Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II - New Abridged One-Volume Edition [Abridged] 0691123748, 9780691123745

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustration
Abbreviations
Prefatory Note
Introduction. Scenario of Power
PART ONE. The European Myth
CHAPTER ONE. Signs of Empire
CHAPTER TWO. Peter the Great
CHAPTER THREE. Olympian Scenarios
CHAPTER FOUR. The Education of Princes and the Dilemma of Neoclassicism
CHAPTER FIVE. The Emperor Paul I
CHAPTER SIX. The Angel on the Throne
CHAPTER SEVEN. Nicholas I
CHAPTER EIGHT. Epitomes of the Nation
CHAPTER NINE. Parents and Son
CHAPTER TEN. Alexander II and the Scenario of Love
CHAPTER ELEVEN. The Tsar-Emancipator
CHAPTER TWELVE. The Crisis of Autocracy
PART TWO: A National Myth
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The Making of a Russian Tsar
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. The Inauguration of a National Myth
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. The Resurrection of Muscovy
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. The Life and Death of a Russian Tsar
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Nicholas II as Heir and Husband
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. The Accession and Coronation of Nicholas II
CHAPTER NINETEEN. Demonstrations of Godliness
CHAPTER TWENTY. Nicholas II and the Revolution of 1905
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Historical Celebrations
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Nicholas II and World War I
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Index

Citation preview

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wortman, Richard. Scenarios of power : myth and ceremony in Russian monarchy from Peter the Great to the abdication of Nicholas II / Richard Wortman.— New abridged one-volume paperback ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12374-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12374-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Russia—Social life and customs—18th century. 2. Russia—Social life and customs— 19th century. 3. Russia—Court and courtiers. 4. Russia—Kings and rulers. I. Title. DK127.W67 2006 394'.4'09470903—dc22 2005021463

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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ABBREVIATIONS

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PREFATORY NOTE

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INTRODUCTION

Scenarios of Power

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PART ONE: THE EUROPEAN MYTH

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CHAPTER ONE

Signs of Empire

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CHAPTER TWO

Peter the Great

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CHAPTER THREE

Olympian Scenarios

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Education of Princes and the Dilemma of Neoclassicism

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Emperor Paul I

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CHAPTER SIX

The Angel on the Throne

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Nicholas I

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Epitomes of the Nation

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CHAPTER NINE

Parents and Son

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CHAPTER TEN

Alexander II and the Scenario of Love

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Tsar-Emancipator

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CHAPTER TWELVE

The Crisis of Autocracy

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PART TWO: A NATIONAL MYTH

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Making of a Russian Tsar

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Inauguration of a National Myth

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Resurrection of Muscovy

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Life and Death of a Russian Tsar

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nicholas II as Heir and Husband

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Accession and Coronation of Nicholas II

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Demonstrations of Godliness

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Nicholas II and the Revolution of 1905

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Historical Celebrations

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Nicholas II and World War I

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CONCLUSION

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NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

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INDEX

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1. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Portrait from Portrety, Gerby i Pechati Bol’shoi Gosudarstvennoi Knigi 1672 g. (St. Petersburg, 1903). Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. 2. Tsar Peter Alekseevich. Portrait by Gottfried Kneller, 1697. D. M. Rovinskii, Podrobnyi slovar’ russkikh graverov XVI–XIX vv (St. Petersburg, 1888). Vol. 3. Slavonic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. 3. Triumphal Entry of Russian Armies into Moscow, 1709. Engraving by Aleksei Zubov. State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 4. Pietro Baratta, Mercy. Summer Garden, St. Petersburg. 5. Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Engraving by Johannes Stenglin after drawing by Louis Caravaque. From Obstoiatel’noe opisanie . . . Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. 6. Crowning Ceremony, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Engraving by Grigorii Kalachev. From Obstoiatel’noe opisanie . . . Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. 7. Allegory of Catherine as Legislator. Brückner, Istoriia Ekateriny vtoroi. Vol. 4. 8. Monument to Peter the Great, St. Petersburg. Sculptor, EtienneMaurice Falconet. Photograph by William Brumfield. 9. Monument to Peter I. St. Petersburg. Sculptor Carlo Bartolommeo Rastrelli. Photograph by William Brumfield. 10. Copy of Dioscuri. Horse Guards Manege, St. Petersburg. Sculptor, Paolo Triscorni. 11. Dedication of the Alexandrine Column. Drawing by A. Ricard de Montferrand. From his Plans et détails du monument consacré à la mémoire de l’Empereur Alexandre. Courtesy Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. 12. Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. Moscow. Architect, Constantine Thon. From Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (1879), No. 1. 13. Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich and Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna. Engraving by Thomas Wright. Artist, George Dawe. From Shilder, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, Vol. 1. 14. Deathbed Scene of Nicholas I. Lithograph by Vasilii Timm. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, 1855. Courtesy Slavic and Baltic Division New York Public Library. 15. Coronation of Alexander II: Entry procession, by M. A. Zichy. Opisanie sviashchenneishago koronovaniia . . . Aleksandra Vtorago i

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Imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny Vseia Rossii. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 16. Nicholas I Monument, St. Petersburg, by August Montferrand and Peter Klodt. Photograph by William Brumfield. 17. Millennium Monument, Novgorod. Design by M. O. Mikeshin, 1862. Niva, 1872. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 18. Alexander II at the Danube Front. Chromolithograph Lubok, 1877. GARF. 19. Alexander III, Chromolithograph. 1882. Russian National Library, Print Division, St. Petersburg. 20. Alexander III at Red Staircase, July 1881. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia. 21. Crowning of Alexander III, by Ivan Kramskoi. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia . . . Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 22. Cathedral of the Resurrection (Christ on the Blood), St. Petersburg. Architect, Alfred Parland. Photograph by William Brumfield. 23. Alexander Nevskii Cathedral, Revel (Tallin). Architect M. Preobrazhenskii. M. Preobrazhenskii, Revel’skii Pravoslavnyi AleksandroNevskii Sobor. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 24. Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna bring bread and salt to their imperial majesties at the costume ball of January 25, 1883. Chromolithograph. Russian National Library, Print Division. St. Petersburg. 25. Popular picture of Nicholas II, Alexandra Fedorovna, infant Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Olga, 1899. Russian National Library, Print Division, St. Petersburg. 26. Embrace of Emperor and Empress, Nicholas II coronation album, Koronatsionnyi Sbornik. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 27. Nicholas II in Robes of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Portrait in M. S. Putiatin (ed.), Letopisnyi i Litsevoi Izbornik. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 28. Nicholas II Speech to Duma Deputies, April 17, 1906. L’Illustration. 29. Nicholas Tastes Sailors’ Rations on the Yacht the Standard. From A. Elchaninov, The Tsar and His People. 30. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexei on Red Staircase, May 25, 1913. L’Illustration.

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Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Literature and History, Columbia University State Archive of the Russian Revolution, Moscow Moskovskie Vedomosti Novoe Vremia Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire) Russian State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg

This volume is meant for a broader audience than the two-volume edition of Scenarios of Power. I have not reproduced the extensive footnotes of the original and have limited my references to important direct quotations or points of interpretation. I have included only what I judged to be the most significant illustrations, though I refer to some others in the text. Those interested in the omitted footnotes and illustrations, I urge to consult the original volumes.

Scenarios of Power

The splendor of Russian imperial ceremonies and celebrations is a generally known historical fact, as is the persistence of absolute monarchy long after it had disappeared in the West. This book contends that the drama of the presentations of the Russian court and the Russian tsar’s claim to exert unlimited power were closely related. Symbolic display served as an essential mechanism of tsarist rule. Carefully staged ceremonies and celebrations, the coronations foremost among them, demonstrated the monarch’s powers of control and direction, providing a simulacrum of a political order responding to his will. As the chapters indicate, imagery and pageantry made it clear that Russian monarchs were neither bound by the limits of the everyday nor subject to mundane judgment. Representation lifted them into a realm of the sublime. I call this process elevation. The exercise of power and the representation of the monarch were reciprocal processes: absolute rule sustained the image of a transcendent monarch, which in turn warranted the untrammeled exercise of power. It was this nexus that defined absolute monarchy in Russia and that came to be understood under the term “autocracy” in the nineteenth century. Scenarios of Power approaches Russian monarchy not as a succession of tsars, with idiosyncratic traits and achievements, but as an elite institution with its own culture, expressed in a symbolic system that persisted over time and adapted to new demands and influences. Successive generations of heirs to the throne grew up within a world of ceremonial performance. Ritual, verbal, and artistic expressions of the court, the theater of power, constituted their psychological reality, defining their relationship to parents and servitors as well as shaping their understanding of government. The animating myths of Russian monarchy from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century associated the ruler and the elite with foreign images of political power. Arising on the ruins of the Mongol empire, far from the Roman empire, and at the periphery of the Byzantine empire, Russian princes and the early tsars had difficulty creating native images of sovereign power that would set them above the ruled and allow them to approach foreign monarchs as equals. From the formation of the monarchy in the fifteenth century, when Tsar Ivan III rejected the offer of the title of king from the Holy Roman Emperor, Russian monarchs understood sovereignty in terms of empire. The word “empire” carried several interrelated though distinct connotations. First, empire signified imperial dominion or supreme power unencumbered by other authority. Second, it implied imperial expansion, extensive conquests, encompassing non-Russian lands. Third, it referred

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to the Christian empire, the heritage of the Byzantine emperor as the defender of Orthodoxy. These meanings were conflated and served to reinforce each other. The expansion of empire confirmed the image of supreme power and justified the unlimited authority of the Russian emperors. The monarchs of early modern Europe engaged in the same borrowing. The distinguishing feature of Russian monarchy was the persistence of a pattern of appropriation of symbols and images from abroad long after it ceased to be the practice in Europe. This pattern has befuddled efforts to categorize the Russian state under a single cultural rubric, Mongol, Byzantine, or European. The devices of identification with foreign sources of power were varied—tales of foreign origin, analogies with or imitation of foreign rulers. In all cases, the source of sacrality was distant from Russia whether it was beyond the sea, whence the original Viking princes came, or located in the image of Byzantium, France, or Germany. A national subtheme runs through Russian political imagery and myths, but, until the late nineteenth century, as an antithesis that was repeatedly submerged by a dominant foreign motif.1 The presentation and representation of the monarch elevated not only the ruler, but his servitors as well above the ruled. Joining imperial ceremonies, the elite displayed their personal bond with the monarch and their preeminence before the subject population. Max Weber pointed out that elites perform ceremonies to justify their collective domination to themselves, the performance and its representation demonstrating the truth of their preeminence.2 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian emperor ruled what Ernest Gellner has described as a horizontally organized society. A multinational imperial elite comprised noblemen from areas such as the Baltic and Tartar provinces and Georgia, as well as Russian nobility. They shared a common bond of service with the emperor and a common domination of a subject population.3 Myths elevating the tsar and his servitors placed them in heroic narratives that presented them as the makers of history. Divine sanction provided constant but not sufficient grounds for absolute power. From the reign of Peter the Great to the late nineteenth century, Russian rulers appeared as heroes— conquerors, reformers, or educators of their people who demonstrated their preeminence by tales of secular achievement. The people remained in what Marshall Sahlins described as a realm of “historylessness.”4 When the people appeared at ceremonies, they provided a human backdrop that might occasionally join in choruses of acclaim. As we shall see, in the course of the nineteenth century, they became more visible participants in the presentation of Russian monarchy. However, we witness not expressions of popular mentality, but representations of their response as it figures in current versions of the myth. It is these representations, which the tsars and the elite often believed characteristic of the peasantry as a whole, and not actual peasant mentalities, that figure in this book.

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The particular realizations of the governing myth by the successors to the throne, I call scenarios of power. The scenarios cast each ruler as mythic hero transforming the myth to fit his personal views and tastes, as well as the cultural and political circumstances of the time. Ceremonies figured not as discrete and unrelated events but as episodes in the monarch’s ongoing scenario. They exemplified attitudes toward authority and modalities of public conduct that would prevail among the elite during each reign. As a result, ceremonies assumed different meanings and greater or lesser importance as demanded by the scenario. Beginning with Peter’s reign, Russian emperors and empresses emulated Western monarchs, distinguishing themselves from seventeenth-century representations, and performed what I call the European myth. The scenarios presenting the current Western image of the sovereign expressed the distance separating the monarch and his elite from the ruled. Rulers appeared as heroes coming from without, achieving the salvation or transformation of Russia. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the presentations of his successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, also followed European ideas and practices, but now those emphasizing the identification of monarchs with the history and traditions of their peoples. These scenarios, which I describe as a National myth, presented Russian monarchy as a distinctive institution with roots in the Russian people. The dominant trope of both myths remained one of conquest, the rulers’ acts presented as triumphs of valor over the empires’ foes or the legacy of incompetence left from previous reigns. From the era of Peter the Great, what I call a conquest motif set the monarch in a higher realm through symbolic shows of force. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a utilitarian discourse glorified the ruler as triumphant bearer of civilization and progress. The Petrine triumph, Olympian celebrations, imperial parades elevated the sovereign as a savior redeeming Russia from despotism or ruin. With the adoption of a National myth, the utilitarian appeals were submerged: the conquest came from within, the heroic monarch rescuing Russia from alien elements. Throughout the history of the monarchy, we witness a succession of apparent ruptures, a continuity of asserting discontinuity. The presentations under the European myth produced an illusion of constant renewal, the irresistible power of the monarch’s will and personality claiming to accomplish prodigies of transformation. Conquest could also take the form of captivation, the monarch descending from Olympian heights to appear as a sentient mortal filled with humanitarian sentiments and showing astonishing humility. But the pathos, like a god’s, arose in the act of descent, the momentary shedding of the awesome persona to reveal his altruistic nature and win his subjects’ affections. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we observe a striking pattern of alternation of the dominant mode of conquest, the fierce intimidating manner of a ruler, like Paul I or Nicholas I, alternating with the

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manner of enchantment and captivation, like that of Alexander I and Alexander II. The instruments of force, however, always remained in evidence. In this book, I observe a fundamental distinction between the monarchy as an institution, the monarch’s space—his family, his friends, lovers, favorites—and the state, the official space of the institutions of the tsarist administration. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rulers increasingly identified with the state and measured their successes in terms of its expansion and transformation. The state was the monarch’s instrument and owed its power to his authority. But Russian monarchs never identified completely with the state, nor, as evolved over time in Western monarchies, allowed the state to appropriate attributes of sovereignty and immortality.5 They could exercise their will unconstrained by regulation or formal hierarchy, their very freedom from such constraints representing a potent sign of their supremacy. They could rule through informal networks of favored individuals chosen to wield supreme power. •

The chapters detail the symbolic dynamic that characterized the scenarios of Russian rulers. Each reign resumed the Petrine cadence, opening with energetic demonstrative change, a discrediting, explicit or implicit of the predecessor, a new vision of the creative perspective of the autocrat. The exception was the last reign when the shift in imagery and goals began only a few years after Nicholas II’s accession. In the nineteenth century this dynamic of repudiation was tempered by assertions of dynastic continuity and devotion to a national heritage. At the beginning of his reign, the emperor brings a new vision and manner of rule, appoints new figures to key positions. But after a period of vigorous, innovative government, obstacles surface, the initial inspiration dissipates, and the scenarios become frozen, “routinized.” Disappointment with the high hopes of transformation sets in. The performance of the world in potentia loses credibility once the potential is not met, and failure opens the mind to new designs and more current settings of the myth. The next monarch then follows the symbolic dynamic, repudiating the premises of his predecessors. The process communicated a vitality to Russian monarchy, but at the same time promoted discontinuity, a rejection of the ideas and institutions of the previous period before they had a chance to develop. The education and upbringing of the heirs to the throne sought to perpetuate the governing myth and support the claims to supremacy and transcendence. Tutors acquainted them with historical examples of heroic rule and Western ideals of enlightened government. But the European models were diverse, fluid, and open to varied interpretations. Alternative visions of Western monarchy offered the heirs antitheses that might revitalize the monarchy and the myth. In some cases, it was the grandmother or mother, in others tutors, who acquainted them with ideas and images of authority that diverged from their fathers’. The new scenarios arose even as the heirs

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played their roles in the old. For this reason, I have devoted several chapters to the upbringing and education of Russian monarchs and the emergence of their public personalities before they ascended the throne. Scenarios, as we shall see, changed in content and presentation. However, the myth, whether European or National, precluded a sharing of power, or even the delegation of power—as in the case of the appointment of a responsible prime minister—for this might dispel the ruler’s aura of supremacy and lead to anarchy and the disintegration of the empire. The political conflict of the early twentieth century took on its particularly violent and destructive character in part because of the resolute intransigence inculcated by the myth. In the eighteenth century, staged shows of acclamation by the elite demonstrated a form of consent that enhanced rather than limited the rulers’ power. After the Decembrist revolution of 1825, the conception of popular sovereignty was sublimated in ceremonies of popular adulation of the Russian people for their Westernized absolute monarch. The tale of the invitation of the Varangians to rule over Rus’ became an emblematic historical expression of the Russian people’s lasting monarchical spirit. Alexander II’s scenario adapted Official Nationality in two ways. He made the peasants prominent figures in imperial ceremonies. The narrative of Official Nationality then presented the Great Reforms of the 1860s as generous acts of the monarch for his people. The conquest motif resurfaced in the people’s displays of utter devotion and love for their distant ruler. Alexander II’s son, Alexander III, rejected not only his father’s scenario, but the premises and imagery of the European myth as the basis for absolute monarchy in Russia. The presentations and representations of the Russian monarch from 1881 emphasized the tsar’s native characteristics and tried to show the close ethnic and spiritual bonds between tsar and people. The National myth disclosed a new foundation period, borrowed from Slavophile teachings, for Russian autocracy. Consent for the exercise of power derived from the assemblies of the land of the seventeenth century, particularly that of 1613, which had elected Michael Romanov tsar and provided a democratic mandate for absolute monarchy. In his scenario, Alexander III was presented as the most Russian of Russians. He reenacted the conquest motif, showing his sacral power by the exercise of force against the revolutionary movement and the silencing of political opposition. He appeared as a transcendent expression of the nation, a powerful authoritarian native ruler. The people displayed their accordance not by shows of gratitude and love as they had for Alexander II but by the prayers they uttered under the guidance of the Orthodox church. The European myth had promoted the development of an educated elite and society. The National myth excluded educated society from the nation. It expressed a growing rift between the monarchy and institutions of state, many of which were staffed by officials loyal to the principles of legality and openness that had gained acceptance during the era of great reforms. This rift widened during the reign of Nicholas II. With the establishment of

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representative institutions after the revolution of 1905, Nicholas was faced with the task of restoring, not preserving autocratic power. His scenario presented him in close spiritual rapport with the peasants, who he believed represented the true Russian people. He displayed this bond from 1909 to 1913 at the Jubilees of the Battle of Poltava (1709), the Battle of Borodino (1812), and the Tercentenary of the election of Michael Romanov (1613). These events, with their orchestrated responses from the peasants, were staged to demonstrate that Nicholas enjoyed a personal mandate more indicative of popular sentiment than the electoral mandate of the Duma. Contrary to many characterizations of Nicholas II, the monarchy continued to represent a dominant and active force in the politics of the early twentieth century. Nicholas’s scenario made the restoration of autocratic power a religious mission conferred upon him directly by God. His faith in the efficacy of punitive violence was derived from the historical narrative of the National myth and his father’s success in crushing the revolutionary movement. His stubborn resolve fragmented the moderate forces in Russian society and denied them a role in governing the empire. The collapse of the tsarist regime in February 1917 left Russia without a civic nation. The political vacuum would be filled by a new incarnation of power, reliant on demonstrative use of force, and claiming to achieve social and political ideals hallowed by Western ideologies. Now we turn to the inception of this process, the beginnings of the adoption of myths and signs of sovereignty and the trappings of power in early Russia.

Signs of Empire

Tales of Origin and the Russian Coronation The process of “the gathering of the Russian lands” culminated during the reign of Ivan III, 1462–1505. Ivan subjugated Novgorod in 1478, renounced his subordination to the Mongol khan in 1480, and began to rule Russia as a unified monarchy. He introduced his own coinage, a law code, and created a military force of conditional landowners that provided him with a reliable source of manpower. But Ivan’s newly unified monarchy lacked the symbols and titles of a sovereign ruler. Guided by the hierarchs of the church, he began to lay claim to the symbolic heritage of the Byzantine empire, which had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1452. Ivan assumed the emperor’s titles of tsar and autocrat. The word “tsar” had been used by Russian princes principally as a title for address of the Tatar khan and the Byzantine emperor. It came to connote a Christian emperor as distinguished from the pagan emperors of antiquity, such as Augustus, who was described as kesar’. The designation of a prince as emperor expressed the sense, fundamental to later Russian political attitudes, that imperial sovereignty was the only true sovereignty. Ivan first used the term “autocrat,” samoderzhets, a calque of the Greek (autocrator), to express the supremacy of the Muscovite tsar and his freedom from overlords. Ivan III also appropriated signs of sovereignty from Western sovereigns. He adopted the Byzantine imperial seal—a crowned double-headed eagle, with wings lowered. He did so to show parity with the Holy Roman Emperor, whose seal, also a double-headed eagle, symbolized the unity of Western and Eastern empires. To demonstrate this parity, he married the Byzantine princess Sofia Paleologus, who had been residing in Rome, and then set about constructing cathedrals and palaces that would lend his capital a monumental grandeur. He brought architects from Italy, who gave the Moscow Kremlin an aspect of Renaissance magnificence. Pietro Solari designed new Kremlin walls and towers in the manner of an Italian walled town. Rodolfo Fioravanti’s Assumption Cathedral added greater dimensions and splendor to the domed-cruciform pattern of the Vladimir Assumption Cathedral. Venetian architects decorated the exterior of the Archangel Cathedral with a shell motif. The Palace of Facets, the first stone residence of a Russian ruler, was an imitation of a Renaissance palace. Like the Hapsburg emperors, the first Russian tsars adopted mythological genealogies that linked them to ancient Rome. The Tale of the Vladimir

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Princes inserted a brother of Augustus, Prus, into the historical record, said to be a direct ancestor of Riurik and the ruler of the Prussian lands. It then traced the lineage of the Moscow princes back to Riurik. Ivan IV (1533–1584), Ivan the Terrible, frequently announced his kinship with Augustus in justifying his sovereignty. He asserted that he was no “Russe” and boasted of his “German” descent from Riurik. This reconstruction of the past was the basis of the first Muscovite “historical” work, the Book of Degrees (Stepennaia Kniga) and the Book of Saints’ Lives (Chet’ia-Minei), both of them composed under the Metropolitan Macarius’s direction in the middle of the sixteenth century. But while Western monarchs used such tales of imperial origin to free themselves from the domination of the Roman Catholic Church, Russian church hierarchs themselves created the tales in order to enhance the standing of the ruler of Rus’. The tales elevated both tsar and clergy as heirs to the Byzantine imperial mission of defending the faith. The symbiotic relationship between tsar and church reflected the late Byzantine concept of the “symphony” between secular and ecclesiastical spheres as expressed in the Kormchaia Kniga. The clerics who wrote the Tale of the Vladimir Prince created an imagined genealogy that drew a direct connection between the Moscow prince and his presumed Byzantine forebears. The second part, The Legend of Monomakh, contrived a long tradition and “ancient” regalia for the Russian imperial coronation. Vladimir Monomakh (the grand prince of Kiev, 1113–1125), it related, received imperial regalia from the Emperor Constantine Monomakh, the prince’s grandfather. The prince of Moscow claimed descent from Monomakh, and therefore this episode, of which there is no historical record, provided the historical basis for the new regalia. Metropolitan Macarius composed and staged the first Russian coronation rite for the crowning of the seventeen-year-old Ivan IV in 1547. The Russian coronation was a ceremony of absolutism, with none of the medieval holdovers of the French and English coronation, such as the peers of the realm, rites of chivalry, and a coronation oath promising to uphold the laws of the realm. Macarius adapted his ceremony from late Byzantine rites of the fourteenth century. The regalia of Monomakh—the crown “Monomakh’s cap,” a scepter, the barmy or shoulder pieces, and the life-giving cross—gave concrete evidence of a link to Byzantium. The investiture with the regalia constituted the principal moment of Ivan’s coronation as tsar. The coronation opened with Ivan’s asking the metropolitan to consecrate his hereditary claims to the title of Russian tsar. Ivan stated that since Vladimir Monomakh all his ancestors had been crowned. He also mentioned his father’s command that he be crowned, “according to our ancient rite” (po drevnemu nashemu tsarskomu chinu). The metropolitan replied by confirming the tsar’s ancestral rights to the imperial crown. He lowered the life-giving cross around the tsar’s neck, then placed his hands on the tsar’s head and pronounced the benediction, as in a clerical ordination. The gesture, the metropolitan declared, achieved the act of consecration.

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After conferring the “holy barmy,” the metropolitan crowned Ivan, then handed him the orb and scepter. He concluded the first part of the ceremony by delivering the precept (pouchenie). Written by Macarius and drawn from the homily of the Deacon Agapetus to the Emperor Justinian, the precept was an extended admonition on the obligations of the tsar to the church and his subjects. It ended on an eschatological note; the metropolitan envisioned the tsar’s ascent into the heavens and, in recompense for his “imperial exploits (tsarskie podvigi) and labors,” ruling in the heavenly kingdom with Christ and all the saints. The Legend of Monomakh was the guiding myth of the early Russian coronation, and the regalia of Monomakh became the sacred insignia of power of the Muscovite tsardom. Ceremony turned the fiction of imperial succession into sacred truth. The Legend played the same role as the Legend of the Holy Ampulla in the French coronation. The holy ampulla was the vial that contained the oil of Clovis, which had been borne from heaven in the beak of a dove; a few drops of the oil anointed the Capetian kings at each coronation. Both legends evoked sources of the charisma transmitted to the bearer of power by sacred articles, the regalia in Russia, the oil in France. Both invoked descent to establish the historical connection of the present ruler to the recipients of the initial charismatic gift. But their motifs suggest the different character of the charisma they bestowed. The holy oil was sent from heaven, attesting to the providential origins of the French monarchy. God bestowed his sanction directly on the clergy and kings, without imperial mediation. The oil bestowed the power to cure scrofula on the French kings. Russian princes and tsars were never credited with magical powers. The Monomakh legend was a secular myth showing the Kievan prince’s valor in his invasion or threatened invasion of Constantinople. It accentuated the derivative character of Russian sovereignty: sanction came not from God directly, but through the acquiescence of the Byzantine emperor. The Patriarch of Constantinople, confirming the title of tsar in a charter of 1561, likened Ivan IV to a Byzantine emperor, “tsar and sovereign of Orthodox Christians of the whole universe from the East to the West and as far as the ocean.” The Muscovite coronation, in this way, gave the image of conqueror religious sanction. Ivan IV’s coronation in 1547 consisted of an investiture and a mass. The anointment was added as an afterthought in a coronation order (chin) composed in the 1550s, and this established the tradition for all later coronations. In the Russian coronation, anointment took place after the investiture, unlike the French, English, and late Byzantine coronations, and played no role in the consecration of the tsar’s secular power. It rather endowed the tsar with a special charisma that set him apart as the most holy of laymen and made him the equal of Western monarchs who were anointed. The tales of imperial descent were accompanied by imperial designs to rule over extensive realms and other peoples. Ivan IV’s conquest of the

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khanates of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 brought the first nonRussian territories under the suzerainty of Moscow. The victory over Kazan was marked by a triumphal progress through Russian towns, culminating in a ceremonial entry to Moscow. These processions celebrated the victory of the conqueror, but unlike Roman triumphs, attributed Ivan’s successes to God and the church. Before Ivan entered Moscow, he removed his armor and dressed himself in the Monmakh cap, the barmy, and held the lifegiving cross. Ivan’s ambitions to expand into the Baltic region were defeated by Swedish and Polish armies in the 1570s and 1580s. But the pretensions remained. He began to use the word “Rossiia,” greater Russia ruled by the Russian tsar, instead of “Rus’,” which referred to the core territories of the Muscovite principality. The establishment of a Russian Patriarchate in 1589 bestowed the supreme ecclesiastical title in Eastern Orthodoxy on the head of the Russian church and enhanced the tsar’s image as the defender of Orthodoxy.

The Seventeenth Century: Cultural Crisis The seventeenth century began with the cataclysmic social and political breakdown of the “Time of Troubles” following the death of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich in 1598, bringing the Riurikovich dynasty to an end. The country fell into civil war between the various social groups and reunited only after invasion by Swedish and Polish armies. A movement of national unity, summoned by the hierarchs of the church, was led by Kuz’ma Minin, a merchant, and Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, a military servitor. The movement culminated with the convening of an assembly of all the estates of the realm, which, after considerable intrigue, in 1613 elected Michael Romanov tsar. The end of the Troubles and the election of Michael, the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii wrote, brought a new national consciousness to Russian political life. Russians no longer regarded their country as the possession of the Muscovite tsar, but as a state ruled by a tsar and including the people. Tsar Michael (1613–1645) and Tsar Alexei (1645–1676) succeeded in consolidating state authority. A centralized administrative system of chancelleries (prikazy) grew during this period, exerting more effective bureaucratic control from Moscow. At the same time, the Orthodox Church came under increasing state control. The government curbed the persisting social conflicts and consolidated the monarchy’s authority during the first decade of Alexei’s reign. An assembly summoned by Alexei approved a law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649, which addressed the grievances of the military servitors and the townspeople, defining the service obligations that strengthened and extended the power of the central state. The code established the basis for a state-sponsored system of bondage, which cemented the alliance between the military servitors and the throne.

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Peasant discontent would erupt in bloody revolts over the next century, but these accomplished little but to strengthen the landlords’ authority. The landlords and governmental officials joined the tsar as partners in rule, dominating the subjugated population on the land. They also joined in the presentations of his power that elevated them above the melee of social interests and made clear the universal character of their power as servants of the Russian tsar. Rather than seek rapport with the people, the Romanovs strove to reclaim the imperial dignity of their predecessors. The principle of election compromised the concept of the tsar’s absolute power, and official statements sought to explain away Michael’s election as an act of divine intervention and to place him in the genealogy of the old dynasty. The Great State Book, an illustrated collection of brief biographies of the princes and tsars, connected the Romanovs directly to the “Great Riurik” and St. Vladimir, with no indication that the succession had been broken. Compiled in 1671 and 1672, the years of Alexei’s second marriage to Natalia Naryshkina and the birth of their son, Peter, The Great State Book began with portraits of Augustus and Riurik and repeated the genealogy of the Tale of the Vladimir Princes. This theme is also presented on the walls of the Palace of Facets in the Kremlin. The pictorial genealogy shows Augustus with his three sons, seated on thrones, and Riurik. Official rhetoric, with themes and imagery borrowed from the West, began to glorify the tsar as a secular ruler capable of achieving prodigies, a “god on earth.” Semeon Polotskii, a Kievan monk educated in Italy and Poland, composed baroque panegyrics that presented the ruler’s personal features as political virtues. His Scepter of Rule (1667) broke with Russian tradition and preceded the word “tsar” with individual qualities, “most serene” and “most pious.” These qualities did not belong to the official title but were used during church services and in the court. During the reigns of Tsars Michael and Alexei, portraits executed by or under the influence of Western artists, parsuny, began to show the tsar’s personal likeness, as did portraits in governmental books compiled at the time. In the early 1670s, after his marriage and Peter’s birth, Alexei remodeled his suburban estate, Preobrazhensk, and made it a center of amusement, following the example of the Baroque courts of Europe. There he watched a presentation in honor of Bacchus and the first dramatic production, The Play of Esther, known in Russia as The Play of Ataxerxes (Ahasuerus), which had been adapted from the Western original by a German Lutheran pastor, Johan Gottfried Gregory. Alexei had received assurances from his confessor that Christian rulers, including the Byzantine emperors, had permitted such presentations. The play likened the Russian tsar to the Persian king. A courtier addresses Ataxerxes, “Oh universal tsar, you are an earthly god!” The king’s speaker Mamurza announced to the tsar that King Ataxerxes was rising from the grave. The king then bowed before Alexei, in recognition of the glory and power of the emperor of Russia.

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The annexation of the eastern parts of Little Russia, including Kiev, and of White Russia, including Smolensk, under Alexei in the 1650s and 1660s, gave new territorial grounds for the imperial claims. The Russian tsar now could claim to be “tsar of all the Russias.” The word “Rossiia,” greater Russia, increasingly replaced “Rus’ ” in official documents and ceremonies. The seal was expanded to reflect a new imperial grandeur. The “state seal” that Alexei Mikhailovich introduced in 1667 was composed under the supervision of the Austrian heraldry master Lavrentii Khurulevich. Khurulevich’s seal had the eagle’s wings raised, as on the seal of the Holy Roman Empire, rather than lower in imitation of the Byzantine seal, as had been the case under Ivan III. Three crowns above the eagle symbolized the possession of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia, while three sets of columns on the borders represented three “cities,”—Great, Little, and White Russia. The eagle held the orb and scepter in its talons, which signified, according to a decree of 1667, “the most gracious Sovereign, His Imperial Majesty (Tsarskoe Velichestvo), Autocrat, and Possessor.” To complement and reinforce his imperial aspirations, Alexei sought to place the Russian church at the center of a universal rather than parochial version of Orthodoxy. The church reform of the mid-seventeenth century set the monarchy on an international plane, replacing the liturgy and the books that had been declared canonical by the church councils of the sixteenth century with those found in the Ukraine and Greece. Ukrainian monks, many of them educated in the West, came to Moscow to help draft the reforms. Ukrainian clerics introduced new patterns of thought, conduct, and dress that elevated the church hierarchy far above the parish clergy. The author of these reforms, Patriarch Nikon, was appointed in 1652 by Tsar Alexei, who had ascended the throne in 1645 at age sixteen. Nikon simplified the liturgy, revised church books, and banned icons that showed figures making the two-fingered, rather than the newly instituted threefingered cross. The reforms alienated large numbers of parish priests and their parishioners. The “old-believers” defended what they regarded as ancient and sacred traditions, and their faith, which spread rapidly, became a form of resistance to the many changes affecting Russia in the seventeenth century— increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the state, the introduction of serfdom, and the growing Western influence in Russian institutions and culture. Although Alexei turned against Nikon in 1658, he preserved his reforms. In 1667, a Council of Bishops declared the reforms canonical and opposition a rebellion against both church and state. Old Believers now became liable to both civil and ecclesiastical punishment. But enforcement in Alexei’s reign was both hesitant and haphazard. Nikon, who envisioned himself as co-sovereign like Tsar Michael’s father, the patriarch Filaret, initiated Alexei into a severe liturgical routine that he believed exemplified the Christian emperor. During these ceremonies Alexei wore opulent golden barmy resembling those of Byzantine emperors, and carried an orb and scepter made in Istanbul. During religious ser-

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vices, he was addressed by the word, “sacred,” sviatoi, included in the title of the Byzantine emperor. This term presented the tsar as a figure with the qualities of a demigod, bestowing divine features onto the state. It broke with Russian religious tradition, which presented the tsar as most pious worshiper, and brought forth angry condemnations from Old Believers, most notably the archpriest Avvakum. Performing elaborate religious ritual at his court, Alexei assumed an aura of spiritual supremacy. He appeared as the absolute monarch who embodied the attributes of both ecclesiastical and secular preeminence. His almost monastic regimen of worship is the first clear example of an imperial scenario, a concerted and organized demonstration of an individual tsar’s embodiment of a foreign image, in this case the image of what was believed to have been typical of Byzantine emperors. The service elite displayed their adherence to the tsar’s sovereign power by joining him in the performance of the role of “pious” tsar. They appeared in his devotional regimen, as if they too were monks. They took part in all the services, processions, and receptions under threat of punishment, as “the tsar’s slaves.” The servitors’ positions in the ceremony revealed their status in the court, their closeness to the tsar, and the power and influence they could wield. Ceremonial orders (chiny) were issued for many functions, ambassadors’ receptions, weddings, and banquets. In keeping with the monastic regime, women, with rare exceptions, were barred. The tsarevna watched ceremonies, including the coronation, through a concealed window. The tsar’s daughters and sisters were forbidden to marry “princes and boyars of the sovereign,” who were considered his “slaves.” They also could not marry “the sons and kings of other states since they are not of the same faith.”1 Most imperial ceremony remained within the precincts of palace and cathedral, where only those high in the service could behold the tsar’s “bright eyes.” The notion of a warm emotional bond between tsar and people in the seventeenth century was a nineteenth-century Slavophile myth. On major religious holidays, however, the tsar displayed the grandeur of his court in processions that left the palace and vested spiritual ascendance in attributes of secular magnificence. The processions displayed Alexei in his newly fashioned Monomakh regalia, the Great Array (Bol’shoi nariad) (fig. 1). He wore new ornately wrought gold crowns, copies of the Monomakh hat with countless gems crafted by foreign workmen in his service or imported from abroad. His gold-embroidered robes had emerald buttons, and his gold bracelets were strung with pearls. His servitors were also dressed in rich clothing with gems. The processions presented a hieratic image of a Christian emperor surrounded by his servitors and the clergy. The most sumptuous of these was the Blessing of the Waters, which took place each year at the celebration of the Feast of Epiphany on January 6. The tsar and patriarch proceeded to the Moscow River where the patriarch blessed the waters through a hole in the ice, and blessed the tsar with the water. This ceremony had little resemblance

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1. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Portrait from Portrety, Gerby i Pechati Bol’shoi Gosudarstvennoi Knigi 1672 g. (St. Petersburg, 1903).

to its Byzantine counterpart. The Blessing of the Waters in Constantinople had taken place in the emperor’s palace, and the emperor himself played the central role. In the Russian “Blessing” of the sixteenth century, the metropolitan dominated the proceedings, seated on the throne while the tsar stood. In the early seventeenth century, these positions were reversed.

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of the “Blessing” in the seventeenth century was the massive presence of armed forces, particularly the musketeers (strel’tsy), the regular barracked troops who served as a palace guard and internal police force. Two hundred of them, dressed in bright uniforms and carrying gilded muskets, golden spears, and harquebuses plated with mother-of pearl, led in the procession, while 150 accompanied the tsar. Another regiment, with drums and standards guarded the route. At the end of the seventeenth century, a detachment of brightly dressed cannoneers stood guard at their guns during the ceremony. Late seventeenth-century coronation ceremonies introduced additional analogies between the Russian tsar and the Byzantine emperor. At his coronation in 1676, the fourteen-year-old tsar Fedor Alekseevich (1676–1682) appeared in the entry procession wearing the opashen’, a golden caftan that his father, Aleksei, had worn in emulation of the Byzantine emperor. The ceremony incorporated two innovations: the recitation of the creed during the investiture, and the taking of communion in the sanctuary, which Alexei had introduced during his reign. The innovations brought the Russian rites closer to both the late Byzantine original and the coronation ceremonies of European monarchs such as the French kings. The eloquent opening consecration of the tsar’s hereditary claims to the legacy of Kiev and Byzantium included a statement of the extent of the tsar’s rule. Standing before his throne on the dais, Fedor proclaimed that all “Great Sovereigns” of “all Great Russia,” going back to Riurik, had been crowned. He used the term “Great Russia” (Velikaia Rossiia), the word Rossiia having replaced the word Rus’ to describe the extent of the tsar’s imperial authority in seventeenth-century chiny. Fedor’s chin went a step further and referred to the Great Russian Tsardom, Velikorossiiskoe Tsarstvie, a term denoting an imperial, absolutist state, subordinating Russian as well as non-Russian territories. The coronation processions to and from the cathedral were resplendent displays of the elite of empire, the tsar, the clergy, the servitors, all guarded by large numbers of musketeers. The opening processions accompanied the regalia and then the tsar himself from the Palace of Facets to the cathedral. The recessional from the cathedral was longer and even more imposing. Fedor emerged in full regalia from the south doors of the Assumption Cathedral. As he left the cathedral, a boyar threw gold coins before him, a custom probably borrowed from wedding ceremonies, where it betokened prosperity for the newlyweds. Accompanied by his family, entourage, and clergy, he moved slowly across the square, stopping at the Cathedral of Archangel Michael, where he paid his respects to his ancestors, and then at the Annunciation Cathedral, the imperial family’s private church, before returning to the palace. The order describes the equivalent of a popular acclamation. It mentions “an innumerable multitude of orthodox Christians,” now specifying “both men and women” who stood “in fear and trembling.” There is also “cordial joy (serdechnaia radost’) and thanksgiving.”

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The coronation ceremonies concluded with the banquet, which followed the recessional. The banquet was a sedate occasion that gave another demonstration of the solidarity between church and secular authorities. The coronation in the cathedral had begun with the patriarch welcoming the tsar at the portal into his domain’s ecclesiastical space. The banquet in the Muscovite coronation was an occasion for the tsar to receive the presiding cleric in secular space, the Palace of Facets. Thus, Fedor Alekseevich began the ceremony by sending a special invitation to the patriarch and the leading hierarchs, the “Sacred Council,” who then proceeded to the palace. •

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical persona of the tsar, the tsar sharing in the rituals of the clergy, increasingly clashed with the secular demands of his rule. To further the conquest of new territories, Michael and Alexei recruited specialists from abroad to introduce new military technology and tactics. Since the musketeer and the middle service cavalry, made up of lesser landholders, could not adapt to these innovations, the government organized a separate army, structured on Western models and led by senior officers from the West. Russians served as foot soldiers and, by the 1660s, junior officers as well. Military reform aimed at an army of these new formation regiments, but the transformation would be completed only under Peter. Until then the musketeers and the middle service class continued to serve in their own detachments, and two incompatible armies made up the military forces of Muscovite Russia. Like the new officer corps, the officials in the expanding governmental system of chancelleries understood the state as a secular institution whose interests had little to do with the liturgical imagery of rule. The cultural and political tensions raised by the symbolic contradictions in the presentation of the tsar reemerged during the succession crisis that began with the demise of Alexei’s oldest son, Tsar Fedor, on April 27, 1682. Fedor died childless. On the day of his death, the patriarch Ioakim assembled church and secular elites in the vicinity of the Kremlin to choose his successor. Alexei’s surviving sons were Ivan, by his first wife, Maria Miloslavskaia, who was sixteen years old, but feebleminded, and Peter, by his second wife, Natalia Naryshkina. Peter was able and healthy but only ten years old. If Ivan ascended the throne, it was clear that he would be dominated by his sister, Sofia. The convocation, at Ioakim’s instance, chose Peter and his mother as regent. Ioakim regarded Peter’s election as an opportunity to counteract the “Latinizing” tendencies associated with Semeon Polotskii, who had excercised considerable influence over Sofia and Fedor. Ioakim, a religious conservative, also had difficulty accepting a female ruler. The boyars saw Peter as a way of opposing the power of the Miloslavskii clan. Then regiments of musketeers, dissatisfied by the abridgment of their service privileges in Fedor’s reign, took advantage of the dynastic crisis to

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seek redress of their grievances. Encouraged by the Miloslavskiis, they rose in rebellion demanding that Ivan be placed on the throne. The uprising led to the murder of several leading members of the Naryshkin clan and spilled into the streets of Moscow. After three days of bloodshed, the elites negotiated an agreement that forced the patriarch to perform an unheard-of dual coronation, which took place on May 26. Sofia became informal regent for both Ivan V and Peter I and thereby de facto ruler of Russia. Many saw the uprising as an opportunity to restore old Russia and spread resistance to the church reforms. A debate on these reforms took place in July 1682. Sofia heard arguments from the exponents of the Old Belief that would have branded her father, Alexei, and brother, Fedor, as heretics. She reacted with ruthless persecution of all Old Believers throughout the Muscovite state.2 Having quelled the rebellion, Sofia assumed the same religious persona and pursued the same absolutist policies as Alexei and Fedor. The patriarch, however, remained hostile. He was disturbed by her pretensions to rule, her tolerance of the Jesuits, who had come to establish themselves in Moscow, and her reliance on foreigners in important military posts. He was most concerned by the decline of the authority of the church hierarchy and the influence on Sofia of Semeon Polotskii’s chief disciple, the abbot Sylvester Medvedev, who shared his mentor’s absolutist conceptions of rule. The clashing notions of the role of tsar and church and the goals of monarchy emerged in a theological dispute on the interpretation of the Eucharist that took place in 1685. At the dispute, symbol and ceremonies were used to advance opposed conceptions of tsarist rule. Theological tracts written by Sylvester had identified Sofia with divine wisdom. He had described her as an emanation of Christ, regent of God’s grace, who did not require clerical consecration to preside over the spiritual enlightenment of her realm. An engraving executed at his instance depicted Sofia with crown, orb, scepter; the legend stated that she had been blessed with holy wisdom. At the dispute, spokesmen for the church insisted on the mediation of the church hierarchy in bestowing God’s grace on the tsar and the state. They further argued that a Russian sovereign had to receive communion at the altar like members of the clergy, and that a woman was not entitled to clerical prerogatives. The Naryshkin party avoided confrontation with the patriarch. Rather they waged their symbolic struggle distant from the Kremlin precincts in the suburban estate at Novyi (New) Preobrazhensk. New Preobrazhensk established continuity with the original Preobrazhensk where Alexei had watched Baroque theater and staged his own absolutist theater of power. As Ernest Zitser has shown, the new Preobrazhensk became the setting of a miniature imaginary state, a simulacrum of power, enacted as play, for play was not constrained by competing authorities or institutions. Preobrazhensk was the scene of spectacles of firepower—salvos, fireworks, and war games—with the young Peter as commander of his “play regiments.” These “play regiments,”

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the future Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii guards, became the agents of his overthrow of Sofia in 1689. At Preobrazhensk, he also built a play city that represented “an alternative capital and locus of a new transfiguration.” In 1689, after two defeats of Russian armies led by Sofia’s favorite, Vasilii Golitsyn, against the Crimean Tartars, Sofia attempted a coup and tried to rule on her own account. Peter, claiming to defend the dyarchy, took the opportunity to mobilize his regiments at Preobrazhensk and assume power himself. He sent Sofia to Novodevichii Monastery, where she lived until her death in 1704. In 1696, Ivan died, leaving Peter as sole ruler. It was only then that he began to take personal charge. Peter continued to engage in play activities after the defeat of Sophia. His presumably playful antics established grounds of authority that would free him not only from the domination of the patriarch but from the Naryshkin clan as well. The play regiments were accompanied by a mock army, headed by Prince F. Iu Romanodovskii, who also headed the Preobrazhenskii Chancellery, “the chancellery of Transfiguration,” the kernel of Peter’s secret police. Peter played the role of officer in the ranks, Captain Peter Alekseev. But it was he who was credited with the most heroic and decisive deed in the mock campaign, making clear that his supremacy came from something higher than formal rank, a special gift, his charisma. At Yuletide 1691, Peter staged the first procession of his Most Comical and All Drunken Council, a parody of church ceremonies, with a mock pope, a mock clergy, and raucous drunken rites dedicated to the service of Bacchus. In 1692, he appeared in a drunken parody of the Palm Sunday procession. The council’s ribaldry reversed the meanings of signs, designating what was holy absurd, and what was profane sacred. But the blasphemy that Peter performed in Preobrazhensk, and later on the streets of Moscow, had a higher purpose. Their parody of “sober drunkenness” was designed to produce a “transfigured kingdom,” with Peter exerting the charisma of Jesus Christ at the moment of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. The mysteries of Transfiguration, evoked in ribald disregard of the present order, invested Peter with an otherworldly source of divine power not disclosed by the rank he held. Peter’s world of play thus became a theater to display the transformative possibilities of supreme personal power. When he began to rule in the late 1690s, he already represented an irresistible and unquestionable force, which suggested that he could imagine the unimaginable and could impose it at will, for he, not the patriarch, bore the mark of divinity. Peter had invested his secular authority with sacral meaning and, so empowered, could embark on the transfiguration of Russia.

Peter the Great

Redefinition by Analogy: The Petrine Triumphal Entry On September 30, 1696, Peter I staged a Roman advent to celebrate his victory over the Crimean Tatars at Azov. His armies passed through a classical arch, built at his command. An enormous relief figure of Hercules held one side of the vault and pediment under the words “with Herculean strength.” On the other side stood a figure of Mars beneath the inscription “with the courage of Mars.” Peter announced a new symbolic language and political imagery taken from the repertoire of Western absolutism. Hercules and Mars signified the irresistible, superhuman force that Peter attached to a modern army. Semblances of classical gods rather than pious Byzantine emperors elevated his image as tsar. Hercules and Mars confronted Russians with the Western metaphors of monarch-hero, monarch-god, marking the abandonment of the humble and effacing mien of the Muscovite tsar. The inscriptions on the vault trumpeted the extent of Peter’s own superhuman achievement. The words “I have come, I have seen, I have conquered” were inscribed in three places on the arch, an identification with the figure of Julius Caesar that would be repeated frequently during Peter’s reign. The inscriptions on the pediment made clear the role of human agency in the achievement. “God is with us, no one can attack us, the unheard of,” one of these read. But it was not God who deserved the credit; “He who has wrought this is worthy of his reward,” a phrase from a letter of Peter’s, ornamented the pediment, and beneath, a figure of a winged Victory held a laurel crown and a green branch. Two gilt tapestries on the side carried legends comparing Peter to the emperor Constantine. But the phrases described the warrior Constantine, not the pious believer: “The return from victory of Tsar Constantine,” and “The triumph of Tsar Constantine over the impious Roman tsar, Maxentius.” The procession through the city lasted from nine in the morning until nightfall. It celebrated the exploits of the commanders Marshall Le Fort, and General Shein, and by implication, of Peter himself, who appeared as “The Great Captain.” The Duma clerk and postmaster, Andrei Vinius, stood on the arch and shouted panegyric verse to the accompaniment of cannon salvos. Peter walked behind Lefort’s sleigh, at the head of the sailors. He wore a black German coat and a hat with a white feather and carried a halberd. Ottoman prisoners were displayed along the way. The Scottish mercenary, General Patrick Gordon, marched at the head of his troops, and the musketeers’ regiments brought up the rear. The procession

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also included Imperial and Brandenburg engineers, as well as Franz Timmerman with his shipwrights and carpenters. The verses shouted by Vinius made known the shift from a Byzantine to a Roman imperial model. Peter was bringing Renaissance political spectacle to Russia, staging an advent in the manner of Charles V and Henry IV of France. He was emulating the European monarchs’ emulation of a classical model. But the innovation here was far more sudden and shocking. Peter’s first entry had no trappings of welcome; it showed the raw power of arms, the conquest of the capital celebrating his conquest of new lands for the empire. Such advents also followed his major victories over the Swedes in the Northern War. The advent replaced the coronation as the defining ceremony of Peter’s reign. His coronation, at the age of ten with his half-brother Ivan in 1682, could not justify the rejection of the past and the sacrifices he demanded to introduce a new more powerful Russian state. Georges Florovsky observed that Peter “was inclined to exaggerate anything new. He wanted everything refurbished and altered until it passed beyond all recognition.”1 In this respect, symbolic change preceded political and social change: Peter redefined the meaning of his rule and presented a new image of monarchy before he embarked on his reforms. The advent conferred dominion upon the ruler as military leader, imperator. Peter’s advents gave notice that the Russian tsar owed his power to his exploits on the battlefield, not to divinely ordained traditions of succession. The image of conqueror disposed of the old fictions of descent. The conqueror presents himself as the founder, a godlike figure who defiles old forms of authority to create new ones, reproducing what Marshall Sahlins called “an original disorder.” Then, “having committed his monstrous acts against society, proving he is stronger than it, the ruler proceeds to bring system out of chaos.”2 The primitive founder came from outside and invaded as a conqueror, denying the prevailing moral order to assert a new form of authority more ruthless and pervasive than the old. Although Russian, Peter assumed foreign features from childhood. He never grew a beard, the traditional Orthodox sign of godliness. In the early 1690s, he began wearing Western clothing. To the horror of the hierarchy, he ate meat during fasts and remained indifferent to their strictures. Rumors spread among the people that he was a son not of Tsar Alexei, but of a German, who had been substituted for a daughter born to the tsaritsa. Others called him a Swedish pretender from Stockholm. Rather than young monk, he displayed himself as young commander, brother to mercenary soldiers, not to prelates, Caesar’s successor and the protegé of Hercules and Mars. Wearing Western dress, he gave indication that his servitors too would have to change guise and assume a new cultural persona. After Azov, Peter decorated LeFort with what was the first Europeanstyle military order. During his trip to Europe in 1697 and 1698, he founded the order of Andrew the First Called, imitating the examples and the deco-

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rations of the English Order of the Garter, the legendary Order of Constantine, and the French Order of the Holy Spirit. His first ceremonial spectacles surrounded his power with the stage effects of the battlefield. For Peter as Louis XIV, the festival was a symbolic equivalent of a coup d’état, creating miracles previously allowed only to God. Displays of fireworks, often staged by Peter himself, demonstrated the conquest of the heavens. A show of fireworks at the village of Voskresensk in 1693 glorified his comrade-in-arms, Generalissimo Romanodovskii, whom he had declared the commander of his “play” regiments and admiral of his fleet. Three salvos from fifty-six cannons heralded the event, while the sky was illuminated with the generalissimo’s initials. Peter himself played the humble officer, working his way up the ranks, but an officer, as the displays showed, who was akin to the gods. A blazing picture of Hercules tearing apart the jaws of the lion, symbolized the power of Peter’s forces and his unremitting, superhuman will. Peter followed ceremonial celebration with pictorial celebration of the events. Engravings and then paintings celebrated his triumphs and made known the new military image and Roman persona of the Russian tsar. A series of portraits by Gottfried Kneller, executed during Peter’s visit to Holland in 1697, presented the emperor as a young warrior in armor. A crown in Western style is set before him (fig. 2). In subsequent years, his portraits, most of them by European artists, presented him in their conventional manner—dressed in armor, surrounded by laurel wreaths, weapons, state shields, and imperial regalia. Several carried the title imperator before Peter officially adopted it in 1721. Absolute monarchies did not leave the understanding of visual symbols to the imagination. Explicit verbal explanations ensured that their associations would enhance the sovereign image. Classical and mythical figures were turned into emblems that were decoded in emblem books. The book Symbols and Emblems, a favorite of Peter’s, was published for him in Amsterdam in 1705 and republished in Russia in 1719. The frontispiece of the volume shows Peter surrounded by emblems set in medallions. The inscription reads, “Beauty and Defense from Him.” As in the West, the emblems and symbols were explained in texts by symbol specialists. In Russia, this task was taken on by scholars at the SlavicLatin Academy who both planned the triumphs and subsequent displays of fireworks and composed program books elaborating their meanings. The arches for the 1703 triumph after the victory over Sweden were decorated with the classic motif of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. The accompanying text explained that Perseus represented Russia, Andromeda, the conquered territory of Ingermanland, and the sea monster, of course Sweden. The infant Hercules destroying two serpents symbolized Peter’s crushing of the rebellion of the musketeers in 1698. Sermons, speeches, and paintings presented Peter as Mars, Agamemnon, Neptune, Jupiter, as well as Hercules.

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2. Tsar Peter Alekseevich. Portrait by Gottfried Kneller, 1697.

The prefect of the academy, Iosif Turoboiskii, explained the meaning of the new likenesses of power. The gods, he wrote, were meant not in their literal but in their allegorical sense. The allegories came “not from sacred texts, but from secular histories, and are not sacred icons, but figures invented by poets.” Turoboiskii defended the use of allegory. It was known to all that “great things cannot be depicted exactly, that lesser things can do this, as a circle describes the sun.” But despite such strictures, the devices were often taken as objective parallels as they had been in Europe during the previous century. Peter presented himself as the founder of Russia, a hero set apart from the past, the casus sui, his own father. He insisted that he be addressed without patronymic, an honor previously reserved for the clergy or saints.3 The pan-

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egyric plays given by the pupils of the Academy emphasized the difference between previous times, prezhde, when Russia was in dishonor, bondage, and darkness, and nowadays, nyne, when it had become glorious. To be sure, his Romanov ancestors were presented and praised, but only as precursors, harbingers of his own greatness. On the arches for the 1703 triumph, Michael was depicted as pacifier of the realm. Alexei extended the boundaries of Rus’; he was the “new Russian Philip of Macedon,” preparing the way for Russia’s Alexander. Peter’s glorification by allegory and illustration in picture resembles that of Louis XIV. But whereas Louis was creating a fictional persona of king, Peter’s heroism and achievements were real. There was no separation between the mortal and the political body: the glorification of the sovereign was not a glorification of the state or nation personified but of Peter’s own superhuman feats undertaken for the benefit of the nation. After Poltava the visual arts openly characterized Peter as emperor and god. On his banners, Peter’s figure no longer concealed his person in the figures of his patron saints, Peter and Andrei: he began to place an imperial crown and his own initials on his standards. We observe the shift from allegorical identification with gods to visual resemblance. In 1711 and 1712, the painting on the ceiling of the Menshikov Palace, the Triumph of Mars, portrayed the god with Peter’s features. The 1709 Poltava triumph, the most grandiose of the Northern War, marked his assumption of the persona of military leader, imperator in its original sense. We can see the triumph rendered in the engraving by Alexei Zubov (fig. 3). Peter entered, now on horseback, not the captain but the military leader, behind the Preobrazhenskii Regiment, guarding Swedish captives. The Poltava entry demonstrated that the triumphal entry had displaced the religious procession as the central public ritual of Russian monarchy. During the entry, Peter took over the religious imagery that had been reserved for the patriarch. He was greeted with the chant previously sung to the patriarch in the role of Christ during the Palm Sunday procession, “Blessed is he that cometh in the Lord’s name, Hosanna the highest, God, the Lord appear before us.” Peter’s victory was couched in Old Testament analogies. A play presented him as David, slaying Goliath—Charles XII of Sweden. Peter had left the office of patriarchate vacant after Patriarch Adrian’s death in 1700, and the Poltava triumph prepared the way for the abolition of the office and secularization of the church administration in 1721. The master of the panegyrical use of biblical imagery was the prefect of the Kiev Academy, Feofan Prokopovich. Prokopovich’s Panegirikos, pronounced at Saint Sofia Cathedral only two weeks after the Battle of Poltava, amply displayed his gifts as a rhetorician in the service of the throne. The battle took place, he observed, on the day of St. Samson “not I imagine without the watchfulness of God,” and he used the occasion to compare Peter with the biblical Samson breaking the jaws of the lion, now representing Sweden.

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3. Triumphal Entry of Russian Armies into Moscow, 1709. Engraving by Aleksei Zubov.

The analogy with Samson became general in the panegyrical literature. In 1735, C. B. Rastrelli’s bronze statue of Samson struggling with the lion was placed in the center of the great cascade of fountains of Peterhof.

Venus and Minerva: the Symbolic Ascendance of Women These startling innovations in the presentation and representation of the Russian monarch followed the pattern of Russian political mythology. Peter elevated the authority of the monarch and the state by vesting himself in new foreign forms exemplifying sovereignty. He redefined the ruler as a foreign force in a way that permitted him to embark on far-reaching changes. Ceremonies prepared the way for reform as the beginning of a new tradition. Peter’s new foreign image of rule announced colossal changes in the Russian state, economy, and culture. In the first years of the eighteenth century, he completed the transformation of the Russian army, under way in the seventeenth century, into a regular standing army and founded a Russian navy, which his father had envisioned. He developed a native iron and cloth industry that made Russia self-sufficient in the production of arms and uni-

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forms. Russian armies, supported by impressive artillery power, engaged Sweden, the major power of eastern Europe, in grueling hostilities for twenty-one years that resulted in the conquest of the Baltic littoral and the establishment of Russia’s new capital St. Petersburg on the Neva. The great transformations that Peter introduced helped to consolidate and strengthen the service state structure that had taken form in the previous two centuries. He enforced a requirement of lifetime service for the landholding classes and established a Table of Ranks, on European models, that would attach status more to service than to birth. The introduction of the head or poll tax eliminated distinctions between different groups of the peasantry, subjecting them all to bondage and preparing the way for their further debasement in the course of the eighteenth century. Westernization, and the modernization of the military, economic, and political structure of Russia thus proceeded at the cost of the subjection of the mass of Russian population to a system of state-sanctioned serfdom. During the last fifteen years of his reign, Peter set about providing Russian monarchy with the institutions of Western absolutism. This was the period of the establishment of the colleges and new local governmental institutions, and the introduction of a system of procuracy headed by a general procurator who presided over the Senate. The new institutions followed Western examples, particularly the Swedish model recommended by the Holsteiner Heinrich Fick, formerly an official in Swedish service. Peter apparently expected that Swedish institutions would function in Russia in a similar manner. But the differences in social organization, particularly the existence of an enserfed peasantry and the absence of a tradition of local self government and an educated officialdom in Russia, make Peter’s hopes seem fanciful. The governmental reforms, however, also had symbolic importance: they provided Russia governmental institutions that resembled those of the European monarchies. Having given the Russian state the semblance of a Western administration, Peter set about creating a Western court culture to unite and to educate his servitors. In what he called his “paradise,” St. Petersburg, Dutch and French architects built palaces and laid out gardens. At Peterhof, he created his own copy of the palaces and gardens at Versailles. Petersburg embodied the idea of regularity, reguliarnost’, the symmetry, order, and control of the baroque city. The public buildings and homes of the Petrine aristocracy were built of stone in styles borrowed from Europe. Like the triumphal entries, the capital had to be represented as well as created; it had to be celebrated by being depicted. Engravings showed the vast spaces of the Neva and made known the symbolic meaning of Peter’s new city. Alexei Zubov’s Petersburg landscape of 1716 lines up the residences of the emperor and his high officials. The buildings corresponded in length to the number of serfs held by each owner, like what Grigorii Kaganov called, a “ceremonial group portrait.”4 Peter was especially impressed by the layout and art of Versailles and immediately ordered measurements taken of the garden. Like Versailles, his

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gardens were schools in mythology and literary references to teach the nobility taste and refinement. He pursued the goal of creating a new elite responsive to his conception of the state with the same ruthless ferocity that accompanied his military reform. Peter replaced the old decorum of humility, blagochinie, with a decorum based on Western social norms. Peter’s Table of Ranks, issued in 1722, introduced a hierarchical ordering based on progress in service and prescribed official and public behavior according to a servitor’s rank. Parallel tables of military and civil ranks defined standing by office and conferred hereditary nobility on non-nobles who reached the eighth rank in the civil hierarchy and the fourteenth (the lowest officer’s rank) in the military. A servitor’s rank designated where he and his wife would stand at church services, ambassadorial audiences, ceremonies, and celebrations. It also determined the richness of the clothing he was to wear. The last article of the Table decreed that “each should have the attire, equipage and livery demanded by his rank and character. All must act accordingly, and be deterred by an announced fine and greater punishment.” External signs of Western character—Western wardrobes, gestures, and language—demonstrated the nobility’s participation in the Europeanized world created by the monarch. Peter instructed his servitors in courtly manners. No longer were they simply to defer obsequiously before the ruler as “obedient slaves.” They had to display their beauty, to become men in the image of gods rather than monks. They would assume the tastes, manners, and ways of speaking that would allow them to frequent Western court society. To acquaint them with Western standards of civility, Peter had published The Honorable Mirror of Youth, a collection of instructions from Western courtesy books prepared under the supervision of Count Jacob Bruce and issued in 1717. The volume instructed Russian youth in the genteel manners of Western courts—how to eat and speak properly and in general to distinguish themselves from peasants. It urged them to converse with each other in foreign tongues, both to practice the languages and to avoid eavesdropping by servants. The new deportment had to be taught and demonstrated in public. St. Petersburg, the city epitomizing the principle of regularity, would breed an elite accustomed to act according to the secular principle of decorum expressed by the idea of “police.” In 1718, Peter established the Chief Magistracy of the Police in imitation of the French Lieutenant-Général de Police, an office meant to make Paris a secure and orderly city. In 1718, the first chief magistrate, Anton Divier, issued a decree announcing a new type of gathering, the assamblei. “Assemblei is a French word which cannot be rendered into Russian by a single Word,” the decree stated. In contrast to Peter’s drunken feasts, the assamblei introduced a new standard of polite behavior. The guests chatted, played cards or chess, partook in soft drinks, and danced. The men were to adopt a new gallant manner, to pay homage to the fair sex, whose beauty complemented their contribution to the state. They performed graceful Western dances, and under Peter’s

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watchful eyes, the leading figures of government, some of them old and decrepit, dutifully executed endless minuets, English dances, and polkas. If a guest failed to behave properly, there was the threat of blows from the fists of the emperor himself. During the evening, the host awarded a bouquet to the most distinguished lady, who then took charge of the dances. Later on, she passed the bouquet to her favorite cavalier, who on the next day was obliged to send her a fan, a pair of gloves, and a bouquet. Peter, thus, brought women of the elite out of seclusion and presented them too as embodiments of Westernized nobility, at both official functions and the less formal assamblei. The public presentation of women had great significance for Peter’s and subsequent reigns. The devotion to the world of the sublime and genteel in late seventeenth-century France took the form of the worship of idealized feminine forms. Peter adopted the feminine allegorical idiom of Louis XIV’s court. In Russia, what Jean Starobinski called the “fictitious ascendancy of women,” took on prescriptive force, for it designated the most sublime stage of Western monarchical rule.5 Just as the images of might—Hercules, Perseus, Mars—symbolized military conquest, Venus and Minerva, and throngs of women around the monarch symbolized the conquest of the higher sphere of love and beauty. In place of the self-abnegation and Christian love inspired by the Mother of God, the female images introduced a Western neo-Platonic concept of love, comprising beauty, strength and wisdom. Venus and Minerva represented love as supreme beauty, tamer of discord, the inspiration for a poetry of terrestrial bliss. Woman represented man’s higher faculties rather than the snares of the passions. Marriage became the consummation of love rather than the acceptance of a hierarchy of divinely ordained paternal authority. In the Summer Garden, Peter placed the famous Tauride Venus, a Roman copy of a statue of Praxiteles acquired in Rome, his answer to Louis XIV’s Venus of Arles. To line the alleys of the garden, Peter’s agents in Italy purchased semi-nude statues of virtues and other classical subjects—Mercy (fig. 4), Justice, Sincerity, Peace and Plenty, Amour and Psyche. The statues violated at once traditional moral sensibilities and Orthodox suspicions of three-dimensional representation. Crude and artless when he wished to be, Peter nonetheless presented an example of the cultivated worship of the feminine. His romance with Martha Skavronka, later the empress Catherine I, the Lithuanian peasant girl, placed love above considerations of social background and religion. His marriage to her, in secret in 1711, then publicly in 1712, was a studied affront to traditional Russian susceptibilities. Not only had the emperor married a commoner, but he had married her while his first wife was alive. Their wedding had taken place without a priest, according to the ceremony of a rear-admiral, not of a tsar. But the greatest desecration of the traditional norms of kinship occurred at her baptism into Orthodoxy. Peter’s son, Alexei, served as her godfather and provided her patronymic, Alekseevna.

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4. Pietro Baratta, Mercy. Summer Garden, St. Petersburg.

This meant, according to spiritual kinship, that Peter had married his granddaughter. It was taken by traditionalists, Boris Uspenskii writes, as “a kind of spiritual incest, a blasphemous flouting of fundamental Christian laws.”6 Although Peter’s marriage to Catherine emphasized that marriage should be on the basis of love, and that individuals should marry by choice, he did not extend this principle to his children and other members of the imperial family. For them, he introduced a new norm—that the Russian emperor

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should marry outside of Russian society. In this way, the monarch freed himself from dependency on the families from the serving classes who had previously supplied the brides of tsareviches, and he raised his family to an international, European plane. Peter arranged marriages for his children and niece with European royalty, initiating a practice that brought Russia into the marital politics of the West and imprinted a European character on all future members of the imperial family. From Peter’s reign, the sovereign’s children, now designated by the titles Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, married only foreign princes and princesses. The promulgation of Peter’s wedding was as important as the event itself. Peter invited the leading figures of state, foreign ambassadors, representatives of the estates, to a feast, ball, and fireworks display. He issued numerous announcements of the event, whose significance was made clear by an engraving of the feast, apparently executed before the event, by Alexei Zubov. In the evening, illuminations lit up a transparency with an allegory of marriage as love, which was reproduced in an engraving of the design of the spectacle. Two entwined columns occupy the center. At one side stands Hymen grasping a flaming torch, at the other the bride, with Catherine’s features, holding a burning heart. At her feet, two pigeons are kissing. Above, there is the all-seeing eye and the legend, “United by your love” (V Tvoe liubvi soedinennyi). By the last years of Peter’s reign, the images of the conqueror and the goddess were dominant figures in the representation of Russian monarchy. The descriptions of the Blessing of the Waters of 1722, which took place during the court’s sojourn in Moscow for the Nystadt celebrations, give a sense of a new mode in the observance of traditional religious holidays. The celebration began in the palace before the blessing itself. Women, far from being concealed, were proudly in evidence. The military’s presence, already prominent in the last decades of the seventeenth century, now overshadowed that of the clergy during the ceremony itself. The clergy marched in procession, dressed as before in their magnificent ceremonial robes, with gold and silver embroidery. But Peter’s guardsmen dominated the landscape. Eight regiments, numbering fourteen thousand troops, many of them chosen for their appearance, lined up along the river.

The Reproduction of Divinity: The Petrine Coronation and Funeral Peter continued to justify his power by referring to achievement, whether military or civil. In this respect, Petrine ideology was very much of the age of rationalism. The preambles to his laws always referred to the principle of reason. The word ponezhe, “inasmuch as,” explained why a given statute would work to benefit Russia’s, the obshchee blago or obshchaia pol’za. The principle of utility was the philosophical equivalent of victory on the battle-

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field, turning the monarch into the savior of his people, enhancing his charisma as a figure from beyond who wrought prodigies. Feofan Prokopovich elaborated the rationalist propositions he found in the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and other Natural Law theorists into an ideology that made the emperor the chosen of God to rule his people for their good. Petrine ideology created what Georges Florovsky called “ ‘police pathos,’ the pathos of order and paternalism,” which “proposes to institute nothing less than universal welfare and well-being, or quite simply ‘universal happiness.’” With Peter, Russian monarchs presented themselves as embodiments of the ideal as well as the reality of Western monarchy. Seventeenth-century ceremonies and rhetoric had portrayed the tsar as an exemplar of sanctity, as well as of a fictive imperial tradition. The new principle of utility disposed of tradition and ensured that history began with Peter’s accession. The utilitarian argument justified the direct subordination of the church to the emperor realized in Prokopovich’s Spiritual Regulation of 1721, which replaced the Patriarchate with the Holy Synod, a state office organized on collegial principles. The organization followed the model of the Protestant states of Germany, where the prince was uncontested head of the ecclesiastical administration of his realm. The figure of St. Alexander Nevskii provided an image of princely religious virtue for the Petrine church. Nevskii, whose victories afforded historical grounds for the claims to the lands along the Neva River, was glorified as patron saint of St. Petersburg. In 1723 his remains were removed from Vladimir to the Nevskii Monastery in the capital. The sanctification of Nevskii transformed the prince in Peter’s image, emphasizing his military exploits and downplaying his piety. The feast day of Alexander Nevskii was moved to the anniversary of the Treaty of Nystadt, which concluded the Northern War, thus commemorating Peter’s victories more than Nevksii’s. In 1724 the Synod ruled that the saint should be depicted not in monk’s but in princely attire. From 1721, the personal holidays, the birth and name days of the members of the imperial family, were placed on the list of official holidays, tabel’nye or vysokotorzhestvennye dni, in the manner of German princes. Most of all Peter wished to be identified as creator. When he accepted the title of imperator from the Senate in October 1721, the rhetoric of the speeches raised him to a supreme being. Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin lauded Peter for taking Russia “from the darkness of Ignorance into the Theater of the World, so to speak from nothingness into being, into the company of political peoples.” Peter actively developed the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea from a baroque emblem into a personalized glorification of his achievements. Peter as a sculptor shaping Russia—the allegory of Pygmalian and Galatea—emblazoned his standard and seal. Golovkin heralded Peter as “Father of the Fatherland, Peter the Great, All-Russian Emperor (Imperator),” giving him the highest dignities accorded to Western monarchs. The adoption of the title emperor, imperator, turned

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a tsarstvo into an imperia. The renaming marked a cultural transformation. It meant, as Golovkin suggested, a coming into being, escaping ignorance and barbarism, for the company of “political peoples.” “All-Russian,” Vserossiiskii, now designated not only rule over many peoples, but a new political identity, of those belonging to the imperial category, those part of Westernized, elite culture, who had shaped themselves in the image of their sovereign. “Peter the Great” made him the equal of Louis le Grand. The title, “Father of the Fatherland,” Otets otechestva, the equivalent of the Latin pater patriae, stated the new meaning of the tsar’s role as father of his flock. Now the relationship between sovereign and subjects was to be based on the obligation to serve the state. The title was bestowed, the Senate decree of October 22, 1721, declared, because Peter was the model of such service. The principle of utility rather than blood defined the metaphor of tsar as father. Peter was the paternalistic father: one who was obeyed and revered because of his care for his subjects, his direction of their lives. For the elite, the paternalistic image of domination by solicitude replaced the patriarchal image—domination justified by biblical injunction to revere the father. But creating a successor proved vastly more difficult than constructing a mythology of rule. Involved in his military campaigns, Peter left his son in the care of his first wife, Evdokiia. Alexei received a traditional religious education and showed little interest in military or civil service. From 1715, Peter began to bring his second, his Western family into his scenario, displaying Catherine and her children by him in public and using engravings to exalt their image. Alexei Petrovich could find no place in the reigning myth, and the conflict ended with the trial and murder of the heir in 1718. The result was the succession law of 1722, which sought to remove the mishaps of biology from the succession. It deemed succession by seniority “an evil custom.” The oldest son could be poisoned by “Absalom’s malice.” The principal argument was from utility. Peter claimed he acted out of “solicitude for the integrity of the state,” whose borders he had greatly extended. He commanded, as a result, that “the ruling tsar always have the freedom (volia) to designate whom he wishes and to remove the one who has been designated.” In fact, Russian tsars had possessed this freedom, and the law referred to the precedent of Ivan III, who had designated his grandson, Dmitrii, then his son Vasili, as heir. But Peter’s decree was understood as abolishing the principle of seniority and requiring the reigning monarch to designate his or her successor. The law concluded with an oath, to be taken by all servitors, to abide by the emperor’s choice. The change in the law was defended by the tract The Law of the Monarch’s Will (Pravda voli monarshei), which set forth additional examples from history and natural law arguments of Hobbes and Pufendorf. Peter never designated a successor. In his last years, he began to advance his spouse, Catherine, as the preserver of his values and incarnation of the new secular order. Catherine was his counterpart in the reigning myth, a

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player in his scenario. Whether or not Peter had decided to make Catherine his successor, and the evidence is ambiguous, in a manifesto of 1723, he announced his intention to proceed to crown her Empress of Russia. The coronation of a woman was another open transgression of Orthodox norms, another violation committed and displayed in order to establish a completely new order. The only previous crowning of a tsaritsa had taken place in 1606, when the First False Dmitrii, supported by the Poles, had been crowned at the side of his Polish wife, Marina. Peter’s manifesto again invoked analogy to place the Russian monarchy on the plane of universal monarchy and to justify the break with tradition. It began with the typical Petrine rationalist explanatory ponezhe “inasmuch as”: “inasmuch as it is known to all that in all Christian states it is the indispensable custom for Potentates to crown their spouses.” The Manifesto then cited Byzantine tradition, providing examples of four emperors who had crowned their wives. The second argument, from utility, defended Catherine’s qualifications to rule. The manifesto extolled her service both to Peter and the Fatherland, particularly her valor in the Northern War, when she had “put aside female weakness, and willingly stayed at Our side and helped as much as possible.” The coronation manifesto introduced a new note of sexual ambiguity into the image of empress, which would sound again in Feofan Prokopovich’s coronation sermon. The classical Western concept of fundamental identity of the sexes described by Thomas Laqueur here enters Russian imagery. Queen Elizabeth of England used these attitudes “to play the alluring but inaccessible virgin queen and warrior prince,” and Catherine I and her female successors would affect a similar duality.7 The iconic form of this monarchical persona was the goddess Minerva, who conjoined power with wisdom, beauty, and high culture. The wall and ceiling paintings of the Summer Palace, completed in 1713 and 1714, presented Minerva in both military and peaceful dress. She wielded a sword, and her victory was celebrated by Cupids holding a wreath of stars. A carved wall panel of Catherine as Minerva adorned Peter’s study at Peterhof. The ceiling of the throne room of the Summer Palace, The Triumph of Catherine, painted in the 1720s, probably after Peter’s death, completed Catherine’s ascension to the heavens. Wearing a decolleté gown, she rides in a golden carriage drawn by a double-headed eagle and holds a scepter in her right hand, and the figure of a warrior with lance and shield in her left. She is accompanied by Cupids, while the figures of perfidy and ignorance lie defeated beneath. •

The coronation of Catherine I in Moscow on May 7, 1724, laid claim to Muscovite ceremonies, but changed them freely to give religious sanction to the principle of utility, Western ways, and the unchallenged supremacy of the secular power. Just as the Muscovite coronation disclosed the Russian tsar as the bearer of the signs of Byzantine sovereignty, the Petrine corona-

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tion used Muscovite rituals to sanctify the Western court of the capital. The coronation and Peter’s funeral, which took place less than a year later, sought to perpetuate his legacy not in the persons of his biological progeny but among his spiritual progeny, who would observe the new ceremonies and make his transformations everlasting. They were final examples of his use of ceremonies and symbols as mechanisms to announce the intentions and innovations of monarchical rule, a practice many of his successors would adopt, though without his radical vision. To enshrine his new ceremony and ensure its recognition by present and future generations, Peter issued the first published “description” (opisanie) of a Russian coronation. The title was Opisanie koronatsii, the Western borrowing, “koronatsiia” supplanting the Muscovite term for crowning, venchanie. Unlike the chin venchaniia, the Opisanie encompassed the many events that Peter added before and after the religious ceremonies. The Description established the new cultural context in which the coronation was to be understood. It made the religious ritual an event of secular import, justifying and glorifying every movement of the all-Russian tsar. The “textualization” of the coronation followed European example, defining the meanings the ceremonies were supposed to convey, the responses they were meant to evoke. The opening of the account made clear the new textual focus: the first subject was not the cathedral, or the regalia, but the emperor and empress themselves, whose movements before and after the ceremonies set the coronation in the chronicle of their lives. The opisanie mentioned the new ceremony of promulgation, borrowed perhaps from Prussia, which it called “the usual ceremony,” usual perhaps in Europe but not in Russia. Two days before the coronation, heralds in Western costumes appeared “everywhere in Moscow,” and “with horns and drums made public announcement” of the date of the coronation. From the start, Catherine’s coronation had the aspect of a triumph. The Description presented the troops as principal actors and made them far more prominent than the clergy. Cannon salvos resounded through the city to announce the moments of the crowning and anointment. Before the ceremonies began, the guards regiments and other battalions invested Kremlin Square. Grenadiers of the Guards, their hats decorated with plumes, lined the way from the Palace of Facets to the Assumption Cathedral. The description made no mention of spectators. The reception of the regalia in the palace, which had opened earlier coronations, was eliminated, an indication that their importance in the ceremony would be somewhat reduced. The opening procession from the Kremlin palace to the Assumption Cathedral was apparently planned with the assistance of Peter’s and Catherine’s son-in-law-to-be, the Duke of Holstein. A new ceremonial division of the guards, the drabanty, led and closed the procession. The drabanty, later called Cavalier Guards, were modeled on European guards regiments, most likely the drabants of Charles XII of

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Sweden. They wore bright green uniforms decorated with gold braid and golden imperial coats of arms and boots with spurs; their musicians played silver drums and horns. The drums and horns provided a martial counterpoint to the tolling of the bells of the churches of Moscow, as the imperial family and the court proceeded from the Palace of Facets to the Assumption Cathedral. The court dignitaries who followed now bore the titles and wore the dress of a European court—a Hofmeister, a dozen pages, then four of Peter’s young adjutants. The emperor marched behind the grand marshall, flanked by the field marshals Prince Menshikov and Prince Repnin. Abandoning his simple style of dress, Peter now wore an elegant blue summer caftan embroidered with silver, work, it was said, of the empress herself. Catherine, walking arm in arm with the Duke of Holstein, wore a lavish purple robe in Spanish style, decorated with gold embroidery. Five “state ladies” carried the train. Her hat was studded with gems and pearls. They then entered the cathedral, to the accompaniment of the choral singing. But now the choir intoned not the traditional “many years” but the one hundredth Psalm (one hundred and first in the Western Bible), “I will sing of mercy and justice unto Thee, o Lord.” The Psalm proclaimed the king’s vow to extirpate evil and promote justice, announcing a Western, Protestant conception of the monarch’s assumption of supreme moral guidance of his subjects. The scene the Opisanie depicted inside the cathedral resembled no previous Russian coronation. Westernized courtiers and foreign diplomats were arrayed in glittering magnificence in the gallery along the walls. German royalty occupied prominent places in the cathedral. Catherine, Duchess of Mecklenburg, and Anna, Duchess of Courland, both nieces of Peter, sat on thrones near the empress. Behind them in cloth of gold was the seat of the Duke of Holstein, the fiancé of Peter’s eldest daughter by Catherine, Anna. The placement of the courtiers and the Duke of Holstein at the throne followed European practice. For the first time at a coronation, emperor and empress sat on thrones side by side; above them was a golden canopy, with the state arms embroidered in black and the cross of St. Andrew. Peter introduced new items of regalia and purged the ceremony of the symbols of descent connected with the legend of Monomakh. A European crown and mantle replaced the Monomakh cap and the sacred barmy. The lavish new crown of gold was in European style. Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz, the chamberlain of the Duke of Holstein, remarked approvingly in his diary that it “far surpassed all the [other crowns] in its elegance and opulence,” and had been made “as an imperial crown ought to be made.” It weighed four pounds and was decorated with hundreds of gems, including an enormous ruby acquired by Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei, from China, which, the Opisanie boasted, was “the very most expensive” (naidragotsenneishii) and “of a size larger than a pigeon egg.” Above the ruby was an orb with a diamond cross. The new imperial mantle was no less extravagant. It

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was of gold and purple cloth, ornamented like the mantles of European kings, with ermine, and, according to the Opisanie, “a multitude of large diamonds.” The scepter and orb, as mentioned above, had been made in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in western Europe. The Opisanie stressed that the orb “recalls imperial orbs,” and claimed that its work was “ancient Roman.” The first part of the ceremony, the conferral of the regalia, had also been changed beyond recognition; Peter together with the Archbishop Feodesii worked out the changes. Although Catherine was being crowned, and Feodesii and the archbishop of Pskov, Feofan Prokopovich, officiated, Peter himself was the central figure in the ceremony, who directed the proceedings and conferred the regalia. Once all had taken their places, he gave the order to begin. He rose from the throne and took the scepter, the symbol of supreme authority, in his right hand and brandished it throughout the ceremony. Turning toward the clergy, he pronounced in loud tones, “Since our intention to crown our dearest wife has been known to all, may we proceed to complete this according to the church ceremony.” In the central episode of the coronation, Catherine fell to her knees and Peter placed the crown upon her head, the emperor replacing the clergy as the agent conferring the principal symbol of power. At the moment of the crowning, two cannons placed before the cathedral were fired and answered by a salvo of all the guns of the city and a volley from the guards lined up on the square. Peter handed Catherine the orb. Since the precept had also been removed from the ceremony, Catherine proceeded directly to the Imperial Doors. There she kneeled and was anointed according to the earlier ritual, on the brow, lips, and arms. But as consort, she was not given communion at the altar with the clergy, but before the holy doors. Another cannon salute announced the anointment. The elimination of the precept made clear that the monarch no longer looked to the clergy for moral guidance. It was replaced by a sermon or oration (Slovo Bozhiia), which at this coronation followed the communion. As in the manifesto on the coronation, Prokopovich’s sermon attributed male virtues to her: “This great Heroine is so strong in this respect that few men can compare to her, on campaigns, bad weather, adversity, boiling, heat, frigid weather, storms, hard crossings, noisy rooms, and other such difficulties harmful to the health.” She also excelled in her wifely duties. She gave Peter rest, entertainment, and companionship. Catherine’s coronation was the first to be surrounded by the elaborate and spectacular secular celebrations that would overshadow the ceremony itself over the next century. The festivities gave ceremonial confirmation to the utilitarian scenario: displays of merriment and joy indicated that the emperor’s efforts for the benefit of the realm were appreciated. The celebrations, however forced and regimented, provided symbolic consent for the enormous sacrifices of service the emperor was exacting. But these festivities

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comprised only the elite surrounding the emperor. The people of Moscow kept their distance behind the lines of soldiers and showed little sympathy for the celebrations. The day after the coronation, a gala reception took place at the Kremlin, which was resumed two days later. The receptions were followed by a ball and a lavish two-hour fireworks display on Tsaritsyn Meadow. The Opisanie extolled the spectacle. The festivities were celebrated “with magnificence and richness (s magnifitsentsieiu i bogatstvom)” and concluded “deep at night . . . with the igniting of splendid and really skillful fireworks.” An engraving of the fireworks shows eight fountains of light and numerous rockets traced against the night sky. In the foreground is an illuminated figure of Neptune on horseback. •

Peter the Great’s funeral was a moving spectacle of the reception and consecration of Peter’s legacy of secular Western culture by the elite of his state. Peter had made clear his conception of imperial funeral solemnities. Muscovite obsequies were modest events, religious observances in keeping with the ecclesiastical tenor of the tsar’s life. They began with a simple cortege, of clergy, courtiers, and the tsar’s family, which proceeded from the Kremlin Palace to the Archangel Cathedral on the day of the tsar’s death or the day after. Peter broke with the old traditions in 1699 when he staged funeral ceremonies for Admiral and General Lefort and General Gordon on the model of European knightly funeral processions. In the processions, the deceased’s horse and battle paraphernalia showed his achievements on earth. Officers replaced the clergy as the principal participants in the ceremony. Field Marshall Count Jacob Bruce composed Peter’s ceremony, apparently on the model of French, German, and Swedish royal funerals. Bruce patterned Peter’s rites on funerals for generals, adding elements of Western royal ceremonies, notably the regalia and the standards of the provinces of the empire. The elaborate ceremonies of lying in state, probably based on French practice, supplanted the Muscovite custom of immediate burial. As with the coronation, a Description (Opisanie), published shortly after the funeral by the Senate press, recorded the details of the ceremonies and established the event in the new mythology of empire. The funeral cortege on March 8, 1725, as recounted in the Opisanie, was a massive demonstration of Peter’s imperial achievements. More than a thousand musketeers and ten-thousand troops of the guard, fleet and local garrisons, as well as cavalier-guards lined the way from the palace to the Peter Paul Cathedral. Officers and officials, nobles, clergy, and merchants joined the imperial family on the way to the emperor’s resting place. The presence of deputies from the nobility and the towns made the observance a show of national grief and respect. The Opisanie thus confirmed the presence and participation of representatives of the Russian state.

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Peter was buried in the cathedral in the Peter-Paul fortress. The regiments lined up along the city wall. After the service, Archbishop Prokopovich delivered his famous funeral oration. The speech itself was brief, but according to one eyewitness, it was interrupted by weeping and crying so often that it lasted nearly an hour. Prokopovich invoked biblical analogies to eulogize Peter as a pagan god, not a sinful mortal. He cited biblical heroes not to trace the divine origins of monarchical power, but to give Peter’s accomplishments biblical significance and magnitude. Peter was Russia’s Samson: he found feeble forces “and made your [Russia’s] power stone, adamantine, as befits his name.” He was Russia’s Japthet, for building a fleet; Moses, for giving laws; and Solomon for advancing wisdom, knowledge, craft, and civil institutions. David and Constantine, the only nonbiblical figure he mentioned, were his symbols for reorganizing the church and combatting superstition. For Prokopovich, the bible figured as another sign of beginning, the ultimate denial of predecessors and origins. He mentioned no previous Russian ruler. Peter had created Russia, and he had created his successor in his wife Catherine as well. Out of “gold refined in a crucible,” Prokopovich declared, Peter had fashioned an heir to his crown, orb, and throne. Prokopovich’s eulogy held out the consolation that Peter’s spirit lived on. It lived on in Russia, whom Prokopovich now made the object of emotions. Peter had made Russia lovable, fearful to her enemies, “glorious throughout the world.” It lived on in his religious, civic and military reform. Finally, Peter’s spirit lived on in the empress, “your [Russia’s] sovereign and mother,” and his descendants. Peter could not reproduce his own superhuman persona. But in Catherine he created his new image of the Russian monarch, who resembled European monarchs, embodied the same values, and earned the same admiration as they. During the following decades, women would represent and preserve the image of civilized Western monarch in Russia. The stage manager, director, and leading actor withdrew from a scenario of heroic conquest and change, leaving the role of founder vacant.

Olympian Scenarios

The Petrine Heritage Peter the Great bequeathed to his successors a daunting image of emperor as hero and god. His Succession Law and other legislation established a utilitarian measure of justifying rule by dedication to the general good. The right to rule did not emanate from the imperial office, whether acquired by heredity or usurpation, but by achievement, real or pretended. Just as Feofan Prokopovich’s funeral oration made Catherine I Peter’s spiritual heir, the sermons, odes, and festivals that inaugurated subsequent reigns portrayed new rulers as benefactors who like Peter had subdued the forces working for personal interests against the welfare of all. Their scenarios presented them as godlike saviors of the realm, the emanations of Astraea, the virgin goddess, whose return inaugurated an era of universal justice. The practical effect of Peter’s law was to leave the succession clouded by doubt. Peter himself designated no one, and the conflicting directives of his successors held little force. In the half century after Peter’s death, aspirants to the throne called upon regiments of the guards to decide the outcome of struggles for the throne. Even before Peter’s death, Empress Catherine ordered out the guards. Citing grounds of neither heredity nor her predecessor’s designation, the decree named her ruling empress on the basis of her coronation. Similar scenes opened the reign of Empresses Anna Ioannovna, the daughter of Peter’s half-brother, Ivan V, in 1730, and his daughter, Elizabeth Petrovna, in 1741. The guards regiments and the court elite advanced the interests of the entire nobility in defending an alliance with the crown that lasted until the accession of Paul I in 1796. These decades saw the increase of the nobles’ power over their serfs. The eighteenth-century state was a shared system of domination between an empress, whose personal power was unlimited by institutions, and a nobility who dominated the bureaucracy and ruled their estates in a manner resembling their sovereign’s. It is no accident that women rulers proved able to fuse the personae of conquering and conserving monarchs, for only they could claim to defend Peter’s heritage without threatening a return of his punitive fury. From 1725 until 1796, Russia was ruled by empresses, except for the brief interludes of the reigns of Peter II (1727–1730), Ivan VI (October–December 1741), and Peter III (December 1761–June 1762). Empresses served as exemplars of both cathartic force and disarming mildness and love, reflecting a classical conception of the identity of the sexes and sexual ambiguity.

