Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Created under the aegis of Nicholas I, the ideological slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” became an effective tool for cultural and political control for many years. The unwillingness or inability of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, to modernize the cultural policy of his predecessors was, I believe, one of the essential causes of the collapse of autocracy in Russia.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, there is no history, only biography. In this book I describe the relations between the Romanovs and “their” writers, poets, composers, and artists as the interaction of living people—gifted, ambitious, vain, impatient, capricious. Both sides clearly imagined themselves onstage, under the floodlights of world history, and acted accordingly.

Victor Shklovsky, one of the fathers of Russian formalism and biographer of Leo Tolstoy, told me in a conversation in Moscow in 1974 that his circle believed that personal dealings with major creative figures (and Shklovsky had known, among others, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Boris Pasternak) help you better understand the great writers of the past.²

When you see for yourself how the private emotions and public statements of cultural leaders correlate, Shklovsky maintained, you can make sounder judgments about the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of years past. Comparing the giants of yore with people you knew, you have greater focus in your perception of the legendary figures (for all the conditionality of such parallels), who are then no longer never-erring cardboard “geniuses” but real characters capable—as we all are—of making terrible mistakes and glaringly unjust statements.

I had many opportunities to see the wisdom of the old paradoxalist Shklovsky’s idea. Personal contact with Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Balanchine, and Joseph Brodsky helped me, I hope, to research and interpret historical materials on Russian culture in a less prejudiced way.

Shklovsky’s hypothesis applies even more to Russia’s leaders. Traditionally they have been considered to be “rulers from God,” in the words of Ivan the Terrible. Only members of the inner circle or specially selected and vetted “representatives of the people” could have access to them. What were the chances of a Russian Jewish intellectual like me looking the tsar in the eye, even for a second? None.

In Soviet times, the leaders of Russia managed to retain that aura of inaccessible omnipotence for a long time. Joseph Stalin was extremely successful in this regard (having learned much—especially in the sphere of cultural politics—from Nicholas I). His successors gradually lost that political capital.

There were so many jokes about Nikita Khrushchev in the last years of his reign. And yet … I remember the excitement I felt in September 1964 in Leningrad when, as a twenty-year-old conservatory student, I found myself in the crowd surrounding Khrushchev (security in those days was rather lax) as he entered the Kirov Theater on Teatralnaya Square with President Sukarno of Indonesia.

Khrushchev (who would be ousted by Leonid Brezhnev in a few weeks) passed by me just half a step away, smiling broadly; his face, contrary to what I read later about his depressed mood in those days, radiated energy and confidence. I was struck by the contrast between his tanned face and his snow-white short-cropped hair around a large bald spot: it literally glowed in Leningrad’s unusually bright autumnal sun, creating the effect of a halo.

Perestroika unexpectedly made contact with Russian leaders more possible, even for outsiders like me. I was lucky: living in America, I could “look into the eyes” (if not the souls) of a past, a future, and an acting president of Russia (respectively Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin) on their visits to New York.

I intersected with some of their closest comrades-in-arms or most prominent opponents (Yegor Ligachev, Alexander Yakovlev, Anatoly Sobchak, Vladimir Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar, Grigory Yavlinsky, Boris Nemtsov). Sometimes it was merely a quick question and answer, on other occasions a longer conversation. Each meeting added a new and precious insight into the psychology of the political elite, reinforcing my image of national leaders (professional politicians) as a special—in both good ways and bad—human breed, living within its own moral and emotional realm.

The various aspects of the interaction of one such specific group (that is, the Romanov dynasty and their “inner circle”) with another special stratum (the Russian cultural elite) have attracted the attention of many remarkable people, whose writing and opinions have served as a guiding light for me.