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religiosity with which they resisted aggressors who claimed to represent a superior civilisation.27

A different interpretation that also took root among the people in 1812 and the succeeding decades recognised that Napoleon was a revolutionary but situated him, and the entire notion of ‘republicanism’, in the native tradition of anarchic jacqueries that many Russians had learned to fear. Thus, Gorky’s grandfather recalled that Napoleon

was a bold man who wanted to conquer the whole world and he wanted everyone to be equal – no lords or civil servants but simply a world without classes. Names would be different, but everyone would have the same rights. And the same faith. I don’t have to tell you what nonsense that is . . . We’ve had our own Bonapartes – [the Cossack rebels] Razin, Pugachov [sic ] – I’ll tell you about them some other time.

A similar outlook shines through the recollections, also from the 1870s, of a former house serf who in 1812 had witnessed a riot behind Russian lines – ‘they were all getting drunk, fighting, cursing’, she recalled: ‘it was a republic all right, absolutely a republic!’28

The legacy of the war

In Russia, as in the lands of the ‘outer empire’, Napoleon’s regime thus enjoyed little support. Yet across Europe, his empire had aroused intense ideological partisanship, created a form of state that reached new heights of power while plumbing depths of aggression and exploitation, and encouraged a synthesis of militaristic elitism and popular mobilisation, imperialistic chauvinism and the romantic myth of the ‘career open to talent’ exemplified by the ‘little Corsican’ himself. Post-war society had to contend with this legacy, finding ways to replicate his regime’s ability to integrate, control and mobilise the nation, but without contracting its socially egalitarian tendencies or its selfdestructive imperialism.

One response was religious; it was centred in the masonic movement, pietist circles and the newly created Russian Bible Society, and drew heavily

27Pavlova, ‘Moi vospominaniia’, 228; M. A. Dodelev, ‘Rossiia i voina ispanskogo naroda za nezavisimost’ (1808–1814 gg.)’, VI (1972), no. 11: 33–44.

28Gorky, My Childhood, pp. 86–7; ‘Razkaz nabilkinskoi bogodelenki, Anny Andreevny Sozonovoi, byvshei krepostnoi Vasil’ia Titovicha Lepekhina’, in ‘Razkazy ochevidtsev o dvenadtsatom gode’, Russkii vestnik 102 (November 1872): 291.

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on German and British influences. It gained tremendous momentum from the seemingly miraculous manner of the destruction of Napoleon’s army in 1812: ‘The fire of Moscow lit up my soul’, Alexander I would later explain, ‘and the Lord’s judgment on the ice fields filled my heart with a warmth of faith that it had never felt before. Now I came to know God as He is revealed by the Holy Scriptures.’29 The manifestation of this ideology in foreign policy was the effort to unite Europe in the ‘Holy Alliance’, while domestically, a newly created Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Popular Enlightenment was charged with reforming the moral tenor of Russian culture. The goal was to make Russians into ecumenically minded Christians in whom better education, Bibles in the vernacular (a controversial innovation) and participation in organised philanthropy would instil benevolence, self-discipline, a sense of social responsibility and a heightened civic consciousness. The state’s authority over the people would henceforth be rooted in mutual respect, not fear, and Russia would become the kind of cohesive, authoritarian, mildly progressive polity that Napoleon had modelled, but at peace with others and without the socially explosive notion of ‘careers open to talent’.

Its institutional armature allowed this ideology to reach Russians beyond the upper classes that had conceived it. Thus, Aleksandr V. Nikitenko, although legally still a serf at the time, became the secretary of the Bible Society’s chapter in the town of Ostrogozhsk (Voronezh Province) and embraced its commitment to the ‘religious truths that the Gospel had given us’ and ‘their salutary influence on the morals of individuals and society’ with ‘sincere enthusiasm and youthful ardor’; and the headmaster of the church school in Kasimov (Riazan Province) – a corrupt petty tyrant who prospered by exploiting the students and clergy under his power – also joined the Bible Society, though his motives were probably more careerist than idealistic.30 By the mid-1820s, however, the effort to ground the culture and politics of Russia and Europe in a Bible-centred Christianity had fallen so far short of its goals, and generated resistance from so many quarters, that it was scaled back and the Orthodox Church’s pre-eminence within Russia was restored. Yet in an Orthodox and more emphatically ‘Russian’ guise, the ideological linkage between the regime

29N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols. (St Petersburg:

A.S. Suvorin, 1904–5), vol. III, p. 378.

30A. Nikitenko, Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1 804–1 824, trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 180–1;

D.I. Rostislavov, Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son, trans. and ed. A. M. Martin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 134, 175–6.

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and Christianity remained stronger in the nineteenth century than it had been before 1812.