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In this system, the term “general welfare” came to mean the advancement of noble interests. Peter’s secular, rationalist scenario of power was recast to express the harmony between sovereign and nobility. Accession decrees and coronations presented the empresses as benefactresses of the realm. But if Peter exercised what Norbert Elias described as the leadership of the conqueror, the empresses of eighteenth-century Russia epitomized the conservative rule of the later stages of absolutism. Rather than compel the nobility to sacrifice for the benefit of the state, they maintained their positions in a stable system by manipulating the relations between the great families, disposing of honors, and skillfully exercising intrigue and fear.1 Yet at the same time the empresses maintained the ethos and image of conqueror. With the exception of Catherine I, who acceded to Peter’s throne, the presentations of their assumption of power emphasized the rupture with the previous reign, which stood for injustice and despotic selfinterest. The show of force set them within the Petrine myth of monarch seizing the throne in order to advance the utility of the realm. The demonstration of force was a symbolic requisite of enthronement, revealing the empress as the possessor of unbridled authority—one who had the power to act on behalf of the general good without regard to the scruples of the previous ruler or cliques. Each seizure of power, therefore, was not concealed but publicly enshrined in public statements and displays as a heroic act. Accession manifestos justified the coup, the empress appeared at the head of guards regiments, paintings glorified the show of force. The empresses presented themselves as the perpetuators of Peter’s work of transformation, maintaining an image of reforming tsar.2 The myth of renewal, of renovatio, endowed the victor with the aspect of a goddess descendant, inaugurating an age of gold. Her triumph was confirmed by the expression of consensus of the noble elite in a process that Cynthia Whittaker has described as an “etiquette of accession.”3 At ceremonies and celebrations, the nobility appeared as a unified group, the diverse economic and national constituents of the empire displaying their common allegiance to their new sovereign. Their rejoicing provided her acclamation, the ceremonial equivalent of a renewal of an original contract. The Russian monarch’s authority was justified not only by an original agreement—such as the invitation to the Varangians or the election of 1613—but by festive expressions of assent that bestowed both popular and divine mandates to rule absolutely on successful claimants of the throne.4 The scenarios of the eighteenth century glorified change while they maintained and reinforced the stability that would preserve the predominance of the serf-holding nobility. The conqueror was also the conserver, who helped defend and extend the authority of the elite. Olympian scenarios presented the symbolic and artistic forms that reconciled the antinomies of conquerorconserver, turning the conqueror into the bringer of the era of tranquility, cultivation, and grace. The androgynous image of Minerva fused the violence,

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upon which the authority of the monarch rested, with classical reason and wisdom and identified the Russian empress with the royal figures glorified as denizens of Olympus in the West. In this respect, eighteenth-century empresses continued the role of Catherine I and served as symbols of Western culture and taste. The Russian court was to become a semblance of the West; but it had to be a semblance, Russians acting as Europeans, performing the metaphor and behaving “like foreigners.”5 Status accrued to noblemen through service; they displayed their standing by imitating Europeans while remaining Russian. It was the very division between Russian origin and Western manners that entitled them to rule. In eighteenth-century Russia, theatricality was an attribute of power. Foreigners might be recruited for Russian service, but their rule or domination of the court violated patriotic pride. Although Peter recruited many non-Russians to serve in his new institutions, he restricted them to certain positions to ensure their subservience. The breach of this principle during the reign of Anna Ioannovana, 1730–1740, the daughter of Peter’s half-brother Ivan V, violated the patriotic feelings of the nobility. Anna’s German favorites, particularly her lover, Ernst-Johann Biron, dominated the government and the brief regency for the infant tsar, Ivan VI, whom she had designated. On November 25, 1741, Peter’s younger daughter by Catherine, Elizabeth, led a coup supported by members of the guard that deposed Ivan VI. The guardsmen claimed to be animated by patriotic hatred against the German tyranny. Elizabeth came to the throne as a “native” prirodnaia empress and elaborated the forms of Westernized presentation and celebration that Catherine II later used to glorify her own reign. The accession manifesto portrayed Elizabeth as savior of the realm. Anna’s regime was using violence in the name of the infant tsar, subjecting the population and herself to “extreme oppressions and insults,” and bringing the state to ruin. As a result, her subjects “especially the regiments of the Guard,” had asked her to ascend the throne. Finally, she declared that the throne was hers by legal right. Future decrees asserted her claims entirely on the basis of inheritance. But the presentations also emphasized her selfless act for the well-being of the fatherland. In the three years after her accession, numerous sermons elaborated this theme—Evgenii Anisimov counts over one-hundred—proclaimed her victor over “the wicked wreckers of the fatherland,” a heroine who had wrested “Peter’s heritage from the hands of foreigners.”6 The victory ushered in a celebration of the age of gold. The nobility performed rituals of acclamation according to the model of the Pindaric ode, which evoked theatrical scenes of the empress’s subjects rejoicing in praise of their sovereign. The celebrations consisted of hero and chorus, as if set on a proscenium: the audience was as much a part of the performance as the players, the subjects responding with exultant acclamation to the benevolence of the monarch. The odes of Michael Lomonosov and Alexander

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Sumarokov presented these shows of adulation as a collective ritual. The individual voice of the poet expressed the collective “we” of Russia, Rossiia. Lomonosov’s ode of 1742 on the occasion of a defeat over the Swedes evoked the joy of the elite at the coming of “the age of gold.” The monarch, the goddess, drives away the storms and clouds and brings the spring, She resurrects the universe, Renews nature for us, Covers the fields with flowers again: And so kindness and love, And the bright gaze of Peter’s daughter Enlivens us with new life.7

The sun breaking through the clouds is hailed with choral approval from the empire and the world—what L. V. Pumpianskii called Lomonosov’s “rapture before the West,” which turned into “rapture over oneself as a Western country.”8 Metaphor created analogies that presented Elizabeth as the equivalent of Western monarchs. Poets placed her in the classical pantheon along with European royalty. In their odes, the Christian God ruled a pagan pantheon. Lomonosov has God on Mount Olympus address the empress as “the Russian Goddess,” to whom he had entrusted “thunder” to defeat the Swedes. Elizabeth became as it were God’s own icon: “Peoples will worship My image in you,” the Lord says.9 The Russian court performed allegories of a political Olympus where the ruler, joining the company of European monarchs, bestowed benefactions upon his or her subjects. It presented what Stephen Baehr has described as “an ideal world where man can control his fate and harness the natural forces of the world to give him an ideal life.”10 The empresses were shown as heroines delivering and showering their bounty on the people, not helping to redeem their sins, or to ensure their afterlife. The “iconography of happiness” was expressed in pageants, like those of Renaissance England, which portrayed the empress as the epitome of the virtues. The resemblance is hardly accidental. In both cases, classical imagery strengthened the legitimacy of female monarchs whose rights to the throne were fragile. But the absolutist ceremonies of the Renaissance and Baroque were not empty repetitions of dead European forms. They conveyed contemporary, enlightenment meanings necessary to the elevation of the empresses’ image. The “happiness” in official rhetoric expressed the eudaemonistic ethic of the enlightenment. By promising the felicity of her subjects, the Russian empress defined herself as a European monarch. The nobility in turn understood service as the realization of the idea of enlightenment, of acting for the general good. In an era when, Jean Starobinski has observed, “pleasure became the universal justification,” ceremonial displays of pleasure, indicating general “happiness,” gave public confirmation to the monarch’s devotion to Western conceptions of the general good.11

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The Coronation of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna and the Scenario of Rejoicing In the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial coronation presented the most elaborate of these displays of joy. It combined solemn reverence for the past with the enforced gaiety of the Olympian scenario. The coronation consecrated the claims of each of the empresses, and the accompanying celebrations glorified her in terms of the Petrine myth. It was regarded as an urgent requirement of rule, and preparations began immediately after the seizure of power. In this respect, the ceremony played a role like that of the English coronations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which confirmed uncertain Tudor and Stuart claims to the throne. The coronation of Elizabeth Petrovna in 1742 incorporated the innovations introduced at the coronations of Catherine I and Anna. It represents the final stage of evolution of the ceremonies of the Russian imperial coronation. When Elizabeth removed the crown from the hands of the archbishop and crowned herself, she culminated the changes that had turned the Muscovite coronation into the consecration of an absolute monarch beholden to no earthly power, not excepting the church. The secular and religious events of the coronation elevated the leading figures of the elite, presenting them with the empress as champions of the wellbeing of the empire. The upstarts from the guards who had helped Elizabeth to power joined the scions of old families to bear witness to the consecration of the new reign. The entry into Moscow, the solemn processions to and from the cathedral, the banquet in the Hall of Facets were inspiring shows of solidarity in all the ranks of the state—the grandees of the Senate and the court, the officials in the colleges—with the monarch and her allies in taking the throne. The conquest was celebrated as a defense of the existing social hierarchy, now ostensibly renewed by deliverance from the despotism of the previous reign. The prolonged celebrations following the religious ceremonies provided strenuous, often feverish shows of acclamation by the elite for a monarch dedicated to the well-being of Russia as they understood it. The result was that the coronation assumed a new amplitude, the celebrations reaching beyond the Kremlin and demonstrating by staged and anticipated responses the elites’ acclamation of the new monarch. Elizabeth’s coronation in February 1742 opened with an elaborate entry, a practice repeated at all subsequent coronations.12 Elizabeth also remained in Moscow for eight months after the end of the coronation. She ruled from the old capital, holding court, appearing at balls and masquerades and visiting religious shrines, particularly the Trinity Monastery. In this way, she strengthened her connections with the nobility and officials in Moscow, where many central institutions maintained their headquarters until the last decades of the century.

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The understanding of the intended meaning of the coronation was not left to the imagination of those witnessing the various events. The Opisanie (Description) defined what the events meant, how they were to be perceived, and how they should be celebrated by the elite. Elizabeth’s purported to provide an account of what occurred. But in fact it portrayed not so much what occurred as what was supposed to have occurred. It was prescriptive as well as descriptive, setting the tone and rhetoric of celebration for the forthcoming reign. Elizabeth’s Opisanie was an elaborate leather-bound album, illustrated with numerous engravings.13 Its model, in this respect, appears to have been the lavishly illustrated account published in 1723 for the coronation of the twelve-year-old Louis XV in Paris. Like the Louis XV album, hers was to be the “first monument of a reign,” to glorify and publicize the majesty of her rule. The content and design of the album was assigned to ProcuratorGeneral Nikita Trubetskoi. The librarian of the Academy of Science, Johann Daniel Shumacher, directed the production of the album and tried to ensure a broad circulation. He suggested that volumes be sent to colleges, offices, chancelleries, and monasteries, “in which these books will be kept for the eternal honor and glory of Her Imperial Majesty.”14 The album opens with a magnificent full-length frontispiece of the empress standing proudly, decolletée, in full regalia (fig. 5). The scene is the palace. A baroque painting of an angel decorates the wall behind her. In the engravings of the processions and the ceremonies, highlighting and detail distinguish the empress from the tiny identical figures around her. There are no allegorical descriptions of the nation such as those appended to the description of the French coronations. The personal figure of the empress literally embodies and defines the political order. The ceremonies elevate and glorify her personal role, without the abstractions of state and nation. The albums also include engravings of the masquerades and fireworks, making clear that these now were considered integral parts of the coronation events. The opening description of the entry procession and welcoming ceremonies takes up 21 of the 128 pages, almost one-sixth of the total text of the Opisanie. The account reveals that the entry has become a principal part of the coronation, a spectacle whose symbolic meaning is almost as important as the rites in the Assumption Cathedral. Elizabeth’s coronation entry on February 28 reeenacted the Petrine triumph, making clear that military leadership elevated the sovereign and consecrated her authority no less than the blessings bestowed by the clergy. It was a glorification of force, an unambiguous statement that the monarch’s power derived from a heroic act of conquest that anteceded consecration. It presented the Westernized elite of the new capital, in Clifford Geertz’s term, “taking possession” of Moscow. The rows of guards regiments, the massive array of horses, elaborate sumptuous Western dress and carriages showed the conquest of the old capital by the new. The album described the various groups of noblemen, marching or

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5. Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Engraving by Johannes Stenglin after drawing by Louis Caravaque. From Obstoiatel’noe opisanie . . .

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on horseback, the court aristocracy riding in ornate carriages, the empress’s resplendent carriage drawn by “a most handsome team of eight Neapolitan horses,” and the carriage of Elizabeth’s fourteen-year-old nephew, Peter Fedorovich of Holstein (the son of Peter’s older daughter, Grand Duchesss Anna Petrovna), whom the empress had just designated heir. In imitation of European entries, welcoming speeches were presented at four arches constructed along the route. The welcoming parties consisted of officials, clergy, and merchants holding administrative posts in the Magistracy. The album contains Grigorii Kalachev’s engravings of the facades of the four arches, with explanations in the text. The illustrations convey the principal themes of celebration, especially the image of the empress as God-appointed savior of her people. Elizabeth’s agency, the pictures made clear, was direct, unmediated by clerical or other human powers. A picture above the passageway of the Tver arch showed a hand extending from the heavens to place a crown on Elizabeth’s head. The legend “the true sovereign is crowned not from earth but heaven,” prefigured the empress’s self-crowning. Although not included in the images of the Opisanie, this image was repeated on the coronation medal: a figure of Providence crowned the empress, who wore a decolleté gown exposing an ample bosom. The legend reads, “Divine Providence through faithful subjects.” The procession ended at the Kremlin, where Elizabeth and her entourage attended a welcoming service in the Assumption Cathedral. The oration of Archbishop Ambrosii in the Assumption Cathedral praised Elizabeth as “the actual and true Mother of the Fatherland.” It described “the great multitude of the nation” (vsenarodnoe mnozhestvo) as jubilant, especially “the poor and defenseless.” The archbishop gave the empress the welcome of Moscow. The speech expressed the joy of Moscow as a city, using what would become the conventional metaphor, of Moscow as the heart of Russia. Moscow was both personified as a collective, and made a symbol of all of Russia. The coronation ceremonies took place two months later on April 25. The procession from the Palace of Facets to the Assumption Cathedral comprised forty-nine groups (compared to nineteen at the coronation of Anna Ioannovna) and presented a magnificent display of the social and national components of the Russian elite. State officials were more numerous than at previous eighteenth-century coronations. Following the delegation of noblemen marched senators, then, for the first time, officials from each of the twelve colleges. The investiture remained the principal moment of the coronation ceremony. After reading the credo and assuming the mantle, Elizabeth received the benediction from the archbishop. Then, at her command, the crown was brought to her, she lifted it, and placed it on her head—the first Russian monarch to crown her- or himself. After the conferral of the scepter and the orb, she sat on the throne and listened to a protodeacon recite her full title. The recitation included the principalities and lands that made up her realm,

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6. Crowning Ceremony, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Engraving by Grigorii Kalachev. From Obstoiatel’noe opisanie . . .

a proclamation of the vast extent of her imperial dominion. The bells in the Kremlin tolled, accompanied by a 101-gun salute. The clergy then greeted the empress with a triple bow. Grigorii Kalachev’s engraving presents the empress as if on a stage (fig. 6). Elizabeth, her features delicately delineated, sits in the vast space, all eyes fixed upon her. Indeed, the editorial committee for the album had insisted on proper use of perspective in this illustration and requested the court stage designer, Girolamo Bon, to revise the drawings.15 The drama of the investiture now culminated with two prayers that Feofan Prokopovich had introduced at Anna’s coronation in 1730 to express the absolute monarch’s relation to God and to her people. Elizabeth first pronounced a supplication for guidance from above, the prayer of Solomon. She occupied center stage and addressed the Lord directly rather than through the mediacy of the officiating prelate. In full regalia, she delivered a supplication for guidance, a turning to God for wisdom. She beseeched the Lord to teach her (nastavi) to give her understanding (vrazumi) and to guide her (upravi) “in this great service.” She asked for his help in governing “for the welfare of the people entrusted to me and to your great glory.” The supplication established the empress, rather than the church, as the primary moral guardian of the people. Ambrosii now kneeled and delivered

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the prayer “from the entire people” (ot litsa vsego naroda), which replaced the pre-Petrine precept, the homily delivered by the Metropolitan to the tsar. Ambrosii begged forgiveness for lawlessness and called upon the Lord to instruct Elizabeth to work in “her great service” to God. He also asked God to bestow reason upon her, to judge people fairly, and repeated many of the admonitions that had been contained in the pre-Petrine precept, to subdue enemies, to open her heart to the poor and afflicted, to instill in her subjects a sense of justice and avoid partiality and bribery. There was no reference to the role of the Church, and Jesus Christ, whose name had dominated the precept, was mentioned only once, in the closing sentence. Then Ambrosii delivered a sermon hailing the empress’s courage and heroism, following the example of Prokopovich’s encomium at Catherine I’s coronation. He described Elizabeth as the embodiment of Peter’s courage and foresight. All of Russia, he declared, was rejoicing because “in You our Most Radiant God-Crowned Autocrat lives the soul of Peter the Great, who astounded all the world with his victories and triumphs.” Peter lived in his daughter. Like Catherine, she had forgotten “the delicacy of her sex” and had put her life at risk for the fatherland. As “the leader and cavalier of the troops,” she had succeeded in “wresting the heritage of Peter the Great from the hands of foreigners and delivering the sons of Russia from slavery.” She had brought the return of the prosperity of her father’s reign. After congratulations from “ecclesiastical and secular personages,” the empress left the cathedral in full regalia accompanied by the clergy and her courtiers to the thunder of the guns of the troops on the square, horns and drums, and the tolling of the bells of the churches. She made the traditional procession around the square to prayer services in the Archangel Cathedral for the pre-Petrine tsars, and in the Annunciation Cathedral. Behind her walked the chancellor, Prince Cherkasskii, who tossed coins into the crowd. The coronation banquet had become another event celebrating the Westernized elite surrounding the empress. Elizabeth opened the proceedings by awarding coronation medals to leading figures at the court and bishops of the Holy Synod, thus making clear that clerical positions were equivalent to state offices. She then gave the signal to be seated. Twelve colonels brought the dishes to the table under the direction and with the assistance of the grand marshall and the ceremony-masters of the court. Her favorites, Michael Vorontsov, and one of the Shuvalov brothers, stood at the side of her throne as cavalier-guards. “The celebration of the coronation of Her Imperial Majesty continued with various joyous diversions for a whole week,” the Opisanie declared. Church bells tolled and the city was illuminated. In the evening on the day after the coronation, April 26, the empress held the first of a series of audiences, to receive congratulations from the members of the various estates, the bureaucracy, military officers, and foreign ambassadors. During the first audience, the feast for the people took place before the palace. Wine in the fountains gushed from the mouths of Cupids; figures of Bacchus and Ceres

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symbolized joy and plenty. An engraving shows the square filled with masses of people, the oxen laid out on four plinths. The Opisanie states that “Her Imperial Majesty deigned to throw silver coins from the window to the people.” This was the first official mention of an appearance of a Russian monarch before the people’s feast.16 On April 29, Elizabeth moved in another elaborate procession from the Kremlin to her palace, her “winter house,” on the River Iauza. The decorations on the Iauza Palace, figures of nude gods and goddesses, set the tone for the coming days. There were gala dinners, balls, and performances of the Italian opera troupe. On May 7th, the regalia were put on exhibition in the Kremlin palace. The Opisanie reported that 100 “notables” (znatnye), and 136,158 of those “of other ranks besides commoner,” visited the exhibition. There were frequent masquerades at the winter house, eight listed for May alone. From 800 to 1,000 tickets were given out. The vignette on the last page of the account is a scene of the dance floor, with costumed figures deftly turning legs and torsos. The preface to the description of the fireworks in the Opisanie explained the significance of the celebrations. Elizabeth’s coronation had “produced so many pleasant and amusing feelings.” These thoughts about the coronation, it continued, “correspond completely with the inner feelings and public recognition of all loyal residents of the Russian empire.”17 Fireworks displays marked the official end of the celebrations, nearly six weeks after the coronation ceremony. The engravings show the heavens lit up with fountains of light that illuminate the entwined initials of the empress. Beneath sits Genii symbolizing justice, courage, prosperity, and “the joy of the empire.” An illumination followed revealing a grove of trees before a mountain. The pomegranate tree, the Opisanie explained, was of special significance. Although the pomegranate tree was known as a symbol of fertility, the Opisanie presented it as a symbol of innate and incipient royalty, justifying the self-crowning. The pomegranate, though it has a crown from its first shoots, only displays it at complete maturity and “therefore with its innate (prirodnaia) force must place the crown on itself, that is, Meam mihi reddo coronam or “I lay the crown on myself.”18 The summer after the coronation, Elizabeth went on a pilgrimage to the Trinity Monastery; and a visit to the shrine would conclude all future coronations. Elizabeth was known for her piety; along with the bon vivant, and pagan reveler, she could appear as a devout believer, displaying her orthodox, “native” persona. At the moment of her coup, she is said to have fallen to her knees before an icon of the Mother of God and prayed with great fervor. This was the piety of a lay believer, not the monastic piety of the seventeenth-century court. Elizabeth liked to have clerics in attendance, even at balls, operas, and masquerades, and her exact observance of the many fasts of the church won the admiration of the hierarchs. She thus succeeded in avoiding Anna’s identification with Europeans and fulfilled the symbolic imperative of the myth: to affect a foreign role, while remaining Russian.

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Elizabeth’s pilgrimages to monasteries, like those of her successors, were shows of respect for an Orthodox Church that was subordinated to the authority of the Russian state. Her many pilgrimages to monasteries during her reign had more of the spirit of rejoicing than of solemn devotion. They combined worship with pleasure, turning religious observance into a festivity replete with cannon salutes and fireworks, as well as the tolling of bells. •

The coronation introduced the scenario of demonstrative rejoicing that continued through the first years of Elizabeth’s reign. The rejoicing was for the return of Petrine Russia. But Elizabeth had inherited neither her father’s vision nor his destructive energy. After restoring the Senate and other institutions of Peter’s reign, she tended to leave government in the hands of her favorites. Elizabeth evoked her father not only to legitimize her position, but to provide a mythical charismatic basis for her own rule, the rule of a conserving monarch, whose principal goal was to maintain the existing social and political order. Elizabeth resumed Peter’s role as the leader of revelry. She revealed her devotion to the general good by dominating the imagination with a world of make-believe and delight, the festival as coup d’état. Peter had intended her to wed the young Louis XV, and she indulged her taste for the erotic playfulness and amorous intrigues of Versailles. A painting by Louis Caravaque, no longer extant, gave her the body of a naked Venus. Venus was the allegorical embodiment of gaiety and abandon, the leading figure in a scenario of unending joy. Elizabeth’s beloved metamorfozy effected sexual transformations. All, including the empress, came in costumes of the opposite sex. Elizabeth played her roles with great ardor. Eugene Anisimov estimates that she spent nearly half her days at court diversions during the first decade of her reign. These functions were not exclusive gatherings for the highest elite; they encompassed lesser officials and noblemen as well as the high aristocracy. Over a thousand guests reveled at her masquerades, which filled all the public halls of the imperial palace.19 The elite also expressed their sense of belonging by appearing in costly Western attire. Elizabeth enjoyed preeminence, wearing the most costly gowns, following the example of her mother, Catherine. Her wardrobe was legendary—ostensibly 15,000 dresses were found after her death. The nobility had to follow her example. According to the court jeweller, Pauzié, even ladies of relatively low rank had outfits of enormous cost, reaching 10,000 rubles. Elizabeth’s decrees went into great detail about the style of women’s hairdos and dress at the court, ensuring that the ladies of the court would conform to Western fashion, but not so much that they would rival the empress.20 The empress Anna had begun building palaces that provided vast and fantastic settings for court festivities, and Elizabeth built lavish new palaces and remodeled the old. Bartolommeo Francesco Rastrelli’s Summer Palace, and Smolny Convent, his redesign of the Great Palace at Tsarskoe Selo and the

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Winter Palace created an aura of Rococo magnificence. Rastrelli rendered the Rococo flourishes of feminine grace and elegance in monumental dimensions suitable to the Russian monarchy. Yet it was not only in symbolic externals that Elizabeth preserved the spirit of Peter’s reign. The restoration of the Senate and other Petrine offices indicated the intention to maintain a continuity of state institutions based on Peter’s legislation. Efforts at codification of the laws continued, and the principle of advancement by merit was reaffirmed, even if honored more often in the breach. The government established banks for the advancement of trade and agriculture and, at the instance of Peter Shuvalov, eliminated internal tariffs. Most important, the spirit of reform persisted, paving the way for changes introduced after her death. In the sphere of enlightenment, Elizabeth’s reign prepared the way for the development of thought later in the century. Elizabeth herself was poorly educated and lacked intellectual interests. But many of her favorites, among them Ivan Shuvalov, Peter Shuvalov’s brother, and Nikita Panin read the works of the philosophes and conceived of a monarchy based on law, staffed by officials who gained their positions on the basis of merit. It was Ivan Shuvalov who persuaded the empress to agree to the establishment of Russia’s first university, Moscow University, in 1755. With the encouragement of Nikita Panin, a group of intellectuals and writers formed at the university to pursue ideas of enlightenment reform. Elizabeth appointed Panin tutor to the son of the heir, Pavel Petrovich, the future emperor Paul I. In other areas as well, intellectual Westernization quickened during Elizabeth’s reign. The first scholarly and intellectual journals began to appear, with small circulations to be sure, but harbingers of things to come. “A new generation was prepared, trained in different rules and customs from those dominant in earlier reigns,” Sergei Soloviev wrote. These noble intellectuals would become prominent after Elizabeth’s death, a generation “that made the reign of Catherine II renowned.”21

Minerva on the Throne On June 28, 1762, the empress Catherine Alekseevna, dressed in a uniform of the Preobrazhenskii guards, led a conspiracy that deposed her husband, Emperor Peter III. Peter, the grandson of Peter the Great and son of Peter’s older daughter, Anna of Holstein, ruled for less than six months, during which he alienated the guards and the court elite by his Prussian manner and tastes. Catherine had initially given the impression that she was acting on behalf of her son, the Grand Duke Paul, but it immediately became clear that she herself intended to rule. Peter was imprisoned and shortly after murdered. The former princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, she had no legal claim to the throne—neither by heredity nor by designation. She elevated her rule by

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reference to her achievements, real or putative, for the benefit of Russia. Her seizure of power was extolled as an act of heroic deliverance. The accession manifesto of July 6, 1762, written by Nikita Panin and Grigorii Teplov, painted Peter III’s reign in the darkest colors. Monarchical power “unbridled by kind and altruistic qualities” turned into “an evil with destructive consequences,” the manifesto declared. The fatherland trembled seeing “a Sovereign and ruler who slavishly obeyed all his passions . . . before he began to think of the well-being of the state entrusted to him.”22 Like Anna, Peter III had taken on the appearance of a foreigner, rather than of a Russian acting as a foreigner. The manifesto accused him of “hatred for the fatherland.” He had “no traces of the Greek Orthodox church” in his heart, had shown contempt for the religion, its rites and icons, and had planned to begin the destruction of churches. Most important, the manifesto maintained, he had tried to corrupt everything accomplished by Peter the Great, had scorned laws and justice, squandered state funds, begun costly and bloody wars. The strict Prussian discipline that Peter III had introduced in imitation of Frederick the Great prompted the charge that he had “conceived a hatred for the Guards regiments,” and had thrown the organization of the army into disarray.23 The coup brought the dawn of the new age. Catherine’s selfless act of violence supported her claim to rule in the interests of all. The medal issued upon her accession depicts her in helmet, as a formidable, bellicose Minerva. Like Catherine I and Elizabeth before her, she exemplified male as well as female qualities, both prowess and graciousness. A painting of 1762 presents her in guards uniform at the head of her troops. A drawing executed at her request shows her being greeted by troops at the balcony of the Winter Palace. She loved to ride about and appear at masquerades in guards uniform. “A man’s dress is what suits her best,” the British envoy, Lord Buckingham remarked, “she wears it always when she rides on horseback.” Later in her reign, she continued to wear men’s costumes at balls and on occasion to play at pursuing young ladies.24 The assent for the coup came in the form of expressions of her subjects’ affection. The reverse side of the medal shows Catherine receiving a crown from a kneeling allegorical figure of Petersburg, and the presentations of her accession emphasized the popular support, the love her subjects had shown. In fact, there is little evidence of widespread support for the coup besides the leaders and guards regiments who participated in the coup.25 Catherine’s scenario used the “love” of the people as a sign of the popular support that enabled her to depart from the norms of succession. Love became a leitmotif in the rhetoric of the first years of her reign. The generalized “joy” of Elizabeth’s scenario turns into the generalized “love” of Catherine’s. The word “love” expresses her intention to act for the good of others, not herself. The Manifesto of July 7, 1762, announcing the coronation for the subsequent September, declared, “The entire world can see that zeal for religion, love for Our Russian Fatherland, and also the fervent wish of all Our loyal

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subjects to see us on the Throne, and through us to receive deliverance from those dangers that have occurred and even greater ones that were about to follow.” If she had not acted, she would have had to answer before the Lord’s judgment for the dangers threatening Russia, and having done so, she had received the Lord’s blessing. She had liberated the fatherland from danger, “without bloodshed.” She now had the pleasure of seeing the “love, joy, and gratitude” that her subjects had shown in accepting her and “the zeal with which they pronounced the solemn oath of loyalty to us, about which we had earlier been completely confident.”26 “Love” as well as joy purportedly greeted Catherine’s act of deliverance, and during her reign her relations with her servitors were portrayed in terms of affection. Love suggested inner dispositions that motivated the external displays of joy and exultation. Catherine’s love for her subjects suggested a new type of rule informed with the sensibilities of the enlightenment. It was rule by humane feelings, if not by institutional guarantees. The monarch would reign with benevolence and care because it was in her heart to do so. Her subjects would show their appreciation with displays of love, confirming her right to rule. “Love” described what purported to be an independent prompting rather than an orchestrated response. Catherine used it to evoke a sense of mutual attachment, sympathy, and devotion that would define the relationship between throne and nobility. As the Russian nobility grew to include the elites of newly acquired territories, professions of love expressed the devotion that united noblemen of all parts of the Russian empire with the empress. Catherine was also presented as Minerva, the embodiment of enlightenment, making known that the advancement of science and learning would accompany the impending process of renovation. Her coronation put on display the leading themes of Catherine’s reign—love and science—in the context of the motif of renovation. If Elizabeth’s coronation proclaimed a “native empress” who revived her father’s spirit, Catherine presented a humane empress whose rule was distinguished by a compassion and reason that won the hearts of her subjects. They in turn responded with exultant celebration, which, the text and verse emphasized, was joy animated by a feeling of love. The chorus of adulation extends beyond the elite to include the “people” as well. For the first time at a Russian coronation, there are references to shouts of “hoorah” from the crowds in the square during the procession. The proscenium as a distance-creating barrier is eliminated. No longer a stage performance with an inferred audience, the spectacle purports to be enacted in and among the people. The performance leaves the court, reaches the streets of Moscow, eventually goes to the provinces. But Catherine’s scenario carries no democratic implications. The “people” are themselves only actors supporting the chorus of the elite and confirming the dawn of a new era with Catherine’s accession. There is no hint that rule derives from or even is beholden to popular sentiment. Rather, the response confirms the

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derivation of her power from a higher realm that inspires altruism and wisdom, and allows her to bestow her virtues on her subjects. Catherine’s coronation took place on September 22, only nine days after the entry. The procession to the Assumption Cathedral was longer than before, consisting of fifty-one different sections. The Opisanie stressed the tranquillity of the population during the entry procession to the Cathedral. “There was no disorder but everyone, it seems, waited with impatience only for the crowning of Her Majesty as the beloved Most Kind Sovereign Autocrat.” Delegations from the Zaporozhets and Don Cossacks, each led by its ataman made clear the broadening of the imperial elite. The bearers of the regalia were prominent figures from Elizabeth’s reign, showing Catherine’s loyalty to the ruling elite. The panir was carried by Semen Kirilovich Naryshkin, an Eger-Meister, and Admiral Ivan Talyzin, who had commanded the troops in Catherine’s coup. Senator Peter Sumarokov, who had served under Anna, Elizabeth, and Peter III, carried the state sword. The bearers of the imperial mantle were General Peter Saltykov, who had led Russian armies during the Seven Years War, and Field-Marshall Alexander Shuvalov, Elizabeth’s favorite, who had been a senator under Peter III. The procession thus presented an impressive show of the members of the elite joining ranks in support of Catherine’s usurpation. Despite Catherine’s frequent complaints about costs, she spent lavishly on the production of her regalia, making certain that their magnificence equaled or surpassed Western examples. Immediately after her accession, she preoccupied herself with the redesign of the imperial crown. Following her instructions, the court jeweller, Geremie Pauzié, fashioned a crown that he described as “the most opulent thing that exists in Europe.” It weighed nearly five pounds and, in somewhat altered form, was worn at all subsequent coronations. It was studded with 75 large pearls, 2,500 diamonds, and 5,012 other precious gems. The cross on top rested on a ruby. Catherine’s robe of silver brocade was embroidered with eagles and gold braid.27 Catherine’s coronation observed the order of ceremonies followed by Elizabeth’s. The speech of congratulations, delivered by the Novgorod Metropolitan, Dmitrii, carried on the tradition of lauding the empress’s personal virtues and qualifications for rule and used the appellation “Mother of the Fatherland,” which would be used to describe her concern for her citizens during her reign. Dmitrii spoke of her “pure heart” and her “blameless path” to power. She did not seek power or wealth by coming to the throne. In conclusion he exclaimed, “O, Russians, you have received such a Mother of the fatherland, a Mother who cares for her flock and rejoices in them!”28 The recessional in full regalia to the graves of the empress’s “ancestors” at the Archangel Cathedral and to the Annunciation Cathedral provided an occasion for a display of popular acclaim. When Catherine emerged from the Assumption Cathedral “the regiments standing on parade and all the assembled people shouted hoorah.” The Opisanie text says that the shouts continued for half an hour until the empress gave a sign for the procession

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to continue.29 After the procession, she retired to the Kremlin Palace where she ascended the throne for the granting of favors. She lavished awards, diamond swords, Orders of Nevskii, and court ranks, especially on those who had assisted her on her accession to the throne. The completion of the coronation ceremonies set the stage for the celebrations. “The gala coronation of Her Imperial Majesty continued with various joyous diversions for eight days,” the Opisanie declared. The official account only alluded to the festivities, but their magnificence and scale reconfirmed the European character of the Russian court and stunned foreign visitors. The English ambassador wrote of a magnificent amateur show at court, “which would do honor to its author in any country.” Such elegance was doubly impressive in view of “how recently the fine arts were introduced to Russia.” Celebrations at the homes of the great Moscow nobles, the Sheremet’evs, the Razumovskiis, the Saltykovs, and Golitsyns were no less sumptuous.30 The postcoronation celebrations were given a broader scope to show the “love” of the common people for the new empress. On the evening of the coronation, the Kremlin was illuminated and people converged from all over Moscow to witness “the spectacle of fire.” At midnight, both the Opisanie and the newspaper account reported, Catherine stepped out on the Red Staircase “incognito” to admire the illumination, and the people “recognized her and greeted her with a loud hoorah until she repaired to her chambers.” At the popular feast on the day after the coronation, fountains again spouted red and white wine, and roast oxen were served to the people. Catherine threw gold and silver coins into the crowd, and, the Opisanie adds, “each can imagine the rapture with which the people gazed on their anointed Sovereign.” Catherine was “gladdened” by the joy of her subjects. On Saturday of that week, roast oxen with trimmings and bread were sent out to different streets in the city.31 While the balls and masquerades at Catherine’s coronation were not publicized, the fireworks display on Tsaritsyn Meadow served as another occasion to demonstrate the popular approval of the new empress. At the signal of a 101-gun salute, a blazing shield revealed an allegorical figure of Russia “despairing and insulted” who had been brought back to light by a figure of “Providence descending from the heavens” through the name of Her Majesty. The thunder of the guns and brilliance of the display, the Opisanie continued, so delighted the throng of people who gathered nearby that they could not contain exclamations of “Hoorah!”32 The celebrations of Catherine’s coronation also proclaimed her intellectual intentions and ambitions. The world of education and scholarship gathered to hail the dawning era of wisdom. Speeches from the rostrums of the lecture halls of the Academy of Sciences and the recently founded Moscow University extolled the empress as a patron of learning and were duly published. A fireworks display before the building of the university showed Catherine as Minerva, the bringer of peace and the protector of wisdom.

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The meaning of the symbols was explained in a volume with Russian, German, and French translations. Moscow University expressed its recognition that “by gloriously putting aside weapons and battle, the russian minerva turns her most gracious gaze on [the university] and mercifully deigns to assist its growth.”33 The festivities continued during the six months Catherine remained in Moscow, dramatizing the empress’s role of moral instructor. The dawning golden age would not only bring just rule and prosperity, but instruction of the people in virtue, under the guidance of a benevolent monarch. The golden age now was pictured as a time of honest and responsible behavior, when the population would learn civic virtue. This was the theme of the extraordinary street masquerade staged in January during Shrovetide. The program booklet was entitled “ ‘Minerva Triumphant’ in which the vileness of the vices and the glory of the virtues are presented.”34 The actor and theater director Fedor Volkov staged a cavalcade that lasted three days and comprised nearly four thousand individuals and two hundred floats. Choruses on the floats sang verses composed by Michael Kheraskov and Peter Sumarokov. The floats satirized stupidity and ignorance, drunkenness, deceit, arrogance, and prodigality. The masquerade was combined with extensive popular amusements, games, dances, puppet shows, and magicians. Although it took the forms of carnival, Catherine’s masquerade in the streets used popular forms to display a moral transformation ordained from above. “Minerva Triumphant” presented the motif of transformation in terms of the moral education of the population. The cavalcade of dwarfs and giants, satyrs, drunkards and fools, concluded with the figures of Vulcan and Jupiter and then a parade of the virtues accompanying Minerva herself. The choruses ended with invocations of Astraea and the golden age. In Catherine’s enlightenment scenario, knowledge and reason were to help the monarch overcome the flaws of humanity. Kheraskov, on the staff of Moscow University and director of its printing house, declared that learning and study were the answers to vice.35 The masquerade thus portrayed what would become Catherine’s enlightenment version of the absolute state. Peter the Great had replaced the antinomy sin-salvation with worthless-useful, the terms he had used to describe the heir. Catherine reframed the antinomy as vice-virtue, with virtue defined in civic terms. The empress saves her people from the despotism of her predecessor and transforms them into citizens through laws and education. But she does not redeem their sins nor is she concerned for her own. She and her elite disport themselves in a firmament beyond the judgment of ordinary mortals, where personal probity and biblical morality have no special value. Catherine, like Elizabeth, put on demonstrative shows of her devotion to Orthodoxy and the church. She made clear that she, unlike her husband, would respect the religious traditions of Russia, a gesture necessitated by her intention to proceed with the confiscation of monastery lands planned during his reign. Although she was devoid of piety, she too staged magnificent

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pilgrimages that gave her religious observance all the splendor of a court spectacle. Her first to the Trinity Monastery, took place less than a month after the coronation. She traveled in a large convoy of carriages with a great suite. Her visit was described in an official account published that year, A Description of the Most Joyous Entry of the Most Pious Sovereign Empress Catherine Alekseevna into the Holy Trinity Monastery.36 The text described a gala reception that continued the scenario presented at the coronation. After she entered the monastery to a hymn sung by a group of seminarians, Archimandrite Lavrentii welcomed her as “the Russian Delevratrix,” who in piety was “the Second Helen,” the mother of Constantine the Great, and in courage “the image of Judith of Israel.” In the evening, there was an illumination, which, with emblems and stories from the scriptures “presented the joy that the Church and Russia had seeing ruling over it a monarch known for piety and wisdom,” and gratitude to God for his providence in protecting “his Israel.” The following May, Catherine undertook a demanding pilgrimage on foot to Rostov. Catherine walked to Rostov at the rate of about seven miles a day. Often she had to retire to a carriage, but apparently returned to the place where she had left off. Despite the bad weather, she completed the journey in eleven days. She patiently witnessed miracle cures and insisted that the shrine be kept open during her stay “so that the common people do not think that the remains are being hidden from me.” Her effort won the admiration of Muscovites, who regarded the pilgrimage as a religious exploit. It showed Catherine’s religious sensibilities shortly after she had succeeded in removing the Rostov archbishop, Arsenii, the leading opponent of secularization of monastery lands.37 The Rostov trip, however, was more than a pilgrimage. It was the first of Catherine’s many journeys through the empire as she extended the ambit of her ceremonies to the provinces. Catherine was the first Russian ruler to exploit the ceremonial possibilities of travel to show the monarch’s care for her subjects and their demonstrative appreciation for her concern. From Rostov she went to Iaroslavl. The following fall she visited the Baltic provinces, which allowed the local nobility to demonstrate their devotion to the throne—in the hope of confirmation of their special privileges. The triumphal arches, balls, and fireworks brought the Baltic Ritterschaft into the rejoicing of the realm and displayed the unity of the elite of the empire.38

The Empress as Legislatrix Catherine presented herself as “philosophe on the throne,” identifying her rule not with present or historical models of Western monarchy, but with the ideal she found in Western thought. As a young grand-duchess, she had learned the importance of self-discipline and knowledge from a Swedish Count, H. A. Gyllenborg, who had provided her with a reading list includ-

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ing works of Plutarch, Tacitus, and Montesquieu. Before she came to the throne she had read many of the principal works of the philosophes, and in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, she began to consider theoretical questions of politics under the tutelage of Nikita Panin. She early made known her persona as the legislatrix who brought the benefits of reason to her subjects through the instrumentality of the laws. Her principal endeavor was the commission to codify the laws, which she convoked in Moscow in 1767. The commission consisted of deputies from the estates, nobility, townspeople, state peasants, and deputies from the “nonRussian tribes.” The “Instruction,” Nakaz, that she composed to guide them consisted of precepts borrowed from enlightenment legal writers, particularly Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria. The Nakaz was published in German, French, English, and Latin translations, giving it immediate notoriety. Six editions were published between 1767 and 1771 and four more during the remaining years of Catherine’s reign. But the commission failed to produce a code. Instead, the various estates took the occasion to voice their particular grievances and demands and showed little concern for the empress’s lofty goals. Nonetheless, the expression of legal principles from the throne established an ideal and a measure for future legal reform in Russia. Whatever their legal and institutional significance, the Nakaz and the subsequent commission were constituent events in Catherine’s scenario of rule. They played a crucial role in defining her image as sovereign and presenting her within the Petrine motifs of conquest and renovation. The effort at codification showed her as Astraea, realizing justice, bringing the Age of Gold. Victor Zhivov writes, “The Nakaz, like the entire state ideology, entered the sphere of myth and fulfilled a mythological function. It was an attribute of the monarch establishing universal justice and creating harmony in the world.”39 Yet Catherine gave an entirely new presentation to the myth of universal justice and the age of gold. This was not to be the Christian justice of the pious monarch, or Astraea defeating the forces of dissension identified with Satan. Catherine takes on the image of legislatrix who realizes the welfare of her subjects by introducing legal norms found in the writings of the West. She thus gave a new interpretation to the myth of empire. In Russia, George Knabe pointed out, the image of Rome played a distinctive role, replacing Russian reality with an emblematic reality of classical antiquity.40 If Peter assumed the aspect of Augustus, the military leader, Catherine appeared as the successor to Numa and Marcus Aurelius, a sovereign who embodied wisdom as well as military leadership. Catherine’s exemplar was not the Sun King, but the philosopher king. Voltaire described the Nakaz as “the finest monument of the age.” Frederick the Great said it was worthy of a great man, concluding that “we have never heard of any Female being a Lawgiver. This Glory was reserved for the Empress of Russia.”41 Ernst Cassirer wrote that the philosophy of the enlightenment held to an “apriority of law,” to a “demand for absolutely universally valid and

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unalterable legal norms.”42 Catherine’s Nakaz was a typical product of enlightenment thought, spelling out universal norms for the deputies to choose in order to devise appropriate statutes for Russia. The goal of monarchy, article 13 proclaims, was “Not to deprive People of their Natural Liberty; but to correct their Actions in order to attain the supreme Good.” The Laws brought the wise influence of the sovereign to bear upon the courts. The judge must precisely apply the laws issued by the sovereign without interpretation, for “they are not Legislators” (Articles 20, 149, 151). The propositions of the Instruction were totally new for Russia: “The Laws ought to be so framed, as to secure the Safety of every Citizen as much as possible” (33). “The Equality of the Citizens consists in this; that they should all be subject to the same Laws”(34). The document went beyond legal questions to make recommendations on the growth of population, the development of commerce and trade, taxation, education, the family, and the conduct of the nobility.43 The Nakaz, Stephen Baehr observed, evokes the image of paradise. Article 521 declares that “God forbid that after this legislation is finished any nation on earth should be more just and consequently should flourish more than Russia.” Article 521 expresses the expectation that the codification would make “the people of Russia the most happy . . . of any on earth.” The works of art and literature issued on the occasion of the commission portray Catherine in the company of classical lawgivers, particularly Numa and Lycurgus. In their company, she too takes on the sacrality of a founder and creator. An engraving of the time shows Catherine standing before the throne, flanked by Minerva and Mars, her right hand extended toward the open book, the Nakaz (fig. 7). The common people press toward the throne struggling to see the instructions bestowed upon them. A large obelisk bears the inscription, “the good of each and all.” In the background, on a column stands the statue of an ancient legislator. Before the throne sit a couple with two infants, Romulus and Remus; behind them the face of a wolf is visible. The allegory thus places Catherine in a classical setting, showing her to be the founder, renewing Russia by incorporating Rome. Michael Kheraskov’s allegorical novel, Numa, or Flourishing Rome, published in 1768, expanded on this theme, using the figure of Numa the lawgiver to glorify Catherine, as one whose laws would make Russia into a “flourishing Rome.” Kheraskov portrayed Numa as a savior of his people and other lands. His laws would bring “truth triumphant, virtue rejoicing, and vices driven out.”44 The solemn ceremonies that opened the commission on July 30, 1767, in the Moscow Kremlin established the codification as an act of historical significance in the mythology of state. Convoking the meeting in Moscow, a city not to the empress’s liking, gave it a historical precedent in the Assemblies of the Land of the previous century, and also the consecration of the clergy of the principal cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church. The ceremonies began with a mass in the Assumption Cathedral and the signing of an oath by the 460 deputies. The deputies then filed into the Audience

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7. Allegory of Catherine as Legislator. Brückner, Istoriia Ekateriny vtoroi. Vol. 4.

Room of the Kremlin Palace where they saw Catherine, wearing imperial mantle and the small crown, standing on the dais. On a table beside her lay the books displayed as significant in the work of legislation: the Instruction, the procedure of the commission, and the instruction to the general procurator. Metropolitan of Novgorod, Dmitrii, delivered a speech declaring

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Catherine the successor to Justinian, and Russia the heir to the Byzantine legal tradition. On Sunday, August 12, after mass, the deputies gathered in the palace for a display of personal recognition and homage. They offered Catherine the titles of Great, Most-Wise, and Mother of the Fatherland. She declined all three with studied modesty. Whether she was “great,” she declared, could only be determined by posterity and the term “most-wise” could only be used for God. The appellation of Mother of the Fatherland was superfluous for “to love the subjects entrusted to me I consider the duty of my calling and to be beloved of them is my wish.”45 The hopes for such sacrifice of self-interest in the cause of altruistic legislation, however, proved ill-founded; the deputies above all sought to advance the interests of their particular estates, and the humanitarian sermons left them unmoved. The commission continued its deliberations until the autumn of 1768 when the outbreak of war against the Ottoman empire provided an excuse for termination, though several of the subcommissions continued working into the 1770s. Catherine continued to believe, however, that the didactic purpose had been achieved. The Instruction, she was convinced, brought unity of rules and discussions, and the deputies learned “something of the will of the legislator and to act according to it.”46

The Empress, the Nobility, and the Empire The series of decisive victories for Russia’s land and sea forces in the war against the Ottoman empire enhanced the feeling of mutual admiration and dependence between Catherine and her leading military servitors. The successes of the Russian armies and the defeat and destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Chesma by Russian ships under Catherine’s favorite, Alexei Orlov, on June 24, 1770, established Russia’s dominance in the south. In 1774 the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji gave Russia new territories along the Black Sea, augmented the province of New Russia, and acquired the right for Russian subjects, for the first time, to trade and to navigate on the Black Sea. But the good feeling was considerably diminished by the rebellion led by Emilian Pugachev. The massive uprising among Ural Cossacks, Bashkirs, and other national groups spread to the peasantry of central Russia in 1773 and 1774. Although ultimately defeated, the uprising revealed the nether side of the age of gold, the resentment of the enserfed population toward the noblemen who composed the Westernized administration and culture of Petrine Russia. The initial recruits to Pugachev’s cause were the Cossack rank and file, who had been reduced to near serf conditions with the encroachments of the modern state and the development of local noble elites. The movement turned into a jacquerie in the Volga areas as many peasants took the opportunity to even accounts with landlords, looting estates, stringing up their

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landlords, leaving thousands of dead. Pugachev was executed by beheading and his assistants sentenced to either beheading or penal servitude. But the expenses of the Ottoman War that were levied on the local population, and the state of anarchy brought about by the removal of military forces from the provinces, exposed the vulnerability of the absolutist edifice. The war had left the countryside virtually unpoliced, revealing the absence of governmental presence and a lack of attention to local needs. Catherine now turned to the reform of local government that had been her intention since her accession. The Provincial Reform of 1775 both established a serious administrative presence in the countryside and involved the local nobility in their own institutions. The Reform created district and provincial elective offices that fulfilled judicial, police, and fiscal tasks. It both divided the functions of governmental organizations according to specialization and, through the elections by local gentry assemblies, ensured a supply of officials who would serve in offices that carried low prestige in the Russian social hierarchy. Catherine clearly understood the need to train such officials and viewed the reform as another example of the beneficent, tutelary role she exerted. In the preamble, she stated her hope that the new institutions would instill in those holding office a love for justice, and virtue, and an aversion to “idle time spent in luxury and other vices corrupting to the morals.” They should regard with shame laziness, carelessness, and, most of all “dereliction of duty and indifference to the general good.”47 The new institutions also stimulated local social life, bringing some of the display and pomp of the capital into sleepy provincial towns. The emancipation from service had freed many nobles to return to the countryside and to become involved in the assemblies and the offices created by the reform. The governor-general or namestnik himself became a symbolic bond between them and the Petersburg court. A powerful high official with personal attachments to the empress, he sat in the Senate and appeared as her emissary in the provinces. He arrived with a convoy of twenty-four light cavalrymen and two adjutants and was provided with an honor guard of young noblemen, one from each district of the province. The arrival of the namestnik became the occasion for great balls and receptions, which allowed the provincial nobility to participate in the life of celebration centered in the capital. The founding of the new institutions became a special occasion for festivities, which served to attract the nobility into the new institutions. In Tver, for example, the elections were followed by a Te Deum in the cathedral, a banquet at the governor-general’s house, and a ball. The empress sent her personal congratulations to the nobility of Novgorod. Provincial delegations came to Petersburg after the first election meetings and received a warm personal audience with the empress. Many of them proposed to erect a statue to Catherine; the empress graciously declined and urged that the funds go instead to the local Boards of Public Welfare.48

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The sense of mutual interest and sympathy between empress and nobility led to an extension of their already considerable privileges. The concessions to the nobility, from the time of the emancipation from service by Peter III in 1762, were systematized in the charter to the nobility, which Catherine bestowed in 1785. The charter confirmed their right to own serfs and landed property, their freedom from service, and the right to be tried in cases involving loss of life, property, or noble status by a court of their peers. It vested noble assemblies with a corporate identity and empowered them to certify and register their members. In the preamble to the Charter, Catherine declared that “the most aristocratic and noble Russian nobility” had earned these rights and privileges by the especial devotion they had shown to the fatherland. She mentioned Russian successes in the south, particularly the treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi concluded by Field Marshall Rumiantsev, and Potemkin’s conquest of the Crimea. But it was not the feeling of obligation, she stressed, that had moved her to make so generous a grant, but her “own maternal love and splendid recognition of the Russian nobility.”49 The nobility now began to go beyond choral participation, and to stage their own ceremonies of fealty. They reproduced the spectacles of the court glorifying the empress and other members of the imperial family as the creators of empire and the patrons of the sciences. At a celebration of 1776, at the mansion of the procurator-general, Prince Viazemskii, the host’s little daughter declared in French to the members of the imperial family that she believed that the palace had been transformed into “a temple consecrated to your sacred names.” Her apostrophe to them was printed in SanktPeterburgskie Vedomosti.50 From the beginning of her reign, Catherine inspired an atmosphere of order and mutual affection in her court. She eliminated the excesses of Peter III’s reign, had rules drafted on court ranks, and brought expenditures and palace housekeeping under strict control. She introduced a personal note to the formal splendor of the court. Her displays of kindness and sympathy reflected the monarch’s new beneficent tutelary role. Rather than Peter the Great’s method of prescribing conduct by law in the assamblei, Catherine herself set a tone of conduct for the elite, a modal feeling that would unite all those marked with their sovereign’s attentions. If furious merrymaking and rejoicing united Peter the Great and Elizabeth with their servitors, it was affection and considerate self-restraint that attached Catherine to hers, the sharing of sentiments felt by enlightened individuals. Russian noblemen were to deport themselves with a genteel enlightened cultivation, a civility that separated them from the brutal combat or the crudeness of those deprived of breeding and education. The empress’s favorite played an important role in training the noble elite in genteel conduct. Like Louis XIV, she used her current favorite as an ornament of power; he rode in her carriage and stood at her side at important functions. In this respect, her amorous attraction was to be displayed as

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another attribute of her supreme power. But, as John Alexander has shown, the favorite also was a tutelary image. Catherine sought out lesser noblemen from the provinces, whom she had turned into paragons of cosmopolitan grace.51 She thus repeated and reversed the transformation that Peter had wrought with Catherine I, turning a creature of the opposite sex into a symbol of civilization and progress. Whereas the form of Catherine’s spectacles had something in common with those of earlier absolutist monarchs, like Louis XIV, the content of their presentation and the type of thought and behavior they encouraged were very much reflections of the enlightenment. Catherine was striving to create a new kind of man, shaped according to the stoic image popular in the Panin circle and among other young intellectuals in the 1760s.52 Only by acquiring such enlightenment could the nobleman become an honest and trustworthy official capable of serving the general good in Catherine’s new institutions. The enlightening of the nobility was a central purpose of Catherine’s writings. In her journal, Vsiakaia Vsiachina, she continued the tradition of Kheraskov and Sumarokov, using satire as a means of moral education. She wrote didactic comedies and works on history. She paid close attention to the education of the tsarevich Paul, and his firstborn, Alexander, for whom she composed children’s tales and a history primer (see chapter 5). Her collected works fill a dozen large volumes. Catherine’s writings and remarks projected her image of rule and conduct onto the past, making it an intrinsic character of the Russian monarchy. Like Peter the Great she turned early Russian rulers into forerunners of herself, whom she portrayed as enlightened, refined individuals. Catherine’s historical remarks on Prince Vladimir interpreted the prince as a “wise, sensible, merciful and just sovereign” surrounded by a magnificent court. Catherine sympathized with him as a bearer of enlightenment and stability to Russia. In 1782 she created the Order of Vladimir for those in the civil and military service who had “brought especial benefit, honor, and glory” to Russia. She saw in the prince, Karen Rasmussen observed, “a cosmopolitan sovereign who appreciated and participated in the world beyond the frontiers of Kievan Russia.”53 Catherine transformed Peter the Great in her own image, much as Peter had transformed his predecessors. The transformation was accomplished in part through the medium of sculpture, in the famous statue on the Neva completed in 1782 by Étienne-Maurice Falconet. Falconet created a new image of Peter. His Peter the Great is not the intimidating commander, but what the art historian H. W. Janson called “a hero of virtue.” The monumental equestrian figure in Roman toga, modeled on a statue of Louis XIV by Giovanni Bernini, soars skyward, trampling a snake, triumphant over evil and human weakness (fig. 8).54 Falconet wrote to Diderot that he had in mind “not the victor over Charles XII, but Russia and her reformer.” He therefore put no scepter in Peter’s hand and clothed him as a Roman emperor.55 The conception of the statue as a symbol of the merciless, inhuman power of Peter’s will was a nineteenth-century conceit, a

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8. Monument to Peter the Great, St. Petersburg. Sculptor, Etienne-Maurice Falconet. Photograph by William Brumfield.

product of the genius of Alexander Pushkin. At the time, the statue marked the change from a baroque symbolic of extravagant display to a classical ethos and aesthetic of self-control and order. The image of Peter as reformer also marked a shift to male figures of political virtue. Just as Peter introduced female allegories of virtue, identifying political dedication with love and beauty, Catherine’s principal statue represented civic virtue in the heroic form of the male ruler. Catherine’s monument to Peter introduces the image of male power tamed by wisdom, whose courage subdues human as well as physical nature. This was the stoic image of the emperor, and contemporaries, aware of the message, called the statue “Marcus Aurelius.”56 •

The Russian empire underwent an enormous expansion in Catherine’s reign, to the south to include New Russia, and to the west with the partitions of Poland. Catherine’s endearing manner expressed the unity of native elites with the throne in idealized form. The personal devotion to the sovereign and the adoption of her Westernized culture became the principal bond

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uniting the various nationalities of empire.57 Catherine’s method of rule in the new territories was to co-opt native elites and to assimilate them into the Russian nobility, continuing a process of broadening and diversifying the imperial elite. Thus the upper strata of the Don and Zaporozhets Cossacks were made members of the Russian nobility in 1785. The rank and file, completing a process of differentiation that was under way during the previous century, declined into a condition approximating that of serfs. Likewise, she granted nobility to the Tatar aristocracy in the Crimea, who received the privileges and honors of Russian noblemen. The imperial nobility was revealed as an association of the powerful and the educated of Russian and other nationalities who rejoiced in their devotion to a supreme, beneficent ruler. At the imperial court, uniformity of dress showed the unity of the supranational court elite. Special notices, povestki, announced dress requirements for various official functions. But although the manner was cosmopolitan, the rhetoric and styles of Catherine’s reign left little doubt about the predominance of the Great Russian nobility. Imperial patriotism with a Great Russian coloration was a theme of late eighteenth-century history and literature. Catherine the Great, the only Russian ruler since Riurik to have no Russian parent, extolled the glory of the Great Russian elite, who had achieved the conquest of empire. Again the woman represented the cultural ideal, and Catherine introduced “the Russian dress” for the ladies-in-waiting and other highly placed women of the court to wear at important processions and holidays. The Russian dress attached native elements, taken from seventeenth-century robes, to a Western-style evening gown. It consisted of a white satin gown worn under a red velvet robe ending in a long train. The Russian gown was worn with a Russian-style tiara, kokoshnik, of red felt and gold, often set with gems. It became standard attire for women attending important formal occasions in the court during the nineteenth century. The vision of a vast multinational empire became especially important to Catherine’s image as her reign progressed. Andreas Kappeler points out her great pride for the complete listing of the empress’s title, which she cited frequently. The Charter of the Nobility opens with the enumeration of the titles to thirty-eight provinces and lands under her rule, including tsaritsa of the new “Kherson-Tauride” province.58 By the end of Catherine’s reign, it was important to confirm that Russia was not only an empire, but the most imperial of nations, comprising more peoples than any other. Thus the academician Heinrich Storch boasted of the ethnographic variety of Russia in 1797, commenting that “no other state on earth contains such a variety of inhabitants. Russians, and Tatars, Germans, Mongols, Finns and Tungus live in an immense territory in the most varied climates.” He went on to aver that this was “a most rare phenomenon” and that “one seeks in vain another example in the history of the world.”59 The expansion of the empire brought more emphatic and specific statements of Russia’s equivalence with ancient Rome, even as Greek influence

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began to overshadow Roman in the West. Vasilii Petrov’s translation of the Aeneid, begun in the early 1770s, turned Virgil’s glorification of the Augustan age into a panegyric to Catherine’s empire. Petrov made the character of Dido a celebration of the female monarch, who, coming from abroad, extends her empire and enlightens her people. Other panegyrics of the 1770s gave new force to the theme of translatio imperii. After the peace of Kuchuk-Kainarji, an Accession Day ode by V. I. Maikov proclaimed, “When we turn our gaze from the West, loud fame, flying there, voices the thought that the Russian state [derzhava] has spread out like ancient Rome.”60 Architects used the idiom of neoclassicism to build edifices that would give Russia its own imitations of Roman architecture, again following a European example. The palaces of Rinaldi, Bazhenov, Cameron, Quarenghi, and Starov created an ambience of restrained elegance in contrast to Rococo flamboyance. Russian imitations of Italian buildings transposed the political spirit of Rome to St. Petersburg and its environs. Rinaldi’s unfinished Cathedral of St. Isaac’s was modeled closely on St. Peter’s Cathedral; the Pantheon became the model for parts of Ivan Starov’s Tauride Palace. Charles Cameron’s Pavlovsk Palace and Giacomo Quarenghi’s English Palace at Peterhof brought the style of Palladio to Russia. The great noblemen followed this example and built their own neoclassical mansions and manor houses.61 Russia’s expansion to the south was glorified not merely in terms of national greatness or interest, but as a recreation of Hellenic antiquity. Poets invoked Greek referents to glorify the southern conquests. Ippolit Bogdanovich identified the defeat of the Turks at Ochakov with those of ancient Greece and personified Russia as Achilles, and described the Ottoman empire as the new Troy. With the conquest of the Black Sea littoral and then the Crimea in 1785, Catherine envisioned a Russian restoration of the Greek empire centered in Constantinople, “the Greek project.” Greek names were given to sites in the new territories—Kherson after the Greek, Khersones; Odessa after Odysseus; Tauris, the Greek name for the district of the Crimea. Catherine’s second grandson was baptized Constantine. The reverse side of the medal coined on Constantine’s birth showed the cathedral of St. Sofia. His wet nurse, servant, and first childhood friends were Greek.62 Catherine presented her vision in an operatic drama she wrote in 1786, entitled, “The Early Reign of Oleg, an Imitation of Shakespeare, Without the Observance of the Usual Rules of the Theater.” The play was performed before the court and the general public in 1790 at considerable effort and expense. It was a great extravaganza, with a cast of over six-hundred, and huge suites for the two emperors, the Byzantine and the “Emperor of Festivals.” Greek choruses commented on the action and recited verses by Lomonosov. The play recounted Oleg’s exploits—his founding of Moscow (!),

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his marriage to a Kievan princess, Prekrasa (most beautiful), and finally, and most important, Oleg’s foray into Constantinople.63 But although the play’s action took place in tenth-century Byzantium, its spirit was of pagan Greece, or more accurately, Rome. Catherine’s Byzantium has not a hint of religion. There is no priest among the dramatis personae. Oleg’s victory over the Greek defenders mainly provides the occasion for exultant festivities. The emperor Leo rejoices at his defeat and welcomes Oleg. “In this capital, with so renowned a guest, only happy celebrations shall occur, joyous exclamations, endless games, singing, dancing, merriment and gala feasts.” Prince Oleg watches martial games in the Hippodrome on a dais next to Emperor Leo and Empress Zoya. Hercules and the Emperor of Festivals appear before the celebrations, which are portrayed in dance and choruses, the music composed by the Kapellmeister, Giuseppe Sarti. In the final scene, Oleg leaves the shield of Igor in the Hippodrome for his descendants, and the Emperor Leo declares him a wise and courageous prince.64 The empress followed the myth of empire, not of the universal Christian empire, but of a secular empire, led by an enlightened monarch and an enlightened administrative elite, bringing the benefits of law and improved material life to the new territories as well as the Russian provinces. The actual conquest gave substance to analogies with Rome, demonstrating the power of the monarch to work miracles, turning deserts into populated areas filled with gardens, as Gregory Potemkin tried to bring civilization to the new territories. It was not sufficient, however, to propound the myth in odes and state rhetoric. Here the performative character of the Russian monarchy required that the realization of Western ideals be demonstrated in constant ceremonial affirmation. Catherine had extended her scenario to all of Russia, going outside the capital, bringing the force of her personality and governmental institutions to the local level through the provincial reform of 1775. In 1787 she brought her scenario to the provinces and to the newly conquered territories on the Black Sea, on a six-month journey that dramatized the military and cultural successes of her reign. •

Catherine’s journey took her through the major provinces of European Russia, to Kiev, and down the Dnepr to New Russia, Sevastopol, and the newly founded towns of Kherson and Ekaterinoslav. The journey was a lavish and extended demonstration of the efficacy of her persona and her ideas, showing attainment of the general good of the population, an apotheosis of the Petrine principle of utility. The medal struck for the trip carried the inscription, “the route to the beneficial” (put’ na pol’zu).65 The trip was described in a journal kept by Catherine’s secretary A. V. Khrapovitskii and was published the same year.66

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The administrative authorities in Petersburg sent down decrees to construct a spectacle of happiness along the route. Crowds of happy people, dressed in clean new clothing, singers in their best attire, abundant markets, garlands of flowers should provide pleasant scenes for the empress’s gaze. Catherine believed that such displays would refute foreign beliefs that Russia was a great desert. Everything that did not please her imagination should be removed from sight. In Moscow, in the midst of famine, beggars were driven out of the city so as not to spoil the empress’s impressions. The spectacle of happiness and transformation was presented to an audience of court dignitaries and foreign envoys—of Britain, France, and Austria. On the way to and from the new territories, Catherine participated in numerous staged demonstrations of mutual fealty between herself and the Russian nobility. Widening the circle of her “maternal love,” the trip gave the local nobility the opportunity to reciprocate with its own feelings of affection. All was to be presented in a holiday mood. Khrapovitskii’s description of Catherine’s sojourn in his native town of Smolensk dwells on the displays of recognition between nobility and sovereign. An honor guard of Smolensk noblemen and one hundred horsemen carrying torches escorted her into the town. He quoted the words of welcome of the provincial marshal of the nobility, one Stepan Khrapovitskii. “We are happy with You (in the familiar form), and we prosper. You rule over our hearts, with the countless benefactions You have undertaken. So incomparably greater is our happiness, joy, and rapture, to see you, and to kiss the Hand that is so kind to us.” There followed three days of exhausting balls, receptions, and church services.67 A more emotional and personal response to the empress’s appearance in the provinces was recorded in the memoirs of the Tula nobleman Andrei Bolotov during her visit to the town of Tula in June 1787.68 Bolotov describes the excitement of the preparations to meet the empress. Noble ladies spent lavishly on their uniforms and gowns to satisfy the critical view of the empress. The noblemen were ordered to send the largest carp from their ponds for the festivities. Fireworks were prepared. A triumphal arch went up on the main street of the town. Bolotov recalled that the empress was the single object of the noblemen’s thoughts. All the greater was their dismay when Catherine, shocked by news that the Ottoman empire once again had declared war, to reclaim the Crimea, stayed away from most of the functions. The ladies were distraught, feeling that their effort and expense had been in vain. When she finally appeared at a gala performance, the moment of her arrival was “ravishing for everyone.” The audience stared at her, continuing to look during the play, “which hardly one in ten saw.” But unable to make out her features, they left disappointed. The objective of the journey, the southern region, was presented as a spectacular confirmation of the motifs of conquest and transformation. After a sojourn in Kiev, during which she worshiped and took communion at the

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Monastery of the Caves, Catherine traveled by boat down the Dniepr. This was a voyage not of exploration but of display, comprising a squadron of seven galleys, each provided with an orchestra, eighty ships resembling Roman galleons, and 3,000 troops. Catherine and her entourage beheld a spectacle of happiness along the banks staged by Potemkin, the GovernorGeneral of Azov and New Russia, of the Crimea and Ekaterinoslav, the “Viceroy of the South.” Groups of peasants, Cossacks, and townspeople greeted her in villages decorated with wreaths of flowers and triumphal arches. In Ekaterinoslav, Archbishop Ambrosii’s oration translated myth into fact. Catherine’s rule had “turned infertile deserts into inhabited villages and cities, defending this country from foes, and securing the wellbeing of the subjects.” At the banquet, afterward, an orchestra and 186 singers performed an Italian cantata written by Sarti. In the evening, the town was lit with illuminations. The foreign guests, among them the Hapsburg emperor Joseph, had been invited to acquaint them with the changes Catherine had wrought in the new lands. Though several were impressed by the numbers of settlements and the progress made in so short a period, Joseph remained unmoved. He called the trip a “hallucination” and observed that nothing was being completed and that the changes required the use of poorly fed servile labor. He remarked that 50,000 had perished in the territory since it had been conquered at the beginning of the 1780s. But even Joseph took notice of the fleet and harbor at Sevastopol. He and Catherine were welcomed to the port with an impressive naval review. Loud salutes from the guns of the ships and the sailors on board shouted “Hoorah!” The display and the subsequent inspection proudly demonstrated Russia’s military presence on the Black Sea. Joseph declared it was the best port in the world, and that it awaited a great future.69 The proverbial “Potemkin villages,” it seems, were no more than a canard: with several dubious exceptions, the reports from foreign guests, most of whom hardly restrained their skepticism and even derision, make no mention of cardboard sets of flourishing towns. But the orders issued from the capital and Potemkin’s feverish preparations leave no doubt about the determination to embellish reality. The imperial theme was displayed repeatedly through the journey. The fortress at Kherson carried the device, “The Route to Byzantium.” The city of Ekaterinoslav was to be Catherine’s and Potemkin’s counterpart to Petersburg, a perfect imperial city, to show the monarch’s creation of a realm of cultivation and political order in a “new Russia.”70 Potemkin began construction on a cathedral that would be a replica of St. Peter’s in Rome. He intended to transport a gargantuan statue of Catherine from Berlin. Building materials had been assembled to construct courthouses on the model of ancient basilicas, a propylaeum like that of Athens, and twelve factories. Potemkin planned a musical conservatory in Ekaterinoslav to be placed under Sarti’s direction. Russia, the agent of civilization, was going to restore classical culture to the southern steppes.

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Catherine’s ceremonies also included ceremonies of recognition with the native leaders of the new territories. At Kremenchug, she met with a delegation of Tatar noblemen, the murzy. An escort of murzy accompanied her into the town of Bachisarae where she met the assembled dignitaries of the region. At a banquet, she entertained the Austrian emperor, the mufti— the chief cleric, now recognized as the administrative head of the territory— along with the highest civil and military ranks. The journey to New Russia arrayed the leaders of the conquered territories along with the notables of the court in ceremonial displays of the elite of empire.

The Education of Princes and the Dilemma of Neoclassicism

Enlightenment Models of Rule Catherine’s roles as philosopher and pedagogue, uplifting her people, inspired I. I. Betskoi’s efforts to found schools that would produce “a new type of man” and measures to create a national system of primary and secondary education that would train pupils in “quiet and useful citizenship.”1 The education of heirs to the throne—her son, Paul Petrovich, and especially her grandson, Alexander Pavlovich—also figured in her scenario. The instruction she planned would instill wisdom and virtue in the heirs, shaping them into enlightened rulers. From the mid-eighteenth century through the era of Great Reforms, tutors and their staffs nurtured the hope that by educating the heir to the throne they could help to transform the Russian political system. The absorption with the training of the heir reflected a general shift from a baroque to a neoclassical conception of a monarch. No longer the subject of Olympian metaphors, the monarch ascending the throne had to aspire to the higher qualities attainable by men. Future rulers were to be taught to be better human beings with a higher calling. Gottfried Leibniz’s “On the Education of a Prince” had stressed the importance of careful training of the prince’s moral qualities and intellectual powers, and became widely read during the century.2 A Russian extract from l’Encyclopédie, appearing in 1770, emphasized that the ruler had to learn that he was a mortal, to obey as well as to command. He was not to be lauded as “an earthly god.” The extract stated that “the ignorance and carelessness of sovereigns are the most common cause of the catastrophes desolating their states.” It asserted that the ruler should possess wide knowledge, the appropriate virtues, and the nobility of character that would dispose him to do good. All of these would result from his education.3 The upbringing Catherine ordained for Paul I and Alexander I impressed them with their obligation to transform themselves into great men, and it was the taking on of the obligation to realize this higher ideal that would substantiate the Russian monarch’s claims to transcendence and supremacy. Despite striking differences of personality, manner, and conceptions of rule, Paul and Alexander faced the same daunting task. Their tutors urged them to remake themselves in the image of the great men of the past. They and subsequent heirs to the throne grew up with constant reminders that their

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monarchical distinction was not inbred, natural, or an attribute of their future office, but the product of their own character and efforts. They were never allowed to forget the sobering admonition that emperors of Russia would be expected to represent the highest ideals of Western monarchy. The enlightenment model referred to a new exemplar of the potentialities of kingship, Frederick the Great of Prussia. In many respects, Frederick’s example was the opposite to Louis XIV’s. The myth of sacred king and allegorical pageantry had no place in the formation of the Prussian state. The court at Potsdam and Berlin made little effort at significant ostentation or show. Frederick, rather than seeking to embody the state, presented himself, as he declared, as its first servant, its first officer. His ascendancy, his elevation relied on his achievements, his personal discipline and qualities. The Prussian king projected the image of the humble organ of the state, an official and an officer, who slept on a camp bed. The humility, of course, was spurious, for Frederick represented himself as its first servant, capable of enduring privation and showing limitless dedication, an example for his servitors. The king is like all men, Frederick the Great says, but, Otto Brunner pointed out, he must be a man who incorporates an ideal. “He must also be the most humane and the first citizen.” The allegorical glorifications of the baroque were discarded. The monarch instead aspired to live as a “human being,” but a human being seeking a lofty and largely unattainable stoic ideal of rational and humane ruler.4 Frederick replaced metaphorical transformations with exemplary displays of command and discipline on the parade ground. Like Peter, he exerted something of the charisma of the conqueror, leading his armies to victory on the battlefield. But he made the exercise of severe discipline and control of his army the fundamental principle of his success. The parade ground showed the king’s power to bring about the well-being of the nation. The principle of strict discipline, the training of soldiers and officials in absolute obedience, made possible the enforcement of the king’s rational will. The monarch is not a god but a commander, whose military and civil attainments are achieved by his wisdom and determination in imposing his will.

Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Paul was taught to take Frederick as a model of duty and discipline, but at the same time he learned the humanitarian and altruistic principles of the enlightenment. Paul’s principal tutor, Nikita Panin, who had been appointed by Empress Elizabeth in 1760, prepared an outline for his education that expressed views close to those of Catherine’s, whom Panin had helped to seize the throne in 1762. Drawing on pedagogical principles set forth by Leibniz, Panin sketched out a plan to instill a sense of civic virtue and duty in the heir.5 This duty required the mastery or denial of the ruler’s personal

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impulses. The heir had to become a new kind of man, not the kind he saw in the court around him. Panin’s outline emphasized that the heir must have “a tender soul and heart” before he could learn to think and reason. He had to develop the virtues of a sensitive (chuvstvitel’noe) understanding of his creator and his intentions and of man’s duty to God. But there was little emphasis on religion in Panin’s memorandum. The education he recommended focused on political morality. A good monarch, he stressed, could have no true interest apart from the well-being of the people entrusted to him. For Panin, history was the repository of models that could guide the heir. History would provide lessons of past rule, allowing the prince, Leibniz had written, to “take council from ancient Emperors and Kings so that he one day will better preside in his own realm.” Panin’s project also stressed the importance of Russia’s history, which would present the heir with “examples of the great deeds of his sanctified ancestors.” But Western models— particularly Henry IV and Frederick the Great—dominated Paul’s education. Paul took notes on Sully’s diary and his library contained many volumes on Frederick’s statecraft. The only “sanctified ancestor” his teachers made an example was Peter the Great. Panin and his assistants evoked Catherine’s tamed and seemly Peter, devoted to law and sympathetic to their constitutional goals. Paul was introduced to the new principles of rule in the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, and Hume. At the dinner table, he heard Panin converse with leading officials, foreign dignitaries, and writers. Later, under Panin’s influence, he composed several memoranda that argued for the regularization and organization of government through the introduction of a rule of law and the reform of institutions. Paul wrote that legislative power should “repose in the hands of the ruler but with the agreement of the state, for otherwise it will turn into despotism.” In these writings, Paul described a stoic image of ruler who, subordinating his will to natural law, promoted the well-being of his people. The good ruler also had it in his power to abstain from power, to refrain from abuse of the law. The tsar, as the extract from the encyclopedia suggested, should behave like a man rather than a demigod and, ruling by law, induce his people to love him. The general lines of the education followed Catherine’s recommendations, and she attended all of Paul’s examinations. But Paul took different lessons from his readings than his tutors had intended. He became preoccupied with the exertion of control, and sought a strong masculine image in the monarchs of the past. From childhood, Paul admired the authoritarian, intimidating Peter, whose will brooked no limits, the second element in what David Ransel has described as his “ambivalent legacy.”6 Paul admired other authoritarian figures from the past, particularly King Henry IV of France, whom he extolled in a composition written when he was twenty years old. Paul describes Henry as a king totally devoted to the state, who strives to improve his people as would befit Leibniz’s and Panin’s ideal ruler. But

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Henry’s devotion, in Paul’s presentation, is displayed as a distrust of everyone, a determination to take responsibility for everything himself, and as a will to punish swiftly when disobeyed. Henry refused to be deceived, Paul writes, and made it his business to know everything, down to the pettiest detail. He banished vassals who did not do service and gave gifts and favors himself, not through ministers. He approached government not as a matter of abstract principles, but with the feelings of a father for the wellbeing of his family. And this paternal concern for “the good order of domestic life” distinguished him from gifted people who had profound minds. We see in Paul’s vision of paternal control and supervision the impulses that inspired his passion as emperor to direct all Russian life from the throne. The quality Paul most esteemed in Henry was order, poriadok. Frugality came next on his list, followed by tenderness, patience, honesty, and fidelity to one’s word. He admired Henry’s ability to combine opposed characteristics, elevated feelings and simplicity, a soldier’s courage and an abundance of love. But the strongest feeling expressed in this school exercise is a fear of weakness in the monarch. Paul saw Henry as an embodiment of strength. Though Henry was tender with friends, Paul emphasized, he had a strong will and was never weak. In a note on how a wise monarch could transform “the Russians,” Paul reveals that he hoped by civilizing his people, to turn them into a more effective weapon. Once the wise monarch had “softened their ferocious spirit, their cruel and unsociable manners, this people [the Russians] would become terrifying for all their neighbors.”7 Warfare had the greatest appeal for Paul, and he found his principal examples of male behavior not in the classroom but at the military exercises he was allowed to attend. As a little boy, he fantasized about serving in the ranks in the cavalry and infantry. Riding in uniform, wearing a saber, participating in reviews and maneuvers at Krasnoe Selo captured his imagination. It was not only the glamour and color of the events that he found enchanting. On the drill field, he escaped from the world of admonition and piety and took his position as commander, issued orders, received reports, watched complicated exercises enacted for his approval. This was the real world of power that the abstract prescriptions of his classroom could scarcely rival. It is no wonder that his lessons suffered seriously in the following days. Paul’s biographers have noted his difficulty in distinguishing imagined events from real. He early was inspired by romantic histories of the crusades, especially of the Maltese Order. The role of knight appealed to his mystical longings to impose an order of virtue by warfare. After his marriage, he staged tournaments twice a week in the costumes of medieval knights. In military exercises and discussions, Paul found a common interest with men of high station. His tutors spoke to him as a pupil, preaching and admonishing. Wearing military uniform, Paul, who had been appointed general-admiral at birth, was treated on a more equal footing. Over the dinner table, he heard talk of war and armies. He listened intently to serious

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conversations about military matters and the military resources of Russia conducted by leading generals of the realm, among them Nikita Panin’s brother, Peter. From them, he heard complaints that the armed forces lacked order and discipline and pleas for more powerful and assertive leadership. During these conversations, Paul heard many complaints about Catherine’s neglect of the army and the superiority of Prussian military organization; Peter Panin spoke with great admiration of the Prussian army. In 1765, at age eleven, Paul was most impressed by a description of the Prussian military camp at Breslau by a Colonel Mikhail Kamenskii. Kamenskii sneered at the philosophical character of Paul’s education. What good, he asked, would the wisdom of Greece’s philosophers have done at the battle of Marathon? Kamenskii’s Peter the Great “was not ashamed to be a soldier or sailor, but never was a clerk, nor a protocolist in a single college or even the Senate.”8 Like his father Peter III, Paul idolized Frederick the Great. It was not Frederick the statesman but Frederick the commander and disciplinarian who captured his as well as his father’s imagination. Paul’s admiration only grew when he met Frederick in Berlin in 1776, and he could witness the king’s compelling military control over his government. Discussions with Peter Panin and Prince Nicholas Repin, a cousin of the Panins, convinced Paul of the need to transform the Russian armed forces, particularly in light of the difficulties in quelling the Pugachev rebellion. He drafted plans to improve recruitment of soldiers into the army and the deployment of Russian armies along the borders. He hoped to form a special army of foreign soldiers under his own personal leadership. Catherine, fearing her son as a potential rival for power, allowed him no governmental responsibility. She forbade petitioners to approach him for assistance. In the early 1770s, when Nikita Panin’s influence began to wane, Catherine began to see her son as a center of opposition. Paul became known as “the Russian Hamlet,” the sensitive crown prince, brooding over the death of his father, nurturing hopes for revenge. He found support against his mother in his wives. Natalia Alekseevna, a Landgräfin from Hesse-Darmstadt, whom he married in 1773, formed her own circle and soon stirred the empress’s suspicion and wrath. After she died in childbirth in 1776, Paul wed the Württemberg princess, Sophie, who was baptized Maria Fedorovna. As grand-duchess, Maria Fedorovna was a submissive wife, who shared Paul’s passion for things Prussian. She bore him ten children, the first generation of the Romanov dynasty, as it was known in the nineteenth century. Paul was the progenitor of the dynasty, but he hardly played the role of paterfamilias. The image of father was not morally elevated or sufficient in the context of eighteenth-century scenarios. In this respect, Paul followed the eighteenth-century model of the monarch who, devoted to the wellbeing of the people, was not limited by biblical injunctions meant for ordinary mortals. His return to the notions of dynasty and primogeniture during

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his reign did not inspire him with a devotion to marital fidelity, which he openly violated. The officer, not the father, was Paul’s principal image of power, and Paul turned the surrounding area into a replica of Potsdam. “As you entered Gatchina,” one observer wrote, “it was as if you were entering a Prussian territory.” At Gatchina, Paul indulged his love for drill, uniforms, and the trivial details of the parade ground—the mania that dominated his reign and became his abiding legacy for future generations. His Gatchina detachments, drawn from lesser nobility, many of them Little Russians, were coarse and rude, loyal only to Paul. They formed a reliable force that would make Paul independent of the guards regiments of the capital after his accession. At the same time they bred suspicions and later provided proof of the despotic and alien nature of his rule.9 But Potsdam was not the only ideal that Paul entertained. In 1782 he and Maria Fedorovna had toured Europe, and on this trip, France made the greatest impression. Paul was a great success at Versailles. He seemed to know as much about the French court as the Russian one, and his knowledge and tact impressed his hosts. Potsdam exemplified the effective exercise of authority for Paul, but it was too restrained and austere to suit the sense of majesty he identified with the imperial image. The Russian court in the eighteenth century had been patterned on Versailles or German imitations of Versailles. At Versailles, Paul was impressed by the extent and organization of ceremonies and the courtly bearing of the aristocracy. Paul had the parks of Gatchina laid out on the model of those at Chantilly. Gatchina became Paul’s pleasure palace as well as his military camp. He devoted his mornings to military exercises, his afternoons and evenings to diversions. In the first years at Gatchina, from 1783 to 1790, these pleasures were innocent—walks, games, theater, games of cards and lotto, sometimes a hunt. Paul and Maria Fedorovna led a happy family life. Catherine called them bons seigneurs de parroise, who lived quietly taking care of their estate. But after 1790, relations between Petersburg and the “young court” of the heir became increasingly strained. Paul reacted with outbursts of irascibility and suspicion, the signs of paranoid behavior that would characterize his reign. It was the era of the so-called Gatchina terror when he became distrustful of all, banishing many of his close associates and bringing close to him the most severe and inhuman of the martinets of Gatchina, Alexei Arakcheev, the former Prussian hussar Fedor Lindener, and Paul’s future procurator-general, Peter Obol’ianinov. From 1790 until his accession, Paul stayed away from the capital. Gatchina became the embattled enclave in which he reigned over his Prussian-style regiments. His diversions meanwhile lost their innocence. The representation of sovereignty as erotic power that he had seen in France had not been lost upon him. He began a romance with the maid of honor Catherine Nelidova that at first embittered relations between himself and Maria Fedorovna. This infatuation may have remained Platonic, but Paul’s public

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display of his partiality to Nelidova and the open expression of his feelings are indications that he shared the image of monarch as hero of romantic conquest. The year 1793, the height of his affair with Nelidova, marked also the completion of a Pavilion of Venus on an “Island of Love” at Gatchina, a replica of the pavilion he had seen at the chateau of Chantilly. The Triumph of Venus on the ceiling marks the final stage of eighteenthcentury feminine imagery, an “Olympus of the Ceiling” where floating goddesses charmed the senses without reference to the meaning or purposes of power.10

Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich Paul’s firstborn son, Alexander, supplanted him as the empress’s hope for the future. Catherine doted on Alexander with a grandmother’s affection and actively engaged in the planning of his education. She withdrew him at birth from his parents’ care, just as Elizabeth had taken Paul away from her, and made elaborate and demonstrative efforts to shape Alexander according to a civic ideal of humane ruler. Derzhavin’s ode on Alexander’s birth in 1777 carried a Stoic message. The geniuses bestowed upon the infant all the gifts: plenty, joy, peace, beauty, reason, all the talents necessary to a tsar. The last, virtue, utters an apostrophe that would be cited as Alexander’s guiding ideal through his life. Be the ruler of your passions, Be a human being (chelovek) on the throne.11

On a copy of François Fénelon’s Télémaque, Catherine set forth principles designed to turn her grandson into the ideal ruler she envisaged. These stressed Stoic principles of reserve and self-control. “Be mild, humane, accessible, compassionate and liberal (liberal’nyi).” Good people should love him, evil fear him, and all should respect him. He should preserve the “ancient taste for honor and virtue.” “Duplicity,” she asserted, “is unknown to great people.” She hoped he would become “a great person, a hero.” But she did not want him to follow his father’s military path. When he was four years old, she wrote in her notebook, “Listen, do not begin to imagine that I want to make of Alexander the one who cuts the Gordian knot. Literally, nothing of the kind. Alexander will be a splendid person but not at all a conqueror—he has no need to become one.”12 The ruler Catherine envisaged stood apart from society. He made decisions on his own, prompted by his own conscience: “virtue does not make itself known in the crowd.” He should avoid flatterers and contact with high society that might “darken the ancient taste for honor and virtue.” Catherine dramatized this lonesome quest for virtue in The Tale of the Tsarevich Khlor. The tsarevich, Khlor, in Catherine’s tale, was the son of the kind tsar of Russia before the rise of Kiev. He was beautiful, intelligent, and lively,

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and his reputation spread far and wide. The Kirghiz khan longed to have the wonderful boy. He had Khlor kidnapped, then gave him the task of finding the “rose without thorns,” the symbol of virtue. Felitsiia, the personification of happiness—Catherine, herself—helped him in his quest. Felitsiia’s son, Reason (Razsudok), guides Khlor to find the correct path to the rose. At Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine built Alexander his own temple of the rose. The rose lay in an urn on the altar.13 Catherine listed The Tale of the Tsarevich Khlor (mentioning the title twice) among the books she recommended in the memorandum she wrote to Count Nicholas Saltykov, the governor of Alexander and Constantine. The precepts of the memorandum were drawn directly from enlightenment writers and many of them, like the articles of her Nakaz to the codification commission, are direct quotations from her favorite philosophers—in this case, Comenius, Locke, and Fénelon. The heir’s education, she wrote, should create a kind, good person. Virtue, respect, and good conduct should be the chief concerns of his teachers. He should grow up learning the golden rule, to feel “benevolence to humanity,” and have “tender and sympathetic attitudes to all”—a “pure and grateful heart.” The child should learn “justice,” which she defined as not acting contrary to the laws, in addition to “love for truth, generosity, self-restraint, intelligence, based on reflection, wholesome ideas and reasoning combined with diligence.” Throughout her reign, Catherine defended enlightenment ideas in her conversations with Alexander and in her last years even read and explained to him the Declaration of the Rights of Man.14 Alexander’s tutor was the Swiss philosophe and republican FrédéricCésar de La Harpe. La Harpe set before Alexander a philosophical model of civic virtue for a future sovereign: a ruler, he declared in a memorandum to Catherine, should not be a physicist or a naturalist or jurist, but an “honorable man and enlightened citizen.” He should use his knowledge to become conscious of the obligations of one responsible for the fate of millions. History would provide examples of the rulers who showed the “civic spirit,” but, La Harpe emphasized, the instructor had to guide the heir to the proper models. One must never forget that Alexander the Great, gifted with wonderful genius and brilliant qualities, laid waste to Asia and committed so many atrocities merely from the desire to imitate the heroes of Homer. In the same way, Julius Caesar, emulating Alexander the Great committed a crime by destroying the freedom of his fatherland. 15

La Harpe explained in his memorandum that philosophy would help the prince to understand “civil societies” and “the principles which are their bases.” Alexander would learn that men were once equal, and that there have been absolute monarchs “so generous and true” that they vowed publicly, “We have the glory to say that we exist only for our peoples.”16

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To acquire virtue, to become a “public man,” Alexander had to isolate himself from his environment and engage in diligent, solitary work. La Harpe hoped that principles of philosophy and the examples of history would provide the guidance that would allow his pupil to escape traditional models of masculine conduct. La Harpe urged Alexander “to replace living friends by those who are dead, and these true friends you will find in the great models presented by history.”17 Peter the Great’s name was conspicuously absent from La Harpe’s recommendations, and, Nicholas Riasanovsky has suggested, Alexander may have been the first Russian ruler not deeply concerned with Peter’s image. The historical figures La Harpe approved of as Alexander’s friends were not the conquerors but the great legislators—Solon and Numa—who had laid the bases of the institutions that had shaped their peoples’ political life. His principal exemplar was Marcus Aurelius, and La Harpe liked to think of himself as Nero’s tutor, Seneca. Alexander, enlightened on the throne, could realize the stoic ideal of virtue and introduce a just and egalitarian political order.18 La Harpe introduced him to Montesquieu’s notion of a “true monarchy,” governed on the basis of unchanging laws and institutions respected by the ruler in his exercise of power. When Alexander was eight, he learned that “force established thrones, but to make them firm, to reconcile the strong with the weak, it is necessary to resort to fundamental laws, suited to the establishment of order and the rule of law.” In 1790, at the age of thirteen, Alexander vowed to his tutor to “secure the well-being of Russia on immutable principles.”19 When Alexander was fifteen years old and about to be married, La Harpe assigned him a colossal reading list that would intimidate the most serious of students. The history and thought of antiquity figured most prominently. There were also many books on modern history, including nearly every European country, the Ottoman empire, and the United States. La Harpe was particularly insistent about The Wealth of Nations. “It is indispensable sir that you make the effort to read this classic, of which the principles, once well grasped, allow you to estimate what happens in matters of manufacture, trades, commerce and taxation.” He assigned Cicero’s writings on the Duties of Man, Ferguson’s “Essay on Civil Society,” Montesquieu, Mably, and Rousseau. He even recommended a collection of famous speeches in the English Parliament. But, he told Alexander, ultimately he must seek the true promptings of reason in himself.20 Alexander’s tutor of religion, Andrei Samborskii taught him a religion of humanity and reason that complemented La Harpe’s stoic republicanism. Samborskii was a secularized cleric, whom Catherine had sent to England with a group of priests to study agronomy so that when they returned they could also teach the peasants how to till the land. Samborskii’s religion was evangelical and universal. His was a personal, mystical faith for all

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humankind, recognizing neither national bounds nor institutional limits. Samborskii emphasized the role of religion in determining the relations between states and the maintenance of peace. Samborskii remained Alexander’s instructor and confessor for fifteen years, and his teachings significantly influenced the vision of a Holy Alliance that Alexander entertained after 1812. La Harpe and Samborskii instilled in Alexander moral and political imperatives of a high order. But the enticements of the court proved difficult to resist. His cherubic countenance, poise, and charm evoked sighs of admiration from Catherine and the leading figures at court. His mathematics teacher, C.F.P. Masson, characterized him as “the ideal that enraptures us in Telemachus.” French emigrés called him the “Greek Cupid.” Potemkin compared him to Apollo. The ease of his social success distracted him from serious pursuits, General A. Ia. Protasov, who supervised Alexander directly, lamented. Alexander’s marriage, in 1793, to Princess Margaret of Baden, baptized Elizabeth Alekseevna, ended his tutors’ supervision and brought his education to an end. Alexander took his tutors’ admonitions seriously and constantly berated himself for failing to measure up. At the age of thirteen, he wrote to La Harpe, “Instead of urging myself on and doubling my efforts to profit from my remaining years of study, each day I become more nonchalant, more remiss, more incapable, and each day I surround myself with those like myself who stupidly consider themselves perfection only because they are princes.”21 He showed a far greater propensity for the military. As a child, during the 1780s, Alexander visited Gatchina once a week; in his teens, his visits became more frequent and his love of the military more open. His enthusiasm troubled his teachers. In 1793, when Alexander was fifteen, General Protasov deplored his fascination with gun practice. After his marriage, Alexander began participating in exercises at Gatchina four times a week and experiencing the same joy at the maneuvers at Krasnoe Selo that his father had several decades before. Alexander’s first understanding of state service was military service. But the young Alexander, lacking in assurance and deaf in one ear, needed help in the techniques of command. He received generous advice and assistance from Paul’s favorite, Colonel Arakcheev. Arakcheev, the provincial nobleman, the model of the brutal and ruthless martinet, became the improbable favorite of Alexander after he ascended the throne. Alexander developed an informal, personal relationship with his close advisors and acquaintances. This relationship was characterized as “friendship,” an affectionate bond of the young man with others who shared common ideas and feelings. Friendship brought the principle of equality into political relations and lifted them into an ideal literary sphere. Sentimental literature of the era extolled friendship as a feeling equivalent or superior to love. In a quatrain of 1797, Nicholas Karamzin wrote,

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Love is good for us, Only when it is like nice friendship; And friendship is dear to us, Only when it is equal with love.22

When Alexander was approaching his seventeenth birthday, La Harpe encouraged him to address him as mon cher ami. He began to use the phrase, mon vrai ami in his letters to his tutor, who responded with expressions of his own warm feelings. Alexander evoked the same bonds of friendship in his acquaintanceship with the young aristocrats he drew around him as he grew into manhood. In 1792 he met Victor Kochubei, ten years his senior, who had just returned from revolutionary France. For Kochubei, he expressed amitié sans bornes. In 1795 Alexander first met the young Polish aristocrat Adam Czartoryski, seven years older than him, and in a conversation filled “with effusions of friendship on his part,” confided his dreams to him.23 Alexander also befriended two other “enlightened persons,” Paul Stroganov, only three years Alexander’s senior, and Stroganov’s cousin Nicholas Novosil’tsev, the oldest of the group, who was already thirty-five when Alexander met him in 1795. Stroganov had been secretary of the society Friends of the Law in Paris, which had been founded by his tutor Gilbert Romme, and in 1790 joined the Jacobin club. Alexander was inspired by Western conceptions of government that he, following previous Russian monarchs, believed should be embodied in Russian institutions. In this case the ideal was republicanism. He despaired at the inability of a single person to cope with the problems of the Russian administration. He wrote to Kochubei, Incredible disorder reigns in our affairs. There is stealing on all sides. All branches of the government are poorly administered. There is order nowhere and meanwhile the empire strives only to extend its borders. In such a state of things, it is hardly possible for one person to administer a state, and all the more correct the deeply rooted abuses. This is beyond the forces of a person like myself endowed with ordinary capacities, but even of a genius, and I have constantly maintained the rule that it is better not to take on a matter at all than to do it badly.24

If monarchical rule was responsible for the abuses of Russian administration, Alexander believed that the end of monarchy was the logical next step. His “young friends,” however, convinced him that it was his obligation first to grant Russia a constitution that would enable it to be governed well, then to reform the Russian political system. With him, they formed a circle to discuss the rights of man and plans for such a constitution. Alexander asserted that supreme power should depend not on hereditary succession but on the votes of the people. According to Stroganov, he wanted a republic without a hereditary nobility. In a letter Novosil’tsev carried to La Harpe in England,

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Alexander described a revolution from the throne introducing representative government. The “young friends” also published a journal, SanktPeterburgskii Zhurnal, to further their ideas.25 The education of Paul and Alexander had acquainted them with high principles of behavior and with exemplary rulers, whom they were urged to approximate. They were expected to reconcile the ideals of enlightenment education with an image of authority that could express the transcendence of the Russian sovereign. In seeking the image they would embody and the virtues they would exemplify from the throne, they faced serious dilemmas of representation. As they sought to exemplify both supreme obligation and unquestioned control, their search for suitable personae lent a strange and theatrical character to both of their reigns. The symbolic idiom of the Enlightenment would be insufficient to elevate them to the heights expected of a Russian sovereign, and both father and son, though in different ways, had to struggle in public with the flaw of their mortality.

