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Culture, ideas, identities
of Russian Social Democrats, 1898) he endorsed Plekhanov’s strategy of mak-
ing alliances with bourgeois opponents of the autocracy but emphasised that
Social Democrats must take advantage of these alliances for their own pur-
poses.He wasimpatient with Plekhanov’snecessitarian Marxism, which linked
social democracy too closely to the pursuit of bourgeois freedoms. His most
important early book, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii (Development of Capital-
ism in Russia, 1899), argued that, in rural Russia, capitalism had already led to
the social differentiation of the peasantry. That simple conclusion was both a
blow against neo-populists, who imagined that Russia might still avoid capi-
talism, and a theoretical basis for a future revolutionary alliance between the
proletariat and poor peasants against the bourgeoisie.
Lenin’s pivotal book Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?, 1902), laid out his
theory of the vanguard party. He stated: ‘the history of all countries shows
that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only
trade-union consciousness’.
37
In his opinion, social democratic consciousness
could only be brought to workers ‘from without’, by members of a tightly
organised, centralised party of professional revolutionaries. Although other
Marxists had advocated strong revolutionary leadership, Lenin was the first to
contend that, absent the guidance of the revolutionary vanguard, the working
class could develop only bourgeois consciousness. In the wake of What Is to
Be Done?, Plekhanov accused Lenin of mocking Marx’s belief in socialism’s
inevitability. Trotsky warned of the prospect that Lenin’s theory of the party
might lead Russiato permanent ‘Jacobin’ dictatorship: eventually, he wrote, the
‘organization of the party takes the place of the party; the Central Committee
takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of
the Central Committee’.
38
Later it became clear that What Is to Be Done? was a
first step toward a party ideocracy, a system of government in which the party,
conceived as the source of historically privileged knowledge, imposed its will
in all spheres of culture.
After he elaborated the theory of the vanguard party, Lenin developed
two other crucial ideas. First, he moved toward a theory of national-
ity policy in which he opposed ‘any attempt to influence national self-
determination [among non-Russian peoples of the empire] from without by
violence or coercion’, and simultaneously limited the expression of the right to
37 V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (NewYork: International
Publishers, 1969), p. 31.
38 Trotsky’s prophecy, from his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, is discussed in Leszek
Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. II: The Golden Age (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 408.
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self-determination to those cases in which self-determination was in the inter-
ests of social democrats.
39
In effect, he made national self-determination con-
tingent on permission from the party vanguard. Second, he incorporated into
his own theory of socialist revolution Trotsky’s idea of ‘permanent revolution’,
which held that, due to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Russian
proletariat would have to lead the bourgeois revolution and that, therefore, the
bourgeois revolution could be transformed into a socialist revolution in one
continuous process. According to Trotsky, the Russian proletariat was numer-
ically too weak to hold power for long unless it received assistance from the
West, but he felt that the revolution in Russia might provide a ‘spark’ to ignite
a general revolution in Western Europe. When combined with Lenin’s idea of
contingent national self-determination, Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolu-
tion produced the curious result that Russia was both a subordinate part of a
universal process of historical change and the director/initiator of that process.
In other words, revolutionary Russia could be understood simultaneously as
‘of Europe’ and as ‘apart from Europe’.
Lenin’s crowning work was Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia (State and Revolution,
1917). Taking the experience of the Paris Commune as his guide, Lenin asserted
that a socialist revolution should entail the ruthless destruction of the old,
bourgeois administrative machinery by the armed masses and the insertion
in its place of a proletarian dictatorship. He imagined that, in the socialist
state, workers themselves would execute most governmental functions, for
simple ‘bookkeeping’ could be done by any literate person. For as long as the
proletarian state remained in power it would exercise the strongest possible
control over production and consumption and would maintain its vigilance
over the remnants of the bourgeoisie. Only at the end of the socialist stage, after
an equitable scheme of economic distribution had been established and after
class antagonism had been annihilated, would the state begin to ‘wither away’,
as Marx had predicted. Nowhere in State and Revolution did Lenin enumerate
protections for individual liberty, for he was interested only in the workers’
collective freedom from want.
