

In order to understand the rich cultural and intellectual life that flowered in nineteenth-century Russia and the forms taken by the political opposition to which that life gave rise, we need briefly to consider the country's political and social structure.

Throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed down to the February Revolution of 1917, Russia continued to be governed by an autocrat. That is to say, supreme legislative, executive and judicial power rested in the hands of a monarch who was the sole source of law in the state and was accountable to no-one for the way in which he exercised his authority. (As Leonard Schapiro has pointed out, the Russian word for 'state', gosudarstvo, derived from the word for 'sovereign' (gosudar'), suggests this association of the individual ruler with the polity as a whole [39 p. 78].) Nineteenth-century Russia, then, did not have citizens; rather the Russian tsar (or emperor as he was also known after 1722, when Peter I adopted the title following his victory in the Great Northern War with Sweden) had subjects who owed him unconditional obedience and of whom he could dispose as he pleased.

The institution of autocracy in Russia had developed over a long period following the throwing-off of the Tatar yoke under which Russia laboured from c. 1240 to c. 1480 and the emergence of the grand princes of Moscow as the claimants to power in the post-Tatar state. It is reasonable to argue that the harshness of the institution of autocracy in Russia was to a considerable extent the product of that long domination by the infidel nomads and the difficulty of the conditions in which the Muscovite state developed. The process of constructing a centralized autocratic state was completed in the sixteenth century by Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, who ruled from 1533 to 1584). The power of the autocrat and the severity with which it was wielded were in no way lessened by Peter the Great (sole ruler from 1696 to 1725), despite his far-reaching attempt to Westernize Russia in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Peter's reign is notable for the dragooning of subjects into state service of one sort or another; the brutal crushing of revolts and political opposition, real or imagined; the ruthless expenditure of human life on projects such as the fortification of the country and the construction of St Petersburg which Peter considered of paramount importance to his state; and the regimentation of the populace and the application of discipline of a military type to all areas of national life [32]. Throughout the eighteenth century forces that in the West counterbalanced the power of the state, such as an independent legal profession, advanced private education, a powerful Church, a broad reading public or a middle class, were relatively weak in Russia [61 p. 22]. Alexander I (ruled 1801-25} and Alexander II (ruled 1855-81), in the early years of their respective reigns, did give enlightened opinion of the time some hope that the autocrat himself would limit the sovereign's power. Meanwhile a developing political opposition - represented, for example, by the Decembrists of 1825, the radical thinkers of the 1850s and 1860s and the revolutionaries active from the 1860s on - hoped either to wring concessions from or altogether to destroy the autocracy. And yet no reform in nineteenth-century Russia eroded the authority of the autocrat nor was any major political concession wrung from the government. Moreover, throughout the century the autocrat had at his disposal a powerful military force, a large - though inefficient bureaucracy, and further instruments of control, such as a large secret police force, an army of informers, and powers of censorship, which at certain periods - for example at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I (ruled 1825-55) - were strengthened or deployed with increased vigour.

Nobility and Service

Autocracy depended on the support of the nobility. In Muscovite Russia the privileged position of the great noble clans had been bolstered by a complex system of precedence (mestnichestvo), introduced in the fifteenth century, of which the autocrat was obliged to take account when making high appointments or arranging ceremonial functions at court. However, already in the sixteenth century, particularly in the reign of Ivan IV, there emerged alongside those who were noble by virtue of their pedigree a new class (dvorianstvo) that had attained noble status by means of loyal service to the state in the person of the ruler. This class was rewarded with the allocation of land held as a fief (pomest'e) which remained the legal property of the tsar and which differed from the patrimonial estate (votchina) held in perpetuity by the old boyar clans [39 pp. 92 ff.]. Although mestnichestvo continued to flourish in the seventeenth century, it was finally abolished in 1682 and shortly afterwards Peter the Great took steps, as Ivan had done, to ensure that his nobility gave unstinting service to the state. His Entail Law of 1714, prohibiting the division of a nobleman's estate on his death and requiring that the estate be bequeathed in its entirety to only one of the nobleman's sons, left the remaining sons available for state service. His Table of Ranks, published in 1722, according to which fourteen ranks were created in each of the three areas in which service to the state could be given the civil service, the army, and the navy (which Peter himself had created) - firmly established the relationship between service and rank [32 pp. 188-93; 34 i, pp. 420-21-, 47 pp. 155-7].

Peter's successors came under pressure to relax the demands on the nobility. Thus in 1736, under the Empress Anna (ruled 1730-40), the period of compulsory state service was reduced to twenty-five years; in 1762 a manifesto issued by Peter III (ruled 1761-62) altogether abolished the requirement that nobles serve the state; and in 1785, in her 'Charter of the Nobility', Catherine II (ruled 1762-96) confirmed the exemption from service and other privileges of the nobility. That is not to say that all nobles in fact ceased to serve, although many in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century served only in a desultory way and for a short period. Nevertheless the abolition of the ancient obligation to serve did create an idle class, a minority of whom used their leisure and resources to cultivate themselves but many of whom lacked a sense of purpose. In the nineteenth century, if we are to judge by his portrayal in the imaginative literature of the age, the nobleman exempt from service was prone to an ennui nourished by Western fashions. At the same time in many noblemen a sense of obligation remained strong and this sense, no longer channelled by the state, began to find expression in an interest in ideas and ideals that were ultimately to prove destructive to the autocratic state [42].