The Emperor Paul I

Accession and Coronation The French revolution challenged the premises of the utilitarian rationale that had justified absolutism in Russia since Peter the Great. The people themselves had arrogated the right to determine their own well-being, rejecting the image of the supreme, dispassionate rational sovereign. They had taken on the task of annihilating the vestiges of the past, including the monarchy and privileged estates. The emergence of the concepts of “nation” and the “people,” often rendered in Russian with the same word, narod, brought discordant notes into political rhetoric. These concepts threatened the symbolic distance that separated the ruler and the elite from the ruled as well as his title to absolute power. Paul I (1796–1801) and Alexander I (1801–1825) followed opposite directions in their responses to these symbolic dilemmas. Paul sought to reaffirm the signs of absolute sovereignty, Alexander to make them disappear. Both engaged in an ultimately futile quest for suitably exalted images that could incarnate the Western ideal and the majesty of the Russian ruler. It was only as military leaders that they succeeded in assuming a Western image that was lofty enough to sustain the claims to total power demanded by the office of emperor. Lacking the talent to command on the battlefield, Paul and Alexander displayed their prowess on the parade ground. During their reigns, the parade became the principal ceremony of Russian monarchy and the role of parade commander the principal persona of the Russian emperor. The fascination with military drill to be sure was not limited to Russia at this time. “Prussomania” had swept eighteenth-century Europe, but for Russia it played a greater role. In Europe, the parade symbolized military organization and power; in Russia, it demonstrated the authority and control of the emperor. The monarch, setting in motion the movement of a great number of men under the guidance of noble officers, presented a concrete rather than a metaphorical expression of domination. On the parade ground, the monarch and the elite performed ongoing, all-encompassing enactments of the conquest motif, reaffirming the efficacy of the Westernized ruler and elite. The military victories of both Paul and Alexander against Napoleon, the expansion of the empire to include parts of the Caucacuses and Finland, gave confirmation to the image of irresistible power. Paul and his sons, Alexander I and Nicholas I, turned the discipline of the parade ground into the paramount ceremonial demonstration of imperial rule.

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On the night before Catherine’s death, the tsarevich, Paul Pavlovich, dreamt that he was being lifted into the heavens by an invisible and supernatural force. During his reign, he struggled to vest himself in symbolic forms that would exalt his rule above the perils of revolution and court conspiracies. He appeared, at different moments, as the incarnation of Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, and Knight-crusader. He performed these roles with a fanatic dedication, forcing the nobility’s compliance without regard to the self-esteem they had gained over the previous half-century. The great lability of his moods and his shifting fancies of royal behavior struck them as a bizarre parody of the Petrine myth. Although legal heir to the throne—as he had been named in Catherine’s manifesto of 1762—Paul followed the pattern of accession by demonstrations of force, making a bold break with his mother’s reign. But the display of military force revealed the intention to bring subjugation rather than the signs of liberation that had surrounded the accessions of Elizabeth and Catherine. Gavriil Derzhavin called Paul’s accession an act of conquest, zavoevanie. The Winter Palace began to resemble a barrack, the sounds of boots and spurs echoing through the halls. The morning of November 7, the day after his accession, at eleven in the morning, Paul held his first Wachtparade, which he would repeat unfailingly during his reign. On November 29, he issued decrees imposing Prussian military rules upon the Russian army. Parades, Adam Czartoryski observed, became “the chief occupation of each day.” Parades were not only shows of force to deter the opposition Paul feared to his rule: they presented a new image of foreign domination. Troops lined up in battle array on the palace square astounded the crowd by “the sight of soldiers entirely different from those it had been accustomed to see.” Changes in dress and conduct accompanied the new military order. “In less than a day,” Czartoryski wrote, “costumes, manners, occupations, all were altered.” Gatchina troops were integrated with units of the guards under the command of Gatchina officers. Strict rules from above ended the old, nonchalant attitude toward military dress that had allowed dandies to tailor their uniforms as they wished and to leave them fashionably unbuttoned. The grenadiers-guards began to wear pointed hats, soldiers appeared with lances and halberds and other long-forgotten military paraphernalia. High collars gave way to low collars, mustaches, thickly dyed became obligatory, coiffures were strictly regulated.1 Paul’s accession mimicked Peter the Great’s shows of military force and imposition of foreign dress and manners. But his performance of the conquest motif violated eighteenth-century scenarios, which brought the nobility into the scene and presented them as participants in power rather than debased subjects. Peter’s measures had been coercive and often brutal, but their goal was to make the noblemen participants in his Westernized Russian state. Paul humiliated the nobility, turning them from comrades in

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arms into victims of the conquest perpetrated by his Gatchina contingents in Prussian dress. Noblemen found themselves thrown down from their Olympian status under Catherine to the position of subalterns at the mercy of Paul’s henchmen. His military manner struck them not as an example of Western rule but as a throwback, which they compared to Germany of the sixteenth century or to Ottoman despotism. In response to the French revolution, Paul presented himself as the defender of traditional authority. His succinct accession manifesto of November 6, 1796, written by Alexander Bezborodko, referred to “Our, Paternal (Praroditel’skii), hereditary, Imperial, All-Russian Throne.” The principle of heredity had primacy over the principle of utililty, which was mentioned only in the last line—an invocation for the Lord to help raise him to the task of “the well-being of the Empire and the prosperity of Our loyal subjects.”2 In the weeks after Catherine’s death on November 6, 1796, Paul set about restoring his father’s memory to the history of the monarchy and exalting the symbols of hereditary monarchy. On November 19, he and the members of the imperial family attended a ceremony of disinterment of Peter III at the Alexander Nevskii Monastery. The coffin was opened and the members of the family proceeded to kiss the remains. On November 25, Paul staged the posthumous coronation of Peter III by placing the imperial crown on his dead father’s casket. The burial ceremony at the Peter-Paul Cathedral on December 6 demoted Catherine one step further. The imperial crown rested on Peter III’s coffin, while Catherine’s was bare. The scene symbolically and posthumously dethroned the empress Catherine the Great as ruling monarch and restored the direct connection between Paul and his father. In this way, Paul created a symbolic fiction of continuity and hereditary right, and began the process of sacralization of the regalia, which in his reign were to become symbols of hereditary right as well as opulent symbols of the imperial nature of Russian monarchy. Paul’s coronation celebration in April 1797 presented the image and model of authority that he believed would impose order upon the state. If Elizabeth and Catherine had played the role of deliveratrix and benefactress of a rejoicing fatherland, Paul descended upon Moscow as the bearer of order and stability, the embodiment of the discipline that would would eradicate the laxity of the “spirit of Potemkin.” Before the arrival of the court, Moscow was transformed. “Everything was made Prussian to please the new tsar.” His triumphal entry into Moscow on March 28 was not a Roman advent, but a display of Prussian domination and conquest. Even the court servants were forced to ride horseback wearing what struck onlookers as odd imitations of Prussian uniforms. There was little show of rejoicing, forced or otherwise. The Wachtparaden took place daily, even during Holy Week. The military world of Gatchina now was put on display in Moscow, and the spectators, watching the troops march in Prussian uniform and partake in Prussian-style maneuvers, imagined that they were in Potsdam or Berlin.

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Since no official description was published for Paul’s coronation, the reconstruction of the event must come from memoirs and the brief entries of the court journals. Contemporaries witnessed an entry procession that presented the emperor as military commander and father. Paul rode down the street hat in hand waving to onlookers, the first Russian emperor to ride horseback in a coronation entry. Behind him rode his two oldest sons, Alexander and Constantine. The weather was cold, and several of the courtiers had to be removed from their horses completely frozen. The coronation ceremonies were held on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1797, and expressed Paul’s sense of his elevated religious mission. His succession law for the first time formally described the Russian sovereign as the “Head of the Church.” While this merely stated what had been de facto the case since Peter had abolished the patriarchate, Paul took his role literally and believed that communion in the sanctuary actually bestowed priestly status upon him. He displayed his ambitions to an international religious mission by wearing the dalmatic—a clerical shoulder piece worn by Holy Roman emperors and French kings at their coronations and by archbishops on special occasions. In the weeks after the coronation, Paul announced his wish to officiate at religious services and had sumptuous vestments made for that purpose. He also wished to serve as confessor to members of the imperial family and his ministers but was dissuaded by arguments from the Holy Synod citing Orthodox prohibitions against administering sacraments by one who had remarried. The proclamation of the Law of Succession took place after the communion. In an extraordinary gesture, Paul stepped forth and declaimed the law from the steps of the throne. The presentation of the law at the coronation sanctified it as a holy writ, the beginning of a new era. Paul then returned through the holy doors and placed the law in a silver arc, and declared that it would remain in the cathedral “for preservation for future times.” Paul thus created a new relic that would command respect and worship as an embodiment of supreme authority. For Peter and his successors, the regalia had been expressions of their Western character and the wealth and therefore progress of the Russian state. For Paul, the physical objects contained the sacred essence of monarchy commanding unquestioning obedience to the power of his descendants. In this sense, he returned to a Muscovite faith in the physical items of the regalia as the repository of the dynasty’s charisma. The law took the form, unprecedented in Russia, of a familial agreement.3 It consisted of a covenant between husband and wife, which he and Maria Fedorovna had composed in 1788. The decree carried both signatures. The families of the German states often made such agreements, but not issued from the throne with only two signatures. It thus represented an element of private law given public force by the sovereign will. On the basis of their agreement, the emperor and empress designated their son Alexander heir

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“by natural law.” The statute introduced what was called the “Austrian system” of succession: male primogeniture of succession with women following in line only in the absence of a male heir. The law required the permission of the ruler for marriages of all those in line for the throne. It also spelled out the organization and conditions of regencies in case the heir had not reached the age of sixteen in order to prevent a recurrence of the events that had kept Paul from the throne in 1762. Despite the ecclesiastical trappings, the law still was expressed in the utilitarian rhetoric of the eighteenth century. The principle of heredity derived neither from religion nor tradition. Justified by “natural law,” it ensured “a tranquility of the State,” which was “based on a firm law of inheritance upon which every right-thinking person is certain.” If Peter’s Succession Law defended the monarchy against the scheming and perfidious son, Paul’s took care to support the claims of the son and to leave no room for the pretensions of an ambitious consort. The conclusion declared that the law provided “proof before the whole World, of Our love for the Fatherland, the love and harmony of our marriage, and love for Our Children and Descendants.” The Statute of the Imperial Family, promulgated the same day, made the connection between the well-being of the imperial family and the well-being of the state an explicit premise of Russian autocracy. It established the “increase of the Sovereign family (familiia)” as one of the grounds for the “illustrious condition” of the state. Russia had experienced the principal blessing, “seeing the inheritance of the Throne confirmed in Our Family, which may the All-High perpetuate to eternity.” The statute specified the estates and revenues that would go to the members of the family, the titles they held, and the rules of inheritance they would observe. It established an Appanage Department to manage the family’s estates and income. On the day of the coronation, Paul took another step honoring the family. He revived the Holstein Order of St. Anna that had been founded by his father, Peter III.4 Paul’s clerical aspirations did not overshadow his military predilections. Rather, they indicated that he saw little distinction between the types of governmental service and obedience. He began to appoint clerics to honorary orders, a practice that prompted angry objections from his teacher, the metropolitan Platon. He wore his sword during the ceremonies of crowning and anointment. Only a reproof from Platon, “Here we bring bloodless sacrifices,” deterred him from wearing it into the sanctuary when he took communion. The fusion of commander and cleric took place in Paul’s vision of himself, growing out of his boyhood dreams of himself as leader of a medieval knightly order of Russian noblemen. On the day of the coronation, he issued a Statute on Russian Imperial Orders, proclaiming their symbolic importance during his reign.5 The exalted rhetoric of the opening phrases recalled the glories of the chivalric tradition, which Russia had never known.

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Soon after the time when the light of Evangelical teaching illuminated the universe and when the true faith conquered error, Societies of Knights were founded for the defence of piety and innocence and to promote deeds pleasing to God and useful to humanity. These, according to time and circumstances, being protected by the Supreme Authority, grew further and further.

Russia did not, however, have to look to foreign examples, the preamble went on, for Peter the Great had established such orders, an allusion to the orders of St. Andrew and St. Catherine. Paul thus confused the medieval connotation of medieval European knightly orders with their more recent function as a reward for service to the absolute monarch. The orders would transform the nobles’ service to the state into Christian service, in which the emperor was the principal priest as well as sovereign. The postcoronation events were staged to present imposing spectacles of Paul’s authority rather than of the joy of subjects ostensibly delivered from danger. Paul turned ceremonies into an enforced worship of his person, using the regalia to signify his exalted office. He wore crown and imperial mantle at court processions and during the prolonged ceremonies of congratulations after the coronation. He continued this practice during his reign, holding crowning ceremonies during religious services on holidays and before he received communion. He had the regalia reworked to make them even more lavish than they had been. The new scepter of gold was studded with diamonds, the enormous Orlov diamond fixed at the end. The sapphire orb also glistened with diamonds. Catherine’s crown was enlarged and the small pearls replaced with larger ones. These three items became the traditional regalia for nineteenth-century emperors. In this respect, Paul hardly resembled Frederick the Great, whose manner was one of reserve and simplicity. Paul admired the elaborate ceremonies of the French court, which better defined the hierarchical relationship that he wished to establish between himself and the nobility. He upheld monarchical authority by elaborate and prolonged displays of homage from the elite. The announcement of the awards of orders, promotions, and grants of serfs before the banquet turned into a painful show of deference as Paul on the throne himself affixed the medals and then had the recipients kneel and kiss his hand. The audiences on the days after the coronation were accompanied with elaborate and trying rules of etiquette invented by the emperor himself. As grand master of ceremonies, Adam Czartoryski wrote, Paul treated the courtiers like recruits, disciplining them to bow, kiss the emperor or empress’s hand, and withdraw precisely as commanded.6 The rules were extended to the balls and other celebrations, which also turned into tedious exercises in obedience. Paul mimicked Peter the Great’s induction of the nobility into the rules of civility, but Peter’s lessons were ones of manners and sociability, Paul’s were training in subservience. Paul’s severity did not extend to his own personal morality, which continued to reflect the hedonistic spirit of the previous century. During the festivities, he amused himself

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with many of the young ladies present. One of them who caught his fancy, Anna Lopukhina, would later become his mistress; her father was shortly appointed procurator-general. After the coronation, Paul contrived excuses for additional ceremonies. He moved back and forth from the Kremlin to his suburban residence as often as possible in order to multiply the occasions for processions. He issued and rigorously enforced a rule that required all passers-by to stop and kneel before all members of the imperial family whom they encountered. The French ambassador wrote, “It is unbelievable to what degree Paul loves great Ceremonies, the importance he attaches to them, and the time he uses at them.” The grand master of ceremonies, he remarked, had become one of the most important posts in the empire.7 Paul fused the symbols of religious, military, and court supremacy, trying to exalt his power as an object of worship as well as obedience. He commanded the parade in the Kremlin dressed in the dalmatic and crown. He was the first and only Russian emperor to command troops in regalia, and clad in clerical, sacerdotal, as well as imperial dress. When the metropolitan Platon blessed him, he decorated his teacher with the Order of St. Andrew.

The Representations of Regimentation The parade served as the ceremonial center of Paul’s government, the setting where his power was displayed most dramatically. At each morning’s Wachtparade, he received reports and announced favors and punishments. He made no exception for religious holidays, such as Easter Sunday or Christmas and spent two to three hours a day on the parade ground. He stood with bare head and without overcoat wearing a simple green uniform, imitating Peter the Great’s and Frederick the Great’s spartan manner, even in frigid weather, and expected his trembling officers to do the same. In 1800 he issued a law prescribing the precise rules for the command and movement of troops in the Wachtparade, indicating that the details of parades were a fit subject for legislation. The drill field became his means to inculcate the nobility with a service ethos of absolute obedience. In some respects, Paul tried to enhance their position. He bolstered their exclusive position by prohibiting the promotion of raznochintsy to officer ranks; he rewarded his favorite servitors with huge numbers of serfs. To replace the privileged elite of Catherine’s reign, he insisted that the young noblemen who held court sinecures as chamberlains had to serve in civil or military positions. But he disregarded terms of the Charter of the Nobility, restoring compulsory service and forbidding the registry of infants in the guards and other evasions of the education requirements. He simplified the complex system of local courts and asserted central control over local institutions and noble assemblies. He withdrew the rights of personal petition and freedom from corporal punishment. The sentences

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he imposed for violations were severe, including loss of estates. By trying to strike his own image as the guardian of civic virtue, Paul offended the nobility’s own sense of dignity, which under Catherine had become integral to their political and cultural identity. Paul’s journeys brought his barrack scenario to the provinces. Whereas Catherine’s travels were occasions for the display of mutual concord and love, Paul’s trips were tours of inspection, designed to ensure the efficacy of subordination. On his return to Petersburg after the coronation, he conducted morning guards parades and drills in the Russian towns along the way, then visited Vilnius and Grodno, where the condition of the troops pleased him. But in Kovno he found that his system of discipline had not been implemented and ordered Alexei Arakcheev to remain to train the troops properly. Arakcheev subjected them to harsh and unrelenting discipline for six weeks. To maintain his personal direction over the military administration during his trip, Paul established a special Military-Campaign Chancellery, staffed by his adjutants. He continued to use this as an agency of personal supervision after the trip. The Chancellery provided the nucleus for Alexander I’s imperial suite. Paul took special trips to ascertain that the Prussian military regulations had been faithfully adopted. The accounts of his journeys indicate that he made no appeal for demonstrations of acclaim either from the elite or the “people.” At his stops, he exchanged cordial greetings with members of estates, but otherwise avoided throngs. He prohibited ceremonial meetings or large gatherings of people during his stay in Kazan and spent most of his time reviewing parades and military exercises. But he did not have the people dispersed who gathered before his house, and seemed pleased by their enthusiasm. The reports indicate that he appreciated the feelings expressed at receptions given by the estates and a ball given by the nobility. At the ball, he and his son, the Grand Duke Alexander, according to a contemporary journal, “uninterruptedly” danced polonaises and contra dances, “favoring many ladies and maidens in this way.” Aside from the drills and the ladies, he did not take special note of local conditions. He announced that he had heard that the people in Kazan were crude, but that he found “many who were well-mannered and enlightened, especially among the ladies,” and that he had found “few of the like in Moscow.”8 Paul made the principle of disciplinary subordination exemplified by the parade ground a principle of governmental organization that he applied ruthlessly and literally throughout the state apparatus. He imposed what John Keep has called a “militarization of government,” subordinating administrative offices to the discipline of his personal command. In the first months of his reign, he issued decrees on the resolution of cases in state offices, and asked for petitions to be addressed directly to himself. Corporal punishment was introduced for wrongdoers of all estates. He took measures to limit excessive expenditures among the nobility. The severe discipline

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instilled fear throughout the administration. Wrongdoers from all classes of the population were summoned and sentenced without reference to law in the Senate’s Secret Expedition, which was directly responsible to the emperor.9 Paul’s efforts to control expressed an impulse to reform. He took the first steps toward centralizing the governmental system in institutions that could bring supervision of local institutions, a goal later realized in Alexander I’s ministerial system. But his efforts at centralized control and regulation lacked guiding principles, and the artifice of law became a means for Paul to direct everything himself. It was a crude effort to follow the example of Frederick the Great as he understood it. He tried personally to regulate everything down to the exact hours that governmental offices worked and the granting of leaves. The passion for regulation became an end in itself, an indiscriminate fascination with uniformity. His fear of revolution led him to prohibit the import of foreign books and to forbid travel abroad. During 1799 the police chief of Petersburg, clearly at Paul’s instance, forbade dancing the waltz and wearing the following: toupees over the forehead, any bright ribbons on women’s attire that might resemble the ribbons of honorary orders, large curls, sideburns, as well as German coats and women’s blue frock coats (siurtuki) with white skirts. During Paul’s reign over five times as many laws were decreed per month than under Peter the Great, and twice as many as under Catherine. In 1797 alone Paul issued 48,000 orders. “The ardor for reform,” the English ambassador wrote, “Or more properly for change, extends even to the Provinces, where everything as in the Capital must now wear a military appearance.”10 Paul’s dream was to bring discipline and morality to the nobility through a great Christian order. He had announced his plans at the coronation, and they grew only more grandiose during his reign. Paul demonstrated the universal character of Russian sovereignty by presenting himself as the defender of all Christianity, Roman Catholic as well as Orthodox. The opportunity to assume this role arose when he accepted the offices first of protector, then of grand master of the Knights of Malta at their request after the island had fallen to the French. He wrote to the pope explaining that his acceptance of the grand mastership was part of his struggle against French aggression and his attempt to preserve the European nobility. He introduced the Maltese Cross into the Russian imperial shield. He used the symbolism of the order to enhance the image of dynasty by knighting his sons, the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine and bestowing the Order’s grand cross upon the empress. Assembled for the ceremony were members of the government, the clergy, and the highest ranks of the court. At first Paul acted as protector only of a Russian priory that admitted no one but Roman Catholic noblemen in the empire. In 1798, when he accepted the title of grand master of the Order, he introduced a second priory open to Orthodox noblemen. Paul opened ninety-eight “commanderies”

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or chapters for Russian Orthodox noblemen, ten times more than the original Russian priory, and filled them with great numbers of cavaliers of the order. The Knights of Malta began to overshadow all of the other orders in Paul’s dream of creating a single Russian chivalric order. He expected that it would indoctrinate the nobility in the principles of self-sacrifice, duty, and discipline. The rites transformed him and the knights into Russian counterparts of the crusading orders of the Middle Ages. He walked in crown and full regalia in procession, with the guards officers dressed in uniforms of the knights—black velvet cloaks embroidered with the Maltese cross. He then replaced the imperial crown with the crown of grand master and donned a crimson felt dalmatic embroidered with pearls. The noblemen present felt uneasy. “There could be nothing stranger than the disguising of the Russian court as Maltese Knights,” wrote Count Alexander Ribaupierre. Czartoryski compared it to a masquerade “which made the spectators and even the performers smile.”11 Gatchina, Paul’s domain before his accession, became the principal scene of his court displays, spectacles, and celebrations. S. Kaznakov estimated that the emperor and empress spent all but three or four hours of the day before the eyes of the court. “All the merriment of Versailles and the Trianon” took place in its precincts, General Nicholas Sablukov recalled. Gatchina became the theater of the family principle proclaimed at the coronation. The entire family participated in the presentations and celebrations. Paul and the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine devoted their mornings to military exercises. The afternoon and evening were taken up by audiences, “assemblies” (sobraniia), and sometimes plays or operas. All functions were governed by a severe, unrelenting etiquette devised by the empress.12 With the new importance assigned to the imperial family, Paul celebrated the “imperial days,” the birthdays and name days of the members, with especial solemnity and magnificence. The congratulatory audiences began the evening before. Then there were diplomatic audiences and a “parade banquet” with chamberlains standing behind the chairs and serving the members of the imperial family. The balls in the evening were magnificent affairs. The grand-dukes partnered the grand duchesses to open the dances. The empress generally played cards and the emperor engaged in conversations. They joined only the polonaise, the stately procession through the rooms of the palace. At Gatchina, Paul also showed himself a successor to Louis XIV in the realm of romantic conquest. By 1798 Anna Lopukhina had replaced Catherine Nelidova as the chief mistress, awakening the empress’s apprehensions about the loss of her position at court. Paul displayed his mistress proudly at the balls of Gatchina; the liaison clearly was not Platonic. She loved to dance at balls and even performed the waltz, which Paul now permitted, despite its connotations of licentiousness. While she danced, he stood at the

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side listening for slights of her or himself, which could bring immediate disgrace. Balls and celebrations, Czartoryski wrote, were arenas where “one risked losing his liberty.”13 But amidst the pomp, Paul constantly feared for his life. By the beginning of 1801, his distrust of his son Alexander, as well as of others near him, had become all-absorbing, undermining his faith in his own dynastic principles. In October 1799 he had designated Constantine Pavlovich tsesarevich, although, according to his Law of the Imperial Family, this title was to be held only by the heir to the throne.14 In 1801 he prepared a document to legitimize sons born to him from a mistress, Iur’eva, and spoke of banishing the empress. According to one memoir, Paul discovered a copy of Voltaire’s Brutus on Alexander’s desk and brandished before him Peter’s decree condemning Alexei Petrovich. The plans for a stable dynasty were foundering on Paul’s own fears and the intrigues of the court. Paul had planned his own Petersburg palace, the Michael Castle, named after the archangel Michael, who presumably appeared to a soldier and announced that a palace would be built on the site. Tradition holds that Paul beheld the same vision. He then set about constructing a palace that would afford him security from attacks and express his medieval Christian vision of himself. Responding to the emperor’s wishes, the architect Vincenzo Brenna designed a forbidding red building resembling a medieval castle, an impregnable fortress surrounded by a moat and guarded by twenty cannons. Three drawbridges protected by guards provided the only access. In the center of the parade ground before the palace, Paul placed Carlo Bartolommeo Rastrelli’s equestrian statue of Peter, which had been kept hidden in a shed since Elizabeth’s reign. The statue presents a fierce and intimidating image of Peter as commander (fig. 9). The inscription, “From a GreatGrandson to a Great-Grand Father,” was Paul’s answer to Catherine’s statement of descent on Falconet’s statue. Over the objections of the members of his family, Paul moved from the Winter Palace to the Michael Castle on February 1, 1801. Appropriate festivities, including an opera and masquerade, celebrated the move. The court was most uncomfortable in the gloomy forbidding halls of the new palace, its plaster still dripping with moisture. But Paul’s residence there was brief. On the night of March 11, 1801, a little more than five weeks later, Paul met his death by assassination at the hands of leaders of his military forces. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russians passed by the Michael Castle without daring to look and feared speaking of what had occurred there. Paul’s reign and his death left embarrassing memories for his successors. He had established the legal grounding of conservative dynastic rule in Russia as it came to be known in nineteenth-century Russia.15 He was the progenitor of the ruling house. But he had also violated the traditions and forms of representation of the Russian monarchy. He was remembered as a despot who had acted according to personal whim and had

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9. Monument to Peter I. St. Petersburg. Sculptor Carlo Bartolommeo Rastrelli. Photograph by William Brumfield.

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ignored the rights and dignity of the members of the elite. He had banished the nobility from the circles of power and relegated them to the position of underlings. He had denied their identity as members of the ruling elite, comrades in arms of the conqueror. Paul I was a founder, but a founder manqué, whose furious and terrifying reign provided a distressing first chapter to the history of nineteenth-century monarchy.

The Angel on the Throne

Accession and Coronation On the first day of his reign, March 12, 1801, Alexander I moved back into the Winter Palace and issued his accession manifesto. The manifesto did not emphasize the break with the previous reign. Indeed, responsibility for the death was assigned to “Divine Fates” that had brought an end to his father’s life “suddenly with an apoplectic stroke.” The new emperor proclaimed that he was ascending the throne by heredity, nasledstvenno. At the same time he declared that he assumed “the obligation to govern the people entrusted to Us by God according to the laws and the heart of Our late August Grandmother.” He stated the hope “to raise Russia to the heights of glory and to provide for the indestructible good of all Our loyal subjects according to Her most wise intentions.”1 The decree thus affirmed both the hereditary grounds for rule legislated by his father and the principle of acting on behalf of the subjects of the crown epitomized by his grandmother and instilled in him by her and La Harpe. Without condemning Paul, it intimated a scenario of deliverance and efforts to undo the despotism of the previous reign. Alexander’s first steps indicated that he intended to fulfill such expectations. He restored the violated provisions of the Charter of the Nobility and summarily ended the administrative terror from the throne. He ordered the abolition of the hated Secret Expedition and the reinstatement of administratively discharged officers and officials. He issued an amnesty and a declaration that future cases must be prosecuted according to law. He also lifted the prohibition on foreign books and foreign travel. The immediate reaction was relief and euphoria. Paul’s funeral was later remembered as an occasion for boisterous merrymaking rather than weeping. Young people immediately exercised their freedom by wearing the round hats, and within several days the old caftans and camisoles vanished, and Paul’s long and clumsy uniforms gave way to close tight-fitting ones closer to the French model. Before long, Russians began following the French imitation of Roman dress, though without the republican overtones. The act of deliverance lacked the heroic postures of the previous century. Alexander abandoned elaborate ceremonials, which he found tedious and useless. The accession was not accompanied by extensive celebrations; there was no compulsory rejoicing or evocations of the love of the “people.” In part the reserve was the result of his own ambivalence about his consent to the conspiracy. But it also reflected an attitude that he shared with

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his father: that the emperor’s authority did not require validation by acclamation. Alexander’s rule derived from hereditary right and his humanitarian and egalitarian sympathies that were reflected in his efforts to appear, as Derzhavin’s poem had urged him, as a “human being on the throne.” But to rule as Russian emperor he had to appear as something more than a mere human being. From the beginning of his reign, Alexander’s person found its idealization in the metaphor of an angel. The image of angel exalted his humanity and humility; it raised him above ordinary mortals without claiming for him the attributes of a deity. Alexander’s angelic form was the spirit of gentleness, beauty, and reason, the ideals of the educated nobility since Catherine’s reign. The form of the angel also captured the melancholy and dissatisfaction with the world that set him off from the eighteenth-century monarchs who inspirited their subjects with joy. Alexander’s angelic persona was introduced in Nicholas Karamzin’s ode, “To His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, All-Russian Autocrat, On His Ascension to the Throne.” You shine like a divine angel With goodness and beauty, And your first words promise Catherine’s golden age. Days of Happiness, Joy, Glory, When the most wise statutes, Maintained tranquility, And abroad, Russia was glorified, Citizens sowed in peace, And a citizen was a hero.2

The persona of angel was a leitmotif of Alexander’s scenario for the duration of his reign. His endearing qualities evoked love, but this was a more muted and ethereal love than the robust affirmations evoked by Catherine. Moreover, while on occasion he allowed himself to receive expressions of love from the elite or people, he rarely asserted or displayed his love for them. He avoided any displays that might hint at a popular basis of his sovereign power. Alexander’s modal feeling was friendship and it was the sentimental scenario of friendship that idealized Alexander’s personal bonds with his advisors and high officials. Announcing the end of the rift between emperor and nobility, Karamzin’s ode declared that Alexander would surround himself with “friends, Russia’s best sons.” Friendship was more discriminating than love: it indicated a special affinity, singling out those who shared feelings and ideas with the monarch. In June 1801, he joined with his “young friends” in an “Unofficial Committee” to consider plans for reform. These would be announced at his coronation in September 1801 as the program of his reign. The coronation would present and consecrate the image of self-abnegating

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monarch who accomplished the greatest act of heroism, surrendering his unlimited power for the good of his people. The most radical of the Committee’s proposals was the project for a “Charter of the Russian People,” a Russian version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which the members adapted from a project drafted by Count Alexander Vorontsov. In the opening article, the emperor vowed never to violate the terms of the charter. This charter not only confirmed the Charter of the Nobility, but extended to all citizens the right to property, and freedom of thought, speech, religion, and action. It promised reform of the courts and the laws, and announced the principles of innocence until proven guilty and habeas corpus.3 Alexander enthusiastically supported the project. He proposed that the committee first should reform the administration then proceed to introduce a constitution that would preserve the laws. The newly created “Permanent” Council of high aristocrats approved the Charter of the Russian People unanimously on September 9, 1801, the day after Alexander’s coronation entry into Moscow. The Unofficial Committee also considered projects to improve the condition of the landlords’ serfs as a step toward their emancipation, and to grant the Senate a greater role in legislation. But these young landlords were not enthusiastic about abridging the privileges of the nobility or giving the Senate the power to pass on laws. One of the members, Nicholas Novosil’tsev warned that laws that did not issue from the tsar at the present time would be regarded as acts of violence for they would not bear “the sacred character that obliges the people to obey.” La Harpe, who had returned to Russia after Alexander’s accession, also advised caution. In a letter to the emperor, he exhorted Alexander “in the name of your people, preserve as inviolable the authority bestowed upon you, which you want to use for its supreme good. Do not allow yourself to be deterred by the aversion that unlimited power arouses in you.” He urged him to show the courage to preserve his power “entirely and indivisibly” for the moment when it was necessary for “energetic government.”4 When the time came, Alexander announced none of the coronation projects. Rather than a declaration of permanent laws and rights, Alexander’s Manifesto of September 15, 1801, was a statement of kind intentions. The preamble asserted his obligations to his people, and his efforts from the beginning of his reign “to strengthen all statuses (sostoianiia) of the population in their rights and their immutable privileges.” He summarized the first acts of his reign, the abolition of the Secret Expedition, and the end of investigations over officials who were wrongfully accused. On the other hand, he made clear that he believed that these measures were only beginnings, that only time would allow him to achieve the well-being of his empire. “By all these laws we wished only to indicate how sincerely we wish the happiness of our people, how pleasant it is for us to attest before the true sons of the fatherland to our love for the fatherland and attention to its good.” The message of the manifesto was inscribed in the column on the reverse side of the coronation medal: “Law is the guarantee of each and all.”5

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At the coronation, instead of specific reforms, Alexander revealed the particular charisma that would allow him to embody absolute power in forms consonant with his enlightenment ideas. His mildness was his understated expression of the break with the previous reign, showing him as his father’s antithesis. If Paul had asserted his right to the rule by displays of brute authority and force, Alexander would assert his by showing his restraint, power in suspension. He now put a humane face on the rule of the absolute monarch. His very unassuming, modest manner substituted captivation for conquest and made it obligatory for his loyal servitors to react with gestures of affection and admiration rather than terrified submission. Alexander’s coronation unveiled the scenario of a kind and gentle monarch who ruled his subjects out of a true concern for their well-being. The focus of the accounts was the emperor’s own person, rather than the ceremonies consecrating him or the celebrations raising him to glory. The events, indeed, were modest in comparison with those of the previous century, in keeping with the enlightenment disdain for ceremony as a wasteful distraction from the business of wise government. Alexander proposed to the Unofficial Committee that the celebrations be brief. The committee agreed that his stay in Moscow should be limited to six weeks, so that his attention would not be burdened by “useless and onerous presentations.” He carried out his intentions almost exactly, spending only forty days in the city. On the other hand, the event was performed to a larger audience than previous coronations. An enormous influx of noblemen from Moscow province and other regions converged on the city to see the tsar. The poetry written for the event celebrated his personal sensitivity and kindness; his distinguishing feature was “gentleness,” krotost’, exemplified in the image of angel. Gavriil Derzhavin wrote “Hymn to Gentleness” (“Gimn krotosti”) for the coronation. Gentleness was “the trait of angels that emanates from God himself!” When gentleness adorned the tsar, he was the “benefactor of the world,” whose beauty equaled the sun. It was gentleness that substituted for force elevating the authority of the emperor, and the feature remained attached to his image throughout his reign.6 Karamzin’s coronation ode extolled the love for humanity that made Alexander sensitive to his subjects’ plight. The poet made clear that he was praising human not divine accomplishments. Alexander’s greatness was to be sought not in analogies with divinities. Karamzin returns to the motif of Derzhavin’s ode on Alexander’s birth. Clio declares, You have on the throne a human being! The Most-Wise Alexander, born To serve the fatherland, crowned To live in hearts and annals!7

Alexander was a human being (chelovek), but a human being in two senses. He shared human traits with his subjects, but at the same time he was a humane being, the model and exemplar of what human beings should

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be, in the Renaissance or Enlightenment sense of “Man.” In this sense, he was to be a superhuman, though not a god, an angel, deserving of worshipful admiration. The absence of a coronation album indicates Alexander’s general shift to understatement, a refusal to indulge in the inflation of rhetoric and imagery on the part of the government. The speeches of Metropolitan Platon developed the themes of the coronation manifesto and the celebratory verse. Platon’s welcome speech in the Assumption Cathedral after the entry to the capital portrayed the emperor’s Christian self in a sentimental voice. The metropolitan first compared the church to the heart of Christ, then declared, “Thou bearest the image of the heavenly Tsar. We in thy visible glory contemplate His invisible glory, and this cathedral is the image of our hearts, for the external church creates the internal.”8 Platon’s savior was Jesus Christ, the compassionate lover of humanity rather than the image of God on earth. When he spoke at the welcoming reception that took place the next day, September 9, before the notables of Moscow at the Slobodskii Palace, Platon declared that in Alexander, God had given Russia “a gentle, kind, enlightened Tsar.” He called upon the emperor to rule for the sake of “truth, gentleness and justice.”9 The coronation sermon that Platon delivered echoed the reform conceptions voiced in the Unofficial Committee.10 Alexander’s empire awaited “perfect harmony and good organization” from his wisdom. But Platon then went further, introducing the principle of the equality of men; his speech caused grumbling in conservative circles. The most famous lines proclaimed, “Humanity itself will appear before thee in all its primal and naked simplicity without distinctions of birth or origin: behold, our common father, it cries out for the rights of humanity. We are all thy offspring.” The speech was intended for circulation abroad. After the coronation, Alexander ordered it translated into Latin, Greek, French, Italian and German. It appeared on the front page of the London Chronicle.11 The coronation introduced the scenario of kind and gentle sovereign who expressed his relationship to his servitors by his concern for their welfare. The scenario permitted but did not encourage shows of popular enthusiasm. It evoked Catherine’s scenario of mutual love, but did so in understated manner, avoiding any hint that Alexander’s power might derive from public acclaim. The first occasion occurred on his visit to Riga in May 1802. The brochure relating Alexander’s visit is an early example of the use of a personal, sentimental voice to present the Russian monarch. The ceremonial text returns, but in different form. It now purports to be not official at all, but the expression of an individual, often anonymous, author. Affecting a personal voice, the author describes the events, as much as possible, in terms of the emperor’s scenario. The author himself describes what the population felt for the emperor and the feelings of the audience as well. He includes the people, but the focus remains very much on the qualities of the emperor’s person. Alexander himself refrained from open shows of affection during the trip and declared his intention to spurn “all honors and ceremonial

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occasions.” But the brochure portrayed the enthusiasm of the crowds. It described a gala welcome procession to the city, greetings by the governorgeneral, the merchantry, and the joyous crowds. Several hundred members of merchant guilds asked to unharness the horse and pull the carriage themselves. Alexander at first refused, disliking such shows of emotion. But when they insisted, their eyes wet with tears, “the Emperor, touched, finally yielded to their entreaty.” At the castle, Alexander was greeted by a hymn, praising him as the “Angel of Tsars!” An actress delivered an encomium proclaiming that their “heartfelt warmth depicts the feelings of tenderness and the zeal of love that burns in the heart and the blood, monarch, for thee.”12 In Russia proper, Alexander expressed his appreciation of the audiences’ acclaim. In December 1805, after an enthusiastic welcome to St. Petersburg, he issued a decree declaring that “the love of my dear people is my best reward and the sole object of all my desires.” A young nobleman, the would-be playwright S. P. Zhikharev wrote “These words express all of Alexander I. . . . How impatiently I long to gaze at the tsar—the soul of sacred mother Russia!” When Alexander appeared in Moscow, it was his heavenly countenance that won the author’s sympathies. “What a majestic appearance, what a beauty, and in addition what a soul!” He marveled at the tsar’s “angelic face and captivating smile.”13

The Chancellery and the Parade Ground Alexander continued to nurture hopes for a constitution that would involve some type of public participation. But the illusion of the omnipotence of the autocrat met up against the everyday realities of wielding power. To produce change Alexander had to centralize his administration and make it a more efficacious tool for change, to enhance his power before he curtailed it. Alexander’s contributions to Russia’s political development were the reform and rationalization of the central administration and the lifting of the educational level of the officialdom. These changes merely increased the monarch’s responsibility in decision-making and his need to exert a personal, symbolic sway to make his rule effective. Alexander, like his predecessors, looked abroad for the most advanced template of governmental organization. He found it in the administrative structure of Napoleonic France. For the members of the Unofficial Committee, Marc Raeff has shown, the notion of constitution took on the late eighteenth-century sense of l’esprit de système, systematic, legal government. During its deliberations, the Unofficial Committee entertained an enlightenment eudaemonistic ideal of achieving the happiness of subjects through forceful and rational reorganization imposed from above. Its means was to be “administrative regulations,” expressing the will of the sovereign and not the particular interests of groups in society. They took the French model of

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a ministerial system, adopted after the French Revolution and institutionalized by Napoleon.14 Their project, signed by the tsar on September 8, 1802, divided government by function into eight ministries headed by individuals who were to preside over the colleges. They were to be responsible to the tsar and the governing Senate. The reformers also envisaged an institution that would unite the ministers in their decisions, a cabinet. This “united government” would ensure that all branches would pursue the same policies and be subject to the same rules. It required that the emperor deal with the ministers collectively.15 Alexander also sought to staff his bureaucracy with qualified officials. He again looked to a European model. A university degree or examination had become a requirement for many administrative and judicial offices in the monarchies of the West. Alexander introduced measures that would encourage university education and eliminate the pattern of gaining high office through service in the military or the court. This task was undertaken by Alexander’s most influential advisor at this time, Michael Speranskii. Speranskii resembled Western clerks and state-secretaries—men of non-noble background who had administered Western administrations in the interests of their sovereign and state. The son of a priest, he been an outstanding student at the Alexander Nevskii seminary in St. Petersburg and was chosen as the personal secretary of Prince Alexei Kurakin. Shortly after Kurakin was appointed chief-procurator of the Senate in 1796, Speranskii entered state service in Kurakin’s chancery. Speranskii exemplified the new official qualified by dint of his abilities and training. Alexander also took initial steps toward building an educated officialdom. From 1801 to 1803, he founded four new universities and expanded Moscow University during the first two years of his reign. The Examination Law of 1809 made a university degree or the passing of an examination administered at a university a requirement for attaining the eighth civil rank, which conferred hereditary nobility and opened the way to further promotions. A second measure enacted in 1809 brought the administrative change to the level of the imperial court and reflected Alexander’s approach to the representation of political power. The eighteenth-century court had been a display of the unity of the throne with the noble elite, the great families, whether old or upstart, who sought their interests through closeness to the throne. The law declared that “each type of service demands executors prepared by experience and gradual advancement.” It eliminated the court ranks of chamberlain (kamerger) and chamber junker(kamer-iunker) which became instead titles, conferring no administrative standing on the holders. In the future, officials had to attain administrative rank to receive such titles and during the next half-century, the court was transformed into a showcase of the highest levels of the bureaucracy. The result was not only to ensure that the lower court ranks had performed administrative service, but to make court ranks rewards to officials who had shown especial loyalty to the

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tsar in the administration. As the administration became more educated and specialized and its procedures more defined, the court drew the officialdom into the scenarios of power. The ministerial system introduced by Alexander during the first decade of his reign governed the Russian administration until the revolutions of the twentieth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century it brought about the expansion and the specialization of a centralized state bureaucracy. But the goal of a government that operated systematically according to regulations and laws was not achieved. Alexander continued to exercise his influence when he saw fit, and the attempt at systematization hardly reduced his own personal sway. He appointed many of his personal favorites as ministers and to other important positions. He preferred to deal with his ministers directly and privately rather than through the Committee of Ministers functioning as a cabinet. The rules on the accountability of the ministers to the Senate quickly turned into a dead letter. The emperor’s image seemed only the more superordinate when he could breach the tangle of laws and ordinances that bound ordinary officials. High officials then established their own preeminence by reproducing his pattern of conduct. Alexander continued to evoke the feeling of friendship that gave his scenario what Marc Raeff called an “erotic tinge.” Friendship tied his servitors to him more effectively than obligation or intimidation and allowed him to ignore formal procedures. The figures who did his bidding, his alter egos, executed his will and at the same time protected his angelic image. Such bonds of affection could be withdrawn just as they were bestowed. But many noblemen felt their special relationship with the crown threatened by Speranskii’s influence and the reforms. Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, written in 1811, expressed these fears. Karamzin regretted that “eminent officials” with “long training and a strong sense of responsibility for their whole office,” had come to be replaced by “insignificant officials, such as directors, filing clerks, desk chiefs, who, shielded by the Minister, operated with utter impunity.” He insisted that rank should depend on noble status, for only noblemen had the wealth and the desire for distinction necessary to serve well.16 But though the examination laws could be evaded, and the richest nobles could find other paths to the court, Speranskii’s laws remained in effect and would help reshape the character of noble service and social identity in subsequent decades. Karamzin called into question the fundamental premise of Alexander’s reforms that Western models should be used to transform Russian institutions. He called upon the emperor to codify old laws, instead of new, and to return to the institutions that had ruled Russia in the eighteenth century. There should be more, not less personal intervention by the monarch. Alexander had to “keep an eye on the judges.” “Russia is not England.” Karamzin no longer extolled Alexander’s mildness. “Not to fear the sovereign is not to fear the law!”17 He was calling into question the notion that the Russian monarchy and the values of the enlightenment were compatible.

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It was as commander that Alexander sought to display his prowess as leader and his authority as ruler. But like his father, he had little aptitude for the battlefield. During the battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, Alexander tested his skills at command against Napoleon’s army and, contrary to General Michael Kutuzov’s advice, insisted that his troops advance. The French counterattack sent them into rout and left Alexander confused and despairing, lost in the field cut off from his adjutants. Like Paul, he displayed his preeminence on the parade ground, and while he disliked court ceremonies, great reviews remained his passion. He resumed the Wachtparaden the day after his accession and continued them with fanatic dedication. He began each day with a review and made no exception for holidays. He even reserved time for his daily parade during the darkest moments of 1812. He shared his father’s preoccupation with the details of drill and dress. His mother, the empress Maria Fedorovna, remarked that such matters should be left to a subaltern. If Alexander could not emulate Napoleon’s military genius, he could take on his manner of show. He followed the Napoleonic model of making military displays, and military men, an aesthetic object. Napoleon closely attended to the minutiae of uniforms, giving the French military a flair and panache that made the military officer a model of style. Alexander replaced the ugly uniforms of his father’s reign with the latest military styles of France and introduced French drill formation and French march music. But for all the effort to affect an affinity for Napoleon, Alexander’s military display revealed a different image of monarchy. Napoleon, except on special occasions, wore simple attire setting himself apart from his officers who commanded a spectacle meant for the emperor’s own eyes. Alexander showed his identity with the military elite. He dressed in brilliant uniforms, and allowed the same to those close to him, the members of his suite. In Alexander’s reign, the emperor’s suite gained new importance as a symbol of the tsar’s preeminence. They appeared in uniforms like his—a bicorne hat, the aiguillette, aksel’bant, the fancy gold braid draped smartly over the shoulder—and wore the emperor’s initial on their shoulder belts. The adjutants of the suite were young men who owed their position to connections in the court gained during Paul’s reign. With the exception of I. V. Vasil’chikov, they were all opponents of reform. The suite was Alexander’s sphere of friendship in the military. Its members went out with him before his troops at his daily parade, accompanied him on his rides and his walks through the capital, appeared with him at balls and events of the court. They dined with him and were at his side in all his daily activities. Like his associates in the bureaucracy, they were favored with bonds of affection and trust. Relations with them were easy and informal. The model of deportment was friendship. The Countess of ChoiseulGouffier observed that Alexander spoke in a different manner to different

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10. Copy of Dioscuri. Horse Guards Manege, St. Petersburg. Sculptor, Paolo Triscorni.

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people. “With men of a certain rank with great dignity and yet charm; with those in his suite with an air of kindness and familiarity.”18 Alexander prized refined conduct and proper appearance and felt utter scorn for officers who lacked it. This blinded him to the genius of General Mikhail Kutuzov, and led him to dismiss his advice. Alexander aestheticized military ceremony in Russia. The parade ground identified the force of arms with civilized taste and culture. The masses of men, ranged by size in brilliant uniforms, moving in unison, created a spellbinding show. Iurii Lotman observed the similarity to a ballet: the soldiers were the corps, Alexander the producer.19 Alexander remained the leading figure, much as Louis XIV had been at the first ballets staged at Versailles. The many statues placed on the administrative buildings of Petersburg at this time exalted Alexander’s rule in the neoclassical forms dominating Western sculpture at the time. While drawing on mythological subjects, neoclassical statuary broke with the cosmic imagination of the baroque. The virtues of the monarch were no longer to be glorified in the celestial images of gods and goddesses, but in idealized figures of men themselves. Alexander commissioned copies of the statues of the two Dioscuri—the messengers of the gods—that stand before the Quirinal Palace in Rome. The Dioscuri were a favorite subject of the classical artists of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, who portrayed heroism in terms of grace and elevation of the soul. The two sleek, naked youths strain in the pattern of the “heroic diagonal” to subdue their horses (fig. 10). Intended for the steps of the Horse Guards Manege, where they now stand, the statues exemplify the military aesthetic of early nineteenth-century Europe, force sublimated as beauty.

Alexander I in Moscow: The Inclusion of the People From the moment of his accession in 1801, Alexander avoided appeals to popular sentiment and displays of popular acclaim. The invasion of Russia in 1812, however, forced him to abandon his manner of reserve and to resort to such appeals. Alexander now followed the example of Napoleon, “the emperor of the French,” and began to seek popular support. The cosmopolitan, enlightened ruler appeared before crowds of exultant subjects and allowed himself to be depicted as the focus of popular and even national sentiment. Moscow provided the setting for these displays of popular acclaim. Moscow exemplified the spirit of the “native” and Russian; it stood for Russia—a synecdoche of the nation—and its rejoicing was presented as the rejoicing of all Russians. Official descriptions couched in the personal sentimental voice explained the meaning and magnified the significance of the events. Alexander’s visit to Moscow in July 1812 marked a major turning point—his assumption of the role of national leader who mobilized all the

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estates of the realm in the cause of defending the empire. This role offended Alexander’s strongest inclinations. He agreed to go to Moscow only when defeat seemed imminent and after the urgent pleas of his advisors. Alexander still understood wartime leadership as command of armies on the battlefield. In the spring of 1812, while Napoleon’s troops massed for invasion, he remained close to the armies, whose positions he inspected. When news came of the invasion, Alexander issued a rescript in the name of Field-Marshall Saltykov, concluding with his famous words, “I will not lay down arms while the last enemy soldier remains in my empire.” The rescript indicatively referred to the empire as “my” and said nothing about the Russian people.20 It was Admiral A. S. Shishkov who finally prevailed upon Alexander to leave the command of the armies and go to Moscow. A conservative chauvinist, Shishkov had been appointed state secretary when invasion threatened. In subsequent months, Shishkov composed manifestos signed by Alexander that appealed to the patriotic and religious feelings of the people and called upon them to dedicate themselves to the struggle against the invader. The trip to Moscow had practical as well as symbolic purposes. Alexander solicited money and recruits from the nobility and the townspeople. En route to Moscow, he received pledges of support from local noblemen. Enthusiastic welcomes greeted him all along the way and throngs went out to meet him as he approached Moscow. But, wishing to avoid the crowds, Alexander arrived in the evening and declined a welcome ceremony. He found the morale in Moscow low. Oppositional sentiment among the nobility, who blamed Russia’s situation on him, remained strong, and there was little sense of emergency or the need to sacrifice among the populace of the city. As Alexander entered the city, townspeople were being impressed into service, feeding feelings of fear and disquiet. On the next day, at a point late in the Kremlin ceremony, a rumor that the gates were being shut in order to conscript the spectators caused panicked flight, leaving the Kremlin square empty. But the published texts described a wild and frenzied acclaim attesting only to utter devotion. The emperor’s appearance would become a central episode in the myth of national sacrifice and unity woven around the events of 1812. At the moment, it gave a lofty purpose to the urgent and often brutal measures necessitated by the invasion. The most important contemporary text describing the event was the work of Sergei Glinka, a Moscow nobleman and the publisher of the journal, Ruskoi Vestnik. Glinka’s account, ostensibly written in August, 1812, was published in Ruskoi Vestnik in 1814. It provided the basis for later official portrayals of the event, and the model for future ceremonial meetings of tsar and people in the Moscow Kremlin.21 Glinka’s 1814 description is that of a rapt, innocent observer stunned by an explosion of popular enthusiasm for Alexander. Alexander emerged from

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his palace and “appeared on the Red Staircase like an Angel of god.” He was greeted with shouts of “hoorah!” and tears of joy. The rapture (vostorg), the pity, “the love for the gentle tsar” and anger at the enemy inspired the people, creating a “spiritual outpouring.” “Lead us Tsar-Sovereign! We will die or destroy the villain!” When the emperor proceeded through the crowd to the Assumption Cathedral, to the shouts of the people, Glinka recorded the people’s shouts accompanied by tears of “Our Father! Our Angel! May God preserve you!” Glinka turned this expression of love into a superlative, denying anything comparable in human history. “Those Anointed by God ruled over peoples, no Tsar has ever been met and greeted, as our Tsar was met, the Father of his subjects and Tsar of hearts!” Glinka’s description brings the people into Alexander’s scenario of personal ingratiation. There is a natural love as well, a sense of national unity or patriotic upsurge. The Tsar is both “Our Angel,” and “Our Father,” both “the Tsar of Hearts,” and the “Father of his subjects.” The tie is both affection and blood. There is a suggestion that it is not only the virtues of the tsar, his achievements, that evoke enthusiasm, but a collective sense of the people themselves, an organic connection. Glinka looked back to Muscovy for a national image and had placed portraits of Prince Dmitrii Donskoi and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich at the front of the first issue of his journal; the spelling title Ruskoi is an apparent attempt to recall pre-Petrine Rus’. Alexander’s procession, after the Te Deum, to the shrines and the tombs of his ancestors allowed Glinka to portray the bond between tsar and people as a historical one distinctive to Russia. He compares Alexander’s visit to the election of Tsar Michael in 1613. Again resorting to the unsubstantiated superlative, he quotes one “revered lover of the Fatherland” as saying, “Only in Moscow can one enjoy such an enrapturing coming together (sblizhenie) of the people with the Sovereign. The kind Russian Tsars thus built their palaces so they could see everyone and so that the Russian people could see them, and come close to them like children to their fathers.” Glinka tries to bring an element of reciprocity into his account, a sign that the tsar recognizes the devotion of the people. To the shouts of enthusiasm, Alexander came out on the Red Staircase and paused. “For a few minutes, his eyes and heart ran over (obtekali) the throngs of his loyal people.” There is an intimation of reciprocity, but no more. Alexander stops to consider the spectacle, but his eyes remain dry. He weeps later, however, when he greets the merchant estate, in response to their loyal devotion. “The tears of the Tsar about his people are truly a priceless gift!” Glinka writes. The theme of nation and blood, apparent in Glinka’s and several other texts of the time, was clearly incompatible with the tenor of Alexander’s scenario. The ceremonies continued to present the tsar as a personal rather than a national leader. Archbishop Augustine’s greeting to Alexander at the parvis of the Assumption Cathedral utilized the standard rhetoric of Alexander’s scenario, extolling him as a heroic conqueror of foes on the bat-

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tlefield and of hearts among his people, who now would inspire them to fight for the fatherland.22 Though Alexander was pleased by the mood of the people in general, the acclaim in the Kremlin seems to have made little impression upon him. He was clearly ill at ease pressing through the crowds. Afterward he wept, he wrote his sister Catherine, but the tears were prompted by the “memories of happy times.” The tears during the receptions for the merchants and the nobles appear to have been prompted by the substantial donations and the volunteering of men for the militia, which he took as being “for the general good.” He expressed his thanks in terms of personal trust. “I could expect nothing else from you. You have justified My opinion of you.”23 While Fedor Rostopshchin and others called upon Holy Russia to resist the invader, Alexander’s own statements avoided such appeals. It is clear that he did not view himself as a national leader. “This people,” he said, “needs a leader capable of leading them to victory, and I, unfortunately, have neither the experience nor the necessary gifts for this.”24 But the advance of Napoleon’s armies forced the emperor to issue more emphatic statements of national leadership. After the fall of Moscow, Alexander resolved to continue the struggle, despite pressure to sue for peace from the court and the imperial family, particularly the grand duke Constantine, the dowager, and Alexei Arakcheev. It was at this point that he issued a national appeal that addressed the people directly. On September 8, he signed a manifesto, written by Shishkov, calling upon the Russian people to take up the cause of all peoples united in the struggle against the aggressor. The Russian people, led by the Orthodox church, were presented for the first time as a force for salvation and liberation. It is pleasant and characteristic of the good Russian people to repay evil with good! Almighty God! Turn Thy merciful eyes on the Orthodox Church, kneeling in prayer to Thee! Bestow spirit and patience upon Thy faithful people fighting for justice! With this may they triumph over their enemy, overcome them, and, saving themselves, save the freedom and the independence of kings and kingdoms!25

The Christian Empire The burning of Moscow and the victory over Napoleon resulted in a turn in Alexander’s conception of his role and the forms of his presentation. He included the people in his scenario only when disaster loomed and desperation prompted a summons to national feeling. The people’s involvement threatened the tsar’s image as a superordinate force, whose title came from outside or from above. The sudden change of fortune in the autumn of 1812, Alexander claimed, revealed the true source of his power and elevation. The burning of Moscow, Alexander said, had produced the revelation that his

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efforts on behalf of mankind were in vain and had given him knowledge of God. The Bible now replaced philosophy as the source of the ethical principles that elevated his imperial authority. The ambiguity of his image, a human being but one with aspects of divinity, now reflected itself in the image of the tsar as the leader of a universal Christian mission of repentance and faith, the humblest of all believers achieving an act of human transformation far greater than secular enlightenment. This change was reflected in a shift in emphasis of the imperial manifestos issued after the reversal of military fortunes. Shishkov’s famous manifesto, issued after the expulsion of the enemy from Russian territory on Christmas day 1812, began with ringing praise of the Russian people, who had fulfilled the promise not to lay down arms until the foe no longer remained on Russian land.26 “We took this promise into Our heart, relying on the powerful valor of the people entrusted to Us by God, and we were not disappointed. What an example of daring, courage, piety, endurance and strength was shown by Russia!” Alexander, chary of these addresses to the people, was careful to recognize divine intervention. The achievement was so staggering, the decree asserted, as to be beyond human powers. “In this deed we recognize Divine Providence itself.” Salvation was to be found in religion, which the enemy had scorned. “We will learn from this great and terrible example to be mild and humble executor of the laws and will of God, not like those who have fallen away from the faith, those desecrators of the temples of God.” Alexander then summoned all to give thanks to God in cathedrals. On the same day, he issued another decree, in which he vowed to build a cathedral to be named Christ the Redeemer, to show thanks to divine Providence for Russia’s salvation. Inspired by Providence, Alexander’s vision had become even more grandiose, even as his posture became more humble. His flamboyant humility reaffirmed the distance between the ruling and the ruled without resort to the Olympian imagery of the previous century. He took every opportunity to display a self-effacement in his work to effect the designs of God. The official medal commemorating 1812 carried the inscription, “Not for us, not for us [sic] but for Thy name.”27 In July 1814, the members of the Senate, Synod, and State Council approved a recommendation to offer Alexander the title “Blessed” (blagoslovlennyi) and proposed a coin and a monument in tribute to him. Alexander declined these honors. The word “blessed,” however, continued to figure in expressions, official and unofficial, about Alexander and, by the end of his reign, became as fixed an epithet as “angel.” Alexander wrote of his conversion, “From that time, I became a different person. The salvation of Europe from ruin became at once my salvation and my liberation.” Alexander now assumed the role of the leader of world Christendom, the embodiment of the absolute values of humanity. The responsibility for the success of the war was displaced from the people onto the Russian armies, and the ceremonial expression of Alexander’s providential

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power became disciplined and massive military spectacles. He demonstrated this power in two grandiose military reviews staged in France in 1814 and 1815. The first of these took place in Paris on March 29, 1814, Easter Sunday on the Russian calendar. It was staged on the Place de la Concorde, previously named the Place de la Révolution. Alexander, King Friedrich-Wilhelm III of Prussia, and Prince Karl-Philip Schwartzenberg, representing the Hapsburg court, reviewed 80,000 troops and, at an altar erected on the site of Louis XVI’s execution, knelt for a prayer service. The ceremony convinced Alexander of his providential mission to absolve the French of their misdeeds. The final apotheosis of Russian military glory occurred on the plains of Champagne near the town Vertus in August 1815, after “the hundred days” and the Congress of Vienna. Alexander intended a display that would prove to the world the perfection of discipline and training attained in the Russian army. The army itself would bely the notion of Russian barbarism and demonstrate the European character of Russia. At the rehearsal on August 25, he looked down upon his troops from the hill Mount Aimé in admiration. He remarked to Alexander Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, “I see that my army is the best in world. Nothing is impossible for it, and from its external appearance no armies can compare with it.”28 External appearance was indeed the emperor’s principal concern, for beauty and symmetry signified order and now the squares formed by the armies gave almost mystical confirmation of the divine source of his power. At the review on August 29, Alexander viewed the parade from the mount next to the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor, both in Russian uniform. The field below was covered with spectators. When the army shifted into squares, the three monarchs, surrounded by their suites descended to the field and rode past the lines of troops standing at attention. The Duke of Wellington followed behind with his suite. Alexander’s younger brothers, the grand dukes Nicholas and Michael, proudly commanded brigades and later cherished the memory of this coming of age at Vertus. The displays had been scheduled to include Alexander’s name day, August 30, the feast of Alexander Nevskii. The celebration provided the occasion for an immense religious ceremony held a few miles from the site of the previous day’s activity. Prayer services for the monarchs, generals, and armies took place in seven field chapels. The troops, more than 150,000, lined up without arms in a pattern of open squares pointing toward a nearby promontory, Mont Cormant, each side formed by an entire division. Each unit moved in formation toward its altar. The field was silent as the tsar knelt in prayer with the immense army lined up in symmetrical patterns in the field before him. Two days later the Russian armies began their return home. The review showed that Russia, the instrument of Providence, had equaled and surpassed the achievement of Napoleon. The model of Napoleon’s massing of eighty thousand troops at Boulogne in 1805 was an example that

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Russians now claimed to have exceeded. For decades after, Russians could boast that Europeans were stunned: “they could hardly believe their eyes.” The Duke of Wellington, himself a great advocate of strict discipline, was quoted as saying, “I never imagined that it was possible to raise an army to such great perfection.” The English ambassador Sidney Smith declared that the review was a lesson to other nations.29 The London Times reported that “all the evolutions were executed with astonishing precision. The soldierly appearance of the troops, the uniformity in each class, both in regard to the men and materiel, were such that no fault could be found by the most experienced judges.”30 Alexander had elevated discipline to a spiritual absolute, an all-encompassing expression of providential designation and authority. Just as the army had replaced the people in official rhetoric, the review replaced the battles as the essential fact of the mythical past. The spectacle at Vertus demonstrated the divine source of all authority for Alexander and, in his mind, began to overshadow the experience of the war itself. He said, “The recollection of that review in which, before the Allied Sovereigns and their Generals, the regiments of the line and the artillery rivalled each other in the order and precision of their movements and in the condition of their arms and equipment, will always be present in my memory.” When the army returned to Russia, he insisted on increasing training in drill to bring its marching techniques to a new peak of virtuosity. New rules were introduced and a committee began to formulate a new parade ground statute. A special model battalion was formed to train lower ranks in posture, the length of step, presentation of arms and dress. In Alexander’s last years, during his travels across Russia, he staged reenactments of the Vertus parades and wearied his adjutants with reminiscences about it. After his return from Europe, Alexander continued to present parades as spectacles glorifying the authority of the Russian emperor. On vast parade grounds, the clergy blessed the army as the embodiment of the nation. The army became the symbolic substitute for the people, one more amenable to the emperor’s wishes. At the same time, the elite units of the army, the guards regiments, became the substitute for the army. The guards units rose rapidly in numbers and in importance. Guards officers began to dominate command appointments and the most handsome and able soldiers were removed from the army into the guards regiments. The parade had become the central ceremony displaying the supremacy of the emperor and the noble elite as the exemplification of the nation. Another effort to impose discipline and efficiency on the army was the establishment of military colonies at the initiative and direction of Alexei Arakcheev. The founding of the colonies began in 1810 and gained momentum in the last decade of Alexander’s reign. The plan was to settle soldiers on their land so that they could be self-supporting and yet ready for military service. The colonies promised great savings in costs of supporting the large Russian army. It also seemed a way to circumvent, and perhaps even ulti-

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mately eliminate serfdom, since it dispensed with the need for the nobility. It was no small undertaking—by the end of Alexander’s reign one-third of the Russian army was in the colonies. The display at Vertus was a grandiose prelude to the final declaration of Alexander’s divine mission, the announcement of the Holy Alliance. Alexander drafted the terms himself and prayed with Baroness Krüdener that his allies would sign. The text of the Holy Alliance presents the principles of religion and the relations between nations in terms of Alexander’s sentimental scenario. International salvation was to be attained by the application of the “Christian precepts of justice, charity and peace, which far from being uniquely applicable to private life” should direct the actions of princes as well. Monarchs should be united “by the bonds of true and unbreakable fraternity” and would rule their subjects “like fathers of families, in the same spirit of brotherhood, which animates them, for the preservation of faith, peace and justice.”31 The declaration of the Holy Alliance denied the existence of distinctive national characteristics. The members of the alliance would be animated “by mutual benevolence and affection” and consider themselves members “of a single Christian nation.” The “Autocrat of the Christian People,” the document declared, was none other than Jesus Christ, in whom all love and knowledge resided.32 Alexander, speaking in the name of Christ, drew his moral authority from above and detached himself from the forces of popular nationalism awakened during the war. Alexander conspicuously avoided shows of national feeling and even public condolence for the wartime suffering of the Moscow population. He visited none of the sites of the major events of 1812 as he had in Austria and Belgium. He ignored August 26, the anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, neither visiting the battlefield nor holding a mass for the victims in Moscow, but did find time to attend a ball. His bewildered adjutant, MikhailovskiiDanilevskii, wrote in his diary, “It is worth mentioning that the tsar does not like to remember or talk about the Fatherland War though it makes up a magnificent page in his glorious reign.”33 •

Alexander’s mission became to reform the Russian people and as emperor to impose on them his version of Protestant pietism based on his reading of the Bible. The agent for Alexander’s designs for spiritual regeneration was his friend Prince A. N. Golitsyn, the chief-procurator of the Holy Synod, whom he named head of the Russian Bible Society in 1814. Before his own religious conversion in 1812, Golitsyn had been a rationalist, free-thinker, and bon vivant. Under his direction, eighty-nine branches of the society opened all over Russia and distributed over 400,000 copies of the Bible in Church Slavonic. The Bible replaced the philosophes as obligatory reading for provincial governors, marshalls of the nobility, and even bishops. They quickly followed the example set above and formed their own chapters, well

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understanding that participation was essential to their future careers in the service. In 1816 Alexander indicated to Golitsyn that he wished Russians to be provided “with the means to read God’s word in their native language, which for them is more comprehensible than the Church Slavic now used for the publication of Holy Scripture.” Work began on a Russian translation of the Bible.34 In 1816 the Ministry of Education, the Synod, and the Administration of Foreign Creeds were amalgamated under Golitsyn’s direction. Religion, the manifesto announcing the changes indicated, was merely another form of knowledge, “for Christian piety has always been the basis of true enlightenment.” The ministry would permit no bigotry or religious intolerance. The Russian state began to promote an evangelical Protestant doctrine that had little in common with the highly liturgical and institutionalized worship characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy. Alexander and Golitsyn prayed in silence together with Quakers visiting Russia. When the Quakers discovered extracts of Voltaire, Cicero, and other “heathen philosophers” in primers in one of the Lancaster schools, they warned Alexander of such writings “harmful for their morality.” These readings were replaced with selections from the scriptures. Education was to be Alexander’s way to transform mankind and create a utopia of believers. But the principles of religious tolerance and faith quickly became instruments of intolerance. Karamzin immediately noted that the combination of religion and education under a single ministry had the sinister potential of making hypocrisy a means for officials to proclaim their piety and crush independent thought. The philanthropic goals and declarations of humility of the movement were accompanied by the persecution of secular philosophy and an effort to extirpate doctrines of rationalism from the universities. Golitsyn’s subordinates, such as another former free-thinker and liberal, M. L. Magnitskii, purged the universities of recently recruited professors of philosophy and prescribed the teaching of the religion. As curator of the Kazan educational district, Magnitskii dismissed eleven of twenty-one professors and introduced impossible requirements—like basing the teaching of political economy upon the scriptures. He organized the students according to a military model, compelling them to march and sing in chorus. D. P. Runich, another of Golitsyn’s appointees, introduced similar measures at Petersburg University. The Orthodox Church finally responded to the Protestant challenge to its teachings and authority. In May 1824 the leaders of the church hierarchy together with Arakcheev, who resented Golitsyn’s influence, won a power struggle and forced the minister’s resignation. He was replaced by Admiral Shishkov as head of a reinstated Ministry of Education. Shishkov promptly condemned efforts to translate the Bible into Russian as a foul heresy and had the text of the Russian Pentateuch burned at the brick factory of the Nevskii Monastery. Yielding to pressure from Shishkov and the hierarchy, Alexander forbade the translation of the Bible and had the Bible societies closed.

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The Flight from Responsibility In his last years, Alexander took extended trips both abroad and through the provinces. When in the capital, he participated in the usual court ceremonies and balls but with little relish or flair. His dissatisfaction with himself and what he had accomplished grew more extreme and began to affect his public image. He became increasingly peevish and distrustful, lashing out unaccountably at those who aroused his suspicions. He preferred to retreat whenever possible to Tsarskoe Selo where he could work in solitude and quiet. He relinquished the direction of day-to-day government to Arakcheev, who increasingly ruled in the emperor’s name. Ministers sat for hours in the favorite’s anteroom awaiting an audience. The division of functions established in the first decade of his reign became blurred, and affairs fell into the type of disarray that had so pained him in the years before his accession. Meanwhile the military colonies had become a symbol of despotism. The colonists were left at the mercy of the lower officialdom, who coerced them, under Arakcheev’s influence, to get the maximum harvest and income from the colonies. Punishment and discipline were severe and brutal. The combination of agricultural work and military training proved difficult to achieve. The colonists were supposed to drill at the end of a difficult day in the fields. The result was discontent, strikes, open rebellions, resulting in brutal retaliation. •

In the years after the victory over Napoleon, liberal noblemen, many of them officers in the elite guards regiments, took up the ideas of reform that Alexander seemed to have betrayed. In their eyes, his failure and apparent loss of faith in reform undermined the mythical figure of benevolent tsar and fractured the monologic universe of heroic acts that had united the nobility with their sovereign. They had shared the apocalyptic frame of mind after the victory, which, expressed in poetry, identified Napoleon with the beast and Alexander with Christ. The rapid disappointment of these hopes, Boris Gasparov has shown, brought a reversal of the polarities and an identification of Alexander with the devil.35 The granting of a constitution to Poland but not to Russia in 1818, the brutality of the military colonies, the obscurantism of Alexander’s religious visions led them to the conclusion that they would have to take up the cause of realizing the Western political ideal in Russia. The monarchical myth was replaced by a revolutionary myth. The advanced members of the nobility, not the monarch, undertook the act of cathartic violence that would draw a sharp line between present and past. At the end of the decade, they began to organize secret societies to bring constitutional government to Russia. Alexander knew of these societies, but he neither proceeded with reform nor acted forcefully to suppress them. Despite the mutiny of the Semenovsky regiment in 1820 and reports from

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his generals about widespread discontent and the existence of revolutionary circles in the guards regiments, Alexander did nothing. His irresolution was one expression of his failing sense of the righteousness of his own power. Alexander’s frequent trips through the empire have accurately been described as a flight from responsibility. They also represent an innovation—the use of trips to to publicize the emperor’s interest in and concern about conditions in the provinces and non-Russian territories. Catherine’s travels had been displays of mutual admiration. Alexander’s showed him trying to learn about his subjects and to be in touch with the empire. Alexander replayed his version of the scenario of friendship away from the capital where he found it easier to show himself as simple mortal, to give touching displays of modesty and humility. He continued to shun lavish presentations and even gave out orders to prohibit ceremonial meetings. In 1824 Alexander journeyed from late August through October following an itinerary that took him as far as Orenburg and Perm in western Siberia. Along the way he inspected mines and factories, as well as the local garrisons, making clear his concern for the economic betterment of the nation. Accounts were carried in the semi-official journal, Otechestvennye Zapiski, edited by Pavel Svin’in. From Orenburg came “A Letter to the Publisher,” written in the personal voice with great emotion by an anonymous correspondent. The correspondent reported that the inhabitants were filled with joy when they heard of the tsar’s planned visit and eagerly awaited “the sight of his face” (litsezrenie). The account also emphasized the appeal of the Russian sovereign for the subjects of various nationalities. Even “foreign and crude peoples”—the Kirghiz, Bashkirs, and Tatars—were enraptured with his goodness (blagost’). The review at Orenburg included brigades of the Orenburg Cossacks and three hundred Bashkirs. The author described a colorful scene of the soldiers, Cossacks, and Bashkir warriors in their battle dress on the field surrounded by native Bashkirs, Khivans, Tatars, and Kirghiz. The tsar riding through the ranks praised the “cleanliness and neatness of the clothing and the even lines,” and deigned to command himself. At the conclusion of the three-day visit, the correspondent described “a feeling of quiet despondency produced by the departure of the Blessed Emperor.”36 Reports of Alexander’s visits to factories and mines emphasize his interest in industrial work and his sympathy with the workers’ lot. At Zlatoustov, he visited an arms factory and a gold mine. He arrived at the iron refinery near the factory on a Saturday night and was surprised to hear the sounds of hammers and see the flames from the furnaces. Showing his concern for the laborers, he remarked that it was very late and that the next day was Sunday. The manager replied that the work of the factory itself had come to a halt, but the refinery workers, who were paid by the piece, wanted to wait until the molten iron had cooled in an hour, an answer that the tsar received favorably. At the arms factory, he admired the polished and smooth surface of one of the cannon balls. He then turned one of the lathes, which became, momentarily, “an invaluable monument of His Majesty’s labor, designated

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to be preserved for posterity.” Alexander also inspected the arms in the arsenal and commented on the quality of the weapons produced.37 The accounts of his journey portray a sovereign in search of a role, caught between the heroic imperatives of the Petrine myth and the unavoidable evidence of his own mortal fallibility. The human being on the throne could not give the necessary signs of advancing the well-being of his people. The final proof of his weakness was the Petersburg flood of November 9, 1824. Alexander’s inability to defeat the ravages of nature brought a realization that the human being on the throne could not spare his subjects incredible loss and suffering. His wife, the empress Elizabeth, expressed her and Alexander’s common reaction in a letter. “The sight is terrifying because of the destruction that it represents; it is worse than a fire because one can do nothing to check it.” Alexander felt able to accept the bloodshed of the battlefield; he declared, “that is the inevitable lot of war.” But seeing the orphaned and dispossessed “deprived in one moment of everything that was dearest to them in life, that resembles nothing I have seen!”38 After the waters had receded, Alexander rode through the streets and witnessed the carnage. He left the carriage, stood and wept. The common people understood the flood as divine retribution; some thought it was for the sinful gay life of the capital, others for failing to help the Orthodox Greeks in their rebellion from the Ottoman Turks. Alexander made clear to everyone that he viewed it as a sign of his own failings and doom. To a remark that God had punished the people for their sins, he purportedly replied, “No, for mine.” After the flood, he became even more dejected and reclusive.39 The flood juxtaposed his image against the awesome memory of the founder. Peter had built a city on a swamp and had not been troubled with the death and suffering of those sacrificed to his task. Alexander displayed the acute sense of guilt and responsibility that went with the character of kindly, blessed tsar, the exemplar of his era as Peter had been of his. But Alexander unlike Peter suffered his inability to save lives. Falconet’s statue had apotheosized the enlightened ruler Alexander was to emulate. “The Bronze Horseman” was Pushkin’s epitaph for the heroic myth. Pushkin’s sad tsar acknowledged, “It is not for Tsars to tame God’s elements,” and “gazed at the horrid disaster with sorrowful eyes.” The emperor of Russia had been defeated by nature, chastened by an awareness of the limits of his powers. The flood in this respect marks the end of an era when claims of prodigies of transformation were sufficient to elevate imperial authority.

Nicholas I

The Mother of the Dynasty The monarchies that reemerged on the ashes of Napoleonic Europe differed fundamentally from those that had confronted the revolution at the end of the previous century. Once restored to their dominant position in domestic and international affairs, monarchs had to adapt to the new social and political forces awakened during the revolutionary period. The principle of popular sovereignty may have been defeated, but only by calling upon the principle of popular sovereignty itself in rallying national feeling against Napoleon’s forces. Nineteenth-century monarchs also found it necessary to find a national foundation for their authority. They began to develop ways to represent themselves as the embodiments of national feeling rather than as distant figures whose title to rule stemmed from otherworldly origins. In certain respects, this change was the next step in the ongoing desacralization of European monarchy under way during the eighteenth century. But the spinning of personal and historical mythology around the monarchs would continue over the next half-century, elevating rulers as figures revered or worshiped by the nation and uniting conservative elements of the nation during periods of rapid change. If the monarch could no longer be presented as a god, he or she could be idealized as a better kind of mortal, embodying the features that people admired. Alexander I professed the thoughts and sensibilities of an ordinary though gifted human being, but could not avoid the imperatives of the dominant myth and was resacralized in the form of an angelic mortal, sustaining the image of otherworldliness. George III of Great Britain—after the American and French revolutions—and Frederick William III of Prussia and Francis II of Austria embodied what Heinz Dollinger described as the “leading-image of bourgeois monarchy.”1 An affectation of simplicity and equality replaced resplendent majesty as a royal ideal. While this image may have appealed to “bourgeois” values, European monarchs succeeded in divesting it of egalitarian connotations. They appeared as immanent rather than transcendent ideals: no longer denizens of the heavens, unbound by biblical strictures and shedding benefactions on the land, they became exemplars of human conduct, of modesty and probity, to be admired by their subjects. Their virtues were demonstrated in their private lives, and particularly in the realm of the family. The increasing autonomy of European bureaucracies encouraged this change. Administrative reforms of the early nineteenth century in Prussia and Austria created a separation between court and bureaucracy, limiting

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the monarch’s powers over administrative institutions and making his symbolic role all the more significant. The Prussian king and the Hapsburg emperor, as the centers of aristocratic society and the emerging middle-class elite, epitomized the common values of family and religion that appealed to both. The idealization of the monarch’s family elevated the ruling dynasty as the historical embodiment of the nation. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, monarchs sought to emphasize not the distance between king and nation but their common values. Frederick William presented his family as an exemplar of romantic love and moral rectitude to unite the nation. At his accession in 1797, he banned his predecessor’s mistresses and introduced “almost the style of a German burgher home” to his court. The first issue of the new journal, Jahrbücher der Preussischen Monarchie unter den Regierung von Friedrich Wilhelm III, published in 1798, identified the household of the king, which was “pervaded with the values of true domesticity,” with the greater family of the people. The image of the family united the monarch and his subjects, who “entered into this beautiful sphere.” The royal family now began to put on display the ideal of love in marriage. An essay in the June 1798 issue Jahrbücher der Preussischen Monarchie, entitled “Belief and Love,” averred, “We have seen in our time that a marvel of transubstantiation has come to pass. Has not the court turned into a family, the throne into heaven, a royal marriage into an eternal union of the heart?” A painting of Frederick William and Queen Louise with their children typifies the Biedermeier style and became a model for subsequent royal family pictures.2 Dispossessed of his kingdom after the battle of Jena, forced to accept the reforms instituted by Baron Heinrich Stein, Frederick William III of Prussia was left with the private realm as his only domain. He claimed no designation from above and even removed the words “from the grace of God” from his title. He represented the effacing king who exemplified probity, constancy, and piety. In the austere tradition of Prussian royalty, he constructed no immense palaces. He disliked the etiquette of the court and would, unpredictably, ignore it. Only on the parade ground did Frederick William show a taste for show, but the symbolic value of his military leadership was destroyed by the debacle at Jena in 1806. If Frederick William exemplified paternal feeling and morality, Queen Louise appeared as the cultivated, selfless mother and spouse. She combined the elements of “true religiosity” and “true patriotism,” epitomizing the “new Prussian wife.” She participated in the German literary awakening of her day, though her first language remained French. From the pietism of Paul Gerhardt, she acquired a faith in the spiritual perfectibility of mankind, and, influenced by the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and JohannHenrich Pestalozzi, she tried new approaches to the upbringing of her children. After her death in 1810, she became the subject of a myth of the pure and holy woman. Poets sung her virtues; artists depicted her in terms of the transfiguration and with the features of the Virgin Mary. One adept

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of this myth was the queen’s oldest daughter, Princess Charlotte, the future empress Alexandra Fedorovna of Russia and wife of Nicholas I. •

Dynasty emerged as a central theme of Russian monarchy in the reign of Nicholas I. Paul I had established the legal grounding for a dynastic tradition, but his laws could only attain their goal when they corresponded to principal symbols and modes of public behavior that the monarch used to represent his power. Like his father-in-law, Frederick William III, Nicholas presented himself as a model of constancy, family values, and simple religious faith. Russian monarchy, however, did not permit the retiring, private lifestyle of the Prussian king. The royal family had to exemplify private virtue in a scenario, an ongoing dramatic performance of domestic dedication to be admired and imitated by its servitors. The private life of the tsar was lavishly staged to portray a Western ideal before the Russian public. It was the dowager empress Maria Fedorovna who shaped the new scenario and instilled familial values in Nicholas during the last decade of Alexander’s reign. Only forty-two years old at Paul’s death in 1801, Maria Fedorovna retained precedence as the principal figure at the imperial court. While Alexander shunned public appearances, she presided over social functions, family dinners and outings, enforcing the strict etiquette she had observed in Paul’s reign. Her palace at Pavlovsk became the social and cultural center of the monarchy. She brought to Russia Protestant notions of the altruistic mission of women and the image of empress as protector of the poor and bereft. She developed the network of foster homes and women’s training institutes that she had founded under Paul and encouraged other charitable activities. Maria Fedorovna thus initiated the tradition of secular charity as women’s concern in Russia. Maria Fedorovna shared the religious and ethical values of the Prussian royal house and strove to instill them in the members of the Russian imperial family. She introduced the practice of demonstrative mourning for the deceased members of the house and the belief that family bonds grew stronger after death. She taught her children the importance of marriage and marital love, but her oldest sons, Alexander I and the grand duke and heir, Constantine Pavlovich, remained deaf to her pleas. Both had strained relations with their wives and maintained the fashionable insouciance in matters of marital fidelity. Both marriages were childless. Alexander’s two daughters with Elizabeth had died in infancy. Constantine’s wife, the Grand Duchess Anna Fedorovna left Russia in 1801 and saw her husband only during his European trips. Maria Fedorovna became the family conscience, warning her children that they served as personal models for their subjects. She was particularly concerned about the grand duke Constantine, who remained the heir, tsesarevich, in the event of Alexander’s death. When, in 1803, Constantine informed her that he wished to terminate his marriage with a divorce, the

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empress replied with an angry letter. After describing “wounds of the heart” he had inflicted on her, she pointed out the symbolic implications of such a step. It would bring “ruinous consequences for public morals as well as the lamentable and dangerous temptation for the entire nation.” The humblest peasant far from the capital, noting the absence of the grand duchess’s name next to his in church prayers, would lose respect for the sacrament of marriage and for religious faith itself. He [the peasant] will presume that faith is less sacred for the imperial family than for him and such an opinion is enough to tear the hearts and minds of subjects away from the tsar and the entire imperial house. How horrible it is to publicize the fact that this temptation is caused by the imperial brother, obliged to be the model of virtue for his subjects! Morals, already corrupted and spoiled, will decline into still greater depravity through the ruinous example on the steps of the throne, one who occupies the position next to the sovereign. Believe me, dear Constantine Pavlovich, only unwavering virtue will enable us to instill in the people confidence in our superiority, which together with the feeling of reverent respect, secures the tranquility of the empire.

She was willing to relent if Constantine chose a respectable German princess for his wife. Constantine, however, had little taste for German princesses. In 1820 an imperial edict announcing the approval of his divorce permitted him to proceed with his morganatic marriage to a Polish noblewoman, Joanna Grudzinska.3 Maria Fedorovna’s three youngest children—Nicholas, Michael, and Anna—grew up sharing strong feelings of family solidarity. Ignored by the court, they drew close to each other. They formed their own club, “triopathy,” and wore special rings, one of which they gave to their mother as an honorary member. They maintained close ties throughout their lives, what Anna described as their “family union.” Their later correspondence continued to express an intimacy of feeling and a common purpose that united the members of the house. Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich shared his mother’s reverence for the institution of marriage and her inclination to regard marital vows as lofty and sacred. When Nicholas showed an interest in Princess Charlotte of Prussia on his return from France in 1814, Maria Fedorovna’s esteem for him, previously none too high, rose appreciably. She herself had dreamt of such a match, and in 1809 had discussed the possibility with Queen Louise herself. Princess Charlotte worshiped the memory of her mother, whose bust she later kept in her boudoir. She made herself in her image, adopting her romantic literary tastes and showing the same devotion to family and children. After Louise’s death, which had occurred in her thirteenth year, Charlotte took her mother’s place at her father’s side and learned at an early age the poise and confidence of a sovereign. The betrothal of Princess Charlotte to Grand Duke Nicholas in October 1815 turned the alliance between monarchies into a family bond. The

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sentimental rhetoric of the alliance identified political loyalty with personal dedication, but as we can see from their letters to Frederick William in 1816, the emperor Alexander I and his mother had different notions of personal dedication. Alexander praised the bond as an expression of the feeling of “sacred friendship” that had arisen between the monarchs. Maria Fedorovna dwelled on the qualities of the two young people, which seemed to promise a truly romantic marriage. Princess Charlotte struck her as the ideal spouse. But it was not Charlotte’s beauty that impressed her. “The enchanting character of the young princess, her thorough and unaffected mind, the tenderness of her feelings clearly foretell the happiness of my son as well as my own.”4

The Two Spheres If the Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich fit his mother’s notion of the ideal husband, he hardly lived up to her expectations of education and cultivation. Maria Fedorovna herself was a product of the Enlightenment. She believed in civil education and mistrusted military training, which she saw running amok during Paul’s reign. Nicholas was raised under the tough and unyielding supervision of officers from the Baltic provinces who instilled in him a German respect for discipline and authority. His first teachers were Miss Jane Lyon, a Scottish woman of pronounced anti-Polish views, and two Baltic noblewomen, Iulia Adlerberg and Charlotte Lieven. In 1800 Paul had appointed General M. I. Lamzdorff to take charge of the education of his youngest sons, Nicholas and Michael. Lamzdorff immediately imposed a severe military regime on the boys. Lamzdorff’s notion of training and discipline was not complicated by Enlightenment theories of the sensibility of the child. He struck with rulers and rifle ramrods. Sometimes he would fly into a rage at Nicholas, seize him by the chest or collar, and slam him against the wall until he was nearly unconscious. Nicholas’s early education may have been stern and at times brutal, but it remained simple and uniform and free of the contradictions and pressures that had beset the early lives of Paul and Alexander. He grew up learning to respect the image of his father and to admire everything that Paul represented. The young man not born to the throne gained the absolute confidence in authority that made him the exemplar of power for the Romanov house throughout the nineteenth century. To be sure, Maria Fedorovna endeavored to give Nicholas a serious education and appointed noted scholars to teach him Latin, Greek, political economy, and law. But he showed little interest in these subjects. The tedium of his lessons only strengthened his longing for the military. He showed diligence and ability only in the study of military science. In 1814 he gave up alternating military and civil dress, as his mother had insisted, and began to appear only in military uniform. Both Nicholas and Michael longed to see combat against Napoleon, but their hopes were disappointed by their mother and the emperor. Their prin-

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cipal experience was celebrating the victory, particularly in large scale parades, and both lived with frustrated dreams of battle experience. They were allowed to participate in the great review at Vertus. Nicholas, age nineteen, and Michael, seventeen, joined in the victory festivities as adult members of the family. In their debut as commanders, they delighted in the rehearsals of the drill formations. The mystique of Vertus, the translation of victory into spectacle that reflected Providence, remained with Nicholas through his life. The culmination of Nicholas’s education, as it was planned by Maria Fedorovna, was two educational tours, one through Russia, the other to Europe, which would acquaint the grand duke with the empire and with the world. Such a trip fit the new inclination for monarchs to make themselves seen outside their palaces and capitals. An educational tour had been recommended by philosophes such as Diderot and was an important part of the program outlined by the German poet E. M. Arndt, whose work on the upbringing of a prince was well known in the Russian court (on Arndt, see chapter 10). Maria Fedorovna organized the journey in detail, giving specific instructions on what he was to see and how he was to behave. Her memorandum outlining the plans stated that the trip’s personal goal was to enable the grand duke to learn about the condition of the Russian state. She proposed, and Alexander agreed, that he was to visit governmental institutions where he would be allowed to question the officials about the functioning of their offices. Maria Fedorovna stated most emphatically that the trip should not be focused on military matters. She stressed that his inspections of the various areas had the purpose of teaching him about institutions, not of inspecting them in order to pass judgment. The tour also had a ceremonial purpose: to introduce the grand duke to his subjects. Maria Fedorovna was extremely apprehensive about the impression Nicholas would leave. Nicholas’s three-month tour in the spring of 1816, when he was approaching his twentieth birthday, took him through central Russia to the Ukraine, the Crimea, and New Russia. Nicholas kept his “civil” and “military journals” faithfully, both of them in French, but otherwise seems to have paid little heed to his mother’s words. Despite her admonitions, he viewed himself as an inspector, as a severe judge of what he saw, a young man who was not mindful of the opinions of society, but had his own views, which he did not question. The published extracts from his journal indicate his conviction that all problems could be solved by more assertive authority. On occasion he also remarked on economic measures, such as the building of a factory by a landlord to make productive use of household serfs’ labor, or the possibility of making Odessa a free port to draw trade to the Black Sea. The same tone of censure characterizes his remarks in his military journal, which focuses primarily on physical conditions and drill. He reports on the poor state of hospitals and barracks. He objects strenuously to the living accommodations of the regiments and the way the men were provided for. Otherwise, he devotes his journal to descriptions of drill and uniforms.

