Russia (33 page)

The cost of victory was heavy enough. Kutuzov’s army, 120,000 strong when it began the pursuit, had shrunk to a mere 35,000 by the time it crossed into the Duchy of Poland,
¹¹
and the campaign as a whole had cost Russia 250,000 men. Yet in long-term perspective the loss seems small. Russia’s population was soon to recover; the demographic cost to France was more serious. The Russian campaign heralded the decline of France as a great power, while Russia now became the strongest power in continental Europe. Wellington and Blücher won what the former called the ‘close-run thing’ against France at Waterloo in 1815, but, with a powerful Russian army marching towards him, Napoleon was doomed even had he won at Waterloo.

While Europe’s statesmen gathered in Paris and then Vienna to redraw the political map, Russian soldiers bivouacked in the Champs-Elysées and gave a Russian word,
bistro,
to French dictionaries to denote fast food service.
Since both Castlereagh, who represented Britain, and Metternich for Austria feared Russia’s power in Europe, they tried to limit it by co-opting France into the ranks of respectability in order to provide a counterweight. Although Russia did not gain all it had hoped for in the peace settlement, it nevertheless got most of it - the lion’s share of Poland as well as Bessarabia and Finland.

Russia’s rule over Poland could hardly be characterized as oppressive. Tsar Alexander and his brother Constantine, whom he appointed his viceroy in Warsaw, were children of the Enlightenment and had both been reared on advanced ideas.
¹²
Some of these were reflected in Russia’s new regime for Poland. The constitution, largely the work of the Polish magnate Adam Czartoryski, provided for a parliament that included elected representatives of the respectable classes
of
both countryside and town. Poland was to have its own army of 35,000 men, and would be united with Russia only through the person of the Tsar in his capacity as hereditary king of Poland. The Catholic religion was guaranteed, and Polish was established as the official language of government, the courts and education. Furthermore the viceroy, Grand Duke Constantine, was liberal by disposition and married to a Polish lady.

The Polish political classes as a whole would not be reconciled, however. Traditionalists still hankered after the greater Poland of a former age, while many of the educated young were fired by revolutionary ideas. But there were some prominent Poles who believed in working with the Russians for the good of their country. It was a policy that soon bore fruit. Largely due to their reforms of the 1820s, for example, the foundations of a modern economy were laid in Poland.
¹³

The prospects darkened, however, with the Warsaw uprising of 1830—31. Led by a group of young intellectuals, including army officers, it did not gather much of a popular following, and was put down with relative ease. But it raised the spectre of Jacobinism again. Fear of radicalism ran very deep in governments across Europe, including Russia’s. Thenceforth Russian policy in Poland became much harsher. Strangely perhaps, this failed to elicit any protest from Russia’s own radicals, the so-called Decembrists, who had themselves attempted to overturn the autocracy in 1825, when Tsar Alexander died and was unexpectedly succeeded, not by the elder of his surviving brothers, Constantine, but by the younger, Nicholas. On the contrary, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had sympathized with the Decembrists, was outraged by ‘demagogues’ in the French Assembly who protested about the crushing of the Polish rebels. In an angry poem, he dismissed the protest as unbased and unjustified. The repression in
Poland was merely a phase in the longstanding ‘domestic quarrel’ between two Slav peoples, which foreigners should stay out of. Had Westerners protested when Polish forces occupied Moscow? Why did they hate Russia, rather than being grateful for its saving Europe from the Turks and from Napoleon? Russians had spilled their blood for Europe’s freedom. If the West dared back its rhetoric with action it would find

a shield of flashing steel raised

Over the Russian land from Finland’s cold rocks to flaming Colchis,

From the shimmering Kremlin to the walls of impassive China.

So, you demagogues, send us your sons indoctrinated in hate.

There’s room enough for them in Russia’s fields

Alongside the graves of their compatriots.
¹⁴

Pushkin’s poetic diatribe reflected not only patriotism but a pride in empire which most educated Russians seemed to share. And the sense of estrangement from the West and the possibility of war conveyed by the poem were prophetic. Russia’s imperialism was indeed to provoke a war with the West — though not in Pushkin’s lifetime, and not over Poland, but over Russia’s expansion to the south.