Serfdom and Social Backwardness

The autocrat had a further means or rewarding service, apart from land and status, namely the award of serfs to tend the noble's estate, or estates, and to wait upon him and his family in his manor (usad'ba). The gradual development of serfdom in post-Tatar Muscovy is indicated in edicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (e.g. 1497, 1550, 1597) which place increasing restrictions on the movement of the peasant population. The existence of serfdom in its full-blown form is registered by the legal code, or ulozhenie, issued in 1649 under Alexis (ruled 1645-76), which confirmed the landowner's status as absolute and unconditional master of his peasants and taxgatherer for the tsar [33]. Thus by the beginning of the nineteenth century the nobleman wielded on his own estate an absolute power comparable to that exercised by the tsar in Russia as a whole. He had full legal authority over his serfs and was able to sell them - breaking up families in the process - or give them away as gifts or in settlement of debts, inflict corporal punishment on them or have them sent into the armed forces or to penal labour in Siberia. An advertisement placed in a late eighteenth-century newspaper attests to the status of the serf as chattel:

For sale: domestics and skilled craftsmen of good behaviour, viz. two tailors, a shoemaker, a watchmaker, a cook, a coachmaker, a wheelwright, an engraver, a gilder, and two coachmen, who may be inspected and their price ascertained ... at the proprietor's own house, No. 51. Also for sale are three young racehorses, one colt and two geldings, and a pack of hounds, fifty in number, which will be a year old in January and February next, [quoted in 111 p. 33]

The serf tied to the estate of a nobleman had an onerous obligation towards his master. This obligation took the form of either barshchina, a labour-due similar to the Western corvée, or obrok, similar to the Western quit-rent, that is to say an obligation to deliver to the landowner some combination of money and payment in kind. Although the Emperor Paul (ruled 1796-1801) stated that a serf should be required to work for his master for no more than three days each week, in practice such laws could not rigorously be enforced since the judiciary was itself drawn from the landowning class. The labour due, barshchina, was generally considered the more onerous of the two obligations and landowners of liberal temper sometimes transferred their peasants to obrok. In the main, though, the prevalence of one type of obligation or another in a region was determined by the relationship between the local agricultural conditions and the interest of the landowning class: where the land was fertile, especially in the rich black-earth belt, barshchina tended to prevail, whilst in less fertile regions obrok was more widespread. It should be added that every male serf was obliged to pay a tax to the state, that is the poll-tax (podushnaia podat'), introduced by Peter the Great following the census begun in 1718 and first levied in 1724. He was also liable to military recruitment for a term of twenty-five years, if he was taken to serve in the army, or ten years if he was taken to serve in the navy where conditions were still harsher.

Protest at this state of affairs, in the form of localized eruptions of violence, was a commonplace feature of Russian rural life. A more serious danger, of which government and nobles were ever conscious, was recurrence of elemental peasant revolt of the sort that had erupted with an almost fatal regularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These revolts - led by Bolotnikov in 1606-7, Stenka Razin in 1671-72, Bulavin in 1707-9 and Pugachov in 1773-74 emanated from the Russian heartland in the South East, in the regions of the Volga and the Don. They attracted large, unsettled, drifting sections of the population and serfs in those regions, unleashed a tide of savage destructive energy and, in the case of the revolts of Stenka Razin and Pugachov, were put down by the state only with great difficulty.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the late survival in Russia of serfdom, an institution that in Western Europe is associated with medieval, feudal times and had begun to decline from the end of the thirteenth century. (In Eastern Europe the institution had persisted much longer, but even in the Austro-Hungarian Empire it had been abolished in the late eighteenth century.) Its persistence in Russia until 1861 had profound adverse moral and social consequences. For one thing serfdom was felt to degrade the serf-owning class itself. The existence of a servile mass dedicated to the task of providing for a privileged minority fostered indolence and dependency in many landowners. Some, like the notoriously cruel mother of the novelist Turgenev [62 pp. 16-17], were clearly brutalized by their absolute power over their serfs. In a minority - and it is from this minority that some of the most articulate opponents of autocracy were to come - the power they involuntarily wielded over fellow human beings induced a crushing sense of guilt. On a broader level the persistence of serfdom inhibited the spread of literacy, education and civic consciousness. Among the mass of the population an independent spirit could therefore find expression only more or less outside the jurisdiction of the state, among the Cossacks who settled at Russia's frontiers, in the sectarian communities that had sprung up following the schism (raskol) precipitated in the Russian Church in the second half of the seventeenth century by the reforms of Patriarch Nikon [34 i, pp. 286-95], and among the criminal elements of society idealized in the second half of the nineteenth century by revolutionary anarchists.