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Nor did Nicholas seem to make an effort to win the hearts of his servitors. The reports on his trip are reticent on his reception. News of Nicholas’s trip appeared in Severnaia Pochta but with few indications of the impressions he had made. An account of his appearance at a ball in Novocherkassk briefly indicates that “taking part in the dances his incomparably sympathetic conduct brought those at the ball to indescribable rapture.”5 His guardian on the trip, the adjutant-general Count P. V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, reported favorably on his conduct, indicating “that he had received excellent respect, devotion and love from all estates,” but the descriptions of his visit give little sense of warmth. F. F. Vigel’ described him as “uncommunicative and cold” in the years before his marriage. “Many regarded him unfavorably. . . . To tell the truth absolutely no one liked him.”6 He was hardly the charming young grand duke conquering the hearts of those he met. But it was not Nicholas’s inclination to court affections or perform a scenario of friendship. The tutelage of “Papa Lamzdorff” had instilled a respect for force, authority, and punishment that left him little disposed to seek approval or affection. It was this mode of behavior that he would display in unveiling his own scenario of power during the first days of his reign. Nicholas’s education concluded with a four-month tour of England in the fall of 1816 and the winter of 1817. A special memorandum written by Count Nesselrode, the foreign minister, informed him that each nation’s political institutions were the result of its own historical experience and had to be protected from foreign borrowings. Nicholas took to the English aristocracy and the English court, and during his reign he loved to play the English gentleman. But English political life, especially the clubs and demonstrations, repelled him. After England, he again visited Prussia, which was more to his taste. He was delighted when he was appointed chief of the Third Brandenburg Cuirassier Regiment and then led the regiment in review before the Prussian king. •

The passion for military review was another feeling shared by Grand Duke Nicholas and Princess Charlotte. Charlotte felt none of the Enlightenment wariness about military pursuits and display. When she crossed the frontier into Russia in June 1817, the sight of the guards’ regiments welcoming her dispelled her homesickness. She was baptized as Grand Duchess Alexandra Fedorovna and very quickly became accustomed to her life in Russia. Although her Prussian manners seemed a bit brusque, as she herself was aware, those in the court quickly began to accept her “when they saw my general benevolence.” She and Nicholas spent the summer after the wedding enjoying dances and games at Pavlovsk. Her single unpleasant memory was her conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. “The change of religion cost me so much and oppressed my heart.” She never found spiritual sustenance in Orthodoxy. At heart she remained Protestant; the master bedroom at Peter-

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hof typically contained a European crucifixion and a Bible in English along with Russian icons placed there for Nicholas. Although, as empress, she faithfully observed Orthodox rites and practices, she remained largely indifferent to religious questions and the activity of the church. The happiness of Nicholas and Alexandra’s marriage now brightened the scene that Maria Fedorovna constructed around herself, a contrast to the doleful family lives of Alexander and Constantine. The picture was completed when in April 1818, at the age of twenty-two, Nicholas became the first of his brothers to father a son and to make the dynasty a human reality. After the birth of their son, they moved into the Anichkov palace. Nicholas had the rooms of the palace reconstructed in order to eliminate large halls and provide small rooms suitable for a quiet family life. He declared, “If someone asks you in what corner of the world true happiness hides, do me a favor and send that person to the paradise of Anichkov.” Nicholas and Alexandra looked back on this period as the happiest time in their lives. “He and I, both of us were truly happy and content when we were alone in our rooms, very affectionate and tender,” she wrote. “Both of us,” she recalled, “had a horror of everything that was the court.” The happiness was interrupted only at a dinner in 1819, when Alexander stunned them with the suggestion that Nicholas would be his successor. “We felt as if struck by a bolt of lightning,” Alexandra wrote. “The future seemed somber and without happiness.”7 Their idyll dramatized the sharp division of sexual spheres, between the public and the private, prevalent in Europe in these years. It was the end of the eighteenth-century androgynous concept reflected in the ideal of a ruler who united male propensities to power with female attributes of beauty and love, whose private life was engulfed in public obligations and duties beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Catherine I, Elizabeth, and Catherine II could emulate men in the manner of goddesses in heroic achievements. It was the political reflection of “the end of the old isomorphisms,” what Thomas Laqueur called “the discovery of the sexes.”8 Empresses now distance themselves from politics, sequestered in their own sphere as a symbol of the higher values that the government had to maintain. Alexandra vowed she would never utter the word “command.” Literature and the arts, not political thought, constituted her intellectual pastimes. While Nicholas intimidated, she endeared. She lived in a fairy-tale world protected from the sordid and brutal exercise of power. From the late eighteenth century, the ideal of marriage embodying romantic love had been set forth in European art and literature. Nicholas and Alexandra exemplified this ideal, again presenting Russian monarchy as the realization of a current Western value. Their vision found expression in Caspar Friedrich’s painting On the Sailboat, which they purchased in 1820 during a visit to Germany. A couple lies on the bow of the boat looking across the water toward the outlines of a medieval city concealed in mist. They

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hold hands, spiritually united, facing a mysterious world from a spiritual distance, and brought closer to each other by the expanse of the sea. On the Sailboat later hung on the wall of the living room of Nicholas’s Cottage, the family retreat with a view out onto the Gulf of Finland and Kronstadt (see chapter 10).

Nicholas’s Accession and the Decembrist Insurrection The occasion for the Decembrist uprising was, indicatively, a succession crisis. Paul’s Succession Law of 1797 remained in force, but Alexander remained without children. Constantine, who still held the title of tsesarevich was next in line but had made known his reluctance to rule. Therefore, Alexander reverted to the eighteenth-century principle of designation and chose Nicholas as his successor. In 1823 he signed a manifesto appointing Nicholas heir. But the act had not been promulgated, for reasons that remain inscrutable, and therefore had no legal force. The uprising of the guards on December 14, 1825, indicated both the sway and the limits of the utilitarian rationale for Russian monarchy. The insurgent guardsmen, many from leading noble families, had accepted the premise of the sovereign’s unlimited power to promote the betterment of his subjects. It was Alexander’s failure to live up to their hopes that led them to take on the task for themselves. The Grand Duke Constantine remained the legal heir. Under the pretext of bringing him to the throne, they demanded a new form of government, whether constitutional monarchy or republic. Although the Decembrists numbered only a small minority of the Russian nobility, their rebellion represented the first open rejection since 1730 of the Petrine myth that the emperor was the principal agent of secular progress. The insurrection and its aftermath occasioned a split in the nobility between those who adhered to the dynastic scenario and a small but growing number of educated noblemen who no longer looked upon the emperor as transcendent embodiment of the state. After December 14, 1825, acceptance of the imperial scenario became a matter of political choice. Only a few regiments mutinied on the morning of December 14, and Nicholas’s order to open fire on them dispersed them quickly. But the challenge to Nicholas’s rule created an atmosphere of hostility, bitterness, and fear that would dominate his reign. It remained imprinted in Nicholas’s mind as a traumatic moment that justified intensified surveillance and police persecution to combat a persistent specter of revolution. But the event that challenged his and the dynasty’s right to rule was at the same time the opportunity for him to justify its power, to relegitimate monarchical authority. In addition to suppressing the rebellion and wiping out the vestiges of opposition, Nicholas set about constructing an elaborate myth of the event. His manifestos and ceremonies following the event, the memoirs he left, his

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constant recollections of each moment of the day in private conferences assured that the heroic efforts of that day would not be forgotten. Each year, December 14 was celebrated with a Te Deum, and those who stood by him at the moment of the danger became his constant comrades and advisors. Nicholas used the Decembrist rebellion to refurbish the ruler’s conqueror image, and to put it at the service of the defense, rather than the transformation of the autocracy. Nicholas’s act of violence was perpetrated on behalf of the dynasty. The insurrection made it possible to present conservatism as a radical break, for Nicholas defined the Decembrist movement as the embodiment of the Western, rationalistic views that had been held by his brother Emperor Alexander as well. His violence hallowed the very fragile dynastic tradition that could perpetuate absolute monarchical power in Russia. He presented his triumph as the triumph of the Russian national spirit. Just as eighteenth-century monarchs defined their governance as like European monarchies, Nicholas would define his as distinctively Russian, as loyal to a nationally rooted tradition of authoritarianism. To defend a dynastic tradition, one first had to be constructed, for it was the absence of clear directives about succession that had created the conditions for the revolt. Paul’s Succession Law of 1797 remained in force, but Alexander’s childlessness and Constantine’s ostensible unwillingness to succeed him made it largely irrelevant. Nicholas at first endeavored to adhere to the law and took the oath to Constantine, who was in Warsaw, serving as commander in chief of the Russian armies. Sergei Mironenko has shown that Nicholas’s initial impulse was to assume the throne, but he was dissuaded by General Miloradovich, who as governor-general of St. Petersburg insisted on observing the legal order of succession. The guards regiments of the capital then swore loyalty to Constantine; this was a flagrant breach of the tradition, for previously military forces had sworn their loyalty only after the civil authorities.9 Nicholas awaited Constantine’s declaration of abdication. But Constantine remained enigmatically silent. When Nicholas received news of an impending revolt, he embarked on a virtual coup d’état. He presented his accession manifesto to the State Council on the evening of December 13, 1825. The State Council approved the manifesto that evening. They had little choice. “Today, I request you to take the oath; tomorrow I shall command you,” Nicholas declared. The statement, Bruce Lincoln has observed, set the tone of his relationship with the Council for the course of his reign.10 The next morning the members of the Senate and the Holy Synod and the chiefs of the loyal guards regiments swore the oath to Nicholas as Russian sovereign. Nicholas began the process of ceremonial confirmation of his rule after crushing the revolt, on the very day of the insurrection. The initial display took place late in the afternoon of the fourteenth. Nicholas brought his eight-year-old son Alexander before the Sapper Battalion, which had saved the imperial family from the insurgent Grenadiers’ Regiment. Nicholas made clear that he and the heir were one. He asked the troops to love his son

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as they loved him. Then he placed Alexander in the arms of several cavaliers of the Order of St. George, and, at his command, the first officers in each line rushed to the boy and kissed his hands and his feet. This was the initial demonstration of the new importance of the principle of primogeniture in the life of the imperial house. Nicholas showed that the imperial family rather than the emperor alone represented the spirit and values of autocracy. The scene became an emblematic one during his reign. It was commemorated in popular pictures and on the bas relief of the Nicholas I monument, which Alexander II erected to his father in 1858. At 6:30 in the evening the formal prayer service blessing the beginning of the new reign took place in the palace church. Before the court, the members of the family enacted an exalted scene that would be repeated frequently in the ceremonial settings of St. Petersburg. The event not only consecrated the victory, it revealed the pattern of response expected from those present, an emotional statement of solidarity with the ruler and his family. Baron Modest Korf, the author of the official account of the uprising, wrote, “No one among those attending this holy ceremony will ever forget its tender solemnity. All were shaken; all had tears in their hearts and on their eyes.”11 The young tsar, Nicholas, who had evoked only antipathy, required frequent ceremonial demonstrations of attachment and love. In the eight months between his accession and his coronation, Nicholas staged two major ceremonial events that presented the basic principles of the new reign—the funeral and memorial services for Alexander I, and the manifesto announcing the sentences of the Decembrists. Both of these, while claiming fidelity to the past, signaled major innovations in the image of the autocrat and his relationship to the elite and the state. The burial of Alexander I in March 1826 marked a major change in the official celebration of death in Russia. After Peter the Great’s funeral in 1725, such occasions had been observed discreetly, overshadowed by the celebration of deliverance. The memory of the previous ruler having been repudiated would not be glorified or perpetuated. The single exception was Paul’s ceremonies of reburial for Peter III, which he used to restore his father to the dynasty. With Nicholas’s accession, the imperial funeral assumes a new importance as a statement of the continuity and sacred character of the dynasty itself. The solemnities in the capital were an international event, attended by Prince William I of Prussia, the Prince of Orange, and the Duke of Wellington from Britain, and Arch Duke Ferdinand d’Este from the Habsburg court. The funeral cortege from the Kazan’ cathedral, where the coffin lay in state, to the Peter-Paul Cathedral took place on March 13 and was commemorated by the publication of a folio of engravings in Petersburg. The international and imperial pretensions of the house were expressed in additional coats of arms, the number having increased from thirty-two in Peter the Great’s procession to forty-seven. The character of the participants had also changed. Rather than military officers, officials of specified ranks dressed in black cloaks and hoods carried the standards and orders. The

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sequence of the groups and the positioning of the various ranks were illustrated on a scroll about three inches wide and nearly thirty feet long that was distributed before the procession.12 The memorial literature published in the two years after Alexander’s death expressed the new romantic notion of “a beautiful death,” an exalted spiritual moment when the deceased entered the hereafter. The works dwell on the details of the deceased’s last days and especially last moments. The moment of death brings the emperor back into the family. The accounts describe the tender reconciliation of Alexander with the empress Elizabeth before his trip, as he arranges for her to convalesce at Taganrog. The emperor, who during his reign had regarded his wife as a mere appendage of office, now is depicted in terms of the new domestic scenario, as a caring husband filled with family feeling and concerned for familial obligations. But in the exalted spiritual mood of the time, death was only the prelude to a more lasting union in the hereafter. The empress Elizabeth expressed these thoughts in a letter to Maria Fedorovna, cited in N. Danilevskii’s account and widely quoted in subsequent years: “Our Angel is in Heaven (Notre ange est au ciel) and I myself vegetate on earth! Who would have thought that I, feeble and sick could survive Him?” She declared that she would not long survive him and died the following May. In June there was another cortege and funeral in St. Petersburg, also commemorated by the publication of a book of engravings. Danilevskii wrote in his preface that husband and wife died at almost the same time. “Their souls could not remain separate.”13 It is now the dynasty, the family that attains immortality, a family union in the hereafter. The “cult of memory” of the dead monarch became an intrinsic part of scenarios of the nineteenth-century Russian monarchy. If the memory of eighteenth-century rulers was consigned to a swift and inglorious oblivion, the memory of nineteenth-century rulers would be idealized by their successors and transformed beyond recognition. The sense of loss was presented as a shared national grief felt by the people for the deceased emperor and his family. The Last Days of Life of the Unforgettable Late Tsar Emperor, Alexander I, published in 1827, contained personal letters describing the grief of the anonymous author to his son and brother. “I do not weep, but sob that I have outlived him.” Alexander’s humble death was his apotheosis.14 The Decembrists were subjected to severe retribution for their mistaken notion of the nation’s destiny. Five were sentenced to quartering, thirty-one to beheading, and the rest to imprisonment. Nicholas commuted the sentences of the five to hanging, and of the thirty-one to imprisonment. The harsh punishments drew a sharp line between the reigns of Alexander and Nicholas. Capital punishment had not been practiced under Alexander. The execution of five of the leaders, M. P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, P. G. Kakhovskii, S. I. Murav’ev-Apostol, P. I. Pestel’, and the poet K. F. Ryleev, and the sentences to exile of other young, attractive, and talented aristocrats

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confounded and shocked even conservative members of the elite. On the day of the executions, July 13, a memorial service on Senate Square consecrated the act of retribution. Troops lined up around a field chapel constructed next to the “Bronze Horseman.” Members of the court led by the clergy proceeded from the Admiralty Church to the square. The empress arrived in a carriage, Nicholas on horseback. After the service, the clergy blessed the troops with holy water. Nicholas described the solemnity as “the final duty of memory,” “a purifying sacrifice for Russian blood shed for the faith, Tsar and fatherland on this very spot.” A decree informed the army that the sentence and execution had taken place—“and your loyal regiments have been cleansed from the infection threatening you and all of Russia”—and that a thanksgiving service had taken place “for the bestowing of the salvation of the state by your deeds.”15 The second decree issued on July 13, the manifesto promulgating the sentence, presented Nicholas’s concept of nationality and the state, in what Baron Korf called “the majestic program” of the new reign.16 The manifesto shows the clear influence of Nicholas Karamzin, who, as his health was failing, continued to advise the young tsar. It began with the statement that the sentences had cleansed Russia of a festering infection—meaning the spread of ideas of constitutionalism and revolution. The intention of the Decembrists was not only criminal, the manifesto indicated, but was alien to the Russian people. “Neither in the characteristics nor the ways of the Russian is this design to be found. . . . The heart of Russia was and will be impervious to it.” Here sounds the note of national distinctiveness that would be developed in the doctrine of Official Nationality. The Russian people are intrinsically dedicated to their ruler. “In a state where love for monarchs and devotion to the throne are based on the native characteristics of the people, where there are laws of the fatherland and firmness in administration, all efforts of the evil-intentioned will be in vain and insane.” Feeling created the bond between tsar and people as it did between members of a family, and family as the basis of political solidarity was a central theme of the manifesto. The uprising prompted new signs of attachment uniting the estates. “Fathers did not spare their criminal sons, relatives repudiated the suspects and brought them to the court. We saw all estates united in one thought and one wish—the trial and punishment of the criminals.” The manifesto indicated that the home education of noble children, usually conducted by foreign tutors, was at the root of the error of the revolutionaries. It warned that parents should turn their attention to “the moral upbringing (nravstvennoe vospitanie) of their children.” The nobility should lead in the process of the improvement of Russia. “Just courts, the armed forces, the various branches of the government all need, all depend upon zealous and knowledgeable executors.” Nicholas set the goals for his elite. The improvement in the Russian state would occur “not from impudent dreams,” but from the way “the institutions of the fatherland are gradually perfected, inadequacies are overcome,

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abuses are corrected.” It would be based not on schemes from the West, which did not pertain, but on every “modest desire for the better.” The political system of monarchy had become an incontrovertible attribute of Russian nationality, not to be judged by external standards or to be seen as a reflection of foreign models. The task of the nobility was to strive to become better officials who could improve Russia only by working within the autocratic system. Nicholas’s initial steps in the months after the insurrection revealed that he viewed the improvement of the governmental system as his own personal concern. He turned his own chancellery into an agency that would ensure that administrative offices followed his intentions, thus making himself the principal supervisor of the administrative machinery of the state. Governors now were not to send reports on political matters to the Ministry of Interior, but directly to the emperor’s chancellery. In January 1826 he established the first and second sections of his chancellery. The First Section was charged with oversight of governmental appointments and other personnel matters. The Second Section had the seemingly intractable task of codifying Russian laws. He told the first head of the Second Section, Michael Balugianskii, “I want to put the full force and strictness of the laws at the base of the governmental system.”17 Under the direction of Michael Speranskii, the Second Section published the Complete Collection of Laws in 1830 and a Digest of Laws in 1832. Nicholas himself closely followed the work at each stage. The Third Section of his chancellery, the political police, has come to characterize Nicholas’s style of personal absolutism more than any other organ of his rule. In June and July 1826, he brought the political police under his own purview and appointed Alexander Benckendorff head of the Third Section. The Third Section enabled him to exercise political and moral surveillance over the empire. The officials of the section, supported by corps of gendarmes barracked in the provinces, sought to discover and extirpate oppositional thought and to inform the emperor of the condition and state of mind of Russia. But it also spied on the administration itself, ensuring that officials were working with the loyalty and the honesty that the tsar expected. It was a new “eye of the sovereign” that could extend the moral force of the emperor’s person to the distant reaches of the empire. At the same time, Nicholas made it clear that he was not giving up the process of reform. The manifesto of July 13 indicated that change could be pursued within the system of autocracy, and he worked to remedy some of the grievances revealed by the Decembrists during their interrogations. He himself believed that serfdom was an evil and sought ways to improve the conditions of the serfs and to consider conditions for emancipation. He declared that “there is no doubt that serfdom, in the form in which we have it now, is clearly and obviously bad for everyone.” But, he added, “to attack it now would be even more destructive.”18 The committee of December 6, 1826, was the first of eleven secret committees established under Nicholas to consider changes in the status of the serfs and other governmental

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reforms. Their work had few results, however, since the fear of disorders and rebellion discouraged measures that might call into question the very grounds of the authority of the nobility and officialdom. The single significant reform instituted in Nicholas’s reign was the introduction of new administrative and self-governing organs for the state peasantry by Count P. D. Kiselev, the minister of state lands.

The Coronation The crushing of the Decembrist insurrection and the severe punishments meted out to the revolutionaries validated Nicholas’s claims as emperor. Defeating a menace to the fatherland by ruthless use of force, he had fulfilled the symbolic precondition for enthronement. He then proceeded to the next stage of representation, the coronation, which consecrated his particular conception of rule as intrinsic to Russian monarchy and enshrined his person as the incarnation of supreme political power. The Russian coronation now began to serve new functions. Eighteenthcentury coronations had celebrated the successful aspirant to the throne as the champion of the general good, legitimizing dubious claims to succession. Nineteenth-century coronations, beginning with Nicholas’s, consecrated the monarchy itself, as it was incarnated in the ruling dynasty of which the enthroned emperor was the God-chosen representative. Nicholas’s scenario of power enshrined the principle of dynasty by glorifying his family as the ideal of both personal and political relationships for the Russian people. The members of the elite fade into the background of the coronation drama, leaving center stage to the emperor’s family. Nicholas I’s coronation occurred two years after the coronation of George IV of Great Britain, and in the year after the coronation of Charles X of France. All three events were reaffirmations of the hierarchical splendor of monarchy as the rulers sought to rival the revolution as centers of popular sentiment. George IV’s coronation sought to recapture the glory of the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Charles X’s coronation sought to rally and demonstrate popular support for the throne by evoking the monarchy’s medieval past. Romantic writers and artists advanced the Gothic as a national style. Eighteenth-century practices of covering Reims cathedral with a neoclassical decor was abandoned. The arches and galleries constructed for the event were designed to harmonize with the Gothic original. The authorities carefully orchestrated shows of acclaim and assembled a force of fifteen battalions of infantry and eight cavalry squadrons to keep the people outside the cathedral during the rites. They also used plays, poetry, and particularly the press, to sing the praises of the monarchy. The royalist newspaper Quotidienne, remarked upon a “universal adherence” to the monarchy that promised a radiant future: “Royalism, devotion, fidelity, love of principles, and

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princes . . .” The oppositional press, however, reported general public apathy to the celebration.19 Nicholas’s coronation too emphasized the historical roots of Russian monarchy. Following the example of both Great Britain and France, he used the press to win popular sympathy. The ceremonial texts were written in the personal voice, like that popular in the previous decade, the work of presumably independent authors. They were published in periodicals that were privately owned, though dependent on the state for subsidies and protection. Descriptions of the events appeared in Pavel Svin’in’s journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, M. T. Kachenovskii’s Vestnik Evropy, and Fadei Bulgarin’s newspaper, Severnaia Pchela. In 1828 an illustrated album was issued in Paris with a brief French-language text explaining the coronation to a foreign audience.20 The increasing publicity given to the coronation prefigures a dedicated effort to address broader layers of the educated public in Russia and to bring them into the sphere of the tsar’s scenario. The most complete account was written by Pavel Svin’in, the diplomat, travel writer, and painter whose journal had published the official reports of Alexander I’s trips. In contrast to eighteenth-century descriptions, Svin’in places the ceremonies in the context of their historical development. It is entitled “Historical Description of the Most Sacred Coronation . . .” and the first installment traced the evolution of the coronation from its presumed beginnings in the reign of Vladimir Monomakh. Svin’in emphasizes the persistence of the rituals, and notes to his text remind the reader of the origins of the various items used in the ceremonies.21 Svin’in’s was the first description to present the coronation as a national tradition manifesting the monarch’s historical ties with his people. A ceremony, previously elite in its participants and audience, now appears as one with mass resonance, with the people themselves playing a principal role. Svin’in gives full range to the personal voice of official sentimentalism in evoking the popular national upsurge for the tsar. He describes the entry procession on July 26 in epistolary form, writing with the pseudo-naive tone of a surprised observer. The Muscovites only wanted to see their tsar “to delight in the sight of his face.” The Muscovites all wanted to say, “I saw the tsar up close.” Now the enchantment, however, is not produced by the charm or beauty of the emperor, as it had been with Alexander I. Rather, it is a historical property of the people. “Isn’t it true that one has to be Russian or know very well the attachment of Russians to their tsars to understand these words? Russians have always honored their tsars and always cherished the happiness of coming close to them.”22 The reporter for Severnaia Pchela describes the exuberant welcome of the people as an emotional counterpoint to the sumptuous entry. “The external brilliance of the imperial procession was elevated and ornamented by the spiritual rapture (dushevnym vostorgom) of the zealous and faithful people, who with joyous tenderness (radostnym

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umileniem) in countless multitudes met the Great Sovereign within the walls of the First Throne city.”23 Svin’in described the moving effect of the tsar’s prayer at the Iberian Mother of God. As Nicholas prayed, his face revealed a sincere piety as he asked God to bless his state. He “prayed for our happiness, for the blessing of us.” Then the procession moved to the Assumption Cathedral. Svin’in felt unable to express the feelings that overcame him when the tsar kissed the cross before the cathedral “with the feelings of a Christian.” The scene recalled dramatic events of history that the author believed had occurred at the cathedral’s parvis, the return of Dmitrii Donskoi after the battle of Kulikovo, and Michael Romanov, exhorted by his people to accept the throne. Then on the Red Staircase, their majesties were met by priests with the cross and holy water and members of the coronation committee who greeted them with bread and salt according to the ancient tradition. This ritual showed “the character of the virtues of the people and the gratitude to the Tsar who stands aloof from No one and honors the customs of his forefathers.”24 Svin’in’s account presented the entire imperial family as the object of popular affection. Nicholas rode down the avenue flanked by his brother Michael, his brother-in-law, Prince Karl of Prussia, the Duke of Württemberg, and his son Alexander. But it was Alexander, not the emperor, who was endearing. “The kind Russian people admired the angelic charm of the Heir to the Throne with indescribable rapture.” The author went on to point out that this “Royal Child” (Derzhavnyi Mladenets) was particularly dear to Muscovites because he was born in the Kremlin.25 The members of Nicholas’s elite now see their own devotion to the emperor reflected in the acclaim of the people, which justifies his firm assertion of power. One of those watching the procession was Dmitrii Bludov, a protegé of Karamzin and Vasilii Zhukovskii, now a state-secretary of Nicholas’s. Bludov was one of the few civil servants to serve on the investigating commission for the Decembrist Insurrection. He described the coronation as an act of national unity; he may have been the first to use the phrase “union of tsar and people” that later became standard in official rhetoric. “Yesterday, we saw our monarch, who has succeeded so quickly in stirring so many hopes, arrive in the capital of the fatherland to receive the crown and scepter of his forefathers—to confirm his union with the people.” Nicholas was worshiped by all Russians, Bludov believed, but especially by the poor.26 Bludov was especially moved by the family scene. The dowager, the mother of two tsars, the emperor himself, the son, all seemed to ornament one another. He watched them proceed behind the clergy, who were holding gonfalons and crosses. Watching Nicholas prostrate himself before the Iberian Mother of God, Bludov recalled the events of 1812. Red Square was lined with Infantry of the Guard, and before the Kremlin walls, the band played “God Save the Tsar”—the first time this anthem, with its English

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melody, was played in Moscow. The strains of the music, mixing with the tolling of the church bells exalted him. “The effect was indescribable.”27 With Nicholas’s coronation, great reviews and maneuvers became an integral part of the coronation celebrations. They assumed the character of a ceremonial expression of the devotion of the military to the imperial family. On July 30, a parade of over fifty thousand troops paid homage to the dowager empress. The grand duke Alexander rode in his father’s suite on a magnificent steed. The eight-year-old galloped past the emperor, charged up, and stopped before him to the delight of the spectators. The son had paid deference to the father. Then Nicholas led a detachment before his mother and saluted her, giving recognition to her personal and ceremonial preeminence in the house. The feeling of the unity of the dynasty was enhanced by the surprise arrival of the grand duke Constantine in Moscow. A broadsheet printed at this time shows the three brothers, Nicholas, Constantine, and Michael, riding side by side, with the heir, Alexander, on horseback at Michael’s side. On the day of the coronation a manifesto was issued establishing the rules for a regency and designating Nicholas’s “most kind” brother Michael regent lest Nicholas die before the heir’s majority.28 •

The accounts of the coronation reveal the mode of presentation of official events that would dominate the ceremonial texts of Nicholas’s reign. The author uses the personal voice of sentimentalism to express collective feelings not only of the elite but of the people themselves. Individual feelings are politicized and generalized to express adoration and worship of the emperor and his family. The words, vostorg, rapture, enthusiasm, umilenie, tender pity or pathos, conveyed the intensity of emotion of subject for monarch. Both were expressed by the shedding of tears. These words, borrowed from the religious lexicon, carry the connotation of inspired fervent devotion. Vostorg, according to Dahl’s dictionary, has a sense of rapture, of oblivion, “of self-forgetting and temporary renunciation of the world and its vanities.” In Nicholas’s reign, it expressed the sensuous merger of the subject with the sovereign and his family, a worship of and infatuation with their persons. Dahl defines umilenie as “a feeling of sweet pity, humility, grief, spiritual and joyous sympathy, benevolence.” It was connected with the feeling of the Mother of God for the Christ child, depicted in umilenie icons. The word above all expresses the emotional bond, the sense of connection, between a figure that was lofty or powerful, with one vulnerable or supplicant. In Nicholas’s reign, umilenie denoted the gratitude and love of the subject for the emperor who forsook his majestic reserve and showed human feelings, what B. I. Berman called, in reference to saints’ lives, the “rapture of submission” (vostorg poddanstva).29 Svin’in uses these words to portray the heightened emotional state produced by the coronation ceremonies on August 22. “This high sacrament,”

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he wrote, “uniting the Sovereign with his subjects, like a father with his children, took place under the sign of those lofty virtues, which, since his ascension to the throne have conquered the hearts of Russians for God’s Anointed.”30 After the procession had reached the cathedral and the august personages had been blessed by the bishops and taken their places, the emperor’s entry commenced. The figures of husband and wife dominate the author’s attention. “All saw only The Monarch and his spouse, that August couple proceeding with the proper humility and piety to receive The Most Holy of Sacraments.”31 Svin’in described the scene at the throne after the emperor and empress had entered. At their side were prominent officials and officers, and the highest clergy. The author remarked that their presence “attested that the Young Monarch was surrounded by wisdom, experience, merit, brought to the altar of faith and the fatherland.” A footnote indicated that the emperor would be seated on the elaborate throne of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, studded with 876 large diamonds and over a thousand rubies and emeralds. The throne of Alexei would be used and displayed as a great tsarist treasure at later coronations as well. The empress sat on the golden throne of Tsar Michael Romanov.32 After Nicholas had conferred crown and mantle on himself, the empress knelt before him. After touching the large imperial crown to her forehead, he placed the small crown on her head. She fell to her knees “to a rising, general feeling of tenderness (umilenie).” He then placed the mantle on her shoulders and the chain of the Order of Andrew on her neck. Svin’in evoked the emotional response of the moment. “What rapture (vostorg) seized the hearts of those standing by, and all the inhabitants of Moscow, who had learned by the resounding bells and the cannon salvos that the Imperial Couple were invested with the purple and crowned!” Nicholas’s declamation of the prayer, on his knees, here identified as the “prayer of Solomon,” moved everyone to tears. The powerful impression always produced by the liturgy on Christians was heightened by the sight of the tsar and tsaritsa, Svin’in wrote, using the pre-Petrine title. Their appearance, accompanied by the “heavenly” singing of the chorus, “submerged all present in sweet ecstasy, which suddenly was broken by rapture when this harmonious and majestic chorus intoned ‘many years’ three times!”33 The taking of communion also figured as a moment in a family imperial drama. Before he entered the sanctuary, Nicholas removed his sword and symbolically handed it to Constantine, demonstrating the trust that had come to unite the brothers. Alexandra received communion at the Imperial Doors outside the sanctuary. Svin’in again told the feelings of the spectators. Seeing “the tender feelings” (umilenie) and reverence of the couple in receiving the sacrament sent those present into “sweet ecstasy,” broken only when the choir sang long life to the tsar three times. They then bowed three times to greet the tsar on his coronation. At the end, they witnessed “the very most tender spectacle,” (umilitel’neishee zrelishche), the kissing of the members of the imperial family, “a spectacle moving every Russian to tears, see-

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ing in this union, an example of high morality, the guarantee of the happiness and prosperity of the fatherland.”34 The spectacle fulfilled the literary and mythical expectations of the foreign guests and the Russian official elite. The Duke of Raguse found the unity and devotion of the family “one of the most beautiful things the imagination can conceive.”35 Nicholas’s coronation introduced scenes of family devotion and reconciliation to the solemn rites. The family becomes a metonymic expression of the constant, devoted, and pure feelings that attach servitors and subject to the throne. The political bond was sustained by a mythical bond of affection for the imperial family, which the dignitaries of Nicholas’s state would be expected to display at the proper occasions. The shedding of tears of joy and, when necessary, grief became obligatory at court ceremonies—a sign of loyalty and sharing in the family life of the tsar that symbolized his moral and therefore political supremacy. The culmination of the ceremonies portrayed by Svin’in occurred not in the cathedral, but on the Kremlin square. The appearance on the square signaled the broadening of the appeal of the ceremony, the absorption of those beyond the highest rank into the coronation ritual itself. In addition to the common people standing on the square, over five thousand who could not fit into the crowded precincts of the cathedral watched patiently from grandstands. Among them were senators and lesser officials, foreigners, merchants, and deputies from Asiatic nationalities. The array of colorful costumes—of the Russians, the Circassians in their brilliant belts and pearls, the Kirgizy, Kabardintsy, Georgians, Armenians, Kalmyks—ornamented and showed the extent of the sovereignty of the Russian emperor and his elite. The gathering on the square stood for both nation and the empire, which merged in the political entity of Rossiia. “It seemed that everything was assembled here that is attractive and glittering in Russia,” Svin’in wrote.36 The dramatic climax occurred when Nicholas reached the top step of the Red Staircase as he returned to the palace. He then paused, turned to face the crowd, and bowed three times, once in each direction to the exultant people on the square. The act, which resembled the triple bow the emperor made before the imperial doors in the cathedral was an unprecedented gesture of recognition and reciprocity. The Russian emperor, previously could receive but not acknowledge acclamation, for it was regarded as unseemly for his godlike person to seem beholden to ordinary mortals. We have seen how Alexander I, even in 1812, refrained from outward signs of recognition on the Red Staircase. Nicholas I reciprocated the feelings of those cheering him. Svin’in exclaimed, “I will say that this alone would be enough to win the hearts of the good Russian people, if they did not already belong to the Anointed of God.”37 Like the dignitaries in the cathedral, the people responded with the emotion appropriate to the scenario. Many of those present recalled an explosion of enthusiasm. “The joy of [the loyal subjects] knew no bounds at this

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solemn moment: loud unrelenting cries filled the air, innumerable caps flew upwards, the crowd stirred noisily. Strangers embraced each other and many wept for joy.”38 And though those on the Kremlin grounds were specially selected, the members of the imperial family believed their acclaim sincere and representative of the nation. The empress was elated. “This dazzling Kremlin, on the clearest day, resounding with the cries of enthusiasm of this excellent Russian people! It was beautiful!” she wrote.39 Nicholas performed the triple bow at subsequent Kremlin processions, to the acclaim of the crowd. It was repeated by his successors and by the end of the century, came to be regarded as “an ancient Russian custom.” The act both brought the people into the ceremonies on the day of the coronation and redefined the meaning of “love” in the relationship between throne and people. Bowing, the tsar recognizes the love of the people as the source of his unlimited power, but the rhetoric of the text transforms the people’s love into a historical justification for absolute monarchy. The triple bow acknowledged the principle of popular sovereignty, and immediately neutralized it, turning ceremonial acclamations into an expression of popular will.40 •

Svin’in stressed the national and imperial elements in his description of the celebrations following the coronation. His description of the great masquerade attended by nearly five thousand members of the nobility, merchantry, and native leaders dwelled on the variety of ethnic types that constituted the empire. In their native dress, the Asiatic representatives at the coronation bore witness to the supremacy of the imperial elite, whose members wore European uniforms and gowns that set them above national distinctions. Viewing the scene from the balcony, Svin’in observed the ladies’ gowns sparkling in silver and gold. He saw “Asian ladies” in “sumptuous furs and valuable brocades.” But his attention was drawn most to the Russian national costumes. Most of the women present, were “dressed in Russian sarafans, with Russian bands (poviazki) and kokoshniki on their heads, bathed, one might say, in pearls and diamonds.” As they danced the polonaise, their “patriotic attire,” (otechestvennyi nariad) transported him back to the times “when Russians were not ashamed of their splendid dress, proper for the climate, having a national character, and incomparably more beautiful than foreign dress.”41 Svin’in gave the first account of the gala theatrical performance in a Russian coronation description. He emphasized the importance of the imperial family’s attendance at a Russian show; the program included the opera The New Landlord and the ballet Sandrillon. The theater served as another scene of wild acclaim for the imperial family. The festivities continued with a popular feast that gave the author the opportunity to elaborate on the ravenous appetite of the Russian people. The celebrations concluded on Sep-

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tember 22, with fireworks at the buildings of the Cadets’ Corps, which presented a brilliantly illuminated triumphal arch with the inscription, “To the Pacifier (Uspokoitel’) of the Fatherland Nicholas the First.” Over the arch appeared an allegorical figure of Russia, in a carriage drawn by four horses. Her way was lit by two “Slavic horsemen” before whom soared Glory. Military trophies appeared between lit columns, and in the rear two gladiators sat upon steers they had slain, while horsemen raced across the expanse.42

Epitomes of the Nation

The Illusion of Omnipresence Alexander I had sought to appear as an ordinary mortal, but his pretense to wisdom, kindness, and in the end godliness invited the metaphor of angel and the epithet “blessed” that lifted him into a higher realm. Nicholas I demonstrated what was possible for an ordinary human being uplifted by a sense of duty. By the force of his will, he claimed to make things work, curb abuses, make the empire flourish, and give the impression, conveyed by the Marquis of Londonderry, of “one of the most remarkable men of his age.”1 Allegory was disavowed in official rhetoric, because it was superfluous or insufficient. The emperor was all the more admirable and lofty because praise did not require embellishment. “The Russian Tsar (we speak without allegory, without exaggeration, without flattery) is the beneficial luminary of His land, nurturing everything, bringing life to everything,” Russkii Invalid commented during Nicholas’s visit to Nizhnii-Novgorod in 1836.2 Nicholas’s charismatic appeal was immanent rather than transcendent: his person expressed qualities and values integral to this world, or as was claimed, particular to Russia. In this respect, he adopted the manner of Frederick William III and other Western monarchs who appeared as exemplars of virtue for the private life of their subjects. The monarch strove to reflect the essential characteristics of the nation. Presenting the charisma of immanence, official texts adopted new rhetorical strategies, revealed in the descriptions of Nicholas’s coronation. They shift from figurative modes of presentation, which compare the emperor with universal images, to metonymic or more precisely synecdochic modes, which make of him the concrete expression of the nation. Rather than expressions of otherworldly spheres, ceremonies presented microcosms of Russia, exemplifying the attitudes toward authority and modalities of conduct, both official and private, that should prevail in the macrocosm of the empire.3 But though of this world, Nicholas had to fulfill the imperatives of the Petrine myth and appear as superior and supreme embodiment of the Russian state. Rather than the humble example of Frederick William III, Nicholas presented an example of superhuman achievement, setting himself apart from his subjects, the highest embodiment of the nation. He sustained the symbolic preeminence of the autocrat not by elevating himself to celestial spheres but by abasing his subjects; he was a living reproach for the mortal weaknesses that prevented his servitors from working for the general good. Thus the figure of “first servant of the state” in Nicholas’s person,

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kept and paradoxically enhanced the image of superordinate ruler whose person represented the Russian state. In this equation, the macrocosm was defined in terms of the microcosm. The emperor, his family, the dynasty, the army and state epitomized the principal qualities of Russia and represented the whole. Here we see a kinship between political and symbolic representation. Both, Kenneth Burke observed, invoke synecdoche to describe the identity between microcosm and macrocosm. All attempts to “represent” the general will of the people in parliamentary institutions involve a transfer of qualities to the representative body that stand for the people as a whole.4 Likewise, the imagery of Nicholas’s reign claimed to reflect the will of the people by making the tsar in his ceremonial appearances the representation of the whole. The signifiers—Nicholas, his family, and their ceremonial appearances— engulfed the signified, Russia. The paradox of the Russian emperor, who ruled because he appeared foreign, presenting himself as a national ruler was resolved by a reformulation of the Petrine myth. The decree on the sentencing of the Decembrists, cited in the previous chapter, announced the national character of the monarchy. The failure of the Decembrist uprising was itself proof of the national character of the monarchy. It was the very devotion of the Russian people to their ruler that constituted the distinguishing feature of Russia’s experience. Uniqueness came from a political structure that preserved universal principles of monarchy, the heritage of the Byzantine and Roman empires, from which Europe had fallen away, seduced by the philosophies of the enlightenment. The relationship was expressed in the founding legend of the “invitation” of Viking princes in 862 by the people of Novgorod with the words “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.” The tale achieved the status of canonical verity in Nicholas’s reign. The historian Michael Pogodin, elevated the event to the central moment of all of Russian history. In a lecture, delivered in 1832 in the presence of Sergei Uvarov, Pogodin declared, “The Varangians came to us, but voluntarily chosen, at least from the start, not like Western victors and conquerors—the first essential distinction in the kernel, the seed of the Russian State.” The Russian people had invited their foreign conquerors, obeyed and loved them; autocracy had national roots. In the West, conquest and conflict had brought national states into being and remained endemic to their history. The devotion to the supreme foreign ruler had become the distinguishing mark of the Russian people.5 Uvarov was pleased by the lecture, and Pogodin’s ideas contributed to his formulation of the doctrine of Official Nationality, which he promulgated when he became Minister of Education the next year. Uvarov provided the ideological statement of Nicholas’s national rendering of the Petrine myth. His formula “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” was his response to the revolutionary slogan, “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” In an age of idealism, nation was enshrined in principles or ideas, which, regardless of outer appearances, ostensibly determined how phenomena

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should be understood. Uvarov’s explanations, Andrei Zorin has pointed out, were drawn from an understanding of Western Enlightenment and idealist philosophers. He followed the eighteenth-century utilitarian justifications of autocracy as the institution that had created and saved the Russian state. Uvarov made no mention of divine sanction: autocracy was the “necessary condition of the existence of the empire.” He defended Orthodoxy, not as a revealed truth, but as “a guarantee of social and family happiness.”6 The third element in the triad nationality, narodnost’, expressed the devotion of the people to the person of the tsar and preserved monarchy in Russia, when it was tottering elsewhere. The principles of Uvarov’s slogan were proclaimed and defended by a number of official writers contributing to such journals as Severnaia Pchela and Moskvitianin.7 Norbert Elias observed that symbols in monarchy can become ends in themselves. In the court of Louis XIV, the glory of the king became such a dominating, uncontested value, and the courtiers were obliged to admire and extol the glory of his reign.8 The baroque courts of Europe followed his example and glorified their sovereigns in a metaphorical frame. The central value of Nicholas’s reign was loyalty, which Official Nationality defined as distinctively Russian. The loyalty of the people was displayed in ceremonies of devotion to the monarch. The people were recognized and then engulfed in demonstrations of loyalty to the sovereign. The events of December 14 established the paradigm for such demonstrations of loyalty. During his trips across the empire, on the parade ground and in the court, Nicholas reenacted the role of the embattled leader. Foreign visitors described a Russian empire dominated by the emperor’s presence and personality. The literature about Nicholas’s travels through the empire, his strolls through St. Petersburg, created the image of a monarch who not only watched over his people, but appeared among them. He gave the impression of involving himself in everything, from the writing of the laws to the design of buildings and the settling of domestic disputes. In Petersburg, he received and examined the daily reports of the police chief. Striding through the streets of the capital, he was known to intervene in brawls and to instruct policemen on their duty. His ability to move among his own people was presented as a sign of their affection for him. At moments of crisis, Nicholas appeared in public and reenacted the heroic scene of December 14. When cholera struck Moscow in the summer and fall of 1830, Nicholas appeared at the scene to take charge of the measures against the epidemic. His appearance before the people had almost magical effects. The crowds went wild. Alexander Benckendorff wrote, “it seemed to all that the disease itself would capitulate to his omnipotence.” Filled with a sense of his own mission, Nicholas courageously visited institutions. He too fell ill with the fever but quickly recovered. When cholera struck St. Petersburg, the quarantine measures aroused protests from the populace. On June 23, 1831, Nicholas appeared before a rioting mob on Sennaia Square, in a scene closely resembling that of Decem-

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ber 14. Nicholas faced the crowd alone. He threw off his coat, ordered the rioters to fall to their knees and cross themselves. He then scolded them, employing his characteristic logic that defiance proved disloyalty and, therefore, the lack of a Russian spirit. “Remember what you did, remember that you aren’t French, you aren’t Poles, but Russians!”9 The drama of the physical confrontation of a lone figure subduing the mob was caught in the bas-relief placed on the pedestal of Nicholas’s statue in 1858. The emperor stands courageous and hard, unmoved before the crowd, a tower of certainty before the frightened mob at his feet. Most important, Nicholas’s scenario emphasized his closeness to the people, denying while maintaining the distance between the monarch and his subjects. The awe he inspired was the counterpart of love, the ostensibly voluntary dissolution of the subject’s individuality in inspired devotion to the sovereign. Nicholas’s presence among his people created a sense of connectedness by contiguity. Symbolic elevation occurs by making the scenes of contact metonyms for the political structure as a whole, and by presenting ceremonies and celebrations as expressions of the people as a whole. Nicholas used the press to adapt the imagery of the Russian autocrat to a new era of nationalism and to establish a connection between monarch and nation. Following the example of France, the government began to use the press not only to glorify the monarch but to give the illusion of widespread popular support. In Nicholas’s reign, subsidized newspapers—Severnaia Pchela, Russkii Invalid—and the illustrated journal Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok brought knowledge of Nicholas’s family and court to a broader reading public. Moscow was the principal expression of national enthusiasm for the tsar and Severnaia Pchela gave Nicholas’s visits glowing accounts. The newspaper reported on the joyous response of the Muscovites when he visited the city in March 1830.10 Nicholas had “renewed the tradition of unexpected visits of his Great Ancestor, Peter.” The Muscovites were especially joyous, for they had not seen him since the coronation. A long supplement published on April 1 gave a detailed account of the emperor’s visit.11 Nicholas inspected the trade fair with especial attention. The account concluded with a description of the banquet given by the Moscow merchantry, where one of the merchants delivered a rousing speech proclaiming the Muscovites’ and the Russians’ love for their tsar that brought everyone present to tears. “It was touching to see how, without difference of rank and title, all hearts felt one thing, and all speeches expressed one thing.” Nicholas’s extensive travel, much of it described in the press, heightened the sense of connectedness with the empire. “The emperor travels without interruption,” The Marquis de Custine wrote. “He passes through at least fivehundred places in a season.”12 Nicholas’s concern for the life in the provinces was shown by his attention to the appearance of the towns he visited. He made his presence known by giving opinions and instructions, exercising rule on the spot. In Nizhnii-Novgorod, he inspected the fair. A report printed

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in both Russkii Invalid and Severnaia Pchela in August 1836 described the “splendid spectacle” of Nicholas in the town.13 Having seen the town, Nicholas took steps to improve its appearance. He himself drafted plans for rebuilding the area of the booths at the fair and for new buildings along the embankment; the most scenic point would be occupied by a new house for the military governor. One of the factors furthering the goals of the government, Russkii Invalid explained in the September 9 issue, was the devotion of the people to a sovereign who was concerned with “the tranquility, the well-being, the wealth and the happiness of the people entrusted to him by God.” In Kazan, Nicholas inspected schools, hospitals, and the university. In Simbirsk and Penza, he visited the gymnasiums and praised the boys for their attentive studies.14 Appearances were of great importance to Nicholas. He hoped to reconstruct provincial towns on the model of Petersburg. For example, in Simbirsk, he deplored the appearance of public buildings, which, he claimed, lacked “a proper look.” He criticized the design of the local trading arcade and other buildings that were rising along the Volga. He had the work halted and gave precise instructions about the construction of new edifices, embankments, and a wharf. He ordered the local officials to give the town square “a correct look” and to lay out a public garden. He told them to raze the old governor’s mansion and build a new one on the embankment. He drew the changes he wished on a map of the town for the governor and the office of Routes of Communication. He also issued a decree ordering the erection of a statue of Karamzin in the town. He left the next day. “All the best buildings of the town and many other edifices were erected as a result of his supreme will,” the Simbirsk resident wrote.

The Parade Ground as Epitome Under Nicholas I, the stunning discipline and subordination of Russian troops demonstrated not only Russians’ capacity to equal but to surpass the Western model of military organization. The literary idiom of the time presented the displays of discipline not as triumphs of professional expertise, to which the monarch bore witness, but as spectacles of the monarch’s personal authority and the Russian people’s gift for obedience. Their obedience was portrayed as loyalty and love. Parades became a central part of most holiday celebrations. Christmas Day—the anniversary of the expulsion of Napoleon’s armies from Russia— was celebrated with Nicholas’s inspection of the guards regiments in the halls of the Winter Palace, then a Te Deum for the veterans of the war. The parades accompanying the Blessing of the Waters, when weather permitted, became the center of a massive pageant that engulfed the religious ceremony. Easter was marked by a great parade followed by an exchange of greetings between the emperor and his troops. Baron Haxthausen described

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with admiration how the emperor, dressed in his uniform of the Don Cossacks, met and embraced soldiers selected from each of the regiments to bring him greetings.15 Nicholas sustained this bond, in part, by instilling fear. He was the allseeing monarch. His eyes haunted those who saw him; they seemed to reach everywhere and to reach into the servitor’s soul. A lithograph of the time, entitled un seul regard, reminded his subjects of his fierce, unswerving gaze. One officer wrote, “I have never again felt the glacial impression that the sight of the tsar made upon me.” When Nicholas spoke, his “leaden eyes” remained fixed on those he addressed “as if he wanted to seek the secret thought at the bottom of their soul. . . . Of a colossal height, with an admirably handsome face, his eye, hard and penetrating, subjugated you [sic].” One officer found his left eye particularly fearsome. It was like “a red-hot nail,” emitting a special piercing glow that left even courageous men trembling, and made some avert their gaze and feel ashamed, “like a maiden.”16 Fear, however, was not the only or the principal bond between Nicholas and his officers. Nicholas aroused a feeling of love, a feeling that derived from a dissolution of the individual in the embodiment of monarchical authority. Vladimir Daehn, a guards officer in the Sappers and later a governor, confessed to these feelings in his memoirs. In his late twenties, he served as an adjutant to Nicholas at Peterhof. He recalled the joy at being in the detachments that had the tsar as chief, a “joy—a delight which I am not in a state to describe: I loved him with all my loving soul—I could never get enough of him. My daily morning visit to the palace replaced all other pleasures for me.”17 Nicholas felt a kinship with the artist who exercised power and control over reality, shaped the world into aesthetic order, and excluded the unruly elements of human volition. He himself took lessons in engraving and left many copper plates of guards regiments. Paintings and engravings of parades hung on his study wall. The paintings produced by the “perspectival school” of art that he encouraged depicted what Richard Stites described as the “panegyric, administrative” utopia. We see men reduced to lines of the precisely disciplined troops in symmetrical formation who perform the drama of subservience, joining the emperor in overpowering the forces of disorder.18 The construction of buildings in Petersburg followed the same spirit, continuing the project of recreating Rome in St. Petersburg. The governmental edifices spread out over large expanses, producing an impression of cold and forbidding uniformity. Petersburg was to epitomize all of Russia, and no project for a governmental building anywhere in Russia could be undertaken without passing the emperor’s inspection. Nicholas paid the same careful attention to the uniforms of his servitors. He loved to spend hours sketching uniforms and drawing handsome guards officers in graceful poses on still and stately horses. Proper dress and demeanor was the essential sign of loyalty showing an officer’s identification

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with Nicholas’s rule. The Preobrazhenskii regiment, which had shown itself loyal to a man on December 14, provided the model of military appearance. Every year, at 1 p.m. on December 14, he visited the Preobrazhenskii barracks for a review and family reunion with the regiment. Nicholas heightened this sense of identification by favoring officers who resembled him. Tall and stately men were selected for the regiment and the best went into the “company of his majesty” of the first Preobrazhenskii battalion, which guarded the Winter Palace. The Preobrazhentsy on parade, one of them wrote, “crowned an army that by its martial look alone inspired full trust for all the eventualities in life.”19 Rules on uniformity of hairstyles and grooming were strictly enforced. A decree of the minister of war in 1837 specified that hair was supposed to be cut on the forehead and the side, no longer than 13⁄4 inches, and parted from right to left. Soldiers of his infantry had to be seen in black hair and mustaches, whether natural or dyed. Beards were prohibited. Nicholas himself wore a mustache. Only officers were permitted to follow his example and to resemble the dashing figure of the emperor. Since appearance denoted political disposition, the highest form of devotion was in imitation. Officers assumed Nicholas’s intimidating pose and impressed their troops that no mistake or infraction could elude their gaze. Portraits show them with their mustache cut like his, assuming his air of disdainful superiority and absolute control. Sleek, tall, and stiff, they took on Nicholas’s punitive, menacing manner. Nicholas greatly expanded the imperial suite; he appointed 540 adjutants compared to the 176 appointed by Alexander. His adjutants checked on command assignments at parades and undertook inspections of the troops to ensure their readiness. They performed guard duty for him in the palace and accompanied him on his trips through Russia, which they helped to arrange. The appointment of the empress, his brother Michael Pavlovich, and his sons as heads of regiments strengthened the tie between officers and the family, weakening tendencies to professional autonomy in the military. Nicholas made special efforts to draw young noblemen into the life of his family. Junkers and cadets learned to regard the imperial family as their own. Nicholas delighted in organizing boys in military formations. They showed the continuity of his order, a reproduction of the parade ground in miniature. He showed a paternal concern for the progress of the cadets and the pupils in the military training schools and took enormous pride in their marching skills. During the 1840s, he founded his own Preobrazhenskii “play regiments” for his young sons, the grand dukes Nicholas and Michael, which he filled with sons of the aristocracy and important figures at court. Under the direction of old soldiers, the boys learned to dress and march properly and to build fortifications. The most favored joined in war games with the young heir and became his comrades (see chapter 10). When they grew up they attended the military maneuvers at Krasnoe Selo and met the imperial family at numerous balls, receptions, and theatrical performances.

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The first and most widely publicized glorification of dynasty and nation was the dedication of Auguste Ricard de Montferrand’s column to Alexander I, which took place in the aftermath of the crushing of the Polish uprising of 1830. On August 30, 1834, Alexander’s name day, 120,000 troops gathered in the capital for a ceremony that marked the Alexandrine column as a votive object in the cult of dynasty. The principal published accounts, a brochure by Ivan Butovskii and an article by Vasilii Zhukovskii, described the spectacle as the epitome of the political order that had lifted Russia to heights of power and international prestige.20 Butovksii presented the setting, the imperial family, the lines of troops as an epitome of the relationship between the subjects and their sovereign. The setting was the massive palace square and the broad expanse to the north, “the enormous plain, that majestically spreads out before the eye of the spectator.” The statue of Peter the Great was visible then in the distance, on St. Isaac’s Square; nearby was Rossi’s majestic Senate and the Synod arch. One could see Quarengi’s Horse Guards Manege and the building of the military ministry, then the Winter Palace, and the noble arch of the general staff. All of these were parts representing the whole; they made up the “foundation stones upon which our empire rests. The happiness and wellbeing of Russia flow from the marvelous buildings bordering the square.”21 For Butovskii, the ceremony revealed the emotional solidarity that existed between people and monarch. The people on the square represented all the Russian people, united by pride in Russian military triumphs abroad, and their relief and joy at the victory over the rebels. He described a “touching scene” that took place after the ceremony. “Common people” (prostye liudi) gathered at the monument and looked upon it with tenderness (umilenie), uttering the name of Alexander with tears in their eyes. They called him “their Angel, their Benefactor, their Little Father.” Others brought their children to the column and spoke of “the kindness and majesty of Russian tsars” and the glory of the Russian armies.22 The column itself was a blunt statement of Russia’s exemplification of Western conceptions of empire. Montferrand had designed the column after the Vendôme column in Paris and Trajan’s column in Rome, but made sure that it stood taller than both.23 The statue on the monument, by Boris Orlovskii, glorified Alexander in Nicholas’s idiom. Placed high atop the column—like the Roman emperors and Napoleon on their respective columns—the figure presents Alexander as an angel crushing a serpent. The angel, with Alexander’s face, holds a cross, points to the heavens, and peers down at the square. If Peter the Great appeared as a classical hero, Alexander assumed the incorporeal form of an angel. But he is a militant, not a gentle and endearing angel. It is a powerful expression of a divine force, an instrument of Providence acting on behalf of the nation. It is a statement of national destiny.

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11. Dedication of the Alexandrine Column. Drawing by A. Ricard de Montferrand. From his Plans et détails du monument consacré à la mémoire de l’Empereur Alexandre.

If the ceremony confirmed the political significance of the monument, pictures placed the ceremony in the mythic history of the dynasty. Montferrand’s engraving turns the mortals on the square into objects of art, their order and submission reflecting the creative will of the monarch (fig. 11). They are arranged in neat quadrilaterals over the expanse, the square surrounded by monumental classical edifices. The scene fades into the distance, giving the impression that it continues indefinitely, that Russia is an endless expanse of neoclassical squares filled with parades.

The Imperial Court as Epitome If the parade ground displayed the identity between imperial family and the military, and by extension the nation, Nicholas’s court put on view the bonds between the family and Russia’s officialdom. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the imperial Russian administration grew—the number of officials rose fourfold from 1800 to 1856—and became increasingly educated and specialized. Bonds of personal devotion enabled the emperor to counteract rival claims of institutions and law that had favored the devel-

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opment of a professional bureaucratic ethos in the West. The ceremonies of Nicholas’s court brought officials into the culture of dynastic monarchy and discouraged loyalty to the spheres of specialized competence characteristic of the European administrations that were Russia’s ostensible models. Nicholas institutionalized his court, establishing a Ministry of the Court on August 26, 1826, the day of his coronation. The ministry administered court appointments, made arrangements for the disposition and attire of participants and guests, and circulated “ceremonials” (tseremonialy) that described the order of ceremonies. It also incorporated the Cabinet of the emperor, the office that managed the family’s finances and the Appanage Department, which supervised their estates and palaces. He made the award of ceremonial orders, such as the Order of St. George, or the Order of Alexander Nevskii, a matter of his concern. His reform of the orders in 1842 designated the minister of the court chancellor of orders and placed their administration under his own personal jurisdiction. Feasts for the orders could be sumptuous affairs with two to three thousand guests dining on elegant china service. At court as in the military, exactitude and uniformity of dress were matters of great concern to Nicholas. At his accession, no single form of dress was prescribed either for the court or for the civil service as a whole. Nicholas issued rules for the design and use of a court uniform. He also prescribed the women’s court dress. A law of 1834 set strict rules for the colors, material, and style of the gowns worn by the different categories of ladies of the court, as well as for grand dukes and duchesses. The “Russian dress” that had been introduced by Catherine the Great was required at the most formal occasions, and Nicholas allowed no divergence from the official design. By complying with the dress rules of the court and attending its ceremonies, officials felt themselves inhabiting the same world as their sovereign. Court ceremonies were means for Nicholas to lift the leading cadres of the administration to the high levels of appearance and discipline that he believed characterized the military. The ceremony most expressive of the unity of the imperial court was the “great procession” (bol’shoi vykhod), which moved from the tsar’s apartments in the Winter Palace to the great or small Palace Church on holidays. Participation in the processions, or even witnessing them from the halls of the palace, was a mark of an official’s status. At the “great processions,” those with the highest standing had the right to assemble with the imperial family in the Malachite Hall adjacent to the imperial chambers before the procession; they entered “behind the CavalierGuards,” the guards regiment with the most extensive and illustrious ceremonial tradition. Great processions were led by court servants in livery—the gof-fur’ery and kamer-fur’ery. A ceremony-master followed behind two rows of chamberlains and junkers of the chamber. Behind them marched high court officials in ascending order of seniority. The chief marshal of the court swinging his diamond-studded mace preceded the emperor and

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empress, who were followed by their suites, the heir, and other members of the imperial family. Ladies-in-waiting brought up the rear. •

The major holidays—New Year’s, Easter, Nicholas’s name-day celebration, Alexandra’s birthday—became occasions to reaffirm the personal bond between the family and servitors. These events were not described in the periodical press, but they were open not only to the highest members of the elite but also to lesser ranks in the civil service. The festivities gave the impression of inclusiveness: in addition to the diplomatic corps and distinguished foreign guests, one could see merchants “in oriental caftans” and specially selected peasants. Such occasions presented what the empress’s confidant, the writer and pedagogue August Theodore Grimm, called “a miniature representation not only of the whole Russian realm, but also of Europe.”24 The bringing of felicitations to the emperor and empress on these holidays dramatized the family relationship that was supposed to govern official relationships throughout the Russian state. The ceremony provided a model for all levels of the administration: on holidays, officials were obliged to bring greetings to their superiors and to attend church services with them, a requirement that Nicholas believed was part of their training in good manners. On Easter Sunday, they embraced and greeted each of the guests with the phrase “Christ has Risen;” by the end of the ceremony the wax from the hundreds of mustaches covered Nicholas’s face. Nicholas’s name-day celebration took place on December 6 and marked the beginning of the winter social season in the capital after the imperial family’s return to the Winter Palace. The elaborate reception was a rather anxious moment for many of the notables in the court. Nicholas showed his gratitude to his servitors by announcing generous awards of bonuses, titles, and promotions, which inevitably left some disappointed. He also distributed signs of his favor—rings, diamond-studded boxes, thimbles, imperial portraits. There is no choral approval as in the eighteenth century, for there is no separation between the sovereign and the leading members of the court, noble-estate, and administration who were obliged to attend this function. The elite showed their devotion to the monarch by ritual kissing of the empress’s hand—the baise-main. After the mass, the empress, according to the custom for the tsar’s name day, received these felicitations from the high nobility, officials, and others with access to the court. The baise-mains began with the ladies; then the gentlemen followed. Lord Londonderry described the name-day celebration in 1836 as a marvel of luxury and organization, attesting to the absolute devotion and obedience of all of Nicholas’s subjects. In the first hall, he beheld dames d’honneur and the dames à portrait, wearing gowns of green and gold; the maids of honor of the grand duchesses were dressed in light blue. They wore long veils and the Russian cap covered with jewels “as numerous as resplen-

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dent,” presenting “a matchless coup d’oeil.” In the adjoining halls stood members of the State Council, the senators bedecked in scarlet “with the richest gold embroidery,” high civil servants and diplomats “with light blue dress coats equally costly.” In the last “magnificent apartment,” Nicholas stood at the head of the room before the generals, the aides-de-camp, and the officers of the armed forces grouped according to unit.25 The principal dance at the ball in the evening, the polonaise, was little more than a stately procession to musical accompaniment. The emperor with a lady on his arm, the empress with a gentleman, led a long line of couples that wound through the palace. Its direction, Custine remarked, was “at the whim of the man who leads it.” On the occasion of the emperor’s name day, as on many of the personal holidays of the imperial family, the polonaise lasted for most of the ball. Nicholas himself did not enjoy dancing, and tended to approach it as ordered movement, like parades. At the sign given by the conductor, the music began, and quadrilles moved “with the precision of exercises in triple time.” Then everyone returned to his and her place and stood still. “A kind of automatic submission to these demands of etiquette was the best way to please the tsar,” Prince Joseph Lubomirski wrote.26 The final and, for many, the culminating moment of the evening the supper, took place in a lush and exotic setting. This was the empress’s sphere of “fairyland.” In a winter garden, the guests dined on elegant plate, before vessels of silver and gold, amidst the aroma of immense orange trees whose stems had grown through the tables. The empress made the circuit of the tables according to Russian etiquette, chatting with each of the guests. The presence of orange trees in the midst of winter, blacks in Moorish costume serving “every delicacy in the world” delighted the guests. The American John Maxwell wrote, “It rivals the enchantment of an eastern story.”27 The fairy-tale motif of the connubial love in the imperial family was the theme of the lavish festivities that took place at Peterhof each July, on the occasion of the empress’s birthday. If the parade ground presented a paradigm of power, a simulacrum of the awesome state, the family scenario presented a scene of concord, flawless beauty, unchanging youth. The empress was the center of admiration and love. Nicholas played the attentive husband, Alexandra the ideal wife and mother. Though the pretense was that Peterhof was open to the public, strict police surveillance controlled those admitted. Groups of peasants, judged reliable, attended the festivities, but when a few “beggars with children” slipped in, Nicholas demanded that they be immediately expelled. The celebrations began at the emperor and empress’s idyllic Peterhof residence, the “Cottage.” Early in the morning, Nicholas had the empress awakened by music from the same military band that had welcomed her to Russia. From the Cottage, she rode past throngs of spectators. Before the lines of notables in the halls of the palace, she proceeded arm in arm with Nicholas

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to the church for a high mass. After the service, she received greetings and then appeared on the balcony of the palace before the elegant “public” of lavishly dressed ladies and handsome guards officers in dress uniform. A. I. Iakovleva, a lady-in-waiting for the grand duchess Maria Aleksandrovna, wrote, “Between the public and the imperial personages there was something kindred and close. The imperial family made the public the participant in its joys and pleasures. Everyone felt this and all were happy at meetings with the imperial family.”28 The empress then left the balcony and sat in an equipage with the grandduchesses to review the troops of her cavalier guards regiments. They marched before her in their white parade uniforms, their silver-colored helmets crowned with the Russian eagle. The emperor and the heir, wearing the same uniform, led the troops in a ceremonial march past her. Nicholas then stopped and bowed before her. Foreign guests were charmed and moved by this scene. The evening was the occasion for a climactic extravaganza. The ball began at seven. The polonaise now was the only step. Then began the illumination. In the half-light of the July night, the great Peterhof canal brilliantly reflected the glittering lamps, stunning the eyes of the guests. Custine said it required an Ariosto, the language of fairies to describe the blazing lights arranged in fantastic forms, “flowers as large as trees, suns, vases, bowers of vines . . . obelisks, columns,” everything glittering like diamonds. On the sea, small ships were lit with color. Twelve military bands played in different parts of the garden. At the end of the canal, the empress’s initials burst into white flame surrounded by red, green, and blue, “a diamond crest, surrounded by colored gems.”29 Shortly after the July 1 celebration, the imperial family customarily presented an open-air spectacle of family life. Before the Cottage, they took tea in full view of the public, including peasants from their estates, who gazed upon them “in silent devotion, as something sacred.” The empress prepared and served the tea. Nicholas would rise and walk over to talk “with one of the most insignificant in the crowd,” and Alexandra would invite one of them to take tea. The loyal Grimm expressed the intended meaning of this display. “Thus the greatest simplicity succeeds the utmost magnificence; yesterday the Empress of all the Russias was admired, but today the family of the Czar is honoured, the wife, the mother, in their quiet domestic life.”30

National Motifs The displays of popular devotion and the doctrine of official nationality sanctified the Westernized absolute monarchy and the multinational empire as national—the product of Russia’s history and the monarchist sentiment of the Russian people. Without discarding the Petrine heritage, Nicholas tried to adorn the monarchy with visible signs of Russia’s distant past. He

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encouraged the discovery and preservation of historical artifacts. He initiated a period of church renovation, including the Kremlin cathedrals, the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir, and the Romanov House in Kostroma. His reign witnessed a search for a national church architecture and a national music that would glorify the monarchy and show its rapport with the people. Nicholas made church architecture a principal expression of his scenario, a sign of his attachment to pre-Petrine Russia and of the important role of the church in building the Russian empire and autocracy. The major cathedrals of Alexander I’s reign, the Kazan Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. Isaacs had been built in neoclassical style, obviously imitative of cathedrals of Rome, particularly St. Peter’s. Alexander, however, had also sought an original architectural expression of his vision of universal Christianity. On Christmas day 1812, when Napoleon’s armies had been driven from Russian soil, he announced that he would build a cathedral to commemorate the men who had lost their lives in the struggle. He commissioned Alexander Vitberg, a Russian of Swedish ancestry, to design the church. Vitberg conceived of a grandiose classical edifice of colossal size that would be a soaring statement of the eternal, universal faith that Alexander cherished. Work began on the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer on the heights of the Sparrow Hills, then at the edge of Moscow, now the site of Moscow State University. But the technological capacities of the time could not realize Vitberg’s dream, and the project was abandoned after Alexander’s death. Nicholas’s conception of a spiritual monument was one that recalled Russia’s religious past and particularly its Byzantine heritage. He felt drawn to early Russian church architecture as a young man. During his visit to Moscow in 1817, he visited Nikon’s New Jerusalem Monastery. The monastery and the cathedral, which was ostensibly modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, were expressions of Nikon’s vision of Russia as a new Jerusalem and the successor to the heritage of the Byzantine empire. Nicholas encouraged efforts to restore the monastery cathedral, which had fallen into disrepair. The artist M. N. Vorob’ev was sent to Jerusalem to make drawings of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in order to compare Nikon’s cathedral with the original. For Nicholas, Russian Byzantine architecture provided a national artistic counterpart to the Gothic, which Charles XII’s coronation had presented as an early expression of French national architecture. The struggle against the Ottoman empire and Nicholas’s vision of Russia as the defender of Christian shrines in the Holy Land heightened his sense of identification with Russia’s Byzantine past. He pursued his interest with his usual unswerving determination. In 1827 the competition for the Church of St. Catherine at the Kalinkin Bridge in St. Petersburg called for a church that “would attest to compatriots as well as to foreigners of the zeal of Russians for the orthodox faith.” After a competition that failed to produce a project to his taste, he commissioned a project from Constantine Thon, a young

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architect of German-Russian extraction. Thon’s project for the Catherine church pleased him greatly. Thon sought his prototype for national churches in what he called the Byzantine style. Thon wrote in 1835, “Byzantine style, having become intimately linked with elements of our nationality (narodnost’) from distant times, created our church architecture, examples of which we do not find in other countries.”31 While Thon remained uncertain about what distinguished this style, Nicholas made it clear to him that he wanted to build churches with the five-cupola form embodied in the Vladimir and Moscow Assumption cathedrals and that Nikon had made the canonical model for church building in the 1640s. The building ordinance of 1841 established this version of Byzantine architecture as the official national style. The churches designed in Nicholas’s reign typified an eclectic approach, grafting national motifs onto a Western structure. The “Thon style” combined the technological innovation of neoclassical architecture with stylistic elements of early Russian-Byzantine traditions. This effect was most visible in the principal architectural expression of the official nationality doctrine, Thon’s Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow.32 Thon inherited the task left by Vitberg. After work on construction of Vitberg’s Sparrow Hills project had been halted, Nicholas announced that he wanted a cathedral “in ancient Russian taste.” Accordingly, he chose a site near the Kremlin and assigned the work of designing the cathedral to Thon. Thon’s final plans for the exterior of the cathedral were approved in 1832. Nicholas laid the cornerstone in 1837; the inscription on the stone read, “Alexander I bequeathed, Nicholas began execution.” Construction started the next year, and the building itself was completed early in the reign of Alexander II, whereupon the interior decoration began. The dedication of the cathedral took place after the coronation of Alexander III in 1883. The cathedral had the appearance of the five-cupola form of the MoscowVladimir style, but the resemblance was superficial (fig. 12). The most striking difference was in proportions. Nicholas abandoned Alexander’s grandiose dreams of a gigantic temple to dwarf all other buildings. But he too associated grandeur with size, and as a monument to the 1812 war, its proportions had to be monumental. The height from the base to the cross was about 340 feet. This meant that it was a hundred feet higher than St. Sofia in Constantinople, over twice the height of Fioravanti’s Assumption Cathedral, and three times the height of the Vladimir Assumption Cathedral. Architectural historians have made clear the neoclassical elements of the building, the symmetrical arcades, the purely decorative cupolas, the central dome. But Thon’s neoclassical rendering of a Russian original more than any other building expressed what was meant by “national.” For Nicholas there was no contradiction between national and universal; he saw the Russian monarchy as heir to the universal imperial tradition that he defended against the Ottoman Turks. If the spaciousness of the interior approached the vast interiors of St. Sofia in Constantinople more than the confined areas

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12. Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. Moscow. Architect, Constantine Thon.

of a Russian church, this corresponded with Nicholas’s urge to make the Russian emperor heir to the imperial heritage of Christendom. In this way, the architecture of the church erased the break between Petrine and Muscovite Russia and brought the history of early Russia into a universal perspective. The wall paintings inside the cathedral and the bas-reliefs on the exterior walls illustrated the role of the Orthodox Church in the struggle for the unification of Rus’ and the defeat of external enemies. The subjects for all the reliefs and most of the paintings were chosen by the metropolitan Filaret and other hierarchs of the church. The bas-reliefs in neoclassical style presented scenes from the Bible and Russian history that suggested parallels between sacred and military history. Reliefs on the south corners showed Abraham and David returning victorious from battle. On the west corner there was a relief of Solomon and David, renderings of the scene of St. Sergei blessing Dmitrii Donskoi before his departure on the campaign against the Tatars, and St. Dionysius blessing Minin and Pozharskii in 1612 before the struggle with the Poles. The Vladimir Mother of God, which had accompanied Russian armies at the battle of Borodino, was set in the arch above the central portal, while images of the sainted metropolitans of Moscow, Peter and Alexei, were placed in another arch. Both were depicted in scenes glorifying the Muscovite prince’s construction of churches.

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The events of 1812 were portrayed in the cathedral’s lower corridor. One painting showed an angel holding the Kazan Mother of God, which General Kutuzov venerated before departing to the army. Another showed the general’s patron saint, Michael. The icon of St. Sergei of Radonezh was borne by an angel blessing Alexander I. A series of paintings illustrated the actual events of the fall and liberation of Moscow. They carried the message that victory in the Napoleonic war, the basis for Russia’s present imperial grandeur, was the culmination of a pact between church and monarch sealed during the rise of Moscow. The cathedral, demolished under Stalin, has now been rebuilt at the same site, with the same proportions, in an attempt to restore the image of a national Orthodox church in Russia. Thon’s second major statement of nationality in architecture was not a church but his New Kremlin Palace. The palace, begun in 1838, complemented the restoration work that Nicholas initiated on the Terem Palace in the Kremlin and the St. Dmitrii Cathedral in Vladimir. The tsar scrutinized the initial plans for the palace, corrected the sketches and made drawings indicating his own wishes. Thon’s task was to fit a large, nineteenth-century palace into a seventeenthcentury setting. Again he faced a problem of proportions, for the building was meant to hold the immense receptions and processions of the imperial court and yet had to fit with the modest size of the old Kremlin palaces and cathedrals. The palace contains approximately seven hundred rooms and halls and the main facade is nearly four hundred feet long. The large St. George’s Hall took up the right wing of the building while the halls of the various orders filled the front and one side wing. It was the facade that introduced the national motif. Thon designed the tracery and arcade to blend with the churches and palaces around it. The reference now was not to Byzantium, but to seventeenth-century embellishments found on the old palace nearby. The small windows decorated with surrounds of double arches and pendants add a medieval motif borrowed from the frames on the windows of the Terem palace. Thon’s exterior dressed an opulent Petersburg palace in national costume for Nicholas’s festive appearances in Moscow.

A National Anthem and a National Opera Nationality in music in the early nineteenth century usually referred to the use of folk themes, which suited neither Nicholas’s tastes nor his imperial conception of nationality. But he encouraged musical works that would glorify the monarch as the spirit of the nation. Such pieces assimilated distinctive Russian elements to the Western-type composition he favored, and dramatized his scenario with moving expressions of love for the tsar. The national anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” and the opera A Life for the Tsar,

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both written under his supervision, remained fixtures of tsarist ceremony until the demise of the empire. Their rousing strains created a national atmosphere around the monarch, a sense of uplift and inspiration identified later in the century as characteristically Russian. A national anthem provided additional opportunities for exemplary demonstrations of the emotional bond between the people, represented by those singing and their sovereign. In the 1830s, France, Austria, and England had their own national anthems, and Russia used the English melody, with Russian words. Nicholas told Alexander Benckendorff that the English music wearied him and that he regretted that Russia did not have its own anthem. After he returned from a journey to Austria and Prussia in 1833, he instructed a member of his suite, Flügel-Adjutant Alexei L’vov to compose a new anthem. In his memoirs, L’vov told of how he endeavored to write a song with broad appeal that could be used in all situations—“a majestic, powerful, emotional anthem, comprehensible to everyone, having the imprint of nationality, fit for the church, fit for the troops, fit for the people from the scholar to the ignoramus.”33 The sequence of his concerns is suggestive of the sources of his inspiration: he conceived of a melody that was solemn and ceremonial for church, parade ground, and finally the people of Russia. L’vov wrote the hymn to words by Vasilii Zhukovskii. The poet rewrote his 1813 poem “Prayer of the Russian People,” reducing it to an anthem to the tsar himself, rather than to the fatherland and Orthodoxy. L’vov was a gifted composer of church music, and the anthem is very much a prayer set to music. Like most anthems of monarchies, it has the cadences of a hymn and surrounds the tsar’s secular person with an aura of religious veneration. Yet this is not a liturgical prayer that one would hear from the lips of a priest. It is the prayer of a poet, a secular address to the deity to protect the Orthodox sovereign, expressing the servitors’ deep attachment to the monarch. It calls upon God to protect the tsar, powerful and sovereign, for the glory of Russians and fear of their enemies.34 The anthem delighted Nicholas and his family. At its first performance in 1833, by a chorus and two military bands, he demanded several reprises, and remarked, “C’est superbe.” At its first public performance on Nicholas’s name day, December 6, 1833, in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, it was repeated three times. On Christmas day of that year, military bands played the anthem in all the halls of the Winter Palace, according to emperor’s own command. A week later he decreed that it be performed at all parades, reviews, and other ceremonial occasions. Public singing of the anthem in the theaters of Moscow became common soon after its introduction. The first public performance in Petersburg was on January 10, 1834, at the close of Catterino Cavos’s opera, Ivan Susanin. The program declared that the entire troupe accompanied by members of the regimental bands would join in the new national anthem. The hymn

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spread quickly into the provinces so that by the heir’s trip of 1837, he was greeted by its strains in most of the towns he visited. Music, more than any other medium, translated political into personal feelings and identified the individual with tsar and nation. An article in Severnaia Pchela on May 3, 1840, declared that the anthem had “satisfied the needs of the Russian heart” by producing “an outpouring of national feelings.” The music had a dual character, “religious and melancholy-tender.” The anthem was “a musical study of the Russian character, nationality, in the full sense of the word.”35 •

The composition of the opera A Life for the Tsar was an episode in the discovery of the early seventeenth century as a period of national resurgence. The formation of the national militia and convocation of an assembly of the land during “the time of troubles” provided a colorful theme for glorification of the Romanov monarchy. Ivan Susanin was a peasant who lived on the Romanov estate of Domino in Kostroma Province. After the election by the Assembly of the Land, Michael Romanov was in hiding at the Ipat’ev Monastery in Kostroma from Polish detachments and brigands. Susanin fell captive to a band of Poles, who, according to the tale, tried to force him to reveal the whereabouts of Michael. Instead, he led his captors into the woods and paid with his life. When Michael ascended to the throne, he rewarded Susanin’s son-in-law, Ivan Sobinin, and daughter, Antonida, and all their descendants with a deed to land in inheritance and an order that these lands in the village of Domino should be exempt from all taxation. The tale of a peasant sacrificing his life in the struggle against the invader enjoyed considerable popularity during the Napoleonic wars. But literature of an official character, loathe as it was then to suggest mass participation, avoided the subject. An extensive official album, recommending heroic subjects for artists published in 1807 included the major political figures of 1612 and 1613, but omitted mention of Susanin. Susanin’s exploit, however, suited the metonymic imagery of Nicholas’s scenario. One peasant’s devotion stood for the devotion of all, became both the model and the substitute for the sympathies of the entire people. Michael Glinka’s initial conception of the opera followed the patriotic myth of Susanin. His initial title was Ivan Susanin, a Patriotic Heroic-Tragic Opera.” He wanted the opening chorus to express the “strength and carefree fearlessness of the Russian people,” and to achieve this sense musically, in “Russian measure and approximations” that were drawn from rural subjects.”36 But the libretto was reshaped by the dictates of Nicholas’s scenario into a story of personal devotion of the peasant to the tsar. It was written by a young Baron from Estland, Egor Rosen, who was then serving as the heir’s personal secretary. Vasilii Zhukovskii contributed the text of the final scene of the opera, including the famous “Glory” chorus. Instructions came from

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high circles in the government, probably from Nicholas himself, to change the title from Ivan Susanin to A Life for the Tsar. The result was an operatic masterpiece that presented the official view of the Russian peasant absolutely devoted to the person of the tsar. Glinka’s opera lifts the tale of Susanin from the level of heroic adventure to tragedy. It was the scene in the woods and the death of Susanin that caught Glinka’s imagination, the act of noble sacrifice. Susanin’s sacrifice is not only heroic, it is noble and reflects the selflessness of his person, which embodies the features of the official image of the peasant—generous, devoted, and passionate. The entire plot centers on the peasant’s need for a tsar and the desperate feelings the peasants expressed when deprived of a tsar. The bond of peasant and tsar is close and personal. In the first act, Susanin’s daughter, Antonida, and her beloved, Ivan Sobinin, wish to wed. But there can be no wedding, Susanin insists, until there is a tsar. When the Lord gives us a Tsar, Then, immediately will be a happy wedding, A rich feast for all, We will rejoice for Rus’.37

The family and the army are the principal themes of the opera. Susanin is the most eloquent voice for the imperial power in the family. He is the noble father figure, enforcing sacrifice on his family. Family feelings are entwined with the accession of the tsar. In his initial plans, Glinka emphasized that the wedding should be a “family picture,” Familiengemälde. The opera concludes with the fervent acclamation of the tsar Michael by the people of Moscow. The scene was written by Zhukovskii, but his text was modified considerably to suit the official character of the libretto. Crowds of people await the entry of the tsar into Red Square, on the roofs of surrounding buildings and the walls of the Kremlin. Michael himself does not appear in the opera, owing to a prohibition of portraying Romanov monarchs on stage. The people sing the rousing “Glory” chorus, glory to Rus’ and the tsar, and to the troops entering the city. They console Antonida and Sobina for their loss, assuring them that Susanin died for Rus’, and intone the final stirring verses of the “Glory” chorus. Glinka’s use of folk melodies and the folk idiom gave the opera’s music, composed according to contemporary European principles, a national tinge. He thus succeeded in expressing a national idea and national musical themes in the form of the European grand opera. Indeed, the folk melodies offended the tastes of many aristocrats and others unaccustomed to such breaches of classical form. Court circles were highly critical of music that drew upon peasant songs. It did not fit the elegant themes they expected in grand opera, and several in attendance were heard remarking “Our serfs sing like the music we have heard here.”38 But the polonaise and mazurka from the opera soon became staples in the ballrooms of the imperial court.

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Last Visits to Moscow The revolutionary events of 1848 in Europe heightened the significance of Moscow as a symbol of the nation. The revolution only confirmed the sense that Europe was infirm and corrupt, while Russia, having escaped insurrections, remained strong in the defence of religion and monarchical legitimacy. The crushing of the Hungarian revolution in June and July of 1849 thrust Nicholas forward as defender of the throne and opponent of liberation throughout Europe. The spread of revolution only raised his fears that the infection might spread. He embarked on a series of restrictive measures, ranging from terminating deliberations on redefining relations between serfs and landlords, to the tightening of censorship rules. Steps were taken to increase the importance of religion in the university curriculum, and the teaching of philosophy was shifted to the theological faculty. Police surveillance intensified, and superiors in governmental offices were empowered to dismiss politically suspicious subordinates without trial or explanation. Travel abroad required the personal approval of the emperor, which he was increasingly loathe to grant. Fear of the West brought more strident assertions of Russia’s national mission. Although Russia faced threat of neither invasion nor revolution, Nicholas’s manifesto of March 14, 1848, proclaimed that “following the example of Our Orthodox forefathers, after invoking the help of God Almighty, we are ready to meet our enemies, wherever they may be, and not sparing Ourselves, We shall, in indissoluble union with our Holy Rus, defend the honor of the Russian name and the inviolability of Our borders.” He thus proclaimed his solidarity with the nation, using the pre-Petrine term Rus’ for Russia. The manifesto closed, “God is with us! Take heed, peoples and submit for God is with us.”39 The distinction between Holy Russia and Europe, monarchy and revolution, God and godlessness, took on increasingly messianic overtones during his visits to Moscow in March and April 1849, and August 1851. He used these appearances to reaffirm his connection with the nation’s past by appearing at its national shrines. The announced purpose of the journey in 1849 was the dedication of Thon’s Kremlin palace. To emphasize the religious significance of the dedication, the ceremony was scheduled for Easter Sunday—the first observance of Easter in Moscow by an emperor since Paul’s coronation in 1797. The emperor accompanied by the imperial family, the suite, and other notables proceeded through the ancient Hall of Facets to the small Church of the Savior in the Terem Palace. After the mass, Metropolitan Filaret led the procession into the sumptuous rotunda of the new palace. With priests carrying the altar cross and icon of the Don Mother of God, the procession moved through the halls of the palace, while the chorus sang “Christ Has Risen,” and the clergy blessed each hall with holy water. Filaret intoned a prayer of blessing in St. Andrew’s hall.

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Alexander Vel’tman, the author of romantic novels and works on historical antiquities, presented the service in the sentimental idiom of the official nationality. While “the whole family of the Russian people” observed Easter Sunday, the heart of the realm, Moscow, “beat joyously, celebrating the Radiant Holiday with the Father and Mother of the Fatherland and their Blessed Family.” Vel’tman’s rhetoric merged historical and familial traditions. “It has been a long time since this ancient temple of the prayers of the Tsar’s Family . . . has resounded with a similar Liturgy in the presence of The Tsar Himself, the Tsaritsa, and the Tsar’s Family.” Indicatively, Vel’tman used the early Russian titles of of Tsar and Tsaritsa for the emperor and empress.40 The final display of Russianness was a great masquerade in national costume given by the governor-general of Moscow, Count Arsenii Zakrevskii at his mansion. The court witnessed noble couples dressed in native costumes representing each of the fifty-two provinces of Russia file before them. Each couple followed a little boy, also in Russian costume, carrying the seal of the province. Numerous Russian historical figures also appeared, the bogatyr’, Dobrynia, Ivan Susanin, Pozharskii, Ermak. A masquerade of noblemen in Russian costume was hardly an innovation. From Peter’s time, masquerades enabled the elite to play at appearing Russian. It allowed them to relax their primary, official identity by relinquishing Western clothing and assuming an ephemeral secondary role as native Russians. The fervent national rhetoric and the appearance of national costumes stirred the expectations of Slavophile intellectuals for an autocracy purified of Western trappings and for a true union between tsar and people rather than ceremonial demonstrations of connectedness. The Slavophiles, such writers as Ivan Kireevskii, Alexei Khomiakov, and Constantine Aksakov, had been influenced by German idealist philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schelling. They believed in the existence of a national spirit—to be found among the people, not in the state—that was revealed in the distant past, the seventeenth century. They sought expressions of this spirit in the teachings of the Orthodox Church and in the peasant commune and viewed the imperial state as an alien imposition thrust violently on the Russian people by Peter the Great. Several of the Slavophiles, including Alexei Khomiakov and the brothers Ivan and Constantine Aksakov, took Nicholas’s visit as an occasion to appear in public wearing beards and Russian dress. The response was not long in coming. On the first day of the masquerade, a circular of the Ministry of Interior, issued to provincial marshals of the nobility, announced that “the tsar is displeased that Russian noblemen wear beards.” It went on to explain that in the West, beards were a sign of “a certain type of ideas.” “We do not have this here,” it asserted. The tsar, it concluded, “considers that beards will interfere with a nobleman’s elective service.”41 In Nicholas’s Western frame of mind, beards signified not Russians but Jews and radicals. The official view identified the nation with the ruling

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Western elite, and the suggestion that there was another, contradictory measure of nation in the peasantry or the past intimated rebellion. Nicholas’s shows of national spirit were meant to preserve, not to narrow the distance between the autocratic-noble elite and the ruled, to dramatize obedience as a spiritual quality of the nation. Authenticity, truth, other versions of the national past threatened the monologic universe of the European myth, a Westernized monarch bringing order and culture to a devoted people. •

The visit to Moscow in August 1851 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas’s coronation carried an even clearer political message. A tumultuous reception at the Iberian Chapel was described in an article of one Mikhailov in Severnaia Pchela, which was reprinted in the illustrated journal Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok.42 The crowds swarmed through the street awaiting the arrival at the Iberian Chapel. All the conversations reported by Mikhailov were statements of absolute loyalty to the tsar and the system of autocracy and serfdom. The people were gifted not with eloquence, but with intelligence and a “pure heart not spoiled by false teachings.” They uttered such phrases as, “Without a Tsar it is impossible to live for a minute.” “Everywhere a chief is necessary.” “Without lords we can’t get along . . . and the Tsar too can’t get along without the lords, and the Tsar makes the lords, and God gives us a Tsar.” The procession from the Assumption Cathedral had now taken on central importance as a tradition hallowing the emperor’s links with the pre-Petrine past and his remoteness from current European politics. An article in Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok traced the history of the procession from early Russia until Nicholas’s appearance at the Kremlin on August 22, 1851, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation.43 The Kremlin, it began, had been the center of the religious life of the Muscovite tsar. On holidays, he appeared on the Red Staircase before his people in brilliant processions. After the capital moved to Petersburg, the love of the Russian people for their tsar only grew warmer. “Moscow people met their tsar, pressing toward him, like children to a father.” The Kremlin square could be called “the open-air reception chamber of the Russian Tsars,” the article continued. “Russian Tsars admitted, without distinction, all their subjects and received the greetings of their love along their path to the sacred cathedrals, where the thanks and prayers for the salvation of Russia rose to Him on High.” The rapt account of Nicholas’s procession in 1851 placed the emperor at the culmination of a history of demonstrative love of the people of Russia, personified in the people in the Kremlin, for their emperor. When Nicholas appeared, the square resounded with shouts of “rapture.” By 1851 the bowing from the Red Staircase had become still more important for it symbolized the distinction between the Russian people and the peoples of the West, who did not bow to their monarchs. As a result, the

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new ceremony had been turned into a tradition showing the adoration of the people of Russia, personified by the people of Moscow for their sovereigns, immanent in the nation’s history. But their sovereigns still retained the external attributes of the Western elite, the conquerors, and the pathos of the scene came from the mutual attraction of opposites, the grateful acceptance of the conquerors by the conquered. In this respect, the scene did recall the Russian past, though not so much the religious processions of Muscovy as the legendary summons to the princes beyond the sea to rule and bring order to the warring Slavic tribes of the ninth century.

Parents and Son

“The Lord of the Cottage” With great fanfare, Nicholas adopted the nineteenth-century European ideal of a separate family sphere in which the hard-working ruler could find happiness and peace. Like previous scenarios, the domestic idyll was presented in absolute terms as a flawless realization of Western values of domesticity, about which foreign visitors were expected to remark with admiration. Florent Gille, a confidant of the empress, wrote in an effusive memoir of 1864 that Nicholas practiced the “moral cult of the woman,” which Gille considered one of the essentially civilizing elements introduced by sovereigns in Christian society. The queen or empress became “the first woman of her empire, the predestined being, upon whom after the sovereign, regards have always been fixed.”1 Nicholas played the role of knight, shielding the delicate and beautiful woman from reality. Alexandra played the frail and exquisite damsel; her delicacy and her nervous tremble—usually attributed to the events of December 14—seemed to call out for protection. The emperor was the hero in a romantic tale, rather than a classical hero of battle or virtue. The domestic scenario, however, was more than a romantic embellishment to the image of the tsar. It made the family a central symbol of the moral purity of autocracy—the most virtuous form of monarchy. The association between domestic morality and autocratic government outlived Nicholas’s reign and remained intrinsic to the image of Russian autocracy for the duration of the empire. To violate the principle of autocracy became tantamount to a biblical sin against the father, while violation of family morality would throw into doubt the moral foundations of autocratic rule. Nicholas introduced the forms of behavior, the ceremonies, the feelings of obligations that underlay the notion of dynastic autocracy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter will examine the elaboration of the familial scenario in Nicholas’s reign, first in the romantic elevation of the empress, second in the upbringing and presentation of the heir as the defender of his father’s traditions, and third in the perpetuation of the domestic scenario with Grand Duke Alexander’s marriage and family life. The dramatization of the tsar’s family life ignored the distinction between private and public spheres. The private sphere provided a theatrical demonstration of obligations that were political as well as domestic, and Nicholas’s family life became the object of his subjects’ attention and even observation. Nicholas represented not only the good husband and father, but the most faithful and devoted pater-

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familias of the realm whose spectacular displays of domesticity would earn him the admiration of all those in Russia and the West who shared the dominant familial morality. This was his scenario, his theater of power. There was rumored to be another side—tales of his straying, seducing daughters and wives of his servitors, and later in his reign, his taking a mistress, Varvara Nelidova. But if true, these episodes were carefully concealed from the court so that even the ladies-in-waiting learned of it only at Nicholas’s death.2 The emperor’s straying, unlike his father’s, did not figure in his display. Infidelity was no longer the sign of a monarch’s virility and power. In representations of the family, Alexandra epitomized maternal love and tenderness. The new scenario dispensed with the former reserve in the display of parental love. The close emotional relationship between Alexandra and her firstborn son, Alexander Nikolaevich, as well as her other children appeared in the foreground for all to see. Nicholas used the media of painting and engraving to disseminate his family idyll both to the elite and to a broader audience beyond the court. Portraits by English painters presented the imperial family in the style of domestic portraiture perfected at the English court. Paintings by George Dawe, rendered into engravings by his compatriot, Thomas Wright, presented royal personages for the first time in intimate family groups. One of these shows the empress sitting with the infant Olga Nikolaevna in her right arm, and the seven-year-old Alexander Nikolaevich grasping her gown on the left (fig. 13). Another is a garden scene: Alexander Nikolaevich in sailor suit pushes his little sister Maria, wearing a bonnet with flowers, on a swing. Both have the innocent cherubic expressions of nineteenth-century beautiful children. Domestic scenes reached a wider audience in popular prints, such as one of the emperor adjusting his son’s pillow, and another of a family gathering at Ekateringof. Alexandra was the center of this cult, irresistibly endearing, as tender and gracious as Nicholas was intimidating. She was the passive recipient of affection, not like Maria Fedorovna—the bestower of maternal solicitude and succor upon the unfortunate. Although Alexandra continued to dispense charity, she insisted that her benefactions remain secret. The mansion Nicholas built for her, the Cottage (Kottedzh), was designed by Adam Menelas, who had come to Russia from England to work with Charles Cameron in 1784. Just as the unrelenting neoclassical style of Petersburg buildings expressed Nicholas’s official persona, the Gothic home symbolized the sequestered private life set apart from the noisome everyday world. If in Petersburg, and in the more public Great Palace and upper park of Peterhof, Nicholas was the Roman or Prussian leader, hard and intimidating, at the Cottage he was the English country gentleman, genteel and chivalrous. In England, he liked to call himself “Lord of the Cottage.” The Gothic revival house of early nineteenth-century England, Marc Girouard has pointed out, became associated with Christianity and sociability. The style suggested a churchlike retreat from the detriment of the secular world. It evoked images of the novels of Walter Scott, popular in

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13. Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, and Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna. Engraving by Thomas Wright. Artist, George Dawe.

