Grand Prince Vladimir (r. 980–1015) faced an exceptional choice in the 980s, according to the Primary Chronicle, the most fundamental source for the history of Kievan Rus. Representatives of four great monotheistic religions – Islam, Judaism, Roman Christianity and the Christianity of Byzantium – came singly to his court to ask for a hearing. In this ‘Investigation of the Faiths’, Vladimir listened and pondered the virtues of each. He was drawn to the idea of a single God who would be worshipped by all his subjects, rather than the plethora of gods and spirits which currently provided the religious life of the Rus lands, because this might bring all his people together and legitimize his own single-person rule. Embracing God, not the gods, was a turn towards the future.
Christianity seemed to have advantages rather than drawbacks. Islam’s prohibition on alcohol was unappealing. The fact that the God of the Jews had not given his people their own land was unpromising. By contrast, Vladimir’s grandmother had been a Christian, and a Christian church had been at work in Kiev for half a century. And geopolitics held out a trump card. By the end of the first millennium AD, Kievan Rus looked south, towards Byzantium, for cultural resources, commercial advantages and political friendship. Newly baptized, and Christianizing his people en masse, Vladimir sent an army of 6,000 men to relieve Basil II, emperor of Byzantium, who was under strain following an uprising in the Balkans by the Bulgars. In return for Vladimir’s support, Basil offered his sister’s hand in marriage. Strengthened by his Christianizing programme and his powerful ties to Byzantium, Vladimir consolidated the rule of the Riurikid dynasty over Rus, assuring the status of Kiev.1
In November 2016, 1,001 years after Vladimir’s death, President Putin and Patriarch Kirill unveiled a statue to the grand prince a short distance from the Moscow Kremlin. Putin praised Vladimir as a great unifying figure. He drew attention in particular to his introduction of the Christian faith. ‘This choice,’ Putin declared, ‘was the common spiritual source for the peoples of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, laying valuable foundations which define our life, right to the present.’2 The unveiling took place on 4 November, itself a symbolic date, which marks the anniversary of the expulsion of Polish forces from Moscow in 1612. This had become a public holiday, the Day of National Unity, in 2005. (Here ‘national’ comes from the word narod, which could also be translated as ‘people’s’, so the idea is more cultural than geopolitical.) The public holiday is more happenstance than the consequence of a nationalist agenda. It emerged as a convenient way of resolving a banal dilemma: how to cancel the celebrations that anachronistically marked the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution without dispensing with a popular day off in early November.
The statue was controversial. Ukraine’s government claimed that Russia was expropriating a great Ukrainian hero; a similar and much more venerable statue stands in Kiev. Even the formulation of the name could sound like cultural appropriation; in Ukrainian, ‘Vladimir’ is ‘Volodymyr’, though the grand prince in question ruled a sovereign territory that was neither Ukraine nor Russia, and the name in the Primary Chronicle is ‘Volodimer’. Western commentators wondered what to make of this latest gesture of braggadocious nationalism, as many of them saw it. Muscovites were unsure of the monument’s aesthetics. Local residents had successfully petitioned for the statue not to be erected in the city’s Sparrow Hills.
However one might disentangle the symbols and the politics, it seemed clear that the Russian government was making its own use of a millennium of history, explicitly drawing a 1,000-year line between Kievan Rus and the Russian Federation.3 Talking about the long-range connections between Russia’s past and present is an understandable political strategy at a time of national and international uncertainty. Governments in other countries do the same (think of today’s politicians’ grand statements about Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the Founding Fathers). But it’s also a strategy that outsiders have used many times to make Russia seem a uniquely dangerous and repressive place.
The myth of Russia’s special, undeviating path to misery is at the heart of the Russia Anxiety. Misread from historiography and repeated endlessly by journalists and foreign statesmen, and agonized over by Russians themselves, it has shaped understanding of the Russian past more than anything else. ‘Strains of xenophobic paranoia and a gravitation to autocracy are embedded into the [Russian] cultural DNA in a way that long predates the twentieth century,’ tweets a journalist in New York City with 127,000 Twitter followers, as the Russia Anxiety grew during the Trump election campaign. ‘It’s incredible,’ tweets back a writer in Ontario followed by less than 1 per cent of that, ‘what the media can say about Russians that would be quickly denounced if you used a different group.’4
This is Russia’s black legend, the idea that centuries of oppression have created a servile population forever fated to be hoodwinked by a tyrant. It’s the historical mood music of the Russia Anxiety.5 The purpose of this chapter is to describe the legend and to offer other ways of understanding Russian history, closer to the facts and more promising for the future.
‘Russia lives in history – and history lives in Russia,’6 wrote Time magazine when it announced Putin as its Person of the Year in 2007. ‘Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear,’ wrote Tibor Szamuely, casting the same idea in a more pessimistic light, ‘heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past.’7 History is always alive in contemporary Russia, just as it is in much of the Middle East as well as other parts of Eastern Europe. In luckier places, history has been tamed and housebroken, confined to ruined castles, books of photographs and days of remembrance. But in those societies where the whole future – the borders of the country, the national way of life, the entire way of doing politics – is permanently up for grabs, history is a living actor.
Sit round a family’s kitchen table in Russia, and at the moment when the conversation turns to politics, history will pull up a chair. And history will contribute not just decorative precedents, loosely parallel personalities or killer factoids. It will invoke whole structures of historical time, in which a millennium of Russia’s past makes possible a democratic future or foreshadows inevitable dictatorship. Using and abusing the deep past in everyday political discussion is embedded in Russian culture.
A few distinguished scholars have written convincing millennium-long histories of Russia that make a structure of the Russian past.8 Such historians point to long-range continuities, and some of them are pessimists, but it is only by caricaturing their work that it can be turned into the black legend. Instead, they often emphasize a particular variable as the key to Russia’s development. It might be the ‘strong leader’, or religion, or the relationship between nation and empire, or property relations, or patron–client ties, or the exploitation of the periphery by the centre. In an earlier age of historiography, especially as practised by Soviet historians, it could even be class. This way of doing Russian history has made centuries of history look comprehensible, but it comes at a cost. History is made up of layers and is prone to interruption and sudden change, so the structural, big-picture approach must show the variable at stake following false starts and hitting dead ends as well as travelling down a broad highway of historical development. Only by doing that can the historian who links present to past convincingly show an obvious truth: that the Russian present is a complicated place that can give rise to different futures.
Russia’s black legend, by contrast, does not do this. It’s certainly clever. Many of its details are accurate. But ultimately it’s based on a blunt understanding of historical change. It pulls off a brilliant rhetorical trick, but its overall argument is misleading.
