5

The 1880s

Immediately after 1 March 1881, in an open letter to Alexander III, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will offered to cease the terrorist struggle if the new tsar would summon the representatives of the people. The expression ‘course of things' is not a metaphor, but a reality; it knows how to disavow those who do not understand it. It had seemed that only the other day the Populists were denouncing any constitution as a doorway to capitalism. Now they were promising to renounce revolutionary struggle in exchange for a constitution. The frightened tsar wept on the shoulder of his tutor, Pobedonostsev. However, this weakness among the ruling groups did not last long. The terrorist acts had evoked no response in the country. The peasants saw in the murder of the tsar an act of revenge on the part of the nobles. The workers joined the revolutionary movement only in isolated cases. The liberals were in hiding. Nobody supported the demand for a national assembly. The government, convinced that the terrorists represented nothing except their own heroism, took courage. On 29 April the tsar issued a manifesto proclaiming autocratic rule inviolate. At the same time, pogroms were set in motion. Henceforth a firm course was steered. The Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, Pobedonostsev, the minister, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, and the Moscow publicist, Katkov, became the inspirers of the new regime. A popular assembly? Why, it suffices to cast a glance at those provisional ‘talk fests’, the zemstvos! Who is running them? ‘Worthless people, immoral, living outside their families, debauched philanderers…’ Thus Pobedonostsev instructed the young tsar, who was known to be a good family man.

There was nothing for the terrorists to do but declare an open season on the new tsar. To this effect, one of the prominent members of the People’s Will formulated a programme of action: ‘Sashka after Sashka!’ But this formula hung impotent in the air. The capital of the People’s Will was spent. It was a long way to a new change. In 1883 Degayev, an agent of the police, betrayed Vera Figner, one of the most admirable figures in the Executive Committee. In 1884 G. A. Lopatin, who had been in close contact abroad with Marx and Engels, returned to Petersburg to renew centrally directed terror. But there were no further successes. With the arrest of Lopatin, numerous addresses fell into the hands of the police, making it possible for them to liquidate all that still remained of the People’s Will. There was a fatal logic in this chain of failures. The political movement of an isolated intelligentsia had been narrowed down to the purely technical effort to assassinate tsars, which isolated the terrorists even from the intelligentsia. The element of surprise had played a big role in the initial effectiveness of terrorism. But as soon as the police made their preparations and resorted to provocation, the little band of terrorists was caught in a noose. The continuity of the organization was completely broken, and there remained only a tradition, more and more preyed upon by doubts. The new attempts at revolutionary activity under the old banner had a disjointed, almost accidental character, and not even an occasional success. Nevertheless the inertia of fear did not soon disappear from the tsar’s palace. Alexander III never left Gatchina. Through fear of assassination, the coronation was postponed to May 1883. But there were no attempts. At his coronation the tsar unfolded before the township leaders a clear programme: ‘Obey the marshals of the nobility, and do not believe in these absurd and foolish rumours about a division of land …’

That sharp turn toward aristocratic reaction which characterized the 1880s was promoted by disturbances in the world market. The incipient agrarian crisis brought great changes in the domain of ideas and programmes. It was not accidental that the abolition of serfdom coincided with a period of high prices for grain. Capitalist agriculture, having increased exports, was bringing high profits to landowners. In the first years after the reform, only the more parasitical landlord estates went to ruin. These could not even be saved by the peasants’ redemption payments. The sympathy of progressive landowners for those liberal measures which converted Russia from a serf-owning into an aristocratic-bourgeois country held out only as long as the prices of grain remained high. The world agrarian crisis of the 1880s struck a cruel blow at aristocratic liberalism. The landlords could now hold out only with direct financial subsidies from the state, and with a partial restoration of slave conditions in peasant work. As early as 1882 a Peasant Bank was founded, which helped the peasant bourgeoisie pay the discontented nobility immoderately high prices for their land. Three years later, the tsar, in a special manifesto, confirmed the dominant role of the nobility in the state, and established this time a Nobility Bank to make direct subsidies to aristocracy.