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Russia no less than in Europe, and a setting for the displays of chivalry that identified the Russian emperor with the noble romantic sensibility Scott described in medieval England. The theme of the Cottage, the chivalric defense of the female sphere by the male force of arms, was represented in the emblem of a sword rising through a wreath of white roses with the legend “For faith, tsar, and fatherland,” which was devised by Vasilii Zhukovskii. It appears on a shield of turtle shell that hung over the door and is repeated throughout the house. Nicholas presented the Cottage to Alexandra in 1829, after the victory over the Ottoman empire in that year. A stone from the fortress of Varna, which he gave to her as a knightly token was inserted above the doorway. He had two captured Turkish cannons placed before the main Alexandria gates.3 The Cottage, isolated at the edge of the sea in the midst of a private park, created the romantic setting for the tsar’s display of private family life. The large living room window, where Friedrich’s On the Sailboat hung, gave out onto a magnificent view of the Gulf of Finland, with Kronstadt in the distance. Nicholas constantly declared his preference for the Cottage. “It is when I get there, just with my family, (for it holds no more,) that I am really happy.” Alexandra said that she asked for a cottage as a retreat from the “massive gilt” of Peterhof, which she found insupportable. Official audiences did not take place at the Cottage, and only servants, tutors, and officials were allowed admission. Lord Londonderry expressed the desired impression that the Cottage was “a household of most domestic and affectionate intercourse.”4 In fact, from the many statements of praise of the building, it is clear that the Cottage was an important public exhibition of private virtue, meant to be seen and to command obedient admiration. The cultural life of the court also was in the empress’s sphere and here she set a tone of high seriousness, ernst. In the evenings she held a circle where she and her confidants read the sentimental and romantic literature of the day aloud. She was a lover of the theater and attended once or twice a week, often accompanied by the emperor and her children. They entered the theater without the customary ceremonial entry. In this way, the empress and the imperial family set another cultural pattern to be followed by officialdom. Alexandra was also an active patron of the musical life of the court and the capital. She organized numerous family concerts and musicales where she played the piano, and Nicholas the trumpet, and invited numerous foreign luminaries to perform at the palace and in the concert halls of St. Petersburg.

Son and Pupil In Nicholas’s eyes, his firstborn son, Alexander, was the hope for the future of his dynasty. He openly doted over the boy and watched closely over his education and military training. His concern was described in exalted

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rhetoric and displayed on tours through the empire. Such ties between father and son marked a sharp break from the Petrine ethos, reproduced by Catherine II and Paul, in which the son represented a potential rival. In a letter of 1846 to Alexander, Vasilii Zhukovskii expressed his wonder at the change. “When all historical epochs speak to us of the distrust of tsars for their heirs, and secret or open opposition of heirs to the thrones to their fathers, we see here the most tender concern of the tsar about his son. This is not from political necessity alone, but from deep parental feeling.” Zhukovskii believed that Nicholas’s paternal feeling showed concern for both “the tenderly-beloved son and the happiness of the people, who are beloved of the tsar.”5 Nicholas’s strong paternal love for the heir, though undoubtedly sincere, became a central theme of his scenario, made conspicuous in ceremonies, art, and descriptions of the imperial court. Alexander represented both the moral and cultural preeminence of the imperial house and the future of the dynasty. His training for the throne, as a result, took on a critical urgency. The trust in education to mold an ideal ruler persisted from the eighteenth century, but in Nicholas’s scenario the ideal assumed a different character. The heir was not to be presented with a philosophical ideal of civic virtue and accomplishment taken from classical antiquity, but an image of moral perfection. The boy’s every step and misstep in the microcosm of the family had consequences for the macrocosm of the realm, as he was reminded by his instructors’ rebukes and his father’s icy stare. In the study, in his personal relations, he was forever on view, an exemplar of the future. As in the eighteenth century, the impetus for heir’s education came from the empress. In this case, the dowager Maria Fedorovna took the initiative in planning and organizing her grandson’s education. In 1826 she appointed Zhukovskii as the chief tutor. For the heir’s governor, her choice was Karl Karlovich Merder, a hero of 1812, a kindly, family man, respected in both government and literary circles. She gave Merder the tract Plan for the Education and Upbringing of a Prince, written by the early nineteenth century German romantic poet Ernst-Moritz Arndt.6 The Plan set forth the national, romantic concepts that informed the heir’s upbringing and education. Arndt had aspired to a constitution for Germany and drafted his program to prepare the future monarch to become the popular leader of his nation. Not a remote figure seeking the truth in isolation, like the eighteenthcentury philosophical ideal, the national monarch would understand his nation and become a part of it. In contrast to earlier pedagogical approaches that aimed to isolate the heir from parents and the corrupting milieu, Arndt’s plan sought to bring the boy into the world as a social being. Princes, he asserted, were men and should be educated like other men. Contact with friends of his age would teach the prince to determine which men were worthy of trust, and Alexander studied with two aristocratic boys. Unlike most eighteenth-century theories, Arndt’s plan emphasized that the prince’s parents were to play the principal role in raising him as a humane

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and able individual. The mother was to provide an example of love, faith and harmony. “In her, live the dark and secret forces of God and nature.” The father embodied the principle of necessity. “In him live the clear and ordered forces of God and nature.” To the mother belonged faith and harmony; to the father strength, order, the festive and the fearful. “The mother is the shadow of infinite mildness, the father the shadow of infinite holiness; the mother is the picture of the inner, the father the picture of the outer world.”7 Alexander II’s upbringing appears to have conformed closely to Arndt’s prescriptions. From an early age, Alexander learned the meaning of discipline from his father. Alexander responded to failure and frustration with tears, angering Nicholas with conduct inappropriate for one who was supposed to show strength. Merder’s diary tells how the slightest reproach or failure at studies made Alexander cry. When he was eleven, poor marks from Zhukovskii and other teachers brought him to tears. He wept when Gille corrected his French spelling and again when Gille gave him the lowest grade of the three boys in geography. Most embarrassing were the war games Alexander played with his friend, Joseph Viel’gorskii before his parents eyes. Viel’gorskii usually won, and then Alexander cried in disappointment, to his father’s open dismay. At the age of thirteen, Alexander was thrown from his horse and fell to the pavement unconscious. When he came to, he burst into tears. His father rebuked him for carelessness and lack of self-control. Alexandra was Arndt’s mild and consoling mother, as indulgent as Nicholas was demanding. When his tears brought rebukes and anger, she gave him solace. She rewarded him for his fall from the horse with a full day in her company. She helped him avoid the regimen of his studies by taking him on walks or to plays.8 •

While there seems to be no direct evidence that Zhukovskii had read Arndt’s tract, his notion of monarch as national leader corresponded to the German poet’s. Like Derzhavin and Karamzin, Zhukovskii had summoned the heir at birth to be a “human being.” But for him the distinguishing feature of the ideal human being was not the acceptance of reason, or the show of human sensibility. It was living for the people, understanding their needs and their sympathies. In the oft-quoted words of his ode on Alexander’s birth in 1818, he declared, Yes, in his exalted sphere he will not forget, The most sacred of callings; to be a human being, To live for posterity in his people’s majesty, For the good of all, his own to forget, Only in the free voice of the fatherland, To read his briefs with humility.9

The education Zhukovskii arranged for the heir was very much a sentimental education, an education of the heart. The classical grounding of

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monarchy did not figure significantly in Alexander’s instruction, as it had in Paul’s and Alexander I’s. Like eighteenth-century pedagogues, Zhukovskii emphasized the importance of history, but he focused on the history of the Middle Ages, not classical antiquity, and the model he presented to Alexander was not the great monarchs of antiquity, but Prince Alexander Nevskii. Zhukovskii conveyed his ideal through feelings and images rather than philosophical statements. He used the visual, two-dimensional idiom of his era and had a painting commissioned that he gave to the heir as a present. The painting portrayed Alexander Nevskii at about Alexander’s age standing at the edge of a cliff and surveying his lands. Nevskii’s pose, Zhukovskii explained in a letter to Alexander, revealed the inner resources that had made the prince great. At this point, Zhukovskii wrote, Nevskii had achieved nothing great, but already sensed who he was, what he should prepare for, and what was expected of him. Nevskii had climbed the cliff with great difficulty, and his diligence was rewarded by an enchanting scene. “Beyond the promontory there spread a vast plain, glittering in the rays of morning, strewn with human dwellings, decorated by the various creations of God.” Everyone awaited the sun. Zhukovskii took this traditional symbol of monarchy as a symbol of the prince himself, who had been “designated by God to be the benefactor of the whole land, just as the sun was the benefactor of the whole land.” Nevskii’s beautiful soul sensed the meaning of what was before him, and, clasping his hands in prayer, he cried to the Lord “with submissive strength: ‘Your will be done!’ ”10 Three years later, Alexander set forth the lessons he was supposed to learn from the painting for his tutor. Nevskii had kept the promise he had made to God and himself on the promontory, Alexander wrote. “He became the model of Tsars and Heroes.” He had achieved great victories as prince of Novgorod. “But History is even more surprised by his truly Christian humility.” Nevskii’s submissiveness before the Tatars was not a yielding to necessity, but an act of humility. Nevskii “forgot his dignity and humbly asked mercy for his subjects from the arrogant Tatar khans.” It was for this political act, according to Alexander that Nevskii was canonized, “as a sign of gratitude for the self-sacrifice for the general good.”11 Zhukovskii’s Nevskii was an antithesis to Peter the Great. In a letter he wrote to Alexander in 1843, when the heir was approaching twenty-five, he defined autocracy as “only the highest degree of submissiveness to divine justice.” He cited Peter the Great—an idol of Nicholas—as an example to be avoided, an example of rebellion against God. “Peter the Great, your great creator left behind a pile of fragments. God does not endure a rival in his kingdom.”12 Controlling his passions, Zhukovskii’s Nevskii proved able to transform institutions. His grandeur came from a humility that enabled him to subordinate himself to the good of the land, the desires of the people. Indeed, Zhukovskii’s Nevskii was merely a poetic recreation of the model of the European monarch that constantly was set before the heir—his grandfather, Frederick William III of Prussia, whose chief achievement had

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been the courageous acceptance of defeat and humiliation in the war against Napoleon. Giving Alexander a biography of the king on his name day in 1843, Zhukovskii described the king’s “bright, pure, just and blessed soul.”13 The principle of humility dominated Alexander’s religious lessons as well. His first instructor of religion, G. P. Pavskii preached a life of Christian love. In his first lesson in 1826, Pavskii told the boy to take Christ as an example. Christ taught the boy to look inside his heart to be sure that he did nothing to defy the will of his parents or to displease his teachers.14 Michael Speranskii’s lectures to Alexander in 1837 are often credited with inspiring in him the concern for law and legality that he later showed in his reforms. But Speranskii’s lectures emphasized morality over law as the distinguishing and elevating feature of absolute monarchy—what he called “pure monarchy.” In pure monarchies, the ruler achieved moral supremacy through the exercise of self-restraint in the interests of the people. Such selfrestraint raised pure monarchy above mixed monarchies and republics, in which different “aristocracies” took power and struggled for their own particular advantage over the good of the whole people. The autocratic authority of the emperor was limited by no other power on earth, Speranskii taught, but by the limits that the tsar himself establishes through treaties or his own words, which “should be for him immutable and sacred.” “Law (pravo), and consequently autocratic law,” Speranskii explained, “is law to the extent that it is based upon justice (pravda). Where justice ends and injustice begins, law ends and despotism begins.” The autocrat was never subject to human courts and judgment but always to the court of conscience and God.15 Alexander’s wayward impulses were constantly prompting admonitions from his governor and teachers. To become absolute ruler, Merder repeatedly stressed, the grand duke had to learn to obey, which, Merder emphasized in many of his reports, Alexander refused to do. Merder told the grand duke again and again that he must serve as a model of compliance with rules if he wished to prescribe laws for others. Constantine Arseniev, his tutor of history, warned him when he was thirteen that his work about Russia was exceedingly careless, and said, “I felt like crying from pity, knowing that you are the hope of Russia.”16 Alexander’s response was to propitiate with expressions of compliance and agreement. Indeed, he believed his father and his teachers were in the right and not only acknowledged their fairness, but pronounced their principles with great conviction. Merder observed that it would be hard to find a young man who had such just ideas of his obligations as Alexander; he had never heard him utter an incorrect judgment. “But unfortunately it would be just as difficult to find a young man who had so little will power over himself.”17 From the age of nine to sixteen, Alexander was surly, arrogant, and lazy in his work. He showed no sign of developing the self-knowledge and self-discipline that Zhukovskii considered the goals of man’s education. To spur Alexander onward, invidious comparisons were made with his

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comrades, particularly Joseph Viel’gorskii, who usually surpassed him in his studies and was a true model of good conduct. His instructor in religion, G. P. Pavskii, taught him to emulate his father, whom Pavskii extolled as “a splendid example of wise activity.” He urged Alexander again to keep the vow to invest himself in Christ and be his disciple.18 Pavskii told Alexander that to become his father, the dominating fearsome emperor, he had first to become like Christ, humble and self-denying. But these were daunting images for the boy, and he felt himself forever falling short of the demands of an office he associated throughout his life with his father. He continued to profess the principles he heard in the classroom. The gap between his words and his actions as a child was perceived as dishonesty, and as emperor, as hypocrisy. But his lessons also instilled in him an acute sense of moral frailty. Unlike his father and his successors on the throne, he had a sense of humility; though a tsar, he could bow before prevalent ideals, and, taking the advice of others, admit the fallibility of power in order to win his people’s love.

The Son as Symbol In his public role, the heir experienced none of the difficulties of the classroom. He gained effortless successes at court and on the parade ground. Handsome, poised, adorable, he became the endearing symbol of the dynasty, proof of its survival and vitality. When paraded forth at the age of eight at the coronation, he was the center of attention, the embodiment of the familial monarchy. “All eyes were fixed on him,” Merder wrote. “In the son of their tsar the subjects saw the guarantee of the future happiness of Russia.”19 Engravings and paintings presented the beautiful child and the bond between mother and son to the elite. We see him as a tot, erect and distinguished in the uniform of the Pavlovsk regiment, his sword planted in the ground to the side, one leg stylishly before the other. He was often painted at the side of a bust of his namesake, Alexander I. He was portrayed in popular pictures (lubki) as well, in 1828 in military uniform, at the side of his mother, and in 1831 in the uniform of his own cuirassiers regiment. Both empress and heir were cast in passive roles, objects of admiration for the Russian and European elite. For Nicholas, the heir was primarily a military figure whose status would be designated by his military rank. From 1827 Nicholas announced a succession of appointments and promotions of his son that were then made known to all in newspaper statements and illustrations circulated to the court and the public. The process began in October 1827 with the naming of Alexander honorary “Ataman of all the Cossack Hosts” and “Chief of the Don Regiment.” The position of honorary ataman was presented as a direct personal bond between the imperial family and the Cossacks. The bond was consecrated in an elaborate ceremony at Novocherkassk during the heir’s 1837 trip (see below). Alexander

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II and his successors renewed these ties throughout the century, appointing the heirs Cossack atamans and sustaining what Robert McNeal called “the myth of tsar and Cossack.”20 Upon the death of the grand duke Constantine Pavlovich in June 1831, Alexander inherited the title of Tsesarevich. Nicholas issued a decree declaring, that “Our most beloved son” should henceforth be called “Sovereign Heir, Tsesarevich and Grand Duke” (Gosudar’ Naslednik, Tsesarevich i Velikii Kniaz’).” The decree was printed in the press and a series of pictures executed that made known Alexander’s new title.21 In his diary, Alexander recorded his delight with his promotions and the fancy new uniforms and ceremonies they entailed; these were signs of his entry into his father’s world. On New Year’s Day 1834, he proudly appeared in the Great Procession through the halls of the Winter Palace in a red cavalry-guard uniform. But the most thrilling moment was his appointment as flügel-adjutant to the emperor on the eve of his ceremony of majority. When he appeared before Nicholas, he heard his father say that “he wants to indicate by this that I should prepare to be his helper.”22 During his father’s reign, Alexander regarded his membership in the suite as a signal honor and distinction. Alexander’s love for the parade ground became all absorbing. Zhukovskii watched with dismay as his charge followed the path of previous heirs. In October 1839, he entered a confession of failure in his diary. One cannot think of the casualness (vetrenost’) with which the grand duke’s life is being sacrificed without a sign of indignation. And for what? To the imperial toy, which is improper for a tsar, harmful to Russia, and which kills all abilities of state. Since his return, the grand duke has been forced to command from morning till evening. Here we play at war and are fascinated with parades, while inside the state murdering and burning go on and there is no one to send to catch the brigands.23 •

Paul’s Law of Succession of 1797 had set the majority of the heir at the early age of sixteen in order to ensure a smooth succession in the event of the early death of the ruling emperor. Alexander was the first heir to reach that age under the law. To mark Alexander’s sixteenth birthday, Nicholas introduced a new ceremony into the life of the imperial court—the taking of the oath of majority. Pronounced by Alexander and all future grand dukes when they came of age, the oath made the maintenance of autocracy a filial obligation consecrated by God. Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow prepared an imposing ceremony in which the son pledged obedience to his father, the autocrat, and the laws of Russia before the assembled elite of the Russian state. Alexander’s oath, composed by Michael Speranskii, was an emphatic statement of the unity of family feeling with autocratic government and the maintenance of the inviolability of the prerogatives of the father-sovereign. The purpose of the ceremony, Speranskii asserted, was to give religious

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sanction to the heir’s future obligations. An oath, he wrote, “is an act of conscience and religion, by which he who vows summons God in witness to the sincerity of his promises and submits himself to His wrath and vengeance in case of violation.”24 The ceremony took place on April 22, 1834, on Easter Sunday, which lent the event an especially sacred character—as it had the promulgation of the Succession Law. The oath was an important rite of passage for the boy, from a child to his father’s helper, joining his father at least symbolically in the exercise of autocratic power. At midnight of New Year’s 1834, Nicholas and Alexandra told him that the coming year would be the most important of his life. Alexander wrote in his diary, “I ask the All-Powerful Father to give me strength to follow the example of my father in a worthy manner.”25 On April 16 Nicholas took his son on a walk to the Peter-Paul fortress. He told him of the difficulties he would encounter and urged him to turn to his father and mother for advice. At the cathedral, father and son kissed the graves of Paul, Alexander I, and their spouses, and the grave of Constantine Pavlovich. Nicholas kissed him and said, in French, “When I lie there, visit sometimes.” “These words touched me so much that I could not contain my tears, and I prayed to myself that the All-Powerful God allow a long life to my dear father.”26 The ceremony of the oath on April 22, 1834, in the Great Church at the Winter Palace was a major state occasion, described in a detailed account published in Russkii Invalid and Severnaia Pchela.27 The account described those attending as “all of Russia,” the symbolic representatives of the entire Russian state. From Alexander’s teaching staff, Zhukovskii, Edward Collins, and possibly others attended. The palace was so crowded that Alexander Pushkin had difficulty slipping through the back stairways to visit his aunt. The first part of the event, in the Great Church, was the taking of the oath as heir to the throne. After metropolitan Serafim and other clergy met the imperial family with the cross and holy water, Nicholas led his son to the pulpit, before the life-giving cross and the gospels. Alexander, raising his right hand, delivered the oath. He vowed to serve and obey his father “in all respects” (vo vsem). He promised that he would not spare his life and would give his last drop of blood, the words of Peter the Great. He would defend the rights and power of “the autocracy of His Imperial Majesty” and would “assist the service of his majesty and the welfare of the state.” He pledged to observe all the rulings of the throne and the Laws of the Imperial House. Finally, he called upon God “to guide and teach him in the great service” that had devolved upon him, words from the prayer of supplication at the coronation. At this point, he broke down in tears and it took several tries to continue. The emperor and empresses then embraced and kissed him. Metropolitan Filaret wrote that he and all those present wept.28 The ceremony was a reprise of the domestic scenario.

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The heir then signed the oath, and Count Nesselrode, the foreign minister, removed the document for safe-keeping to the State Archive. The first part of the ceremony concluded with the singing of a Te Deum, a 301-gun salute from the cannons of the Peter-Paul fortress, and the tolling of the church bells of the capital. Then, after the prayer for the long life of the emperor, the imperial family received congratulations from the members of the Synod. The report published in Severnaia Pchela and in Russkii Invalid, following the sentimental ascription—and prescription—of emotion, described a general feeling of tenderness, of umilenie that “penetrated all hearts.” The dramatic climax was the embrace of parents and son. First, Nicholas kissed Alexander three times. Alexander wanted to hug his mother, but Nicholas reached her first. Then the emperor clasped both of them to him. The author of the newspaper accounts compared Alexander’s tears to those of Michael Fedorovich when as a boy he had accepted the throne of Russia; the tears showed his understanding of the importance and greatness of the ritual. Alexander then proceeded to the second stage of the ceremony, the taking of his oath as military officer in the Hall of St. George. This was performed to an even larger assemblage than the civil oath. To the rousing strains of the new national anthem, the emperor, empress, and tsarevich entered, ascended to the throne and saluted the troops. Nicholas then stepped down and led Alexander to the lectern beneath the ataman’s standard. There, Alexander pledged to serve the emperor faithfully, to obey all military regulations, and to oppose enemies of emperor and state firmly and courageously. The troops saluted, the standards were lowered before the throne, and the recessional began. In the halls of the palace, their majesties received congratulations from officials of the highest ranks and then retired to their chambers. In the evening, the capital was lit with festive illumination. On the day of the ceremony, Nicholas issued an imperial manifesto that declared the oath an official state act, to be included in the recently published Digest of Laws and celebrated by Te Deums in the churches of the empire. To celebrate the event, Alexander declared that he “had the happiness to fulfill his first duty, taking before the throne of God the oath of fidelity to the Tsar parent, and in his person, the dear fatherland.” He made gifts of 50,000 rubles to the poor of both Petersburg and Moscow, and pronounced his thanks to both capitals. He addressed Petersburg where he had spent his childhood, “where I learned to love Russia, and where finally I pronounced my sacred oath.” Moscow he called “my dear native land”; “God gave me life in the Kremlin.”29 The celebration continued through Holy Week. The next day there was a reception for the diplomatic corps, and Alexander met and received congratulations from foreign ambassadors and emissaries. A state dinner was held for the imperial family, dignitaries of the first three ranks, and those with court ranks and titles. Court officials offered toasts to the emperor, the

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heir, and the imperial house to the accompaniment of trumpet fanfares and kettledrums, and the roar of cannon salutes from the fortress. Holy Week ended with a great ball given by the Petersburg nobility in the mansion of chief master of the hunt, D. L. Naryshkin, which marked Alexander’s first appearance as a member of Petersburg society. The rhetoric of the writers close to the throne transformed the heir into a national symbol as well. A song Zhukovskii wrote for the occasion, set to music by Count Michael Viel’gorskii, presented Alexander’s birth as a birth dear to the nation. From the heights of the Moscow Kremlin, the poem began, “the Russian Land” (Russkaia zemlia) had witnessed Alexander’s birth. Years had passed quickly, and now, on the day of the resurrection, the “touching ritual “ (umilitel’nyi obriad) was taking place in “Petrograd.”30

The Tour of the Empire Alexander’s tour through the empire after his nineteenth birthday, from April through December 1837, brought the dynastic scenario to the reaches of the Russian empire. Accompanied by Zhukovskii and an adjutant of Nicholas’s, S. A. Iur’evich, Alexander covered a distance of over thirteen thousand miles. It was the longest tour of the empire by a tsar or heir and took him to regions, including parts of Siberia never visited by a member of the imperial family. The principal purpose of the trip was ostensibly instructional. It marked the final stage in the education when, according to the educational theories of the day, the heir was “to become acquainted” with his future subjects. But it was also meant to acquaint the subjects of the tsar with the heir, to present him to them for the first time as an adult. Nicholas declared in his “general instruction” for the trip, “The heir’s journey has a dual role; to learn about Russia to the extent possible and to let himself be seen by his future subjects.”31 Following his mother’s example, Nicholas gave specific directives about what Alexander was to do, whom he was to receive, where he was to stay, what he was to wear. Many of the phrases repeated Maria Fedorovna’s instruction for Nicholas’s 1816 trip through the empire, which Nicholas must have consulted or recalled. Alexander should examine everything, for “everything useful must be important for you, and in addition you must learn about the ordinary to get a notion of the true state of things.” Like Maria Fedorovna, Nicholas counseled caution in making judgments, for “you are traveling not to judge but to become acquainted with things, having seen them, keeping them to yourself, for yourself.” When he reviewed the troops he was not an inspector and so should make no remarks but should convey his comments in private to the officers in charge.32 Nicholas went into much greater detail than his mother on how the heir should develop ties with those he met and inspire a sense of emotional

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closeness in them. “Be tender (laskovat’sia) with all—you must dispose them all to you, and make them attached to you (priviazat’).” He gave particular suggestions on how to win the affections of the particular estates. With the nobility, he was to conduct himself courteously (uchtivo), singling out those who had distinguished themselves by their previous service. He advised “tender, simple and polite conduct” with the merchants, singling out those known for their “virtue and useful enterprises.” The “common people” (prostoi narod) required “accessibility.” Unaffected, tender conduct will make them feel attached to you.”33 These were instructions for the role of the kindly, humane, and sensitive son, not those of the autocratic father. Alexander entered each town amidst crowds of people shouting hoorahs. Bands played the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” which had been composed only three years before (see chapter 8). According to Nicholas’s schedule, Alexander received welcomes from the governor, the provincial marshall of the nobility and other eminent noblemen, the town clergy, and the highest civil and military ranks. He visited important historical sites, churches, and monasteries. He was shown schools and charitable institutions of the towns. He devoted much time to examining factories and “industrial exhibitions” where he demonstrated his, and the government’s interest in the economic development of the empire. He visited garrisons and reviewed the troops on parade. His sojourn usually concluded with a gala ball given by the provincial nobility. The feeling of rapport during the trip was an act of mutual beholding. Towns along the way, many of which had never received an heir or emperor, primped for his inspection. Provincial governments had streets cleaned and weeded, public buildings painted, sidewalks, where they existed, repaired. Barrels along the streets that contained water for use against fire were painted, and their contents, often putrid from standing, were replaced. Multicolored flags enlivened the dreary expanses of provincial streets. The presence of the tsarevich broke the torpor of provincial towns by bringing them into the sphere of imperial attention. A reporter from Tver described the town as a backwater, or “a pretty postal station,” until the heir arrived. “Emptiness and boredom, boredom and emptiness!” The effect was most profound in Siberia. The inhabitants said of the visit, “Until then our region was Siberia, from that time it became Russia.”34 From the beginning of his trip, Alexander captivated with his beauty, tenderness, and charm, evoking personal affection for the imperial family. Memoirs of Alexander’s visits to provincial towns unfailingly recall the effect of his beauty. “He was a real beauty (krasavets), cheerful, charming everyone with his unusual cordiality,” a Saratov resident wrote.35 Alexander showed his kindliness through acts of charity. Following his father’s instruction, he gave 240,000 rubles to the needy and large sums to repair cathedrals and historical monuments. He received nearly 16,000 petitions of grievance to the tsar. In Siberia he was touched by the lot of many of the exiles, including some of the Decembrists, and petitioned his father for a

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mitigation of their punishment. To the joy of his accompanying party, Nicholas informed him that he would reduce many of their sentences. Severnaia Pchela made familial love a central theme in its reports of the heir’s trip. The anonymous author of “A Letter from Tver” told how, returning from a visit with Zhukovskii, he had heard peasant, merchant, and nobleman alike exclaiming with joy about the “paternal concern” of a tsar who had sent his son to learn about Russia.36 The principal function of Alexander’s journey, as Zhukovskii perceived, was ceremonial—to link the people to the tsar through the son. Everyone said, “the tsar is sending us his son; he respects his people and everyone’s heart is full of gratitude,” Zhukovskii wrote.37 The trip was a love affair between Alexander and a personified Russian nation culminating in what Zhukovskii called an “all-national betrothal with Russia. (Rossiia)”38 The young man gave indications of the susceptibility to public acclaim that would characterize him as emperor. After the tumultuous welcome in Tver, Zhukovskii observed, Alexander returned in the evening full of “a happy feeling of gratitude to the Russian people.” Alexander recorded his satisfaction in his diary, “The people received me with astonishing cordiality.” When he returned from the ball at eleven, he wrote, “the people accompanied me and shouted, ‘Hoorah!’ like in Moscow.” He noted the warmth of the greetings when he crossed the Volga. The people stood shouting along the shores and roared their approval at his coach windows.39 Two events of Alexander’s trip assumed especial importance for the role Alexander was to play in his father’s scenario—the visit to Moscow in July and August, and his installation as Cossack ataman in Novocherkassk in October. The Moscow visit linked his personal appeal as heir born in Moscow with Russia’s historical past. The metropolitan Filaret emphasized this theme in the welcome speech he delivered on Alexander’s arrival, which was printed in Severnaia Pchela. Alexander, Filaret declared, had now reached Moscow, the resting place of his ancestors. “Here you will come even more into contact with the heart of Russia and its vital force, which is an inherited love for hereditary tsars, repelling in previous centuries so many enemy forces. You will see it in its free play, in those waves of people striving toward You, in those enraptured (vostorzhennykh) gazes and solemn cries.” An inherited, historical, affection was the source of the ruler’s authority. “May the love of Russians make your task easy, inspired by love for Russia.”40 Michael Pogodin wrote an essay for Alexander explaining Moscow’s role as political and religious center. Moscow preserved the national spirit, while Petersburg represented European influences. “That is why [Moscow] can be called the representative of Holy Rus’.”41 The investiture ceremony at Novocherkassk in the steppes of New Russia on October 21 made the office of honorary ataman an attribute of the heir’s hereditary right. Emperor and heir rode in ceremonial procession into Novocherkassk, the administrative center of the Don Host. The Cossack leaders

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formed a circle around the cathedral; in the middle the “appointed” (nakaznyi) Cossack ataman conferred the pernach, one of the maces constituting the Cossack insignia of power, on Nicholas, who then conferred it on Alexander. Nicholas explained the significance of the event. He declared that appointing his son his ataman, he was giving “the most valuable pledge (zalog)” of his good will to them. “May this serve as proof of how close you are to my heart. When he replaces me, serve him as loyally as you served my ancestors and me. He will not forsake you.” In his diary, Alexander described the ceremony and copied down his father’s address.42 The next day, Alexander and Nicholas inspected a review of over 17,000 members of the Host and in the evening attended a ball where he took part in several dances. From Novocherkassk, Alexander traveled to Moscow, and again received a warm and cordial welcome. He remained through the first week of December before his return to Petersburg. He attended lectures in anatomy at Moscow University; he was the first Russian heir to receive instruction at a university.

Marriage and the Family Alexander played the role of loyal and presentable son well. But the very extent of his subordination to his father and his strong filial feelings made it difficult for him to see himself as father. The roles of adoring and faithful husband or doting father were not congenial to him. In the previous century, the ruler’s marital behavior had not been an issue, but now, with the sovereign or future sovereign presented as a model for his servitors and subjects, Alexander’s personal life threatened to clash with the image of the moral ascendancy of the Russian monarch. To be sure, Alexander showed the proper intentions in striving to match his father’s righteous example. But as in the classroom, this involved a struggle between duty and feeling, in which the former was only fleetingly the victor. Nicholas tried to show him the importance of constancy, for straying, in his opinion, was dangerous as well as immoral. To dramatize this point, he took Alexander, then nineteen, to the syphilis ward of a hospital. He wanted to show him “the most horrible example of the effects of syphilis on men and women.” Nicholas had been introduced to the same sight as a boy, and “the diseased people I saw so horrified me that I knew no woman until my marriage.”43 Nicholas’s admonition failed to discourage his son’s amorous adventures. In 1838, Alexander became romantically involved with a Fraulein Kalinovskaia, which infuriated his father and led to stern reproof. At his mother’s instance, he left the capital in order to forget Kalinovskaia. Under the circumstances, it became urgent to arrange the heir’s marriage. The selection of a spouse was the purpose of his journey through Europe in 1839, when Alexander was introduced to the courts of Europe. His journey took him to Sweden, Denmark, and Austria, as well as the Italian and the

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German states. At each court, he surveyed the eligible damsels arrayed before him. The presentation followed the fairy-tale motif. This was not to be an arranged marriage: Alexander had to choose a spouse who suited his inclinations. And also as in fairy tales, none of the most elegant or prepossessing candidates on his parents’ list captured his fancy. Rather it was a delicate and retiring princess not quite fifteen years old who caught his eye at the end of his trip. She was Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt, who had been considered too young to be numbered among the eligible. As in a fairy tale, Alexander’s parents were not pleased. His choice particularly distressed his mother. It was an embarrassment for a Prussian princess to have a princess from the lowly principality of Hesse-Darmstadt as a daughter-in-law. To make matters worse, the princess’s paternity was in doubt. Her mother and father had not been living together at the time of her conception, and her paternity, rumor had it, belonged to a chamberlain. For Nicholas, the champion of legitimacy, whether political or familial, this caused concern. In addition, Marie was in poor health. She suffered from serious colds and coughs that later were diagnosed as tubercular. But stopping the tsarevich’s escapades outweighed these concerns. Once Alexander returned to Russia, he resumed his affair with Kalinovskaia. He even began to smoke, a habit that Nicholas could not abide. He neglected his work and lied about what he was doing. Enraged, Nicholas recalled the example of Peter the Great, and considered removing his son from the succession. The champion of dynasty began to doubt the principle of primogeniture of succession and in a conversation with his aides blamed the confusion at his accession upon the precedence of the senior line. Alexander, like Peter the Great’s son, Alexei, may have been neglecting the obligations and duties defined by his father and indulging his own personal sentiments. But the similarity ended there. Unlike Alexei, Alexander shared his father’s image of the ideal ruler and was contrite. His sin was not rebellion but profligacy. When called to task, he fulfilled the role his father had assigned him. It was difficult for many to understand the appeal for the dashing prince of Princess Marie, a sad and retiring girl. Marie had grown up neglected and isolated in the court of Hesse-Darmstadt, a small principality, ruled after 1820 as a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature. Her mother, Wilhelmina Louise of Baden, was the sister of Alexander I’s wife. Ignored by her husband, Wilhelmina Louise suffered an additional blow from her oldest daughter’s death in 1826 and paid little attention to Marie and her brother, Alexander of Hesse, who was one year older than she. An official version of Marie’s life, however, emphasized the bond between mother and daughter. Marie claimed that she felt her mother watching over her from above and followed the advice she had received from her in childhood, especially in matters of faith.44 It was Marie’s sad vulnerability that fit the chivalric role Alexander had learned from his father. He was the knight protecting the helpless. He was

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attracted by her “modest charm.” She awakened the feelings of pity and compassion he had been taught to display toward women, and especially toward his mother, who was constantly suffering from indispositions. Through the magic of his charm, he could lift the shy and melancholic princess to the dazzling heights of the Russian court. In April 1840, Maria crossed the frontier into Russia and was escorted by her fiancé accompanied by a detachment of Cossacks to Petersburg. She felt homesick for her native land, she wrote in a letter just after her arrival, but also “extremely attached to Russia.” Like Alexandra Fedorovna, when she came to Russia, she found the military pageantry a setting that was familiar and reassuring. She wrote in her letter that she was cheered by the strains of her favorite “Ernst-Ludwig march” and the sight of “rich pretty uniforms,” for which she shared her fiancé’s taste. “There were even Turks among them.”45 But the sixteen-year-old girl had difficulties adjusting to her new position in the world. After her arrival in Petersburg, Marie’s face broke out in a rash, an affliction that would beset her at moments of tension throughout her life. She had to wear a veil and remained indoors for several weeks. Alexander was extremely caring and attentive in her distress, and apparently at this point she showed the first signs of reciprocating his affections. In December 1840, she was anointed in the Orthodox faith as Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna. She then passed the test of receiving the diplomatic corps, showing poise and elegance of bearing. Despite her shyness, she revealed what impressed Nicholas most, the talent for self-control. The wedding on April 16, 1841, was a spectacle meant to demonstrate the dynastic and national character of monarchical rule in Russia and to impress Europe with the extravagance at the disposal of the Russian emperor. After the ceremony in the large palace church, Nicholas stepped out onto the palace balcony facing the Admiralty with Alexander and Maria at his side before a crowd of people. He and his son wore Cossack uniforms. Nicholas marked the event by revising an article in the Digest of Laws to bestow upon the wife of the heir to the throne the old Russian title of Tsarevna as well as that of Grand Duchess, another of Nicholas’s attempts to give the European monarchy a national look. The wedding was hailed in Severnaia Pchela with lavish phrases praising family life that resemble the words of Vasilii Zhukovskii. “If family happiness is the greatest treasure of ordinary human life, then in the life of the Tsar it is a heavenly blessing.” “The firm edifice of the people’s well-being is built on domestic morals and the foundation stone of that edifice is the morals of the Tsar’s family.” The article went on to hope for the same type of “touching example of domestic happiness” in the family of the heir as was given by the tsar to the people.46 The next day, the emperor and empress, and the newlyweds rode through the streets of the capital in carriages and were greeted by the shouts of onlookers. There followed a fortnight of celebrations. Numerous lavish balls took place. Forty-two thousand invitations were reputedly sent out for

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the ball given by the newlyweds. The festivities concluded with the great May parade, in which the grand duke commanded an infantry division. Maria was treated to the sight of a charge of forty regiments of cavalry who, at Nicholas’s command, came to a halt a few yards away from the marquee. •

After the wedding celebrations, the couple left for a visit to Moscow. In 1781 Catherine II had forbidden the tsarevich, Paul, and the grand duchess Maria Fedorovna from visiting Moscow before their European trip; she feared for demonstrations on their behalf. Now the heir represented an ally, not a rival of the sovereign, and the sojourn of Alexander and Maria Aleksandra initiated what would become a tradition followed by later heirs and their spouses. The newlyweds, the symbol of the vitality and the popularity of the dynasty, now received the acclamation of the Russian population. If the wedding itself was played to Europe, the visit to Moscow demonstrated the nation’s acceptance of the marriage. Alexander expressed this feeling in a letter he wrote to Maria’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, just before their departure from Petersburg. “It is my native city that I am about to present her to and I am very much rejoicing. She will see with her own eyes how much in the heart of Russia [the people] are attached to their Sovereign and to His whole family.”47 The memoirs of the poet Afanasii Fet give a sense of a young nobleman’s perceptions of the popular response to the imperial family. He watched from a window as the procession came down Tver Boulevard. The emperor led the procession in general’s uniform, on horseback, “incomparably handsome, our Sovereign,” followed by the heir. The bride rode in a carriage drawn by six snow white horses given by the Hesse-Darmstadt prince. The scene of the throng of people mobbing the emperor, shouting resounding “Hoorahs!” raising their right hands with a sign of the cross, “was engraved in my mind.” The emperor ordered them away, but then overwhelmed by the shouts, let them come close. They kissed his boots and saddle-cloth as well as the horse itself. Fet was later told that when the police chief tried to stop the crush of the people, they answered, “What for? He himself is here!”48 With the marriage, the emperor, according to the Law of the Imperial Family established the heir’s own court. This provided Alexander with his own social world, where he and his wife held their own functions and drew together those close to him personally. Ideally, this world should have been more relaxed and private than the imperial court. But Nicholas brought the next generation into living arrangements resembling an extended family. Alexander and Maria had none of the freedom and privacy that Nicholas and Alexandra had enjoyed during the first years of their marriage at the Anichkov Palace. The young couple were immediately installed in the Winter Palace under the watchful eye of the emperor and empress. Alexander’s chambers adjoined his mother’s; Nicholas’s were on the floor above. “The members of the imperial family lived in close proximity,” Anna Tiutcheva a

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lady-in-waiting of the empress’s, wrote, “which created an intimate family life, at least as far as the habits of everyday life were concerned.”49 From nine to ten in the morning the family would gather around the empress for morning coffee. Maria had to appear at Alexandra Fedorovna’s daily gatherings of ladies, where she would work on crocheting, or listen to readings of literature. She attended numerous audiences, dinners, presentations, balls, and concerts and strictly observed the schedule of visits to members of the imperial family. At Tsarskoe Selo, life was more tranquil, but there too it was dominated by the empress. At Peterhof, they lived at the “Farm,” not far from the Cottage on the Alexandria estate. Maria was constantly involved in the ceremonial and leisure activities of the imperial family while Alexander was kept busy in the active military exercises in and around Peterhof. Alexandra made sure that her daughter-in-law learned to act like an empress. Alexander continued his rise as Nicholas’s subaltern. The marriage, on the eve of Alexander’s twenty-third birthday, represented his true coming of age. On the day of the wedding Nicholas appointed him to serve in the State Council. The ceremony of majority, had made him his father’s helper; his marriage, a comrade in arms. On the birth of his first child in 1843, he was promoted to adjutant-general and could not contain his feelings of joy and gratitude. The portraits of the time show him proudly wearing his adjutant’s uniform.

The Dissolution of the Scenario In the last years of Nicholas’s reign, particularly after the revolution of 1848, members of the elite close to the imperial family became skeptical of the presentations of the court. The “charm, acting on the imagination,” Anna Tiutcheva wrote, turned into ennui accompanying the preoccupation with the trivial details of the life of the imperial family. “The immense significance and grandiose proportions that the most simple events like dinners, strolls, family meetings take on demand so much time, attention, and energy that there is nothing left for more serious matters. . . . Everything unplanned, and consequently, every living and vital impression, is erased from their life.”50 Nicholas himself betrayed diminishing confidence in the efficacy and popularity of his rule and began to show his father’s characteristic suspiciousness of his servitors. The French ambassador, the Marquis de Castelbajac, observed in 1853, “The Emperor Nicholas has within himself the qualities of Peter the Great, Paul I and a medieval knight. But, as the years have passed, it is now the qualities of Paul I which rise more and more to the fore.”51 For the myth to retain its sway, the performance had to fulfill two conditions. First, it had to exemplify Western values that commanded the allegiance of the elite. Second, it had to be sustained by military success,

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confirming the claims of imperial domination. By the end of Nicholas’s reign, his scenario had failed on both counts. The officials who looked to the West were a product of Nicholas’s effort to introduce an educated officialdom drawn from the nobility. Nicholas hoped that trained loyal officials would be effective instruments of his will and would faithfully implement the laws codified at the beginning of the 1830s. A Western-type officialdom, thus, would help him realize his image of all-seeing sovereign supervising every level of the absolutist state. Contrary to his intentions, once these officials began their service, they encountered widespread incompetence, corruption, and injustice and began to look to Western examples to introduce major reforms. They began to develop a notion of the professional dignity of the law that did not comport with the idealization of personal power expressed in official presentations. Dmitrii Obolenskii, a young official in the legal administration, described how these young officials gathered to discuss their ideas after 1848. They shared one feeling, “the wish for a better order.”52 The 1850s witnessed the erosion of Russia’s prestige and influence abroad. The crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1849 saved the throne of the Austrian emperor, but it also identified Russia as the principal foe of progressive change and gave the monarchs of central Europe an uncomfortable sense of dependence upon the Russian armies. The Prussian and Austrian monarchs reached compromises with liberal opinion and granted limited representative government, leaving Russia alone among the great states as an absolute monarchy based upon serfdom. Rather than the savior of Europe and Western Christian values, the Russian empire took on the aspect of a backward, obscurantist state, more Eastern than Western, whose might stemmed from a disregard rather than a defense of humane values. Even writers who were sympathetic to Russia, like Balzac, saw Russians as different from Europeans, resembling Asians in their preference for obedience over freedom.53 When Russia’s allies sought their interests apart from the Congress system of alliances, Nicholas lost one of the key marks of authority in Russia, the claim to embody the universal values of monarchy. The Crimean War, which began in March 1854, brought the moment of truth. Nicholas blundered into a war, determined to impose conditions on the Ottoman empire, only to find himself deserted by his erstwhile allies Austria and Prussia. He had regarded the young emperor Franz Joseph as a son, had treated him sympathetically, and defended his empire in 1849. Nicholas turned Franz Joseph’s portrait to the wall, and wrote above it, in German, “the ingrate.”54 The hypnotic power of Nicholas’s scenario had blinded the tsar himself to the true state of the Russian administration and armed forces. The illusion of omnipotence and omnipresence had disguised political and economic stagnation just when Europe had begun to develop rapidly and the dynamic effects of industrial development and freedom were making themselves felt. The police system of supervision, rather than assisting his all-seeing eye, had begotten elaborate paper pretenses of control that hid incompetence and peculation. At the same time, the triumphalist myth that had dominated

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military thinking since 1812 had led to a smug disregard of the problems of the Russian military. The excessive reliance on parade-ground training, the emperor’s meddling in the conduct of war, the inadequate recruitment, the shortness of funds, the backwardness of technology had eluded the attention of the emperor and those near him. The setbacks in the Crimean War gave immediate notice that the vaunted might of Russia was illusory and that its government and economy had fallen behind that of its European allies. With the news of his setbacks, his conviction that the autocracy was the embodiment of the nation also weakened. The daughter of Dmitrii Bludov, lady-in-waiting Antonina Bludova wrote in her memoirs that the defeat meant “The destruction of everything that seemed so firmly founded, so sacredly established.” Those close to him described his suffering through sleepless nights, prostrating himself before the church, and at each dispatch weeping “like a child.” In his last hours, he refused to hear reports from the Crimea.55 Indeed there were few at court who failed to realize that the Nicholas system had outlived its time. •

Nicholas’s passing, like Alexander I’s, was commemorated with an elaborate funeral procession. Now, however, the press brought the event to a broader public audience. The official description detailed the individual groups in the procession, while a separate volume provided illustrations of the entire procession, like those on the scroll prepared for Alexander I’s funeral.56 Most important, the description began with a history of Russian imperial funerals, beginning with Peter the Great. It rendered the funeral as an event in the history of the dynasty and a principal ceremony of Russian monarchy like the coronation. The dynastic aspect of the procession was heightened by the appearance of a newly devised Romanov coat of arms, indicating that the royal house now had a historical emblem like Russian noble families. The device, drawn from seventeenth-century personal emblems of the Romanovs, consisted of a griffon holding a raised sword, set on the breast of the imperial Russian eagle. The death literature about Alexander I turned him into an angelic symbol of Providential triumph. The presentation of Nicholas I’s death eulogized a different Nicholas—heroic, noble, and self-sacrificing, devoid of the pretense of infallibility and omnipresence, and ready to admit his own failings.57 Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok and Severnaia Pchela published descriptions of Nicholas’s illness and death. The official presentation of the death was the work of Dmitrii Bludov, the loyal servitor who had hailed Nicholas’s coronation. Bludov described Nicholas’s death in a slim volume, The Last Hours of Nicholas I, which was published simultaneously in French, German, and English, as well as Russian. Bludov used the deathbed scene to dramatize the emperor’s secular and religious virtues. Even as his illness progressed, Bludov wrote, the emperor allowed himself no indulgence, “devoting himself to work day and night,

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14. Deathbed Scene of Nicholas I. Lithograph by Vasilii Timm. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, 1855.

and stealing his hours of rest from sleep.” Nicholas’s simple, austere study in the Winter Palace, depicted in a plate at the rear of the French volume, symbolized his self-denial. His camp bed, upon which he purportedly preferred to sleep, is at the center, a striking symbol of his spirit of Spartan dedication. The furniture is sparse—besides the bed, a plain desk, a table in the rear, a small couch, a few tables and chairs.58 Timm’s lithograph in Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok shows him on his deathbed, an image of modest self-denial (fig. 14). Describing the parting of Nicholas and Alexandra, Bludov characterizes the tsar as sentimental hero, devoted husband, and father. “In their tenderness, they spoke gently to each other. The conjugal affection which had embellished their long union, still ruled this last conversation.”59 To his son he left both an admission of defeat and an implicit imperative of change. “Having taken upon myself everything difficult and painful, I would have wished to leave you an Empire that was peaceful, happy, and flourishing. Providence has decided otherwise. Now I will pray for Russia and for you, who are, after Her, what I love above all in this world.”60

Alexander II and the Scenario of Love

Accession Alexander II attempted to refurbish the Petrine myth with a new scenario adapted to the political universe of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The “hope” of Russia, who had been dedicated to everything his father stood for, had to repudiate basic principles of his father’s rule. But in the framework of a cult of dynasty, he also had to maintain an illusion of continuity. The initial statements of his reign intimated a scenario that in contrast to those of the previous century minimized the break with the previous reign and made the new reign seem a continuation of the old. Alexander’s accession manifesto of February 18, 1855, declared his solidarity with his predecessors, with the pointed omission of his grandfather, Emperor Paul. Just as our Dear lamented Parent devoted all His Efforts, all the hours of His life, to the labors and cares for the welfare of His subjects, so We . . . take the sacred vow to have as a single goal the well-being of Our Fatherland. Guided and protected by Providence, which has called us to this Great service, may we establish Russia at the highest level of might and glory, and may we realize the constant wishes and intentions of Our August predecessors, Peter, Catherine, Alexander the Blessed, and our Unforgettable Parent.1

Alexander’s education imbued him with the tenets of the doctrine of Official Nationality. He believed in autocracy’s historic mission and the Russian people’s devotion to their Westernized rulers. He conducted himself as a member of European royalty and took on the tastes and manner of the many young German princes who were his comrades. His tutors gave him an education in the sentiments, trying to make of him a “human being” who had sympathy for the sufferings of others. He came to see himself as a national leader who had to win the sentiments of his people by taking their needs and feelings into account, an image that both made possible his acceptance of reforms and established their limits. Alexander’s scenario emerged under the impetus of military defeat. When he ascended the throne in February 1855, Russia was in the midst of a setback against the Ottoman empire, France, and Great Britain, with a large Austrian army threatening intervention from the west. The presentation of the Russian monarch as the exemplar and invincible defender of Western absolute monarchy crumbled with growing evidence of incompetence, corruption, and backwardness. On February 20, Alexander received the members of the diplomatic corps and announced his decision to continue the war.

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In the first year of his reign, Alexander found it difficult to break with his father’s memory and image of power. In his case, the phrase “Our unforgettable father” (Nezabvennyi Nash Roditel’) was more than a convention. He was unable to separate the office of emperor in his mind from his father’s memory. He found it painful to hear himself addressed as “sovereign” (gosudar’). When he appeared before the State Council to formalize his accession, on the day after his father’s death, he could not contain his tears. Alexander’s lack of assurance troubled the noblemen used to an aura of certain and intimidating authority. He was tall and handsome and his figure graceful, but his manner betrayed weakness to those accustomed to an authoritarian presence. The eyes of a sovereign disclosed his authority to his servitors. Nicholas eyes prepossessed and daunted. Alexander’s gaze called out for pity and help. “A calf’s eyes,” Boris Chicherin remarked. The Kamer-Fraulein Anna Tiutcheva wrote, “The eyes are large and blue but the gaze is uninspiring.” To make matters worse, Alexander began his reign with a relaxation of court etiquette that was perceived even by reformminded members of the court as a dangerous weakening of his authority. He reduced the period of lying in state and the period of mourning from six to three weeks. This change followed Nicholas’s own instructions, but it seemed part of a general disregard of the rules of etiquette in the opening months of his reign. Anna Tiutcheva wrote, “The prestige of authority to a large degree is sustained by the etiquette and ceremonial surrounding it, which has a strong impact on the imagination of the masses. It is dangerous to deprive authority of this aura.”2 But Alexander’s statements and policies in the first of year of his reign suggested his new style of rule. His accession manifesto mentioned Catherine the Great, whom Nicholas had despised for her liberalism, morals, and treatment of Paul and whose name he banned from governmental decrees. Although Alexander seemed indifferent to reform, he began to permit a freer, more open atmosphere. Memoranda and plans for reform circulated in society and the bureaucracy and reached the emperor’s desk. Michael Pogodin, in May 1855, called upon Alexander, who had been “met with such love,” to pronounce “the great word,” and summon a Duma, which would bring the Russian people to life. “[The people] will certainly be resurrected, will rise like one person, throw off the shackles of their hereditary and acquired vices. They will be ready for all sacrifices and will abandon petty calculations.” Constantine Aksakov’s memorandum calling for freedom of speech and an Assembly of the Land came to Alexander’s attention.3 Controls on the press slowly loosened, and periodicals other than Russkii Invalid were permitted to print dispatches from the front. In December 1855, Alexander closed the Supreme Censorship Committee, established by his father, and accepted the view of Baron Modest Korf that its extreme measures resulted only in the clandestine circulation of works in manuscript. Leading figures in educated society were allowed to found journals and express their views in print. The Westernizer Michael Katkov received

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permission to open Russkii Vestnik, a journal proposing a broad consideration of the problems of state. Slavophiles, among them, Iurii Samarin, Alexander Khomiakov, and Ivan Aksakov, who had been regarded as subversive under Nicholas I, founded a new journal, Russkaia Beseda. Nicholas’s ban on foreign travel and the high fees for passports were abolished. Other measures lifted controls over the universities and ended policies of forcible recruitment of Old Believers and Jews into the army. The progressive deterioration of the military situation induced Alexander increasingly to assume an image of leader of the people that would sustain his pretensions as national monarch. His upbringing had trained him for the role of popular monarch who could mobilize the population in support of autocracy. Like his predecessors, Alexander emulated the model of his chief international rival, in his case, Emperor Napoleon III, whom Pogodin described in 1856 as “the leading person in Europe.” Napoleon III had risen to the throne by rallying popular support on tours through France. In preparation for the plebiscite confirming the restoration of the empire, he was greeted by organized demonstrations where the people shouted “Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoléon III!” He had been elected “emperor of the French,” “the emperor of the people”; Alexander II had no intention of conducting elections or a plebiscite, but the French emperor provided a model of a monarch who was able to rally popular support. Such an example could be used to call upon the Russian people’s devotion to their Westernized sovereign without challenging his prerogatives. The symbolic rupture between reigns took place despite Alexander’s reverence for the principle of dynasty and powerful emotional attachment to his father. He presented himself in a scenario that claimed fidelity to Nicholas’s principles at the same time as it repudiated the entire basis of Nicholaean authoritarianism. Alexander strove to adapt a form of popular, national leadership to the Russian mythic tradition and to encompass the people in the monologic universe of imperial ceremony. The people would give their assent to the monarch in explosions of enthusiasm, whether staged or spontaneous. The trope of love, likening monarchy to a romance between monarch and people, would show the national character of the empire. It would indicate that the Russian emperor could win popular support without granting the constitutional reforms instituted in Prussia and Austria. His reign marked a new stage in the presentation and representation of Russian monarchy, when the people became central figures in imperial presentations. •

To renew the sense of rapport with the people that he had experienced on his journey in 1837, Alexander embarked on a ceremonial trip through the empire. In September and October 1855, he traveled to Moscow, New Russia, and the Crimea. His visit to Moscow was staged as a repeat performance of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance after Napoleon’s invasion. But

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the reenactment of 1812 took place under the shadow of irreversible defeat, after the fall of the fortress of Sevastopol. The enthusiastic reception of Moscow consoled him. He wrote to Prince I. F. Paskevich, “In the midst of these painful circumstances, it was a joy to my heart to meet such a warm and sincere reception.”4 The reports of Alexander’s trip to the south emphasized the feelings of cordial and mutual devotion between tsar and people. The semi-official Severnaia Pchela couched its accounts in the rhetoric of personal devotion and religious reverence. In Odessa and Kherson, the troops greeted him with rapture, vostorg. When he ventured closer to the front, the soldiers, the report tells us, stopped his carriage, kissed his hands and feet. The cries of the troops “reached the soul of the tsar. They caressed his soul and repaid the August Voyager for his labors and cares.” When Alexander stood at the bedside of soldiers in a military hospital in Nikolaev, the correspondent A. Garainov reported that the injured soldiers responded with tender pity (umilenie), another expression of deep feelings of love for and religious devotion to the tsar.5 To the satisfaction of the public, Alexander replaced the minister of war, Nicholas’s favorite, General Peter Kleinmichel, who was held generally responsible for the defeat at Sevastopol. But this scarcely affected the course of the war. Despite the seemingly hopeless situation in the Crimea, and Austria’s threat to enter on the side of the England and France, he remained determined to fight on. His visit to the armies in the Crimea only strengthened this resolve. He helped to formulate campaign plans and expected that disorders among the French lower classes would force France to withdraw from the conflict. He confidently rejected terms proposed by the allies. It was only after Austria gave an ultimatum and even Prussia hinted at intervention that Alexander relented. Nicholas’s most trusted advisors, Count P. D. Kiselev, Count K. V. Nesselrode, Count M. S. Vorontsov, and Count A. F. Orlov pointed out that the situation could only deteriorate. In March 1856 Alexander signed the Treaty of Paris. He agreed to the neutralization of the Black Sea and the cession of southern Bessarabia, acquired in 1812. This deprived Russia of control of the mouth of the Danube. Many figures in the government and the liberal intelligentsia considered the concessions excessive. Though he had no other choice, Alexander regarded the treaty as a personal humiliation. The Crimean defeat and the Treaty of Paris irreversibly altered the relationship between the Russian monarchy and its European counterparts. Rather than the dominant military force in Europe, the Russian empire had been proved wanting in the organization and technology of warfare. Massive and elaborate parades suggested not armed might and irresistible authority, but diversions from the more serious tasks of government and military strength. On April 29, 1856, Prince Obolenskii noted in his diary while watching the May Day parade on Mars Field in Petersburg:

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In the old days, the sight of a huge mass of an army at its most brilliant conquered the imagination and seemed the incarnation and guarantee of the power and invincibility of Russia. Now this specter has vanished and the crowd of armed men saddens the heart with the memory of catastrophes that have befallen us. I wanted this Field of Mars, upon which our army spent all of its military prowess, to be covered with buildings so that it could never again be the scene of a parade.6 •

The decisiveness of the defeat forced Alexander II to separate his image from his father’s and to proceed with the elaboration of his own scenario of power, a scenario that sought to evoke love. He chose to emulate Western rulers who earned the love of their peoples by working for their benefit. He declared his intentions in his Manifesto of March 19, 1856, on the signing of the Treaty of Paris. With the words, “May each, under the canopy of laws equally just for all, equally protective of all, enjoy the fruits of honest labor in peace,” Alexander augured a departure from the principle of tightened administrative surveillance.7 The manifesto announced the beginning of the reform era, when the monarch in the interests of his people would try to change the social, institutional, and legal bases of his power. The scenario of love adapted the concepts of Official Nationality to a program of reform. The Russian people’s devotion to their sovereigns expressed not only their immemorial subservience to authority, but their love and gratitude for the benefactions bestowed by their rulers. The scenario described a relationship that permitted social and institutional change to take place peacefully under an absolute monarchy, without the divisive conflicts associated with Europe. The bonds of sympathy, the shared lot of the Crimean disaster, now replaced the bonds of awe and devotion of Nicholas’s reign. In foreign policy too, Alexander appeared as an exemplar of sympathy and conciliation. The new policy was announced with the appointment of Alexander Gorchakov in April 1856 to the position of foreign minister. The appointment of a diplomat with a Russian name to the position held by Carl von Nesselrode for forty years, was itself regarded as a sympathetic gesture to the Russian nation, even if Gorchakov spoke little Russian. Gorchakov announced, “The emperor wishes to live in good harmony with all governments.” Alexander, he declared, had decided to devote himself to the wellbeing of his subjects and “concentrate on the development of the internal means of the country.” He continued with his famous words, “They say that Russia sulks. Russia does not sulk. Russia is collecting herself” (“La russie se recueille”).8 The policy known as recueillement—collecting or composing oneself—went along with accueil, a manner of graciousness and amicability. Rumors of reform began to spread in March 1856. On March, 30, 1856, during a brief visit to Moscow, Alexander gave a speech to the marshals of the Moscow nobility pronouncing serfdom an evil. He uttered his famous

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words that it would be better if emancipation of the serfs “came from above, than below,” and through his minister of interior, A. I. Levshin, asked the nobility to submit petitions for reform.9 The jurist and historian Constantine Kavelin wrote to his former mentor Michael Pogodin on April 3, 1856, that “love for the tsar grows with each day,” but indicated that everyone still feared for the future. “I confess to you that the kindness and sincerity of the tsar has begun to stir even me, and to attach me to him personally, so that if it continues long this way, I will buy his portrait and hang it in my room. Still one should not hurry. What did Alexander I degenerate into?”10 On his thirty-eighth birthday, April 17, 1856, Alexander replaced other ministers left from his father’s reign and issued a manifesto setting the date of his coronation. Whereas Nicholas I’s coronation manifesto expressed retribution and the consecration of order, Alexander’s announced a humanitarian ideal. “May the All-Powerful help us, with the taking of the crown, to take a vow before the entire world to live only for the happiness of the peoples under our authority, and with the inspiration of His Most Holy, Life Giving Spirit may he direct all our thoughts, all our efforts to that end.”11 The word “happiness” placed Alexander in the tradition of Alexander I, of dedicating himself to advance his subjects civil and economic well-being. In the following weeks, the government introduced measures further relaxing censorship restrictions, eliminating admissions quotas to the universities, and establishing government stipends for students to study abroad. The manifesto referred to the happiness of the peoples under the emperor’s authority, indicating that he had in mind all the nationalities in the empire. In this way, the scenario of love identified the Russian nation, Rus’, with the empire, Rossiia, uniting all in a bond of affection with the emperor who worked for the benefit of all. On his trips in the spring of 1856, Alexander brought the elites of Finland, Poland, and the Baltic provinces into his scenario. His visits to the Baltic cities were occasions to reaffirm ties with the Baltic nobility, Ritterschaft, who dominated the local government of the Baltic provinces and sought confirmation of the special privileges originally granted by Peter the Great. He received an especially warm reception from the nobility and townspeople of Riga, much as Catherine the Great and Alexander I had after their accessions. Reports in the Riga newspapers, reprinted in the German edition of Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti and in Russkii Khudozhevennyi Listok explained the cordiality of the reception as an expression of personal sentiment. The articles emphasized the outpouring of love from all parts of the population. “Feelings of reverence poured forth in the currents of love that surrounded the Monarch during his visit.” The elaborate decorations, flowers, and flags were signs of personal feeling. “The lowliest pauper in the most distant shack” expressed his love with an ornament near the candle he lit for the emperor.12

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Coronation Due to the war, Alexander II’s coronation took place eighteen months after accession, the longest period to elapse before crowning since Peter the Great. If Nicholas I’s coronation had consecrated the Russian emperor as the incarnation of the national spirit of devotion to absolute monarchy, Alexander II’s presented him as the focus of Russians’ love for their tsars and as their hope for the future. Broader publicity in Russian and foreign periodicals sought to bring news of the events to new groups in the population. Foreign correspondents were made welcome. The descriptions in the Russian periodicals drew heavily from their reports, proudly indicating the attention and the admiration that the ceremonies had evoked in the West. The lavish coronation album exemplified the effort to impress Western opinion. It was the largest and most ostentatious of the albums printed to date. Four hundred copies were published, two hundred in Russian, two hundred in French, to be given to figures in the court and foreign guests attending the ceremony. The volume was “of such immense size,” the English man of letters Sacherevell Sitwell wrote, “that the term ‘elephant folio’ has no meaning, and, indeed, this may be the largest book that ever issued from the printing press.”13 Special large type was cast and Chinese paper imported for the volume. The title was printed in large old Church-Slavonic script in gold leaf, red, and black. Alexander personally rejected the editor’s proposal to use old Slavic script in the text. The album’s numerous illustrations, many of them in color, gave visual confirmation to the scenario of love. Figures of people from all classes cluster in the foreground watching intently and greet the tsar with rapture. Alexander’s entry procession on August 17 was described in a report translated from L’Independance Belge and was printed in four issues of Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok as well as in Severnaia Pchela. The report of L’Independance Belge described the brilliance and luxury of the uniforms and costumes. The glittering golden livery of eighty servants of the court, the correspondent observed, cost three to four hundred rubles apiece. His imagination was stunned by the twenty-eight lavish carriages covered by felt and gold, painted in the style of Francois Boucher and occupied by holders of court rank and members of the State Council. The braided uniforms and the chain of carriages carrying court ranks and members of the State Council gave Tver Street “the appearance of a golden river.” The author described the approach of the Cavalier-Guards “in which sons of the first Russian families consider it an honor to serve.” The sun rays glittered on their silver arms and helmets. “The sight of this magnificent cavalry evoked cries of astonishment from all.” The Horse-Guards appeared in white uniforms, and on black horses, recalling legendary German knights who roamed through the woods at night.14

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15. Coronation of Alexander II: Entry procession, by M. A. Zichy. Opisanie sviashchenneishago koronovaniia . . . Aleksandra Vtorago i Imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny Vseia Rossii.

The pictures accompanying the texts confirmed the rhetorical evocations of exotic splendor and popular enthusiasm. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok proudly quoted the London Times correspondent’s remarks on Alexander’s “majestic looks,” the close facial resemblance with Nicholas, and his imposing appearance on horseback. “He rode his horse, a perfect model of stateliness, lightly and attractively.” He was so touched by the shouts of the crowd that tears appeared in his eyes, a sign of recognition of the acclaim.15 The coronation album printed a montage conveying the excitement of the various parts of the procession. The plate by M. A. Zichy, Alexander’s favored court painter, of the entry is a vivid rendering of the ecstatic welcome of the tsar and the court by the Moscow population (fig. 15). Both educated society and the people are encompassed in the frame. From the grandstand, a group of writers give animated welcome to the emperor, among them Feodor Tiutchev, Ivan Turgenev, Fadei Bulgarin, Alexei Tolstoi, and Vladimir Odoevskii. In the foreground are the people: a peasant woman in folk dress and a tiara hat faces the tsar, a man raises his arms in greeting. Before the spectators, we see large figures of the last row of the Horse-

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Guards, proud mustachioed men dressed in elegant white uniforms and golden helmets. Alexander appears in middle ground riding toward us in his green general’s uniform and cape, the center of the picture, before the many figures of his suite clad in blue. The accounts cited in the Russian press dwelled on the pageant of colorfully dressed representatives of the various Eastern peoples in their native costumes who participated in the procession—Bashkirs, Cherkessy, Tatars, Armenians, Georgians, different varieties of Cossacks. The reporters saw them as a demonstration of the extent and diversity of the empire and the forging of bonds between the Asian peoples and the tsar. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok presented the people from Central Asian khanates as “tangible proof of the vastness of our state, which, some justly call a special kind of planet.” Their appearance in procession “eloquently attested to all about the one whose authority they recognize, and whom they came from their own lands to worship.”16 William Russell of the Times of London marveled, “What a recollection of the majesty and might of Russia will these people bring back to their distant tribes! They flashed by us in all of their brilliance, a dream from A Thousand and One Nights.”17 Foreigners’ reports cited in Russkii Vestnik and Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok emphasized the civilizing mission of the Russian state. L’Independance Belge observed the vigor of the deputies from Central Asia, and their rearing horses “with smoking nostrils, foam in the mouth, a striking symbol of the triumph of the power of the well-ordered over the power of disorder.”18 The press focused on the mutual love of tsar and people displayed during the procession. Severnaia Pchela described the moment with a rhetorical flight. “All gazes fixed on the Most August Visitor, arriving to receive the tribute of the people’s love and the legacy of His ancestors. The sensitive heart of the people looking into the cordial smile of the Sovereign Emperor, it seemed, guessed the treasures of love and mercy filling the heart of the Monarch who so loved his children. Many of those present made the sign of the cross and shed tears of tender pity.” The people also gazed with love on “the young Tsaritsa, ornamenting the life of her Sovereign Spouse.” The bowing from the Red Staircase brought the climax of the people’s adulation. The reporter in Severnaia Pchela wrote, “These minutes were most joyous and most tender. The heart nearly leapt from joy. Tears were on the eyes of all.” When the tsar bowed to the people, one foreign correspondent found the cries of the people “frightening.” The reporter replied that “for the Russian heart they are joyous, because we know their source and meaning.”19 These statements left no doubt about the distance between the beloved tsar and the loving people—the love of a parent for his children, those who were endearing because they were lesser and grateful for guidance and protection. The coronation ceremony revealed the same attentiveness to and wariness of the people. The procession of the imperial family and official delegations to the Assumption Cathedral for the first time included delegations of the peasantry. Village elders of the state peasants, one from each

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province in the empire, the kingdom of Poland, and the grand duchy of Finland followed the Cavalier-Guards, the pages, and masters of ceremony. But, as the coronation album noted, they were permitted only to “walk around” the cathedral and had to await the end of the ceremony in the Synodal Chamber.20 Metropolitan Filaret’s address of welcome at the portals of the Assumption Cathedral expressed the theme of hope and love. “Russia accompanies You. The Church meets You. Russia sends You off with a prayer of love and hope.”21 The invocation of love and hope was taken up in the press. The account in Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok asserted that faith and love were “unshakeable principles upon which the power, unity, and prosperity rest; hope, the third daughter of heaven, is the radiant companion of the new star, the present reign.”22 After Alexander crowned himself came the dramatic moment of the supplication, when he fell to his knees to beseech God to help him govern the realm. Alexander implored the Lord to teach him, to give him understanding, and guide him in “his great service” (vysokoe sluzhenie). He asked for help in governing “for the welfare of the people entrusted to me and to Your glory.” Then he rose, and as the entire congregation knelt, the metropolitan delivered the prayer “from the entire people.” He called upon the Lord to instruct Alexander to work in “his great service” to God. When Alexander placed the small crown on Maria Aleksandrovna’s head, many in the cathedral wept. Alexander then respectfully embraced his mother, shook his wife’s hand, and embraced the other members of the imperial family. The moment of marital devotion was captured in Zichy’s painting of Alexander’s crowning of Maria Aleksandrovna in the coronation album; the album contains no illustration of the emperor crowning himself. We see the scene across the bare shoulders of the ladies of the court. In the foreground, guardsmen, cadets, and a young lady in a bright pink dress watch intently. Zichy succeeds in placing the imperial couple and the spectators in the same frame, capturing the emotions that presumably united Alexander with his elite. We can understand what Sitwell meant when he wrote of these, “Not works of art, but fascinating in their improbability.”23 When Alexander stepped out of the cathedral into the view of the throng on the Kremlin Square, in full regalia, wearing the heavy crown, he appeared weary and sad, overwhelmed by the task that awaited him. The crowd on the Kremlin square responded with shouts of adoration when the emperor and empress in full regalia bowed three times to them, indicating their recognition of the devotion of the Russian people. Those present at Alexander’s coronation were convinced that these shouts expressed genuine feelings of love for the monarch. Prince Obolenskii, who was close to the Slavophiles, sensed a powerful bond between the tsar and the people. To his dismay, the people were kept at the edge of the square, behind a cordon of guardsmen, and this gave the spectacle “an official look” (kazennyi vid). Nonetheless, he perceived that all the peasants (muzhiki) were “full of love

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and deep compassion for him.” This feeling lasted into the evening, and was particularly evident during the illumination of Moscow. “When you hear expressions of love from the source, the lips of the people,” Obolenskii wrote, “you feel ashamed that you don’t feel this love yourself.”24 The belief that Alexander was beloved by the people remained an article of faith and sustained his and many other officials’ and writers’ vision of reform as a display of altruism and generosity. Alexander’s manifesto, promulgated on the day of the coronation, showed exceptionally generous consideration to all estates of the realm. He was profuse in his thanks to the nobility, which, he declared, “for long has led the other estates (sostoianiia) as an example on the field of honor and sacrifices for the fatherland.” The manifesto also granted unprecedented clemencies and favors. Most important, the exiled Decembrists were allowed to return from Siberia to European Russia, and to regain their previous titles and rights, ending the bitter resentment that had clouded Nicholas’s reign. Other political prisoners were also released, and nine thousand individuals were freed from police surveillance. Some arrears were forgiven, and political sentences were reduced. Alexander declared the recruit obligation suspended for three years, unless the peace came to an end. Filaret’s words of congratulations after the coronation emphasized the emperor’s civic responsibilities. He stated the hope that “from the tsar’s crown, a life-giving light will spread, as from a central point to the whole tsardom, the most honorable of rare stones, state wisdom,” and that the tsar’s scepter would lead his people to the public good. The imperial standard should “gather the millions of the people together in strict order and the labor and vigilance of the tsar should serve to stir and elevate their activity and ensure their tranquility.”25 In keeping with the inclusive spirit of the celebration, Alexander insisted that the reception the day after the coronation include new groups of the population. Instead of the traditional gathering of the highest four ranks of officers and officials, marshals of the nobility and mayors, the reception was thrown open to all hereditary nobles in the capital with their wives and daughters, including the district marshals of the nobility. A delegation of peasant elders, one from each province, presented Alexander with bread and salt on a silver plate, purchased from funds from the peasant estate. Alexander thanked them for their devotion and zeal, especially during the war. Altogether, he received a total of eighty-one gold and silver plates with bread and salt from the noble, merchant, and peasant estate organizations. Numerous gala occasions—parades, theatrical performances, dinners, and balls—took place on the following days. The Moscow Merchantry gave their traditional ceremonial dinner for the lower ranks of the guards, but unlike his father, Alexander did not attend. The gala performance that opened the new Bolshoi Theater on August 30 expressed the effervescent spirit of the beginning of Alexander’s reign. A special arcade of lights was constructed around the square for the celebration of the theater’s opening.

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The performance included Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, The Elixir of Love. The opera was the kind of frothy diversion that the emperor enjoyed, expressing a sentimental faith in the magical power of love, creating good feeling, and healing wounds—joy and infatuation conquering disbelief and making for a sense of common humanity. The masquerade in the Kremlin palace repeated the pageantry of the ball of 1849. Indeed, it was more a theatrical presentation than a social occasion. Eight thousand tickets were given out. The correspondent of Le Nord remarked on “the public of the streets, the rabble of society, trampling upon the marvelous mosaic of the parquets with their dirty boots, and quenching their Homeric thirst from the golden and silver goblets of the imperial buffet.” He was amazed that the doors of the palace were opened to allow the mob to “enjoy the luxury and magnificence destined only for the select of society.” In no democratic country, including his own Belgium, would such a “mixture of citizens of all estates” be allowed.26 The British journalist Henry Sutherland Edwards wrote with admiration of how Alexander spoke freely with peasants and particularly guests from the distant parts of the empire.27 At the masquerade, the ladies of the court came dressed in the “Russian dress.” These were the traditional formal gowns with Russian-style tiaras, now made more authentic with real kokoshniki and sarafans. The empress and grand duchesses wore national costumes bedecked with diamonds and other jewels. The emperor and the grand dukes appeared for the first time at a major function in the uniform of His Majesty’s Rifles, the regiment formed by Nicholas in 1853 out of the peasant militia from the imperial family’s Moscow domains. The uniform of His Majesty’s Rifles was in national style: wide sharovary over high boots, a Russian-style kaftan, a black lambskin cap. Count G. A. Miloradovich wrote, “This purely Russian form of clothing very much became the tsar.” Sutherland Edwards remarked that “at the national fête, he wore a national costume.”28 The traditional feast for the people, which took place on Khodynskii Field at Alexander’s coronation, symbolized both the largesse and the dangers of the inclusive spirit of the new reign. It was staged on a grand scale, and the problems of organization and control, which would have a tragic outcome at the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896, were already testing the organizational capacities of autocracy. Rather than order the food from a contractor, the government assigned each of the regiments a dish to prepare. The dishes, however, were prepared too early and lay rotting under covers for two days, filling the air with aromas that attracted stray dogs from around the city. Although the dinner was scheduled to begin at noon with the arrival of the tsar, the mobs of people began to appear at eight in the morning, undaunted by a driving rain. Hundreds of thousands covered the field. By noon most of the food had been consumed. Apparently, the commission in charge of the event, embarrassed by the condition of the food, had raised the white flag— the signal to start—an hour early.

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When the tsar arrived to open the feast, surrounded by a splendid suite of foreign princes, he was startled that nothing remained. He rode around the field for about fifteen minutes and left. When he had reached his pavilion, the white flag was raised again, and the fountains poured forth with white Crimean wine, and mead. The people flattened the trees near the fountains, and in a few minutes had emptied the fountains. They then were entertained by acrobats, jugglers, stunt riders, and rides on the carousel. Zichy’s painting of the feast is in the genre of rollicking peasants, merry children enjoying the emperor’s largesse. But the scenario of love was addressed principally to educated society. The rhetoric of love expressed the tsar’s desire for conciliation with intellectuals who had been the object of the monarch’s suspicion and fear since the Decembrist revolt. It indicated his intention to make them allies in his work for reforms, particularly the emancipation of the serfs. Appealing to the romantic sensibility, the scenario was greeted with an effusive response. Writers extolled the tsar’s paternal role. Rather than intimidating patriarch, he was the kindly protector of his flock who, filled with Christian sentiment could view his people as brothers as well. A verse of Alexei Khomiakov’s poem, “August 26, 1856,” presented Alexander as the bearer of fraternal love. And we believe, and will believe, That He will give a gift, the crowning gift, The gift of fraternal love for brothers and people, The love of a father for his sons.29

Stepan Shevyrev, the Slavicist and spokesman for official nationality, signaled the beginning of an alliance between throne and university. He declared that university professors could help the tsar by bringing him “truth” (istina). But these scholars had to combine truth with love, reason with the heart. “Truth of the reigning power was confirmed and took root as a faith, in the life of the Russian people, by [the governmental] power’s acts of love.” In Russian history, he concluded, government had been a force for peace, acting to reconcile warring divisive elements.30

New Images of Authority After the coronation, Alexander began to reveal his own personifications of imperial authority consonant with the scenario of love. Alexander took on this persona without repudiating his father. The equestrian statue of Nicholas I, designed by August Montferrand and executed by Peter Klodt, was an initial sign of continuity between father and son. Alexander proceeded swiftly with its execution: the cornerstone was laid in June 1857, and the monument was dedicated on St. Isaac’s Square in Petersburg in June 1859 (fig. 16). The figure of Nicholas on the statue appears preened for a parade in the uniform and eagle helmet of the horse guards, one of the most

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16. Nicholas I Monument, St. Petersburg, by August Montferrand and Peter Klodt. Photograph by William Brumfield.

aristocratic of the regiments. He is executing a fancy riding exercise. His famous strong and piercing gaze is not visible, because his head is fastidiously averted. The statue established continuity with Nicholas’s reign by showing the ceremonial elegance of his bearing rather than his stern, superhuman presence. The comparison with the soaring figure of Falconet’s Peter

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was evident to contemporaries. Scoffers in the nineteenth century remarked that Nicholas I was galloping after Peter the Great but couldn’t catch up.31 The imperial court under Alexander II continued to represent the ceremonial center of the administration, where highly ranked and especially favored officials could pay homage to their sovereign and receive his personal recognition. Alexander followed his father’s practice of drawing an increasing number of government officials into the court. By the end of his reign, a significant number of those with court ranks served in high positions in the administration. Court ceremonies assumed a new aura of elegance and cordiality. The Marquis de Custine and Lord Londonderry had described the balls of the 1830s as events that demonstrated Nicholas’s capacity to awe his guests with his power to impose order and discipline. The spectacle of Alexander II’s court was captured in the famous evocation of a Winter Palace ball in 1859 by the French writer, Théophile Gautier in his Voyage en Russie.32 The opening polonaise, in Gautier’s description, was no longer a parade displaying the luminaries of the court and state but a show of color and beauty. The emperor was the exemplar of grace, leading the procession with a grand-duchess, or court lady on his arm. He wore a uniform “that showed to good advantage his tall, svelte, lively figure.” His white jacket was braided with gold and bordered with blue Siberian fox, his breast covered with jeweled medals. “Tight-fitting blue trousers, revealing the contours of his legs, ended in thin boots.” His hair was cut short, “leaving exposed his full, smooth well-formed forehead.” Gautier thought Alexander’s mouth a fit subject for a Greek sculptor.33 The refined elegance extended to the Asiastic guests, making the ball an expression of the cordiality that united the empire. Gautier notes the turbaned heads in the hall. He remarks upon what he described as a peculiarity of the Russian court— Circassian princes and Mongol officers, walking with grand dames of the Orthodox faith. “Under the white glove of civilization is concealed a little Asiatic hand, accustomed to play with the handle of a dagger, grasping it with his nervous, dark, fingers.” And yet no one seemed surprised, “And isn’t it natural that a Mohammedan prince marches the polonaise with a grande dame of St. Petersburg, a Greek Orthodox [sic]! Are they not both subjects of the Emperor of all the Russias?”34 Alexander gave another striking display of the bonds of cordiality between himself and “Asian peoples” after the capture of Shamil later that year, in August 1859. He received the fierce leader of the Chechens and other mountain peoples as a friend. He exhibited him at balls and parades, as a living trophy of conquest.35 When Alexander met Shamil at the military camp at Chuguev in Kharkov province, the newspaper Syn otechestva reported that he embraced and kissed his captive and invited him to wear his sword during the review of troops at his side.36 The press made clear that Shamil bore witness to the love evoked by the tsar. After the emperor left Kharkov, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti

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reported, Shamil remarked to the marshal of the nobility, “Everything I have seen here has interested me a great deal, but especially how the highest estate, the nobility, loves its young sovereign!” In return, Shamil himself became an object of popular acclaim, officials making sure to follow their emperor’s lead. In Kharkov he was entertained with a circus and illuminations. When he reached Petersburg, he was escorted to see the sites of the city, among them the monument to his erstwhile foe Nicholas I. Shamil and his family were presented as wondrous specimens from a lesser civilization and proof of the empire’s civilizing mission in the east. They were installed in Kaluga, where Shamil, his sons and sons-in-law were exhibited in full tribal dress. By order of the war minister, all officers passing through the town were obliged to visit him.37 Shamil’s reception was a prelude to the imperialist rhetoric of the subsequent decades, which presented expansion to the east as a sign of Russia’s belonging to the common civilization of imperial powers. In his circular of November 14, 1864, Gorchakov justified the advance into Central Asia as the pattern of “all civilized states which are brought into contact with halfsavage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organization.” Such states “in the interests of security” had to defend their frontiers and reduce their foe to submission, for “it is a peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force.” The other countries, “forced by imperious necessity into this onward march,” were the United States, France, Holland, and England. The civilizing of Russia’s Asian neighbors had been assigned as “her special mission.”38 Gorchakov’s words presaged the conquests of the subsequent decade—Michael Cherniaev’s seizure of Tashkent in 1865, Constantine Kaufmann’s of Samarkand in 1868, and the reduction of Bokhara, Khiva, and Kokand to the status of Russian protectorates in the next decade.

