Hi Cave-dwellers! Unitary Moonbat here, thanking pico for looking after the scrolls and tending the fires while I flap off to limited-connectivityland. The moonbattery will re-commence next week, and remember: There may be a pop quiz when I get back...
Evening, Kossacks! I'm honored to be Cave-sitting today while the Bat takes a much-needed break from the duties of historiography. Tonight we're going to take a break from his excellent series on Afghanistan to visit with their neighbors to the (frozen) north. So come on in and warm up, while I'll put on a samovar for some hot tea.
My approach to today's history is a little more scattered than the Bat's, but there's a reason for it. In Russia of the late 19th century, a new writing style was meeting some its first and best practioners: what later came to be known as skaz, or a highly stylized imitation of everyday speech that gave literature a more informal, gather-'round-the-campfire quality. My language is hardly stylized to the level of Leskov or Zoshchenko, but my stories do tend to wander all over the place.
So come warm your hands near the fire, sidle up for a few sips of smooth samogon, and let me spin the tale of one of those strange comical/tragical moments in history, the somewhat disastrous but influential "Going to the People" (khozhdenie v narod) in pre-revolutionary Russia.
I. The Players
"Going to the People" happened in the late 19th century, but like any good story we need some background on the players in order to appreciate all the levels involved. Now when it comes to storytelling, I lean more Dostoevskian than Tolstoyan, so expect a little more melodrama than objective detachment. Russian history is full of colorful, hyperbolic figures, and if the history gets tainted with the myth, it comes with the territory. I have no desire to turn our pungent and well-seasoned shchi into bare cabbage and water.
So allow me to introduce the players in our historical drama:
a) The Tsar
Russian tsarism begins way back in the 16th century, when a brilliant but disturbed ruler by the name of Ivan Grozny (usually translated as "terrible", but in the sense of "awe-inspiring") adopted the title tsar to go along with his imperialistic and increasingly autocratic style of ruling. Ivan had a good reason to consolidate power, at least from his perspective: the elite class of boyars, which passed roughly for an aristocracy, was not only flexing its political muscle, but had murdered much of his family to prove the point. Granted, Ivan wasn't a stable child to begin with - if tossing dogs off the towers just to watch them die can be charitably be called "unstable".
Of Ivan's many actions as tsar - including the establishment of a cruel secret police, the expansion of Russian territory into the Caucases, and side gigs as a monk and author - one was a bit more regrettable than the rest: he violently bashed in the head of his heir.
Whoops.
Following a crisis of succession, Ivan was succeeded by the head of his secret police and former chess partner, Boris Godunov. Remember that name, because we're going to come back to it later.
(sidenote: those of you unfamiliar with Russian history may still recognize the name Boris Godunov, either through the Pushkin play, the Mussorgsky opera, or the subtly punning name of Rocky and Bullwinkle's archnemesis)
In the interest of time, let's jump ahead a few centuries to the Romanov years, when the tsarist regime has been restabilized and the tensions between the tsar and the aristocracy somewhat deflated. During the 19th century, the Russian government oscillated between conservative and liberal regimes, the former bent on furthering autocratic control over many aspects of the culture (especially censorship) and the latter attempting to emulate the Enlightened monarchies of the West.
Tsar and Sexy Beast Alexander II (source: wikimedia commons) | If the routing of Napoleon in 1812 was a high point for tsardom, then the Decembrist rebellion in 1825, in which members of the military had fought for a Constitutional monarchy, was its low point. Nicholas I successfully defeated the Decembrists, but by the 1860s, it was impossible to ignore that the Autocracy was hopelessly detached both from its own countrymen and from the decline of monarchy as a feasible system of government in the modern age. Alexander II, one of the most progressive rulers until that time, finally ended Russia's system of serfdom on March 3, 1861 - but much like the end of slavery in the United States, the elimination of the system without a clear plan of action re:its impact on local economies turned out to be not much of an improvement for many.
In the meantime, ideas from the West were flooding in more quickly than the liberally-leaning tsar could implement them. Eliminating the death penalty and founding a legal system based on peer juries were giant leaps for Russia, but the social and political tensions were so great that tsar found himself personally threatened by radical movements. A failed assassination attempt in 1866 did little to endear him to the radical left, although much less so the successful assassination attempt in 1879. |
b) The People
On the other end of the social scale was the enormous, faceless mass known as "the People" (narod). As in Western tradition, the People are rarely engaged in pre-20th century Russia, their uses limited to manual labor, low-level military, and occasional but brief appearances in literature as the voice of purity and innocence.
