Nomenklatura’s Revanche

Liberals didn’t react well to Nicholas I after his death. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, for example, called his reign “a kind of plague.” It was contempt, hatred even. But all that was nothing compared to the ruthless campaign of debunking that the conservative political class of Russia, the nomenklatura, if you will, unleashed against the memory of the late monarch. Even moderate conservative A.V. Nikitenko was among them. “The main disadvantage of this reign,” he wrote, “was that it all was a mistake.” Details of the anti-Nicholas campaign were recorded in the diary of Anna Fedorovna Tyutchev, who was an influential maid of honor of the new empress.

Of course, Anna Fedorovna was an exalted girl, but she really knew the situation from inside, from her place at the imperial court and in the community. No, the nomenklatura critics were not concerned that Nicholas hadn’t bothered to liberate the peasants or to repeal the eleven censorships he introduced to them—they were blaming him instead purely for his personal policy, which, in order to satisfy his own vanity and for the sake of European glory, betrayed our brothers, the Orthodox Slavs, and turned our , who had to revive the East and the Church, into Europe’s police chief.

The essence of their accusations, if you clean from them the husk of rhetoric, was simple: Nicholas, in his efforts to isolate Russia from Europe morally, hesitated too long to isolate it politically. It’s as if Putin, after his death, could be accused of cutting Russia off morally from the civilized world and dipping it into the font of Orthodox fundamentalism, and then continuing to play G8 games instead of creating with the Izborsky Club his own Eurasian Group of Eight, in which Russia would dominate as the Soviet Union once did. A. G. Dugin has warned Putin that “Russia within the Russian Federation is not only an insufficient geopolitical entity, but essentially the false solution to the issue.” And that its correct decision should come “from a purely imperial understanding of the historical mission of Russia, which must either be an independent, self-sufficient continent, or else deviate from its historical mission.”

One and a half centuries ago, Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin knew nothing of such abstruse words as “self-sufficient,” but he taught Nicholas, as we remember, about “Russia’s historical destiny”—not a Eurasian destiny, but a Slavic one. Does it change the very core of it? We are talking in both cases about the same thing: the restoration of a superpower. Regardless, anyone who read the first part of this article knows which voices the nomenklatura listened to after Nicholas’s death. Here’s how Tyutchev summed up its ideas:

Nicholas felt that he was destined to suppress the revolution. But he was mistaken as to what resources to use for this. He tried to galvanize a body that was at a stage of decomposition—the heretical West—instead of giving freedom to a chained, but living, slave— the Slavic and Orthodox East—who kept faithfully to traditions and social system, and who was destined to bring the living a redemptive start to the world.

As a result, it was concluded that “Russia had lost its way.” And only a revanche could correct this fatal mistake. But what other consensus could the nomenklatura come to in this phantom phase of its Napoleon complex? According to this consensus, Russia now had to seek restoration of the superpower status that the “loser” Czar had so foolishly squandered.

 

On the Constitution

So the nomenklatura was distressed because of Russia’s expulsion from its superpower’s Olympus. The problem was that most of Russia’s educated society, especially young students, paid little attention to its heart-rending suffering and grandiose plans. They had their own worries. It is true that, at first, hatred of Czar Nicholas’s ancient regime rallied the country for a short historical moment. And—it’s hard to resist the comparison—it was very much like the raging anti-communism wave that rallied Russia for a moment 130 years later, in the late 1980s. A hero of that old Russia, its own Boris Yeltsin if you will, became the young, not yet the liberator, but one who rejected, along with his people, the old regime. Here, however, the comparison ends.

Then the nomenklatura didn’t dream of private property, but of a superpower status, and society expected not European standards of living from its hero, but a constitution. Society’s position seemed logical. Was it actually appropriate for the new Russia to remain the only autocratic monster in constitutional Europe, where dictators like Napoleon III and Bismarck opted for universal suffrage, knowing that, as Count Hayden said in his maxim: “the only way to keep the monarchy is to limit it”? Moreover, everything that the Decembrists were whispering in secret societies thirty years prior was now being discussed by their successors in public. According to Konstantin D. Kavelin, who knew a lot about these matters, “the constitution—that is now the subject of dreams and fervent hopes. It is now the most favorite and widespread thought of society.”

