“The State and the Dominant Classes” and “Society and the People, Empire and Nation”: Redefining Russia by Redefining Service; and The Russian Mission Civilisatrice (Copy)
Essay A, Prompt B: Redefining Russia by Redefining Service
At the moment of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, a group of young, revolutionary soldiers sought to upset the very social fabric of imperial Russia with a radical discourse of constitutionalism, emancipation, and citizenship. Underlying all of these discourses, the Decembrists were particularly fired up with the question of service towards those “under the heavy yoke of tyranny.” However, about a century prior to the Decembrists, the man who came to embody the ideal Russian tsar himself, Peter the Great, came forth with his own revolutionary thinking. Ironically enough, the Petrine Revolution equally concerned itself with the question of “service” - only instead of connoting a societal destratification, the end-goal of Peter’s “service to the fatherland” directly foregrounded imperial expansionism. The shift from service of the glorious expansion of the empire to the more inclusive, domestic service of the Decembrists owes its existence to three key phenomena: the intellectual movement of nations and nationalism, the affective commitment to a negotiable “Russian” identity, and the inclusion of the peasantry into the powerful notion of a Russian nation.
At a fundamental level, the service that Tsar Peter spoke of cannot be separated from the framework of an expansionist, imperial mode of governance. When Peter bemoaned his son Alexei for being a “amphibious creature” who “will do nothing,” he was hardly questioning his son’s commitment to philanthropy towards the lower classes. Rather, his primary concern was for Alexei to “apply [himself] to learn the art of [war].” However, Peter’s enthusiasm for military affairs cannot be understood in a vacuum; after all, 18th century Russian imperial expansion owed its success to Peter’s economic, social, and military reforms. In most of his decrees, Peter emphasizes the reforms themselves as the means to the end of war and conquest. The third imperative of the Petrine “Decrees on the Duties of the Senate” puts this point quite bluntly: “To collect as much money as possible because money is the artery of war.” Therefore, Peter’s flowery descriptions of the “labor of our faithful and affectionate children, our Russian subjects” directly concern the expansionist military ambitions of the Russian Empire.
A century later however, the Decemberists would completely redefine service through a wholly different framework: that of the republican “nation,” an intellectual project of Revolutionary France that focuses instead on social destratification. The Decembrists made no secret of the influence of Revolutionary French discourses in their own explosive ideology. Out of 15 interviews conducted with the imprisoned Decembrists after the failure of the revolt, ten mentioned or alluded to France, the Revolution, or Rousseau as the inspiration for their “liberal ideals.” As opposed to the Petrine doctrine, which could not have existed without a stratified empire at its center, the Decembrists aimed their service at a more inclusive Russian nation, in line with the French reworking of “nation” at the time. In an essay on “The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form,” William Sewell argues that “By instituting the new territorial units, the [French] revolutionaries were creating an empty, homogeneous national space...” In the same intellectual tradition, the Decembrists hoped to create that “empty, homogeneous national space” in Russia by emancipating the serfs, creating citizenship laws, and instituting equal protection under the law.
However, to portray the Decembrists’ newfound understanding of service to the Russian nation as simply an imported intellectual tradition would completely overlook its rootedness in the emotive tradition of defining “Russianness.” In fact, the discourse of defining what it meant to be “Russian” became a hot topic of the 18th century. In 1749, Michael V. Lomonosov wrote his “Challenge of the Normanist Theory,” in which he argues that the Russian people are distinctly Slav in origin. Besides being one of the earliest investigators the origins of a “Russian” identity, Lomonosov particularly lambasted the “transgressions against the Russian language” by theorists who disagreed with him. Lomonosov’s critiques would later find themselves eerily echoed by one of the Decembrists’ most important influences, Nikolai Novikov. In a strong critique of empress Catherine II, Novikov candidly states that “her whole problem is that she cannot express herself clearly in Russian.” Novikov combines his radical anti-serfdom stance with allusions to a “Russian” identity that would find itself at the core of the Decembrists’ rhetoric. While other thinkers, such as Nikolai Karamzin, would have a much more tsarist loyalist take on patriotic feeling, the Decembrists’ allusions to “the Russian people” cannot be separated from the broader discourse of negotiating and redefining what it means to be committed to “Russia.”