The besetting imperial dilemma of St Petersburg’s bureaucrats at that time was whether to devolve power in the Empire or to centralize it. Should governors be accorded the freedom to act as local circumstances demanded, which would impede centralization and the enforcement of legal rights? Or should the government insist that all regions comply with the law laid down by St Petersburg, which would promote officialism and insensitivity to local conditions and sentiment?

In Finland and in Russia’s other Baltic territories imperial rule continued to be marked by a certain complaisance, although when Alexander had confirmed the rights and privileges of Estland and Livland he had taken care to add the proviso ‘insofar as they are consistent with the general decrees and laws of our State.’
¹⁵
But trying to draft laws that would be equally appropriate to the educated populations of the western territories, the Russians of the heartlands, and the tribesmen of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia turned out to be much like attempting to square the circle.

Alexander had grappled with ideas of constitutional reform since the beginning of the century. He had corresponded with Thomas Jefferson about them, consulted John Quincy Adams, and discussed them with his inner circle of able advisers. These included Novosiltsov, who wanted to
redesign the Empire as a federation of twelve huge provinces, each with a bicameral ruling council
(duma);
Czartoryski, architect of the well-intentioned but unappreciated arrangement for Poland; and Mikhail Speranskii, who was to be looked back on as the most visionary reformer of all.

One solution to the problem of running so vast and variegated an empire equitably was federalism. But the desperate war against Napoleonic France and the threat of revolution that loomed over Europe afterwards discouraged the idea of dismantling the autocracy, so the proposed federalist solution had been diluted, reduced to the creation of a few super-provinces, in central Russia, the north-west (including the Baltic) and the south (where New Russia, Bessarabia and the Caucasus were brought together). There was also some tinkering with provincial institutions, but Speranskii himself was sent away to be governor of Penza province, and then to Siberia as governor-general.

Nowhere was the fundamental problem of empire more intractable than there. Much has been made of the memoirist Vigel’s comparison of Siberia with a remote estate of a wealthy landowner who appreciates it for the extra income it brings and the interesting objects it yields but otherwise pays it no attention. That the centre interfered so little is hardly surprising given the difficulty of communication. The furthest point on land was nearly 9,000 miles from St Petersburg. Seaborne communications were quicker, but as late as the 1840s it was to take eighteen months for a reply to a query sent from New Archangel on Sitka Island in the Gulf of Alaska to arrive from St Petersburg.
¹⁶

However, it did not seem reasonable to devolve responsibilities on to the indigenous leadership of a society which, as in Yakutia, respected shamans who worked their curative spells by hopping about to the accompaniment of a doleful chant, and ‘making the most hideous distortions of face and body’ before pretending to plunge a knife into their belly
¹⁷
And if the natives were insufficiently modern to be allowed to share in government, the local Russians, aside from the administrators, were little better - chiefly merchants who were as rapacious, ignorant, oppressive and insensitive as those portrayed by the novelist Leskov (and later by the composer Shostakovich) in his ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’.

Speranskii introduced the rule of law into Siberia with his statutes of 1822, but it did not take him long to realize that the people had ‘less of a conception of legality than elsewhere’, and that the population — many of whom were migratory by habit — could not be treated like Russians. Their officials would have to be appointed rather than elected. However some
members of the Yakut and Kamchadal elite appointed to office proved to be at least as oppressive as any Russians. Speranskii decreed that, apart from criminal offences, the people were to be ruled by their own tribal laws. He recognized the rights of nomads, assigned them land, protected it from encroachment, and left it to them to decide its distribution. He even inspired the setting-up of a council for the nomads, though the new institution survived for only ten years.
¹⁸
Speranskii’s more lasting reforms were administrative and organizational rather than institutional. For the rest, he could only pray that the natives would be Russified, as for the most part the Tatars had been, and as soon as possible.

In the south, Russia continued to press forward at Persia’s expense. A war between them ended in 1828 with the annexation of Yerevan and the plains of Ararat, whereupon tens of thousands of Armenian Christians from further south flocked there seeking Tsar Nicholas’s protection, although many Muslims moved in the opposite direction. Nicholas approved the creation of a new, Armenian, province for them, though it was to be merged into a Caucasian super-province twelve years later.
¹⁹
If Armenians welcomed Russian rule, however, many Muslims of the Caucasus continued to resist it.