 

Vera Figner (left); Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

This was reflected in what Interior Minister Sergei Lanskoy reported to the Czar about his conversation with one of the most influential members of the nobility: “He spoke positively of the constitution, saying that this idea is spreading in the minds of the nobility everywhere, and that if the government does not heed such a common request, it should expect very unfortunate consequences.” Any sensible person could understand the nature of the “consequences” the deputy spoke of, and the Czar certainly knew this after Dmitry Karakozov’s shot in the spring of 1866: it was the danger of the young people’s radicalization.

But the ’s nomenklatura stood against the constitution. The main spokesman of its ideas, the wimp-heir and future Alexander III, carelessly said: “The Constitution? They want the Emperor of Russia to swear to some cattle?” Yes, he thought very well of his people. (Please, I need to be excused by the reader for my irreverent review of the monarch, whom Orthodox monarchists do not tire of praising to this day. But even his closest associates did not speak much better of him. Sergey Yulievich Witte wrote about him: “below average intelligence and below average ability and lower than average secondary education.”)

Meanwhile, if there was ever a time for the revival of the country, it was then, in the 1850s, when the very air in Russia was filled with expectations of a miracle.

Alexander Herzen felt it, even in London, when he wrote to the Czar that “the current government could do wonders.” So, would it not have looked miraculous if the young emperor had invited for advice and consent, “public persons,” as they said in the old days, and signed at the beginning of his reign what he signed at the end of it, on that fatal morning of 1881? I’m speaking of the project of the Legislative Commission, about which Alexander II said to his sons, according to ceremony witness Dmitry Milutin: “I agreed to this idea, although I cannot hide from us that we are on the path to the constitution.”

Few people recognized then that Russia had been offered a unique opportunity: If the Czar had signed this act a quarter-century earlier, in the 1850s—in an atmosphere of euphoria, rather than one of fear and panic—the country could have saved the monarchy and avoided street terror and regicide. And bolshevism, too. And Stalin. Needless to say, it is difficult to imagine now. And even more difficult to prove it in a short essay (although I worked through it pretty thoroughly in my trilogy.) I can say that the fears of minister Lansky’s unnamed interlocutor were more than justified: the youth did indeed radicalize. And the more the nomenklatura (and the Czar who, for a long time, didn’t have the guts to contradict it) clung to the right to treat its own people like cattle, the faster the youth radicalized.

Only their radicalism was not Leninist, but Decembrist. The young people did not try turning Russia around in the name of world revolution, but merely to get rid of the autocratic power. They sought not socialism, but safeguards against arbitrariness. This explains not only the sympathy of liberal society (revolutionary Vera Figner attested, “The majority of society surrounded us with sympathy”), but also the desperate lurches of the most desperate “demons” accuser: Fyodor Dostoevsky. No wonder his Peter Verkhovensky was “a con artist, not a socialist.” No wonder Dostoevsky applauded the verdict of “not guilty” in Vera Zasulich’s trial. No wonder he said before he died, “Wait for a continuation of The Brothers Karamazov ... My pure Alyesha will kill the Czar.”

Dostoevsky knew that these pure boys and girls started not by shooting; they began with “going to the people,” to teach and to heal. And they were appalled by what the autocracy did with people. I risk quoting here an excerpt from the memoirs of the same Vera Figner—a future member of Narodnaya Volya. The quote is long, but without it, we would have difficulty understanding Dostoevsky’s logic. Figner graduated from medical school in Switzerland and worked as a nurse in the countryside. This is what she saw:

“30-40 patients instantly filled the room. Dirty, exhausted. All have chronic illness; in adults, in every step there is rheumatism, catarrh of the stomach, chest wheezing, audible from a lot of steps, syphilis, sores, ulcers, endless—and all this is with such incredible mud houses and clothes, with food so unhealthy and lean that it stops me in stupefaction over the question: is this an animal or a human life? Often, my tears stream down in a hail of medicine and drops.”