Here it goes. Geography is the black legend’s starting point. The harsh climate of the central Eurasian landmass, with its long, freezing winters, means that the Russian lands have always had a short growing season, sometimes half the length of Western Europe’s. Fields can be rotated less frequently, diminishing their fertility. But Russia is unlucky too in its rainfall: it rains the most where the soil is worst. The good-quality black earth soil can’t yield its potential. Harvests, as a consequence, are low. Unable to scratch much more than a subsistence living, peasants were averse to risk. They spent the long winters cooped up with their animals, breathing in too much carbon monoxide from the stoves in their wooden houses. As a result, they became passive, failing to develop and innovate. They were almost congenitally backward. Peasants relied on each other, through bonds of mutual responsibility, and while their collective identity was strong, they had little sense of individual personhood, or so the legend claims.
Nevertheless, some of them had enough initiative to seek out the open route to a better life in the south and east. In order to maintain production levels, extract taxes and recruit enough soldiers, the sovereign found such mobility intolerable. Peasants had to be prevented from moving on. They had to be tied to the land. This was the basis of serfdom.
With or without serfdom, the very small agricultural surpluses inhibited urban growth. Production of finished goods was low, and the country relied excessively on raw materials and natural resources, in the first instance fur. The problem of weak urban development was worsened by geographical isolation, insufficient waterways and poor roads, all of which suffered when the snow and ice melted in the spring. Poor communication links reduced access to trade.
Towns lacked an independent spirit. By international standards, there wasn’t much of a bourgeoisie: a class which owned capital, drove forward trade, turned professional, gained qualifications and administered public offices effectively. The nobility was also weak, because property law was tilted dramatically in favour of the sovereign. In fact, law was a misnomer, as the sovereign’s authority was unlimited. He owned everything inside his realm, and his subjects were de facto (and sometimes de jure) slaves. Officials who administered central government and the provinces quickly resorted to corruption. The term to describe this system is patrimonialism.Over several centuries, the black legend goes on, the system of Russian oppression was extended in all directions, as Muscovy and then the Russian Empire grew at extraordinary speed. Eventually, the empire reached the Pacific Ocean. In this system of power, ethnic Russians were colonized – exploited – as much as other ethnicities. Meanwhile, the long borders that resulted were difficult to defend, generating all kinds of geopolitical challenges. The eastern, southern and western borderlands were all zones of suspicion and threat. Foreigners routinely insisted that Russia was a menace to its neighbours.
As a result, a willingness to sacrifice the people for the good of the sovereign has been the common thread that’s run through Russian political life. This contention is perhaps the core of the black legend. Ivan the Terrible exemplified Muscovy, Peter the Great defined imperial Russia, Stalin was the ultimate truth of the Soviet Union, and Putin was the only reality of post-Soviet Russia. They were all variations on the same principles and practices of total sovereign power.
In these circumstances, opposition has been difficult. The archetypal opposition movement emerged in the nineteenth century. This was the intelligentsia. Frustrated by its stunted professional chances, and angered by its exclusion from the political nation, it turned against the autocracy. Obsessed with German philosophy, it explained the world in abstracts that were a poor match for Russian conditions and had no organic connection to the reality of the people who lived there. Violent, black-and-white radicalism resulted. It led naturally to the Bolshevik Revolution. Meanwhile, the characteristics of the Russian political tradition – patrimonialism, corruption, the cult of a leader, repression, censorship, the absence of rights and civil society – transmitted themselves across the revolutionary divides of 1917 and 1991.
This is the black legend of Russian history. It is not a straw man, but a clever and coherent explanation. Not all of it is wrong. The relationship between ecology and society, for instance, contains important truths. Some of the legend’s insights have animated the best of historical writing. Taken whole and uncritically, however, it generates a dark reading of Russian society that has little explanatory power.
There’s a better way of understanding Russian history. For a start, we might reflect on the layers that construct it, which give it variety and energy. The Russian past should be thought of as a cake, not a legend.
Imagine an old-fashioned English cake, a sponge with a vanilla centre, topped with pink icing. However much you look at the cake from above, deconstructing the swirls of icing, and sampling occasional bits of pink, there is no way that the bird’s eye view will give you a sense of what the whole cake is all about. To get that, you have to cut a slice, look at the layers, reflect on how they ooze into each other, and then take a bite from the bottom to the top.
Russian history, like this cake, is a layered confection. You will not get very far towards understanding its complexity by only gazing down on it from above. Although the black legend has plenty to say about different groups in Russian society, ultimately it’s a story of top-down power, concerned with the sovereign’s repression of his people, his ‘paranoia’ and his international ambition. The legend squashes the cake out of all recognition.
One way to understand what is right and wrong about Russia’s black legend, then, is to look at the layers beneath. We might illustrate the point with three of them: serfdom, the Orthodox Church and the intelligentsia, all of which have given grist to the mill of the legend in one way or another. Yet these three examples – one could offer many more – show that Russian power has been much more interactive and dispersed than the legend suggests, creating space for individuality and unpredictability.
Early in 1847, the future novelist Ivan Turgenev published one of his first literary works, the short story ‘Khor and Kalinich’. Turgenev had already travelled abroad to complete his education, and was starting to know Western Europe well. But he was also deeply and instinctively in tune with the countryside and the people of Oryol Province, where he had grown up on his mother’s estate. For him, the world of serfdom was instantly clear. It was reprehensible, for sure, but it was also varied, complex and not simply an expression of the tsar’s power.
In this story, Khor’s house had burned down fifteen years earlier. It was usual in those circumstances for the serfs in a village community to bind together to help the victim. Their economy of mutual responsibility demanded this: the village as a whole shared certain financial obligations, which meant that it was in the interest of everyone to help a neighbour who had fallen on hard times. But Khor made an offer to the noble who owned him, Polutykin. I will pay you whatever rent you choose if you let me build a house out in the marshland. Why not? Polutykin agreed. A clever individualist, Khor became rich, paying more in rent as the years went on. Polutykin was a reasonable man. He told Khor to buy his freedom: he would be able to afford it many times over. But Khor protested that he lacked the means. He was being wily: it was obviously in his interest to remain where he was. Serfdom seemed to facilitate his autonomy and even to reduce his obligations. In Khor’s world, the Russian autocracy was built on far more compromises than anyone could readily describe. Out in the backwoods and the marshland, the arm of repression could be feeble. Serfdom was plainly a flexible instrument with diverse effects. It created multiple realities. ‘A Russian is so sure of his strength and robustness that he is not averse to overtaxing himself,’ wrote Turgenev’s narrator. ‘He is little concerned with his past and looks boldly towards the future.’9
Yet by the time that Turgenev was writing, many people in Russia’s educated and even noble society had become opposed to serfdom as an offence against human dignity. The history of serfdom makes it clear why this should be the case. Serfdom was imposed from above, mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it endured until 1861. It did not just exist from time immemorial. Instead, it was a result of political and legal decisions, not of a culture of passivity by the peasants or unlimited ownership by the tsar.