It is valuable to compare Lenin’s view of the socialist state to that of Bog-
danov, the most prolific philosopher among the early Bolsheviks. In his science
fiction novel Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star, 1908) Bogdanov imagined commu-
nism as a stateless order wherein individual workers would select their jobs
based on statistical employment projections, and citizens would be clothed
androgynously, be fed manufactured rations and be offered free medical care.
39 Quoted in Kolakowski, Main Currents, vol. II, p. 400.
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Simultaneously, however, Bogdanov projected a desperate collective effort
to keep social production ahead of population growth, technology ahead of
nature, and the human spirit ahead of satiation and depression. He was sug-
gesting that communism would not constitute the end of history after all.
Moreover, Red Star depicted within ‘stateless’ communism a directorate of
intellectuals, an exclusive group of scientific experts, who would make soci-
ety’s most crucial decisions. In Bogdanov’s prophetic reckoning, the socialist
state as a formal legal entity might dissolve only to re-emerge in a new, supra-
legal form.
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7
Russia and the legacy of 1812
alexander m. martin
Russia stood at a historical crossroads when it experienced the trauma of
the 1812 Napoleonic invasion. Like Germany’s 1813 Befreiungskrieg and Spain’s
1808–14 Guerra de independencia, Russia’s Otechestvennaia voina – War for the
Fatherland – became the stuff of ambiguous patriotic legend.
Speaking for many who saw 1812 as a unique opportunity to transcend
Russia’s bitter internal divisions, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace that the
heroes of the war had been the Russians of all social classes whose deep roots
in Russian culture and spirituality made them selflessly patriotic and intolerant
of social injustice, but also generous towards their nation’s defeated enemies.
Tolstoy’s villains, by contrast, were ‘Westernised’ aristocrats, cynical cowards
whose shrill wartime xenophobia reflected the same spiritual rootlessness
and disdain for their own people that had also conditioned their pre-war
Francophilia. According to this vision, the ‘War for the Fatherland’ had proved
the Russian people’s civic maturity and ought to have been followed by Russia’s
transformation into a liberal nation-state. Tolstoy’s original idea for the novel
had actually centred on the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825 against the
autocracy, a blow for freedom that he and many others regarded as a natural
outgrowth of 1812. Of course, that coup had failed, and Russia remained a
dynastic, autocratic, serf-based empire; as collective memories, however, the
war and the Decembrist revolt raised Russians’ national consciousness and
created an impetus to expand the realm of human freedom and dignity that
was often suppressed but never snuffed out.
This liberal nationalist reading of the war contains an element of historical
truth and is itself a part of history thanks to its place in Russiansociety’s cultural
consciousness, but it should not hide from view the more illiberal aspects of
the legacy of 1812. Like the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet
I thank Olavi Arens, Mariia Degtiareva, Janet Hartley, Deniel Klenbort, Dominic Lieven,
Michael Melancon and Katya Vladimirov, for their helpful comments on an earlier version
of this chapter.
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system in the early 1990s, it gave Russians the heady sensation of witnessing
a turning point in history, thereby encouraging a sense of empowerment and
a long-term quest for emancipation. However, also like those other traumas,
it too convinced many Russians of their own vulnerability in the face of vast,
malevolent forces, and that only a stern, authoritarian order could shield them
against foreign hostility and the brittleness of their own social order. This
chapter will develop that argument by discussing the challenges Russia faced
on the eve of the war; the war’s contribution to a xenophobic and reactionary
nationalism, a reflexive social conservatism, and what might be called (to
borrow Richard Hofstadter’s phrase) ‘the paranoid style in Russian politics’;
1
and the efforts to use an authoritarian religiosity and militarism as tools for
post-war state-building and for closing the social fault lines exposed by the
war.
Russian culture and society before 1812
At the turn of the century, Russian elite culture faced three main challenges.
One involved the meaning of ‘Russianness’. Cultural Europeanisation had
given the elite an identity separate from everyone else’s; as Richard Wortman
has argued, ‘by displaying themselves as foreigners, or like foreigners, Russian
monarchsand their servitors affirmed the permanence and inevitability of their
separation from the population they ruled’.
2
The regime had also sketched
out ambitious imperial projects, from Peter I’s dream of making Russia the
trade route between Europe and the Orient to Catherine II’s ‘Greek Project’
of creating a Greco-Slavic empire that would give Russia hegemony in south-
eastern Europe and – in a bold non sequitur – identify Russia, qua successor to
Orthodox Byzantium, to be the true heir to pagan classical Greece and hence
a senior member in the family of European cultures.