The Tsar-Emancipator

The Presentation of Emancipation Like his predecessors, Alexander strove to embody a cosmopolitan humanitarian image of rule. In 1857 Russia remained the only major European power with a serf system. European monarchs now posed as champions of the liberal, humanitarian values identified with civilized government. More specifically, the abolition of serfdom or slavery had become a sign of political progress during the nineteenth century. The leading figures in Russian government were fully Westernized in their culture and, as Daniel Field has observed, shared “a common system of values that had no place for Russia’s fundamental institution,” serfdom. This view was shared by the new generation of enlightened bureaucrats who staffed the middle layers of the bureaucracy and noblemen who had taken on liberal views current at the universities and circles in the 1840s and 1850s. In these circumstances, if the tsar was to continue to exemplify the values of the elite, he could hardly defend an institution that the historian Sergei Soloviev described as “this sore, this shame lying on Russia, excluding her from the society of European, civilized peoples.”1 For Nicholas I, “Westernism” had been expressed in the love for Western military order and the principles of monarchical legitimacy. He too had intended to deal with the injustice of serfdom, which he considered an “evil, palpable to all,” one that could not continue to exist in Russia. He had convened no fewer than ten secret committees to work on improving the condition of the serfs. But fearing that emancipation would bring a noble coup or a peasant insurrection, he concluded that “to attack it at this point would be even more destructive.” Alexander presented emancipation as the realization of Nicholas’s intentions. It allowed him to remain faithful to the principles of autocracy while attacking its social basis, serfdom. But emancipation for Alexander was not merely an acceptance of an inevitable change. It was an effort to redefine the monarchy as the exemplification of the nation in terms of nineteenth-century nation-states. The Russian nation would unify behind its monarch, who had a special rapport with all the estates of realm, the nobility, the merchantry, the clergy, and most of all the peasantry. It would be distinguished from Western nations by the persistence of the estates and an absolute monarchy attentive to the needs of all. Historians disagree about the extent of Alexander’s influence on the formulation of emancipation. But whatever part he played in particular decisions, he assumed the task of presenting the reform and winning the compliance of

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noble landholders, most of whom clung to serfdom as a cherished right and the basis of their economic survival. He characterized the emancipation as an expression of the feelings of love that impelled both monarch and the nobility. Freeing the serfs was not to be understood as an administrative imposition furthering the interests of the state, but as an act of general sacrifice, in which all gave for the common good. Like previous scenarios, Alexander’s imposed obligatory forms of deference that conformed to the idealized relationship between sovereign and servitors. Self-interest did not figure in this script, nor did the protection of what noble landowners regarded as legal rights to the land. Alexander presented the emancipation in the rhetoric of altruism, as a voluntary sacrifice borne by the nobility in response to the summons of their sovereign to advance the good of Russia. In March 1856 Alexander had requested the nobility to come forth with proposals for emancipation. But they had not responded, and many instead took the opportunity to increase the size of their demesne lands at the expense of their serfs. When at the time of the coronation, A. I. Levshin discussed the serf question with marshals of the nobility, they accepted emancipation in principle but refused to assume responsibility for renouncing the rights of their fellow noblemen. The appeal to the spirit of the sacrifice remained a central fiction in the presentation of the emancipation, but only pressure from above could induce the nobility to respond. In 1857 Alexander convened a secret committee of leading officials to consider the question of emancipation. In August, to move the reform forward, he appointed his brother, Constantine Nikolaevich, chairman. The minister of interior S. S. Lanskoi then contrived an initiative that opened the way to noble involvement in the work of emancipation. He replied to requests of the nobility of Vilnius, Grodno, and Kovno province, instigated by the governor-general of the provinces, V. I. Nazimov. The “Nazimov rescripts,” issued on November 20, 1857, granted the nobility the right to elect committees to consider serf reform. The rescripts circulated to all provincial governors and marshals of the nobility provided for such committees, “if the nobility of the provinces entrusted to you should express a similar desire.” These words were a politely expressed command from the central government. The nobility had no choice but to comply. They formed provincial committees that began deliberation on the terms of emancipation in their provinces in 1858 and the first half of 1859.2 The establishment of committees to consider emancipation represented an unprecedented step—the involvement of noble society in the discussion of an act of state, a breach of the principle of secrecy that had cloaked all discussions of reform since the reign of Alexander I. Although opponents of emancipation commanded a majority in most provincial committees, the government found allies among liberal nobles such as Alexander Unkovskii and other members of the Tver zemstva, and Slavophiles, such as Alexander

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Koshelev, Vladimir Cherkasskii, and Iurii Samarin, who defended a landed emancipation in their provincial committees. The fiction of noble initiative enabled Alexander to include the nobles in his scenario of love. He displayed this scenario on two trips in 1858. The first, in June, took him to northern provinces, which except for Vologda, had few noble landlords. The second, in August and September, included six central provinces dominated by the landed nobility. Alexander abandoned the stately silence of the heroic myth to deliver speeches that either persuaded the landowners, or cajoled and shamed them to support emancipation. One contemporary wrote, “Until this time, it was not the custom of our tsars to speak with the estates about general national interests. They usually flew with lightning speed across the vast expanse of the empire and rarely even bestowed a gracious word or glance upon the subjects who gathered to greet them.”3 The reports in the press presented the Russian emperor as a leader of a broad process of national renewal. Glowing accounts of the emperor’s reception in official publications emphasized the play of personal feeling. The Journal of the Ministry of Interior characterized his visits as “triumphal processions of the beloved of the people (narodnyi liubimets).” It reported the reaction of an old peasant who walked up to Alexander’s carriage and asked him how he could see the tsar. When Alexander pointed to himself, the peasant bowed low before him, and said, “Permit me, little father, to shout ‘Hoorah.’ ”4 During the June trip through the northern provinces, Alexander was shown inspecting canals in Olonets Province and the Aleksandrov Cannon Factory in Petrozavodsk. In Vologda, he met the nobility and visited an exhibition of local handiwork. All along the way, he reviewed the local battalions and gave open signs of his approval at their order and condition. In each town, he made the usual visits to hospitals, schools, and orphanages, demonstrating his support for education and enlightenment. The journey to the northern provinces made a strong impression on the emperor. Upon his return, he wrote to his mother, “Oh, how glad dear Papa would have been if he could have made the tour which we have just finished. Every time that one sees our good people from up close, one gains new strength, and that gives us new courage to dedicate all our existence to them, as was the goal of our dear Papa’s entire life.” Then he added, “I am also far from taking all these demonstrations as something personal, for me, but rather as a certain indication of the prestige and the bond which, thank God, survives here between the people and their sovereign, which was so precious to our dear Papa, and which he was so confident that I would share.”5 Alexander’s visit to the central Russian provinces in August and September gave him additional evidence of the people’s affection. In Kostroma he stepped out onto the hotel balcony three times to bow to the cheers of the people on the square. Huge crowds prevented the progress of his carriage. In Nizhnii-Novgorod, the crush of the crowd broke the carriage windows

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and injured three women. “Everywhere that [their majesties] go the crowd is like a raging sea,” Anna Tiutcheva wrote. It is clear that the members of the family took the acclaim as a sign of personal affection. Even the little grand duchess Maria, Tiutcheva’s charge, enjoyed the scene. It showed, she said, “that the people know her.”6 The response appeared to confirm Alexander’s scenario. He wrote to Constantine Nikolaevich from Kostroma. “We are received everywhere with ineffable cordiality, sometimes rising, one may say, to madness, particularly in Iaroslavl and here, so much so that it becomes frightening on the streets.” Constantine Nikolaevich claimed not to be surprised by the response. He replied, “Thank God, our people have not changed in their attachment to their White Tsar, and in You, dear Sasha, they still see the one who conceived the great deed of the reform of serfdom!”7 The popular acclaim lent force to Alexander’s particular appeal to the nobilities of the central provinces. He approached them personally, securing the sympathetic intervention of provincial marshals, conversing with individual noblemen, playing on their feelings in public addresses. In this context, he began to encourage a measure of openness and publicity. Publicity permitted Alexander to generalize the personal relationship he had established with the individual gentry assemblies. His addresses to the nobility, as well as descriptions of his reception, were published in the Journal of the Ministry of Interior and then reprinted in the major newspapers of the capitals. Fedor Tiutchev wrote to his wife, “All these addresses give sufficient proof that the emperor wants the emancipation of the peasants very sincerely.”8 Alexander celebrated the second anniversary of his coronation in Moscow, where the nobility were among the most vocal critics of the Nazimov rescripts. He armed himself with the moral support of the church. During the religious service, Metropolitan Filaret—known as an opponent of emancipation—praised his sovereign’s efforts on behalf of the general welfare. “Your exploits are our hopes. You laboriously sow, so that we can reap the longed for fruits.”9 Alexander’s speeches were not distinguished by eloquence or even precision of expression; one commentator doubted that they had been prepared beforehand. But they made clear his resolve to proceed with emancipation. His appearance dispelled the equivocal impression about the tsar’s resolve left by State Secretary V. P. Butkov and Deputy Minister of Interior A. I. Levshin during their visits to the provinces. An opponent of the reform in Nizhni Novgorod exclaimed, “Ah my friend, there is no more hope. The tsar is a red.” By presenting emancipation as an expression of the emotional and personal bond between the monarch and the nobility, Alexander made the reform irresistible: to oppose it they would have to challenge or violate the love and devotion the nobility were supposed to feel for their sovereign. An opponent of reform removed from the Tambov Provincial Committee

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lamented in a letter to the minister of justice, “The greatest misfortune in life for a faithful subject is the wrath of the beloved Monarch.” Such statements, which undoubtedly contained elements of fawning and hypocrisy, also expressed sentiments appropriate for the loyal nobleman.10 The trip also affected Alexander’s own attitudes toward the emancipation. Before he left, relations between him and the reformers in the Ministry of Interior had been strained. During his visits, he learned that opposition to the reform was weaker than he had been led to believe and that the peasants thought that emancipation was imminent. As Larissa Zakharova has suggested, he returned with a new resolve to proceed with the emancipation. He now assured Minister S. S. Lanskoi, “We began the peasant matter together, and will take it to the end, hand in hand.”11 He turned increasingly to the reform party in the government, who were arguing for an emancipation that would provide the peasantry with land. On December 4, 1858, the Main Committee adopted a program for emancipation with land, acceding to Alexander’s wishes. On February 17, the emperor established the Editing Commission, with Iakov Rostovtsev as its chief, to work out the provisions to permit peasants to buy some of the land that they worked on the landlords’ estates. The emperor allowed the commission considerable autonomy, which contemporaries considered without precedent in Russia. The Editing Commission determined the range of the size and payments for peasant allotments according to local conditions in the various provinces. In all cases, it increased the size of the allotments recommended by the provincial committees. When the reform encountered its final obstacle in the State Council, which was dominated by conservative landholders, Alexander again invoked his personal bond with the nobility to move the reform forward. In a rare speech to the Council, on January 27, 1861, he acknowledged that the landowners’ fears were understandable, “since they concern the nearest and most material interests of each.” But, he continued, “I have not forgotten, and will not forget that the initiative on the task was undertaken by the summons of the nobility, and I am fortunate that I am destined to attest to this before posterity.” Assuring the members of the council that everything possible had been done to protect the landlords’ interests, Alexander reminded them that “the basis of the entire task must be the amelioration of the life of the peasants, and amelioration not only in words and on paper, but in reality.” He then called upon the memory of his ancestors, tracing the origins of the reform back to Paul’s decree of 1797, limiting peasants’ labor obligations to three days, and Alexander I’s law on free agriculturists, which had introduced terms for voluntary emancipation. He recalled that Nicholas had been “constantly preoccupied with the thought of freeing the peasants.” The majority of the Council made numerous proposals to modify the projects in a manner advantageous to the landlord, but in most cases Alexander approved the minority opinion, defending the reformers’ position.12

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The Political Movement and the Celebration of the Millennium of Rus’ The reception of the emancipation in educated society was mixed. On the one hand, many individuals like the censor Alexander Nikitenko greeted it as an important step forward, a great humanitarian gesture by the tsar. He read the manifesto to his wife and children, explained the document to his ten-year-old son, and told him “to imprint the date, March 5, and the name of Alexander II, the emancipator, on his heart forever.” He wandered the streets and saw people everywhere “content, but calm.” He heard complaints about the two-year waiting period, but when he met a friend, Alexei Galakhov, a historian of Russian literature, they embraced with the exchange of Easter greetings, “Christ is risen! Truly, he is risen!” The metaphor of emancipation as resurrection was common at the time. Michael Pogodin too met his friends with Easter greetings. He wrote, “Twenty-three million Christian souls are being summoned to a new life, to the consciousness of their own human dignity.”13 Others were less enthusiastic. The minister of interior, Peter Valuev, noted only apathy and dissatisfaction among the officials and population of Petersburg. He observed that “God Save the Tsar!” was sung in theaters with little feeling and mentioned that foreigners remarked on the apathy of the people. The senators resolved not to thank or to congratulate the tsar in their response to the manifesto.14 Noblemen began to voice their dissatisfaction with what they regarded as inadequate compensation for their land. They felt the effects of the elimination of governmental credit with the abolition of the Loan Bank in 1859. The leaders of the noble opposition demanded representative institutions that would allow them to voice these grievances and that would compensate them for the loss of their patrimonial rights over the peasantry. The movement began among the Tver gentry, whose leader, Alexander Unkovskii, had given the tsar early support for a landed emancipation. An address of the Tver nobility in 1862 criticized the terms of the emancipation sharply, and asked for a provision that would make it obligatory for serfs to redeem their lands from their lords. They believed that such a provision could end the uncertainty of social relations in the countryside. The nobility did not doubt the tsar’s desire to serve the well-being of Russia, they claimed. The solution was the “summoning of elected representatives from all the Russian land,” which would include deputies from all estates of the population. Other noble assemblies followed with demands for public participation, though none accepted renunciation of noble rights. Alexander allowed the talk to continue while he waited for tempers to cool. In October 1862 he noted on one of Valuev’s projects that he wanted “above all for governmental authority to continue to represent authority and not allow any weakening and that everyone fulfill his sacred obligation.” He agreed with the

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need to correct the shortcomings of the administration “but without touching the basic foundations of monarchical and autocratic government.”15 Alexander would not engage in the type of politics that had allowed his German cousins to forge a powerful alliance with conservative landholders to fortify monarchical power. He expected that the emancipation would reinforce the bond with people and allow him to remain leader of the nation. He said to Bismarck in November 1861 that the people see in the Monarch “a paternal and unlimited lord, placed there by God.” This feeling, he claimed, had “the force of religious belief and does not at all depend on the personal attachment that they may nurture to me, and which, I would like to think, I enjoy.” He concluded that to renounce this power would deal a blow to “that mystique ruling among the people.” “The deep respect which the Russian people, from their innate feelings, surround the throne of their emperor, cannot be divided. I would only decrease government authority without benefit, if I recognized any participation of representatives of the nobility or the people. God knows what the business between nobles and peasants will come to if the power of the emperor is not full enough to realize unconditional supremacy.”16 He trusted the privileged classes still less than the peasantry, whom he described as “the most reliable bulwark of order in Russia.” This viewpoint was an underlying principle of the Official Nationality doctrine. Alexander felt that the privileged classes had not acquired “that level of education necessary for representative government.”17 In 1862 Alexander took steps to quell the constitutional movement among the nobility. He issued warnings against future actions, which were followed in February 1862 by the arrest of thirteen Tver peace mediators for issuing a statement strongly condemning the terms of emancipation. Then he embarked on trips through the provinces to draw the disaffected nobility back into a bond of mutual affection. Just as his 1858 trips had made known Alexander’s commitment to emancipation, those of 1862 showed his determination to preserve the prerogatives of the autocrat. He addressed the nobility directly, evoking sentiments of personal devotion that could submerge oppositional feeling. In July, after a trip to the Baltic provinces, Alexander visited Tver and Moscow. In Tver he expressed his sadness that he had been misunderstood and that noblemen in the province had opposed rather than supported him in the work of emancipation. This feeling, he declared, had forced him to punish the peace mediators. Alexander used the occasion of the anniversary of his coronation to play his scenario to Moscow. Crowds shouted rapturously and rushed through the streets following his carriage. The metropolitan Filaret greeted Alexander with a speech that announced the celebration of the anniversary of the millennium of the Russian state and extolled the role of the church in the education and development of the civic spirit in Russia. The celebration of the millenium of Russia took place in Novgorod, on September 8, 1862. It commemorated the legendary beginning of the Russian

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land in 862—the summoning of the three Viking princes to Novgorod “to come and rule over us,” the mythical statement of the acceptance of absolute monarchy by a grateful nation. Alexander actively participated in planning the millennium monument and in organizing the festivities. They were scheduled for September 8, 1862, the anniversary of the battle of the Don as well as the birthday of the heir, thus linking the liberation of Russia with a celebration of the Imperial Family. But during the summer of 1862, the atmosphere in Novgorod, a stronghold of the noble constitutional movement, became tense. The nobility made known their intention to refuse to address the tsar and to give a ball in his honor. The Ministry of Interior, apprehensive about the situation, sent ahead the director of the Department of Police, Dmitrii Tolstoi. The newspaper Severnaia Pochta carried a series of editorials on the anniversary and accounts of the celebration written by the minister of interior, Peter Valuev. The articles in Severnaia Pochta reveal the commitment of loyal officials to the tsar and autocracy. The calling of the Varangians represented to them, as it had to the theorists of official nationality, a primal acceptance of order and rule by the Russian people. An unsigned article described the summons to the Viking princes to “come and rule over us,” as a sign of the Russians’ “submissiveness to authority” and devotion to “the great idea of order.” The drama of the growth of autocratic power, one of the articles contended, overwhelmed even “the most inveterate pessimist,” inspiring the feeling of umilenie, that sense of gratitude and love for the irresistible power of the monarch.18 Valuev’s and Dmitrii Tolstoi’s accounts of the celebrations give poignant expression to the loyal officials’ dedication to the tsar and their suspicion of independent political action among the nobility. In Severnaia Pochta, Valuev described the feelings he experienced as the emperor arrived by boat along the Volkhov. At the embankments, men stood under the large decorative initials of the emperor, women under the empress’s initial. Alexander, with the imperial family and the suite, stepped off the boat onto the red carpet on the wharf. “Mothers with babies at the breast, decrepit old men, all came out to the meet, to behold (litsezret’) their adored tsar!” The shouts of welcome were unusually impassioned.19 Tolstoi’s memoir describes the change in mood that overcame the Novgorod noblemen at the sight of the tsar. They stood at the wharf, defiantly awaiting a confrontation. They wore flamboyant capes over their uniforms and “some kind of crazy caps” to shock those present and make clear their oppositional feeling. “Their movements and poses, in other words everything, indicated people who were dissatisfied and somehow aware of their autonomy.”20 As the tsar’s boat approached, their hostility melted, to Tolstoi’s great delight. “Their faces expressed not only curiosity. No, in their eyes one could see love. Many, looking on at the ship, crossed themselves, and crossed themselves not from cowardice. They were all overcome with a feeling of love, joy, enthusiasm!”21 The emperor’s appearance brought out what for

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Tolstoi were the true feelings of rapture and devotion of the Russian nobility. “So much for the opposition of our nobility!” he added, triumphant. The next day, the Novgorod nobility showed their change of heart at a reception before morning mass. The provincial marshal, Prince Myshetskii, welcomed Alexander with bread and salt to “the cradle of the Russian tsardom” and declared the Novgorod nobility’s “unchanging feelings of warm love and devotion, about which they have always prided themselves and always will pride themselves.” The tsar then spoke of the celebration as “a new sign of the indestructible bond of all the estates of the Russian land with the government, with one goal, the happiness and well being of our dear fatherland.” Alexander thus identified himself with the government and took the feelings for himself as feelings for the government as a whole. Then he addressed the nobility. “I am accustomed to regarding you, milords the nobility, as the chief support of the throne, the defenders of the unity of the state, the comrades-in-arms of its glory, and I am sure that you and your descendants, following the examples of your ancestors, will, with me and my descendants, continue to serve Russia with faith and justice.” The Novgorod noblemen responded with vows to serve tsar and fatherland. Alexander assured them that he believed their feelings of devotion, and they replied, “Believe us tsar, believe!” The falling out of partners had ended in tearful reconciliation.22 •

The millennium monument in Novgorod was intended to celebrate the political and cultural progress of Russia under its rulers since the ninth century. But Alexander and government officials also conceived the event as something larger, as commemorating the Russian nation as well as the monarchy. The history of the monument reveals an impulse for a representation of the elusive term “nation” that would encompass groups outside of the state and suggest the unity of monarchy and people. But as the state remained central to Alexander’s conception of nationality, the monument emerged as a representation above all of the ambiguity of the concept of nation in his scenario. The initial plans, drafted at the beginning of Alexander’s reign, were for a statue of Riurik. In 1857 the Committee of Ministers decided on “a national (narodnyi) monument to the millennium of the Russian state.” The terms also specified that the monument clearly depict orthodoxy “as the principal basis of the moral grandeur of the Russian people.” It was to commemorate six principal events of the Russian past. The founding of Rus’ in 862 with the figure of Riurik; the conversion; Vladimir, 988; the battle of Kulikovo in 1380; the founding of the unified Russian state; Ivan III; the election of Michael Romanov in 1613; and the reform of Russia and founding of the empire by Peter the Great in 1721.23 According to P. N. Petrov’s official account, the monument was intended to reflect the common feeling for progress held by both the Russian emperor

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17. Millennium Monument, Novgorod. Design by M. O. Mikeshin, 1862. Niva, 1872.

and the people. It would correspond to the majesty of the intentions of the emperor and “those feelings that the Russian people always shared and will share, in the present case with His Majesty.”24 This was a restatement of the Official Nationality precept of the eternal devotion of the Russian people to their sovereigns. The committee’s program for the monument accordingly reflected the conception of Russian history as a series of achievements of its rulers. The winning project by the painter M. O. Mikeshin (fig. 17) repro-

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duced the six scenes requested by the committee and provided a pictorial synopsis of the Russian past that showed members of the ruling house as builders of the Russian state. He gave the statue the general shape of a bell. The upper section, above the six groups was in the form of an orb, the symbol of monarchical rule. Above the orb, the figure of an angel holds a cross, blesses an allegorical figure of Russia, and “points to her glorious future under the protection of orthodoxy.”25 The armored figures from Riurik to Peter, executed by I. N. Shreder with almost identical faces, strike grandiloquent classical poses, while figures of enemies or subjects crouch below with realistically depicted expressions of submission or fear. The effect is to emphasize the heroic, legendary character of the rulers and those they defeat or rule, though the combination of styles struck some critics at the time as discordant and anomalous. It is an example of the confusion of sculptural styles in the second half of the nineteenth century that art historian Maurice Rheims designated “positivist art.”26 The ensemble of historical scenes endeavored to show the unity of the periods as well as the territories of the Russian state. Riurik and Vladimir face south to Kiev, Donskoi to the southwest, the Tatar frontier, Ivan III east to Moscow, Minin and Pozharskii to the west against the Polish threat, Peter the Great north to Petersburg. The monument thus portrayed unbroken development from the ninth century to the present: shifts of capital, cultural style, and political orientation were encompassed in an overall political unity. The harmonizing of disparity is exemplified by the form of the bell, which could represent either the Novgorod bell, a sign of the town’s freedoms until the fifteenth century, or the great Tsar bell, a sign of central domination by the prince of Moscow. It was this grandiose juxtaposition of disparate elements that gave the development of Russian monarchy an ineluctable, providential sweep, which was much admired by governmental officials such as Valuev. The attempt to express a broader concept of the elite of the Russian state was reflected in the bas-reliefs encircling the statue. These gave realistic depictions of “the great figures (deiateli) of the Russian land”—which included representatives of culture and science as well as monarchs, officials, clerics, and military leaders. A volume of biographical sketches of all 109 individuals honored on the reliefs was published to mark the event.27 Sixteen artists, composers, and writers, among them Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovskii, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, as well as Glinka and K. P. Briullov, converse at their leisure as if in a salon. They are followed by thirty-one “enlighteners,” that is those who spread the Orthodox faith, including Princess Olga, Kiril, and Methodius, and the metropolitans of Moscow. A group of twenty-six men of state begins with Iaroslav the Wise and Vladimir Monomakh and included several Catherinian magnates, Michael Speranskii, and Nicholas I, whose likeness Alexander had insisted appear on the statue. But the space allowed to great men outside the government is limited, almost grudging. Crowded into one segment of the relief,

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they serve as minor embellishments to the heroic figures creating Russia. Thirty-seven figures are military heroes, among them several princes, and generals and admirals of the imperial period. Ivan Susanin, the only peasant represented on the statue, appears in this group. The monument provoked critical remarks from writers holding the view that the Russian people, not the Russian state, represented the nation. When a lithograph of the monument was published in the official calendar, Mesiatseslov, for 1862, the philologist Fedor Buslaev wrote an angry critique reflecting some of their views. “This is a monument to the millennium not of Russia in general, but of Russian state life, Russian politics.” The monument had omitted the people. To be true to the spirit of the era, a statue should satisfy the principal demands of the era, which were demands for nationality (narodnost’).28 The poet Fedor Tiutchev found the millennium celebrations “very beautiful,” but admitted that “the one thing that was lacking for me, as for many others was a religious feeling of the past and only it could give true meaning to this festival. The millennium did not look down upon us from the summit of this monument.” In an article entitled “Moscow, September 8,” the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov observed that the millennium had been an offical celebration that had excluded the common people. “They do not know our archaeological calculations. They do not share western jubilee sentimentality.” The people stood outside the external periods and breaks of “external History,” though they had been a part of that history when the State and Land had been one before the Petrine reforms. The people had its own history of “the unbreakable historical succession of the people’s soul.” It is interesting that Alexander himself noted on a copy of Aksakov’s article, “Much is just.”29 •

At the end of 1862 and during 1863, the hoped for reconciliation of the monarch and the state with the nobility appeared to have succeeded. The Novgorod ceremony ushered in one of the few periods of serenity and confidence during Alexander’s reign, Valuev recalled. In the winter, the emperor visited Moscow, where oppositional feeling remained strong. Alexander repeated the appeal he had made in Novgorod to the Moscow nobility and apparently won their trust. In 1864 reforms establishing independent courts and zemstva, all-class assemblies for local government, weakened noble opposition. The tsar’s position was further enhanced by the uprising in Poland. The beginning of an armed rebellion in January 1863 with a massacre of Russian soldiers sleeping in their barracks produced an outpouring of patriotic sentiment for the throne. The government swiftly crushed the rebels, but the savagery of the revolt inflamed public opinion. The tsar was determined not to repeat the capitulation of the Treaty of Paris. “I signed the treaty of Paris, and that was an act of cowardice,” he exclaimed. When his advisors seemed surprised, he pounded on the table. “It was an act of cowardice.”30

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The Polish rebellion, showing the dangers of liberalism and tolerance to the empire, brought punitive measures against opposition movements that might threaten imperial unity. These measures won sympathy in public opinion. It was at this time that Michael Katkov, who formerly had supported liberal concessions, began to champion policies of Russification in the pages of his newspaper, Moskovskie Vedomosti. The heir, the grand duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich became another focus of anti-Polish sentiment and imperial patriotism during his tour of the empire in the spring of 1863. Nicholas Aleksandrovich was presented, as his father had been, as the hope of the dynasty. His instructors saw in him the ideal of an educated monarch, prepared to assume the burden of rule for the benefit of the people. The spirit of the era of reforms, the exceptional intelligence and curiosity of Nicholas Aleksandrovich, seemed to give substance to the hope that they could realize this ideal in a nineteenth-century form— a national reawakening led by a talented monarch drawing on the considerable intellectual resources of Russian universities. Indeed, he sat on benches beside university students to hear lectures at Kazan University during his trip through the Russian provinces in 1861. But in 1862 student unrest and fires in St. Petersburg precluded the continuation of this practice. Russian universities harbored forces bitterly opposed to autocracy, and the fear of conflict that underlay the Russian political order kept Nicholas Aleksandrovich as well as subsequent heirs to the throne apart from Russian society. Instead, Count Sergei Stroganov, who directed Nicholas Aleksandrovick’s education, brought university professors to the palace to instruct him. The journey was reported in letters of his instructors Ivan Babst and Constantine Pobedonostsev, which first appeared in Katkov’s Moskovskie Vedomosti. Babst and Pobedonostsev presented the trip as a display of the bonds that united the imperial family with a newly awakened Russian nation. The heir displayed these bonds, showing his concern for the development of Russian industry and native Russian culture, as well as sharing their patriotic fervor in the struggle against the rebellion. The Letters presented the heir’s jubilant reception as support for the tsar and his defense of Russian interests against the Poles. They described the reception in Iaroslavl where people crossed themselves and threw themselves on the heir’s carriage; women wept; hats flew into the air. Peasants clutching at the carriage cried, “Tell our father how we love him! Tell that we will go against the enemy, all to the last.” Such displays of enthusiasm, the authors warned, might seem strange and crude to one who was not familiar with the popular character. But it was powerful and warm. “These tears, and prayers and movements and cries, fused into one whole chorus, and the unity of the people’s feeling constituted the harmony of this chorus.”31 As the trip proceeded down the Volga, Pobedonostsev and Babst emphasized the theme of imperial unity around the Russian nation. At the governor’s house in the town of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, they stood next to

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the heir and beheld a strange motley throng in national costumes, among them Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Kalmyks, and Tatars. There were few Russian faces in the crowd, but they still felt themselves in Russia, “in one of the remote regions of a great tsardom, united by the powerful bond of state power and a consciousness of state unity.” There among the mixture of “dress, faces, and tongues,” the basic tone was provided by the “founding and gathering element of the Russian tribe.”32 A revival of the noble constitutional movement in 1865 and 1866 proved weak and short-lived. Many noble assemblies advanced proposals “to crown the edifice” of the zemstvo institutions with a national zemstvo assembly. The most detailed plan, from the Moscow noble assembly issued on January 11, 1865, called for dual assemblies, one elected from the zemstva, the other from among the nobility, “for discussion of the common needs of the entire state.”33 Alexander, now confident of his position, dissolved the Moscow assembly. In a rescript of January 29, 1865, he came forth with his only open reply to demands for political participation. He declared that the reforms the government had introduced “sufficiently attest to my constant concern to improve and perfect, to the extent of possibility and in the order prescribed by me, the various branches of state administration.” He insisted that the right of initiative for reform belonged to him exclusively, “and is inseparably connected with the autocratic power, entrusted to me by God.” His subjects did not have the right to anticipate his “incessant care for Russia’s well-being. . . . No estate has the right to speak with the name of other estates. No one can take it upon himself to petition me about the general welfare and needs of the state.” He expressed his belief that he would meet no further “hindrances” of this type from the nobility, “whose centuries-long service to the throne and fatherland remain in my memory and have always been and always will be unswerving.”34 In a letter of January 30, 1865, to the heir, Nicholas Aleksandrovich, Alexander expressed the close connection he believed linked the system of absolute monarchy with the survival of the empire. Constitutional demands, he wrote, thwarted the initiatives of the government toward “the gradual development of the prosperity and power of our Mother Russia. Constitutional forms on the model of the West would be the greatest misfortune here and would have as their first consequence not the unity of the State but the disintegration of the Empire into pieces.”35 The heir’s views at this time corresponded very much to his father’s. In a letter of February 7, 1865, to Alexander, Nicholas Aleksandrovich thanked God that “the majority of right-thinking and enlightened people in Russia are completely aware of the impossibility of applying constitutional forms of the west to the state life of our fatherland.36

The Crisis of Autocracy

The Loss of Conviction At the beginning of 1865, Alexander seemed to have weathered the worst of the era of reforms. The mythical dramatization of the might and popularity of the imperial house seemed to have triumphed; the Official Nationality doctrine had been recast in more humane liberal terms. But two events, in 1865 and 1866, dispelled this euphoria. The death of Nicholas Aleksandrovich in April 1865 at the age of twenty-one deprived Alexander of a symbol of unity and renewal. A year later, in April 1866, an attempt on his life indicated that elements among the educated remained antagonistic to the monarchy, despite the reforms. In June 1864 Nicholas Aleksandrovich embarked on his tour of Europe, with the goal of finding a bride. Before he left, he set his heart on Princess Dagmaar of Denmark. In August 1863 he had written to his mother of his passionate love for Dagmaar, whom he had never met. In September 1864, when news came of peace between Denmark and Prussia, he journeyed to Copenhagen where he first met her. A week later, amid lavish celebrations, came the announcement of his betrothal. After he left Copenhagen, the symptoms of his disease, first diagnosed as scrofula, returned with new severity. He was in great pain during the maneuvers with the Prussian army, which he joined with his father. His imperial party then toured Italy, where his condition deteriorated. He died in the presence of his family and princess Dagmaar in Nice on April 12, 1865. The panel of distinguished physicians who performed the autopsy disclosed that the cause of death was spinal meningitis. His death deprived the emperor of a son who combined the charm and manner of the court, the intelligence to win the support of educated society, and a love of Russia that drew him to the people. It deprived the empress of her firstborn son, whom she worshiped. It deprived his teachers and friends of an heir who realized their hopes for an educated monarch who had escaped the intellectual confinement of the court. Those who attended the burial ceremony at the Peter-Paul fortress had a sense of foreboding. “I felt I was attending my own burial,” the emperor said to Peter Valuev. “I never thought that I would outlive him.” The first sentence was in French, the second in Russian.1 For Alexander, the death of the heir meant the loss of some part of him and his scenario. It made the family a scene of tragedy rather than of strength and happiness, leaving him without hope for the future of the dynasty.

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Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s teachers understood the moment as the burial of hopes for a renewed and transformed monarchy. Pobedonostsev described the moment as “a decisive hour for the destinies of Russia.” In him lay our hope, and each one of us who knew him cherished this hope the more strongly, the darker the horizon became, the stronger the dark powers were pressing, the sadder the circumstances of our future appeared to be. He was our hope. We saw him as a counteracting force, the opposite pole.2

On April 4, 1866, the sometime student Dmitrii Karakazov, dressed as a peasant, fired at Alexander II as he was about to leave the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. Karakazov’s shot, however, was understood as considerably more important than an isolated act of violence. For Alexander, it belied the fundamental hope of his scenario that granting reforms and a measure of free discourse would create harmony between educated society and the monarchy. That the faith in the Russians’ native devotion to their tsar was not limited to official ideology is clear from the immediate reaction to the shooting. Initially both officials and members of educated society believed that the culprit must be a Pole. When Alexander confronted Karakazov, he asked him if he was a Pole, to which he answered, “No a pure Russian.” When the public learned that Karakazov was Russian, and a nobleman, it responded with feelings of perplexity and shame. Alexander took consolation in prayer, and public demonstrations of sympathy confirmed the sense of popular devotion and affection. After the shot, he proceeded directly to the Kazan Cathedral for a thanksgiving service before the Kazan Mother of God. In his diary, he wrote that the prayers were “wonderful.” The State Council awaited him on his return to the Winter Palace to present their congratulations. From the balcony of the palace, he received shouts of “Hoorah,” which, his diary indicates, were deeply gratifying to him. The capital was joyous, and in the evening Nevskii Prospect was lit as on a holiday. In the theaters on the subsequent evenings, audiences sang the anthem again and again.3 On the next day, at the Winter Palace Alexander received congratulations from the Senate, and then the Petersburg nobility, its numbers augmented by noblemen and representatives of other estates. The empress and grand dukes accompanied them, and all were greeted with loud hoorahs and tears. Count V. P. Orlov-Davydov, the Petersburg marshall of the nobility and an advocate of noble constitutionalism, delivered an eloquent speech of sympathy. He described the grief that the Petersburg nobility felt that a criminal or madman had “made an attempt on the life of your supreme person, consecrated by the church and most dear to us,” and expressed gratitude that the tsar had been spared by God. Alexander thanked the nobility and declared that besides God he was sustained in his service by “that devotion and those feelings which are constantly expressed to me in all difficult cases, from you milords the nobility as from all other estates.”4

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The escape was presented as an act of divine intervention. The instrument of Providence was Osip Komissarov, an artisan from Kostroma province, who ostensibly deflected Karakazov’s arm. The tsar rewarded Komissarov with a grant of hereditary nobility. The episode seemed to repeat the tale of the peasant Ivan Susanin, also from Kostroma, who had saved the life of Tsar Michael Fedorovich. Komissarov had presumably struck Karakazov’s arm, sending the bullet astray. In his rescript of April 9, 1866, Alexander declared that his life had been spared “through the dispensation of Divine Providence by the hand of Osip Komissarov.” The rescript claimed that Komissarov had come from the exact volost where Susanin lived.5 At a special performance of A Life for the Tsar, a few days after the attempt, the audience hissed the Polish scenes of the opera, though it had already been made known that Karakazov was Russian. The final procession and “Glory” chorus, as was customary in gala performances of the opera, included the entire company of singers and dancers. “Such a production of Life for the Tsar, I think has never been seen,” the heir, Alexander Aleksandrovich, wrote in his diary.6 The anthem was repeated eight times. The poet Apollon Maikov declaimed a poem that denied that such a person could be a Russian. “Everything that is Russian in our breast is insulted!” he began. Who can this villain be? Where did he come from? In vain we seek him among us! Among Russians—who does not have the dear face of the tsar Impressed on his soul in indelible traits?

Maikov hinted that Karakazov was a fugitive, who “having forgotten his native traditions, from beyond the sea, played at starting rebellion, in the land of his fathers.” Whoever he was “he is alien to us.”7 The response to the attempt provided an occasion for a reaffirmation and formalization of the scenario of love. Letters and telegrams of congratulations were reprinted in a two-volume collection. The preface, by the publisher A. M. Simchenko, stated that the people’s messages expressed “sincere expressions of loyal feelings of limitless love and devotion to their TsarEmancipator, and worship of the blessed Divine Providence.”8 The notion of a Russian people devoted to the tsar was maintained but only by broadening the notion of alien to include insurgents. The word “alien” stigmatized those who violated the bond of love between tsar and people. Pressed by conservative ministers and especially by Michael Katkov, whose Moskovskie Vedomosti maintained a constant barrage of allegations about the weakness of the government’s measures against the revolutionaries, Alexander became increasingly suspicious. Alexander’s May 13, 1866, rescript to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, P. P. Gagarin, indicated a crucial change in the relationship between tsar and the public and a new direction in educational policy. The

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public response had provided “an assurance of feelings in which I find the best reward for my labors for the good of Russia.” These feelings justified the steps he was taking to preserve Russia from “false teachings.” The means to that end would be to strengthen the role of morality and religion. He spoke emphatically of respect for the “rights of property,” which were “closely linked to the development of private and national wealth, which are closely related to each other.”9 The most influential figure in the government until 1874 became the dynamic young chief of gendarmes, Peter Shuvalov, a wealthy aristocrat who sought to preserve noble privilege and restore the authority of provincial governors. Dmitrii Tolstoi replaced the liberal A. V. Golovnin as minister of education and took the first steps to follow Katkov’s program: the imposition of tighter controls on the educational system and a curriculum favoring mathematics and the classics at the expense of natural sciences, history, and rhetoric, which Tolstoi associated with the free thought that had led to the spread of liberal and radical ideas. Leading figures in the formulation and implementation of the judicial reform Dmitrii Zamiatnin, the minister of justice, and Sergei Zarudnyi lost their positions. Zamiatnin’s successor, Constantine Pahlen, sought to reassert the power of the police and procuracy in the judicial system.10 Alexander continued to think in terms of his scenario, hoping for a bond between society and the autocracy. But he had lost his former confidence and élan. Two days after the shot, A. V. Nikitenko wrote in his diary that the tsar was consoled by the devotion of the classes of the population but “his heart wilted: the feeling of security among his people must disappear in him.”11 At the end of the sixties, Alexander increasingly withdrew from direct involvement in government and limited himself to a “managerial” role between competing governmental factions. Allied with Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, Shuvalov resisted the efforts of the minister of war, Dmitrii Miliutin, who was supported by grand duke Constantine Nikolaevich, to reform the army. Miliutin envisioned a citizen army without class distinctions, while Shuvalov struggled to preserve noble privileges (see below).12

Undoing the Image Nicholas I had presented the imperial family as the moral symbol of the Russian state, and the microcosm of family love and devotion as a model for the macrocosm of the state. As a boy, Alexander II had heard about the sacrosanct character of family relations from all sides. After Nicholas’s death, the old constraints loosened. In October 1855 Anna Tiutcheva observed that the rulers themselves wanted to be free: they “want to make believe they are private individuals.”13 After the shattering death of Nicholas Aleksandrovich and the Karakazov attempt, Alexander allowed his romantic predilections to take precedence. In the 1870s, the emperor’s

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private life became an open travesty of the image of an emperor sacrificing his personal interest for the good of his family and the fatherland. After Alexander ascended the throne, relations between Alexander and his spouse, Maria Aleksandrovna, became increasingly distant, though the couple always retained the pretense of mutual respect. The empress found solace in religion. From her arrival in St. Petersburg, Maria Aleksandrovna strove to translate her Protestant religious faith into the language and rites of Orthodoxy. On the day of her confirmation in Orthodoxy, she wrote to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, “I do not call it a religious conversion, because the belief remains the same.” Her lady-in-waiting Tiutcheva wrote that her piety gave her “a meditative and ascetic manner, like a saint’s rather than a society lady’s.” She was regarded as a tragic figure, a martyr accepting her fate with quiet resignation, representative of what Alfred Rieber has described as the “pietistic, sentimentalist, passive type” of empress. She spoke Russian very well for a Russian empress and became knowledgeable in the study of Russian culture and religion. She was attracted to the works of the Slavophiles, especially Alexei Khomiakov and other nationalist and Pan-Slavist authors. Fedor Tiutchev was a frequent visitor, and she admired his verse, especially the poem, “Rossiia.” She sponsored collections for the missionary activities of the Orthodox church in the Western provinces and Poland.14 Alexander himself continued to cut a figure to be admired, the center of the pageantry, trim and stylish even as he aged. During the first decade of the reign, he appeared at family occasions, affected the proper feelings, and posed for pictures surrounded with children. But Alexander’s dispositions were not toward the family. His philandering went beyond the breaching of morés and turned into a concerted, if unacknowledged, rebellion against the image imposed by his mythic role of self-denying emperor. Women gave him the adulation he craved, and his exceptional susceptibility was common knowledge. “People close to him, loving him sincerely, said that in the presence of women he became a completely different person,” Chicherin wrote.15 He enjoyed visiting the young ladies’ “institutes,” and chatting with and heaping favors upon admiring schoolgirls who surrounded him. During his daily strolls in the late 1860s on the embankment near the Winter Palace and in the summer garden, he was usually in the company of a young lady or ladies. Before 1865 Alexander flirted and strayed but kept within the bounds of discretion. The blows of the heir’s death and the Karakazov attempt undermined his confidence in his public mission. He turned instead to private pleasures, flouting public morality and violating the biblical injunctions that his parents had epitomized as the cornerstone of monarchy. Immediately after the death and burial of Nicholas Aleksandrovich, in April 1865, Alexander began his romance with Catherine Dolgorukova, Katia, a schoolgirl at the Smolnyi Institute from a poor aristocratic family. The affair with Dolgorukova, with its titillating connivances and overtones of tragedy, transgressed far more than biblical norms. It was an act of violence against

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the familial ceremony Alexander clung to as the moral and personal grounding of tsarist supremacy. While at court Alexander was the father, exemplifying probity, in private he pursued the romantic adventure of his youth in a show of scorn for the norms of imperial conduct. Alexander’s romance was not the discreet affair that could remain within the bounds of secrecy and not challenge a monarch’s bond to his spouse. He made clear that Katia monopolized his affections. Their romance appears to have been consummated in the midst of the July festival at Peterhof in 1866, the event Nicholas had introduced to celebrate the sanctity of marriage. The affair was soon known to all at court. The emperor, nearing fifty, had fallen passionately in love with a girl of less than twenty. He arranged for her appointment as a maid of honor of the empress, a humiliation that Maria Aleksandrovna accepted with dignity. Rumors held that Alexander even arranged his 1867 trip to France so that he could be with her in Paris. By 1870 Katia was established in her own quarters in Petersburg. Alexander treated her as a wife, starting a second household. In 1872 she bore him a son, George, “Gogo,” and a year later a daughter, Olga. Alexander treated both openly as his own. The romance revealed the emperor not as a strong independent personality, but as a slave of love. It was another example of his loss of control, of the weakness his mother had warned of when he was a young man. The emperor’s reputation as irresponsible libertine was fatal to his image as transcendent monarch, possessing powers of self-control and vision not given to ordinary mortals. His conduct called into question the primacy of the symbolic sphere, of presentation over individual wish, of public obligation over private pleasure. He destroyed the moral distance that Nicholas I had established between ruler and subject, placing the amorous tsar not above but perhaps beneath his subjects. The ethos of self-sacrifice for the commonweal, which justified the tsar’s monopoly of authority, now lost its persuasive power. The affair appeared as the central episode of an orgy of self-indulgence and self-enrichment carried on by members of the imperial house. The entrepreneurial activity of the grand dukes and, secretly, of the tsar himself, added to the atmosphere of deceit and corruption. The behavior of his sons, Alexei and Vladimir, who engaged in carousals with Gypsies during the family’s solemn visits to Moscow, scandalized public opinion. Prince Obolenskii wrote in his diary on March 10, 1874, “The debauchery has actually taken on colossal dimensions and no censorship prohibitions can guard the imperial prestige from debasement when dissolute youth unconstrained by fear of responsibility, feelings of propriety, or a sense of their own dignity, impudently and publicly drag their imperial calling in the mud.”16 The scandals reached their height when in the early 1870s, the son of Alexander’s brother, Constantine, grand duke Nicholas Konstantinovich was apprehended with jewels he had stolen from his mother’s icon frame to pay gambling debts. Exiled by the emperor to Khiva, the grand duke con-

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tinued to embarrass the family with his bizarre behavior, including the theft and sale of a set of ancient coins belonging to the imperial family. The grand duke’s mistress was an American adventuress by the name of Henrietta Blackford, who, after she was banished from Russia, published in 1875 a revealing and highly sought-after memoir under the name Fanny Lear. Russian diplomatic agents abroad were ordered to buy up and destroy copies of the book. In a telling scene, she described the grand duke exposing the hypocrisy of his father, Constantine Nikolaevich, who reprimanded him for his behavior. “I am not to blame, it is my blood,” and he then went on to mention Peter the Great, Anne, Elizabeth, Catherine, Paul, Nicholas, and then Constantine Nikolaevich himself, all of whom kept lovers. Blackford added an allusion to a high personage, who it was generally known “was under the charms of a lady as capricious as she is transparent, who makes, unmakes, remakes ministers, just as a clever little girl dresses and undresses her dolls.”17 •

In the second half of the 1870s, the imperial family increasingly shrank from the public eye, their whereabouts and their ceremonial activity remaining unknown. In addition to long periods abroad, they spent considerable time at the palace of Livadia in the Crimea in the late summer and fall. The semitropical lushness of the area, the exotic scenery, made it an escape from the capital and its responsibilities. The empress lived her own life in the main Livadia palace. From 1872 Dolgorukova resided in convenient proximity at a cottage less than a mile from the estate. While Alexander was at Livadia, the consideration of serious governmental matters came to a halt. “Every year, the business season starts later,” Obolenskii noted in 1875.18 During the celebration of the bicentennial of Peter the Great’s birth in 1872 and the dedication of the monument to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg in 1873, Alexander gave no sign of trying to emulate his illustrious predessors. Instead the two events revealed the distance that separated him from figures of mythic stature and achievement who were his forebears. They celebrated dynamic rulers who drove reforms forward with cunning, energy, and skill, for whom the public weal was their entire life. Peter and Catherine overshadowed Alexander’s considerable achievements, leaving an implicit reproach of his weakness and ultimate failure. Liberal writers used the occasion to contest the monarchy’s claim to the allegiance of the nation, and to present Peter as the symbol of what the nation represented to them. The newspaper Golos condemned the monarchy as the “abstract state,” one that did not “fuse the population into a single people.” It was the “abstract state, isolated from its soil in the people,” that had been crushed at Sevastopol. Instead, the author advanced his view of a nation-state, the nation as civic entity: “A state assimilates tribes only by relying on the strength of a basic nationality (narodnost’), but a nationality can announce its strength only in conditions of public independent action.”

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Not the powerful leader, but an independent people strengthened the state. Russia would become powerful when it became a “Russian state, i.e. when it will rest on the strength of a Russian people, acting independently.”19 The dedication of the Catherine the Great monument on November 24, 1873, also recalled past grandeur, an implicit reproof to the current tsar. Alexander and his family attended the modest ceremony. Prince Obolenskii thought that it did not sufficiently honor the “Great Tsaritsa.” To him, Catherine represented a sovereign who exerted strong leadership in the interests of the people. Obolenskii was inspired by the speeches on Catherine at a meeting of the Imperial Historical Society. He remarked on “Her sincere and unaffected love for the Russian people.” He thought her advisors were also imbued with this love, which was why their work proved fruitful. Peter was a Russian person who had fallen in love with Germans. “Catherine, being German by nature, fell in love with Russians.” As a result, “not in a single degree or word of Hers can one find hypocrisy directed against the Russian Spirit.”20

The Parade Ground and Military Reform Alexander had shared his father’s delight in military display since boyhood. As emperor, he continued to hold massive and resplendent reviews on the Field of Mars or at the Mikhailovskii Manege nearby, and the parade ground remained his passion, as it had been his forebears’. His reviews, however, no longer epitomized the power of the autocrat’s will and the discipline of state as they had under Nicholas I. Alexander was not the stern commander and showed little conviction in demanding precise fulfillment of his orders. His parades rather presented him as a dashing figure of European royalty, in the company of kings and German princes who held ranks in Russian guards regiments, just as he and his sons held ranks in Prussian regiments. When his relationships with society became strained, the parade ground sustained him with magnificent displays of loyalty between him and the military elite of the empire. The parade ground remained a scene of unfailing reciprocal dedication, where the scenario of mutual devotion prevailed even as it lost its credibility elsewhere. The paragon of this stylish military culture was the imperial suite, the array of adjutant-generals at the emperor’s side at all major parades and ceremonies. Alexander was the first emperor to ascend the throne as an adjutant of the imperial suite, and he awarded suite appointments generously. His relations with his adjutants were relaxed and comradely. He addressed them almost as friends, acted as godfather to their children, and visited them when they were sick. Among the generals in the suite were foreign princes, the Oldenburgs from Denmark, the prince of Leuchtenberg and other German princes, related to the tsar. Many of

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Alexander’s friends, whom he appointed to his suite, such as Alexander Patkul and Alexander and Vladimir Adlerberg, were also of German extraction. Other adjutants came from families who had been close to the throne during Nicholas’s reign, such as the Baranovs and Orlovs. The Sunday review of the capital guards regiment at the Mikhailovskii Manege was the highlight of Alexander’s military ceremony, an event that he particularly cherished. Grand dukes and foreign princes in Russian uniform often took command. Ambassadors and embassy staffs attended, sometimes with their families. The Prussian military attaché, and later ambassador, Von Schweinitz, stood at Alexander’s side and strained to hear his comments on European affairs and Russian policies over the blare of march music. Especially elaborate reviews were staged for the visits of royalty such as William I and Franz-Joseph in 1873 and 1874. Indeed the general’s uniform was changed in 1873, because William refused to wear its red trousers, which reminded him of French military dress. At the Sunday reviews, officers from all the guards regiments in the capital presented reports to the tsar. “It was a kind of club,” one of them wrote, “in which the officers made each other’s acquaintance.” They could mingle with their superiors without the formalities of rank and make contacts otherwise denied them. Alexander and his uncle, the grand duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, who was the inspector-general of the cavalry, knew all officers by name and chatted with them, recalling the service of their fathers and other members of their families. Guards officers felt that the tsar knew them and recognized them individually. He called the guards his “little child” (detishche), addressed them with the familiar” ty; they looked upon him as their “leader-father” (Vozhd’-Otets). Most important, they were seen by “the vigilant Eye (oko) of the Tsar,” and they knew “that their service was remembered and appreciated.”21 The guards put on a show to please the tsar, the grand dukes, and European visitors, each squadron or company trying to catch Alexander’s eye. “The units on guard vied with each other in posture, the smartness of their uniforms, their presentation of arms, and their ceremonial march past the tsar.” He then received the reports from the ordinaries of the various regiments. This too was a spectacle; the officers of the cavalry halting their gallop a few feet before him. When pleased, Alexander shouted, “molodets,” and they replied, “Glad to do our best Your Imperial Majesty.” Again each tried to outdo the other. Most spectacular were the tsar’s Caucasian bodyguards drawn from the best horsemen among the mountain tribes. “These wild riders performed various maneoeuvres and feats of horsemanship, culminating in a frantic charge up the centre of the manege to the very feet of the Emperor and his brilliant staff.”22 Alexander’s attachment to the display of the elite on the drill field proved a deterrent to further professionalization of the army and the introduction of universal military service. Plans to reform officer education and to open

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promotions and high position in the army to talent met strong opposition from Peter Shuvalov, Prince Alexander Bariatinskii, and others who strove to maintain aristocratic dominance of the armed forces. It was Prussia’s stunning victory over France in 1871 that made clear the advantages of creating a citizen army. Alexander himself was elated by Prussia’s success. Bismarck had promised him the freedom to revoke the Black Sea provisions—to break free of the stigma of the Crimean war, to take the side of the victors and resume a respected role on the European diplomatic scene. His family and emotions tied him to Prussia and he felt that the victory was in some way his own. He sent telegrams of congratulations to William I and allowed or encouraged Russian officers, doctors, and field hospitals to serve with the German armies. He awarded the Prussian princes Frederick William and Karl Frederick, Prince Albert of Saxony, and Field Marshal Helmuth Von Moltke, the Order of St. George, the highest Russian decoration for bravery in the war. In November 1871, at a banquet given in honor of Prussian guests, he delivered a toast to the German emperor and to the continuation of the alliance between the monarchs. Prussia’s victory ended the stalemate in the Russian government between the supporters and opponents of reform of the Russian army. The former were led by the tsar’s brother and minister of the navy, Constantine Nikolaevich, and particularly the minister of war, Dmitrii Miliutin. They envisioned a citizen army, made up of recruits from all levels of society, and commanded by a professional officer corps who earned their rank through talent and expertise. The conservative party, led by Peter Shuvalov sought to preserve the privileges of the elite aristocratic officers. Peter Valuev, previously an ally of Shuvalov, observed firsthand Prussia’s success in mobilizing a citizen army for a modern war, and was converted to Miliutin’s views. The struggle between the parties continued in the government until 1873, when the emperor came down on Miliutin’s side. On January 1, 1874, Alexander issued the decree for universal conscription and a six-year term of service. During the 1860s and early 1870s, Miliutin as minister of war had taken the first steps to produce trained, professional officers—to end the domination of the highest ranks of the army by commanders who owed their positions to birth, genteel education, and connections. Miliutin introduced junker schools and military gymnasiums with rigorous requirements under local commands, and he abolished many of the cadet corps that had provided genteel schooling for young noblemen favored for high officer positions. He raised the admissions standards and improved the curriculum in the General Staff Academy. These changes created a path to promotion for talent regardless of social origin, but they did not eliminate the nobles’ advantages in reaching the top ranks of the military. They resulted in what John Bushnell described as a “two-track system,” with the nonprivileged entering the regular army, while the elite nobility were assigned to the exclusive guards regiments. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, while

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educational qualifications rose throughout the officer corps, the majority of commanders continued to win appointment through contacts with the court or the imperial family. The limits of the reform would become clear with Russia’s Pyrrhic victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876.

The “Grand-Dukes’ War” Alexander embarked on the Russo-Turkish War reluctantly. The war minister, Dmitrii Miliutin, feared that the army was not ready, the foreign minister Alexander Gorchakov was wary about antagonizing Western governments, and Michael Reitern, the minister of finances, warned of the disastrous consequences of a war in Russia’s precarious financial situation. Armed intervention in the Balkans could bring only heightened suspicions abroad, the possibility of a new coalition of European powers against Russia, and renewed fiscal crises. During the course of 1876, Alexander tried to avoid war and gain the concessions for the rebelling nationalities through negotiations. But with the outbreak of uprisings against Turkey in Bulgaria and Serbia in the 1870s, Pan-Slavic demands for Russian intervention became increasingly difficult to resist. Those seeking Russian support of the Bulgarian and Serbian movements against Turkey called into question the national character of the monarchy, the degree to which it in fact served the Russian nation and sought its national interests. They demanded not political reform but heroic leadership, like that displayed by General Michael Cherniaev, the conqueror of Tashkent who had gone off to Serbia to take command of a Russian volunteer army in May 1876. The rise of Pan-Slavism marked a new era in the public life of Russia, when the commercial press, much of it conservative and monarchist in persuasion, became a political force that the government had to contend with. Colonel Vissarion Komarov, the editor of Russkii Mir, the “voice of PanSlavism,” accompanied General Michael Cherniaev (the principal owner of the newspaper) in his escapades with the Serbian armies and printed spurious reports of Cherniaev’s heroism and victories. One of the most ardent supporters of Russian intervention in the Balkans was Alexei Suvorin, who took over the newspaper Novoe Vremia in 1876. Suvorin turned the newspaper into a mass circulation daily whose reports and editorials inflamed nascent Pan-Slavist feelings. In 1876 he described “the boredom, the melancholy mood that so many people feel; the apathy that makes people shrug their shoulders . . . tells us that they are waiting for something.”23 By 1876, sentiment for Russian intervention embraced a broad spectrum of Russian society, from the empress, the heir, and figures in the court, to revolutionaries who sympathized with the democratic aspirations of the Balkan peoples.

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Pressed by the empress, the heir, his brother Constantine Nikolaevich, the grand duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, as well as the ambassador to Constantinople, Nicholas Ignat’ev, Alexander determined upon war on April 12, 1877. He found strength the night before, when his father appeared to him in a dream and reassured him. When he visited the Kremlin on April 23, 1877, there was little bellicose in his manner. Unlike his appearance in the autumn of 1855, he did not invoke the memory of Alexander I and 1812. The enemy was not on Russian soil, and clearly he did not regard Russia’s fate as linked with the Bulgarians or the Serbs. At his gala welcome in Petersburg, he again referred to his efforts to find a peaceful outcome. But Alexander took on the role of leader of the struggle. He gave the grand dukes command posts. He appointed his brother, Nicholas Nikolaevich, commander in chief and placed the heir, Alexander Aleksandrovich, and the grand duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich at the head of armies at the front, though under close supervision of the generals assisting them. These were not discreet acts of nepotism, but public demonstrations of the valor of the members of the imperial family. What later came to be derided as the “Grand-Dukes’ War,” was proudly presented as a war led by grand dukes. Numerous lubki circulated at the time portray the emperor and the grand dukes at the front in heroic poses. Most important, the emperor insisted on being close to the front himself. Miliutin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, and the generals looked upon his decision to move to the front with dismay. The “imperial chief apartment,” the tsar with his large suite followed by foreign attachés, represented an additional burden. In addition to the physical danger, and unhealthful weather conditions, the emperor’s presence could create disunity in the command structure. Alexander ignored these objections and then alarmed his advisors by announcing that he wished to take command himself. He dreamt he saw his father, who pressed him to his bosom and blessed him. Despite strenuous efforts to dissuade him, Alexander insisted on moving closer and closer to the theater of action. He was dissuaded from taking command, but on July 3, 1877, followed his father’s example and crossed the Danube. Alexander’s participation in the war effort was publicized and dramatized in the diary of novelist and playwright Count Vladimir Sollogub, which was excerpted in newspapers and published in book form in 1878.24 Sollogub’s diary characterized Alexander as a sentimental hero, acting purely out of the altruism that inspired his people. He related how Alexander, “peaceloving,” and reluctant to embark on war was forced to act by Western greed. “The heart of the Emperor, full of love, had to be saddened by meeting black ingratitude in the sphere of his good deeds.” Alexander II led his people in a war unprecedented by its disregard for gain. “The reign in the spirit of love makes up the principal feature in the biography of the present Ruler of one-seventh of the globe.”25

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Sollogub depicted Alexander not as military, but as moral leader, providing psychological support for the troops. This support took two forms, inspiration—the maintenance of morale— and consolation, the compassion for suffering. He maintained morale by participating in the ceremonials of the barrack, the parade ground, and the court that gave his rule its sense of permanence and majesty. He dined with officers and after each dinner enjoyed cigars with them. This showed, Sollogub wrote, that “before the general labors and dangers, if comradeship was unthinkable, a closeness nonetheless comes about, a family bond expressing kindness and cordiality.” Sollogub noted admiringly that Alexander wore the uniform of the unit he was reviewing or receiving, sustaining the family bond with the troops. On the anniversary of his mother’s death, Alexander attended a memorial service dressed in the cavalier guards uniform. His continued attention to uniforms, the author claimed, helped inspire and encourage the troops. On review they responded by shouting “hoorah,” and this cry, Sollogub felt, carried special meaning in wartime. It expressed “a scorn for fatigue, for deprivation, for hunger, for torments, for torture,” and showed “a readiness to die a ferocious death, to fall in entire regiments under fire.”26 Alexander maintained the routine of the imperial court to the extent that conditions permitted. He attended church services and observed all the appropriate religious holidays, as well as the birthdays and anniversaries of the members of his family. For Sollogub these daily habits demonstrated the permanence and regularity of autocratic power. The camp was a simulacrum of the court and the symbolic sphere of the autocrat’s will. It was the autocrat’s will that energized autocratic power, and “the wavering of arbitrariness vanishes before the bond of habits established within the bounds of humanness and the firmness of granite.” The autocrat was “the shrine incarnate of the state order” and so his personal acts were connected with the well-being of the state.27 Alexander began his stay with courtly elegance, but, Sollogub emphasized, from August to December 1877, he lived a spare army life in tents or small country houses, dined simply, and suffered from extreme heat, and cold, as well as prolonged bouts of fever. At the beginning of the journey, in July, at the town of Tsarevitsa, when they experienced almost unendurable heat, Sollogub marveled, “the master of countless palaces, accustomed to the most luxurious chambers in the world, sentenced himself, in his mature years, and while his health was poor, to lengthy, prolonged, dwelling under canvas, where the heat, cold, and rain turn into true torments.”28 Alexander, moving closer to the front, exposed himself and the grand dukes to the danger of war. A popular print issued in 1877 depicts an episode during the emperor’s visit to Sistov, when a bomb exploded nearby (fig. 18). The emperor, the grand dukes Alexander and Vladimir riding behind him, turns with aplomb and, according to the caption, calmly asks, “Has anyone been wounded?” Hearing that there were no casualties, he

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18. Alexander II at the Danube Front. Chromolithograph Lubok, 1877.

crossed himself twice, whereupon he was received by the Russian troops shown at the left, and Bulgarians at the lower right “with inspiration and enthusiasm.”29 Alexander showed his compassion during his numerous visits to hospitals. His appearance had an effect that Sollogub described as almost magical. “The groaning ceased almost immediately. Sufferings were forgotten. Faces beamed with happiness, tenderness (umilenie), and gratitude.” The visits showed “that the power of love, devotion and self-renunciation still lives at the bottom of the Russian soul at solemn moments.”30 After the capture of Plevna, Alexander returned to a joyous welcome in Petersburg. The scenario of love continued with mutual shows of affection and admiration. He was met at the station on December 10, 1877, by military and civilian ranks and the town deputation, who delivered addresses and presented him with bread and salt. He visited the Kazan Cathedral for the traditional prayer before the Kazan icon and then proceeded to the Winter Palace to meet the empress and for a service of thanksgiving. He was met with wild rejoicing, reminiscent, the German ambassador remarked, of a folk festival. The streets were packed with the population of the city, and the

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line of troops, he observed, “vanished in the throng of jubilant muzhiks.” A peasant ran behind the carriage shouting, “Hoorah Alexander Nikolaevich! He has beaten them himself!”31 The correspondent of the Daily News of London described a throng of all classes of the population in the cathedral, greeting the tsar enthusiastically. It was “a microcosm of the Russian nation.” As the emperor rode in a carriage up to the palace, “the clamor of the cheering rent the sky,” and “the cheering continued so long and persistently that he had to gratify the people by showing himself again and again at the window of the palace.” The correspondent raised the fundamental question of whether this enthusiasm was genuine. He heard assertions on both sides, but concluded that the response was sincere, revealing “fervid warmth compared with which the welcome the Berliners gave their Emperor on his return from the Franco-German war was chill.”32 The Petersburg nobility welcomed Alexander with a warm address that extolled the heroic feat, podvig, of the tsar’s extended stay at the front, which Russia would appreciate and “keep for centuries in her memory.” His presence, the speech went on, inspired the troops to show the enormous courage that enabled them to resist the Turks. From the Balkans to the Neva, his journey had been accompanied by shouts of enthusiasm attesting to the devotion and love of the Russian people.33 •

But the difficulties and human costs of the storm of Plevna could not be concealed by displays of enthusiasm. The army seized the fortress only after three attempts, with enormous losses. After the failure of the second attack, the position of the Russian armies had become so precarious that a military council on July 19, 1877, attended by the tsar and the heir, took the extraordinary measure of mobilizing nearly the entire guards corpus of the capital. The third assault was planned by the grand duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, for Alexander’s name day, August 30, the day of Alexander Nevskii. The tsar himself wished to witness the battle. On a bluff, with a commanding view of battle, the tsar, Nicholas Nikolaevich, and the emperor’s suite, heard a prayer service and then lunched. Those present drank a toast to the tsar, and the tsar toasted “our glorious armies.” The attack was pressed despite unfavorable weather conditions, turning the field into mud. The Russian armies fell back after taking more than 15,000 casualties. It was a great blow to Alexander, his Golgotha, his doctor, Sergei Botkin, wrote.34 Plevna fell only on November 28, whereupon the Russian armies advanced toward Constantinople. But by the time they reached the Sea of Marmora, they had sustained more than 200,000 casualties, and their ranks had been devastated by typhus and dysentery. Alexander insisted on pressing forward to Constantinople, but the threat of British intervention and the exhaustion of the Russian armies convinced him to accept the sultan’s offer of an armistice on January 19, 1878.

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Sollogub’s depiction of the tsar as guardian of ritual, order, and stability ill-comported with the popular demands for daring and national military leadership that were reported in the press. Mass circulation newspapers, like Suvorin’s Novoe Vremia, printed realistic and grim accounts of the hostilities. Journalists were allowed unprecedented freedom to report directly from the front and give a sense of the difficulties Russian armies were encountering. Approximately eighty correspondents, thirty from Russian newspapers, mingled with generals at the front and sent reports back by telegraph. These appeared in the morning a few days later, in Russia and abroad, giving the world the latest news of what came to be called the “breakfast war.” The peasants learned the war news, which they heard read to them at their volost’ centers. Nicholas I in 1829 could conceal his distance from combat with elaborate ceremony, while his figure was glorified in rhetorical flourish and lubki. Alexander’s presence at the front only magnified his inability to affect the direction of the war, made his sacrifice appear an empty gesture and his suffering trivial compared to the privation and death around him. The emperor’s symbolic leadership of the war effort now had to contend with a new type of hero—the general-adventurer who showed daring, abandon, and a contempt for the routine that constrained most commanders of the imperial army. The most glamorous of the new generals was Michael Skobelev, who had defied hierarchy, ignored the orders of his superiors to strike out on his own, to take bold tactical initiatives that brought him striking victories at Khiva and Kokand. He distinguished himself at Plevna and engaged in a daring attack at the conclusion of the war at the Shipka Pass during the Battle of Sheinovo. Suvorin’s Novoe Vremia described him in terms of the bogatyr’, the burly knights of the Russian folk epics, the byliny. Educated society began to see him as a true leader of the nation. Vasilii Vereshchagin made him a hero of his cycle of paintings that were otherwise critical of the war. His Skobelev at Sheinovo, exhibited in 1880, was reproduced and widely circulated. In contrast, Vereshchagin’s painting, Near Plevna, depicts the tsar’s party watching the third assault on the fortress while celebrating his name day; when exhibited in Paris it bore the title The Tsar’s Name Day. The tsar sits slouching in a chair on a bluff; an aide bends over, explaining the operations. The members of his suite stand in what seems almost parade order behind. The painting emphasizes the distance from the action, which is visible only by the clouds of smoke rising from the battlefield. It also makes them appear paltry: the figures are small, dwarfed by the scene around them: the hill and the clouds of smoke make them appear insignificant. The figures peer intently into the distance. They are spectators, not participants, watching a scene they cannot control. The painting is a visual counterpart to Tolstoi’s description of Alexander I at the Battle of Austerlitz, in War and Peace—a diminutive figure wandering through the field, humbled by his illfated attempt to command. It caused a storm in conservative circles. The heir remarked, “Vereshchagin is a swine or completely deranged.”35

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Alexander’s prestige suffered a further blow at the diplomatic table. On March 3, 1878, Russia and Turkey concluded the Treaty of San Stefano, which created an enlarged Bulgaria under Russian domination and gave Russia control over the Balkans. But under threat of war from Britain, Germany, and Austria, Russia agreed to negotiations in Berlin. The Congress of Berlin, where Bismarck played the role of “honest broker,” agreed upon a treaty in July, 1879, that reduced the size of Bulgaria and ceded BosniaHerzegovina to Austria. The terms prompted an outburst of indignation in Russia against the Germans and the tsar for permitting such concessions. Rumors of betrayal circulated in Petersburg, giving rise to charges of the emperor’s dereliction of the nation’s interest. “There was a general feeling of discontent, almost of scorn for the Emperor; quite striking,” a French observer reported.36

The End of the Scenario The tightening of police surveillance and administrative controls after the Karakazov attempt did not signal the abandonment of the vision of a reformed autocracy shared by Alexander and his ministers. Shuvalov, the director of the Third Section and chief of Gendarmes from 1866 to 1874, increased police surveillance and favored enhanced administrative power for governors. But he also viewed openness and freedom of the press as goals of the monarchy that in the long run would strengthen the ties between the estates and the monarch. The minister of justice Constantine Pahlen, though a partisan of greater administrative control over the judiciary, believed in open courts, which he thought would condemn the revolutionaries as criminals. Large segments of educated society, however, continued to envision a political nation embodied in representative institutions rather than personal bonds with the monarch. For them such institutions would be the ultimate result of the love and harmony of the first years of his reign. The arrest of the participants in the “going-to-the-people” movement of 1874, and the show trials of revolutionaries in 1878, won sympathy for the revolutionaries, not for a government that moderate society viewed as derelict in its responsibilities. By the close of the decade, Alexander could no longer delude himself about a bond of love between the throne and Russian society. Love had turned into its antithesis, bitter rage, indulgent to violent revolutionary acts. The tsar and his ministers felt completely isolated from Russian society and engaged in a war to the finish with their most ruthless opponents. In January 1880, Miliutin wrote, “It is hard to uproot the evil when the government finds neither sympathy nor sincere support in a single layer of society.”37 At the beginning of the 1870s, Alexander’s ministers still fought the revolutionary movement with the preconceptions of the scenario of love. They

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believed that the new courts would stigmatize the revolutionaries as criminals in the eyes of the public, gaining support for the monarchy. They therefore insisted on publicity of the trials, and disclosing the details of the revolutionaries deeds. The minister of justice, Constantine Pahlen, ordered the stenographic accounts of the trial of the Nechaev group in 1871 made known to the public, stating that “the most candid and full presentation of the facts should deal the greatest blow to the party sympathizing with the accused.” In 1875 the Committee of Ministers affirmed this view. The government, they concluded, had to remedy society’s ignorance about the danger of revolutionary doctrines and the extent of their influence. They recommended a public inquiry “in which all the perniciousness of the elaborated teaching and extent of their menace will be exposed.”38 The show trials that followed, however, had the opposite effect. Government prosecutors had difficulty making their cases, not to speak of stigmatizing the accused before society. The most spectacular—the trial of the 193—which ended in January 1878, assumed the character of an atrocity even before it reached trial. The accused were young intellectuals who had gone “to the people” in the summer of 1874. They had hoped to foment a social revolution in the countryside that would overthrow the autocracy and bring socialism to Russia. They remained in prison for over three years, while the government prepared its case. During this period, seventy-five of their number died or went insane. By the time the trial reached the court, it had come to be regarded as an atrocity. The prosecutors prepared their case carelessly, presenting almost no evidence against the accused. The court acquitted over half of the defendants, though the police arrested many upon release and subjected them to administrative punishments. The final blow to the principle of publicity in political trials was the acquittal of Vera Zasulich in March 1878. Zasulich had, by her own admission, shot and wounded F. F. Trepov, the governor-general of St. Petersburg, in retaliation for his striking one of the imprisoned revolutionaries, A. P. Bogoliubov, a member of the organization Land and Freedom. Rather than try Zasulich for a political crime, which required a special tribunal, Pahlen had her charged with attempted murder, which would be decided by a jury. He hoped in this way to have Zasulich branded a common criminal and withheld information of her revolutionary associations in the government’s case. But the jury decided the case contrary to fact and acquitted Zasulich, to the wild approval of the audience. The press called the verdict an open protest of “public conscience” against governmental oppression.39 Initially conceived as a retaliatory measure against the tsarist police, the assassination of important officials prompted sympathy in educated society and became the revolutionaries’ principal tactic. In June 1879 the terrorist wing of the revolutionary organization Land and Freedom formed a new party, the People’s Will, which identified the autocracy as the source of inequality and oppression in Russia and issued a death sentence on the tsar. The series of attempts on the emperor’s life that followed showed the help-

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lessness of the security apparatus of the tsarist state. On November 19, 1879, a group under the leadership of Sofia Perovskaia mined what they mistakenly thought was the train carrying the tsar to Moscow. On February 5, 1880, a bomb planted by Stepan Khalturin exploded under a dining room in the Winter Palace, before the tsar arrived, but killing eleven people. Educated society, apparently indifferent to the government’s plight, refrained from the displays of relief and sympathy that followed the Karakazov attempt. On the contrary, zemstva assemblies drafted addresses calling for the government to win the support of moderates and liberals by increasing freedoms and introducing representative institutions. The terrorist attacks ushered in the period of the “crisis of autocracy.” The old form of rule no longer worked, but the tsar and his advisors seemed at a loss to replace it. The scenario of love excluded both despotic repression, which might eliminate the revolutionaries, and the establishment of representative institutions, which might win the support of moderate society against them. In these circumstances, the government turned from one to another administrative expedient to fight an unseen, but ubiquitous menace. First, temporary governor-generals were established and vested with extraordinary powers to dispense summary justice. But they soon abused this authority, exiling 575 individuals between April 1879 and July 1880 and sentencing to death 16 in 1879. The measure led only to further resentment and terrorist activity. On February 9, 1880, three days after Khalturin’s bomb exploded, Alexander approved the formation of a Supreme Executive Commission, with broad powers to coordinate and unify the workings of the government. He appointed General Michael Loris-Melikov head of the Commission. The son of an Armenian merchant, Loris-Melikov had served with distinction in the Crimean War and had proved himself an energetic reformer as governor of Terskaia Region. He achieved his greatest renown during the RussoTurkish War, when he led the armies capturing Kars. As governor-general of Kharkov Province, he had both taken forceful measures against the revolutionaries and sought the sympathy of local society. Loris-Melikov assumed extensive powers, uniting all police agencies in a concerted effort to apprehend the conspirators. The feeling of fear through 1879 took its toll on the tsar’s confidence and composure, leaving him in the words of Valuev “a semi-ruin.” Outwardly, this told in heightened security measures. Alexander now had to take his morning walks through the halls of the Winter Palace rather than outside. When he walked his dog, Milord, in the summer garden, a heavy police guard stood at the gates and Cossacks patrolled key points along the Fontanka canal. In 1879, for the first time, Alexander rode through the streets of his capital under convoy and with the blinds drawn. Two Cossacks rode before him, two on the side and two in the rear, and later a Cossack stood on the coach box as well. The Cossacks wore brilliant red uniforms, but, as one member of his suite observed, “the impression was spoiled by the thought of the circumstances that had brought this about.”40 The

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attacks on Alexander destroyed not only the illusion of love, but also the impression of the tsar’s personal inviolability. The sense of secular transcendence had been reflected in the tsar’s capacity to walk godlike and invulnerable among his own people. In December 1878, the correspondent of the Daily News remarked on the nonchalance of the police in St. Petersburg and watched with surprise when a peasant approached the tsar during his solitary stroll along the embankment.41 Now that sense was gone, and both he and the heir felt oppressed by the new rules.42 The celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander’s accession took place on February 19, 1880, less than two weeks after the explosion in the Winter Palace. The Commission insisted on the cancellation of all public functions, but the celebration proceeded in and around the Winter Palace. The guards regiments participating in the ceremony were informed that they must remain on alert in case of disturbances. The confined, beleaguered spirit of the festivities dispelled what was left of the illusion of an affectionate union between tsar and people. Under Loris-Melikov, the government succeeded in locating and arresting many participants in revolutionary organizations, but the leaders remained at large. He attempted to revive the spirit of the reform era by introducing conciliatory measures. He allowed greater freedom of the press, abolished the unpopular salt tax, and involved zemstvo delegates in discussions of possible reforms. In August 1880 the Commission was abolished, and LorisMelikov was appointed minister of interior. He now came to the conclusion that only some form of popular participation could win sympathy. As in 1862, many important officials believed that the introduction of some form of representative government was imminent. Even Peter Shuvalov, now ambassador to Great Britain, was convinced that political reform would come to Russia. He wrote in February 1881, “It is hard to imagine that Russia can long remain the single exception in the family of European states and that she has not earned that trust from her sovereign that he had shown to his Finnish subjects and the Slavs under his protection.”43 Loris-Melikov argued that the government could best struggle against sedition by calling upon society to “participate in the elaboration of the measures needed at the present time.” But his plan amounted to little more than the convening of two preparatory commissions like the Editing Commission of 1858, which would deal with questions of administrative, fiscal and economic reform.44 Loris-Melikov claimed that his project had little in common with popular representation in Western patterns. “Not only are these alien to the Russian people, but they even could shake its basic political outlook and introduce troubles whose consequences are difficult to foresee.” Indeed, the proposal contemplated no change in the structure or operation of government, except to open the organs of the administration to representatives who would themselves be officials, and other “loyal persons” chosen by the government. It still, however, went too far for the

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emperor. In the end the Conference approved only the part of the project that created the legislative commissions, but gave them no voice in governmental decisions. Alexander then approved the conference’s recommendation. The announcement of the reform was prepared for the emperor to sign on Sunday, March 1, 1881. •

While the revolutionary movement brought to an end the pretense of rule through mutual love, Alexander was openly transgressing the familial order that had symbolized the moral supremacy of the autocracy. By the end of the 1870s, his affair with Dolgorukova had turned into an open second marriage. In 1878 he secretly had his children by Dologukova legitimized with noble status, under the name of Iur’evskii, presumably referring to Iurii Dolgorukii, the descendant of Riurik and prince of Vladimir, who in fact was not Katia’s ancestor. But the name marked his new family as Russian. In 1881 he said of George “Gogo,” “This is a real Russian, in him at least there flows only Russian blood.” This presumed, of course, that Russian blood flowed in his own veins.45 After the death of the empress on May 22, 1880, Alexander made preparations to wed Dolgorukova, ignoring the Russian Orthodox Church’s prohibition of marrying for a period of a year after the death of a spouse. The ceremony took place in July, less than two months after the empress’s death, in secret, with no member of the imperial family in attendance. Six months later in an unpublished imperial decree, she officially received her new name, Iur’evskaia, and the title of Most Serene Highness. Alexander’s justification was the fear for his life, and the need to provide for Dolgorukova. The marriage was morganatic, giving neither her nor her children rights as members of the imperial family. But Alexander himself knew that morganatic marriages violated the taboo, in force since Peter the Great, against members of the imperial family taking Russian wives. His marriage deprived his image of both the moral and cultural attributes that had come to justify autocratic power.46 Many considered the marriage blasphemy against the coronation vows, a violation of a sacrament even more sacred than marriage. Unlike Peter’s first wife, Evdokiia Lopukhina, Maria Aleksandrovna had been crowned and as a result consecrated by the ceremony that gave autocracy divine sanction. One general declared that before the marriage, he believed that no attempt on the tsar’s life could succeed. But once he heard the news, he changed his mind. “I told my wife that now I should not be surprised if he was killed!”47 Knowledge of the breach of the familial order reached beyond the court, spreading doubt about the future of authority. For some, the situation recalled the beginnings of the Time of Troubles at the close of the sixteenth century, when dynastic uncertainties bred political and social chaos. The violation of taboos brought to mind ominous legends and superstitions. Two hundred years earlier, a peasant prophet had predicted death for any

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Romanov who married a Dolgorukii; Peter II had died on the day he was to wed Natalia Dolgorukaia. The devil figured in the talk of peasants and workers. They said he had lured the tsar “to fool around with a girl and now God will forsake him.” Other rumors claimed that the devil had taken the form of a woman and that she therefore must be destroyed.48 The emperor was desolate about the general disapproval, though he did not allow this to influence his behavior. Indeed, there is evidence that Alexander was preparing an even greater affront to the moral and legal order he had vowed to defend, by crowning his new wife empress. Alexander took the first steps by sending Prince N. S. Golitsyn and Tertii Filippov, a Slavophile and specialist on church history, to obtain documents from the archives on the coronation of Catherine I. They returned with the materials on March 1. Iur’evskaia herself claimed that Alexander placed the crown of Catherine I upon her head in a private ceremony. Yet no example could have been more damaging to the prestige of nineteenth-century autocracy than the crowning of Catherine I. Her coronation had been justified by the repudiation of primogeniture and the assertion of the principle of utility as set forth in Peter’s Law of Succession. The nineteenth-century coronation had become a crowning of the royal couple, an expression of the sanctity of the marital vow as much as of the throne. Figures close to the tsar like Alexander Adlerberg and Miliutin spoke of retiring. The heir, according to the memoirs of A. N. Kulomzin, threatened to leave for Denmark with his family and was deterred when Alexander threatened to replace him with his half-brother, Georgii.49 •

March 1, 1881, brought the dénouement of the scenario of love. Alexander began the day in good spirits. News of the arrest of Alexander Zheliabov, the leader of the People’s Will, indicated that the tide had been turned against the revolutionaries. After attending mass, Alexander gave his approval to Loris-Melikov’s project of governmental reform, which was to be sent to the Committee of Ministers on March 4. He then prepared to leave for the weekly review of guards regiments at the Mikhailovskii Manege that he loved, the Sunday “parade with ceremony.” The revolutionary situation had forced cancellation of the parade for the previous two weeks, but despite strenuous warnings from Loris-Melikov, he insisted that the event go on. He was especially determined because that day Constantine Nikolaevich’s son, the grand duke Dmitrii, was to make his first appearance as Alexander’s aide-de-camp. At the manege Alexander played the role of elegant and magnanimous chieftain with great style. He entered with majestic stride and “took everyone and everything in with his imperial gaze.” He mounted and, to the strains of “God Save the Tsar!” reviewed the guard of the Sappers and Reserve Infantry battalions, which were commanded by the heir and the

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grand duke Vladimir. He received reports from his adjutants and officers of the guards. Then the troops passed by him in the great ceremonial march. He praised them; they shouted the usual “Happy to do our best, Your Imperial Majesty,” to which he replied with thanks. “The tsar was happy and satisfied to the fullest extent,” according to Captain Voeikov.50 After the march, Alexander engaged in the gestures of mutual recognition that identified the military with the imperial family. Here he was in his element, displaying his gift of camaraderie, remembering the officers’ names, chatting with them, as always with the familiar ty, about their parents and grandparents, their units, and their common acquaintances. The adjutants designated for guard duty that week formed a semicircle in the middle of the manege. The review concluded with a spectacular show of horsemanship. The Cavalier Guards, the Horse Guards, the Convoy, and the Don Cossacks of the guard rode in three straight lines “like a whirlwind” around the manege, never losing their distance, then came suddenly to a halt before the tsar. The Cossack riders brought the afternoon to a rousing climax. They flew by him over hurdles, their sabers raised, or leaping in acrobatic stunts upon their horses. The tsar delighted, shouting “Thank you! Good Fellows!” (Molodtsy!). After the performance, on his way out, he chatted with his convoy, praising their stunts, leaving the officers and the commanders congratulating each other on the warm praise of the tsar. After the review Alexander briefly visited his cousin, the grand duchess, Catherine Mikhailovna, at the Mikhailov Palace. Then he rode along the Catherine Canal on his way back to the Winter Palace. He sat in his “bombproof” carriage, a gift of Napoleon III, and was guarded by an escort of six Cossacks of the convoy. The first bomb, thrown by Nicholas Rysakov, shattered the carriage but left the emperor unharmed. Ignoring the warnings of his escort, Alexander boldly stepped out. He questioned Rysakov, then bent over an injured Cossack, crossed himself, and inspected the pit the bomb had left. He was looking over the scene and about to leave when Ignatii Grinevetskii’s bomb landed at his feet. Once the smoke cleared, the crowd of spectators could see the emperor covered with blood, his uniform in tatters, and his legs, the beautifully preserved legs of youth, destroyed, one shorn from his body the other maimed. Alexander asked to die at the palace, then lost consciousness. He was carried on the sleigh of the police escort to his study in the Winter Palace. The emperor’s death was signaled by the lowering of the imperial standard over the palace at 3:35 p.m. Outside on the Palace Square, crowds milled about awaiting news. The guards regiments were out in force. The announcement from the entrance to the palace was made by AdjutantGeneral Alexander Suvorov, the St. Petersburg governor-general. Unnerved by the situation, he breathlessly declared, “Sa majesté, L’empereur est mort.” An official statement circulated the next day began, “The Will of the All High has been fulfilled.” The announcement of the death of the Russian

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emperor in French and then its characterization as an act of God were final manifestations of the uncertainty and incomprehension of the last years of Alexander’s reign.51 Alexander’s death dealt the final blow to the myth of secular transcendence. The emperor, the guardian of the integrity of the state, had been deprived even of his physical integrity. Descriptions dwelled on the fragmentation of his body, his torn flesh, the blood staining the pavement. “His legs completely naked, hung in shreds. The sole of one foot was completely torn off,” the newspaper Golos reported.52 The broken body, shattering the illusion of the demigod, began the transfiguration of Alexander II’s image. No longer a beautiful and gracious sentimental hero, sacrificing his own interests courageously in the dispatch of his duty and devotion to his subjects, he began to appear as a symbol of suffering humanity. In the subsequent weeks, those close to Alexander III revealed a new myth, one that elevated a Russian tsar.

The Making of a Russian Tsar

The “Russian Party” and the Heir The assassination of Alexander II destroyed the fiction that the Westernized Russian emperor could maintain his prerogatives by winning the sympathies of the Russian people. The new mythical framework emerged in the first months of the reign of Alexander III. The motif of conquest by foreign rulers, welcomed by their grateful Russian subjects, could no longer exalt authority in an era valuing national participation and origins. The presentations of Alexander III would seek to portray the acts of conquest and domination in national imagery—to make him and the past of Russian monarchy appear native. No longer would Russia be conceived as a union of opposites. Rather the Russian emperor, despite his European lineage and education, would be presented as the most Russian of Russians. He appeared united with them by religion, cultural preference, and an impatience with Western institutions and political values—legality, openness, and political participation. The notion of a Russian tsar had its roots in conservative and Pan-Slavic circles that formed in opposition to Alexander II beginning in the middle of the 1860s. An increasingly vocal corps of journalists and officials felt, like Prince Obolenskii, that Alexander II had not lived up to his role as beloved of the nation and was betraying the people’s trust. They took exception to his Western manner and tastes, his tolerance of dissenting views, and the weakness and indecision they discerned in his foreign policy. They sought a national monarch who was in touch with what they claimed were the beliefs and aspirations of the Russian people, who could create unity between government and state as they imagined it in Europe. We witness the evident paradox of conservative nationalism, that in order to appropriate the dominant Western doctrine of nationalism, Russian monarchy had to be shown to be non-Western and to derive from beliefs and traditions rooted in the people. In this way, the emperor could dominate the national movement rather than following it as Alexander II had in the 1870s. There was little agreement, however, among these writers about what constituted a Russian nation. “The Russian party” referred not to a single organized group but a diverse group of writers, journalists, and officials who opposed Alexander II’s policies from a conservative national standpoint. Most of them lived and worked in Moscow, which emerged in their writings as a symbol of a national historical tradition that had been lost in the Westernized bureaucracy of St. Petersburg.

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The organizational centers of the party were the offices of Michael Katkov’s newspaper, Moskovskie Vedomosti, and the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee. The two principal sources of the new myth were the state nationalism of Katkov and the romantic nationalism espoused by Slavophiles and Pan-Slavists such as Ivan Aksakov. The doctrines themselves were based on different and even conflicting conceptions of historical development, and initially they expressed mutually incompatible political designs. But they converged in their opposition to the equivocating internal and foreign policies of Alexander II after 1865. Katkov’s nationalism focused on a dynamic monarchy that would lead the Russian people in strengthening the empire. In his eyes, Russia should follow the examples of Western states, particularly Great Britain and Germany. In 1870 he singled out King William I of Prussia as an example of a dynasty identifying itself with a “common national idea and patriotic front,” rather than being the instrument of “alien interests.”1 Katkov argued that the state should lead and dominate public opinion. In 1863 he used his newspaper to create an illusion of national “public opinion” to promote his demand for more vigorous suppression of the Polish rebellion. His extreme views brought him into direct conflict with the minister of interior, Peter Valuev. Katkov claimed he was expressing the beliefs of the people, which he counterpoised to those of liberal society. While other newspapers avoided chauvinistic proclamations during the Polish uprising, Moskovskie Vedomosti reported numerous outbursts of patriotism among the common people. Most striking in Katkov’s nationalist exhortations was the absence of the sentimental morality that colored both official nationality and Slavophilism. His newspaper had little patience with the scenario of love; the peasants he described were animated by feelings of national solidarity not by devotion to the imperial family. Katkov was concerned with the interest of state, with political realism, and the instrumentality he considered essential to state interest was the exercise and the display of force. “It is as if we have forgotten,” he wrote during the uprising, “that the symbol of the state is the sword.”2 If Katkov emphasized the state as the expression of ethnic spirit, the various Slavophile and Pan-Slavic writers of the 1870s looked to the religion and culture of the people as the source of a national spirit. Slavophiles such as Ivan Aksakov called upon the tsar to act as defender of Orthodox religion and to return to pre-Petrine culture and political institutions. The Slavophiles rejected the imperial Russian bureaucracy—Katkov’s mechanism of national domination—as an artificial Western imposition introduced by Peter the Great. In contrast to Katkov, the Slavophiles looked to an idealized image of pre-Petrine Russia, when the tsar was able to communicate with his people in a zemskii sobor, an Assembly of the Land. The demands for vigorous support of the Slavic nationalities abroad, expressed most forcefully in Nicholas Danilevskii’s Russia and Europe, published in 1866, narrowed the distance between the Slavophiles and bureau-

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cratic nationalism. Earlier Slavophilism with its emphasis on Russian Orthodoxy as the determining feature of the national spirit had not been concerned with liberation movements of Slavs abroad. Aksakov identified the Russian people with other Slavic peoples and looked to the struggle to liberate their brothers in the Balkans, under the leadership of the Russian tsar, as a way to unite the nation with the monarchy. Katkov saw the Balkans as a region where the Russian state could extend its power, based on the support of the Russian people, and fortify Russia’s position in Europe. By the end of the 1870s, Katkov came to accept Slavophile notions of the primacy of Orthodoxy and the need to preserve the peasant commune, while the Slavophiles accepted the bureaucracy as a necessary institution uniting and strengthening the Russian state at least for the current era. The figure of a strong, national tsar was central to both of their designs, and from the end of the sixties, they looked to the heir, the grand duke Alexander Aleksandrovich, to fulfill these hopes. The intermediary who made this possible was the heir’s tutor of law, Professor and Senator Constantine Pobedonostsev, who was able to turn their dreams of a national tsar into the grounding of a new imperial myth.

Education and Marriage Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death on April 12, 1865, had deprived Pobedonostsev of “the opposite pole,” an antithesis to Alexander II who had a vital rapport with the people, a potential Russian tsar. It was not long, however, before Pobedonostsev himself discovered such an antithesis in Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s younger brother, Alexander. The grand duke Alexander Aleksandrovich was ill suited to play the role of cultivated, sensitive heir in his father’s scenario. During the 1850s and 1860s, he seemed an alien presence—surly, often uncouth and crude in his manner, regarded with evident embarrassment by his parents. He was hardly the handsome young prince conquering the hearts of those who beheld him. His mother, the empress, Maria Aleksandrovna, did not conceal her feelings of aversion toward him. She was particularly distressed by his likeness to Paul I. In a letter of 1854, when Alexander was nine years old, she mentioned his “odious” resemblance to Tsar Paul. A lady-in-waiting to Maria Alexandrovna, Alexandra Tolstoi, observed that Alexander was the most distant from the empress of all of her children.3 Until the age of thirteen, Alexander Aleksandrovich was educated in the company of his older brother but received much less attention. Constantine Golovin was surprised when he met the grand dukes in 1859 that only Nicholas Aleksandrovich lived under strict discipline and received instruction in etiquette.4 Both Alexander and Vladimir Aleksandrovich felt themselves neglected by their parents, who doted on their firstborn, Nicholas, and their youngest, Alexei and Sergei. As middle children, Alexander and

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Vladimir received neither the respect of the firstborn, nor the cosseting of the last. Later in life, they would recall what Alexander Aleksandrovich described as the “the disgusting memory” of their childhood—the indifference of their parents and the meager portions of poor food they were served.5 Alexander impressed those who knew him as someone from outside the world of the court. Large and hulking, he inspired animal metaphors. His father referred to him as young steer (bychok); later in life the word byk, bull or ox, caught on as a fitting term for him. Countess Kleinmichel, seeing him in 1862, compared him to a peasant, and a Kalmyk, “with none of the beauty of his brothers.” He was always described in terms that emphasized his distance from the norms of genteel behavior.6 Such opinions can hardly have remained unknown to him, and from childhood he regarded the polite society of the court with suspicion and fear. Alexander’s intelligence also was regarded as deficient. His mother, his teachers, and governors agreed about his poor aptitude for study. Nicholas learned amazingly fast, Sasha with difficulty, Maria Alexandrovna remarked in 1853 when Alexander Aleksandrovich was eight years old. Indeed in their religion lessons, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, two years his junior, was doing better than Sasha, “who is somewhat indolent,” his mother wrote. From the start, Alexander found reading and writing extremely difficult. He never mastered grammar, punctuation, or spelling, and the diaries and letters of his mature years have frequently been cited as evidence of limited intellectual endowments.7 Alexander showed little grasp of abstract concepts. His companion, N. P. Litvinov, wrote in his diary, in 1862, “Alexander Aleksandrovich’s nature, with his clearly practical aptitudes is not given to the theoretical intellectualizations of Alexander Ivanovich Chivilev. Still, he can be turned into a person who is mature in a practical sense and useful for society.”8 He early developed a respect for practical action and a distrust for the “intellectualizations,” (umstvovaniia) that his older brother had loved. This dislike of embellishment, idealization, and abstraction commended him to those who distrusted the sophistication of educated Western society as something alien to the Russian character. His natural, authentic character was often expressed in the word iasnyi, clear, open, direct, denoting an absence of pretense and evasion. His tutor Jacob Grot thought that he had the “bright (svetlyi) and clear (iasnyi) common sense of the purely Russian person.”9 It was this intuitive grasp, along with a willingness to stand stubbornly opposed to accepted views that created the sympathy between Alexander Aleksandrovich and his instructors. As with Nicholas Aleksandrovich, teachers filled the void left by the distance of the heirs’ parents. Grot, Perovskii, and other teachers who taught him at the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s noted other redeeming personal qualities that had gained him little admiration in the Russian court at the time. He showed enormous diligence and determination—the second child’s attempt to vie with the first-

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born. At the age of two, he already had impressed the adjutant Iur’evich with his persistence and diligence. The grand duke Alexander, Iur’evich wrote, spent over an hour piling up sand, while his brother Nicholas, then four, flitted about from one activity to another. The generals Nicholas Zinoviev and Grigorii Gogel’ used the words “serious,” “assiduous,” “diligent,” to describe his schoolwork and his drill practice.10 During military exercises Alexander looked stiff and uncomfortable in uniform and had little taste for show and bravura. But he eagerly participated in military exercises such as maneuvers. In the summer of 1864, he and Vladimir took part in “real” service at the annual summer exercises at Krasnoe Selo and lived with regular officers. Alexander commanded a company of a model infantry regiment and was delighted at the maneuvers and exercises that lasted from four or five in the morning until noon. He wrote his mother on July 23, “I am very happy that I can serve in the camp. Here it is real service, which is always pleasant if it is well executed.” On August 8, he wrote, “In general, the whole camp and especially the time we spent with our battalion left the best impression on us.” He was the first of his brothers to be decorated with the Order of Vladimir, fourth degree.11 While Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s relations with his teachers remained intellectual in character and notable for his personal reserve, Alexander openly displayed his feelings, both positive and negative. He embraced his tutors and wept when they left him, displays that were not taken well by his stern military governors. With Grot and Perovskii, he first showed the pattern of attachment to and dependence upon a strong tutor that recurred in his later relationship with Constantine Pobedonostsev. His feelings for his older brother were exceptionally warm and open, but the relationship was treacherous. As children, they grew up close to each other, with the younger idealizing and obeying the older. When Nicholas received his own separate chambers in 1850, and again when he began his own class regimen in 1859, Alexander was overcome with feelings of loss and wept violently. In a notebook of 1861 he drew several plans of his and his brother’s rooms at Tsarskoe Selo.12 Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s betrothal in 1865 left him feeling betrayed and desolate. In October 1864 Alexander wrote to his mother, “Now Niks will finally forget me because he has only Dagmaar on his mind.”13 Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death on April 12, 1865, was the culmination of these abandonments and disappointments. He had lost “a brother, a friend, and what is most horrible, his legacy, which he transmitted to me.” He recalled in 1868 that the experience was particularly painful for him “because I could not imagine that I would become heir and replace my dear friend Niks.”14 The death of Nicholas Alexandrovich confronted the grand duke Alexander, at the age of twenty, with the painful obligations of heir to the Russian throne. Perovskii, following the example of previous mentors of heirs to the throne, urged the heir to overcome his mortal limitations in order to assume the persona of Russian sovereign. But Alexander Aleksandrovich could not

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rise above himself. He remained uncomfortable and awkward in public. He felt nonplussed by the ingratiating advances suddenly made to him when Nicholas Aleksandrovich lay dying. He wrote to his teacher Grot, “No, I already see that there is no hope. All the courtiers have horribly changed in their attitude towards me and have started to woo me.” In the summer of 1865, he remarked to his friend, Vladimir Meshcherskii, “I know that there are good and honest people, but there are also not a few bad ones. But how does one distinguish, and how will I rule in my time?”15 During his first appearances as heir, Alexander Aleksandrovich made clear that he would not dispose Russia toward him “by politeness and attentiveness.” His difficulties became immediately evident at his majority ceremony, which took place on July 20, 1865, a little more than three months after Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death.16 He stumbled over the words of the oath. As at previous majority ceremonies, the emperor, empress, and son embraced in tears. “A painful moment, “ the report in Journal de St. Peterbourg declared, “But at the same time endearing. Everyone was overcome by the excitement, everyone had tears in his eyes. . . . and everyone prayed God to deliver his parents from greater trials.”17 At the reception, Alexander was “compelled” to say a few words to the members of the State Council, the Senate, and some officers. Apparently, it did not go well. “A difficult task without the necessary preparation,” Peter Valuev noted in his diary.18 The empress wrote to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, on the occasion of the oath, “I have lost faith in the future. How different it was when Nixa at sixteen took the same oath.”19 Alexander’s trips through the countryside in the months after the majority ceremonies were lackluster affairs. He traveled to Moscow in August 1865, and a year later in August 1866. The dinners and receptions for members of the noble and merchant estates proved onerous for him. Alexander used every opportunity to avoid such meetings. In Tver he rejected a proposal for a ball from the provincial nobles and merchantry. In NizhniiNovgorod, he declined to attend a sumptuous reception and urged the donors to use the money instead for public needs. The other obligation Alexander faced on becoming heir was marriage, and with little ado, his parents insisted that he take his brother’s fiancée, Princess Dagmaar of Denmark. Alexander in the meantime had found solace for the loss of his brother in a romance with Princess Maria Meshcherskaia, but his parents’ insistence brought the affair to an end. He then fell as passionately in love with Dagmaar. The wedding took place with Dagmaar now rebaptised Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, on October 28, 1866. For Alexander Aleksandrovich the family was a sacred personal sphere apart from the obligation of presentation before court and state. His marital constancy developed in opposition to his father’s frivolity and fickleness. From the moment of his marriage, he entered into a loving close relationship with the grand duchess. After the wedding, he wrote, “It was such a pleas-

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ant and extraordinary feeling to think that finally I am married and the most important step in life had been taken.” He described his first night with rare feeling—locking the door, the joys of the embrace, then long conversation and little sleep.20 The official account of the wedding, written by Peter Nikolaevich Petrov, the author of the description of the millennium monument, focused on the importance of foreign wives as bearers of cosmopolitanism and enlightenment. “The conclusion of weddings between members of the families of rulers strengthens the close bond of the mutual friendship between peoples.” From the time that the Byzantine princess “who bore the name of Wisdom (Sofiia)” came from Rome, “the light of European enlightenment was shed on the capital of Ivan III.” Catherine the Great had “wanted to make people educated,” and to instill in them “a greater demand to live in an educated society” (italics original). The empress Maria Fedorovna had continued Catherine’s tradition by encouraging the education of young noble ladies. Russian people, as a result, saw the wives of their emperors as their “new guardians.” The magnificence of the occasion and the details of the ceremony were worthy of attention, not only because of the gravity of the moment, but because they were related to “Them alone, as objects of the people’s love.”21 Maria Fedorovna’s personality offset her husband’s brooding presence and enabled the couple to appear as objects of the people’s love. She had the magnetism necessary to draw the elite to her, the endearment and kindness, the laska, that denoted the charm of Western royalty. The grand duchess carried on the rituals of personal graciousness and friendship that were part of the scenario of love. In 1867 the couple traveled to Moscow to introduce her to the second capital. The visit was a major success, her charm winning an enthusiastic response. In 1869 and 1870 Alexander Aleksandrovich took his principal tour of the empire, the first and only such journey taken by a Russian heir with his spouse. He was accompanied by Pobedonostsev, Babst, Meshcherskii, and Perovskii. They followed the course of Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s trip in 1863 down the Volga and the Don. The receptions were enlivened by the grand duchess. An anonymous account of the trip, published at Katkov’s Moscow printing house, contained the standard descriptions of popular acclaim and descriptions of Maria’s meetings with the peasants, who “say how much they love Her, they say it with tears.” She smiled at them and hugged their children. The peasants brought fish, cups, and dishes, “gifts of simple love which must announce itself in some way.” Considerable attention was devoted to the couple’s visits to churches. The account mentioned their meeting with an archpriest in Saratov who had organized the local Red Cross and led a campaign against the spread of the Old Belief. The trip ended in Kiev where the couple visited the Cave Monastery. In the evening there were popular amusements, where “happy Russian faces” were visible and there was a

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Russian spirit. The next day, they visited St. Sophia Cathedral. The author expressed his feelings that this was “the place that the Russian land came from. . . . Here is the Russian spirit, Russia is in the air.”22 Meanwhile, the tsarevich had continued his brusque ways and offended the merchants of Samara by cutting short their presentation of bread and salt and statement of affection for the throne. Two moments stirred his feelings— the visit to Sevastopol and his investiture as ataman of the Don Cossacks in Novocherkassk. At Sevastopol, General E. I. Totleben, hero of the battle, escorted him on a tour of the ruins of the fortress and showed him the shell casings and bullets lying on the ground fourteen years after the siege. The investiture ceremony and the bestowal of the Cossack ceremonial mace, the pernach in July 1869 moved him deeply. He wrote of that “glorious ceremony that made me tremble a lot and filled me with emotion—but it still was pleasant when it was all over. I was happy without limit and satisfied with everything because I felt the power of the Ataman in myself, and that this is not a simple title but a power, and a great one.” He described the Don country as “a completely different world. Quiet and tranquility are evident everywhere. No one thinks about politics, no one is even interested in it. The most patriarchal society and more democratic because the nobility came about accidentally and there is no native nobility.”23 Alexander’s admiration for the Cossacks was an expression of his fundamental aversions—to political discussions, and to the articulate and assertive members of the nobility. The Cossacks’ hearty demonstrations of loyalty, the rough equality that obscured the rifts between their leadership and the lower ranks, gave the impression of a simple world without politics. They were Russians distinguished by martial prowess displayed in the defense and advance of the empire—which he understood as an ethnic Russian image of conquest. A society martial, “democratic,” and devoted to the tsar—however atypical they were of the Russian population—was a perception he cherished and that he would pass on to his son, Nicholas II. When he returned to Novocherkassk in May 1870 for the three-hundredth anniversary of the Don Host, he wrote to his uncle, the grand duke Michael Nikolaevich of his pleasure “with these nice Don Cossacks. It is impossible not to become attached to them and not to respect them after their threehundred years of loyal service to Russia.”24 Returning to St. Petersburg, Alexander withdrew into his own family, separating himself as much as possible from the family unhappiness of his parents and the life of the court. He and the grand duchess Maria Fedorovna settled in Anichkov palace and like Nicholas I and Alexandra Fedorovna found its intimate surroundings and small rooms more to their liking than the vast reaches of the Winter Palace. The Anichkov also preserved memories of his older brother, which he loved to dwell upon. In two halls facing the garden, he kept the same yellow silk wall covering that Nicholas Aleksandrovich had ordered in Moscow. Otherwise, Alexander experienced his greatest happiness during his visits to the suburban palaces,

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Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, and Gatchina. He referred to these residences as “dear,” milyi, to the Winter Palace, and its tedious social functions, “the endless cotillion!!!”25

The Shaping of a National Image The members of the Russian party looked to the heir to provide the national persona that would unite monarchy with the people. Like his older brother, he had been taught to love the Russian people and to see in them the true national spirit. He and the other grand dukes spoke Russian among themselves and at court, unlike Alexander II as grand duke who frequently used French in his daily life. But Alexander lacked his brother’s rapport with the people. Rather than a grand duke who was drawn to the people, his teachers and advisors fashioned from him a symbol of Russianness. They made the grand duke appear Russian by stressing particular features that distinguished him from the Westernized court and that they defined as national. They effected a reversal in value of signs: they gave positive value to the very features that made him seem out of place at court. They took his uncouthness and unsociability as signs of the authenticity and candor of the Russian man untouched by the duplicity of Western culture. They discovered an intuitive sense of truth not clouded by intellectualizing in his apparent obtuseness, and in his sullen obdurate temper they discerned a source of strength and personal authority. Most important, his taciturnity and difficulties with verbal expression became signs of inner certainty, the intimidating silence of the epic hero. It was the heir’s Orthodox faith that identified him most clearly as a Russian man. For Alexander Aleksandrovich worship meant more than compliance with the liturgical requirements of the church. He loved religious services and prayed fervently. He often recorded in his diary the exact count of the number of times he attended church and his feelings of exaltation at the services. Religion provided an emotional bond both with his dead brother and his mother. He noted on March 23, 1866, that he read the Gospel according to John aloud with Meshcherskii. “This is my favorite Gospel and I came to love it even more when it was read at the death of dear Niks according to Mama’s wish.”26 Faith in God, he wrote in his diary, gave him the strength to carry on after Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death. “Perhaps in the eyes of others I have often forgotten my designation, but the feeling that I should live not for myself but for others was always in my soul; a painful and difficult obligation. But ‘May Your Divine Will, be Done.’ I saw these words constantly, and they console and support me always, because whatever happens with us, it is all God’s Will, and therefore I am tranquil, and I place my faith in the Lord!”27 Alexander III’s national and religious tastes arose from wells of feeling within him: the animosity toward his father and his Western frivolity, but

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most of all a powerful intellectual and spiritual, if not personal affinity with his mother. His mother’s brooding and reclusive asceticism provided Alexander Aleksandrovich with a model of piety and spiritual dedication. Just as the empress Maria Fedorovna had set the emotional tone for the scenario of Nicholas I, the empress Maria Aleksandrovna provided an image of Orthodox piety that would be enshrined in the scenario of Alexander III. On May 22, 1884, the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death, he wrote his wife, If there is something kind, good, and honorable in me, I owe it all to my dear nice Mama. Mama constantly occupied herself with us, preparing us for confession and prayer. By her example, she taught us to love and understand the Christian faith as she herself understood it. Thanks to Mama all of my brothers and Mary (Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna) became and remained true Christians and we loved both the faith and the church.28

It is clear that love of prayer and worship brought Alexander close to the most influential figure in his development—Constantine Pobedonostsev. A professor of civil law at Moscow University, Pobedonostsev had participated in the drafting of the court reform of 1864. During the Polish uprising of 1863, his patriotic feelings had drawn him into Katkov’s circle. A Muscovite by origin and taste, the grandson of an Orthodox priest, he was close to the Slavophiles and shared their high valuation of the importance of Russian Orthodoxy to the Russian nation. But at the same time, he revered the Petrine administrative order as the source of law in Russia. The disruptions of the reform era offended both his sense of order and spiritual tranquillity. A reclusive intellectual who preferred contemplation and writing to governmental activity, he found service in the Senate tedious and futile, and increasingly felt alienated from what he saw as a temporizing, immoral governmental policy. Pobedonostsev used his position as tutor to develop Alexander’s sense of himself as a Russian. On the birth of Alexander’s first son, Nicholas, in 1868, Pobedonostsev hoped that the child, Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s namesake, would resurrect his spirit. “May the newborn resemble him in manner and mind, and in that native love of Russia, which struck everyone in him, attracted everyone to him, and raised joyous hope in everyone’s soul.”29 To encourage Alexander’s interest in Russian history, Pobedonostsev arranged for history lessons from Sergei Soloviev and sent him works of Pan-Slavist writers such as Michael Pogodin, Nil Popov, Iurii Samarin, and Rostislav Fadeev. He recommended the patriotic historical novels of Mikhail Zagoskin and Ivan Lazhechnikov, whom the heir came to regard as his favorite writers. He suggested trips to the monasteries and churches of the Russian north, and in return Alexander sent him icons and other religious items for distribution to churches. He introduced Alexander to the nationalist circles of Moscow and invited their leaders to lecture before him.