The decline of grain exports made possible, on the other hand, a sharp rise in import duties on industrial commodities from Western Europe. This was what the young and greedy Russian industries were trying to get. The ideas of free labour in agriculture and freedom in foreign trade had lost currency simultaneously. Alexander III revived semi-serf-owning relations in the interest of the landlords, and introduced semi-preventive tariffs in the interest of the industrialists. The official slogan of the reign, ‘Russia for the Russians’, meant: no Western, and especially no constitutional, ideas; state positions – for the Russian nobility; the domestic market – for Russian industry; the ghetto for the Jews; enslavement of Poland and Finland in the interest of Russian officialdom and the Russian merchants. The semi-restoration of serfdom and the forced growth of capitalism, two processes working in opposite directions, together constituted the economic policy of Alexander III. And the landlords and industrialists received all that could be received at the expense of the people: cheap labour, high rentals, high prices for industrial products, and in addition to that, subsidies, bonuses, government contracts. The nobility had ceased – and the merchants had not yet begun – to play the liberal. The bureaucracy was taking revenge for the epoch of great reforms. Governmental reaction developed without hindrance throughout the whole reign. Such transformations as had been preserved from the spring days of the previous reign underwent a consistent revision in the spirit of aristocratic privileges, discrimination against national minorities, and police controls. As against the decade of the ‘great reforms’ (1861 to 1870), there arose a decade of counter-reforms (1884 to 1894).

The extremely conservative liberal Kavelin, who had connections in the highest circles, wrote secretly in 1882 to a dignitary then in disfavour: ‘Everywhere there is dull-wittedness and idiocy, stupid routine and demoralization. Nothing useful can be made from this rot and dirt.’ The course of things, after its fashion, refuted Kavelin. From that rot and dirt was created a reign in the monumental style. After the first years of quietude, Alexander III finally came to believe in himself and his mission. Gigantic, fat, ignorant, inclined to vodka, greasy foods, and crude jokes, he did not admit even the thought of his subjects’ having any rights. Thanks to the mortal antagonism between France and Germany, Russia’s international position at that time seemed doubly secure. The Petersburg court lived hand in glove with the court in Berlin, At the same time, friendship with France opened to tsarism inexhaustible financial perspectives. The Western world, with its parliamentary ‘circuses’, Alexander treated like an abomination. One summer, when he left unanswered an urgent diplomatic dispatch, he explained to his minister, ‘Europe can wait while the Russian tsar goes fishing.’ Of his crowned colleagues the tsar spoke with much candour: Queen Victoria he called an ‘old gossip’; Wilhelm II, ‘crazy’; the Serbian King Milan, ‘a beast’; the Turkish Sultan, ‘an old fool’. Not all these designations were incorrect.

The tsar did not lack common sense. Kavelin wrote of him: ‘Great caution, shrewdness, great distrust, maybe a certain amount of slyness.’ The loyal liberal grieved only that the tsar lacked ‘knowledge and manners’. Alexander III, moreover, was firmly convinced that his corpulent physique was of divine origin, and in all its functions served the welfare of Russia and the aims of Providence. There was character in this narrowness: the tsar was feared. Grey and bald-headed grand dukes, drunkenly scrapping with French actors, hid their capers like scared schoolboys. When the chief of the state police, Durnovo, was incautious enough to become involved in some shady affair, the tsar wrote: ‘Get rid of this pig’ – which, by the way, did not prevent Durnovo from becoming, under Nicholas II, an all-powerful minister. To justify the official kowtowing to the roughneck on the throne, the war minister, Vannovsky, said: This is a new Peter I with a big stick. The minister of foreign affairs, Lamsdorf, wrote in his diary: Only a big stick without Peter I. The police system dominated everything without effort, by the mere motion of a finger. The patrolmen on their beats with their moustaches and medals, the famous burgomaster Gresser riding through ’his’ city behind a span of dappled greys, the state council, the Most Holy Synod, Pobedonostsev, the unbending spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the old cannon announcing the noon hour – what an ensemble! Without batting an eye, Gresser ordered the opera orchestra not to play so loud lest they disturb the most exalted listeners. And the orchestra obeyed, notwithstanding the notations of Wagner himself. Noise was strictly forbidden in literature, on the street, and even in music.

The spirit of the reign was subsequently incarnated, perhaps partly subconsciously, by the Russo-Italian sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy in his famous statue of Alexander III, where glorification is combined with satire. That obese giant, with his mighty pig-iron behind, holds down a horse that looks more like a well-fattened hog. All official Russia conformed to this style of insuperable hoggishness. The quarter-century experiment, opening with the liberation of the serfs and closing with the murder of Alexander II, had, so to speak, newly revealed the solidity of the national foundations: Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality. Indeed, had it not been proved by experience that even dynamite cannot move the granite rock of tsarism? Everything seemed cut and sewn on the measure of eternity.