3
The Russian elite thus
had to come to terms with both its own national identity and an ill-defined
imperial destiny, issues that became all the more urgent once the French
Revolutioncrystallised modern nationalism and shatteredthe old international
system.
1 See. R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York:
Knopf, 1965).
2 R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995–2000), vol. I, p. 5.
3 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 57; E. V. Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh reform (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989),
p. 418; A. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla . . . Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v
poslednei treti XVIII – pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001),
pp. 35–8.
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Furthermore, Russia’s sociopolitical order was neither stable nor just. Sen-
sitive, educated Russians worried that their vast empire, with its oppressive
serfdom, corrupt officials and nouveaux riches aristocrats, represented – to
borrow Robert Wiebe’s description of the United States in the Gilded Age –
‘a peculiarly inviting field for coarse leadership and crudely exercised power’.
4
The dynastic turmoil of the eighteenth century and the parade of unaccount-
able favourites who dominated court politics, together with the threat of
popular revolts like the one led by the Cossack Emelian Pugachev in 1773–5,
also rendered the system disturbingly unpredictable.
Lastly, the Russian elite faced conflicting cultural imperatives as they alter-
nated schizophrenically between exercising untrammelled power on their
estates and suffering the most pedantic regimentation in their own service as
army officers or civilian officials. Religion and state service demanded ascetic
self-discipline, while the fashionable ‘Voltairean’ scepticism of the Enlighten-
ment, combined with the social pressure to flaunt one’s wealth and the atmo-
sphere of legal impunity created by serfdom, made it acceptable to indulge
one’s whims with little regard to the consequences. One manifestation of the
conflicts this bred was a sexual morality torn between conservative modesty
and unbridled hedonism, as we see in the pious noblewoman Anna Labzi-
na’s bitter tale of her marriage to the libertine Karamyshev.
5
Another was
the quasi-suicidal propensity of many noblemen in state service for staking
their well-being on a literal or figurative roll of the dice, for example, in
high-stakes card games or lethal duels; thus wilfully abandoning one’s fate to
chance was also a form of rebellion against the stifling power of the regime.
6
Hesitating between conflicting models of individual conduct, Russian nobles
remained deeply uncertain about what it meant to live a good and honourable
life.
The 1812 war and Russian nationalism
To understand the war’s psychological impact, it is important to recall the
drama and speed with which it unfolded. Napoleon invaded Russia in June.
By September, he was in Moscow. And by Christmas, his Grande Arm
´
ee had
been annihilated, at the cost to Russia of hundreds of thousands of lives and
4 R. H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 37–8.
5 Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758–1821, ed. and trans.
Gary Marker and Rachel May (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), passim.
6 Iu. M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII – nachalo
XIX veka) (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 1994), p. 163.
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immense economic losses; in Moscow, the devastation and carnage were such
that the sheer stench was unbearable even from miles away.
7
Countless nobles
found themselves on the run as they fled east or south from the war zone. For
many, this brought eye-opening new thoughts and experiences.
Not surprisingly, many conceived a bitter hatred for the French, but
Napoleon’s alliance with other states also led many to blame Europeans
in general. The young aristocrat Mariia A. Volkova was typical in her out-
rage at the French ‘cannibals’ and their allies for daring to call the Russian
people ‘barbarians’: ‘Let those fools call Russia a barbarous country, when
their civilisation has led them to submit voluntarily to the vilest of tyrants.
Thank God that we are barbarians, if Austria, Prussia, and France are con-
sidered civilised.’
8
Aside from the fear and loathing spawned by the invasion
itself, these comments reflected the agreeable discovery that lower-class and
provincial Russians, whom the educated elite had traditionally despised and
feared but among whom many noble refugees and army officers perforce
now found themselves, were in fact capable of patriotism, humanity and good
sense, even though – or more likely, to a generation reared on the ideas of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, because – they had been little exposed to European
‘civilisation’.
Educated Russians’ long-standing love–hate relationship with France had
taken a turn for the worse in the decade preceding the war, when cultural
Francophobia had become an all-purpose deviceforcriticising the decadenceof
aristocratic mores, the liberal reform plans attributed to Alexander I’s advisers
(especiallyMikhail M. Speranskii), and Russia’sdefeats in the Napoleonic Wars.