A second emerging force that structured nineteenth-century Russian society was militarism, which, in Russia as in Napoleonic France, was associated with government that was hierarchical and centralised but also effective and inclined to social fairness. It acquired momentum under Paul I and touched broad social strata: ‘My God!’, exclaimed the merchant Nikolai F. Kotov in his reminiscences,

from the very outset of Emperor Paul I’s accession [in 1796], what strictness, what meekness, what a martial spirit began to rule in Moscow! From being arrogant and unapproachable, the nobles became humble, for the law was the same whether one was a noble or a merchant. Ostentatious luxury came under suspicion. And among the common people, there appeared a kind of terror and obedience before a sort of martial or enlightened-authoritarian spirit, for the strictness and obedience extended to all classes of people.31

Russia was at war almost continually from the 1790s to 1814. These wars entailed a vast mobilisation of people and created new role models for society, ranging from dashing hussars to female peasant guerrillas, who demonstrated Russians’ capability for both heroism and cruelty, for co-operation between social classes and disciplined, organised action. The end of the war brought the return of newly self-confident and worldly veterans who changed the tone of society, whether by bringing a whiff of European humanism to stale provincial backwaters or by abusing Russian peasants and small-town notables like conquered enemy populations.32

While the wars themselves contributed to the militarisation of Russian life, Paul and his successors also saw militarism as a pedagogical tool for counteracting revolutionary ideology. However, while Napoleonic militarism had favoured meritocratic egalitarianism as a way to unite France’s post-revolutionary polity and create a powerful fighting force to serve an imperialistic foreign policy, its Russian incarnation instead focused on symbolic elements that might instil respect for the social hierarchy: drill and pageantry were emphasised, cadet schools for noble boys were founded, uniforms became mandatory for university students, and even life at church academies was militarised;33 while its actual combat readiness stagnated, the

31OR RGB, Fond 54 (Vishniakov), ch. 8, ‘Zapiski Nikolaia Fedorovicha Kotova o tsarst. Ekat. II i Pavla I 1785 po 1800 gg.,’ l. 40–40 ob.

32Nikitenko, Up From Serfdom, p. 135; Rostislavov, Provincial Russia, p. 180.

33See, for example: D. I. Rostislavov, ‘Peterburgskaia dukhovnaia akademiia pri grafe Protasove, 1836–1855 gg.’, Vestnik Evropy 18 ( July 1883): 158–62.

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army became the preferred metaphor for a society that was orderly, disciplined and committed to the regime’s vision of carefully controlled societal progress.

However, even while it suggested ways to stabilise society and strengthen the state, the Napoleonic experience had also disrupted traditional social patterns and created expectations that would prove troublesome to the regime in the future. There are indications that Russian peasants understood their ‘liberation’ from Napoleon to mean freedom from serfdom as well, and like Spain, though to a far lesser degree, Russia had peasant guerrillas who might become a threat to the regime once the French were gone. A more fateful parallel with Spain was the creation of secret societies of disillusioned officers who were committed to radical political change and would attempt to overthrow the autocracy in December 1825.34 Nikitenko met some of them when he was still a serf in Ostrogozhsk:

[p]articipants in world events, these officers were not figures engaged in fruitless debates, but men who . . . had acquired a special strength of character and determination in their views and aspirations. They stood in sharp contrast to the progressive people in our provincial community, who, for lack of real, sobering activity, inhabited a fantasy world and wasted their strength in petty, fruitless protest. The contact the officers had had with Western European civilization, their personal acquaintance with a more successful social system . . . , and, finally, the struggle for the grand principles of freedom and the Fatherland all left their mark of deep humanity on them. . . . In me they saw a victim of the order of things that they hated.35

Like the proponents of militarism and the Holy Alliance – who were, after all, their friends and relatives – the Decembrists saw an opportunity to resolve the problems outlined at the opening of this chapter. They proposed to place progressive military men, whose moral authority rested on a patriotism tested in battle, at the head of a cohesive and mighty Russian nation-state. By liberalising the social and political order to a degree that even Alexander I and Speranskii had never seriously contemplated, they meant to confront tyranny and social injustice. In adopting for themselves the persona of austere, dignified, outspoken, emphatically moral men of action committed to the public good, they offered their own answer to the crisis of spiritual meaning and of the norms of individual conduct that beset the nobility.36 By creating ‘secret

34Isabel de Madariaga discusses this issue in ‘Spain and the Decembrists’, European Studies Review 3, 2 (1973): 141–56.

35Nikitenko, Up From Serfdom, p. 135.

36See the (by now classic) ‘Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni’, in Lotman, Besedy, pp. 331–84.

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societies’ as a framework for political action, they acknowledged the same absence of a viable civil society that prompted Alexander I and Nicholas I to foster religious associations, bureaucracy and militarism. And in seeking to gain power through a pronunciamiento, they joined nationalistic officers from San Mart´ın to Nasser in following in the footsteps of General Bonaparte’s Brumaire coup, but they also helped to bring the violent, conspiratorial culture of eighteenth-century Russian politics into the ideologically polarised world of the nineteenth.

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