Most importantly, serfdom was associated with economic backwardness. By tying the bulk of the population to the land and preventing the movement of a free labour force, it acted as an impediment to the growth of towns and the development of industry and modern communications. Whereas the ratio of townsmen to villagers in 1840 was roughly one to two in Britain and one to five in France, in Russia it was one to over eleven [44 pp. 142-3]. The proportion of the population that could be classified as factory workers was relatively small and industry was often of the cottage variety. Construction of a railway line between St Petersburg and Moscow did not begin until 1842 [45 p. 247], This retarded economic development may in turn be associated with the lack of a coherent middle class or bourgeoisie. Even late in the nineteenth century the elements that in the West comprised a middle class - business people, bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals - tended in Russia to be disparate and to pursue different interests [45 pp. 28-9], This social lacuna had a profound effect on political as well as economic development. It accounts for the relative weakness in nineteenth-century Russia of moderate, liberal political opinion. It may also explain the lack of sympathy shown by thinkers at both ends of the political spectrum for entrepreneurial activity, the lack of practicality in much of their thought - which tends towards the visionary rather than the concrete - and their disdain, even contempt, for prosperity and material gain.

2 Cultural and Intellectual Life

Westernization

Political and social backwardness in pre-revolutionary Russia cannot be divorced from the late arrival there of secular learning and culture. The domination of Russia by the Tatars for over two hundred years had the effect of cutting Russia off from the West at the time of the Renaissance and severely retarded the progress of intellectual and cultural life. In Kievan times (from the tenth to the twelfth centuries) the earliest Russian state had enjoyed contacts - commercial, cultural, religious and even dynastic — with many other peoples. In Muscovite times (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries), on the other hand, the Russians did not participate in the remarkable geographical exploration, scientific discovery, flowering of commerce, architecture and painting, rediscovery of classical learning, and development of scholarship, secular literary traditions, theology and philosophy which were taking place in the West in those centuries. Admittedly a written literary tradition was kept alive in Russia during the dark age of the Tatar yoke by the monasteries, whose existence the Tatars tolerated. However, Russia had drawn its Christianity — in 988 according to the chronicles, during the rule of the Kievan Prince Vladimir — from Byzantium in the East rather than Rome in the West, and in 1054 the growing schism between the Western, Catholic branch of the Christian Church and its Eastern, Orthodox branch was formalized by a papal bull excommunicating the Eastern Church. The Russian Orthodox Church, which laid claim to leadership of the Christian world when Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453, harboured deep suspicions of alien influences, set no store by the intellectual interests fostered by the Western Church, defended a pre-scientific, superstitious view of the world and opposed the dissemination in Russia of secular learning and art. Not until the reign of Peter the Great early in the eighteenth century was the decisive influence of the Church on the national mentality challenged.

There is debate among historians both as to the degree to which Peter the Great set Russia on a new path by his numerous and sweeping reforms and whether these reforms constituted the coherent implementation of a premeditated plan, on the one hand, or a piecemeal response to the exigencies of the wars he waged, on the other. Certainly Western influences had begun to percolate into Muscovy under Peter's father, Tsar Alexis, in the second half of the seventeenth century and even earlier, as attested by the appearance at court of Western coaches and clocks. At the same time it is indisputable that under Peter Russia became a European power and began to seek in Western civilization the means with which to sustain and enhance its new status. As a result of the Great Northern War against Sweden, Russia acquired territory on the Baltic littoral, gained access to the Baltic Sea and, in 1703, laid the foundations for a new capital, St Petersburg, on the desolate, inhospitable banks of the River Neva. The army was reorganized on Western lines, equipped with new weaponry such as flintlocks and bayonets, and drilled in modern fighting techniques. A naval fleet was constructed first in shipyards on the Don with a view to fighting the Turks in the Sea of Azov and then in the Baltic. The Russian administration was reorganized by the creation of 'colleges' on Swedish and Prussian models with the role of supervising areas of activity such as foreign relations, state revenue and expenditure, the army, the navy, commerce and justice, and by the establishment of a Senate intended in the first instance to oversee government during Peter's absences. The Church was subordinated to the state, first through the suspension of the Patriarchate on the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700 and then through the foundation in 1721 of a Holy Synod by means of which the secular ruler could control ecclesiastical affairs. Many steps were taken to divert the wealth of the Church to the state. Industry was stimulated, initially with a view to military applications in ship-building, the manufacture of munitions and provision of sail-cloth and uniforms (though later in Peter's reign production of such materials as bricks, glass, china, silk and velvet increased). Educational institutions were founded, including a navigation school, an engineering academy and an artillery academy. An edict of 1714 required that the children of all landowners and civil servants between the ages of ten and fifteen receive an elementary education (though the results were disappointing, owing not least to the resistance of the nobility to the measure). An Academy of Sciences was opened in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• An introduction to the series
• Note on referencing system
• Note on dates, transliteration and use of Russian terms
• Foreword
• Map: Nineteenth-century Russia
• PART ONE: THE HISTORICAL SETTING
• PART TWO: PHASES OF OPPOSITION
• PART THREE: ASSESSMENT
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Bibliography
• Index