Nationalistic writers and officials fostered a climate of opinion that regarded
absolute monarchy, the old-regime social hierarchy, the Orthodox faith and
cultural Russianness as the core of a national identity whose antithesis was
post-revolutionary France.
9
The only other country at which such venom was directed was Poland.
Russia and Poland shared a complicated history, including a protracted strug-
gle for hegemony in present-day Belarus and western Ukraine; Poland’s
intervention in Russia’s Time of Troubles; Russia’s part in the parti-
tions of Poland and the extremely bloody suppression of its constitution-
alist movement in 1794; and the 1812 war, when Russian eye-witnesses
7 ‘Griboedovskaia Moskva v pis’makh M. A. Volkovoi k V. I. Lanskoi, 1812–1818 gg.’, Vestnik
Evropy 9, 8 (August 1874): 613.
8 ‘Griboedovskaia Moskva’, 608, 613, 616.
9 See A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and
Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
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singled out Napoleon’s Polish auxiliaries as having been especially brutal
occupiers.
10
In the hands of the nationalist writers associated with the influential Alek-
sandr S. Shishkov, as the historian Andrei Zorin argues, this painful past became
raw material for a compelling mythopoesis of Russian national identity. Poland
had all the attributes of both a national and an ideological enemy: it was
an old religious rival; it was a traditional ally of France, and associated in
Russian eyes with similar revolutionary attitudes; and the presence of many
ethnic Poles in the Russian Empire created fears about a Polish ‘fifth col-
umn’. After Napoleon’s victories over Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1805–7
had crushed Russian national pride and led to the creation of the irredentist
and pro-Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw, even while the Polish patriot
Prince Adam Czartoryski figured prominently among Alexander I’s liberal
advisers and Russia reluctantly allied itself with France, ‘Shishkovist’ writers
took to celebrating the Time of Troubles – which, fortuitously, had occurred
exactly two centuries earlier – in poetry and on stage. In so doing, Zorin
contends, they initiated a fundamental shift in Imperial Russia’s sense of his-
tory. Two hundred years earlier, they argued, a divided Russia had been con-
quered by Polish aggressors with the complicity of domestic traitors, but in
the end the nobility and the people had come together under the aegis of
the Orthodox Church, restored Russian liberty and freely invited the House
of Romanov to rule over them. This patriotic, anti-Western movement ‘from
below’ in 1612–13 – and not, as had been proclaimed in the eighteenth cen-
tury, Peter I’s Westernising reforms ‘from above’ – was the true founding
moment for the Russian nation, whose essence lay not in a European des-
tiny achieved by a Westernised nobility and emperor, but in the unity of
the Orthodox under a traditional Russian tsar, and in their selfless struggle
against foreign (especially Polish) invaders and vigilance against domestic
traitors.
11
The regime was slow to endorse these views. Alexander I’s entourage
remained as multiethnic as ever after the war, and his conception of Russia’s
imperial destiny had no strong ethnic component. Internationally, he sought
to stabilise the post-war order (and Russia’s dominant place in it) by uniting
the monarchs of Europe in a cosmopolitan, ecumenical ‘Holy Alliance’; and
in cases where his domestic policies were innovative and liberal – as when
10 For examples, see A. M. Martin, ‘The Response of the Population of Moscow to the
Napoleonic Occupation of 1812’, in E. Lohr and M. Poe (eds.), The Military and Society in
Russia, 1450–1917 (Leiden, Boston and Cologne: Brill, 2002), p. 477.
11 Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla,pp.159–86.
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he issued constitutions to Finland and Poland or abolished serfdom in the
Baltic Provinces – it was often in ways that privileged the empire’s ‘European’
periphery relative to Russia proper. He disliked Moscow, the symbolic historic
capital of the Great Russians, and while he enjoyed commemorating the cam-
paigns of 1813–14 in Europe, he ignored sites and anniversaries associated with
the 1812 war in Russia (when his own role had been considerably less heroic).