Muscovy’s rulers needed a stable workforce, not one that was mobile, ready to up sticks and seek out a new chance, if the productivity and tax potential of the peasantry were to be maximized. One answer was to turn peasants into slaves. Not serfs, but slaves. This cruel institution had existed for centuries. By its nature, it was exploitative; it was unfree labour, the selling of one person to become the property of another. But Russian slavery was unusual. It did not follow military conquest, and it was not usually the subordination of one ethnic group to another. On the contrary: many Russians willingly sold themselves into slavery. At times of emergency – famine and war, or as a result solely of personal misfortune – it was a way of guaranteeing one’s basic survival. The initial transaction, at least, was contractual, though scarcely a deal between equals. The usual type of Russian slavery was for a fixed term of one year. A desperate peasant would take out a loan from a landowner, offering labour instead of paying interest. Should he default on the principal, which was sometimes as little as one ruble, the term was extended to life, and could be hereditary. By 1550, between 5 and 15 per cent of the population were slaves, and a government office existed to deal with this aspect of Muscovite society. For government, it had a plus side: it kept peasants working in a given locality. But slavery was inefficient. Slaves could not be taxed. A law of 1597 allowed them to be freed when their owner (formally speaking, the creditor) died. But freed slaves often struggled to adapt. They quickly reverted to slavery, and were once again peasants from whom the state could not extract revenue.10 To repeat: this was the institution of slavery, not serfdom.
The existence of slavery in Russia seems to go with the flow of the black legend of Russian history. Slaves willingly gave up whatever rights they might have had before. Many must have suffered beneath the Muscovite ‘power vertical’. But this system lacked the dehumanizing and disorienting forced movement of the transatlantic slave trade, the expatriate fortunes that resulted from it, and the violent racism which was its hallmark. Russian slavery, moreover, was phased out and then abolished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it had slowly been turning into an anachronism since the fifteenth century. The tsars preferred serfdom, though it took until 1724 for Peter the Great to change the status of all remaining household slaves into serfs.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, an idiosyncratic rule was introduced: that peasants who worked monastery lands were only allowed to move on and find residence elsewhere once a year, on St George’s Day. In the law code (the Muscovite-era term is Sudebnik) of 1497, the mobility of all peasants was constrained in exactly the same way. The point was to keep them in one place, working as part of functional and effective village communes, which collectively contributed to the state budget. But within a century, this safety valve had been turned off. In the 1580s and 1590s, peasants were denied the right even to move on St George’s Day. Boris Godunov, as regent then tsar (1598–1605), was set on recovering the capacity of the state after the chaos that Ivan the Terrible had brought to the rural economy. But he also reduced the penalties for fleeing from one’s owner. If a fugitive serf was not recaptured within five years, he was legally free. Why? The Muscovite territories to east and south were expanding and were too empty of Russian peasants to be economically productive. The statute of limitations allowed a minimum of labour mobility to cultivate this land.11 These different laws were consolidated in 1649, with the approval of a major new law code (the Ulozhenie). But for all its awfulness, serfdom was varied and complex in ways that the black legend doesn’t explain.
The legal scope for serfs to exercise any control over their own lives, or to extend protection to their family, was minimal.12 Still, not all peasants were serfs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, state peasants had a different status, though their lives were often similar. They still faced limits on residence and mobility, and worked with their fellow villagers in a system of collective responsibility. And there were some peasants who had more rights, notably special categories of settlers: the military settlers, and those from outside, including Germans and Mennonites.13 The life of Turgenev’s Khor suggests that serfdom was built on compromises and concessions as well as on repression. Despite the legalities, there were serfs, like Khor, whose lives resembled those of prosperous smallholders. Others were educated and trained, in estate management, say, or in music or acting, and seemed indistinguishable from free men or women.14 However improbable it seems, there were also serfs who became major business magnates, leading wealthy lives and controlling millions of rubles. But they were still the property of their owner, their formal rights over their own commercial enterprise were very insecure, and their success depended on the progressive attitude of the noble family in charge of them. The Sheremetyev family, spectacularly rich and managing in turn a network of many thousands of their own serfs, were such a family.15 Meanwhile, traditional peasant culture disregarded aspects of the law, making an entirely different set of assumptions about ownership of land and resources. Many peasants led their lives wilfully, according to their own customs and mentalities, their communities seeking to avoid the arm of the state.
Perhaps the variety of serfs’ lives only exposed the indignity and growing inefficiency of an awful institution. By the nineteenth century, serfdom was failing to match the needs of an industrializing economy or a modern conscription system, and it was partly blamed for the defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, soon after which it was abolished. But emancipation came in 1861 for two reasons. First, Alexander II was convinced of the moral case for change. Second, he could implement it in practice because of the progressive administrative work that had already been undertaken by some leading bureaucrats during the reign of Nicholas I, a time which is often seen as merely dark and reactionary.
All of this – the way that serfdom was introduced, the varied forms it took, the process of emancipation – reveal the layered quality of Russian history. This is the antithesis of the black legend. Carefully studied, even serfdom offers correctives and precedents that should reduce the Russia Anxiety. We can say the same about Russian Orthodoxy.
The legend goes like this: the state triumphed over the Orthodox Church, and for centuries thereafter religion has lacked spiritual coherence and practical effectiveness, with little ability to hold power in check. After introducing the great law code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, Tsar Alexis turned his attention to the febrile spiritual atmosphere abroad in his realm, with the help of a six-and-a-half-foot Volga-region monk called Nikon. Having gained Alexis’s ear, Nikon promised to achieve religious harmony and uniformity across Muscovy, and soon became patriarch. He edited a new psalter in October 1652 and new books for services three years later, revised the words of the Lord’s prayer, and changed the way that worshippers made the sign of the cross, with three fingers rather than two. The reforms caused great unease and generated resistance. For example, when they crossed themselves with the traditional two fingers, believers were calling out to God and Jesus; three fingers, by contrast, were symbolic of the Trinity, and that seemed more Roman than Muscovite, an affront to Orthodoxy and a needless concession to Catholicism. A priest called Avvakum, who came from the remote north, became the centre of opposition. His traditional and even fundamentalist followers were persecuted. Some of them were rounded up and burned to death. Others were excluded en masse from the Orthodox Church. Fleeing to the interior, they became known as Old Believers, and practised Orthodoxy in the way they were convinced was right. Their leaders, though, were exiled to the Arctic coast and jailed. Avvakum was comparatively lucky; the authorities cut out the tongues of two of his co-conspirators.