The old master of Russian satire Saltykov-Shchedrin, as he approached the end of his life, complained bitterly in his diary: ‘It becomes wearisome and hard to live ... A man feels as though he were in a dungeon and getting a blow on the head besides.’ It is hard now even to imagine the adoration among the circles of the leftist intelligentsia for the journal Notes of the Fatherland, an outspoken monthly closest in spirit to the revolutionary Populists. 'We awaited the magazine’, relates one of its contemporaries, ‘as a beloved guest who knew everything, and would tell about and explain everything. It was not only a literary publication, but an ideological headquarters. The groupings and tendencies in educated Russian society had for many years, and particularly since the peasant reforms, formed themselves around the so-called thick journals. But the pious trinity that had declared war on ‘the demon of the sixties’ – Pobedonostsev, Dimitri Tolstoy, and Katkov – were vigilant to good effect. ‘The blow on the head’ did not delay. In 1884 Notes of the Fatherland was suppressed. The world of the radical intelligentsia was left without a centre of gravity. At the same time the works of Mill, Buckle, and Spencer, to say nothing of Marx and Chernyshevsky, were removed from the libraries.

The last issue of the journal People’s Will, which came out on 1 October 1885, when the party itself no longer existed, painted in bleak colours the morale of educated society: ‘Complete intellectual disintegration, a chaos of the most contradictory opinions on the most elementary questions of social life…; on the one hand, pessimism both personal and social, on the other hand, socio-religious mysticism.’ Those second-ranking men of the 1870s who had survived and remained at liberty looked around with astonishment. The whole scene had become unrecognizable to them. Advocates of terror, to be sure, were still to be found here and there, ‘You can silence everything,’ they were repeating, ‘but you can’t silence the explosion of a bomb.’ However, even the terrorists were not what they had used to be. Having renounced their utopian idea of a seizure of power, they were hoping to use their bombs only to extract liberal concessions. But only a great idea, or at least a great illusion, can inspire the young to go out to death. That great illusion was lost. Having become, in essence, constitutionalists, the prophets of terror were looking hopefully toward the liberals. But the property-holding opposition made no answer. Thus, terror was undermined from two sides. There were prophets and defenders of the terror, but no terrorists. In the revolutionary circles that did appear here and there, the reigning mood was one of doom. The favourite song of these times offered only one consolation: ‘From our bones an austere avenger will arise.’ One of the last members of the People’s Will, Yakubovich, branded his own generation in emotional stanzas as ‘a generation accursed of God’.

The Populism of the 1870s consisted of a revolutionary hatred for class society and of a utopian programme. During the 1880s the revolutionary implacability died out, leaving only utopianism. But, deprived of wings, this, too, was replaced by a programme of reform in the interest of the small proprietor. To realize this programme, latter-day Populists had only one hope – the goodwill of the ruling classes. ‘Our times are not times for big tasks, ’ said the humbled Populists, echoing the liberals. But it was only for a small minority that the process stopped even at this stage. The broad circles of the intelligentsia, in the eloquent words of a reactionary writer, wholly ‘renounced the heritage’ of the 1860s and 1870s. In philosophy this meant a break with materialism and atheism, in politics abandonment of revolution. There was a flood of renegades of every kind. The more established strata of the intelligentsia frankly announced that they were sick and tired of peasants. Time to live for ourselves! The fading radical and liberal journals revealed the decline of social interest. Gleb Uspensky, the ablest of the Populist writers, complained that in the passenger trains general conversations on political subjects, which had recently been so loud, were no longer to be heard, There was nothing left to talk about. But ‘life for ourselves’ turned out to have an extremely meagre content. Petersburg, complained the progressive press, was never so colourless as now: stagnation in trade, and complete intellectual stagnation reaching the point of prostration. It was still worse in the provinces. The provincial capitals were distinguished one from another by the fact that in one they drank more than they gambled, in another they gambled more than they drank. Any art that turned its eyes upon the people was condemned as tendentious. The intelligentsia put forward a demand for ‘pure art’, which would not disturb it with reminders of unsolved problems and unfulfilled obligations.

The bard of the leftist circles at this time was the young Nadson, a poet with broken wings, a cracked lyre, and tubercular lungs. In his wistful verses, which ran through several editions in a short time, the principal note sounded is doubt. ‘We know no way out’, wept this poet over his generation, which had lost faith in its former heroes and prophets. The star of Anton Chekhov was slowly rising in literature. Chekhov tried to laugh, but in the atmosphere of discouragement and melancholy, his laughter soon broke off. Chekhov found himself, and his times, in the ‘twilight tales’ and ‘dreary stories’, where a complaint against the cruelty and meaninglessness of life joins hands with an impotent hope for a better world ‘in three hundred years’. Chekhov was supplemented, in painting, by Levitan, who depicted rural pastures inhabited by crows, and country roads washing away with rain in the melancholy rays of autumn twilights, These grey colours became the basic hue of an entire epoch.