However, Alexander’s effort to impose a non-nationalist reading of the events
of 1812–15 failed, and his post-war attempt to build a new European system
and imperial culture on an ecumenical Christian basis crumbled within a few
years under the weight of its own contradictions. Instead, the revival of elite
interest in religion ultimately benefited Orthodoxy while Russian thinkers
grew increasingly preoccupied with exploring the historical roots and ethno-
cultural specificity of the Great Russian nation. At the same time, the alliance
with Berlin and Vienna increasingly derived its resilience not from the Chris-
tian faith but a shared pragmatic interest in preventing a restoration of Polish
independence and a recurrence of the sort of international anarchy associated
with the French Revolution and Napoleon.
By the 1830s, the regime and its supporters had clearly embraced the nation-
alist conception of history. Alexander’s post-war attempt to reconcile Russians
and Poles collapsed amidst the 1830–1 Polish revolt and the subsequent sup-
pression of Polish autonomy; in 1833, Nicholas I’s minister of education, Sergei
S. Uvarov, famously defined the essence of Russian identity as being ‘Ortho-
doxy, Autocracy, Nationality’; Mikhail I. Glinka’s patriotic, anti-Polish opera
A Life for the Tsar, set in the Time of Troubles, premiered in 1836; and in 1839,
Aleksandr I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii published the official history of 1812, An
Account of the War for the Fatherland in 1812, whose very title helped canonise the
interpretation, and the name, of the conflict as a ‘patriotic’ war of the Russian
nation. The notion of a centuries-old unity of altar, throne and Russian ethnos,
adumbrated by writers after the defeats of 1805–7 and preached by regime and
Church in 1812, had become official ideology by the 1830s and remained so
until the end of the Romanovs.
Not all the implications of this theory enjoyed universal acclaim. The regime
itself remained ambivalent about its anti-Western ramifications, while many
educated Russians believed that, by defeating Napoleon’s tyranny and uphold-
ing Russian independence, the nation in 1812 had won the right to a freer, less
authoritarian sociopolitical order. Yet most accepted the nationalist concep-
tion’s key propositions – the focus on Muscovite history and Russian eth-
nicity, the sense of Russian national uniqueness, the moral valorisation of
the common folk and the importance attributed to their spiritual bond with
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the regime. Perhaps aided by the growth of the education system and the
propaganda campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, these views also reached the
general population, as is apparent from the notebook into which the provincial
goldsmith Dmitrii S. Volkov in the 1820s copied readings that were particu-
larly meaningful to him: a patriotic, anti-French diatribe by the nationalist
Fedor V. Rostopchin, a primer on how to behave in church, a sermon by an
Orthodox Greek preacher and a text cataloguing Russia’s monarchs from the
legendary Riurik to Peter I.
12
‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Autocracy’ and ‘Nationality’ were
all represented.
The war and Russian political culture
Russians by 1800 had recently experienced two very different models of
monarchy: Catherine II had presented herself as a consensus-builder who
welcomed input from ‘society’ and favoured an embryonic form of electoral
politics – exemplified by the Legislative Commission of 1767 and by her sup-
port for noble and municipal self-government – that pointed in the direction
of political liberalism, while her son Paul I had favoured the opposite role of
authoritarian, militaristic commander-in-chief. Alexander I was torn between
these two options, but ultimately political liberalism suffered disastrous set-
backs under his reign. Aside from the court politics of the time, this was
due to the convergence of two forces whose growth was fatefully accelerated
by the Napoleonic Wars. One was the nationalist conception of history that
added a powerful layer of ideological armour to autocracy by depicting it as
the indispensable corollary to Orthodoxy, Russianness and national unity. The
other was the way in which the political culture was poisoned by the growing
tendency to imagine politics as a succession of malicious conspiracies.
Because of the absence of a civil society and the vast power wielded by small,
secretive groups of unaccountable individuals, conspiracy had long played an
important role in Russian government. Conspiracies traditionally involved
lower-class pretenders who claimed to be the ‘true tsar’, or else power strug-
gles within the dynasty. However, the mischief by pretenders faded after the
Pugachev revolt, and the last dynastic coup took place in 1801 when Paul I
was assassinated and replaced with Alexander I. Instead, from the late 1780s
onwards, conspiracy theories increasingly centred on ideologically or ethni-
cally motivated opposition to the regime as such, especially by freemasons,
liberals or socialists, and Polesor (later) Jews, often at the behestof Russophobic
12 OPI GIM, Fond 450,d.835a.
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