Nikon’s triumph was an empty one. Tsar Alexis took the chance to tighten control over Nikon’s Church, to end old talk of patriarch and tsar enjoying equal authority over Muscovy. Having overplayed his hand, Nikon was exiled. Alexis turned increasingly towards Western influences and celebrations of secular power. The process was taken to its logical conclusion by Peter the Great in 1721, when the office of patriarch, and the supreme Church council, or sobor, were eliminated. Any semblance of religious autonomy was apparently ended. The Orthodox Church was now administered by a government office, the Holy Synod.16
But the Old Belief fought back. It became a layer of Russian life – an alternative authority, a centre of civil society. Under the leadership of Nikolai Dobrynin, Old Believers took part in a major uprising in Moscow in 1682. Later, they became more respectable. In the nineteenth century, the Old Belief possessed a major presence in public and commercial life. Clustering in the Zamoskvorechye district – the area ‘beyond the Moscow river’, across from the Kremlin – were entrepreneurial families of the Old Belief, such as the fabulously wealthy Morozovs, who had made their money in the textile business in Moscow Region.
Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church itself was not a mere government department. It continued to direct the spiritual affairs of the nation, and played a significant part in the last decades of tsarist power. True, in April 1905, when he was under great pressure from revolutionaries, Nicholas II declared his Manifesto on Freedom of Conscience, which for the first time gave an easy green light for apostates to leave the Church. In these fluid times, some priests saw a chance, asserting themselves by campaigning for the calling of a council. There had been no such gathering since before Peter’s reforms.17 It eventually took place in the revolutionary year of 1917, when it elected the first patriarch for two centuries, Tikhon, who would face the Bolsheviks’ brutal campaign for atheism.18
Orthodoxy therefore took part in the political contests of the early twentieth century, though it had to fight for attention. In the heartlands, it remained at the centre of people’s lives. From the great social realist painters of the nineteenth century, with their eye for a useless, drunken priest, to the historians of the Soviet Union, with their Marxist agenda, the coherence and significance of Orthodoxy has been understated by observers. The religion of the peasants has often been described as a ‘dual belief’, part-pagan, part-Christian. Already hinting that official Russian Orthodoxy was a fake version of Christianity, in a way that they would not think of, say, the Church of England, some Western commentators claimed that these everyday religious practices were hardly Christian at all, with the Scriptures and the saints a veneer over longer-standing rituals and simple fatalism. But Orthodoxy, far more than any other source of knowledge, left its mark on the peasant mentality, whose traditional beliefs were reconciled to the demands of Christian faith.19
Orthodoxy, meanwhile, is not the only religion in the Russian lands. Other versions of Christianity played an important part in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Some were inflected by Roman Catholicism, such as the Uniate Church, especially important in Ukraine, and others by Protestant beliefs and practices.20 Islam has been a crucial feature of Russian civilization since the Mongol invasions. Buddhism is historically one of Russia’s major faiths. Many other forms of spirituality have proliferated among the ‘small peoples of the north’ and in Siberia. In the most difficult circumstances, religion has given many Russians the ability to endure. It has also provided them with ways of understanding secular power, accommodating themselves to it and even standing up to it. The sheer variety of Orthodox experience is another layer of the Russian past that the black legend cannot process or describe. And then there’s the intelligentsia.
Yuri Trifonov spent eight or nine days of March 1955 in Nebit-Dag, the largest city in the west of Turkmenistan. Trifonov was still enjoying the success of his first novel, The Students, which had been published in 1950 and for which he had won a Stalin Prize. He had come to Nebit-Dag to visit the literary critic Tsetsilya (Cecily) Kin. She had spent eight years in the Gulag, the wife of an enemy of the people, and had ended up, by a roundabout route, living in Nebit-Dag. They stayed in her cramped accommodation. He told her all the big political and literary news from the capital. She talked to him about the poet Pasternak, and Trifonov recited his poems from memory. Later, their conversation ranged more widely. ‘We did not hide our heads under our wings,’ she said. There was no point in being coy. This was two years after Stalin’s death, and they had a common history of unhappiness. She had been in the Gulag. Trifonov’s father had been shot and his mother had been arrested when he was a child.
These scenes – reciting Pasternak spontaneously, the talk of life and death, the mood hovering between anguish and joy, the life of exile, in a room far away – look like the Russian intelligentsia at sharpest focus. As such, the picture seems a bit too familiar. Cynics will point out that the Russian intelligentsia has always been capable of vanity and snobbishness not less than long, unselfish exchanges of the highest intellectual standards. But these moments in Nebit-Dag, in the uncertain time between the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev’s condemnation of him in the Secret Speech of 1956, were fretful ones, and the conversation was no doubt an honest attempt to come to terms with events. The exchange also reflected the ethics of the intelligentsia. ‘Our pains, misfortunes and grievances were not simply and not only our own,’ Cecily said. ‘Our personal fates were like grains of sand. Our personal tragedies were the pain and tragedy of the motherland.’ What is the motherland? It ‘isn’t the landscape, not the silver birches, not the cornflowers in the rye’. Instead, ‘it is the victory over fascism. It is the immortal tragedies of the Russian novel, of great Russian poetry.’21
Cecily Kin’s words capture part of the mission of the Russian intelligentsia: to show how the lives of individuals can represent the experiences of society as a whole, to make the case that the collective achievements of the people belong to the people and not to the state, and, therefore, to hold power to account. The Russian intelligentsia historically exists apart from the state. It is in another layer. The black legend might respect the achievements of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, and it might admire the manners of intelligentsia types and the quality of their conversation, but it sees them as prone to extremes, quick to exaggerated emotions, possessed of a fake morality, attracted by violence, naturals for Bolshevism.
In other words, the legend turns the intelligentsia into another act in the long history of repression by the Russian state. Yet the political record of the Russian intelligentsia veered to moderation as much as extremism; it generated liberalism as well as Bolshevism. And the fact that Bolshevism won was a matter of chance.
The origins of the Russian intelligentsia have been traced to the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century,22 but it recognizably emerged during the reign of Nicholas I, when poets, writers and critics such as Pushkin and Herzen were writing for the new literary journals and exchanging ideas in salons and ‘circles’ of the like-minded (kruzhki). There were not many of them; but they made an historic splash. Some of these men were nobles, and the literary salons that they attended in St Petersburg or provincial outposts were often run by high-born women. But many among the intelligentsia had little class or estate affiliation, and little loyalty to the state; they were ‘people of various ranks’, who sometimes had a university education, were always engaged in the world of ideas, but lived in a society that seemed neither to respect nor need their accomplishments. Nicolaevan Russia had plenty of bureaucrats, but it lacked a clergy with university degrees, or ostentatiously learned lawyers for hire, or a coffee-house culture and a fairly free press. It didn’t have the obvious ways of absorbing and calming down a middle-ranking awkward squad who might think differently. Instead, lacking opportunities, those people often turned against the monarchy.