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In 1868 Alexander attended political discussions that included, in addition to Pobedonostsev, Ivan Aksakov and Michael Katkov. In the 1870s, Pobedonostsev supplied Alexander with publications of the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee, the principal Pan-Slavist organization, and invited leaders of the organization to lecture to him and the empress in the palace. He persuaded Alexander to subscribe to Meshcherskii’s Grazhdanin and later arranged for Dostoevskii to read his works before him. As tutor and advisor of the heir, Pobedonostsev pressed Alexander to assert his national persona in opposition to his father. The first episode of conflict took place on the occasion of the death of the metropolitan Filaret in 1867. Urged on by Pobedonostsev, Maria Aleksandrovna wanted the heir to attend the funeral. “The entire people considers the burial of Filaret an all-national matter,” Pobedonostsev wrote to him. “They await and crave your arrival in Moscow.” The emperor was unable to go, and Alexander’s presence, Pobedonostsev assured him, would “attest to everyone the complete involvement by the imperial family in the feeling of national and state loss, and would make the people’s heart beat even more strongly with love for the tsar and for you.”30 This letter proved decisive in defining Pobedonostsev’s relations with the heir and the shaping of their concept of nation.31 Pobedonostsev viewed the tsar’s appearance among the people at a religious event in Moscow as a demonstration of the monarchy’s national bond with the people. The failure of the emperor to appear was a dereliction of his obligations as national monarch. The emperor, however, decided to send Vladimir Aleksandrovich and prevent his heir from becoming a focus of national sentiment. Alexander Aleksandrovich was crushed. From this point, Alexander Aleksandrovich began to regard his father’s antagonism to him as contempt for the national spirit. Under Pobedonostsev’s encouragement, Alexander Aleksandrovich increasingly viewed Moscow as a national center and his father as isolated from the popular and spiritual roots of monarchical authority. Ivan Babst showed him the need to protect Russian merchants and industrialists, especially those centered in Moscow, from foreign competition. Babst plied him with anti-German and anti-English memoranda, evoking, Alfred Rieber writes, “a touching picture of the honest, plain Russian merchants defending themselves (and the interests of the hard-working Russian working man) against the accusations of sloth, greed, and selfishness heaped upon them by unfeeling bureaucrats.” Although Babst kept the heir informed and brought him to the appropriate meetings, the effort to raise tariffs failed.32 From the late 1860s, the heir, as an advocate of national causes, waged a psychological and political duel against his father. On the surface, Alexander II showed confidence in his son, following the example of Nicholas I. On September 14, 1865, he appointed him to the State Council. In April 1868 he designated him adjutant-general in his suite and in September of that year lieutenant-general. He made him a member of the Tariff Commission and

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invited him to meetings of the Committee of Ministers. From the moment of Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death, he insisted that Alexander Aleksandrovich attend ministerial reports and dinners with important guests. He appointed him head of the committee to direct relief for the famine in 1868, the one position in which the grand duke gained public sympathy. When the emperor went abroad in 1875 and 1876, he entrusted the direction of the empire to him. Alexander Aleksandrovich often took issue with his father’s views and advanced those favored by Pobedonostsev, Meshcherskii, and others in the Russian party. Alexander II found himself being doubted by a son whose intelligence he held in contempt. The grand duke, on the other hand, believed the high offices he had been assigned meant that his views should be treated with some respect, and the disregard they encountered struck him as an ongoing indignity. At the beginning, Alexander Aleksandrovich tried to prove himself and to serve his father. But the emperor failed to answer his letters, and his suggestions were ignored. During the late 1860s and 1870s, encouraged by Meshcherskii and Pobedonostsev, Alexander Aleksandrovich began to entertain the image of a new type of servitor—one animated by a national spirit to assist the tsar in attaining the good of Russia. His criticism increasingly focused on individual officials whom he believed to be hostile to the well-being of Russia as he and his confidants understood it. He began to condemn such officials for being out of touch with the people, for being anti-national. He wrote to Meshcherskii in August 1867 that the main problem of Russian ministers was that “they do not know our Mother Russia.” But he realized his own shortcomings as well. “Unfortunately I must confess that I myself know my Dear Native Land poorly, but at least I try to find out, and I am always happy when people write or speak of her sensibly (del’no).”33 Del’no, a favorite word of his, meant practical and business-like, not deluded by intellectualizing, abstraction, or showy sentiment. It meant dealing with reality, and reality could be found only outside of Petersburg. In a letter of 1868, he praised the minister of justice, Constantine Pahlen, who had just returned from Moscow with an extremely critical report of the Moscow court system. “It is evident that Pahlen does his trips sensibly (del’no). . . . He himself admits now that Petersburg views on the matter are often false and that without traveling and seeing everything oneself, it is impossible to know Russia.”34 During the late 1860s, and early 1870s, Alexander Aleksandrovich increasingly saw the source of Russia’s problems in Germans, whether they served in Russia or in Germany. In 1867 Pobedonostsev introduced him to Iurii Samarin’s critique of the privileges of the Baltic German nobility and Lutheran church hierarchy in The Borderlands of Russia. The book made a strong impression on him. The same year, Alexander wrote of an article by Samarin in the journal Moskva, “This article is against these filthy Germans and is marvelously written.” He feared that the author would be brought to trial for speaking the truth about the best interests of Russia.35

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The heir’s anti-German sentiments also reflected the influence of his mother and wife, both of whom feared and detested Prussia. The empress, Maria Aleksandrovna, a Hessian princess, had always been suspicious of the growing power of Prussia. The grand duchess Maria Fedorovna openly expressed the anti-Prussian feelings of the Danish royal family and the bitterness over the loss of Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia after Denmark’s war with Prussia and Austria in 1864. Indeed, a month after her betrothal to Nicholas Aleksandrovich in October 1864, she had written to Alexander II requesting Russian support for Denmark to resist the growing Prussian influence.36 The moral and political split between foreigners and Russians became sharper and more emphatic in the heir’s response to two major events of the 1870s, the Franco-Prussian War, culminating in the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, and the Russo-Turkish War. In both circumstances, he blamed his father’s ministers for a weak defence of Russia’s national interests. The Franco-Prussian War confirmed his suspicions of Germans. He wrote to Meshcherskii in August 1870, “One has to think seriously of our native land and soon the filthy Prussians will reach her and even now there are people who still think that [Prussia] is our ally.” He recognized the menacing implications of a united Germany for Russia and sharply criticized his father’s support for Prussia. “It is sad, very sad to see how we are preparing an inevitable danger for ourselves and worry only about making it easier for the Prussians to occupy our Baltic provinces and perhaps even more.”37 On October 16, 1870, after hearing of the fall of Metz, Alexander wrote to his mother, “Sooner or later we are bound to feel the power of Germany on our own shoulders.”38 When Alexander II raised his glass to toast the German emperor in November 1871, his eyes were directed at the heir. Indeed, none of the grand dukes shared the Prussian sympathies and tastes of their father. The Prussian ambassador did not fail to note the sullenness and hostility toward him of all but the youngest, Paul Aleksandrovich.39 The emperor and the heir came into open conflict on the issue of support for the Bulgarian and Serbian uprisings. The grand duke maintained ties with Pan-Slavist circles in Moscow, approved of their speeches, and joined the clamor for war against Turkey. The issue allied him with his mother, the empress. Pobedonostsev’s letters argued the case that war was inevitable in Russia’s diplomatic situation and explained the failure to act by the weakness of leadership. The tsarevich replied that he was in complete agreement. He condemned Gorchakov and Miliutin and praised the Pan-Slavist ambassador to Turkey, Nicholas Ignat’ev. He yearned for war and criticized temporizing and conciliatory policies. When the minister of finances, Michael Reitern, insisted that Russia lacked sufficient resources to wage war, Alexander scoffed and declared, “Moscow will give everything that is needed. All that is required is to tell her of the goal of the war and the tsar’s decision.” His support for the Slavonic cause helped stir war passions and prompted angry rebukes from his father. The police read his mail and kept

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Pobedonostsev under surveillance. Yet the grand duke continued to attend the daily meetings of the emperor with Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin, Minister of the Court Count Alexander Adlerberg, and military leaders. During the summer of 1876, languishing at Livadia, Alexander Aleksandrovich felt oppressed by the daily routine of social occasions and spoiled for action. The wavering of the government, the efforts to reach compromise and avoid taking the lead of a national movement angered him. At this point, his association of weakness with anti-national leadership by those alienated from the people, and his identification of strong, authoritative rule with national character began to crystallize in a new concept of authority. His letters to his “little soul Mini” express his growing frustration with officials who were not Russian in origin or spirit and indicate what he expected from a national official. On September 30, 1876, he wrote to her, “It simply nauseates me to think of what has become of us and the kind of petty and pale individuals who are at the head of our government.” There were no statesmen. “All this scum (svoloch’) of officials who think of their own bellies and nothing else, and not as ministers of the Russian Empire. Papa does not have one decent man who would tell him the truth and will be his staunch advisor, who would know and love Russia and would be a true Russian (istinnyi russkii chelovek), who would serve his Sovereign, and his fatherland out of conviction and not as a hireling. I can’t do anything by myself and can’t say anything because Papa won’t trust me.” He reported a discussion with Nicholas Ignat’ev who insisted that Russia had to take the opportunity to declare war, or the situation would turn to Russia’s disadvantage.40 Alexander’s letters of these years suggest the type of rule and official conduct that he expected in the Russian state. He used the words “true Russian,” indicating that there were false Russians about, and that Russian nationality was not simply a matter of origin and language, but a specific political persona capable of decisive and forceful action. Alexander II’s ministers, Finance Minister Michael Reitern foremost among them, were the antithesis of his ideal: they were vacillating, full of doubt and ambivalence, without the will to act for the benefit of the fatherland. Alexander Aleksandrovich’s crude and intemperate language gave a new national expression to the service ethos. It sharply divided those with the ethic of sacrifice, who thought in terms of Russia’s well-being, from those weakened by doubts and Western influence who were ruled by narrow self-interest—their bellies. Pobedonostsev’s letters to Alexander and his writings combined this type of moral splitting with a vision of new men, distinguished by virtue, firmness of conviction and will. Drawing upon historical rhetoric and legend, Pobedonostev projected such figures into a vague, distant national past, before Peter the Great, when Russians were united in an emotional bond, through religion and a respect for authority. Pobedonostsev’s letter of October 12, 1876, follows the cadences of the Russian Primary Chronicle. “Our land is great and rich” (zemlia nasha velika i obil’na) were the words of the

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invitation to the Varangians in 882. The Russian people were “fresh” and their nature “given to mighty spiritual upsurge.” But they lacked a strong authority. “Without direction, without management, all this perishes, just as our bogatyr’-soldiers perish in battle without able officers.” Pobedonostsev returned to the motif of conquest but changed its central figure. The reference to bogatyr’s, the heroic knights of the epos, called forth a native image of martial strength, contrasted to an effete, European leadership.41 The national monarch would distance himself from the men ruling Russia in the previous regime, guide himself by ancient example, and dominate through the attributes of a legendary past. Pobedonostsev’s historical imagery was an answer to the problems of current Russian monarchy—the legacy of weakness and corruption that he portrayed as coming from blind imitation of Western rationalism and openness. Like Katkov, Pobedonostsev argued that the people themselves yearned for forceful rulers. But unlike Katkov, he identified this with an ancient tradition. The heroic figures were to come from within Russia, native heroes, imbued with the spirit of the people. The idealization of the ancient past and the role of a national tsar echoed some Slavophile visions of pre-Petrine Rus’, but not their notions of an Assembly of the Land. Nor was this unity between tsar and people the emotional bond of mutual affection that Alexander II sought to exercise. He described it to Alexander in his letter of October 16 as a moral, spiritual bond inspired by resolute exercise of the power in behalf of the people. All possible legal benefits and rules mean nothing compared to this feeling. The people fall into despondency and anguish when they feel no governing force. My God! How important this is! Here in Russia there is no governing force but the unity of the people with the government in moral consciousness.42 •

Alexander II’s decision to embark on war dispelled the heir’s frustration and ennui and filled him with excitement about the national cause. In his diary, Alexander Aleksandrovich recorded the feeling of uplift and enthusiasm at the reviews of the departing troops and especially at the processions in Moscow on April 26, 1877. About to leave to meet his father at the front, Alexander wrote his wife, “I am sure that no matter how sad it is to part for an indefinite time that you are happy for my chance to join a real cause and to prove in that cause to the Tsar and Russia my readiness to serve them not merely in words but in acts as well.”43 Despite the large forces at his disposal, Alexander’s assignment was purely defensive, to protect the flank of the Russian advance at Rushchuk on the Danube, and this rankled in him. Most of the military decisions were made by the generals assisting him, among them Peter Vannovskii and Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov. Alexander felt himself disregarded as he had been during governmental deliberations. His impressions, recorded in his

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letters to his wife, indicate that he looked upon war as something less than glorious. He gave simple but moving descriptions of the human costs of war, the waiting, the pain, the injured youths groaning and languishing without beds, the filthy conditions. He wrote of the tragic siege of Plevna, “What is unendurably sad and painful is that we again lost such a great mass of people, so much dear Russian blood was shed once more.”44 At the front, he also observed the ineptitude and weakness of many of those in command. When his troops first were forced to retreat, he wrote to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich and claimed the setback resulted from carelessness (neispravnost’) and poor direction (nerasporiaditel’nost’) “or, to put it better from lack of desire to fulfill what was commanded.” All those who visited his detachment remarked on its exemplary order (poriadok).45 He developed a strong sense of solidarity with the officers at Rushchuk. Vannovskii later became his minister of war, and Vorontsov-Dashkov, the head of his palace security and minister of the court. Alexander may have suffered during his command, but he prided himself on a leadership that he believed instilled obedience and discipline, and his general’s uniform, the Cross of the Order of St. George in prominent view, was his favored attire for important celebrations. The heir’s leadership and true coming of age were symbolized by the large beard he grew, in response to an order permitting the growing of beards for those at the front. “What joy,” he wrote to Maria Fedorovna. “We have been allowed to wear beards and to stop shaving. That is such a pleasure. I just gave an order to take my razors as far away as possible!”46 He kept the beard after the war. It symbolized the lasting bond that had developed among the officers at Rushchuk. In subsequent years, they gathered at reunion suppers, in their war uniforms—many of them even gluing on false beards—to recall, Alexander wrote in his diary, “that time so dear and glorious in our memories.”47 The experience of war, revealing the disorder in the system, confirmed Alexander’s sense of the dangers of weak authority. The terrorist movement then became his and Pobedonostsev’s chief preoccupation and made them increasingly wary of Pan-Slavist efforts to involve Russia with national insurgencies abroad. After the acquittal of Vera Zasulich in March 1878, Pobedonostsev wrote to Alexander in despair. “There is no government as it should be, with firm will, with a clear notion, of how it wants to defend the basic principles of administration decisively, to act wherever necessary.” The revolutionaries were acting against the will of the people. “Should a handful of young people who have lost their reason be feared, in view of the mass of the people who preserve their common sense and faith in authority?” But, he contended, the mass of the people were losing their faith in a government that was busy composing new rules.48 At this time, Pobedonostsev introduced Alexander Aleksandrovich to Fedor Dostoevskii, who had become a defender of strong governmental authority. Dostoevskii and Pobedonostsev shared the notion of reconstituting the moral

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influence of the Orthodox church that had been weakened by the Petrine reforms. Dostoevskii personally presented The Brothers Karamazov to the heir and apparently was received at the palace. His vision of a state based on religion as well as his contempt for foreigners and ridicule of the progressive press clearly appealed to Alexander and Pobedonostsev. Shortly before his death in 1881, Dostoevskii advanced his own proposal for an Assembly of the Land—direct consultation with the peasants, to find out their needs rather than “chatter-houses” dreamt of by Europeanized Russians.49 Alexander Aleksandrovich voiced the national authoritarian views of Dostoevskii and Pobedonostsev in the discussions of governmental reforms under way in the commission headed by Loris-Melikov. At the beginning of 1880, he attacked Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich’s project for a consultative institution of deputies from the estates to discuss legislative matters. The project would have brought garrulous representatives of educated society into the government; it was not an assembly of land uniting people and tsar. Alexander Aleksandrovich and Pobedonostsev now argued for the concentration of powers in the hands of an all-powerful dictator, who would unite the administration and initially supported Loris-Melikov. Alexander Aleksandrovich worked together with Loris-Melikov and actively participated in the senatorial inspections the minister organized. He initially saw the general as his longed for official with will. He obtained Loris’s backing to secure Pobedonostsev the position of chief-procurator of the Holy Synod and to allow him to attend meetings of the Committee of Ministers, a privilege not usually accorded to a chief-procurator. But relations began to sour when Pobedonostsev criticized the relaxation of controls over the press and university meetings. Pobedonostsev then was excluded from the sessions of the ministers with the tsar that considered the proposal to include estate representatives in government. Alexander was deeply troubled by the political scene. In an undated diary entry of March 1880, he wrote, “It is terrible to think of what we have lived through during these five years. The troubled years before the Turkish War, then the war itself in 1877 and 1878, and finally the most horrible and disgusting years that Russia has ever gone through. Times worse than these could hardly be!”50 These events were followed by his mother’s death on May 22, 1880. He later wrote, “With her death, began all that time of troubles, that living nightmare, which we lived through and which spoiled everything good, the dear recollection of family life.”51 From his despair, Alexander Aleksandrovich emerged a tranquil but defiant symbol of strength. The change in his personal appearance at the end of the 1870s gave striking expression to his distance from his father’s scenario. Photographs of the late 1860s and the early 1870s show a flaccid, overfed young man, clean-shaven except for a thin slanted mustache—a disappointing contrast to his father, who even in his sixties was admired for his shapely figure. The bushy red beard he grew during the Russo-Turkish War gave him what was regarded as a strong virile, national appearance.

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To be sure by 1877 the beard had long been fashionable in Western Europe. But in the context of the European myth, the beard carried negative meanings: it connoted peasants and clergy, the backward and uncouth elements of Russia, revolutionaries and Jews, the marginal and uncouth elements of the West. The monarch wearing a beard transformed it into a national symbol. The beard designated the tsar as someone from a distant legendary past. The court historian S. S. Tatishchev wrote, “The majestic simplicity of his bearing, the artless, expressive and perspicuous speech, even the broad, thick beard which he was the first member of the Ruling House to grow . . . and which so became the manly features of his face, all of this gave him the look of a Russian bogatyr’, just as internally he was a bogatyr’ in spirit.”52 Within the new symbolic context, Alexander Aleksandrovich, the ungainly, sullen and morose young man, was turned into an epitome of national strength and patriarchal authority. As the ministers lost a sense of control, as the emperor appeared increasingly immoral and helpless, the heir’s appearance and behavior set him apart as one who could defend the values of autocracy. The national, religious rhetoric he had learned, and the Russian image he had come to exemplify, elevated him as the protagonist in a new myth of imperial power.

The Inauguration of a National Myth

“The Russian Land” The presentations of Alexander III would seek to portray the acts of conquest and domination in national guise—to make him, and the history of Russian monarchy appear native. Force, reinvigorated and omnipresent, was the most prominent aspect of the new regime. As at the accession of Paul I and Nicholas I, guards regiments invested the capital with a show of armed domination, reaffirming conquest as a motif of imperial presentation. Immediately after the assassination, the Pavlovsk guards regiment threw a cordon around the new emperor’s residence, the Anichkov Palace, assuming responsibility for the security of him and his family. On March 25, the imperial family left the capital for the palace at Gatchina, which became Alexander III’s favorite and principal residence, as it had been for Paul. The fortresslike structure of the palace symbolized the forbidding distance Alexander placed between himself and the population, the walls of distrust, dispelling the illusion of personal affection played on by his father. Alexander III eschewed the emotional appeals of the scenario of love. His accession manifesto, issued on March 1, 1881, the day of the assassination, repeated the phrases of his father’s accession manifesto, but without the professions of personal loss contained in all of Alexander II’s first pronouncements.1 The program of Alexander III’s reign was set forth in the manifesto of April 29, written by Constantine Pobedonostsev.2 Reaffirming the principle of autocracy, the manifesto evoked a new founding period of the Russian empire—an idealized version of seventeenth-century Moscow. It referred not to the Russian state or empire, but to the “Russian land” zemlia russkaia, conjuring a Slavophile picture of the unity of all estates in Russia, a single people, living in harmony with their tsar. The Russian land had been disgraced by vile sedition, but “hereditary tsarist power” continued to enjoy the love of its subjects, and this power “in unbreakable . . . union with Our land” had survived such troubles—smuty—in the past. Not obedience and gratitude demonstrated Russians’s devotions to the tsar, but “the fervent prayers of a pious people known throughout the entire world for their love and devotion to their sovereigns.” These prayers had brought divine blessings on the sovereign. The historical paradigm now shifts from the legend of the calling of the Varangians to a picture of an idealized Muscovite state. The distance between the ruler and educated society was the distance between him and the manifestations of the fallen present that had encumbered his power. If the national myth sought to divest Russian autocracy of its Western

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trappings, it also announced the separation from its Byzantine origins, which had been emphasized under Nicholas I. The Official Nationality doctrine had sought to establish a national grounding by adorning the European myth with national motifs derived from Russia’s past. The national myth introduced by Alexander III was more sweeping in its repudiation of the heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, delegitimating the judicial institutions, the intelligentsia, and the dynamic of reform that had reached its culmination in the previous reign. The “Voice of God” had summoned him “to turn vigorously to the task of Ruling, with hope in Divine Providence” after the shameful act of assassination. The use of the word “vigorously” (bodro) signified a revitalization and recrudescence of authority. The faith in God, the prayers of the people, charged him to act with energetic and ruthless action from above. Vigor became a common term in the rhetoric of conservative periodicals calling for reaffirmation of autocratic power. In the first months of his reign, Alexander performed a scenario that endowed him with traits and surrounded him with signs that would associate him with the Russian people and distinguish him from the Westernized and educated elite. Some of the associations had originated with influential members of the “Russian party.” But it was Alexander who identified them with the imperial persona and made them aspects of an image of ruler who was transcendent because he embodied national traits now defined as intrinsic to Russian monarchy. Alexander’s gruff and surly manner immediately revealed his break with the graciousness of the Westernized elite. If Alexander II was feminine in his graciousness and capacity for endearment, Alexander III would be masculine in his capacity to intimidate. The English correspondent Charles Lowe wrote, “His manner is cold, constrained, abrupt, and so suggestive of churlishness as often to deprive spontaneous favors of the honey of friendship for the sake of which they are accorded.”3 He addressed guards officers with the formal vy, rather than the familiar ty. He abandoned the traditional embrace with them—when they kissed the monarch on the shoulder—and instead merely shook hands. Many officers regretted the loss of the kindly paternal aura they had felt with Alexander II. He also diminished the importance and prestige of the emperor’s suite, which had comprised the emperor’s comrades in arms. It ceased to be the brilliant assemblage of the tsar’s inner circle, the array of European princes, grand dukes, and favorites that showed the belonging of Russian monarchy to the royal culture of the West. In future years, Alexander curtailed military ceremonials in the capital. He discontinued the Sunday reviews in the Manege and the spring parades. Instead, he held his major parades in winter on the Palace Square before the Winter Palace. Following the practice of his predecessors, Alexander changed the design of military uniforms to show his imperial persona. The details of his uniforms gave them a virile national, rather than smart European look. The changes first affected the police and gendarmes, whose uni-

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19. Alexander III, Chromolithograph. 1882.

forms were designed to imitate the Russian kaftan. Then the guards began to wear high Russian jackboots. Various regiments lost the ornaments that were their pride. The cuirassiers lost their armor and helmets, except for special gala occasions, the Cossacks their shakos. The Hussar and Uhlans were combined with the Dragoons, and deprived of their epaulettes, sabers, and sultans. Even the tsar’s suite began to wear uniforms resembling kaftans, with white lambskin coats and wide sharovary with stripes. The tsar’s initials on their epaulets were now in Slavonicized lettering. Alexander exemplified the new “Russian style” of the military. He gave a rugged and forceful impression. Large, bearded, wearing jackboots and a Russian cap, he took on the aspect of the bogatyr’ (fig. 19). The officers

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soon were expected to grow beards as well. A decree issued shortly after Alexander’s accession permitted members of the guards to wear beards, extending a right allowed only to the army at the end of the previous reign. (The guards had been allowed to grow beards but only with two fingerwidths of unshaven strip on their chins.) According to Captain Voeikov, everyone immediately grew beards in the guards, though there were a few who considered this becoming a peasant (omuzhichanie). These individuals, however, “vanished from the horizon.”4 The symbolic role of the guards and the officer corps as public expressions of the autocrat’s personality had changed, but the elite elements of the military continued to represent the bond between tsar and high nobility. Although he diminished the glitter of the elite, he continued to defend the supremacy of the officers corps and social distinctions in the hierarchy. In 1882 the war minister, P. S. Vannovskii, restored the more aristocraticsounding name “cadets corps” for the “military gymnasia” established by Dmitrii Miliutin, and replaced civilian instructors for academic subjects with officers. Alexander faithfully participated in the anniversary celebrations of the regiments and invited the officers to his table for breakfast on these occasions. At the end of his reign, a decree was prepared that legalized duels in the ranks, a measure taken to restore the élan of the elite guards units. Emblems of Muscovite Russia were introduced to show the distinctively Russian character of the bond that linked the tsar with his officers corps. Guards regiments received new standards emblazoned with icons whose saint days corresponded to their regimental holidays. Eight-pointed Orthodox crosses were placed at the top of the flagstaffs. The guards, the principal forces of Petrine secularization and the image of the Westernized Russian military, now assumed a medieval and religious as well as national character. The omnipresence of icons, the hush of common prayer with the tsar at Krasnoe Selo, the playing of hymns lent the usual religious services at military ceremony an exalted and inspiring tone in subsequent decades. Some grumbled that the Russian army comprised many who were not Orthodox, but Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, or sectarians, and that the new symbols “would bring division and not unity” into the army. But this imperial cosmopolitan conception of the army received little sympathy in the elite officer corps. General Nicholas Epanchin, a general in the guards regiments and future director of the Page Corps, dismissed such objections as indicating an absence of “a consciousness of state spirit”: he recalled the words of General Suvorov, “We are Russians.”5 The sense that orthodoxy denoted imperial unity and state consciousness began to take hold at the upper levels of the Russian military. General V. I. Gurko wrote that this fusion of “military and religious ceremonies” produced a feeling of elation, as the monarch became the symbol of the people’s might. Such ceremonies, he wrote, were the distinguishing feature of the Russian court, which he believed reflected the spirit of “ ‘the ancient Mus-

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covite empire’ permeated with religious and secular powers which complemented each other and formed one whole.”6 Ancient Muscovy lived on incarnate in the shrines of Moscow, which now became a principal symbol of the Russian monarchy.7 Symbolic Moscow did not encompass modern Moscow, the city of factories, the liberal intelligentsia and often fractious nobility. It was Moscow of the Kremlin and Red Square, epitomizing the spiritual unity between tsar and people and a devotion to the autocratic ruler. The new scenario detached imperial Russia from Petersburg, the imperial city, and located it in a new time-space, what Michael Bakhtin called a chronotope—a metaphor that identifies a certain time in the past with a particular place.8 The relationship between the old and new capitals increasingly was stated in terms of conflict and antagonism, the beginning of a narrative of conflict rather than reconciliation between the national and Western elements of Russian life. An article in Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti printed a few days after the assassination depicted St. Petersburg as a nest of “foreigners thirsting for the disintegration of Russia. . . . In St. Petersburg, you meet many people who seem to be Russians but think like enemies of their native land, like traitors to their people.”9 The Slavophile and Pan-Slavist Nicholas Ignat’ev, who replaced Loris-Melikov as minister of interior in May 1881, shared the view that the source of Russia’s problems was a “powerful Polish-Kike group” in Petersburg that controlled the banks, the press, and the courts. “Every honest voice of the Russian land is drowned out by the cries of the Poles and the kikes, asserting that only the ‘intellectual’ class should be heard and that Russian demands should be rejected as backward and unenlightened.” To counter such influence, Ignat’ev encouraged secret denunciations to the police and introduced the “temporary regulations” of August 14, 1881, which perpetuated many of the security measures in force since 1879. He urged Alexander to visit Moscow to convene an editing commission on administrative and financial measures. He looked forward to the calling of an Assembly of the Land in Moscow.10 In July 1881, during the annual maneuvers at Krasnoe Selo, Alexander unexpectedly announced his decision to travel to Moscow and the towns along the Volga. As V. V. Voeikov understood it, the tsar felt he had to leave his isolation “to appear before his people in the heart of Russia.”11 Alexander arrived in Moscow on July 17 and reaffirmed his bond with the people of Moscow’s national capital. The pictures in Vsemirnaia Illiustratsia show his joyous welcome. After the presentation of bread and salt by the Moscow town delegation, he declared, “The Late Little Father expressed his gratitude many times to Moscow for her devotion. Moscow has always served as an example for all of Russia. I hope this will be true in the future. Moscow has attested and now attests that in Russia, Tsar and people compose one, concordant (edinodushnoe) whole.”12 Then after a religious service, he and the empress stepped out onto the Red Staircase to bow three times and

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20. Alexander III at Red Staircase, July 1881. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia.

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receive the acclaim of the crowd (fig. 20).13 V. V. Voeikov described what he understood as the significance of the act, This is a custom unique in the world—the autocratic tsar bows to his faithful subject people. This custom is the sacrament (tainstvo) of the contact (obshchenie) of the Russian Tsar with his people which conceals the unshakeable consciousness of the indestructible power of sacred orthodox Rus’ through all adversity.14

The same historical national theme surrounded Alexander’s trip down the Volga. He visited towns “from the most ancient times consecrated by devotion to Russia, where, after the great troubles of the XVIIth century, true Russian people elected the Romanov house to the throne.” Here Alexander drew upon the origins of the Romanov authority in 1613. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsia carried a series of prints of his reception in the various towns showing the joy of the people and the gala spirit of the journey. When they came to Kostroma, “the cradle of the Romanov house,” the emperor and empress were met by enthusiastic peasants, going into the water up to their waists, who seized the wheels of their carriages.15 Michael Katkov in Moskovskie Vedomosti interpreted the popular acclaim as a resounding affirmation of state power by the people. He welcomed the tsar to Moscow “to come in contact with the Russian Land in the shrine of her past, in her heart, in the very source of her strength.” He emphasized that all economic development, philanthropy, and freedom in Russia came from the state, that the state was the mainstay of the people’s well-being. In Russia, he insisted, no contradiction, no antagonism, “not the slightest disagreement” could arise between the interests of the people and the interests of the state. The various estates of the realm, he argued, should assist the state, or more specifically the police, in fighting sedition.16 Moskovskie Vedomosti reported on the joyous welcome of the tsar in the Volga towns. This was a display not of personal love, but of “that secret spiritual bond that unites the Russian Tsar with his people. A touching, heartening, scene! May [this bond] be preserved like the eternal sun, whose wonderful rays dispel the deluge of enemies alien to the Russian land!”17 In the first months of Alexander’s reign, a rift opened among Alexander’s supporters between those of a more Slavophile and those of a more statist persuasion. The former saw the national characteristics of the monarchy deriving from direct contact with the Russian people, realized in a Zemskii Sobor. The latter regarded the Orthodox church and the autocratic state as the expression of the spirit of the people. The Slavophile viewpoint was represented by such figures as the minister of interior, Nicholas Ignat’ev, as well as such leaders of the monarchist organization, “Holy Retinue,” Sviataia Druzhina, as Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, who had been at Alexander’s side at Rushchuk and would become minister of the court, and the Pan-Slavist general Rostislav Fadeev. The statist viewpoint was defended by Katkov and Pobedonostsev.

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Those who hoped to establish direct bonds between tsar and people prepared a project for an Assembly of the Land, which Ignat’ev submitted to Alexander in September 1882. Such an assembly, both he and Alexander believed, would enable the tsar to reach beyond the bureaucracy. Allowing direct contact with the people, an assembly would exclude the intelligentsia from state affairs. An assembly meeting in Moscow, Ignat’ev argued, would bring Alexander’s rule closer to its ancient historical roots. The project, drafted by P. D. Golokhvastov, an official in the Ministry and an associate of Ivan Aksakov’s, suggested that the number of deputies be set at about 3,000 and that a zemskii sobor meet in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which had finally been completed. It is clear that Alexander saw no contradiction between such an assembly and the principle of autocratic rule. But his principal advisors thought otherwise. When news of the project reached Pobedonostsev, it produced what the historian Peter Zaionchkovskii described as the effect of a bomb shell. Pobedonostsev wrote Alexander, “If will and direction will shift from the government to any kind of popular meeting it will be a revolution, the ruin of the government and the ruin of Russia.” Katkov, horrified, wrote in Moskovskie Vedomosti that the demands for a zemskii sobor always came from the revolutionary camp, that the revolutionary, Sergei Nechaev, when being led out of the courtroom furiously shouted “Zemskii Sobor, Zemskii Sobor.”18 Alexander quickly withdrew his support for the project, and at the end of May 1882, Ignat’ev was replaced by Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, the former minister of education whose monarchist views were not beclouded by Slavophile fantasies.

The Coronation of 1883 The historical union with the Russian people and the Russian land took place in the realm of symbol and ceremony. The rites and celebrations of the imperial coronation merged two themes of the national myth, the conquest from above by a powerful and authoritative native ruler, and the expression of a spiritual bond between him and the Russian people. The cries of the people on the streets were presented as expressions of this bond, while the Orthodox church appeared as its institutional embodiment, the bearer of the religious and monarchical spirit of the nation. Alexander III’s coronation festivities represented less the fusion of the Western and Russian polarities of imperial culture than a coming home: a denial of the polarities dramatized at previous coronations and an affirmation of the national identity of the Russian emperor. The very fact that the coronation took place was presented as a sign of the recrudescence of the monarchy—showing that the tsar enjoyed a popular mandate. The government waited two years to stage the event, the longest interval between accession and coronation in the history of the dynasty.

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Rumors circulated that there would be no coronation or that it would take place in secret. Apprehensions mounted as the preparations began. The emperor’s sojourn in the capital was to be brief—only two weeks; Alexander I’s had been six weeks, Nicholas I’s nearly two months, Alexander II’s four weeks. “Everyone feared for the Tsar,” Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich wrote in his diary.19 During his stay, the emperor was surrounded by a large guard, his departure times were kept secret, and crowds who approached him too closely were dispersed by bands of Cossacks. The coronation manifesto on May 16 appealed for the reconciliation of “the entire disturbed order,” the enhancement of justice, the enlightenment of the people “in the truths of the faith,” and the strengthening of “loyalty to duty and law” among all groups of the population.20 The coronation events took place without incident, which produced a sense of relief and reconciliation in educated society.21 The authorities skillfully used the native and foreign press to give the impression of broad support to a mass reading audience. The press coverage of Alexander III’s coronation far exceeded that of previous coronations and in itself was a sign of the monarchy’s determination to show itself as a national, democratic institution. The government invited forty-nine foreign correspondents to the festivities and paid all expenses, including transportation. Five foreign correspondents—from England, France, the United States, and Germany—and seven Russian journalists, including Katkov, Aksakov, Suvorin, Komarov, occupied coveted places in the cathedral. Niva and Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia carried descriptions with numerous lithographs of the events. Sel’skii Vestnik devoted several issues to the coronation. Illiustrirovannyi Mir published a lively report with abundant pictures of the ceremonies and personages involved in the event. The most detailed popular account was published by the Pan-Slavist journalist and general Vissarion Komarov, in his chauvinistic newspaper, Svet, with a circulation of over 70,000. Komarov had been associated with Fadeev and the members of the Sviataia Druzhina, and his volumes clearly enjoyed government support.22 The varied accounts introduced a diversity of viewpoints into the presentation of the coronation, reproducing the disagreements between the statist and Slavophile conceptions of the national monarchy among tsarist officials. The coronation album gave the officially approved portrayal of the event.23 The format of the volume made it clear that it was drawing its inspiration from the culture of early Russia. The title and much of the text were printed in Slavic revival lettering. It was the first coronation album to contain artistic evocations of Muscovy. Russian folk-style illustrations depict the tsar and boyars as burly bogatyr’s. The text is brief, sixty-five pages, of which only eleven describe the ceremonies of the coronation themselves. But the message is blunt and unmistakable. The historical introduction identifies the Orthodox church as the bearer of the Russian national spirit. It describes the coronation as “this sacred, solemn, and all-national act that

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expresses the historical union of the Tsar with his State, his precept with his church—that is with the soul and conscience of his people—and finally, the union of the Tsar and the people with the Tsar of Tsars, in whose hands rests the fate of tsars and peoples.”24 The church is thus “the soul and conscience of the people,” and it is the church that bestows popular sanction. The people themselves are hardly mentioned in the album. The color illustrations are the work of exclusively Russian painters, including a number of the “Itinerants” (peredvizhniki). Their contribution to the album makes clear Alexander’s intention to encourage a national school of art.25 Constantine Savitskii presents the entry procession down Tver Boulevard as a mass of guardsmen, a few Asian horseman, and the emperor in their midst. The artist makes no effort to bring the spectators into the scene as Zichy had in the entry procession of Alexander II. The entry appears as a triumphal show of force. Indeed, the coronation album as a whole is a solemn statement of the might of the reign, of autocracy reborn through reconquest. This theme was expressed in the numerous depictions of military ceremonies, which appear for the first time in a coronation album. They show the emperor at the consecration of the standards of the Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii regiments, at various parades, and at the feast for the regiments at Sokolniki. The emperor on horseback, in Russian hat and boots, dominates the scene. While watching Alexander’s entry into Moscow on May 10, the English correspondent Charles Lowe felt as if he were witnessing a triumph. He saw a “scarlet crowd” in the distance that looked like a British regiment but turned out to be the emperor’s personal convoy, consisting of “three squadrons of Circassians and Don Cossacks, all finely-made, handsome men, and bravely mounted.” He cited Shakespeare’s words from the opening of Julius Caesar. What conquests brings he home! What tributaries follow him to Rome To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels!

Then came deputies from the numerous “Asiatic tribes” and “Cossack tribes.” “All eyes turned on these picturesque strangers from the Far East, who pace along on their richly-caparisoned steeds. . . . on they ride before the mighty Monarch.”26 The coronation played a special role in the presentation of a nationalist imperialism. Not only did the presence of the colorful Asiatic peoples amaze foreign observers, but the coronation impressed representatives of subject peoples with the power and wealth of the Russian tsar. A delegation of chieftains from Turkestan invited to the coronation were so overwhelmed with the magnificence of the events and the shows of military might that they decided that further resistance was hopeless. They formed a Russian party that in 1884 petitioned for admission to the Russian empire.27

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Komarov’s volume, V pamiat’ sviashchennago koronovaniia, expressed a feeling of national superiority and colonial disdain for Eastern peoples. The account described the Asian representatives as “a messy crowd, bumping into each other . . . a murderously funny procession of savages.” They wore “the most motley robes that were extraordinarily garish and strange costumes in bright colors. Some dress like women, others tightly like ballet dancers.” One could not but “give a good laugh” at a Kalmyk mullah who rode on horseback wearing a wide red robe and a yellow cap, “like the chorus from Russlan and Ludmilla.”28 The emperor’s approach was announced by a roar, which Lowe thought resembled nothing that he had heard from English crowds. “They do not strike the ear like sharp successive explosions of pent-up enthusiasm, but fall upon the senses like the steady, continuous roar of an ever-advancing sea. . . . every straining Slavonic throat utters deep and loud hoorahs,” as the “two squadrons of ponderous cuirassiers”—the Cavalier Guards— marched before the tsar himself.29 Komarov interpreted the roar as the voice of the family of the Russian people welcoming their father and mother. “This family of one-hundred million is the basis of the Russian states existence, the condition for its structure and life, the foundation of general equality before Tsar and law, the source and preserver of every living atom entering into the composition of the Russian people.”30 Komarov’s volume, reflecting a Slavophile viewpoint, expressed a direct bond between people and emperor, an organic fusion. On May 15, the day of the coronation ceremonies, the people appeared as “a vital force, concealing in itself the presence of God.” He saw a physical sense of merger of people and sovereign. The national rapture, narodnyi vostorg, submerged the individual in the mass: This national rapture, national unity seizing everyone, these ubiquitous gigantic crowds of the people, extending without limit as far as the eye can see, these cries of rejoicing, this sincere, heartfelt “Hoorah!” rising from the breast—all of this fused and united in one whole, all and everyone. It elevated and diminished each person.31

For Komarov, Moscow was the embryo of Russia’s “state existence” (gosudarstvennoe bytie) and of Russian and Slavic unity. The Kremlin was the symbolic manifestation of the historical spirit that imbued the people of Moscow. The people of Moscow, “concealing in themselves the presence of God,” were crude and illiterate according to bureaucrats’ statistics. But they had in them “something tender, sensitive, impressionable, a great heart in all cases of state life.” The people of Moscow were suffused with “a feeling of conscious devotion to the Tsar and state.”32 On the day of the coronation, Komarov and others entering the Assumption Cathedral were inspired by the spirit of the crowds extending through the immense expanse around the Kremlin. The Assumption Cathedral,

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modest in size, was filled with the crush of official representatives, foreign ambassadors and journalists.33 The Kremlin square, holding the crowds following the progress of the ceremony by the tolling of bells and the cannon salute, opened out to Russia. It was as if the cathedral had no walls, Komarov wrote, “as if the coronation occurred on a boundless square, under an open sky, as an all-national event (vsenarodno).”34 To show the prominence of the people, as at the 1856 coronation, a delegation of peasants marched at the beginning of the procession to the cathedral. They appeared almost anomalous amid the brilliant uniforms of the guards and courts. The description in the coronation album read, “Volost’ elders from all Russian provinces, communal heads (gminnye voity) from the Kingdom of Poland and the elder of the belopashtsy (descendants of Ivan Susanin) stood out in the surrounding magnificence with their simple but varied attire.”35 Other accounts used similar words. Komarov focused on the elder who represented the descendants of Ivan Susanin, emphasizing that he would be one of twelves elders permitted to watch the ceremonies in the cathedral; in 1856 at the coronation of Alexander II, all had waited in a nearby building.36 At the coronation, Alexander’s measured, sluggish manner was taken as a sign of dignity and strength. Komarov described the drama. The tsar received the crown from the metropolitan and placed it on his head “with unhurried calm and smooth movement.” The adjutant-general, Edward Baranov, brought him the scepter, and Peter Valuev presented the orb, “with the low bow of a boiar.” “A feeling of spiritual contentment descended on all present.” The empress approached the emperor and knelt before him while he placed the small crown on her head. Then he conferred on her the purple and the gold chain of Andrew the First-Called. “All this was performed with great feeling and without the slightest hurry.” He kissed her with “so pure and elevated a kiss, one that spoke of endless, endless [sic] friendship and love.” The emperor and empress now sat on their coronation thrones in full regalia, and the protodeacon recited the full imperial title followed by a loud prayer for “many years,” and a 101-gun salute.37 In Komarov’s account, the ceremony submerged individual feelings in a spiritual, political union. The key moment of fusion occurred after the tsar had crowned himself and the empress, during the “prayer for the tsar.” As the entire assemblage inside the cathedral and on the Kremlin square knelt, Alexander stood and intoned the prayer. The people shed tears of gratitude and tenderness, umilenie.38 During the coronation rites, Alexander found his true ceremonial persona. Ivan Kramskoi’s close-up rendering of the moment before the crowning is focused completely on Alexander, who occupies almost two thirds of the picture, and dwarfs the clergymen at the side, a dominating, stalwart figure, whose countenance nonetheless seems benevolent (fig. 21). “There is something grandiose in him,” the artist V. I. Surikov remarked about his impression of Alexander in the cathedral; he was “a true representative of

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21. Crowning of Alexander III, by Ivan Kramskoi. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia . . . Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny.

the people.”39 He seemed to fit, to express the notion of a national ruler. D. N. Liubimov, a secondary school student serving in the “Holy Guard” for the coronation, later recalled the great majesty of Alexander dressed in the imperial regalia. “This extraordinary garb that so befit the holy places of the Kremlin became him perfectly: his enormous height, his stoutness, his

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great beard. A truly Russian tsar, of Moscow and all Rus’.”40 State Secretary A. A. Polovtsov wrote in his diary, “one felt that here it was not a case of an empty formality, but of a celebration having a national sense and taking place not without a fierce underground struggle.” He noted that the courtiers attending to the tsar were nearly all from old Russian families, while the German noblemen were holdovers from the previous reign.41 After the anointment and communion, the emperor and empress in full regalia walked in procession across the Kremlin square to the Archangel and Annunciation Cathedrals accompanied by the loud hoorahs of the crowd. “A Hoorah that was unforgettable,” Komarov wrote. He, like Lowe, described the Russian shout as distinctive. “Here was expressed all the people’s love. All the nature of the Russian man, with his infinite kindness and selfless spirit of sacrifice unleashed that mighty inimitable cry. . . . ‘The Tsar goes through a sea of sounds,’ they said, but it would be more accurate to say that the Tsar walked with the same look and feeling as the first Christians went to take communion. So much clarity, purity, firmness.”42 The imperial family followed the processions consisting of delegations from all estates, described conventionally as “all of Russia.” After the services in the Archangel and Annunciation Cathedrals, the emperor and empress ascended the Red Staircase. They turned and the square fell silent. They stood side by side and the emperor bowed three times to the people. “From the first bow of the Tsar, tens of thousands of hats flew into the air and the mighty ‘hoorah’ resounded through the Kremlin and white-stone Moscow like rolling thunder.”43 •

The postcoronation festivities evoked the dynasty’s Muscovite past in art, poetry, and music. The seventeenth-century interior of the Hall of Facets, with the murals of Semen Ushakov, was restored for Alexander’s coronation banquet. The director of the Hermitage, Alexander Vasil’chikov, had called for this restoration, hoping that “a new dawn will come for our native art.” Artists from the Palekh shop of icon painters recreated Ushakov’s figures so exactly, according to Komarov, that the fresh gilt and frescoes would “transport you far back into the historical past, to the very beginnings of Moscow.”44 At the banquet, the emperor and empress occupied the same thrones they had sat upon in the Assumption Cathedral but apart from the heir and other members of the family. “The symbolic meaning of the dinner was the unity and uniting (edinstvo i edinenie) of the Tsar with the state. Neither relatives, nor rank, nor foreign interference stands between the Tsar and the people,” Komarov wrote. The emperor and empress were served by Alexander’s brothers and the chief ranks of the court. They dined on Russian as well as Western dishes: borscht and consommé, pirozhki, steamed sturgeon, veal in aspic, roast chicken and fowl, asparagus, kasha, and ice cream. The menu was designed by Victor Vasnetsov. Ornate floral decoration framed a scene

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of boyars bearing the tsar’s regalia to the feast, next to a shield and helmets draped with gonfalons. The reverse showed a priest and peasants bearing bread and salt, and a player of gusliar’ with words praising the tsar. Then an orchestra, soloists, and chorus from the Bolshoi Opera, performed the cantata Moskva, with words by Apollon Maikov and music by Peter Tchaikovsky. For the occasion, Tchaikovsky departed from his usual preference for classical forms and wrote what one authority described as “his only work written in the archaic national style dear to Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.”45 At the previous three coronation banquets, choruses had sung the hymn “What Glory Now Shines!” with words of Lomonosov set to music by Giuseppi Sarti—an eighteenth-century expression of ceremonial rejoicing. Maikov’s cantata, which was reprinted in the coronation album, and Komarov’s book used phrases and imagery from the medieval epics The Lay of the Host of Igor, which Maikov had translated into modern Russian, and the Zadonshchina to extol and recall Moscow’s triumph in uniting Russia. The princes experiencing the wrath of God were disunited until the Moscow prince brought them together and overthrew the Tatar yoke. The Russian tsar then appeared as bogatyr’, representing the hope of all Slavic nations. The figure of the epic Russian knight combined the principle of armed force with the Russian folk tradition and faith in the providential mission of the Russian state as the leader of all Slavs. The people of “Eastern countries” apostrophize the Russian bogatyr’. For all eastern countries, You, now, Are like the rising star of Bethlehem, In Your Sacred stone Moscow! The Lord loves and has chosen You, Fasten Constantine’s sword to Your side, And crown Yourself with the crown of Monomakh, You are to be the defender of orphans, The deliverer of captives, The defender of true faiths! There is this prophesy about Your Moscow: “Two Romes Fell, the third stands, There will be no fourth.”46

The triumph of the Russian nation in the image of the autocrat was the theme of the two parts of the gala performance at the Bolshoi Theater on the evening of May 18. Rather than Donizetti’s opera bouffe The Elixir of Love, performed at Alexander II’s coronation in 1856, the troupe presented the first and last scenes of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. The opera created a ceremonial equivalence: 1613 became a historical setting for what had just occurred in 1883. The finale on Red Square, when Moscow witnesses the procession leading Michael Fedorovich on his way to the Kremlin was a rousing hymn to the new reign. A chorus of almost eight hundred singers,

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accompanied by musicians playing old horns, sang the Slavsia chorus as row after row of soldiers marched in to bring the opera, and presumably the Troubles of the early 1880s, to a rousing conclusion. After the intermission, the ballet company performed Night and Day, choreographed by Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Mincus. If Life for the Tsar celebrated the resurrection of authority, Night and Day allegorized Russia as the dominant nationality in a multinational empire. The ballet returned to the eighteenth-century theme of renovation. The traditional image of the sun represented the monarch who illuminated and gave warmth to everything. The spirits of night give way to glorious day, with birds, fountains, and flowers ushering in the new reign. Butterflies burst from a hive and alight on flowers. “All the nationalities of the Russian empire (Russkoe tsarstvo), in holiday costumes”—Finns, Georgians, Don Cossacks, Siberian shamans, Poles—“greet the rising light of day.” Each group performed its own dance, then all joined a general Russian round dance, in the center of which stood “the most beautiful and stoutest woman, that is, Rus’.” At the conclusion, they came together while a chorus intoned glory to the “beautiful sun, our tsar on earth.” The evening ended with the usual singing of the anthem.47 The people’s feast on Khodnynskoe Field on May 21 assumed a greater scope than previous events. Tables were set for 400,000, though the number attending reached 600,000, the highest until then for a coronation feast. The people were treated to candies, cookies, figs, beer, and mead and received coronation mugs carrying the imperial seal and the year, 1883. The entertainment accompanying the feast for the first time included performances of the popular theater, the balagan, which had been attracting a growing audience during the 1860s and 1870s. The entrepreneur and impresario M. V. Lentovskii, who had founded two theaters in Moscow, was recruited to organize the feast and entertainments. He proposed to the Coronation Commission that an event taking place in spring have as its theme “the rebirth and the dawn of spring, the glory of Russia and her peoples.”48 Accordingly, the central event of the popular festivities was Lentovskii’s spectacular “allegorical procession,” “Spring,” which took place in the central amphitheater on the field. The procession included folk heroes from the byliny and lubok literature. The pageant linked the reassertion of authority with pagan sources of rebirth and fertility, and the government of Alexander III with the Antaean forces of the people, personified in the bogatyr’. The Russian people had conquered their enemies, internal and external. The bogatyr’ Dobrynia Nikitych, representing the healthy forces of the Russian people, had struck down the serpent, “the annihilation of everything bad and evil.” In the illustrated volume Beautiful Spring (Vesna Krasna), these figures were vividly depicted in watercolors by Fedor Shekhtel’. The concluding verse condensed spring, the people, and the Russian monarch into a single image.

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Everything has returned to life, Thank God that you [spring] have breathed into us, Justice, strength, power . . . So our native land, Like the ancient mythical bogatyr’, Mikula Our dear people could be just as strong and full of vigor!49

After the pageant and the departure of the imperial family, the merriment began—songs, round dances, carnival games, clowns, puppet shows. People devoured pirozhki and partook in beer and mead, which “poured forth abundantly from hundreds of carts.” They spontaneously burst into song. The festivity in Moscow was exemplary for all of Russia. A lubok entitled “People’s Fête in the Village on the Occasion of the Coronation of Their Majesty” showed an old peasant and a woman in folk costume dancing merrily to the strains of a balalaika, while a round dance goes on in the background. A boy on the side holds a sheet, perhaps the coronation manifesto. The same day, on the grounds of the Petrovskii Palace in Moscow, the emperor gave a dinner for the peasant elders, numbering over six hundred, who had been selected to attend the coronation, the first since the peasants had been freed from bondage. The dinner marked the peasants’ inclusion, as an honorable estate, in the framework of Russian monarchy. But the elders also represented authority as custodians of order. Alexander warned them to dispel the rumors circulating in the villages that the nobles’ land was soon to be divided among the peasants. “Follow the advice and direction of your marshalls of the nobility and do not believe the stupid and absurd rumors of a division of land, additions to household land, and so forth. These rumors are spread by Our enemies. All Property, yours as well, should be inviolable.”50 •

In the final two events of the celebration, the visit to the Trinity Monastery and the dedication of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, the Orthodox church was elevated as the principal symbol of the national monarchy, a role that it would continue to play for the duration of Alexander’s reign. On May 22, the imperial family made the traditional postcoronation pilgrimage to the Trinity Monastery to venerate the relics of St. Sergei and to extol the saint and the monastery for their part in Dmitrii Donskoi’s defeat of the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380. After the ceremonies at the monastery, the family visited the hermitage of Gethsemane, which had been founded by the metropolitan Filaret as a retreat for solitude and prayer. Alexander recalled a previous visit to the hermitage, and the imperial family took tea in Filaret’s cells, which remained exactly as they had been at the metropolitan’s death. Then they venerated the Chernigov Mother of God at the monastery’s cave church. The visit also provided an occasion to show the religious unity

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between the tsar and the people. Komarov described the large numbers of worshipers greeting the emperor along the way and praying for him at the monastery cathedral. The response, he concluded, revealed the continued devotion of the rural population to the ruling house and to the state. The “common sense” and “firm character” of the Russian people had belied the revolutionaries’ propaganda.51 The dedication of Thon’s Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer set the National myth in the narrative of providential triumph dominant after 1812. Thon’s immense neoclassical rendering of Moscow-Vladimir church architecture, built to commemorate the victory over Napoleon, now also symbolized the defeat of the revolutionaries, the restoration of political tranquility and order, achieved through the union of tsar and people, under the aegis of the Orthodox Church. The imperial manifesto on the dedication, written by Pobedonostev, presented the successes of the monarchy as expressions of this union. The consecration of the church in the midst of Russians gathered for the coronation attested to “how holy and fast is the centuries old union of love and faith tying the Monarchs of Russia with the loyal people”52 Peter Il’ich Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” commissioned for the occasion, presented the war against Napoleon in the triumphalist spirit of the resurgent autocracy. Tchaikovsky juxtaposed two national anthems that were not in use in 1812. The booming, triumphal cadences of “God Save the Tsar!”—composed only in 1834—play against the fanfares of the “Marseillaise,” banned by Napoleon as “a summons to rebellion.” Tchaikovsky himself had contempt for a work that he had put together in less than a week and that he considered “very loud and noisy.”53 Like the Redeemer Cathedral, which he also disliked, the overture expressed the glories of the past in the ponderous idiom of nineteenth-century historicism. The dedication ceremonies began with massive processions of the cross that covered a large area in central Moscow. Bearing miracle icons, the clergy moved from various churches to the Kremlin to the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. The processions established a succession from the Assumption Cathedral, ancient but minuscule, to the immense and ornate new edifice that could hold nearly 10,000 worshipers, and whose cupolas were visible across Moscow. The succession between churches symbolized the spiritual continuity between Muscovy and Imperial Russia proclaimed in the new myth. The clergy then arrayed themselves around the cathedral, the priest of each church facing the building before the gonfalons. All awaited the arrival of the imperial family. At ten, the emperor wearing a general’s uniform and mounted on a white horse, followed by the imperial family in a carriage, made his way from the Kremlin palace to the cathedral. The bands along the way played “God Save the Tsar!” and other military music, and Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” After the sanctification of the altar, the imperial family, the suite, high officials, and foreign guests joined the clergy in the first procession of the cross

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around the cathedral, which completed the consecration. The procession moved between the lines of the clergy and the standards of the regiments participating in the event. To the strains of the hymn “Kol’ slaven” and the ringing of church bells, the artillery launched into a salvo that continued throughout the procession. The music, the parade, and the cannons recalled that “a cathedral was being consecrated that had been erected in memory of the glorious deeds of the Russian army.”54 The procession then returned to the cathedral for the holding of its first mass. At the conclusion, the emperor kissed the cross, whereupon Bishop Ambrosii of Kharkov declaimed a speech emphasizing that Alexander III had completed the work of his forebears, “who sowed that others may reap.” With the coronation, the bishop concluded, Alexander took up his labor of caring for the fate of “the great Russian people.” Then, addressing the empress, he characterized the emperor as one with the laboring population. “The tiller of the soil, working in the field, weary and needing replenishing of his force awaits his food from his home, from his wife: may Your love, with all the treasures of the loving heart, be the bread replenishing the forces of the August Toiler of the Russian land.”55 The dedication of the cathedral concluded the coronation celebrations with a ceremony of incorporation. It brought the Russian past into the present myth, making the defeat of the revolutionaries the equivalent of the defeat of Napoleon. It made the clergy, possessing the sacred icons, the guardian of the symbolic national tradition, embodied finally in the tsar, who by his character, was like the people, the August Toiler of the Russian land. The ceremony inaugurated an era when church architecture would become a symbol of Russia’s national past, and processions of the cross a principal public ritual of Russian monarchy.

The Resurrection of Muscovy

“Holy Orthodox Russia” After the first anniversary of the coronation, Alexander III wrote the empress, Maria Fedorovna, that the coronation was “a great event for us. And it proved to a surprised and morally corrupt Europe that Russia is still the same holy, orthodox Russia as it was under the Muscovite Tsars and, if God permits, as it will remain forever.”1 Alexander’s words expressed the synchronic mode of symbolic elevation introduced with the national myth. Since Peter, the distance between emperor and people had been evoked by tropes, whether metaphorical or metonymical, that lifted the emperor into a realm of art and imagination. Now the predominant forms of elevation became historical rather than literary. The emperor associated himself with a new founding period, the seventeenth century, denoting the true heritage of autocracy. The synchronic mode was profoundly anti-traditional, for it produced a complete rejection of the recent past. By exalting the seventeenth century, it diminished the eighteenth and nineteenth and delegitimized the bureaucracy with its legal principles, the intelligentsia, and the dynamic of reform that had reached its culmination in the previous reign. It looked back to a timeless heritage untouched by historical change. The elevation and glorification of the monarch now took place by claiming to inhabit another time frame, when the Russian tsar was in contact with the nation. Synchronic tropes were characteristic of ethnic, racial linguistics and political myths of late nineteenth-century Europe. They located the nation in its true form at a particular remote point in history. This stage had ended with inevitable decline, retrogression, under the pretext of progress. But beneath, in the substratum of national life, lay the dominant values and beliefs that could be resurrected by a determined, ruthless national leadership ready to expunge the nation of alien elements. The people, narod, was identified with the nation, narod, as it had manifested itself at the moment of foundation. Its idiom was retrospective and legendary. Its heroes were figures exemplary of the nation’s identity, rather than gods descended. Its genres were national epics and saints’ lives. The synchronic mode presented the monarch not as the maker of history, but as its embodiment, as an artifact of a true unchanging past. In this way it broke with official history as written by Nicholas Karamzin and D. I. Ilovaiskii, which glorified the dynasty by extolling the achievements of absolute monarchy in Russia. The Russian emperor might live in Western palaces and

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resemble European royalty, but these superficial overlays concealed a vital native tradition. The distance between the ruler and the ruled was the distance between him and the manifestations of the fallen present that encumbered his power. After Alexander III’s death in 1894, Moskovskie Vedomosti described him as the initiator of a new period in Russian history, “the Russian period”; he was the “great moral gatherer of the Russian land,” placing him among the princes of Moscow. He had restored “Russian Autocracy,” which had been realized in Muscovy when Byzantine autocracy had gained its distinctively Russian character.2 The new myth, confirmed by the coronation, exalted Alexander as Russian tsar—who represented the nation without the summoning of assemblies of the land. The myth designated the policies of Alexander’s reign as “national” and exalted them as the realization of historical traditions that had been betrayed and now was rediscovered in the people. It was perpetrated by a type of person, according to Constantine Golovin, who mouthed simultaneously “such disparate words as ‘powerful authority’ and ‘the rights of the national majority.’ ”3 Alexander’s scenario of brooding, imperturbable confidence exemplified the identification of nation with power and instilled a sense of confidence in his servitors, many of whom took on his brusqueness and arrogance. He may have felt embattled and frightened of the hostile society that had bred a revolutionary movement, but he conveyed the will to prevail over Westernized society and the belief that Russia would recapture the greatness of Muscovy. The resurgence of the ancient past would be displayed in images of forceful Russification, a revitalized Orthodox church, a strengthened state administration, and a national industrial policy. The National myth evoked a different image of empire—an ethnically and religiously united people, ruled by an Orthodox tsar dominating non-Russian nationalities, and striving, where possible, to turn them into Russians by imposing Russian religion, Russian language, culture as well as institutions. Alexander III did not originate the policy of “Russification”: elements of this policy had been initiated in Poland and the Ukraine during the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander II. But the policy now was presented as a defense of the national character and sovereign rights of the monarchy and the Russian people. The idealized conception of the empire shifted from a multinational elite serving the Westernized European emperor, to an Orthodox, ethnically Russian elite, serving a Russian tsar. The symbolic break became clear in the first months of Alexander III’s reign, when the term “true Russian” became a synonym for those favoring ruthless pursuit of ethnic and authoritarian policies. The government openly affirmed the principle of ethnic supremacy first in relationship to the rights of Jews after the pogroms of 1881 in Ukraine. Government officials, recent literature has shown, did not instigate the pogroms, which they feared as a threat to the existing order. But the minister of interior, Nicholas Ignat’ev, used the occasion to repudiate the relative tolerance of the previous reign.

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He proposed measures limiting Jewish residence to designated towns in the Pale and barring them from the liquor trade. He issued these as administrative regulations, thus avoiding the State Council, where they faced considerable opposition. The Committee of Ministers approved a somewhat modified version of his proposals, “temporary regulations,” which forbade new Jewish settlers and Jewish land ownership outside the major cities of the Pale and prohibited them from doing business on Sundays and Christian holidays. Anti-Semitic expletives were common in circles close to the tsar, who frequently used the word “kikes” (zhidy), to refer to people or types of conduct arousing his anger. Alexander’s attitudes were summarized in his remark to the governor-general of Warsaw, I. Gurko: “In the depth of my heart, I am always happy when they beat the Jews, but still we must not allow it.”4 The feeling of ethnic supremacy went beyond the Jews to include other nationalities as well. A. A. Polovtsov wrote in his diary that the sense of Russian distinctiveness had become an ideal of Russian political life. This distinctiveness found its expression “in the worship of the samovar, kvas, and baste sandals, combined with a contempt for everything that has grown out of the life of other peoples. It follows from this that everyone who does not bear the Great Russian stamp must be persecuted. The Germans, the Poles, the Finns, the Jews, and the Muslims—all are seen as one common problem and declared to be enemies of the Russians without any chance at reconciliation or common labor.” Sophisticated aristocrats cringed at the tsar’s crude anti-foreign and anti-Semitic statements, which lent credibility to Western perceptions of Russia as a backward and Asiatic state.5 The policy of Russification was pursued most openly and energetically in the Baltic provinces. Alexander became the first Russian emperor to withhold confirmation of the privileges of the Baltic nobility. In 1882 and 1883 Senator N. A. Manasein submitted a blueprint for administrative and cultural centralization and the spread of Orthodoxy in Lifland and Estland Provinces. He recommended the extension of the Russian court system to the Baltic provinces and the abridgment of the autonomy of local institutions dominated by the German nobility. The governors M. A. Zinov’ev of Lifland Province and particularly S. V. Shakhovskoi of Estland Province energetically supported Manasein’s goals. Whereas the system of selfgovernment survived this campaign, the Baltic nobility suffered a loss of power and status that drove many of them to turn inward and to cultivate their German identity and family life. I. V. Gurko, the governor-general of Warsaw implemented Russification policies ruthlessly in Poland, so much so that “the time of Gurko” became synonymous with harsh, brutal, oppression. In the Caucasus, policies of Russification were introduced when local elites resisted assimilation into the Westernized nobility and officialdom of the empire. Alexander believed that he ruled “the same holy orthodox Russia that it was under the Muscovite Tsar,” and he sought to restore to religion the role

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he believed it played in the seventeenth century. Religion no longer was merely a utilitarian “necessary condition of the empire’s existence in its present form,” as it had been described by Sergei Uvarov, but a faith suffusing the Russian people at all social levels that was the basis of the unity of the state. The first chief-procurator of the Holy Synod whose ancestors came from the clerical estate, Constantine Pobedonostev, sought to convert the Russian people and Russian society to a native, religious form of thought and action under the aegis of the tsarist administration. Pobedonostev extolled a clergy who would accomplish a great exploit (podvig), “toiling in the wilderness, woods, and swamps of endless Russia in great need and cold, hunger and poverty, and often feeling offended.” He envisioned an active parish clergy, “priests from the people,” who would “stand and fall with the people.”6 Between 1881 and 1902, the number of parish clergy increased by nearly 80 percent. The monastic clergy also grew in these years. The number of convents doubled. Between 1881 and 1890, 160 new monasteries were established, and monasteries expanded their charitable and educational efforts. At the same time, new religious fraternal organizations were formed that supported churches, hospitals, and poor houses. Pobedonostev believed that simple priests could uplift the people through education, and his most cherished cause was the network of parish schools, where priests taught peasant children reading and the principles of Orthodoxy. In a report of 1883, he presented his plans as a return to the priests of ancient Rus’ who had taught children “from the very beginning of the enlightenment of the Russian people by Christianity.” From the time of St. Vladimir and Iaroslav, they were “the first and almost the only teachers and educators of the people. . . . Their educational activity corresponded to the spiritual needs of the people.” The aim of the parish schools was “to strengthen the Orthodox faith and Christian morality among the people and to impart useful elementary knowledge.” Their curriculum focused on religion, comprising sacred history, catechism, and explanation of the service. Reading would be taught through religious texts, while arithmetic would be connected with “solving problems immediately related to the peasants’ way of life.” Between 1880 and 1900, the number of parish schools increased nearly tenfold and the number of pupils, nearly fifteenfold, to 1,634,461.7 The financial resources for these schools, however, were meager, and the priests insufficiently trained to teach the curriculum. As a result, in 1891 the Synod reduced the educational requirements for teachers, since half of their number had failed to meet them. Under Pobedonostsev’s direction the Synod sponsored a growing number of publications for the people. These no longer dealt exclusively with the formal details of church activities, but tried to “enter every home.” Pobedonostev believed that the common people could choose heroes, like those in saints’ lives, presenting “an ideal of strength, virtue, and holiness.” Church publications included saints’ lives, scriptures, Gospels, and the Psalter.

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The Synod also greatly increased the circulation of “Trinity and Athos Sheets,” which, its report of 1884 declared, were intended “to provide the simple Russian people with edifying reading, and thus to promote their religious and moral education.” Between 1879 and 1897, more than 76 million of these were circulated. They extolled the simple hardworking life and polemicized against enemies of the church such as Leo Tolstoy. Pobedonostev also hoped to make members of the church hierarchy active participants in spreading religion. But his vision of dedicated, selfreliant clerics clashed with his determination to subject the hierarchy to central, administrative control. He treated the hierarchs with contempt, when possible appointing mediocrities as metropolitans and moving bishops every two or three years to ensure their dependence on the Synod. No figure of the stature of the metropolitan Filaret of Moscow could emerge after 1881. At the same time, he sought to regulate the observance of holy days, alienating both the court and educated society. He canceled plays and public amusements that offended his sense of probity and rescheduled governmental meetings and ceremonies when they coincided with holy days. Not even the opposition of the Ministry of the Imperial Court could prevent him from closing the Imperial Theater during Lent. In the first years of Alexander’s reign, the Synod tolerated the pastoral movement in the Orthodox church, which the church hierarchy had previously discouraged. The movement pursued an “internal mission,” like that practised by German Protestant denominations, and fostered preaching and education among the people. The movement gave rise to a new group of charismatic parish preachers among the secular clergy. The most famous, Father Ioann of Kronstadt, attracted a large national following. These priests addressed the personal and moral needs of their flock. They encouraged frequent confession and communion, which most worshipers took only at Lent. The Russian church in this respect began to follow the example of the Roman Catholic Church, which, after the revolutions of midcentury and the Paris Commune, promoted mass appeals and popular cults as a response to the challenges of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. But in Russia, the movement awakened the suspicion of the authorities, including Pobedonostev, who frowned upon the independence and initiative of the new priests, though a figure such as Ioann of Kronstadt continued to preach under protection of powerful figures in the government and the imperial family. •

Pobedonostev failed to create the selfless and energetic church hierarchy that would bring ancient piety to the people. Instead, great religious commemorations recalled the spirit of Russia’s past and made clear the significance of Orthodoxy for the national myth. Seventeen jubilee celebrations marked great religious events of Russia’s past during Alexander’s reign. These became occasions for immense processions of the cross. Along with

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the clergy in their glittering vestments, the processions included leading officials, military men in uniforms, and schoolchildren: the representatives of state and church demonstrated their unity by following the cross, icons, and gonfalons. The procession for the anniversary of the death of St. Sergei, numbering according to one source, “several hundred thousand” of the faithful from towns all over Russia, made its way over the entire distance from Moscow to the Trinity Monastery. The most important of the religious celebrations, the nine hundredth anniversary of the conversion of Rus’, in 1888, celebrated the rule of the empire by the Orthodox Great Russian monarchy. The idea for the commemoration had originated with the metropolitan of Kiev in 1886. But the St. Petersburg Charitable Society, a Pan-Slavist and nationalist organization headed by Nicholas Ignat’ev, insisted that the celebration assume an allRussian character—namely that the theme of imperial unity overshadow the local Kievan observance of the event. Both Ignat’ev and Pobedonostev attended as honored guests, and Pobedonostev gave the principal speech for the occasion. The celebration included the unveiling in Kiev of M. O. Mikeshin’s statue of the seventeenth-century Cossack hetman, Bogdan Khmelnitskii, whom the text described as “the principal initiator of the unity of Little and Great Russia.” Khmelnitskii was shown on horseback, holding the attributes of his office and pointing to Moscow. The inscriptions read, “We want to be under the Tsar of Eastern Orthodoxy,” and “A Russia, one and indivisible, to Bogdan Khmelnitskii.”8 Processions of the cross displayed pageantry that brought the people into the ceremony; according to the official description, they were “the chief expression” of the celebration. Pobedonostsev’s speech extolled the people’s love for the Orthodox church and he enveloped the present in an imagined past. Early Rus’ had created the basis for a powerful Russian state. Orthodox Christianity, adopted by St. Vladimir, had given the Russian people the strength to combat the pagans and other foes. It had combined “the mighty word of the Russian language and the marvelous sound of their native song,” with the beautiful liturgy they had received from Byzantium. The church was a protector from the snares of error. It was “the home of the Russian person, the home that is most kindred, where all are equal, all have and find their place, and all may equally drink of joy and consolation.”9 From the beginning of Alexander III’s reign, the construction of Muscovite churches symbolized the triumph of the age-old foundations of early Rus’. Russian monarchy utilized revival architecture, as A.W.G. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc had conceived it, as a means to restore a lost purity, to change attitudes, and to reshape society. After 1881, the tsarist government developed this logic into a kind of inverted archaeology—monuments constructed to resurrect a hidden national past. Alexander’s introduction of the Muscovite style of church architecture was an emphatic statement of the break with the religious culture of the previous reigns. The church announcing this break was the shrine built at the

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site of Alexander II’s assassination, the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, or as it came to be popularly known, “the Savior on the Blood.” His wish, as reported in the press, was for a church to be in “the Russian style,” and “in the style of the time of the Muscovite tsars of the seventeenth century.”10 The final project, which won the tsar’s approval, was the work of the architect Alfred Parland. Parland broke with neo-Byzantine “Thon style” of the Cathedral of the Redeemer in Moscow (see chapter 8). He designed the church with seventeenth-century national motifs. Although public donations contributed to the costs of construction, nearly one quarter came from coffers of the imperial family. Alexander continued to watch closely over the completion of the cathedral and resisted attempts to economize. Parland’s Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ was a composite of architectural forms and design motifs of the seventeenth century. At first sight, the cathedral’s exterior recalls the kaleidoscopic forms of Vasilii the Blessed; Parland himself noted the resemblance, which was clearly intentional (fig. 22). The flamboyant decorations, the tent roof, the onion cupolas became signatures of the new style, though the five-cupola form has little in common with the intricate warren of Vasilii the Blessed. The elaborate entwining designs, though deriving from the seventeenth century, verge on the lushness of art nouveau. The cathedral was not consecrated until 1907, but its amalgam of the five-cupola form with pre-Petrine ornamentation became the dominant model for church design in the official Russian style, from 1881 to 1905. A report of the chief procurator from the 1890s asserted that Alexander himself reviewed projects for churches and “willingly approved those projects that reproduced the ancient tradition of Russian churches.”11 The Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ boldly announced the theme of resurrection as central to Alexander III’s scenario; indeed, it was the first of five new churches named “Resurrection.” The exterior mosaics depict the bearing of the cross, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, the Descent into Hell, and, on the southern pediment, Christ’s Resurrection. The Resurrection established Jerusalem as a new point of beginning for the sacred narrative of Russian monarchy. Michael Flier has shown that the interior is modeled on the layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, whose name is also “The Resurrection of Christ.”12 The new cathedral places Russia’s beginning not at the Roman empire—as in the legends of Andrew the FirstCalled, and Prus—or at Byzantium, as claimed in the legend of Monomakh, and reflected in Nicholas I’s preference for Moscow-Byzantine style realized in the “Thon style.” Rather, it transposes Christ’s martyrdom at Golgotha directly to Russia, as revealed in the flamboyant national style of seventeenthcentury Muscovy. The cathedral’s symbolism expresses the determination to do away with foreign mediation of the divine, to overcome the derivative character of Russian religious doctrine, and to identify Russia with the source of

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22. Cathedral of the Resurrection (Christ on the Blood), St. Petersburg. Architect, Alfred Parland. Photograph by William Brumfield.

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Christianity. The true Russian spirituality could be manifested only after Russia had thrown off some Byzantine trappings and before the nation had fallen under the domination of Western culture in the eighteenth century. The Muscovite architectural forms, the tent, the kokoshniki, and shirinki and the elaborate tent-style canopy covering the sacred blood-stained pavement in the center of the cathedral, associated and identified seventeenthcentury Russia with the scene of the Crucifixion and the true faith. The achievements of Alexander II’s reign were inscribed in chronological order on twenty granite plates set into the socle, overshadowed, however, by the rich imagery of resurrection. The Resurrection Cathedral, or the Savior of the Blood, built on the site of the assassination on Catherine Canal, is easily visible from Nevskii Prospect. It is a declaration of contempt for the order and symmetry of the capital, producing what Louis Réau described as “a troubling dissonance.”13 The Muscovite style set in the middle of classical Petersburg was meant to express this contempt. The many Russian-style churches that went up in St. Petersburg in subsequent decades were also placed at prominent sites as visual admonitions to the population. Those that survived the militant atheism of the 1930s, like the Savior on the Blood, the Cathedral of the St. Peterburg filial of the Kiev monastery of the Caves (1895–1900) on the Neva, and the Resurrection Cathedral on the Obvodnyi Canal, can still be seen in Petersburg.14 Churches were placed at other sites to inspire contrition and spiritual purification, especially among the industrial workers. In the early 1890s, Leontii Benois designed a church in Muscovite style for 2,000 people, near the textile factory of the hofmeister N. C. NechaevMaltsov, in the town of Gusev, near Vladimir. Churches in seventeenthcentury style went up in the center of provincial towns across Russia during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II. In the Causasus, Russian colonists and missionaries expected “to restore” Orthodox Christianity, evoking a time when it was presumably the dominant faith in the region. The most striking examples of Russian church architecture as political symbols rose in Estland and Poland. The governor of Estland province, S. V. Shakhovskoi, an ally of Pobedonostev, promoted a campaign of proselytizing the local population for Orthodoxy and actively encouraged the construction of Orthodox churches. His pride was the Alexander Nevskii Cathedral in Revel (present-day Tallin). The cathedral, built in MoscowIaroslavl style, was placed, the architect M. Preobrazhenskii boasted in the dedicatory volume, at the “best site,” allowing it “to dominate the city” (fig. 23). The site was the Domberg, the city’s most prominent square, which Toivo U. Raun called “the traditional bastion of the Baltic German elite.”15 To accentuate the twin feelings of triumph and subjection, the cathedral was named for Alexander Nevskii, the namesake of the tsar and victor over the Teutonic Knights. Russian-style churches carried the national image beyond the borders of the empire, to Port Arthur, Karlsbad, Vienna, and Florence. The spiritual

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23. Alexander Nevskii Cathedral, Revel (Tallin). Architect M. Preobrazhenskii. M. Preobrazhenskii, Revel’skii Pravoslavnyi Aleksandro-Nevskii Sobor.

significance of the new national myth was announced most impressively by the Church of Maria Magdalena in Jerusalem, set prominently on the Mount of Olives at the site of the Orthodox Gethsemane. Alexander III commissioned the church in 1883, in honor of the patron saint of his mother Maria Aleksandrovna, whose memory haunted him. The kokoshnik

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decoration and tent-shaped bell tower are visible from afar, identifying old Russian imagery with Orthodoxy for all to see across Jerusalem and revealing a new sacred history.