Lastly, a series of peasant revolts and uprisings combined with the wartime experiences of the Patriotic War of 1812 created a heightened awareness towards the cruelty of serfdom, catalysing the inclusion of the peasants as members of the Decembrists’ “Russian Nation.” The first substantive peasant revolt came about in 1773 through the fiery anti-serfdom rhetoric of Yemelyan Pugachev. Between the execution of Pugachev and the rise of the Decembrists, a series of peasant revolts flurried throughout Russia - the most likely of which to have directly inspired the Decembrists being the Chuguev Uprisising of 1819. Many Decembrists cite the “frequent rebellions of the peasants against their landlords” and seem to have been deeply moved by “the slavery of the peasants.” As for the Patriotic War of 1812, a war in which the Decembrists actively participated, the dominant narrative of Russian success at repelling Napoleon included a popular movement of peasants to help the Russian soldiers. Through both the largest mobilization of disaffected peasants and a shared wartime camaraderie, the Decembrists became acutely aware of the plight of peasants, citing a feeling of guilty conscience towards their treatment by landlords.
The Decembrists would ultimately fail in their military coup against Nicholas I, dooming their alternative definitions of “service” and “Russia.” However, as fervent romanticists, the Decembrists hoped that their ideas might endure after their passing. The powerful marriage between the notion of creating “empty, homogeneous space” and the affective mission of defining “the Russian people” came to inspire many of their intellectual successors throughout the 19th and 20th century. The inclusion of peasants in the Decembrists’ patriotic discourses also influenced the later movements that directly opposed serfdom as a mode of rule. Ultimately, the Decembrists and their redefinition of service did leave a legacy - and perhaps in that sense, the Decembrists did not fail after all.
Bibliography
Alexeyevich, Peter. “Peter’s Declaration to Alexei, 1715.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
“Decrees on the Duties of the Senate.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
“Excerpts of Individual Testimonies.” In The Decembrist Movement, edited by Marc Raeff. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Karamzin, Nikolai M. “N.M Karamzin’s View on Love of One’s Country and National Pride, 1802”. In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
Kivelson, Valerie. “Decembrists: The Birth of Russian Opposition?” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, February 2019.
Kivelson, Valerie. “The Reign of Catherine the Great” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, January 2019.
Lomonosov, Michael V. “Lomonosov’s Challenge of the Normanist Theory, 1749.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
Muraview, Nikita M. “Project for a Constitution by Nikita M. Muraview: Second Draft.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
Novikov, Nikolai I. “N.I Novikov’s Polemic with Catherine II, 1769.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
Sewell, William Jr. The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form.
Essay B Prompt A: The Russian Mission Civilisatrice
In an ode to empress Catherine the Great’s expansion into the Crimea, Russian poet Vasily Petrov writes: “The Moldovian, the Armenian / The Indian or the Greek / or the Black Ethiopian / Whatever the sky under which someone was born / Catherine is a mother to everyone.” However, as harmoniously as Petrov describes the relationship between the “mother” and her unfortunate children, a look at Russian rule over minority groups in the 18th century paints a far less uniform, and less romantic, picture. In order to justify its rule over its decidedly “uncivilized” non-Orthodox subjects, the Petrine discourse of advancement and reform came to place Russia at the top of a continuum of “civilization.” Through a modus operandi that included institutional cooptation, conversion and Russification campaigns, and forced nomadic settlement, the Russian Empire maintained its position as the vast, glorious imperial “mother” guiding its children to “civilization” through conquest.
Imperial Russia sought to incorporate elites and institutions of non-Orthodox minorities often as a first recourse of policy, a self-serving move towards representing Russia as a glorious, rich empire. By incorporating and reforming pre-existing religious institutions, the Russian autocracy hoped to not only create an inroad into supervision of minority groups, but also to represent the empire as a tolerant and vibrant garden of coexisting peoples. Catherine the Great’s conquest of Crimea illustrates both the success of this mechanism and the popularity of its representation as a “garden.” Under Catherine, Muslim minority groups in the Crimea faced a completely unprecedented institutional hierarchy, with higher-up imams and ulema enrolled as salaried officials of the Russian state. The resulting “churchlike organization among a population that had previously known no such institutions” seemed to have been welcomed, with many Muslims acknowledging the regime “as a potential instrument of God’s will.” By balancing out a certain degree of autonomy for the Muslim minority in Crimea with supervision and subordination to the state, the Russian Empire maintained its superiority while simultaneously projecting an image of benevolence. Catherine portrayed the annexed Crimea as a “aggregate of foreign varieties,” a Garden of Eden to add to the glory of her Russian empire. While the Muslims of the Crimea remained decidedly subordinate to “civilized” Russia, they became a central part of Catherine’s imperial trope of “diversity justifying conquest.”