The intelligentsia spread wide and deep, oozing across social and political layers of Russian life. It was an ‘everyday’ part of society, determined by manners and culture as much as by political opposition, located in provincial towns and country estates, as well as in the capitals of the empire and their grand salons. And it also included great artists such as Chekhov and Tolstoy who worked out how to publish works of conscience that the censors did not touch.
But for much of government – not all, as the state itself contained multitudes – there was no concept of a ‘loyal opposition’ in Russia; opposition could not improve government, but was inherently disloyal. Pushkin and Herzen both spent time in exile. Turgenev had a brief spell in prison. Dostoevsky was incarcerated for longer in Siberia. They took risks to talk freely and to publish even mildly subversive works. Tasked with maintaining public decorum and loyalty, the Third Section, as Russia’s first secret police force was called, worked with the censorship authorities to reduce the public space in which the intelligentsia could operate. Perhaps this uneasy world of conflicting pressures and anxieties was a promising one in which ideas could proliferate in attractive ways.23
By definition, these ideas existed not to prop the government up, but to make it accountable. This is the real distinguishing mark of the Russian intelligentsia: sociologically and intellectually it existed as a layer outside of the state. During Nicholas’s reign, the ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ were an essential part of government, the men whose patient work designing possible reforms to the rule of law and serfdom would come to fruition twenty years later under Alexander II. Some of them had university degrees and deep interests in culture, not to mention a progressive worldview. But they worked for the state. In the later nineteenth century, some members of the intelligentsia would find careers on the edges of local government, bringing enlightenment to their provinces through the expansion of education, healthcare and welfare, the systematic study of regional life, and the protection of the environment. But in the absence of an independent judiciary, parliament or political parties (the first of these would be established in 1864, the other two in 1906) it was only books, paintings and music that could challenge central power. Working within the interstices of the censorship rules, the intelligentsia found inventive ways to do this. The black legend promotes the idea of a defunct or dangerously radical intelligentsia, but cannot explain the varied layers that this complicated group of people occupied in Russian society.
In Eastern European cultures, ‘intelligentsia’ is a wide-ranging concept, incorporating all kinds of people who have made a commitment to the life of the mind. The adjective intelligentnyi in Russian does not refer to intellectual capacity, but to a set of moral qualities. In the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia took different forms; the likes of engineers, for example, were sometimes referred to as a ‘technical intelligentsia’. A person who worked directly for the authorities, in a ministry or party organ, even though he might be entirely intelligentnyi at home in the evening, was not a member of the intelligentsia. But the state was so capacious that almost everyone worked for it in some way or benefited directly from it. Meanwhile, the organs of repression were much more violent and the networks of censorship much more highly oppressive and sophisticated than they had been under the tsars. The Soviet intelligentsia could never have been a direct continuation of its predecessor in the age of Turgenev. Understandably enough, many among the intelligentsia enjoyed the perks that came from membership of, say, the Union of Writers, and settled for a quiet life.
Yet some of the intelligentsia still sought to hold power to account. After Stalin’s death, in the Khrushchev-era ‘Thaw’ and later, their chances to do this increased. Risk-taking editors like Alexander Tvardovsky at Novyi Mir (New World), a progressive journal, found such authors as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and published them. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962, apparently after being personally approved by Khrushchev. The novel went with the grain of official de-Stalinization. But it also gave readers a way of thinking about government policy towards the Gulag and the Stalinist past, and of articulating ways of agreeing and disagreeing with that policy. After Khrushchev fell, Solzhenitsyn ended up on the wrong side of the KGB, writing in elaborate secrecy. He was thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974.
Even so, Brezhnev and his colleagues could easily accept an intelligentsia that was capable of showing, as Cecily Kin pointed out, how the sufferings of a person were the same as those of the motherland – rather than, she might have added, of the state. It prescribed severe limits in which the intelligentsia operated. But the relationship between intelligentsia and power was complicated and mutually dependent. It was even the case that semi-independent organizations that originated in the state but had some similarity to the pressure groups of civil society were founded in these years. Using such institutions as VOOPIiK, which campaigned for the preservation of historical monuments, the intelligentsia was simultaneously coopted by power and held power to account.
It was in this environment that Yuri Trifonov wrote his greatest works, a sequence of novels about the everyday dilemmas of Muscovites of the 1960s and 1970s. All of these were published. Trifonov’s works were very widely read. He was one of the big literary names of the late Soviet period. Whether showing how people responded to the housing shortage, or the pressures on the healthcare system, or the encroachment of the city on the countryside, or the need to make use of the shadow economy, he put forward an accessible vision of how one might reconcile idealism and pragmatism, mind and body in the paradoxical world of late socialism. Many (far from all) of his characters were from one or other layer of the intelligentsia. He described how their families, neighbours, friends and acquaintances related to collectives of colleagues, to the state and to the Revolution that was now decades old and which still structured everybody’s lives. This was not dissident literature. By contrast, the dissidents were a very minor branch of the intelligentsia, albeit one which had an important impact at the end of the 1980s. Their bitter opposition to dictatorship, focus on abstract ideas, fearlessness and self-evident different-thinking were much easier first for the black legend to incorporate – and then to rewrite as a fairy tale of freedom’s inevitable triumph.
But the very fact that Trifonov was not a dissident was the point. It was as the archetypal late Soviet intelligent that Trifonov made his extraordinary contribution to Soviet literature and life. He was part of a group which knew how to make its way successfully in this society, not to reject it. He discovered a way of writing stories that power could accept, but which gave readers a way to critique power. Scholars have called the works of Trifonov and similar writers ‘permitted dissent’.24 This placed him in the long tradition of an intelligentsia that went back to Pushkin, was located in the overlapping layers of Russian history and society, but lay beyond the black legend’s line of sight.
Let us imagine a different cake. The medovík – a honey cake – is made of countless thin, fine, biscuity layers, a bit spongy and a bit crunchy, joined together with a honey mixture, the whole coated with honey-flavoured crumbs. Like this honey cake, Russian history is made up of very many layers; serfdom, Orthodoxy and the intelligentsia are only three. We could, for instance, have talked about the many layers of the state itself, whose competing interests defy the legend’s assumption that one-person rule explains everything. Or we could have analysed the different historic communities in which Russianness has been incubated: village, nation and empire. These too represent indistinct layers, melting into each other, that the black legend of Russian history cannot make sense of. But these are things we will come back to later in the book.
The historical stories that give the Russia Anxiety life come from the black legend. These stories provide historical fuel for the cycle of fear, contempt and disregard that alternate within the syndrome of the Russia Anxiety. The black legend of Russian history assumes a barely deviating, even inevitable route to misfortune for the Russian people, connecting past to present and future in an unbreakable structure. We have already seen some of the problems with the notion of inevitability in chapter 1. But to challenge the legend further, we need to establish whether contingency might have played a bigger role than destiny in the Russian past.
