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Russia and the legacy of 1812

alex ander 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 Russian society’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 monarchs and 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 southeastern 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 Revolution crystallised modern nationalism and shattered the old international

system.

1See. R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).

2R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000), vol. I, p. 5.

3L. 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. Sensitive, 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 unaccountable 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 alternated 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 Enlightenment, combined with the social pressure to flaunt one’s wealth and the atmosphere 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 Labzina’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 Armee´ had been annihilated, at the cost to Russia of hundreds of thousands of lives and

4 R. H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1 87 7 –1 920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 37–8.

5Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1 7 5 8–1 821, ed. and trans. Gary Marker and Rachel May (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), passim.

6Iu. 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 outrage 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 considered 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 device for criticising the decadence of aristocratic mores, the liberal reform plans attributed to Alexander I’s advisers (especially Mikhail M. Speranskii), and Russia’s defeats 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 struggle for hegemony in present-day Belarus and western Ukraine; Poland’s intervention in Russia’s Time of Troubles; Russia’s part in the partitions of Poland and the extremely bloody suppression of its constitutionalist 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.

9See 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 Aleksandr 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 column’. 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 history. Two hundred years earlier, they argued, a divided Russia had been conquered 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 century, Peter I’s Westernising reforms ‘from above’ – was the true founding moment for the Russian nation, whose essence lay not in a European destiny 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

10For 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, 1 45 0–1 91 7 (Leiden, Boston and Cologne: Brill, 2002), p. 477.

11Zorin, 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 campaigns 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 ethnocultural specificity of the Great Russian nation. At the same time, the alliance with Berlin and Vienna increasingly derived its resilience not from the Christian 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 nationalist conception of history. Alexander’s post-war attempt to reconcile Russians and Poles collapsed amidst the 1830–1 Polish revolt and the subsequent suppression of Polish autonomy; in 1833, Nicholas I’s minister of education, Sergei S. Uvarov, famously defined the essence of Russian identity as being ‘Orthodoxy, 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 1 81 2, 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 upholding Russian independence, the nation in 1812 had won the right to a freer, less authoritarian sociopolitical order. Yet most accepted the nationalist conception’s key propositions – the focus on Muscovite history and Russian ethnicity, 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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