However, if “Russia” and “Orthodoxy” remain at the peak of the “civilization continuum,” then conversion to Orthodoxy and “Russification” could provide minority groups a limited upward mobility through the “civilization continuum.” Though forced conversions typically did not factor into 18th century Russian imperial policies, in part because of the influence of Enlightenment attitudes towards conversion on Peter and Catherine, there are notable exceptions to this rule. Unlike the Muslim and animist pagan minority groups, the Old Believers and Uniates who left the Orthodox Church could not be seen as merely “ignorant barbarians.” Because they willingly left the fold of Orthodoxy, their loyalty to Russia and the empire had to be secured through a mass conversion campaign. However, the more common method of conversion to Orthodoxy through the 18th century seemed to have been a more accommodating, incentive-based system. In the example of the Kamchadal Natives in the North Pacific, the framework of understanding non-Orthodox peoples as “ignorant barbarians” returns. Missionaries were sent to allow the Kamchadals to “hear the Word of God and to convert them and enable them to understand Christian morality.” Not only did the senate promise financial rewards for baptized Kamchadals, but officers were sent to the North Pacific to pacify native concerns of exploitation by Russian fur collectors. In both of these conversion stories, the empire allowed minority groups to move up the “civilization continuum;” the Old Believers and Uniates from heretic apostates to acceptable subjects, and the Kamchadals from “ignorant barbarians” to the recipients of “generosity from Her Imperial Majesty.”
Perhaps the darkest chapter of the Russian “civilization” continuum places nomadic minorities as inextricably linked to backwardness, creating devastating campaigns of forced settlement. In an essay on “Strategies of Civilizing Non-Russian Subjects in the Eighteenth Century,” Ricarda Vulpius argues for removing major distinctions between the policies of European “civilizing” colonial projects and 18th century imperial Russia. Vulpius uses the example of the Kazakh minority, a group deemed “barbaric” by the commander in chief of the Siberian front for its nomadic way of life. To gradually shift the Kazakhs closer to “civilization,” the empire utilized a combination of building houses for nomads and eliminating their grazing grounds as settlement incentives. Needless to say, the policy disastrously failed, only creating further poverty among the Kazakhs who resorted to selling both their cattle and their children to provide subsistence needs. A look at these horrific policies indicates that while the Petrine revolution inspired a need for greater progress and reform for all of Russia, some minority groups were simply deemed more “backwards,” and thus more in need of “progress,” than others.
All three methods of cooptation, conversion, and forced settlement showcase a new Russia of the 18th century, one not merely defined just by Orthodoxy as a faith, but by “civilization” as a moral standard and end-goal. As Peter decidedly shifted to a Russia defined by European conceptions of progress, the empire came to define its relationship to its minority groups in increasingly European colonial terms. The Russian Empire became a benevolent mother to its backwards subjects, ushering them closer to the fruits of civilization and disciplining them when they go astray. In that way, Catherine’s rhetoric of a “diverse empire” became a rhetoric of self-perpetuating conquest and exploitation. By representing conquest as benevolent bestowment of “civilization,” Russia justified and perpetuated its claims to more and more territories.
Bibliography
Crews, Robert D. For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and the Empire in Russia and Central Asia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Ronald Suny and Valerie Kivelson. Russia’s Empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
“A Decree from the Senate Appointing Missionaries to Kamchatka to Convert the Kamchadal Natives to Orthodox Christianity, 1742.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
“A Decree from the Senate Sending an Infantry Colonel and Other Officers to Siberia to Investigate Abuses and Mistreatment of Natives by Russian Iasak Collectors, 1745.” In Imperial Russia: A Source Book 1700-1917, edited by Basil Dmytryshyn. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1990.
Schönle, Andreas. “Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea.” Slavic Review 60, no. 1, 2001.
Vulpius, Ricarda. “Strategies of Civilizing Non-Russian Subjects in the Eighteenth Century.” 2016.