In a moment of what seemed like accidental honesty, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin’s prime minister for much of the 1990s, voiced an immortal Russian sentiment: ‘We wanted better, but things turned out like always.’ It was one of the most laughed-at but revealing of Yeltsin-era soundbites. The fall of the Soviet Union might have offered a fresh page on which to write a new Russian future. But instead of initiating a fair reset for the Russian people, Yeltsin and his circle sidestepped the Russian sense of social justice. Their reforms seemed to reward the most those who behaved the worst. Even so, Chernomyrdin’s phrase long retained its cachet, not least because he himself never seemed completely insincere. The first part of what we might think of as his dictum – like always – sounds as if the Russian people were on their special path. But Chernomyrdin pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union offered the chance of a different outcome: we wanted better than the post-Soviet transformation that did occur. This is a quite different way of imagining Russia’s historical development, one that conceives of new beginnings and various futures, even if the 1990s were a false start.
Russian history has plenty of what-ifs, the short moments or indeed quite extended periods when the direction of the whole political culture was under negotiation. There are even instants when the weather takes on the burden of determining the shape of future geopolitics. It might be the case that the onset of a quick thaw in March 1238 deterred the Mongols from striking at Novgorod; concerned that their horses would be bogged down in the melting ice, they paused, then turned south and west, and, in 1240, attacked Kiev instead.25 In turn, the demise of Kiev made possible the rise of Moscow. This was only the most outlandish and speculative of the extraordinary combination of circumstances that contributed to Muscovy becoming the political heartland of the late medieval and early modern Russian lands.
Contingency – the importance of events, decisions, and blind chance – complements structural change in historical explanations. The more you think about contingency, the more the grip of the black legend loosens, and the less sustainable the Russia Anxiety as a whole becomes.
Medieval Novgorod, for example, was built on a relatively participatory and responsive political culture which facilitated its status as a major trading centre. It would be eclipsed when Muscovy became the Mongols’ main point of contact, and there was nothing predetermined about that. After all, Moscow’s geographical location was more problematic than Novgorod’s: it offered only mixed economic potential and was vulnerable to invasion. And even as the Mongols diminished Kiev and Novgorod, they also placed heavy burdens on Moscow, exacerbating its weaknesses with demands of tribute. Even if Moscow was an unlikely capital for East Slavic civilization, it was strengthened and partly formed by the useful legacies that Novgorod transmitted to it. Meanwhile, the fact that Moscow was a hungry state, eager to extract ever greater payments from its population and from surrounding territories, scarcely made it unique in medieval Europe.
Social scientists call what might have happened next ‘path dependence’, suggesting that once a society finds itself on a particular road, it can be difficult to get off it. The basic assumption is that once Muscovy was in the driving seat, the future Russia was doomed. Sure, there might have been forks in the road earlier on, when there was a real chance of taking a different route – when there was a signpost in Russia’s historical development towards Novgorod, say – but as time went on, the number of forks decreased, and sheer momentum would anyway make it tricky to negotiate the turn.26
True enough, what happened in the past sets limits on what’s likely to happen in the future. But history is chaotic. Multiple futures exist at every present moment. Even British history, often perceived as taking a straight line, is marked by ruptures rather than continuities in political culture and defined by moments of decision, not least since 1914. Or take the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most unlikely events in world history. How could a small group of extreme Left radicals seize power in a country which only a few months before had been ruled by a 300-year-old dynasty? How could a Marxist clique, with an ideological agenda designed to overturn a capitalist economy, set about a socialist revolution in a largely rural society? The ultimate answer lies in the political skills of the Bolshevik leaders, rather than in the age-old inadequacy of Russian political culture, or the inevitable demise of capitalism.
In the months between February 1917, when the tsarist order fell under the weight of the massive crisis of the First World War, and October, when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, the Bolsheviks accrued a large following in major urban centres and in parts of the Imperial Army. This was no national majority, but it was a credible base of support at a time when the Provisional Government which had replaced the monarchy was no longer capable of retaining any kind of authority.
The Bolsheviks benefited from widespread sympathy for socialism in general. Their extremism flourished while politics were polarized, when law, civil society and government were being fatally undermined. But it was they who rose to power and not another socialist groupuscule – the Mensheviks, say, or the Socialist Revolutionaries – because it was their leaders who rose to the occasion. There was Lenin, with the clarity of his vision: support revolution now, and get bread, peace and land straight away. And there was Trotsky, with his rhetorical brilliance and capacity for organization. They were able to learn from mistakes, such as the false start of their failed uprising in July. And they were willing to act decisively when the next opportunity presented itself. We know from the records of the Party’s Central Committee that other decisions were possible in October 1917, but that Lenin and Trotsky led the charge to take control at the moment of maximum possibility.
Even then, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup, when the Provisional Government had already been humiliated, and the problems of waging war and recovering the economy seemed intractable, a liberal alternative future was not impossible. True, the political system was broken; anger, hatred and extremism were rife throughout the country. True, too, it was only the circumstances of a total European war that stopped the other allied powers from intervening and crushing a dangerous socialist revolution before it took hold. Germany even fomented revolution in Russia as a way to finish off the conflict on the Eastern front, not least by transporting Lenin back to Petrograd from his Swiss exile. But after they took power, the Bolsheviks looked exposed and vulnerable.
By contrast, constitutional moderates – liberals and gentler socialists – were educated in the ways of administration, familiar with running the professions, equipped to deal with their peers in other countries and capable of devising the laws that might guide the country forward. The monarchy had gone, and no one was campaigning for its return: Russian conservatism was as weak as ever (a counter-intuitive theme to which we will return). A socialist majority might well have existed in the country, but it was fragmented between competing parties. The liberals became irrelevant, but that was the consequence of the accumulation of historical tragedies and accidents between 1917 and 1920. For a time, they were an alternative.
And imagine, before that alternative was eviscerated: without Bolsheviks in power in Russia, there would have been no red menace in the East for Hitler to fulminate against, the German far Left would have lacked momentum, and the Nazis would have matched them for insignificance in a more moderate political landscape. European politics would have been less violent, and international threats much less potent: Russia could have belonged to the moderates indefinitely. To extend the counterfactual speculation, Russia in the 1920s could have become dependent on a different path and looked like a ‘normal’ European country, part of the West, supported and encouraged by Western European semi-democracies, at least as quickly as Poland, say, managed it in the 1990s. Just imagine how Russian political culture might have developed in the 1920s without the Bolshevik proclivity to extremism, suspicion and violence. Imagine if the revolution had come in 1914, preventing the Great War from breaking out, and the extremists had been destroyed by foreign intervention. The imaginary political culture that could have followed might well have been pluralistic and dedicated to the protection of secure rights for all citizens. Those ‘long centuries since the Mongols’ need not have doomed this counterfactual future to failure.
