Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The Napoleonic War illustrated what the Russian state could gain from its European links. Russian diplomats had used to good effect their contacts among the Parisian elite, some of whom were indiscreet and not well disposed to Napoleon. As a result, Alexander knew well in advance when Napoleon was intending to attack Russia in 1812 and how he planned to do so. Without that knowledge, Russia might well have lost the war.

Yet those contacts also held dangers for Russia’s internal stability. Its Europeanized elites brought back home with them French and German ideas: in turn, Pietism, Enlightenment legalism and secularism, Freemasonry, Romanticism, Hegelian idealism, and eventually socialism. Russia offered the first example of what later became known as a ‘developing country’, whose elites were attracted by European culture, yet also resented it as a disruption of a traditional way of life. Broadly speaking, they were divided into two camps: ‘Westerners’ took it for granted that Russia was moving in the same direction as what they called ‘the West’, if rather more slowly, while ‘Slavophiles’ denied this and took a pride in Russia’s distinctiveness.

In the former camp, many felt that victory over France rendered even more intolerable the absence of citizenship or the rule of law. When Alexander died suddenly in December 1825, a group of army officers imbued with such ideals tried to stage a coup in St Petersburg. The rebellion of the Decembrists (as they became known) was improvised and was easily put down, but it left Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), feeling threatened and anxious, determined to make no concessions to liberal sentiment.

Others argued that victory proved Russia was not just a backward European country: its distinctive institutions had their own virtues. Nikolai Karamzin, Russia’s first modern historian, for example, asserted that Russia’s autocracy was not its shame but its glory; indeed, it had played the vital formative role without which Russia would not even exist as a state. Even the poet Alexander Pushkin, who had felt some sympathy with the Decembrists, argued that Russia was justified in suppressing the Polish rebellion of 1830. His acquiescence in this imperial coercion is especially striking since he was not an unreserved admirer of the form the empire had taken. In his poem The Bronze Horseman, he extols St Petersburg as a great and beautiful capital city. Yet he also bemoans the fate of one of its humble inhabitants, who has lost his beloved in one of the floods to which it was susceptible as a result of being built in an unsuitable marshy location. Evgenii shakes his fist impotently at a horse-borne statue of Peter the Great, then flees in terror, imagining he hears the horseman pursuing him through the streets. Later he is found, dead.

Nicholas I’s education minister, Count Uvarov, articulated Karamzin’s view in what became a semi-official catchphrase: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. It implied that Russia owed its greatness to its own church, the untrammelled authority of its monarch, and the patriotic devotion of its people, whose effectiveness had been proved in 1812.

Nicholas himself accepted this view wholeheartedly. He resisted calls for an end to serfdom, even though he called it ‘an obvious and palpable evil’, since abolishing it would destabilize the empire. He turned his face against a constitution for the same reason and governed in authoritarian style with the aid of officers who had distinguished themselves in the Napoleonic campaign. He did, though, see the importance of consistent laws, even if, like his police chief, Benkendorf, he considered that ‘Laws are written for subjects, not for governments’. He promoted the promulgation of a new Digest of Laws, and created an Imperial School of Jurisprudence, where a later generation of senior officials received a serious training in law as an autonomous branch of science.

An especially radical challenge to Uvarov’s homespun pride was offered by a letter circulating in the salons in the early 1830s, written by a Guards officer, Petr Chaadaev. He asserted that Russia did not belong to the European Christian family of nations, but neither was it a properly Asiatic country. Suspended in between, it was a kind of black hole in civilization:

Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, learned nothing from the world, and bestowed not a single idea upon the fund of human ideas.