Life as a peasant in Russia was considerably worse than in other European nations. In 1587, faced with a country rapidly descending into chaos, Boris Godunov had signed a decree forbidding the free movement of serfs from one property to another - a severely restricting and punative system of krepostnoe pravo that became worse in succeeding years, leading to occasionally violent peasant uprisings.
But the cruelty of the Russian system wasn't the only reason it differed so greatly from serfdom in Western Europe: the peasants also had an odd way of speaking Russian, which by the 18th century was no longer the norm among high aristocratic circles. The process of Westernization - always a tension in Russian history, but on full throttle since the reforms of Peter the Great - had created an elite class that emulated their French and German neighbors to the point of speaking French and German almost exclusively, not to mention diving headfirst into the joys of a shallow gene pool.
Thus, while serfdom in Russia didn't have the strong racial component found in slavery in America, the language barrier exacerbated the class divide to the point of creating "Two Russias", in a very real sense.
Nor were the upper classes unaware of this. In the late 18th century, Alexander Radishchev published a travelogue - Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow - in which he exposed the horrendous living conditions of rural Russians, much to displeasure of Catherine the Great. The englightened tsaritsa preferred not to waste her beautiful mind on the sqaulor of reality.
(sidenote: popular history says that her lover, prince Potemkin, erected pretty façades in front of ramshackle villages in order to impress her and hide the extreme poverty of the countryside. These "Potemkin villages" are not uncommon in history: the Soviets used them to fool George Bernard Shaw, just as the mayor of Rock Ridge used them to fool Hedley Lamarr.)
But for the most part, peasant appearances in literature were limited to "local color": that is, until Ivan Turgenev published a series of short stories called A Sportsman's Sketches in 1852. For the first time, an entire cycle of stories actually focused on the lives of the peasantry, including mundane details of their everyday lives. Though the stories today feel a little romanticized, their impact at the time was enormous: the literate class of Russia began wondering if peasants might properly be considered people, too.
While the role of A Sportsman's Sketches in history can be overstated, Turgenev's humanization of the peasant class was an important part of the tsar's decision to "free" them in 1861. No longer bound to the land, all their problems were over, and class issues in Russia disappeared overnight.
Yeah, right.
The peasantry now found itself with all the responsibilities of freedom - sustenance, debt, etc. - but none of the capital or means to do anything about it. Still, they worshipped the tsar as a kindly, patriarchal figure, assuming that most of their problems stemmed not from the grandfatherly man who'd recently granted their freedom, but from the greedy landowners immediately above them.
c) The Intelligentsia
Somewhere between the tiny group of people running the country and the enormous group of people being run lay the gentry class - an extensive aristocracy that spoke French, played cards, traveled abroad, and otherwise occupied themselves. Their political power was extremely limited, access usually coming either through military or civil service. For a while, they couldn't even properly be called the "educated" class, literacy being limited to members of the clergy.
Rapid changes came in the 18th century, when Russia underwent its own mini-Enlightenment. Russian aristocrats began devouring Western literature, and native poets like Lomonosov(also an accomplished scientist) and Trediakovsky began shaping a literary language of their own. Within a few generations, Russia had its own class of intelligentsia creating literature, refining culture, and butting heads with the tsar.
The 19th century intelligentsia found new hope in the Decembrist revolt. On December 14th 1825, a sizeable chunk of the military had refused to swear allegiance to the newly-ascended tsar Nicholas I, demanding a Constitutional government be established. But those with power are usually uninterested in giving up power, and Nicholas felt the best way to communicate this was by hanging a few rebels and sending a bunch more to Siberia. Still, the left had won a significant moral victory, since the rebels - nicknamed the Decembristsafter the month of their revolt - became cultural icons.
(sidenote: though they're often confused with the Oregon-based indie band, the differences are huge - those Decemberists have an extra 'e' in their name.)
Nicholas barely succeeded at keeping this idolatry censored, considering that Russia's leading writers were sympathetic to the Decemberist cause. He ruled for thirty uncomfortable years before his successor, our friend Alexander II, began his reign. In the meantime, the relationship between the gentry and the autocracy maintained an uneasy truce...
With the peasants freed, the tsar uneasy, and the intellegentsia waiting in the wings, we can jump into the topic of tonight's History:
II. Going to the People
What does a wealthy member of the gentry do in mid-19th century Russia? Well, he could move out to the country and farm the land for profit. Maybe travel through Europe a bit. Read. Attend a ball here and there. Read some more. Get stir-crazy enough to slap another member of gentry so that they could fight a duel and have something exciting to do, even if it meant death.