But the Bolsheviks were better at politics than the liberals. Lenin and Trotsky made the liberals irrelevant. The Bolshevik leaders possessed the nerve to override the will of the people, who voted for a broad-based, multi-party socialist future in the elections of January 1918. Instead of accepting the verdict, the Bolsheviks quickly closed down the Constituent Assembly. And they embraced the opportunism that could craft an exit from the First World War under the bemusing slogan ‘neither war nor peace’. Even then, there was no inevitability that they would win the Civil War and push forward the extremism of their vision into the rest of the twentieth century. But they plainly had the ruthlessness to do it.
Viktor Chernomyrdin was an archetype of post-Soviet life. As the country’s senior gasman, he embodied the entitled corruption which allowed a Soviet bureaucrat to cash in his connections and become a wealthy businessman and politician. Such transactions destroyed the chance for a post-Soviet settlement founded on social justice. The reasonable expectations of most of the population, who wanted to preserve the social settlement of Soviet life while discarding its limits on personal freedom and economic improvement, were dashed. But Chernomyrdin had a lack of guile that was somehow bearable. For all the misery of the early 1990s, it was still possible to possess, like Chernomyrdin, a shadow of optimism, based on the recognition that the past does not own the future, and that the next chance that comes along might be the one that turns into a lucky break. Drawing on the black legend for support, the Russia Anxiety misunderstands the flexibility of history. The Chernomyrdin Dictum, with its emphasis on the contingent and conditional, is one device for deflating the legend’s fallacies; the Speransky Conundrum, which shows the flexibility of Russia’s governing institutions, is another.
Russia’s black legend gets the structures and shapes of Russian history wrong. It can’t account for the complex layers of Russia’s past. It doesn’t take account of how contingency vies with structure in the Chernomyrdin Dictum. And where it rightly sees autocracy and dictatorship in Russian history, it fails to grasp that they make little sense if they are only viewed as top-down forces. But Mikhail Speransky, the great statesman of early nineteenth-century imperial Russia, demonstrated otherwise. We might call the problem with which he grappled the Speransky Conundrum.
If the black legend has struggled with the layers and contingencies of history, it has also misinterpreted the flexibility of autocracy and dictatorship in Russian history. Russia’s subjects and citizens have possessed rights at particular times, usually in vulnerable forms. Limited rights have facilitated aspects of a responsive political culture. This was probably even the case in Muscovy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, where subjects seem to have had a sense of belonging and participation, and were capable of making claims on the state. One distinguished historian even calls this ‘rights without freedom’, experimenting with the idea of pre-modern ‘Muscovite citizenship’.27 Assuming Russian power to be rigid, the legend has not seen its suppleness. Russian rulership has struggled with an historic puzzle, of how to incorporate forms of popular rights, however limited, into an autocratic system. No one came closer to solving the puzzle than Mikhail Speransky, Alexander I’s indispensable adviser.
Tsarist Russia had its equivalents of the fabled journey from log cabin to White House, though it didn’t embed them in an attractive master-narrative of politics. The story goes that Alexander Menshikov sold pies on the streets of Moscow as a child; he would become one of Peter the Great’s leading advisers, elevated to the status of prince. Or take the striking story of Mikhail Speransky. He was born on 1 January 1772 in a village in the province of Vladimir, east of Moscow. His father was a priest. The priesthood had some of the qualities of a closed caste, and so Mikhail set out on his father’s path. In the villages of imperial Russia, priests were poor, like the peasants to whom they ministered. At the seminary school in the town of Vladimir, Mikhail endured harsh poverty. None of that stopped him from displaying his dazzling gifts. He was sent on to complete his schooling at the Alexander Nevsky seminary in St Petersburg. Here, in Catherine the Great’s capital, he received an Enlightenment education, learning languages and reading foreign texts as well as receiving religious instruction. Unsurprisingly, his talents were spotted and he acquired a patron: Prince Alexei Kurakin. Speransky became his private secretary, which opened the door to a career in government.
At the age of twenty-six, just a few years distant from village life, Speransky was appointed a collegiate councillor. On Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, this made him the civil equivalent of a colonel. He married a young Englishwoman, the love of his life, who died after giving birth to a daughter. It was the workaholism that accompanied his lengthy grief that turned his already spectacular career into an historic one. Alexander I (1801–25) soon appointed him as his chief adviser. There were progressive influences on Alexander: his childhood tutor, his young noble friends, and his aunt. But the biggest influence on Alexander was his grandmother, Catherine the Great.28
Catherine’s reign (1762–96) offered Alexander the example of Enlightenment rulership. She aimed for rationality and order, distrusting superstition. Catherine sponsored the development of modern medicine, city planning, the arts, the care of orphans and well-organized schooling. Her reforms did not seek universal rights or the demolition of hierarchies. But they showed that Russia was becoming a modern state. For sure, actual democracy and republicanism scared Catherine rigid. The French and American Revolutions made the last years of her life uncomfortable. But the sum total of rights increased during her reign. Her Instruction (Nakaz) of 1767 was her major political declaration. It offered a prototype for increasing the size of the political nation and bending the autocracy in the direction of participation and rights. She also introduced the Charter of the Nobility in 1785. As a concession from the autocrat rather than a durable two-party contract, it was no Magna Carta, and it was vulnerable to a future sovereign’s whims (as the nobles would find out during the brief reign of Paul, between 1796 and 1801, before they murdered him). But no longer could nobles simply be placed at will in particular civil or military roles by the tsar. Instead, elements of civil society sprang up around them, with the formation of noble assemblies and boards of public welfare.29
Following his accession to the throne in 1801, Alexander called on the administrative and legal skills of Speransky to investigate and implement a redesign of Russian government. Speransky had big aspirations, but his achievements were piecemeal. This was his conundrum: how to rationalize government without infringing the status of the Tsar, and how to enhance the status of subjects without diminishing the autocracy. The reforms were unmistakably modern. Speransky established new ministries in the place of Peter the Great’s enduring administrative ‘colleges’, notably the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice. They were led by substantial and able men. Gavril Derzhavin was the country’s first minister of justice. His worldview was expansive, and he was a major poet. There was now a Committee of Ministers. In 1810, Speransky’s State Council came into being. It was designed to be a forum for debating the quality of laws, and was divided into three sections, for economic, judicial and military affairs. The aim was to offer a bird’s eye view from which legislation could better be drawn up. Meanwhile, Speransky helped to devise measures for enhancing the education of government officials. He established clearer lines of contact between ministries and provincial government: when it worked at its best, this decentralization had the potential to make central government more capable and ‘enlightened’. Speransky also explored the possibility of a parliament whose basis would not contravene the norms of autocratic government, though this was a reform too far for Alexander.30 There were faults and contradictions in all this, but the measures created a clearer and more rational administrative order than had existed during the reigns of Peter and Catherine, and provided the shape of the central administration through to the 1905 Revolution.31