Not that Russian policy had been anti-Muslim in principle. On the contrary, the state had often sponsored Islamic institutions. When Russia had occupied the Crimea it had confirmed Muslim clergy in office, and it left both their spiritual authority and their control of religious education intact. It had also allowed them to retain properties that yielded untaxed revenues to support their mosques, schools and charities. It even paid their salaries. But it insisted that the civil law take priority over Islamic law, defined the clergy’s responsibilities, and, from 1834, obliged them to register births, marriages and deaths.
²⁰
This gentle approach would not work in the Caucasus, however. Certainly the army command was sceptical about it.

The new governor-general in the south, General Yermolov, was an established war hero before he arrived in the Caucasus. A proconsul in the Tsitsianov mould, he had no doubt about Russia’s cultural superiority to the peoples with whom he now had to deal, and in his forthright way he sometimes did what he thought best, notwithstanding the Tsar’s milder views. ‘I want my name to be associated with terror,’ he declared. ‘This will protect our frontier territories more effectively than … fortresses. For the natives my word should be a law more inevitable than death.’ On another occasion he wrote that ‘Asiatics see condescension as a sign of weakness. I shall be unswervingly severe simply out of humanity — because
an execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction and thousands of Muslims from treason.’
²¹

Yermolov was lionized by society, and admired by radical youth — not least by the poets Lermontov and Pushkin. It has been fashionable lately to castigate the likes of Yermolov for excessive cruelty, bred of prejudice. It is also argued that his methods were counter-productive — that they provoked opposition unnecessarily.
²²
However, as Baddeley points out, the Russians hardly differed from the British and other imperial powers in their behaviour when their will was contested by peoples they regarded as uncivilized, and it is difficult to imagine that some of the peoples they encountered would have been any more tractable whatever Russia’s actions. It is here that we encounter the origins of the Chechen problem, which stretch back long before 1800.

As the multiplicity of languages recorded in its valleys testifies, the Caucasus had attracted refugees since ancient times. As with the Basques in the Pyrenees or the Romansh-speakers of Switzerland, isolation aided survival. So did belligerence, and the peoples of the Caucasus included some, the Chechens among them, who were more belligerent than most. This tendency was accentuated by the difficulty of winning a living from the stony mountain soil, and by the need to carry arms to defend one’s sheep and goats from wild beasts.

Violence, moreover, could be productive for the mountain people. Trade routes crossed the Caucasus, and so the local population not only sold their services as guides, like the Swiss, but turned to robbery — for money, goods and slaves. (Unsold slaves were set to work in the household or with the animals.) From the sixteenth century at least, reports by travellers make frequent reference to robbers infesting the western shores of the Caspian Sea and its hinterland. Chechen Island, situated at a hazardous but strategic point in the Caspian opposite the estuary of the river Terek, takes its name from the Chechen pirates who used it as a base. Stepan Razin, Cossack leader of a great insurrection in the 1660s which incorporated a robber expedition, is also said to have used it.
²³
Nearly two centuries later a French traveller in the Caucasus remarked that mountain settlements
(auls)
in the eastern Caucasus were prosperous because of the booty their inhabitants had accumulated.

Since no state could impose its law on them, these mountain societies tended to be regulated by the blood feud, which they had come to apply collectively to intruders like the Russians. The German scholar Pallas
noticed the same tendency among the spirited, but disorderly, Circassians to the west, a decade and more before Tsitsianov first arrived in the Caucasus. ‘Among the Circassians’, he wrote, ‘the spirit of resentment is so great that all the relations of the murderer are considered as guilty. The customary infatuation to avenge the blood of relatives generates most of the feuds, and occasions great bloodshed among the nations of the Caucasus; for unless pardon be purchased or obtained by intermarriage between the two families, the principle of revenge is propagated.’The customary law of family vengeance was already being applied to communal retribution, however, and ‘the hatred which the mountainous nations evince against the Russians, in a great measure arises from the same source.’ Moreover, when a member of the Circassian elite was killed, blood money was not acceptable in compensation: ‘They demand blood for blood.’
²⁴