In short: they were bored out of their minds. Effectively barred from anything but government middle-management, the increasingly well-educated elite drowned themselves in liquor, military service, and low-level estate reforms.
Though a similar angst had affected Byron a generation earlier in England, and the ennui of modern living can be found anywhere from Baudelaire to Kurt Cobain, the great author Alexander Pushkin was the first to recognize it in the Russian milieu, most famously in his novel in verse Evgeny Onegin. Describing the novel's hero, a member of the idle rich, Pushkin wrote (English trs. Charles Johnston): | Alex Pushkin, looking bored (source: wikimedia commons) |
XXXVIII
Недуг, которого причину
Давно бы отыскать пора,
Подобный английскому сплину,
Короче: русская хандра
Им овладела понемногу;
Он застрелиться, слава богу,
Попробовать не захотел,
Но к жизни вовсе охладел.
Как Child-Harold, угрюмый, томный
В гостиных появлялся он;
Ни сплетни света, ни бостон,
Ни милый взгляд, ни вздох нескромный,
Ничто не трогало его,
Не замечал он ничего. | XXXVIII
The illness with which he'd been smitten
should have been analysed when caught,
something like spleen, that scourge of Britain,
or Russia's chondria, for short;
it mastered him in slow gradation;
thank God, he had no inclination
to blow his brains out, but in stead
to life grew colder than the dead.
So, like Childe Harold, glum, unpleasing,
he stalked the drawing-rooms, remote
from Boston's cloth or gossip's quote;
no glance so sweet, no sigh so teasing,
no, nothing caused his heart to stir,
and nothing pierced his senses' blur. |
(sidenote: If you're not familiar with Pushkin's work, you're missing out. For intelligence, versatility, depth, and craftsmanship, Pushkin's only peer in world literature is Shakespeare. He's really that good.)
For the aristocrats living in the 1860s, the romanticized vision of the Decembrist "greatest generation" didn't help, since it served to show how little the current generation was achieving. People longed for action, a sentiment echoed in Lermontov's aching lines:
And [the boat], rebellious, seeks out the storms,
As if in storms there is peace!
In the meantime, European thought was immersed in issues of class and social mobility. Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, native writers like Dmitri Pisarev were refashioning Auguste Compte's positivism into an anti-poverty ideology, and even literary critics like Vissarion Belinksy were focusing their interpretive work on the ways literature elevated and humanized even the "lowest" of society.
This combination of boredom and desire for action with a passionate desire to eliminate human suffering led some members of the intelligentsia to a novel idea: they would leave the ivory towers of upper class life and interact directly with the People, bringing them the fruits of Western thought, an education in social values, and hope for a better future.
There were some minor obstacles. Some of the most passionate advocates realized that their Russian was a bit rusty, if it existed at all. And they didn't actually know much about peasant life, since they'd only ever seen it a distance. But any obstacle can be overcome with a little bit of research, so the growing movement of Narodniks (from the word narod, meaning "People") hit the books to prep themselves for their noble journey. Armed with academic rigor and high ideals, they went out to meet the People.
...
I want you to imagine this for a moment.
Picture a small rural village, sunk in poverty, eeking out a meagre living on crops. Suddenly a city-dweller appears, speaking a barely-comprehensible version of the language, wearing "traditional" clothes that have been out of date for decades, waving around books and promising the overthrow of the tsar who'd only recently granted their indepedence.
It didn't go over well.
The wikipedia articlecondenses the extreme awkwardness in a few painful lines:
On arriving into some villages dressed appropriately and singing and dancing what they had studied, Narodniks were viewed with suspicion by many of those Russian peasants who were completely removed from the more modernized culture of the urban sphere, and believed to be witches; many Narodniks were hounded by vigilante groups, and often maimed with farm utensils or put through frenzied trials and burned at the stake.
...
I suppose it's easy to make fun of the "Going to the People" movement in retrospect, although their hearts were in the right place. And, to their credit, those who weren't maimed or killed scored a few minor successes: an occasional uprising that lead to violent repression by the tsar and sped the births of revolutionary movements. The focus of these revolutionary movements on Populism was also a direct result of Narodnik foundations.
But that doesn't mean we can't savor the strange mix of humor and sadness that the event elicits, which is why it's perhaps appropriate that the Russian language actually has an expression for that emotion: smekh skvoz' slezy, or "laughter through tears", the complex reaction you sometimes get reading Gogol' or Chekhov.
That brings tonight's story to a close. Thanks again for letting me Cave-sit this weekend, and with that, I wish you all a good evening.