In so doing, he solved his own conundrum. Speransky understood reform and revolution in Western Europe and the United States. He appreciated that Alexander’s sense of constitutionalism had vanishingly little in common with the constitutional monarchy of Britain, where institutions and conventions placed limits on the power of the sovereign, and it had nothing in common with America, where people’s entitlements were all written down, or France, where the king had recently been guillotined. By contrast, Speransky worked with the grain of Alexandrine constitutionalism. Alexander argued for constitutional reforms, but he had no intention that the constitution should place limits on his own power. What he meant was that the administration should be transparent and rational in new ways. He meant that this system should create predictable and rights-backed transactions between people and power. But he did not mean that these rights should come at the expense of the power of the sovereign. It was a dilemma in Germany, too, where the law-based rule of Frederick the Great’s Prussia a few decades earlier, and the universal suffrage of Bismarck’s unified empire a few decades later, represented the coexistence of some rights with autocratic power in a ‘well-ordered police state’.32
In rationalizing the state administration, Speransky promised to change the form of the autocracy, to prime it for the challenges of the future.33 But the idea of autocracy was not under debate, and Speransky himself did not imagine a world without it – precisely because autocracy was a political order which helped everyone. It was not the same as unlimited central power; when power had been exercised despotically in Russian history, such as during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the principles of autocracy had not been observed. So Speransky’s new Committee of Ministers and State Council were not prototypes of cabinet government, composed of independent men of power. Each minister was responsible to Alexander; they were not collectively responsible for anything. Their power was diminished too by their overlapping areas of authority and by the stubborn strength of provincial governors. But a glimpse of the rule of law was emerging out of the fog of Russia’s opaque institutions. It could co-exist with autocracy because the Tsar, so the claim went, would by his nature not make decisions that went against the interests of his people; the system dealt with bad apples like Paul I, Alexander’s father, who was murdered by a group of nobles after five years on the throne. There was nothing disingenuous about this description of autocracy. Speransky believed in the coexistence of autocracy, rational administration and law as much as Alexander did, arguing that nothing better served the Russian people. For him, it really was possible that the autocracy could be ruled by law.34
The conundrum was not resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, though. Nikolai Karamzin was the father of Russian historiography and a leading conservative voice. He was associated with the tsar’s younger sister, Catherine, who opened her salon to conservatives in her home in Tver (her husband was the province’s governor). Karamzin wrote in 1813 that ‘Russia is not England … In Russia the sovereign is the living law.’35 The tsar was the organic meeting place of past and future, of people and power, and the substance he was made of was the Russian tradition itself. Karamzin argued that Speransky’s reforms were made of something anti-traditional, artificial and even foreign. They were a bit like Napoleon’s law code, which had transmitted administrative regularity to his conquered territories. Napoleon was of course the anti-Christ, recently ejected from Russia. For Karamzin, the reforms placed a bomb under the nobility’s prospects; the seamless relationship between nobles and tsar was the guarantee of the people’s wellbeing. Turning one’s back on the Russian tradition would destroy Russia’s greatness and lead her to international irrelevance. Karamzin’s message was tactless – he was arguing that Alexander was making a mistake – and the great work in which he made the case, his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, was not published until much later.
So what about Speransky? Beset by conservative enemies, he fell out of the tsar’s favour. Alexander sidelined him, removing him from office in 1812. Speransky spent years working in provincial government, partly in Siberia, before coming back to Petersburg to take up a less powerful role in central government. When Nicholas I came to the throne in 1825, a group of noble officers known as the Decembrists rose up against him, seeking the more thorough constitutional arrangements with which Alexander had briefly flirted a quarter-century before. The coup failed, and the perpetrators were executed or exiled. From these scary beginnings to its end amid the disasters of the Crimean War, Nicholas’s reign (1825–55) is remembered as a time of conservative reaction against rational competence and enlightened hope. And yet it was also the age of Pushkin, of showy beauty and clever talk, of Russian Romanticism and the birth of the Russian intelligentsia – and it was still the age of enlightened and rational old Mikhail Speransky.
Nicholas I was responsible for one of the great legislative feats of Russian history. He owed it to Speransky, whom he brought out of premature retirement. Under Speransky’s direction, the new Second Section of the Imperial Chancellery codified Russia’s laws for the first time since Tsar Alexis had done so in 1649.36 Speransky also saw to it that a new generation of officials was properly trained and curious. Such men as Nikolai Milyutin were the ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ who designed the reforms that would be introduced, for the most part, only after their reluctant but not completely obstructive tsar had died.37 It was under his son, Alexander II, that the Great Reforms of the 1860s were brought into being. At their heart was the emancipation of the serfs of 1861. In that way did the Russian Enlightenment, and Mikhail Speransky, devise their ultimate legacy: the great 1860s, a brief coincidence of political stability and expanding rights. No wonder that the black legend of Russian history struggles to explain him.
The new statue in Moscow of Vladimir the Great, grand prince of Kievan Rus and bringer of Christianity to the East Slavic lands, symbolized the meeting place of past and present in third-term Putin’s Russia. But this symbol did not mean that contemporary Russia was locked into the fulfilment of a dark historic destiny laid down by a thousand years of history. Not only did the Russian past offer many possible futures, thanks to its complex, layered form, but the Chernomyrdin Dictum showed the unpredictable force of events and what-ifs, while the Speransky Conundrum revealed the complexity of authoritarian politics, where power flowed in various directions. Russia’s black legend is weak on analysis – and therefore strong on promoting the Russia Anxiety.
Not long before the new statue of Vladimir was built, President Putin inaugurated another monument near the Kremlin. In November 2014, he unveiled a statue of Alexander I, and invoked Speransky’s measures in his speech.38 His interest was the patriotic dimension, 200 years after Alexander’s army occupied Napoleon’s Paris. Configuring historical memory only slightly differently, Russians and foreigners can look at the statue and recall the domestic politics of Speransky, not just the wartime leadership of his tsar.
Speransky showed that Russian history is not about inevitability, or destiny, or legends. Those things offer Russians a licence to give up, and allow outsiders a free rein to fear Russia or treat Russians with contempt. Speransky’s career and the Speransky Conundrum show something else: that the past can set Russia up to succeed in ways that are entirely unpredictable. The next chapter presents a narrative of Russia’s history, from the beginning to the present, that corrects the excesses of the black legend, cutting out the fake history on which the Russia Anxiety depends.