And how did the autocracy thank that noble, self-sacrificing, educated youth? With mass prison terms (recall “the Trial of the 50” and “the Trial of the 193”). It was dull and relentless—both to the suffering of its people, and to the attempts of young people to alleviate that suffering. God forbid, I do not condone the acts of terror performed by this youth; I’m just trying to explain the situation that would drive “pure Alyesha” to “kill the Czar.” There is no doubt that Dostoevsky would have explained it incomparably better. But he ran out of time. I think it came to his mind, though for some reason it didn’t come to ours, that terror is, of course, terrible, but that it was also in the power of the emperor to put an end to it with just the stroke of a pen. In fact, there was not only the constitutional project of Loris-Melikov in 1881, but a similar Valuev project, commissioned by the Emperor in 1862! This means the -Liberator understood that an end to terror depended on him. He understood, but he did not dare go against the nomenklatura; he dared only when he found himself at odds with it because of his love affairs.

 

Ideological Revolution

The nomenklatura was strongly dissatisfied with the rotten public mood. On the other hand, they also disliked the ’s unreliability. The Revenge demanded a “strong,” autocratic Russia, not a European, constitutional mush-head. Political imagination never was the nomenklatura’s strength. Opposing youth idealism with state idealism was the only idea it had in 1870 for reversing the liberal mood in society. It was an idea of tribal and religious unity among Slavs, an idea that demanded Russia’s absolute selflessness, her willingness to make any sacrifice for the liberation of her Orthodox brethren. In other words, they replaced the Decembrist revolution, in the name of which the youth had sacrificed their lives, with an ideological revolution.

 

Ilya Repin. Arrest of the Propagandist (1880-89).

 

At the time, however, it worked. There is a remarkable document: a letter to Dostoevsky from Alexandra Korba (another future member of Narodnaya Volya), written during the patriotic hysteria of the mid-1870s. She writes: “And the discord between the Czar and the intelligentsia has ended finally. A bright celebration of reconciliation took place among the preparations for a war for the liberation of fellow Slavs.” They wanted to believe in goodness so badly. The reconciliation was temporary, though. Korba would still take part in the regicide.

The Slavophiles had no competition for the leadership role in the ideological revolution. In contrast to the nomenklatura, their reputation was impeccable; they were in opposition to the old regime, and they had always been whole-heartedly committed to autocracy. Moreover, this role seemed to them a way out of their own crisis. In the situation of a miniature civil war between the radical nomenklatura and the radical youth, the Slavophiles could not continue to sit on the fence (as they had under the old regime) and at the same time advocate for freedom and autocracy. In the words of the leader of their second generation, Ivan Aksakov, “there is no middle in the present situation—you are with the nihilists, or with the Liberals, or with the Conservatives. We have to go with the latter, no matter how sad it is.” In practice, this meant they had to lead the Pan-Slavic ideological revolution. Ivan Aksakov’s marriage to Anna Tiutcheva became a kind of symbol of the new political union.

 

Getting Absorbed in the Game

The general scheme of the Revenge strategy has been clear since the time of Pogodin: after a big European war, a victorious Russia would proceed to re-division Europe. And, as a head of the “Slavic union, with Russian grand dukes on the thrones of Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Walachia—and St. Petersburg in Constantinople,” would once again become a superpower. Nikolai Danilevsky, very detailed and accurate in his accounting, calculated how many square meters of land and how many millions of “fresh people” each of these countries added to Russia. It turned out to be very, very many. And here you have an example of Russia’s “selflessness” in the Pan-Slavic revolution. Honest Pogodin called it “the fair game.”

But the most interesting thing is that this (or something close to it) happened again decades later. But the designers of the revanche did not take into account that a very different revolution would be needed the second time around, a revolution that was not the one the Petersburg boys sought. It would be a terrible, bloody revolution that would leave behind no stone of the royal nomenklatura, nor of the old Russia, nor, alas, of its truly great culture.

The designers of the revanche took too crazy and suicidal a risk, getting absorbed in their games, forgetting that behind them had been waiting for centuries another, “peasant Russia.” Yes, they could suppress the revolt of the neo-Decembrists youth. But in the process of suppressing it, they would bring the country to Lenin.