Especially significant for the 1880s was the influence of Count Leo Tolstoy – not the artist, long and deservedly famous, but the preacher and teacher of life. Tolstoy’s curve of evolution more than once intersected the orbit of the Russian intelligentsia, but never coincided with it. Bound by all his roots to the aristocratic culture and frightened by its decay, Tolstoy was seeking a new moral axis. Bourgeois liberalism was hateful to him in its narrowness, hypocrisy, and parvenu manners, and the radical intelligentsia in its lack of roots, its nihilism, and its tendency to eat without a fork. Tolstoy sought peace and harmony, and wanted to hide from social alarms and also from the piercing and inexorable fear of death. At the very time when the radical intelligentsia was trying to impart life to the rural commune with its ‘critical thinking’, Tolstoy found the peasants attractive in their lack of critical thought and of individual thought in general. In the final analysis Tolstoy was a repentant Russian nobleman – a frequently encountered species since the times of the Decembrists – only his repentance looked into the past and not the future. He thought of resurrecting the lost paradise of patriarchal harmony – but this time without compulsion and violence. The artist became a moralist. The moralist immediately sought the assistance of a sterilized religion. This most red-blooded of realists suddenly began to teach that the true goal of life is a preparation for death. Not permitting anyone to criticize his own revelation, he mocked science and art, boxed the ears of their priests, and preached meekness with an admirable fury. If you free his philosophic thought from the temptations provided by the still-unreconciled artist, there remains nothing but a depressing quietism. Every struggle against evil only increases it. The oppressed ought not to prevent the oppressor from voluntarily renouncing his oppression. The entire teaching of Tolstoy has necessarily a negative character. ‘Thou shalt not be angry, thou shalt not lust, thou shalt not take oaths, thou shalt not wage war.’ And to make this we added other, more practical advice: do not smoke, and do not eat meat. Christianity in its essence is not a doctrine about improving the world, but a prophylaxis of personal salvation, and an art for avoiding sin. Its extreme ideal is monasticism, just as the extreme of monasticism is found in the anchorites. It is no accident that Tolstoyanism leaned upon Buddhism.

This gospel of non-resistance fell most appropriately upon the soil prepared by the collapse of the plans and hopes of the People’s Will. The quintessence of revolutionary violence having gone bankrupt, what could better replace it than a harmless solvent of Christian ‘love’. If it had proven impossible to overthrow tsarism, tsarism could still be morally condemned. ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’ The idea of moral self-perfection replaced the programme of social transformation. In the circles of the intelligentsia, Tolstoyanism made devastating conquests. Some would try, in the steps of the master, to make bad boots or put up worthless stoves.

Others would renounce tobacco and carnal love – most of them not for long. Still others created agricultural colonies, in which the evangelical wine of love soon turned into the vinegar of mutual recrimination. Five young ladies from Tiflis questioned Tolstoy, and the entire press repeated their question: How shall we live a holy life? But the holy life did not appear. On the contrary, the higher they looked for the rules of personal morality, the deeper they sank in the slime of actual existence. The idealistic philosopher Vladimir Solovyov tried ten years later to express the attitude of the Russian Enlightenment in this formula: ‘Man is only a species of ape, and therefore we ought to … give our souls for our lesser brethren.’ This paradox was designed to be a mockery of materialistic narrowness; in reality, the bite of its satire was directed at idealistic hypocrisy. It was no accident that an epoch of crude and godless materialism, when people gave their lifeblood to pave a road to a better future, was replaced by a decade of idealism and mysticism when each man turned his rear to the rest in order to make sure of saving his own soul.

The political meaning of these ideological metamorphoses presents, especially in retrospect, no enigma. Having originated in the main among circles where pre-bourgeois mores still prevailed, and having passed with its left flank through a period of heroic self-sacrifice in the name of the people, the intelligentsia, after cruel defeats, had taken the road of bourgeois revivalism. In yesterday’s saint began to speak the self-centred man. His first need was to free himself from the idea of a 'duty to the people’. Literature and philosophy hastened, of course, to welcome and adorn these sickly awakenings of bourgeois individualism. The propertied classes did what they could to tame that intelligentsia which had caused them so much trouble. The rapprochement and reconciliation of the bourgeoisie in the process of becoming civilized, with the intelligentsia in the process of becoming bourgeois, was, generally speaking, inevitable. Barbaric political conditions, however, made impossible its smooth and uninterrupted development. The Russian intelligentsia was destined to make more than one new departure in years to come.

Our narrative required this closer look at the 1880s, a period during which Alexander Ulyanov, the university student, entered the arena of struggle, and his younger brother Vladimir was pursuing his studies in the Simbirsk High School.