The Consecration of Administrative Power Under Alexander III, the vigorous and decisive exercise of the tsar’s power became a sign of a national monarchy. The historical narrative of seventeenthcentury Muscovy associated the origins of the Russian nation with the affirmation of monarchical authority after the breakdown of the Time of Troubles. Alexander sought to return the Russian state to the model of the seventeenth century by creating a new administration staffed by officials with the features of “true Russians,” as he described them in his correspondence of the 1870s. These were men who energetically pursued his vision of national power, who were responsive to his will. Together, he and his symbolic national elite created an image of strength that exalted Russian monarchy when the empire’s international standing had declined, its finances were in disorder, and many high officials cherished a sense of legality that challenged the totality of autocratic rule. A sense of efficacy, based on determined and, if necessary, ruthless exercise of power, without the vacillation and doubt of the previous reign, distinguished Alexander’s scenario. The efficacy was demonstrated, first of all by the suppression of the revolutionary movement, which was accomplished with unanticipated ease. The imagined vast network of revolutionaries turned out to be small bands that were rounded up before and after March 1, 1881. The victory ushered in a period of police oppression. The arrests and trials of the revolutionaries continued until after the coronation. On April 3, 1883, the third trial of regicides sentenced seventeen of the accused to heavy punishment. After the coronation, the regime arrested the remnants of the revolutionary organizations. After Alexander III’s accession, the government introduced swift and harsh measures against the press, closing fifteen major journals. The surviving journals were placed under tight restrictions. Circulars from the Main Directorate of the Press proscribed all discussion of agrarian and labor questions in periodicals of zemstvo and administrative institutions. A report from Petersburg in Le temps on April 11, 1883, concluded that the government had reduced the press to impotence and insignificance, depriving itself of sources of information about the country and public opinion: “A universal silence has descended here.”16 The epic unity of the myth had been restored, expressed by an official monologue echoed in the press. Vladimir Meshcherskii, in a memorandum to the tsar, argued that such a policy would “force people to get used to the sounds of conservative talk just as readily as they now are accustomed to liberal talk.”17

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Similar measures were introduced in the universities. These were heralded by the appointment of a conservative minister of education, I. D. Delianov. Michael Katkov heralded the change with the words “Rise milords, the government is coming, the government is returning.” The University Charter of 1884, which Alexander signed against the recommendation of a majority of the State Council, eliminated the vestiges of university autonomy and gave the ministry the right to draft the teaching programs of the juridical and philological faculties. The ministry increased powers of inspectors over the students, and introduced uniforms, and estate quotas, restoring an order similar to the one that prevailed during the reign of Nicholas I. But these efforts did not eliminate student discontent. Quite the contrary, at the close of the 1880s, student disorders led to the closing of five Russian universities (Moscow, Petersburg, Kazan, Kharkov, and Novorossiisk). Indeed, the combination of learning and repression created a cauldron of growing criticism and opposition. Alexander sought to create a renewed administration of officials who would energetically implement his will in spheres like the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Finances. Alexander III’s scenario set him against the traditions of the reform era, turning the administration into a scene of struggle between the monarch and representatives of the legal state, those officials who rose to high positions in Alexander II’s reign and made up a significant part of the membership of the State Council. This struggle occurred over projects for counter-reforms, which the government introduced in the second half of the 1880s. Their principal sponsor was the minister of interior, Dmitrii Tolstoi, a wealthy nobleman who had understood his official role since the 1860s as one of personal obligation and devotion to the tsar. The foremost ideologist of the projects was Alexander Pazukhin, a district marshal of the nobility from Simbirsk Province. Upon his appointment as minister in May 1882, Tolstoi reversed the direction of reform of local peasant institutions being planned in the Kakhanov Commission under Nicholas Ignat’ev. The majority of this commission hoped to break down estate barriers and establish an all-class zemstvo at the level of the county, the volost’. This would introduce the peasants into institutions governed by law—a first step toward the creation of what Frank Wcislo called a “legal autocracy,” which would regulate each level of the state according to the norms of law. Tolstoi augmented the commission with a group of experts, among them Alexander Pazhukhin. They warned against the rise of an alien class of non-noble and peasant small landowners. The strengthening of the state, they argued, depended upon the strengthening of estate institutions, for autocracy “could not base itself . . . on organs that [were] subject to constant change and lack[ed] stability.”18 Pazukhin’s article “The Current State of Russia and the Estates System” described an idealized seventeenth-century autocracy that would serve both as inspiration and blueprint for Tolstoi’s counter-reforms.19 Pazukhin saw

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Russia split into two warring camps, historical Russia, “devoted to ideas bequeathed by her past, the Russia of believers, capable of great sacrifices,” and the Russia without history, which knew no history and had “no ideas, no respect for the past, no care for the future, believing in nothing, capable only of destruction.” “Russia without history,” was Pazukhin’s term for the Westernized educated elite who had moved to the capital, imbibed knowledge from books, and lost their “everyday estate” features and therefore their national identity.20 Pazukhin compared contemporary Russia with the situation after the smuta, when the nation had to unite to combat invaders. Russian autocracy arose, at this time, not from the social conflicts that ostensibly prompted the growth of state power in European states, but from a historical feeling of unity between people and sovereign. This feeling spread during the Time of Troubles, when all estates joined to fight the foreign aggressor and to establish a monarchy. The unity came from within, an intrinsic and organic need for authority. The key link in the state structure was the order, chin: every citizen of the Moscow State had his own order, his place in society: he belonged to an estate, which had specified obligations. When authority failed, the estates united in the Assembly of the Land to restore authority.21 For Pazukhin, the seventeenth century was a period of administrative consolidation and growing state power in Russia. The “land” zemlia comprised for him not a community of the people, as it did for the Slavophiles, but the “state ranks” that constituted society. He asserted, “The estate organization, in the thinking of the ancient Russian person, was the guarantee of order and tranquility in the country.” By the end of the seventeenth century, Russia had attained all the conditions for “political might.” The autocracy had attained “freedom of action” while the estates served the central power and extended Russia’s borders. Peter was not the founder of powerful autocratic rule, but its beneficiary. He developed the system to increase state power and bring Russia closer to the West.22 The Great Reforms, Pazukhin contended, had sundered the historical unity of the Russian state, bringing disaffection and disorder. He was particularly concerned about the effects on the nobility, which had been deprived not only of its patrimonial rights over the peasantry, but also of its power over local government. Pazukhin saw the zemstva, independent of the state, and including members of different estates, as destructive of the “organic” unity that had existed between the administrative authorities and the nobility. He sought to restore this unity and to replace the existing system with a zemstvo that would be an organ of the noble estate. Katkov echoed Pazukhin’s arguments for the estate system in Moskovskie Vedomosti. He greeted this “native creation of Russian history.” The basis for local improvement was noble government in “the Russian tsardom.” “May the Russian nobility as in olden times be the living link between the Tsar and the people.”23 The seventeenth century provided Pazukhin and Katkov with a historical paradigm of nobility and monarch uniting in the cause of a powerful state, a

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vision of Muscovy that, in official thinking, replaced the Slavophiles’ notion of a direct union between the mass of the people and a benevolent tsar. Pazukhin’s evocation of Muscovy represented what Frank Wcislo has aptly described as “a ceremonial monument throughout Alexander III’s reign.”24 As head of Dmitrii Tolstoi’s chancellery, Pazukhin drew up plans to unite nobility and state in the new office of the “Land Captain” (zemskii nachal’nik), instituted in a law decreed in July 1889. The Land Captain, a local nobleman, appointed by the Ministry of Interior, possessed both administrative and judicial powers over local peasant institutions. To remove potential conflicts between administrative and judicial spheres, Alexander, in early 1889, had issued a decree abolishing the Justice of Peace, the office created in 1864 to deal with minor peasant disputes and infractions. For Tolstoi, the justices of the peace represented an alien element in a state too sparsely populated and whose population was too backward to understand the meaning of the law. The peasants, “the dark people,” he claimed, “have no concept of the separation of powers.” They were “seeking an authority to protect them or at least tell them what to do.” The land captain, Tolstoi argued, would raise the damaged prestige of the government among the people by restoring “an authority whose personal directives could redress the violation of law in matters arising from the needs of their simple agrarian milieu.”25 The projects met strong opposition in the State Council and, in January 1889, were defeated in the General Session, thirty-nine to thirteen. Most of the criticisms focused on the merging of administrative and judicial spheres. Even Pobedonostev opposed it, pointing out that the new official would not be connected with the other officials in the district. But Alexander approved the minority opinion, apparently influenced by an article by Meshcherskii, “The Voice of a District Marshal.” He also referred to Tolstoi’s opinion that if land captains were not instituted, “peasant mutinies would undoubtedly blaze up during the coming summer.”26 Katkov hoped that the nobility would “as in olden times be the living link between the Tsar and the people.” In fact, the land captain was a representative of the central government, of the Ministry of Interior, in the locality. A report of the Ministry of 1902 described the estate system as an administrative category, an instrument for the exertion of state power in the peasant village. The land captain would not only extirpate wrongdoing and correct the abuses of peasant courts, but would intervene as a benign patriarchal presence to advance prosperity, and to defend communal landholding against breakdown, wielding a personal authority ensuring the dominance of the tsar and the landed nobility.27 The notion of the nobility as an estate of government administrators in the provinces was counterpoised to the nobility as a group vested with rights and privileges, as defined by Catherine the Great’s Charter to the Nobility in 1785. But the demands for participation advanced in the last years of Alexander II’s reign had made the tsar and his advisors wary of the nobility as a whole. A few months after the publication of Pazukhin’s article,

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Pobedonostev wrote to Alexander that the nobility, though more trustworthy than other estates, should remain on their lands. No estate was distinguished by a “special quality of loyalty to tsar and fatherland,” and all had in their midst members of the opposition, even the nobility, who included in their number “traitors in Russia’s times of trouble.”28 The rescript of April 21, 1885, on the anniversary of the Charter of the Nobility, composed by Pobedonostev, reflected these feelings. It thanked the nobility for their devotion and loyalty and promised credit to the noble estate, “which is inseparable from the history of the state and Russian people.” But there was also a tone of admonition. The emperor announced that “we firmly hope that sons of valorous fathers, who have served the state will show themselves worthy members of the Estate in service to the fatherland.”29 The celebration of the centenary fell far short of the expectations of conservative leaders of the nobility and of Katkov himself. The credit extended was less than wished for, and to Katkov’s dismay, the Noble Bank assumed the obligation of foreclosing on estates whose owners did not meet their payments. A meeting of marshals of the nobility to take place in Moscow was prohibited by the government. Even such wealthy, conservative stalwarts as provincial marshals awakened fears of opposition in Tolstoi and Pobedonostev, who saw this meeting as representing another “assembly,” sobor. The rescript was not a return to the time of Catherine, when the representatives of the orders in society could be summoned to Moscow to help compose a code, and the empress conferred the first rights on an estate. It was a return to the time of tsar Alexei, who dispensed with assemblies and consolidated the power of the state administration. By 1886 Alexander and his advisors had dissociated themselves completely from the reform tradition and set themselves against the officials who remained loyal to the principles of legality and the development of civic order in Russia. The open, symbolic repudiation of the most fundamental of the reforms took place in 1886, when the government not only refused to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the emancipation but issued a special order in February prohibiting its observance. State-Secretary A. A. Polovstov asked in astonishment, “Who would have thought five years ago that the government would forbid the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this measure!” Apparently Alexander and Pobedonostev feared political demonstrations, but, more specifically, they wished to discourage any interest in the previous reign that might stir hopes of reforms. General N. A. Epanchin, an admiring and loyal servitor of the tsar, observed, “This order emphasized the negative view of the reforms of the Tsar Emancipator and even disrespect for His memory.”30 The imperial family’s libraries at the end of the century, Marc Raeff noted, contained few books on the Great Reforms.31 The counter-reforms of the courts and the zemstva met strong resistance in the State Council when they were submitted at the end of the 1880s. In each case, the Council forced significant modifications of the original pro-

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posals, which were intended to curtail the autonomy of these institutions and to ensure the domination of the zemstva by the wealthy landed nobility. In the series of laws issued between 1887 and 1892, the courts and zemstva retained their autonomy, but with increased authority assigned to the minister of justice over the judiciary, and the governors over the zemstva. The representation of deputies from the landed nobility was increased in zemstva assemblies. The most thoroughgoing counter-reform was the reform of city government, which virtually eliminated the independence of urban institutions. More significant than the actual changes was the motive that guided the counter-reforms—the monarch’s abiding determination to reverse the civic development begun in the 1860s. In practice, the national myth elevated administrative authority at the expense of law, which was associated with Westernization and reform. The exaltation of power emboldened officials to use their authority with little regard for legal norms and to promote a form of administrative license. The contempt for the legal order was in part fostered by the “Temporary Regulations” of August 1881, which could be used to invest governors and governor-generals with “reinforced” and “extraordinary” authority in times of political crisis. The regulations, which remained in force until the end of the empire, provided the authorities with extensive powers to jail citizens, close newspapers and commercial ventures, and remove officials from zemstva organizations. The regulations increased the power of the police and organs of the Ministry of Interior to conduct surveillance and to exile suspicious individuals. In fact, the governors, whose punitive authority was now given the sanction of law, often went beyond the particular provisions to order arbitrary arrests, extort bribes, and intervene in parts of the administration beyond their purview. The political police developed their own practices of administrative exile. The Senate, presumably the guardian of administrative legality, did little to correct these grievances. Indeed some governors guilty of infractions were appointed senators. The jurist Anatole Koni described several of his fellow senators as “governors who had flogged the ‘Yids’ (zhidy) and peasants for imagined mutinies, along with a whole string of unsuccessful Directors of the Department of Police who, having feathered their nests, were permitted to protect their precious skins as Senators.”32 •

Alexander III advanced a cautious foreign policy as a sign of strength and confidence. Russia’s international power position had continued to decline with the rise of a united and powerful Germany on Russia’s western frontier and the growing assertiveness of Balkan nations that Russia could no longer control. The finances of the government, still in disarray from the RussoTurkish War, dictated moderation and caution. Alexander’s initial statement of foreign-policy aims, announced in a circular of March 5 only four days after his accession, seemed to augur a concentration on domestic matters,

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like that promised in the first years of Alexander II’s reign.33 Russia, “like all other states,” had engaged in a struggle for its own creation during which “her forces and national spirit had developed.” Now Russia had attained its full development. “Feelings of envy and dissatisfaction are alien to her.” The emperor declared that he would dedicate himself to “matters of domestic development” connected with economic and social problems, “which now constitute an object of special concern of all governments.” The foreign policy would be “completely peace-loving,” as Russia remained “loyal to her friends.” The foreign minister Nicholas Giers endeavored to maintain the alliance with Germany and Austria in defense of the common interests of monarchy in central Europe. The reign began with the renewal of the Three Emperors League in June 1881, which was confirmed again in 1884. Indeed, Alexander, with Giers guidance, succeeded in resisting pressures to wage wars twice during his reign. By backing Giers, Alexander succeeded in restraining the generals who had penetrated close to Afghanistan during the 1880s. Russian action in Central Asia challenged Britain’s control of the routes to India and in 1885 brought the two empires to the point of war. Giers, backed by Germany, agreed to negotiations that settled the border dispute. Alexander curbed those in the Central Asian department of the Foreign Ministry who had allowed the generals to seize territories on the eastern frontier of Afghanistan. He accepted British domination in Afghanistan. At the same time, he gained British acceptance of the conquests on the Afghan border. In 1885 Alexander contained his anger at his “ungrateful” cousin Alexander of Battenberg, the king of Bulgaria, who had taken the lead of a liberal national movement to unite with Eastern Rumelia in 1885. Austria began to prepare for war, but Alexander rejected the advice of Russian agents to intervene in Bulgaria. Alexander was presented as the “peace-loving tsar” (tsar’-miroliubivets) or “tsar peace-maker” (tsar-mirotvorets). But his commitment to peace was an expedient. His principal goal, he noted on a memorandum of 1882, was taking Constantinople, “so that we are once and for all established on the straits and know that they will be constantly in our hands.”34 He allowed Katkov and other nationalists unusual freedom in criticizing the moderation of the Foreign Ministry. Partly under their influence, and against Gier’s recommendations, he pursued an alliance with France that would strengthen Russia’s diplomatic position, particularly in the Balkans. Alexander’s open anti-German sentiment and the national tariff policy (see below) prepared the way for the dissolution of the Three Emperors League at the end of the 1880s and the signing of the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894. Russia, Alexander’s manner implied, could and would make its own choice of when to go to war. In the last years of Alexander’s reign, a brash sense of Russia’s national superiority reigned among officials and Petersburg high society. Andrew Dickson White, the American minister to Russia,

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wrote in 1893 that “there has never been a time probably when such a feeling of isolation from the rest of the world and aversion to foreign influence of any sort have prevailed in Russia as at present.”35 In May 1896, just before Nicholas II’s coronation, a New York Times correspondent wrote from London, “No one seems before to have realized what a colossal thing Russia really is, or what prodigious results must follow when she begins to move about. Visitors there report with curious unanimity the discovery that the Russians believe they are on the point of becoming a match for all Western Europe quite by themselves and independent of allies.”36 •

This sense of certainty, derived from a sense of national historical destiny, made it possible in the last years of Alexander’s reign to disregard the social disruptions and political repercussions attendant on a policy of rapid industrialization. The fear that Russia might follow the path of western Europe had dominated high spheres of Russian government since the reign of Nicholas I. After the emancipation, the government followed a policy of laissez-faire, expecting that increased freedom would stimulate economic growth. Conservative officials sought to discourage large concentrations of industry. The ministers of finance were preoccupied with fiscal concerns, striving to keep down expenditures in order to deal with the deficits caused by Russia’s heavy military expenses. Alexander’s first minister of finances, Nicholas Bunge, followed the same policies as his predecessors, while he struggled with the continuing fiscal crisis left by the Russo-Turkish War. Bunge also introduced measures to improve the condition of the peasants, such as the repeal of the poll tax and the establishment of a peasant land bank. But Alexander increasingly circumvented his minister. He raised tariffs on his own, in response to pressures from the Moscow industrialists. By 1885, Alfred Rieber concludes, consultations with industrial and trading interests had more influence on tariffs than the chancellery of the minister of finances.37 The principal critic of the government’s caution in economic policies was Michael Katkov. Katkov was convinced of the Russian state’s ability to cope with industrial unrest and, at least until 1885, believed that Russia had and could have nothing resembling a European proletariat. He considered industrial development “the basis of state life” and his articles repeatedly emphasized the disproportion between Russia’s natural wealth and its economic weakness. When the Russo-Turkish War exposed the weaknesses of Russia’s fiscal and economic policies, he turned against the doctrines of laissezfaire and began to demand increased governmental involvement in the economy. Katkov’s attention focused on two questions—the nationalization of the railroads and the struggle for a tariff that would protect Russian industry. He concluded that in both Russia and France, private ownership of railroads had led to widespread corruption and disregard for the interests of the

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state as a whole. He admired Bismarck’s policy of nationalization of railroads. “After the bayonet, it is the railways that consummate national cohesion,” he wrote.38 The two ministers who succeeded Bunge, Ivan Vyshnegradskii and Sergei Witte, were spokesmen for Katkov’s views. Both had been trained as engineers and had advanced to positions of directors of the privately owned Southwestern Railway company through merit rather than through the official hierarchy. They brought to government an understanding of industry and the needs of entrepreneurs and a conviction that the development of industry was essential to Russia’s future as a great power. Vyshnegradskii had been a professor of mechanical engineering at St. Petersburg Technological Institute. Witte, a member of the Baranov commission planning the government takeover of the railroads in Russia, published an important book on railroad traffic rates. Both wrote for Moskovskie Vedomosti. Their articles condemned Bunge’s policies and argued for higher tariffs, greater state intervention in the economy, and active encouragement of industry. Vyshnegradskii began his tenure as minister in 1887 by sharply raising tariffs on industrial goods. Other increases followed, culminating in the Mendeleev tariff of 1890—inspired by the chemist’s calls for protectionism—which lifted Russia’s rates to the highest in the world. These increases provoked a tariff war between Germany and Russia. The tariff issue combined with the Russian government’s prohibition on acquisition of land by foreigners in the Vistula provinces led Bismarck in 1887 to forbid the sale of Russian securities on the Berlin stock exchange. Russia now turned to France as its principal securities market. Sergei Witte’s tenure as minister of finance, 1892–1903, marked the turn to a policy of state-subsidized industrialization. His program was the ultimate realization of Alexander’s national views. Witte was convinced that the authority of the emperor as well as the religious faith and political devotion of the people gave the state vast powers to promote economic development. He maintained a Katkovian faith in the power of the Russian state to contain the dissatisfaction and unrest attendant on industrial development. In his mind, the Russian state was a mighty organism standing above society and capable of prodigies. Unlike Pazukhin, he believed that its officials did not have to worry about a social base in the nobility. He wrote in a memorandum of 1897 that the Russian state had not developed on the basis of an existing estate structure. “Having no enemies, the supreme power in Russia has no need of allies.”39 In his writings of the 1880s, he grounded his economic ideas on a conception of the deep religious faith of the Russian people. His ideas in this respect were close to Pobedonostsev’s, whom he regarded as the most highly cultured and intelligent Russian he knew and who shared Witte’s sense that industrial technology was necessary for Russia. Economic doctrine, Witte believed, had to be based on Orthodox faith, which protected the Russian people from socialist doctrines. In his first extended work, an analysis of

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railroad freight rates, published in 1883, Witte presented Orthodoxy as the basis of social morality: religion would instill love in the lower classes—that is, respect or obedience—and would lead the upper classes to exemplify the ethos of work and simplicity. Such a change in the attitudes of many Russians of all classes, he thought, would result from the ongoing revitalization of the Orthodox church. Witte’s brochure, Regarding Nationalism: National Economy and Friedrich List, published in 1888, set forth List’s arguments for protection of national industry. He found the 1841 work of the German liberal a powerful statement of the importance of industrial development to a nation’s greatness. List had looked to Britain as a model, then developed his own arguments for governmental protection of native industry against British competition. Protective tariffs had spared German industry the effects of British competition, and Witte looked to Germany as a model for Russia.40 When appointed in August 1892, Witte embarked on his tasks as the bearer of a national spiritual mission led by the tsar. His first step was to attend a religious service in the Ministry’s chapel. The priest was the popular Father John of Kronstadt. Witte saw the emperor as the single protector of the good of the people. The lofty power of Russian monarchs, he believed, enabled them to avoid “the conditions that twist the soul and close one’s eyes to what one doesn’t wish to see.” The tsars did not harbor the selfish motives of ordinary mortals, “the egotistical and material interests that often spoil the human heart.”41 This statement of the moral supremacy of the autocracy, echoing the views of Pobedonostev, justified the state’s operation of the railroads because only the monarch could pursue the common good of Russia. “In the hands of the government of the tsar, who belongs to all social classes and to none, railroads cannot and will not ever consciously serve as the tool of estate or propertied privilege, or for the conscious maintenance of inequality.” Rather they served the interests of the whole people, “as a means of giving the people access to the highest blessings of culture, education, and plenty.”42 Witte recruited a large number of talented, energetic officials from the provinces into his ministry. This younger generation of officials shared his faith in paternalistic state guardianship, opeka, to advance the economy and change rural administrative institutions, particularly the peasant commune. With Alexander’s backing, Witte worked toward balancing the budget, by sharply increasing excise taxes and seeking foreign loans and investment in Russian industry. Against criticisms that such investment would turn Russia into a foreign colony, Witte replied that the Russian state was too strong to be subjected to foreign powers; it would use Western technology and investment to build the Russian economy. The building of the economy, however, depended on enormous exactions from the rural population, which the government used to balance the budget, subsidize industry, and pay off foreign loans. The high excise taxes introduced under Vyshnegradskii led to the further impoverishment of rural

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Russia and contributed to the great famine of 1891. But when Witte assumed the office of minister of finance in the midst of the famine, he continued the policies of borrowing heavily abroad and taxing the rural population. He maintained the high tariffs that would protect Russian industry, even if it raised the prices of industrial goods for rural landholders. Witte’s policies were based on a Katkovian trust in the autocratic state to contain social unrest and his belief that the peasant population would remain humble and faithful subjects of the monarch. His industrial policies alienated the provincial nobility, who witnessed the government subsidizing and encouraging industry while paying what they regarded as scant attention to their needs. The building of industry both increased the ranks of the opposition among the nobility and led to the growth of an industrial proletariat with a great concentration of workers in the capital. The grandiose designs inspired by the National myth disregarded the apprehensions of traditional conservatives and bred new social and political forces that the government found increasingly difficult to contain. Witte’s major initiative, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, also figured in his vision of a rejuvenated autocracy resuming its status as a dominant power. The railroad sought to advance the goal, long sought by the tsar, of the administrative Russification of Siberia. But for Witte the Trans-Siberian promised gains beyond the administrative unification and economic development of the empire. He shared the enthusiasm in high governmental spheres for Russia’s cultural tasks in Asia, what Theodore Von Laue described as “imperialist exultation.” He viewed the Siberian railroad as a symbol and as an instrument of Russia’s progress and might, allowing Russian penetration of the eastern reaches of the empire and then Asian markets beyond Russia’s borders.43 In the 1890s, Witte began to propagate a national imperialism that exalted the Russian nation as the bearer of a higher Orthodox cultural tradition beyond Russia’s borders into the Far East. He fell under the influence of the Buriat Lamaist healer Peter Badmaev, who boasted that he could foment rebellions in China and inner-Asia among the native population and convince them to accept the authority of the Russian tsar. He also introduced Badmaev to the heir, who listened sympathetically to these schemes. The atmosphere of heady confidence in St. Petersburg lent Russia’s mission in the East a sense of destiny, of coming triumphs and conquests. In a dispatch of July 1895, the German ambassador Prince Radolin, noted the swaggering confidence reigning in the upper echelons of the Russian officer corps about their mission in Asia. “In short, everything I hear blends into one single voice, which says that in time Russia is destined for world domination, starting with the East and Southeast, which are as yet unspoiled by the cancer of European civilization. . . . These are not just a few single exalted individuals who think and speak this way—this is the general view that one encounters everywhere.”44

The Life and Death of a Russian Tsar

The Imperial Family and the Court Since the reign of Nicholas I, the court had represented the ceremonial center of the Russian administration, an epitome of the Russian state. Court titles or ranks rewarded officials who won the favor of their superiors or the throne. They could appear in the precincts of their sovereign and enjoy the reflected glory in their offices in Petersburg or the provinces. The scenarios of the previous reigns lent relationships between sovereign and servitor a sentimental and personal character. The official received the personal recognition of the monarch who addressed him by name and recalled forebears and relatives, suggesting familiar, family ties. The court ceremonies played out the scenarios of the sovereigns, uniting the participants in a sentimental bond with the throne. By all appearances the court flourished in Alexander III’s reign, its festivities providing the show expected of the Russian monarchy. Social functions resumed in the winter of 1882–83. Lavish occasions took place at the Winter Palace, attended by up to 8,000 guests, and the Anichkov Palace, where the imperial family resided every winter, with the exception of 1892, when they were cancelled and the 200,000 rubles assigned to famine relief. Gracious socializing replaced the discord of politics. Oppositional salons closed. Society “danced more and criticized less. . . . Politics ceased to interest the public,” Catherine Radziwill wrote, “because, it was felt, this was a subject which the Sovereign liked to reserve to himself.”1 The round of balls, breakfasts, and receptions that lasted from New Year’s until Lent demonstrated the staying power of the monarchical order in Russia. The return of the social season was publicized in the popular press. The weekly illustrated Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia printed brief descriptions and full page reproductions of drawings and gravures of court events, beginning with the great winter ball in the Winter Palace of January 19, 1883, attended by 2,800 members of the court, the military, the governmental elite, and provincial governors and marshalls. The journal cited Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik, “there has not been the glitter, animation, and unconstrained merriment of this first great ball of their majesty in the halls of the palace for a long time.” A two-page spread of black and white drawings by Karl Brozh presented a montage of five scenes from the event.2

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The National myth introduced a disjuncture between the native symbols consecrated by the myth and the Western ceremonies that united the principal elements of the administrative and military elite with the Russian sovereign. During Alexander’s reign, artistic motifs from the Russian past, presented in “the Russian style” indicated the court’s national character without suggesting a renunciation of the West. Fashion evoked national associations with Russian culture: decorative art, dress, and architecture allowed the imperial family and the court to appear Russian without repudiating the Western culture that elevated the monarchy. Alexander’s younger brother, Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, who was the president of the Academy of Arts, took the lead in favoring the new taste. The initial display of the Russian style was the gala costume ball he gave at his palace on the Neva, on January 25, 1883. The main halls of the palace were decorated to resemble old Russian chambers. The 250 guests came in costumes of boyars, Scythians, Varangians, and citizens of Novgorod, and one lady as a rusalka, or mermaid, from the Dnepr River. The costumes were designed on the basis of careful historical research. A report in Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia marveled, “It was as if all pre-Petrine Rus’ was resurrected and had sent its representatives to the ball.”3 Although the program followed the traditional sequence of Western dances, and the menu was European, the grand duke also served chestnuts, cloudberries, cranberries, and black currants, to suggest a national taste. We witness a change in the meaning of masquerade, from the national costume ball presented in Moscow in 1849 for Nicholas I. Then, a pageant of noblemen and noble ladies entertained the court nobility, who came in their usual dress.4 Now the entire court found a sense of solidarity and identification from their brief contact with the Russian past. Vladimir and the grand duchess Maria Pavlovna, dressed as boyar and boyar’s wife, greeted Alexander and Maria Fedorovna with bread and salt. The scene was shown in a popular lithograph based on a drawing from Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (fig. 24). The empress wears the bejeweled robes of a tsaritsa of Moscow. But Alexander comes in the general’s uniform of the Cavalry of the Artillery. He follows the early nineteenth-century practice, when men of the court did not wear costumes. The emperor thus remains an observer of, rather than a participant in the pageant, paying his respects to the Muscovite past, while maintaining his image as avatar of the Petersburg elite. In 1885 and 1886, Grand Duke Vladimir had the lower dining room of his palace redesigned as an old Russian chamber, with painted vaults and ceiling and richly decorated wood panels. Otherwise, the court continued to follow Western styles, though Alexander did have the musicians at palace balls dress in red Russian-style caftans. The empress, Maria Fedorovna, lent the court its éclat, offsetting her husband’s brooding presence with her charm. She danced and greeted the guests at the tables graciously, while he made the tour of the tables “with a bored

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24. Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna bring bread and salt to their imperial majesties at the costume ball of January 25, 1883. Chromolithograph.

look, rarely addressing a word to anyone, and went finally to sit, as if relieved of his corvée, next to Countess Vorontsova, to whom he owed no such payment.”5 The social life of the court thrived, but it had become the domain of the empress, relegated to the female sphere, and therefore of secondary political significance. Russian empresses had always presided at such occasions, but the emperor and his suite remained the central figures. The accounts of the court of Alexander III, written principally by women, focus on the figure of the empress. They dwell on the gems, the finery, the receptions and salons at the great houses of the capital. Alexander III tried to give the administration and management of the court a more Russian character. The ministers of the court under Alexander II had been Vladimir and Alexander Adlerberg, scions of the Baltic German nobility. Russians were more prominent in Alexander III’s entourage, particularly generals of his suite who had seen combat in the Caucasus and in the Russo-Turkish War. Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, Alexander III’s minister of the imperial court, had distinguished himself in the Caucasus and Turkestan and was at Alexander’s side at Rushchuk. From a wealthy,

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Russian aristocratic family, he had collaborated with Rostislav Fadeev in the Holy Retinue and shared the vision of a national monarchy. For his estate in Tambov Province, he built a flamboyant brick Moscow-Iaroslavlstyle church, designed by Nicholas Sultanov, which was displayed to the public in the journal Zodchii.6 Alexander made known his determination to eliminate waste and reduce expenditures. Memoirs comment on his frugality, his efforts to end the extravagance of court suppers and to curtail excessive personnel. Wherever possible, he declined proposals for major improvements in the palaces and preferred repairs to replacement. Alexander also took a hard-headed, economic approach to members of the extended imperial family, his brothers, uncles, and cousins. He evicted the grand dukes living at court expense in the rooms of the Winter Palace and withdrew their right to help themselves to whatever was needed in the way of furniture, dinnerware, and other items from the imperial palaces. In 1886 he approved a new Law on the Imperial Family that limited membership to the children and grandchildren of reigning emperors, who would receive an allowance of 280,000 rubles a year from the court lands.7 Alexander abandoned the cordial family manner of his father, particularly the practice of allowing grand dukes to visit the emperor uninvited. He refused to tolerate the escapades of his uncles, Constantine and Nicholas Nikolaevich—who had started second families with ballerinas. He punished these wayward relatives like a stern patriarch. He barred Constantine Nikolaevich from residence in Petersburg, and Nicholas Nikolaevich from service. The young duke Michael Mikhailovich paid for a marriage with a foreign countess against the emperor’s wishes by losing his military and court rank in the army and being forced into exile abroad. On the other hand, the emperor raised those grand dukes who enjoyed his respect to prominent positions. He appointed his uncle Michael Nikolaevich chair of the State Council in 1881. His brother, Vladimir, a connoisseur of art, remained president of the Academy of Art, and Aleksei Aleksandrovich continued to serve as chief of the fleet. He appointed the poet Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich, the oldest son of Constantine Nikolaevich, president of the Academy of Sciences in 1889. Alexander placed his greatest trust in his brother Sergei, who was the most zealous adherent of the national myth, and whom he named governor-general of Moscow in 1891. •

Alexander was a devoted family man, but he did not present his family as a symbol of the moral supremacy of the monarchy and the imperial court, as had Nicholas I. Alexander, Maria Fedorovna, and the children made their expected appearance at imperial ceremonies, but they did not play roles dramatizing the transcendent humanity of the emperor. During the winter social season the family resided in the congenial chambers of Anichkov and not at the Winter Palace. The contrast with Nicholas I is indicative. Nicholas

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also had loved Anichkov, and he and the empress Alexandra Fedorovna had regarded the move to the Winter Palace at his accession as an expulsion from paradise. Nonetheless, Nicholas resided at the Winter Palace and presented his family there as the centerpiece of the court. Alexander’s private life assumed its own sacred character. His family constituted a realm apart from the state, the object of primary loyalty and affection. Alexander doted on his children and frequently chopped wood, hunted, and went fishing with them. The imperial family took on the middleclass ideal of separation of private from public life. It inhabited its own sequestered settings, apart from the capital. Gatchina remained Alexander’s favored suburban residence, though the family stayed at Peterhof in June and July for the summer social events. He avoided Tsarskoe Selo, which recalled painful memories of his father’s affair with Dolgorukova. At Gatchina, he lived a life, “more like that of a private country squire than that generally supposed to be led by a Sovereign.” The family occupied small, low-ceilinged rooms overstuffed with Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac and took advantage of the magnificent parks for shooting, boating, and long walks. Members of the court were not attracted to the town, which they found dull and quiet. For the court and the educated public, Gatchina was a scene of confinement, resembling a prison as well as a fortress. The feelings and experiences of the imperial family’s private life found representation in private objects, miniatures of decorative art. Alexander liked Russian art and collected folk handicrafts, ceramics from Gzhel, clay figures from Dumkogo. He and the empress had a particular taste for the jewelry and decorative art that had been perfected and gained new appeal in fin-de-siècle France. In France, Deborah Silverman writes, objects of art decorating the household represented “nature against history, private intimacy against public monumentality, feminine caprice against male rationality.”8 In the Russian Easter egg, the jeweler Carl Fabergé created a work of decorative art that expressed the feelings of the imperial family. The Fabergé eggs reduced the broad themes of Alexander’s scenario to the familiar, picturesque objects that could be owned and appreciated within the confines of the family. Their splendor and importance indicate the shift in the locus of representation, from the arena of the court, to the private setting, where the symbols and events of the imperial house could become the object of the members’ own fascination and adulation. Beginning in 1885, a Fabergé egg became the usual Easter gift of the emperor to the empress and took on the character of a keepsake of the imperial family. The subjects of the Fabergé eggs were chosen to suit the emperor’s taste. Fabergé cleared every aspect of their design with the minister of the court, who, it is evident, was acting under the instructions of the tsar himself. According to tradition, the Easter egg as symbol originated with Mary Magdalena, the patron saint of the emperor’s mother, Maria Aleksandrovna, and of his wife, Maria Fedorovna. The egg symbolized Christ’s resurrection, and Alexander chose the egg as the symbol of the death and resurrection of the

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imperial family and the spiritual rebirth of the nation. The earliest surviving Fabergé egg, given by Alexander to Maria Fedorovna in 1885 was in the form of a golden yolk that enclosed a hen. It contained Fabergé’s trademark “surprise” in the center; the most important symbol was the smallest, the closest to the interior, in this case the egg, the symbol of rebirth as well as the mother. The “Resurrection” egg of 1889 was a single piece of crystal containing a realistic scene of the Resurrection sculpted within. Fabergé’s succession of flower eggs in the 1890s carried on the themes of spring and rebirth. The first of these, the Imperial Spring Flowers Egg, an egg-shaped case of white maple covered with leather, concealed a small egg of red enamel, decorated with rococo-style scroll work. The small egg opened to reveal a bower of flowers of white chalcedony and garnets, which could be removed from its golden base. •

Alexander III’s travels also had a family character. From 1883, the imperial family spent two to three months each year away from Petersburg and the suburban estates. They visited Livadia in the Crimea first in 1884 and most years returned for visits of one to several months. They lived in the modest Small Palace while the larger palace, Massandra, was under construction in Louis XIII style. Despite its baroque exterior and elaborate parks, Massandra had wood-paneled small rooms and low ceilings that gave Alexander a sense of comfort. He also built a small hunting lodge on the estate. For the imperial family, Livadia was a retreat from official Petersburg. The heir, Nicholas Aleksandrovich, described in his diary the warmth and informality of the celebration of the emperor and empress’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1891. “Most pleasant was that there was nothing official about the celebration. Everyone wore frock-coats (siurtuki), and it was completely patriarchal!”9 Other trips included cruises on the imperial yachts through the Finnish archipelagoes, and trips to Denmark, which took place nearly every year and lasted for six to ten weeks. Alexander most closely realized his ideal of private life among his Danish relatives, far from the burdens of his office and fears for his security. He felt himself a welcome guest at Fredensborg palace where he enjoyed “romping on the sequestered lawns . . . with the children of his royal relatives who knew and adored him as ‘Uncle Sasha.’ ”10 The only extensive ceremonial trip of Alexander’s reign, from late August to October 1888, put on display the theme of the national, Russian character of the empire. The family traveled south through the Ukraine to Elizavetgrad for several days of maneuvers, then swung northwest for a week of hunting at the Spala hunting preserve in Poland. Then they journeyed east to the Cossack territories, where the heir received his ceremonial induction as Cossack ataman. From September 25 to October 13 they traveled through the Caucasus Mountains. They returned by ship to Sevastopol for

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their trip to Moscow. On October 17 their train derailed near the station of Borki in Kharkov Province. The appearance of the family laid claim to these border territories as Russian land. It provided an occasion to invoke the synchronic mode that disclosed traces of an original Russian or Christian domination. This was the message of his visit to the Polish town of Kholm, on the edge of the Ukraine, where the family stopped on their way to Spala. Kholm exemplified the goals of the policy of Russification. The nobility of Kholm was Polish and Catholic, the peasantry Ukrainian and adherents of the Uniate faith. In the 1860s the government began an effort to create a new Russian province of Kholm. In 1875 the Russian government had “united” the Uniates with the Orthodox church. After that, the local administration endeavored to force the peasants into Orthodox congregations, but these efforts met with strong resistance. The account of Alexander’s visit in Moskovskie Vedomosti described Kholm as part of the Russian land. One had to be present to understand the importance of “an event experienced by Kholm Rus’, resurrecting her, as once in ancient times a drink of fresh water resurrected the semi-legendary bogatyr’.” The crowds greeted Alexander on his way to the Kiril-Methodius Church, which had been built in 1875. They awaited the act of “union of the Russian Tsar with the Russian people of the borderland representing part of the ancient Russian-Galician principality.” The basis of this union was the popular faith in the Kholm Mother of God icon, by tradition painted by the disciple Luke and brought to the region by Saint Vladimir himself. The newspaper described the “touching” scene of the tsar worshiping together with peasants. “Everywhere in the vast cathedral you could see simple cloth caftans of the local Russian peasantry, you could see the burnt peasant faces. Crude peasant working hands folded, making the cross and zealously praying, with their Tsar. You could see eyes full of tears of joy and divine rapture.”11 In the Caucasus Mountains, Alexander reviewed Russian troops in each town and received numerous delegations from the region and Central Asia. In Batum he attended the laying of the cornerstone of an Orthodox church. The bishop described the conquest of the region as the restoration of Christianity, whose earlier presence was proved by the ruins in the region. Christianity had been destroyed by “the triumph of the sword,” but Alexander’s father, “uniting this region with Russia, restored Christianity and the new cathedral will strengthen it under our power. Here justice and not the sword rules.”12 The words “Russian land” defined the new, national meaning of the Russian empire. The subjugation of other nationalities elevated Russia to the level of an imperial nation and justified the colorful exploits of the Russian forces. The books the imperial family read about history and geography gave confirmation to the myth. The imperial libraries of the late nineteenth

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century, Marc Raeff noted, contained little about other nationalities, except for highly embellished romanticizations.13 The eastern regions served as scenes of Russian heroism in exotic settings, adventure stories that gave substance to traditions of heroic conquest.

Borki and the Invocation of Miracle On October 17, 1888, the imperial train returning from the south derailed at the station of Borki, leaving twenty-one dead and thirty-seven injured. The railroad car carrying the imperial family capsized, but all members escaped without serious injury. The disaster was presented as proof of the miraculous grace shed by God on the tsar and the Russian people. The imperial manifesto of October 23, 1888, stated that the miracle was not only the result of divine intervention: it was God’s response to “to the fervent prayers, which thousands and thousands of sons of Russia daily make for Us.” The tsar declared that his survival was owing to the holiness of the Russian people. He called upon Divine Providence to give him the strength to complete his “great service,” which he had promised to fulfill in his coronation prayer. The congratulatory literature elaborated on the themes of this manifesto. General E. V. Bogdanovich wrote a brochure emphasizing both the heroic role of Alexander III in taking charge of the evacuation of the wounded and the popular enthusiasm over the tsar’s survival. He reported the religious celebrations of the event, as well as the dedication of churches, chapels and icons, and the establishment of an annual memorial church service on October 17 to commemorate the bestowal of divine mercy upon Russia. Bogdanovich concluded by setting the event in the seventeenth-century narrative of “troubles.” Just as God had preserved the tsar, the tsar was preserving Russia.14 The invocation of miracle marked a fundamental change of emphasis in the tsar’s scenario. Before the accident, Orthodoxy was the agency of Russia’s providential history, exemplified by the Russian tsar. Now miracle suggested a loss of trust in the forces of history and actions in defiance of reason and history, realizing the unbelievable. The belief in miracle also brought the tsar’s scenario closer to the simple faith of the people and their veneration of miracle icons, which became increasingly popular in the decades after emancipation. During this period, B. V. Sapunov writes, icons “penetrated all spheres of the social and personal lives of people of that time, schools, special educational institutions, state offices, private enterprises, hospitals, soldiers’ barracks, even drinking houses.” The people turned to icons to help them in their worldly travails and give solace in disappointment and grief. Mother of God icons gained especial popularity, particularly those with figures of the indigent and suffering filling the edges of the image. Their enthusiasm was encouraged by the Russian Orthodox Church, which pro-

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moted the Marian cult as a way to appeal to mass sentiment. Sapunov found 288 versions of the Mother of God in late nineteenth-century icons. These icons were looked to for immediate displays of miracle, for the signs of divine intervention, marking Russia as a chosen holy land, a land of prodigies born of prayer.15 After the Borki accident, miracle icons were presented as both talismans divinely bestowed upon Russia and symbols of the bond between tsar and people. The abbot Ignatii published a pamphlet that connected the tsar’s escape with a miracle that had taken place in Vologda on October 17, 1655. On that date, a procession of the cross bearing the miracle icon “All-Kind Christ” was followed by the sudden end of a plague. The residents believed that their prayers before the same icon in 1888 had brought divine intercession.16 A brochure, Bright Days, published in Moscow by one E. Poselianin described the “miracle of October 17” as an example of “God’s love for man,” like God’s placing Jesus Christ on earth to suffer for man’s sins. The entire railroad car was wrecked, Poselianin claimed, except for the wall holding an icon of the Savior, which remained untouched. God in this way gave evidence of his existence and indicated that the Orthodox church was “the true path to His service.”17 An icon “The Miracle of God’s Grace for the Imperial Family and Russia, October 17, 1888,” showing the patron saints of the members of the imperial family, was widely disseminated in photographic copies. After Borki, Moscow appeared not only as the birthplace of the monarchy, but as the source of miracle, to be exalted to preserve the union between tsar and people. Poselianin’s Bright Days declared that the emperor “should have perished according to natural laws. But the “power that [Moscow] had professed and that had exalted her revoked these laws.”18 In February 1891, Alexander III openly demonstrated the special status to be accorded to Moscow by appointing his brother, Sergei, to replace the liberal V. A. Dolgorukov, as governor-general of the city. The commander in chief of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment from 1887 to 1891, Sergei was a tall, handsome, guards officer, completely absorbed in the life of his regiment and the boon comradeship of his subordinates. He was also a fervent believer in the idea of a divinely chosen national autocracy derived from original sources of Christianity in the Holy Land. Sergei visited Jerusalem twice to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and actively participated in the Russian Orthodox Palestine society, which encouraged Russian pilgrimages to Middle Eastern holy places. He and his wife, the grand duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna, a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, who remained a devout Lutheran, despite the usual requirement of conversion to Orthodoxy, attended the dedication of the Church of Maria Magdalena in Jerusalem in 1888. The appointment of a grand duke to the position of governor-general of Moscow represented an extraordinary intrusion of the family into the civil structure of the state. It meant placing the government of the city under a

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member of the imperial family with direct access to the tsar. The assigning of such power recalled the fragmentation of the early Russian appanage system, when the uncles and brothers of the tsar preserved rights and authority over particular regions.19 It expressed a sense that political power was the private possession of the family. This led Sergei, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote, “to try to turn Moscow into his private domain.”20 Moskovskie Vedomosti made clear the significance of the appointment. It was a sign that “the principles and ideas that always formed the basis of the world-view of Moscow and that correspond to the true good of Russia, have begun to predominate in her political life.”21 Moscow would show its purely Russian character by ridding itself of its Jewish population. Alexander instructed the minister of interior Ivan Durnovo to expel the Jews from Moscow because, he said, “My brother does not want to go to Moscow unless it is cleared of Jews.” Durnovo drafted a memorandum on March 28, 1891, the first day of Passover, then another in the following year that allowed Sergei to expel large numbers of Jews from the capital. Alexander signed both without the approval of the Committee of Ministers.22 In subsequent years, two thirds of the 30,000 Jews of Moscow were forced to leave the city. Those remaining were subjected to various indignities, including the closing, under government pressure, of a new synagogue built at considerable expense. •

The image of a transformed Moscow, under the direction of the tsar’s brother, created a sense of power and national unity, just as Alexander was encountering disappointment in efforts to regain control over the Russian state. The State Council had stymied the program of counter-reforms. The abolition of the privileges of the Lifland and Estland nobility had proved unfeasible due to the social unrest in these areas. The greatest blow to the claim to efficacy, however, came with the famine of 1891 and the cholera epidemic that followed in its wake. Mass starvation and disease claimed as many as 400,000 lives. The government took measures to assist the transport of grain to the stricken provinces, and the tsar appointed a committee, with the heir Nicholas Aleksandrovich as chair, to oversee state and charitable famine relief. But the lack of storehouses and the difficulties organizing supplies exposed the weakness of the administration’s own resources and forced the government to rely on charitable and zemstvo institutions. In this respect, the famine represented a divide as great as that of the Crimean War, exposing the failing administrative capacities of the government just as that war had discredited its military capacities. It energized voluntary and independent organizations as well as zemstvo work, augmenting the active political groups that would enter the opposition in the next decade. Once again, ceremony produced a show of national unity and power. In May 1893, Alexander III returned to Moscow to celebrate the tenth

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anniversary of the coronation and to lay the cornerstone of the Alexander II monument. The press reported an exceptionally warm reception. The grand duke Constantine noted in his diary on May 15 that the newspapers indicated that the rejoicing was greater than at the coronation itself.23 The magazines Niva and Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia published illustrations of the tsar’s procession in the Kremlin. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsia took the explosion of enthusiasm as a sign of the power of the tsar. It referred to Alexander’s inspection of the Black Sea fleet, before his return to Moscow, and described “colossal battleships,” which were “the last word in shipbuilding,” speedy cruisers, gunboats. They were “brilliant proof of what could be accomplished in a brief seven-year period by the obedient fulfillment and correct understanding of the sovereign will.” The Moscow festivities “powerfully helped the upsurge of the spirit of true Russian people.”24

Death and Apotheosis By 1894 it had become clear that the major triumphs of Alexander III’s reign lay in the defeat of the revolutionary movement and the maintenance of peace abroad. He had lost his momentum in transforming the state and, according to Nicholas Epanchin’s memoirs, his faith that his ministers could enact his will. In the last few years of his reign, he became increasingly dependent on the triumvirate of generals of his suite—Vorontsov-Dashkov, Cherevin, and Richter—to make decisions. He asked them to screen all reports and recommendations coming to him from the ministers.25 Alexander III’s untimely death at age fifty-two on October 20, 1894, became the occasion for the monarchy as well as both the Russian and international press to lament the tragedy of a mighty symbol of nation and peace, struck down prematurely by illness. Alexander’s death was a moment of glory that would preserve his image of courage, integrity, and unswerving authority for future decades. The European press reacted to the death with statements of bereavement and admiration for the tsar many regarded as a despot.26 The conveying of the emperor’s coffin from Livadia to Moscow and Petersburg broadened the amplitude of the mourning, which the accounts presented as a truly national display of grief. It demonstrated to Europe, and particularly to France, the popularity and the viability of Russian monarchy. Charles Lowe described the ceremonies as “a grand spectacular funeraldrama in five-acts with a variety of interludes,” during which Alexander “may be said to have been canonized.”27 The most elaborate and impressive observances took place in Moscow. Thousands gathered along the streets, houses were draped in black. The throngs watched in grief and awe as the simple carriage following a procession passed to the tolling of the many bells of Moscow. Lithographs and

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photographs of the entry of the coffin to the city and the approach to the Kremlin were published in Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia and L’Illustration. The new tsar, Nicholas II, led the procession on foot, his head bare, walking slowly, stopping briefly at the Town Duma and at the Iberian Chapel. “The whole people, like a single person, bared their heads, as the holy dust of the deceased emperor approached,” the Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia reporter wrote. “The picture was majestic. From all sides one heard sobbing and weeping.”28 Most significant was the lying in state of Alexander III in the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin, the burial place of the pre-Petrine tsars. Foreign correspondents were admitted into the cathedral to witness the glittering gold catafalque and hear the Service for the Dead. “Many of those present were unable to restrain their emotion,” the correspondent of the Daily Chronicle wrote. “Tears were seen rolling down the cheeks of noble ladies. Sobs broke on the ear almost rhythmically with the cadences of the sacred music. Evidently, the late tsar was deeply esteemed and beloved by those within his circle.”29 The eulogies printed in the Russian monarchist press evoked a legendary image that submerged the contradictions between his Russian and Western features. Articles in Moskovkie Vedomosti stressed the distinctive Russian characteristics of his rule. The analogy with his patron saint, Alexander Nevskii, was drawn, emphasizing the prince’s defense of Russia against attack from the West: the Tatar yoke symbolized not bondage but Western influence. The Official Nationality under Nicholas I had represented a kind of “bureaucratic patriotism” (kazennyi patriotizm), one Iu. Nikolaev asserted, but “was not embodied in living phenomena.” Nicholas I “himself still was not fully conscious of the complete separateness of Russia from Europe by its type, was not aware of the complete separateness (otdel’nost’) of Russian Autocracy from West European monarchism.”30 The press portrayed Alexander as a Russian person, sharing the idealized features of his subjects, a man of the people. A Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia columnist evoked the national image Alexander had left behind. The late Tsar was a complete Russian man. From the good-natured face, polite smile, the blue eyes with their soft glitter, the bright red beard, broad and thick, the powerfully built body, the measured movements, terse speech, the simplicity of manner, directness, the thirst for truth, from all of this to the steadfastness in work, loyalty in friendship, and including the wholehearted love of his family—this was a Russian man.31

Moskovskie Vedomosti described how Alexander had renewed Russian customs at court, the slavlenie, a Christmas procession of the clergy to the homes of worshipers for prayers and hymns (which had been curbed by Peter the Great in 1724), and molitvoslovie, readings from the missal at home at New Year’s. He loved Russian art, Russian writers, particularly Dostoevskii and the playwright Alexander Ostrovskii.32

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The Petersburg newspaper, Novoe Vremia, claimed that Alexander had reconciled new and old Russia. It was as if new Russia in His person found a brother in these ancient church walls in Old Rus’, and recognized in the old Rus’ the precepts without which the Russian people would not have distinguished themselves as mightily among the Slavic tribe and the peoples of Europe. From now on there is no difference between old and new Rus’.33

Alexander as an exemplar of Russia’s humanitarian, Western character was the theme of a controversial speech that the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii delivered as chairman of the Society of History and Ancient Russian Studies at Moscow University. Kliuchevskii praised Alexander for restoring Russia’s prestige in the eyes of Europe. “The tsar of the Russian people was the sovereign of international peace and order,” which confirmed “the historical calling of Russia.” He then affirmed a central theme of Alexander’s scenario, declaring, “In Russia’s political organization, the idea of the people is expressed in the will of the Tsar, and the people’s will becomes the thought of their Tsar.”34 The speech, delivered in a closed meeting, immediately reached the public and stirred indignation in liberal circles, particularly among the students, eighteen of whom were expelled. The presentation of Alexander’s death in the Russian and foreign press created the legend of beloved and forceful national ruler. Alexander III had come to represent integrity, responsibility, predictability—a ruler whose image of strength had prevented war and restored order in Russia and prestige to the Russian throne. Despite the famine, despite the absence of public participation, these evocations left the impression that Russia was better off and more powerful than in 1881, a sense that was widely held among officials, and most important by Nicholas II when he ascended the throne. The most striking description of Alexander’s death was the account written by the priest Father Ioann of Kronstadt. It was remarkable in that a charismatic priest rather than a member of the court clergy had been summoned to pray at the tsar’s bedside and had been allowed to describe his experiences in the press. The priest portrayed Alexander as a humble Christian who found succor in prayer and the sacrament of communion and presented himself as a representative of the Russian people, who could pray for the alleviation of the tsar’s suffering and his salvation. When Ioann saw Alexander for the first time on October 11, he assured him that “all of Russia is praying for you.” The tsar walked into another room, knelt, and invited him to pray with him. “His majesty prayed with feeling, bowed his head, and turned deeply inwards.”35 The power of Alexander III’s image was perhaps best described by an anonymous Russian opponent of the regime who wrote a pamphlet questioning the idealization of the tsar. “Finally, he has become the mythological center of that repulsive cult of falsehood that has been conscientiously devised by all those interested in the perpetuation of autocracy and illegality around

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the presumedly ‘peasant tsar’ (muzhitskii tsar’), and ‘peacemaker tsar’.” In the process of mourning, the good-natured Russian man, the author suggested, was willing to accept these characterizations as a rite of mourning. The Russian man was undiscriminating, all-forgiving—tendencies that reflected his lack of self-respect and that grew stronger from “the feeling of honoring the ‘deceased’ that is so vital in thousands of simple Russian hearts.”36

Nicholas II as Heir and Husband

The Family and the Classroom Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894 imbued with the imagery and historical mission propounded by the national myth. The popular and historical mandate that elevated him as God-chosen monarch made superfluous the pedagogical ideal of the upbringing of heirs. Nicholas did not have to be uplifted to realize sublime moral ideals or to be transformed into a model servant of the Russian state. The importance assigned to formal education accordingly diminished, reduced to the acquisition of the knowledge and the skills required of any young man of high birth entering governmental service. The national myth also desacralized the institutions and officials of the Russian state. Nicholas grew up suspicious of the officials and the culture of the Russian court. For Nicholas II, autocracy would reside within the walls of imperial palaces and churches, where it preserved the spiritual heritage of the past and the Russian people. Formal education did little to shape the views of Nicholas II as monarch. Alexander III did not believe that the heir had to receive special education and training to prepare him for the high office of emperor. Indeed, he tried to protect Nicholas from the consciousness of his destiny and the burdensome obligations that some day he would have to bear. He ruled out a rigorous program of studies. When Nicholas reached the age of eight, Alexander warned his first teacher to limit instruction to spelling and multiplication tables and told her not to allow the boy to think of the throne. While this may have been good advice for a boy of eight, the same principle governed Nicholas’s later education as well. Alexander treated his children strictly, allowing no contradiction. Nicholas adored his father, but regarded him as a distant and in many ways intimidating figure. Nicholas did take on his father’s love for physical activity. His diaries of the 1880s tell of outings together, sawing and chopping wood, horseback riding, and hunting. He also shared Alexander’s fascination with the beauty and drama of the Orthodox liturgy. He knew the service well and loved to sing and lead a choir. He was inspired by the stories of the Passion and the Resurrection and would stand gazing on the image of the Mother of God, and set candles before the icons. “His cherished wish was to dress himself in a gold stikharion, to stand near the priest in the middle of the church, and at the time of anointing, to hold the sacred cup.”1 Nicholas displayed his father’s strong feelings of national pride and contempt for other nationalities, particularly Germans. In a letter of 1878,

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Pobedonostev described Nicholas, then ten years old, eagerly awaiting popular pictures of the Russo-Turkish War.2 In 1880, at age twelve, Nicholas wrote a comic story about two Germans, whom he characterized as petty, selfish, stupid, and cowardly. They speak in broken Russian and constantly fight with each other. They duel and are placed in a fetid prison where they feed on mice and breathe the fumes from a nearby toilet. They are terrified by a spider they see at night. The devil takes them to hell, but they escape and continue their squabbling. As a young man Nicholas loved to tell stories about the awkwardness of Germans, who he believed were unable to adapt themselves to Russian manners and customs.3 Nicholas’s closest relationship was with his mother. By the 1870s, the suspicion of close mother-son bonds characteristic of earlier royal pedagogy had given way to an acceptance of emotional nurturing. Her preoccupation with the newborn grand duke Michael in 1878 greatly distressed Nicholas and his brother the grand duke George: they “seemed to dry up, to become dull. They began to eat and sleep poorly.”4 When he reached manhood, his expressions of love for his mother remained effusive. His letters invariably began with outpourings of affection and professions of sorrow that they were apart, feelings that appear to have been sincere. Maria Fedorovna was both his repository of trust and model for courteous behavior. He took on her manner of unremitting civility and charm and her capacity to endear without feeling attachment or showing real affection. Maria Fedorovna was the first Russian empress in the nineteenth century to take principal responsibility for her son’s education. Above all, she feared his teachers, who might compete for his affections and influence his views. She chose instructors who she felt confident would not dominate the heir. To limit contacts, she arranged their schedule so that no instructor taught Nicholas more than two days in succession. When Nicholas reached the age of ten, General Grigorii Danilovich was chosen to supervise his education. Danilovich was a member of the tsar’s suite and a friend of Alexander’s brothers, the grand dukes Paul and Sergei. Danilovich, like the generals who had supervised Alexander III’s and Nicholas Aleksandovich’s education, was concerned principally with discipline and obedience. He was known for his particularly rigid and intolerant views and his determination to protect the heir from outside influences. According to the grand duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Danilovich believed that “the mysterious forces emanating during the sacrament of taking the oath on the day of the coronation provided all the practical data required by a ruler.” While the grand duke may have simplified Danilovich’s viewpoint, the statement captures the belief that the Russian monarch’s authority was not related to knowledge or experience. Danilovich organized the education within Alexander III’s reclusive scenario, protecting the heir not only from the Russian public, but from the influences of the Westernized court as well. Nicholas detested Danilovich but accepted his authority. He obeyed in an exemplary manner, showing none of the willfulness character-

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istic of earlier grand dukes. “Never was it necessary to make an observation, to subdue resistance, to resort to rule,” his French teacher recalled. “Always an equable mood, a surprising spontaneity of obedience.”5 His teacher of tactics declared that the general had made of Nicholas “a moderate, punctilious old man.” Nicholas developed an extreme reserve and a shield of disingenuousness that enabled him to deal with conflicting views. Even Constantine Pobedonostsev deplored his lack of opinions, noting in 1899 that Nicholas had asked one of those close to him, “Why are you arguing? I always agree with everyone and then do things in my way.”6 The goal and organization of Nicholas’s education was to provide him with basic skills and knowledge without absorbing him and providing interests and commitments that could rival the influence of his parents and family. In this respect, Dominic Lieven has observed, his experience diverged greatly from monarchs elsewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were allowed to attend schools for part of their education. George V had attended Naval College, William II a gymnasium. Even Emperor Hirohito had studied at a “peers’ school.”7 These monarchs had shared some of the experience of conservative young men outside the military and the court. But such contact threatened the Russian heir’s security, and the National myth expressed a distrust of all Western education as alien and corrosive to Russia’s political heritage. The curriculum and his higher courses, which Nicholas pursued after 1884, included modern languages, history, mathematics, physics, chemistry, topography, and military science, but no classes on ancient history or ancient languages. The staff, like his father’s, included university professors, several of them figures of distinction. Nicholas’s history instructor was Egor Zamyslovskii, a specialist in seventeenth-century Russia from St. Petersburg University. Pobedonostev taught law and Michael Kapustin, a jurist from St. Petersburg University, international law. The former finance minister Nicholas Bunge lectured to him on political economy, economic policy, and finances from 1886 to 1889. Bunge responded to Alexander’s growing sympathy for interventionist policies and presented Nicholas with the arguments for increased, although cautious state involvement in the economy. Nicholas Beketov, a renowned scientist, taught him chemistry, and Michael Dragomirov, military science. Most of Nicholas’s instructors were intelligent and accomplished scholars, if not great minds, and the quality of the instruction can hardly be blamed, as it often is, for the limits of Nicholas’s knowledge and judgment. Peter Bark, finance minister from 1914 to 1917, an educated and able official, wrote in his memoirs that Nicholas had received, “from a young age a thorough training under the direction of the best teachers in Russia.”8 Contemporary accounts emphasized the breadth of his education as well as the tsarevich’s sharp intelligence and good memory. But the efforts of his parents and Danilovich to protect the heir from meaningful intellectual interaction deprived his lessons of meaning and

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influence. The caution and distrust of Alexander III’s scenario, dominated the classroom. According to one of Nicholas’s teachers, his instructors were told to lecture and not to question him, a principle precisely contrary to that followed by the instructors of Nicholas’s namesake in the early 1860s. His upbringing translated the suspicion of the intelligentsia, expressed in the National myth, into an indifference to or disdain for intellect in general. As a result, Bunge’s lessons made little impression on Nicholas. General Epanchin, one of his admirers was amazed that he knew nothing about simple economic terms like “tariff war” yet admitted his ignorance with nonchalance.9 The one subject that awoke Nicholas’s enthusiasm was history, a taste that he shared with his father. He studied Soloviev’s works and read historical journals and historical novels. In 1884, at the age of sixteen, he was appointed an honorary member of the Imperial Historical Society. But his historical reading was more a diversion than a source for deeper understanding of Russia’s past. Only Pobedonostev was allowed frequent access to the heir. Like Michael Speranskii, who taught Alexander II lessons on law (see chapter 9), Pobedonostsev asserted the proposition that monarchy is based on firm principles of law that flowed from the supreme power. But unlike Speranskii, he mentioned neither justice nor the importance of conscience in ruling the empire. He identified law with order: “A firm and rational government cannot exist without a firm principle of State order.” Constitutional ideas represented a special danger to Russia. The “ceaseless attempts” to introduce constitutions in Russia came “not from the people but from a few parties, or people who were ambitious or doctrinaire.” Western monarchies had degenerated since the second half of the eighteenth century. Only in England, which had a tradition of local self-government, had representative government succeeded and had “a consciousness of social duty and a firm feeling of national unity” developed. In Pobedonostsev’s evocation, the Russian empire was too diverse to form a nation state, and only the monarchy could prevent breakdown and turmoil. There was no soil for representative institutions, he wrote, “where there is not a whole nationality (natsional’nost’), but a motley variety of tribes, dialects and interests of a heterogeneous population, where fragmented parties, faiths and sects, are in constant struggle with each other, where the notion of civic freedom has not developed historically in inseparable unity with the notion of civic and public duty (as in England) but has arisen only under the influence of abstract teachings of the rights of man and universal equality (as in France).”10 By all accounts, Charles Heath, Nicholas’s English teacher, was the instructor he liked the most and who had the greatest influence on him. An English public school graduate and a former gentleman farmer, Heath had been a popular instructor at the Aleksandrovskii Lycée. With the easygoing urbane manner of the English gentleman, he displayed charm and intelligence without touching on matters that might become serious or offensive. Nicholas learned his excellent English from Heath and shared with him a

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love of the outdoors and sports. While Nicholas I assumed the persona of a Prussian commander, and Alexander II that of a German prince, Nicholas II had the nonchalance of an English gentleman.11

Public Presentations Nicholas II’s boyhood diaries and compositions have a tone and character quite different from those of previous heirs to the throne. They dwell on his family and his play and excursions at Gatchina and the other suburban estates. His classes and teachers are barely mentioned.12 Andrew Verner has noted the focus on the family in his diaries. The word semeistvo, referring to the larger, extended imperial family appears on nearly every page and he frequently refers to activities with the word “we” rather than I, as he engages in study and activity with his brother, George, or other members of the family.13 The family was his world. The imperial family’s visit to Moscow in July 1881, when Nicholas was thirteen, initiated him into the performance of his father’s national scenario. He beheld Russian monarchy as a festive union between tsar and people. A schoolroom composition expresses the excitement he felt as he looked down from the Red Staircase and saw the shouting people on the Kremlin square. “My God! What a majestic and touching picture!!! Thousands and thousands of bare heads. When Papa and Mama came through the doors and when Papa bowed to the people, such a deafening ‘Hoorah’ resounded that I shuddered and my ears rang. This ‘Hoorah’ continued until we reached the entrance of the Assumption Cathedral.” He recorded the same impression after his trip to Moscow the following year. He remembered the people’s displays of devotion that occurred during the trip along the Volga, the massive welcome of shouting people running through streets, whole families of peasants greeting him in boats as he approached Kostroma.14 Nicholas was fascinated by the shrines of Russia’s past in Moscow. His compositions describe his visits to the ancient chambers of the Kremlin palaces and the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which was nearing completion. He was especially impressed by the immensity and magnificence of the cathedral and could not take his eyes off two of the pictures, the betrayal of Christ by Judas and the death of Vladimir Monomakh. He described his first sight of the towers, walls, and cupolas of the Trinity Monastery and recalled the invasion by the Poles at the beginning of the seventeenth century “and how the Russian people courageously defended themselves and repulsed them.”15 Like his father, Nicholas regarded the court as an alien realm and court presentations as painful trials. His majority ceremony on his sixteenth birthday, May 6, 1884, was hardly an imposing or portentous event. Indeed, Alexander III instructed the foreign minister, Giers, to inform foreign diplomats that the celebration would be reduced in size in order to spare the heir

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embarrassment.16 Nicholas’s diary entry on the ceremony is succinct. He mentions that he wore the ataman uniform. “I am very happy that it all went well. I received Prussian, Greek, and Danish orders.”17 A classroom composition he wrote shortly afterward presents the day as little more than a test of nerves. He viewed the ceremony as a frightening moment, interfering with the pleasant course of his everyday life. It inspired no awe or sense of the loftiness of the occasion.18 Previous majority ceremonies marked the beginning of a new stage in life when the heir was allowed greater independence and played a more active role in court ceremonies. They celebrated the heir’s passing into manhood, taking on the responsibilities of his father’s successor. But Alexander III clearly assigned little significance to the ceremony and hardly treated his son with greater regard than before. Indeed, as an economy measure, he announced that Nicholas would forgo the 300,000 ruble allowance, to which he was legally entitled after the majority, and would continue to live supported by his parents. His induction into military training was a festive and joyous moment for him, as it had been for his predecessors. In his diary, he recorded the uniforms he wore on special occasions. In 1884, the year of his majority, he was thrilled by the summer exercises at Krasnoe Selo, where he watched maneuvers in his ataman uniform. On August 26 he underlined the sentence, “I commanded half a company” after a visit to the camp of the Preobrazhentsy. When taken on an outing to a nearby park, his thoughts were only on returning to the bivouac. That winter he participated in the reviews at the Mikhailovskii Manege and attended breakfast with the officers of the guard.19 Active military service began only in 1887 when Nicholas reached the age of nineteen. He eagerly awaited this moment. In January 1887 he asked his father to participate in maneuvers at Krasnoe Selo that summer. Alexander agreed, but indicatively had not thought to suggest it himself. Nicholas’s diary records his great enthusiasm in the subsequent weeks. He danced at the court balls “until ready to collapse,” attended lively suppers, and overslept his lessons. On February 4 he rode to the barracks in his Preobrazhenskii uniform, then marched to the square. “The parade began at seven. I have rarely enjoyed myself so much because I did everything from beginning to end.”20 On May 5 and May 6, 1887, Nicholas journeyed to Novocherkassk for his induction as ataman of the Don Cossacks. During the ceremony, he received from his father the cossack regalia, the silver-tipped wooden maces, the pernach and the naseka, and marched holding the naseka. The next day he reviewed a parade with the pernach in his hand and visited a Kalmyk hut where he heard “their noisy service.” When he returned to Gatchina, he wrote in his diary, “I cannot say what a pleasant impression this trip to Novocherkassk and to the Cossacks made on me!!!” For both Alexander and Nicholas, the Cossacks represented the Russian tradition of conquest, a group carrying on the role of pacifying and colonizing border regions, extending the frontiers of the empire.21

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Nicholas’s service at Krasnoe Selo began in late June 1887. The elated entries in his diary indicate that his stay at the camp fulfilled all his expectations. He described his excitement during the war games and the merriment at the bivouacs.22 Nicholas’s initiation into the guards regiments followed the traditions created by Nicholas I in the 1830s. The heir was supposed to experience a personal as well as symbolic bond with the elite of the armed forces, who would serve him as emperor. But for Nicholas II these bonds took on an especially significant and almost exclusive importance. Much more than his predecessors, he was allowed to revel with the officers. While he loved the parade ground, he was most taken by the diversion of socializing with officers and young men of his own age, whose flattery he appears to have taken at face value. He enjoyed the raucous life of the officers mess—staying out in their company until six in the morning, drinking huge quantities of champagne in restaurants with Gypsy orchestras. In their midst, he was a comrade and equal. The memoirs about Nicholas in the guards give a sense of gracious camaraderie rather than a sovereign among his servitors. His father’s early death fixed him in this role. On his twenty-first birthday, in 1889, Alexander appointed him flügel-adjutant in his suite, and in 1892, on his twenty-fourth, colonel in the Preobrazhenskii Regiment. But it did not occur to him to promote his son to general rank, which both he and Alexander II had received after their majorities as a sign of equality and, ostensibly, fellowship with their father. During his reign Nicholas remained a colonel, a rank that did not enhance the majesty of his image. In preparation for the throne, Alexander appointed Nicholas to the State Council and the Committee of Ministers. He also named him chairman of the Committee on Famine Relief and of the Siberian Railroad Committee. According to General Nicholas Epanchin, Alexander issued an order that Nicholas attend ministerial reports. He did so, however, only briefly and not at all in the last three years of Alexander III’s reign.23 Nicholas felt out of place at governmental meetings and regarded them with impatience. Nicholas regarded state institutions and their officials with disdain and did not trouble to disguise his feelings. He shared his father’s hostility to the Westernized bureaucracy. But whereas Alexander distinguished among his officials between “true Russians” who upheld his vision of a strong autocracy and those infected with Western ideas, Nicholas distrusted nearly all officials. These feelings became clear when he was appointed to the State Council in 1889. During the reception after his first meeting, he could find nothing to say and offended the senior members. They were then excluded from the religious service for his name day and the breakfast celebration at Anichkov. Further slights came when members of the Council were not invited to his birthday celebrations. Such breaches of etiquette in a system based on formal respect for rank and order could only portend a serious rift between the imperial family and the chief legislative organ of state. The State Council was the only institution he attended regularly, one meeting a week, but found preparations for this a tedious chore.

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Nicholas remained juvenile in appearance and tastes, loving sports and games like hide-and-seek. Many in the court and the government made sneering remarks about a tsarevich who did not live up to their masculine ideal. An heir to the throne only five foot seven and slight of build was cause for distress. Even the American minister’s wife, Mrs. Lathrop, remarked in 1886 that it would be a misfortune if the heir did not grow. “Russians will find it difficult to connect the idea of majesty with one who is so small.” Vladimir Lamzdorff, the director of the chancellery of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in 1892, “The heir, twenty-four years old is a very strange sight: half infant, half man, short, skinny, insignificant.”24

Journey to the East From the early nineteenth century, the last stage of a tsarevich’s education was his tour of the empire he would rule. Nicholas took no such tour. Fears for the security of the imperial family precluded a meaningful journey through the central Russian provinces, especially after the Borki incident. The National myth also dispensed with the principal functions of such a tour. The spiritual bond of the monarch with his people came through the church and history and required neither exposure to empirical reality nor knowledge of present-day Russia. Instead, Nicholas embarked on a ten-month-long voyage to Asia, to parts of the world never visited by a Russian heir, or monarch—Egypt, India, Ceylon, Siam, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, China, and Japan. The tour announced Alexander’s determination to show Russia’s presence in Asia and to make the heir aware of Russia’s imperial destiny in the East. For this reason, two of the most articulate advocates of Russia’s eastern destiny, Nicholas Przheval’skii and Esper Ukhtomskii, were encouraged to befriend the heir and share their experiences and views with him. Nicholas Przheval’skii was an explorer, commander, naturalist, and popular writer who undertook numerous expeditions into inner Asia, three of them as far as Tibet. A military leader subduing Manchurian and Chinese “brigands” along the way to Tibet, he saw his journeys as the beginning of Russian dominion in the regions he explored.25 His books connected Russia’s imperial might with scientific progress. Przheval’skii depicted all Asians, but particularly the Chinese, as deceitful and egotistical peoples who spent their lives in idleness consuming opium and tea. They were cowardly and fought only from fear of punishment. He wrote in 1873, “With a thousand of our soldiers we can subdue all Asia from Baikal to the Himalayas. There we can repeat the achievements of Cortez.”26 Przheval’skii, at the empress’s invitation, gave lectures to Nicholas at the beginning of the 1880s. During his fourth expedition to Tibet, he described his experiences in the spirit of what David Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye has called “conquistador imperialism.” His first letter, of November 7, 1883, made clear his

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belief in the superiority of Russians as true Europeans and his contempt for Asians. He explained how he chose twenty of the best Cossack sharpshooters to accompany him. “With the well-known cowardice of Asians, such force is sufficient to guarantee our safety.”27 Esper Ukhtomskii was an official of the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs for Foreign Confessions and a specialist in Eastern art and the Buddhist religion. He published articles and a book on the religious practices of the Buriats and Kalmyks, which he studied during official trips to Siberia and Central Asia in the 1880s. Ukhtomskii was chosen to accompany Nicholas on his voyage to the Far East in 1890 and 1891. His illustrated six-volume account of the voyage, The Voyage of His Imperial Highness, Sovereign Heir and Tsarevich in 1890 and 1891 to the East appeared in Russian between 1893 and 1897, and then in French, German, English, and Chinese translations.28 Ukhtomskii wrote the book in consultation with Nicholas, who personally censored the volumes. Empress Alexandra Fedorovna purchased several thousand copies, which she donated to governmental institutions. Ukhtomskii gave moving descriptions of the many temples and palaces along the way as well as lyric evocations of the beauty of Asia and the sea. These passages were intertwined with comparisons with Russia and turned the travel book into a tract on Russia’s Eastern destinies. Russia’s history, with its contact with Asian peoples in the empire and abroad, had created a spiritual and political affinity between Russians and Asians. Since the Russians were kindred with Asians, they were more sensitive to their needs, treated them as equals, and sympathized with their plight as victims of European greed and exploitation. When the Russian squadron entered the waters of the Pacific, Ukhtomskii expressed his disgust for the “invasion of a complex alien system, the exploitation of Asia for the glory of pitiful egotistical prejudices of soi-disant educated humanity.” Russians on the other hand had “stayed at home” for over two-hundred years. Russia’s expansion, he asserted, did not fall into the same category as Europe’s. “One cannot call the natural merger with Turkestan and the Amur region political conquests.”29 Ukhtomskii and M. K. Onu, an authority on Asian affairs, were the specialists who accompanied Nicholas on his journey. The party also comprised Major-General Vladimir Bariatinskii, an adjutant who was supposed to supervise the heir, and four officers of the guards. Nicholas was feted by local potentates, shown sites, and then given the chance to shop for art objects and curiosities, a passion, which, by his own admission, he indulged freely. In India, Siam, and Indochina, he enjoyed big-game hunting, going after antelopes, tigers and elephants, though usually without great success. The Pamiat’ Azova served as his home during the ocean trip, and Nicholas himself admitted in a letter to his father that “my life on this frigate will remain for me the brightest and most pleasant memory for the entire trip.” The ship reproduced the setting he had left in Russia. The services on

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religious holidays recalled his life in the family. The company of aristocratic guardsmen made for nightly carousing, recalling life with the guards in Petersburg. The trip was commemorated with a Fabergé Easter egg in the form of the Pamiat’ Azova. A dark green jasper egg embellished with rococo gold work encapsulates a gold and platinum model of the ship, fitted with smokestacks, ladders, and guns, and set on an aquamarine base.30 The sumptuous memento presented the frigate as a symbol of Russia’s sea power extended to the waters of the Far East. The journey has often been characterized as frivolous and pointless, a pleasure trip through oriental exotica taken by the heir in the company of aristocratic and none-too-serious comrades.31 Nicholas may have seen little of Asian life outside the courts he visited, but his diaries indicate that he shared many of Ukhtomskii’s attitudes. He took exception to the British colonials’ arrogance and high-handedness in India. He was shocked, he wrote to his father, at the crude arrogance the English showed to the maharajah in Benares. He remarked that English newspapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai were “raging” over his visit to Canton and Hankow. “The articles are so senselessly stupid and impudent that they might have been written by idiots. They all call me ‘the imperial globe-trotter’ (English in original)—and this is their only successful expression!” He admired the neatness of Nagasaki. The people were “cordial and quiet and the main thing I liked was that I saw not a single European.”32 Nicholas, like Ukhtomskii, observed that as a Russian he had a special affinity with the Asian potentates and aristocrats he visited. He liked the maharajahs he met and enjoyed their shows of Indian dancing and magic. In Ceylon, “this paradise on earth,” he was astonished by a torchlight pageant that included priests, a “devil dance,” with the dancers wearing terrible masks, bayaderes, and musicians slowly proceeding through the crowd on elephants. He especially took to the king of Siam, “a kind, courteous person, well educated and worthy of his office.” He got on well with shopkeepers when negotiating his countless purchases. Everywhere, he was impressed by the temples. Visiting a row of Hindu temples dedicated to the god Krishna, he wrote, “Each time, I see a temple distinguished by grandeur, order and reverence, as in Russia, as I enter I begin to feel a religious mood, as if I am in a Christian church!” He liked the bright motley colors of Buddhist temples in Siam, which reminded him of Vasilii the Blessed.33 He described the Japanese as “such a cordial and polite people, the very opposite of the Chinese.” Many spoke Russian. He liked the cleanliness and order of Japanese towns and farms and enjoyed his visits to the market in Japan, where he and his companions amused themselves with parasols. His pleasant visit, however, was brought abruptly to an end when a crazed samurai struck him on his head with a sword while he was visiting the town of Otsu. Nonetheless, Nicholas continued to profess his admiration for the Japanese in the days after the attempt. He wrote in his diary on May 1, 1891, “I like everything Japanese as much now as before April 29th and I

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am not at all angry at the nice Japanese for the disgusting act of one fanatic who is their compatriot.”34 The journey and his lessons confirmed a sense of imperial rivalry and Russia’s moral superiority. What he saw heightened his pride in the Russian fleet and military forces, which represented to him the might and the majesty of Russia. In the Sea of Java, his “heart rejoiced” at the magnificent sight of the Russian squadron in Asian waters, next to what appeared to him shoddy English vessels. He wrote to his mother, “I don’t understand how [the English] can send such rotten skeletons to their colonies, because you can’t call them anything else.” He was happy to see the surprise and envy of the English at the Russian ships, each of which, he believed, was stronger than two of the English put together.35 Both Ukhtomskii and Nicholas felt a swell of national pride when they landed at Vladivostok on May 11. For Ukhtomskii, Siberia was proof of the success of Russia’s colonization of the East. British colonials lived in luxury and comfort. Russian settlers, on the other hand, were selflessly devoted to improving their state. He wrote of “the onerous, wretched, and self-denying conditions, in which innumerable spiritual figures of the Russian land consummate their lofty national deed on its remote frontiers.” “We Slavs unconsciously serve ideals of a tolerant-democratic character, while western Europeans always, and in everything strive by force to achieve domination over the ‘inferior’ races, which they spurn by principle.”36 As he traveled down the Amur River, the beginning of his long return to European Russia, Nicholas continued to be moved by national feelings. A village of settlers from Poltava province had, he wrote, “a completely Russian look,” and the girls performed a round dance before a house. Nicholas admired the Cossacks who came out to greet him from their settlement. He liked their informality: they readily crossed the Chinese border to farmlands on the other side. He noticed that they were in a state of readiness, each with his own horse and arms in good order. They kept alive the new image of expansion, conquest, and triumph by heroic Russian warriors. As he sailed down the Amur, Cossack settlements brought gifts and joyously entertained him with equestrian stunts and dances on the shore.37 Along the way, Nicholas dedicated a monument to Count Nicholas Murav’ev-Amurskii, who as governor-general of Eastern Siberia had pressed Nicholas I to explore and build fortresses on the Amur River. Peasant villages came out on boats to greet him. He read books about Siberia. One of them, by a Lieutenant-Colonel Vebel’ particularly impressed him. Vebel’ warned that the Amur region was isolated from other parts of Russia and could not be provided with help if necessary: only the completion of the Siberian railroad could spare the region from ruin.38 When Nicholas reached Orenburg in July, he attended the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Ural Cossack host. Nicholas came away from his voyage with a conviction of Russia’s importance, moral prestige, and potential role in the Far East. Przheval’skii’s

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“conquistador imperialism” had reinforced his belief in the unlimited capacity of armed force and the historical destinies of Russia, elaborated in the National myth, and had suggested that Russia could prevail in the East. His return through Siberia showed him the exploits of Russian explorers and settlers colonizing the East. Nicholas entertained grandiose perspectives on Russia’s destinies that ill-comported with the cautious Eastern policy followed by the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during his father’s reign.

Marriage and Family Life In the nineteenth century, marriage marked the true coming of age of the heir to the Russian throne, the moment when he received his own court and separate residences, and started a family life that gave him some limited independence from his parents. Nicholas II was the only nineteenth-century Russian emperor who came to the throne unwed. When he returned to Russia from his trip in 1891, he was twenty-three and had not even been betrothed.39 After his return, and especially when the emperor’s health began to fail, marriage became a pressing concern. The delay certainly did not bespeak reluctance. Nicholas had long yearned to marry and shared his parents’ idealized conception of the family. In his diaries of the 1880s, he expressed his attraction to his German cousins, particularly Victoria and Alexandra, “Alix” of Hesse, and remarked on his pleasure being with them. He met Alix first in 1884, when he was sixteen years old. She had come to Petersburg for the wedding of her older sister, Elizabeth, to the grand duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. Nicholas noted in his diary on May 24 that he sat next to little twelve-year-old Alix and liked her a great deal. He wrote in his diary on November 19, 1884, “The desire to marry lasted until breakfast and then went away.” He began thinking seriously of her after meeting her again in Denmark in 1887, and by the time she visited Petersburg at the beginning of 1889, he already felt himself in love. He wrote in 1891, “My dream is to marry Alix of Hesse.”40 After his Eastern tour, his love affair with the ballerina Mathilda Kshesinskaia flourished. The affair was another episode in his sanctioned waywardness, carried on with the understanding that it would not lead to marriage. He arranged a mansion for her on the Neva and visited her nearly daily. In April 1892, he wrote in his diary, “I never imagined that two identical feelings, two loves, could exist in one’s soul. . . . Our heart is a wondrous thing!” His love for Alix spared him the painful crisis of the Grand Duke falling in love with a Russian woman. He found consolation with Kshesinskaia when the plans for marrying Alix met what seemed insuperable obstacles.41 Nicholas was attracted to Alexandra not only because of her stunning beauty, but because the two were kindred spirits. They shared the same

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predilections, for the family, zealous personal religion, and private life. If Nicholas took on the persona of an English gentleman, Alexandra was English in her upbringing and tastes. Her mother, Princess Alice of Hesse, was a daughter of Queen Victoria. Princess Alice was a woman of deep religious faith and a devotee of the philosopher David Strauss during his period of religious mysticism. Alexandra and her older sister, Elizabeth, grew up in a setting of intense religious commitment. When Alexandra was six years old, she lost both her mother and her sister and playmate, May. After her mother’s death, Queen Victoria took a special interest in her and regarded her as her favorite grandchild. Alexandra took on Victoria’s reclusive, grave righteousness, as well as her aversion to frivolity. The death of her father, Prince Louis IV, in 1892 was another shattering blow, leaving her despondent for the subsequent two years. At first, Alexandra’s strong adherence to her Protestant faith kept her from accepting Orthodoxy, the condition for betrothal to the heir that Alexander III refused to waive. From 1891 until April 1894, she adamantly refused to convert. In April 1894, she relented, perhaps under the influence of her sister, the grand duchess Elizabeth, who in 1891 had finally accepted Orthodoxy. The resolution of the crisis was a moment of spiritual exaltation. After she announced her decision, Nicholas repented his sins and proclaimed his eternal devotion. On May 25, 1894, Queen Victoria, who feared the marriage might expose her grandaughter to the hazards of the Russian political scene, wrote to Nicholas that Alexandra needed “great quiet and rest.” “Her dear father’s death, her anxiety about her brother, and the struggle about her future have all tried her nerves very much.” She urged Nicholas not to hurry with the wedding.42 But Alexander’s illness and Nicholas’s determination hastened events. The emperor summoned Alexandra hurriedly to Livadia on October 10, hoping that the marriage would take place before his death. She was baptized into Orthodoxy the day after he died. The wedding took place during a one-day suspension of mourning on November, 14, 1894, a week after the funeral. Nicholas was gloriously happy. He wrote triumphantly in his diary on November 15, “So today I am a married man!”43 Alexandra’s melancholy, vulnerability, and ethereal spiritual aura made her only more appealing to Nicholas. Both had a powerful distrust of society, and both found public appearances burdensome and preferred their own company. No previous emperor and empress were so similar in their personalties. Nicholas I’s cold and intimidating presence contrasted with the endearing figure of empress Alexandra Fedorovna. Alexander II had been charming, sociable, and Germanophile; Maria Aleksandrovna, withdrawn, religious, and with Slavophile predilections; Alexander III dour, menacing, surly; Maria Fedorovna convivial and enchanting. The diverse personalities gave the imperial family a breadth of appeal, a flexibility in dealing with the broad range of personalities and situations taken on by the Russian monarchy. Nicholas and Alexandra on the other hand presented a

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common face to the outside world, one that was aloof and often both inscrutable and exasperating. Nicholas and Alexandra entered into a union of two like people in which each sought and found sustenance in the approval and love of the other and in the family. Alexander III had wanted his sons to grow up like normal and healthy children. He had sought what was normal and healthy in his own family life and regarded the crushing burden of autocratic power, which he bore daily, as something abnormal and oppressive. The upbringing of his son succeeded to the extent that Nicholas found his happiness as an ordinary person in the family. But the Russian monarch was not supposed to be an ordinary person: he was a being whose extraordinary efforts distinguished him from other mortals and justified his autocratic prerogatives. With Nicholas II, the public obligations of the Russian sovereign faded into the background of scenes of marital happiness. •

In the first years of Nicholas II’s reign, home and children was the sacred center of the life of the imperial family. Zealous believers, the emperor and empress shared a cult of the family, more British than Orthodox, which may be one reason their plight seems so familiar and touching to present-day sensibilities. Alexandra preoccupied herself with childbirth and the care of the babies. On the birth of Olga in 1895, Alexandra followed the practice of late nineteenth-century Victorian England and insisted on nursing the infant herself. The diaries of Nicholas and the grand duchesses describe the extraordinary scene of an empress breast-feeding her firstborn. Nicholas noted with pride that he had bathed his daughter. The birth of Tatiana in 1897 and Marie in 1899 were followed by similar scenes of nursing and parental delight, all the while accompanied by a sense of unease that the empress had not produced a male heir to the throne. The Fabergé egg that Nicholas presented to Alexandra at Easter 1898 was an art nouveau apotheosis of the family: dozens of pearls form trellises of lilies of the valley over the pink enamel of the egg and leaves enameled in green. The surprise is a trefoil of portraits framed in diamonds: Nicholas himself, beneath a goldand diamond-studded crown, Olga and the infant, Tatiana. The family became the focus of Alexandra’s religious feelings. Her faith remained one based on personal conscience and private virtue, more akin to Protestantism than the Orthodoxy practiced in the court. She was a devotee of the type of feminized religion that made maternal obligation and fulfillment principal Christian virtues. She sought practical guidance for the life of a Christian wife and mother in the writings of Protestant clergymen. From 1896 to 1901 she transcribed hundreds of pages verbatim from such works, especially those of the American Presbyterian minister, James Russell Miller, The Gentle Life, Secrets of a Beautiful Life, Housemaking or the Ideal Christian Life, and Building of Character.44 Sorrow taught the lesson to live more earnestly for others, and the principal object of selflessness that Miller

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extolled was the home. “Home ought to be the best place in the world in which to grow into Christlikeness,” she copied into her notebook. Married life was “God’s ideal of completeness.” “As a relationship, it is the closest and most sacred on earth,” she wrote and underlined. Marriage was the highest expression of Christian love. She underlined, “Each must forget self in devotion to the other.”45 The flamboyant domesticity of Nicholas I had presented the home as the model of service to state and nation. Nicholas II and Alexandra’s life in the home, on the contrary, represented a private haven from public demands, the intrusions of ministers and members of the court. From the beginning of his reign Nicholas cultivated the image of himself as ideal family man who doted on his children. Popular pictures show him and Alexandra in warm scenes with beautiful cherubic children, as exemplars of nineteenth-century family happiness. On the cover of a calendar for 1899, we see a typical example, published by the house of E. I. Konovalova (fig. 25). Nicholas and Alexandra appear close to each other, linked by bonds of love. Nicholas clasps Olga, and Alexandra holds the infant Tatiana in the midst of lush glowing flowers. It is as if we are peering through a window at parents and children in close and loving contact, unlike earlier family groups in which members strike stiff formal poses viewed through a proscenium. Such scenes also appeared in popular periodicals abroad, winning sympathy for the Russian tsar as an exemplar of paternal love.46 Unlike Alexander III, Nicholas and Alexandra were prepared to live part of the year in the Winter Palace. But their favorite residence soon became the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and they made the Alexander Palace the picturesque setting of an affectionate family life. The layout and design of the rooms reflected the empress’s personal attachments with little mind to matters of aesthetic unity or harmony. In this respect, she followed the example of her grandmother Queen Victoria. Many of the chambers were furnished in English taste and overstuffed with furniture, paintings, and bric-a-brac. But Victorian rooms were only one association evoked in the family’s chambers. The empress’s brother, Prince Ernest of Hesse, was a patron of art nouveau, the Jugendstil, and the most important family rooms on the first floor were redesigned by Roman Meltser in art nouveau style during the first decade of Nicholas’s reign. The aesthetic floral eroticism of art nouveau gave expression to the intense personal relationship of the imperial couple. Nicholas and Alexandra were the first Russian emperor and empress to share a bed. The master bedroom was the center of their family life. After Meltser completed the renovation, Alexandra decorated the room with bright English chintzes, with patterns of green wreaths and pink ribbons. The same motif appeared on the walls and furniture. Nicholas found it “gay and cozy.” After the turn of the century, the room was hung with hundreds of icons, expressing the couple’s search for a personal Orthodoxy that linked them to the Russian people (see chapter 19). Nicholas and Alexandra

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25. Popular picture of Nicholas II, Alexandra Fedorovna, infant Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Olga, 1899.

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devoted less attention to the parade rooms, meant for official meetings. These were decorated with stately Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, and contained rare busts of the empress Elizabeth, Paul I, and Alexander I. The Victorian, the art nouveau, and the neoclassical coexisted in a palace turned into a middle-class home meant to raise children in a setting separated from state and court.

The Accession and Coronation of Nicholas II

Accession Nicholas’s accession manifesto, probably written by Constantine Pobedonostsev, stated the fundamental themes of the National myth introduced during the previous reign. For the first time, the monarch ascending the throne spoke of every Russian heart understanding the monarch’s grief, of the late tsar’s “Russian soul.”1 For the first time, an accession manifesto referred to “holy Rus’ ” as well as Russia, Rossiia, and attributed its strength to the “unity” of the people with the monarch. Nicholas II adopted the images of the National myth as incontrovertible truths expressing the consecration of autocratic rule and precluding the possibility as well as the necessity of political reform. But the myth did require signs of the emperor’s national character, demonstrating that the dynasty, by blood nearly entirely German, had nonetheless preserved a Russian spirit. The Russian party had constructed a national scenario for Alexander III. Alexander’s size, personality traits, and simple tastes had enabled him to appear as Russian tsar, without abandoning the role of All-Russian Emperor. Nicholas cherished and believed the imagery of the National myth, but short and slight, with delicate features and English tastes and mannerisms, there was little Russian in his appearance or his behavior. In the first years of his reign, Nicholas adhered to Alexander’s conservative policies. He kept most of his father’s ministers and relied particularly on Sergei Witte, who dominated Russian industrial policy and had carefully cultivated him as tsarevich. But he disliked any opinion contrary to his own. He believed that the national sanction for his power entitled him to exert authority as he wished, blinding him to constraints, both of institutions and reality. From this faith arose a capriciousness of judgment, a contempt for rule and consistency that exasperated his ministers and admirers. They were troubled by his hasty judgments, an unwillingness to heed contrary opinions, and an opacity of manner.2 If Alexander III’s suspicion of the bureaucracy became with Nicholas general and indiscriminate, Alexander’s growing reliance on members of the imperial family accorded them a special status in Nicholas’s eyes. He believed implicitly that political power was the private possession of the imperial family. Such power was not to be challenged by outsiders, whether

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officials or members of educated society. His uncles, the grand dukes, exerted considerable influence on him, especially in the first years of his reign. In part this was a result of his immaturity and personal weakness. But it also was because the family, including his mother, and later his wife as well as the grand dukes, constituted the single circle of trust in his eyes. The trust in the family was accompanied with an aversion to the imperial court. Alexander III had relegated the court to the empress, who maintained its vitality without according it especial significance. Both Nicholas and Alexandra regarded the social occasions of the court as impositions on their private happiness and spiritual peace. Alexandra was loathe to adopt the pretense of a public role and did little to disguise her discomfort at court presentations. “The theatrical instinct is so deep in Russian nature that one feels the Russians act their lives rather than live them,” Sydney Gibbs, the English teacher to the tsarevich Alexei later observed. “This was entirely foreign to the Empress’s thought, shaped mostly under the tutelage of her Grandmother Queen Victoria.”3 Nicholas’s first steps as ruler immediately disclosed his fierce antagonism to ideas of political reform. F. I. Rodichev, who presented an address to the Tver zemstvo, asking for the right of the zemstva to declare their views, received swift retribution—deprivation of all civil rights including the right to participate in public assemblies. Then, less than three months after his accession, Nicholas delivered a curt and unseemly rebuff to all hopes of reform. At a belated wedding reception held on January 17, 1895. Nicholas met members of various estates—the nobility, the merchantry, the Cossacks, and foreign dignitaries—who brought him and the empress congratulations. Rather than gracefully receive congratulations, Nicholas delivered a blunt statement dismissing constitutional projects as “senseless dreams” and vowing “to maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as my unforgettable father.”4 The speech gave open expression to the emperor’s hostility, not only to the constitutional opposition but to those conservative pillars of the regime—noblemen, merchants, and officials—who had to listen to a rebuke in the midst of a ceremony staged to extend good wishes. The words were published in all newspapers, in some, with brief ironic commentary. They “reverberated through Russia,” Princess Radziwill wrote. “Loyal Russians felt not only aggrieved, but ashamed that such a reproof should have been administered to them before foreigners, such as Poles and Germans, of whom there were many in the various delegations.”5

Coronation Preparations Nicholas II’s coronation celebrations were staged as a demonstration of the vitality of a monarchy with mass support. Although security measures were extensive and conspicuous, the coronation lacked the sense of constraint

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surrounding the 1883 events, reflecting the confidence of a resurgent autocracy. It assumed a grander scale in many respects—more spectators, more foreign guests, and more extensive newspaper coverage. Nicholas II’s inspiration might be personal and private, Russia might be holy and unaffected by Western materialism, but the celebrations of his consecration as tsar would show the monarchy adapting to contemporary forms of mass publicity and present Russia as a center of Western high society. The contradictory influences were apparent in the coronation album. As its title, Coronation Collection (Koronatsionnyi Sbornik), suggests, the album is a book of souvenirs as much as a description.6 The improved technical capacities of the Office for the Production of State Papers (Ekpeditsiia Zagotovleniia Gosudarstvennykh Bumag) permitted the inclusion of new types of color reproductions, illustrative materials, and, most notably, photographs. The historical text and format of the volume strove to emphasize the national character of the event. The opening 132 pages of the first volume are devoted to an illustrated history of coronation ceremonies emphasizing their Muscovite roots. Slavonicized lettering is used for chapter titles throughout the album. On the title page, by Victor Vasnetsov, the letters are entwined in old Russian floral motifs. A. Riabushkin’s program for the gala performance of “A Life for the Tsar” was decorated with old Russian letters and an inset portrait of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich. The elaborate flamboyant lettering and the design on the Menu executed by Victor Vasnetsov for the coronation feast, it was pointed out in Moskovskie Vedomosti, came from the late seventeenth-century album The Accession of Tsar Michael Fedorovich.7 At the same time, the album employed the methods and appeals of the contemporary press to popularize the image of the imperial family as human beings. A remarkable page of photographs introduces the imperial family early in the coronation description. A photograph of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, the spiritual exemplar of the monarchy, is at the head of the page; Alexander II’s portrait is noticeably absent. Beneath are the parents of the imperial couple, to the right Alexander III as heir and Maria Fedorovna as grand duchess, to the left Prince Ludwig and Princess Alice of Hesse. In the center of the page, are the photographs of Nicholas and Alexandra, and beneath, snapshots of them as infants. The coronation album has become a family album. The first volume also contains portraits and photographs of the leading court officials in uniforms, and court ladies wearing the kokoshniki, the tiara headpieces studded with pearls and gems, that were required at formal court events. Press coverage was more extensive than at Alexander III’s coronation. In addition to the daily reports, Russian newspapers provided coronation supplements with photographs of the events and the figures from the court and abroad. Foreign coverage was also far more extensive than in 1883. In 1896 more than three-hundred foreign correspondents, artists, and photographers arrived in Moscow for what was to be a major event, giving cachet to

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the standing of each country’s press. The Ministry of the Court made every effort to assist the unaccustomed number of foreign journalists eager to see all the events. V. S. Krivenko, the head of Minister Vorontsov-Dashkov’s chancellery, believed that the more easily foreign correspondents could see the spectacles, the more accurate and the more favorable would be their accounts. The number of correspondents admitted to the service in the Assumption Cathedral rose from twelve in 1883, to twenty in 1896, ten of whom were from abroad.8 The number of royal personages with their entourages nearly tripled from 144 at the previous coronation to 412, and the costs of feeding and quartering the guests made this the most expensive of the last three coronations. The high society of France and the United States also took the opportunity to appear at what was a major social occasion. Vasilii NemirovichDanchenko, the war correspondent and travel writer, described this scene in a series of vivid “Letters on the Coronation” for Niva. The large number of Western guests, he wrote, “signifies the high international position of Russia.” He observed that “more and more often one hears foreign languages and not the Great Russian dialect.”9 He observed that military uniforms, usually not a prominent feature of the Moscow scene, now flashed everywhere. The arrival in Moscow of Petersburg guards regiments changed the appearance of the city. On April 28, Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich, chief of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment, noted in his diary his great pleasure as he rode at the head of two battalions into Moscow along Tver Boulevard to the march from Life for the Tsar. Each day, he saw more and more military men, “dressed spiffily in full uniform. My Preobrazhentsy gladden my heart. They have such a holiday look.”10 Such a transformation accompanied each coronation, but the extent appeared to have been greater, and the official literature’s emphasis on the Muscovite character of the coronation seems to have only made observers more aware of the disparity between the Western court and the old capital. Observers give the impression of a pastiche, an assemblage of incompatible elements, that lacked a coherent message and focus. NemirovichDanchenko observed that Petersburg had resettled in Moscow. “It is beginning to teach the old lady at least some genteel conduct.” The brilliance of the court, the foreign princes, the State Council stunned the spectators “with their wealth, refinement and lightness.” Some foreigners understood the celebrations as a recreation of a European, not a Russian past. The model was “Versailles relived,” recalling the grandeur of European absolutism, rather than the spiritual depths of old Moscow.11 The elaborate decorations transformed the appearance of Moscow, heightening the sense of pastiche. Following traditional practice, triumphal arches, flags, tribunes, pavilions, and obelisks ornamented the city. Pictures were placed before buildings, and colored flags and cloths, many of them in the national colors—white, red, and blue—hung along the streets. Electric lights were installed, and special illumination provided for the Kremlin. While Kiev

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and Odessa had introduced electric lights along the streets years before, electric lighting could be found in only a few places in Moscow and seemed not to fit the jumbled medieval landscape. Huge illuminated fountains that had delighted Muscovites during a French exhibition of 1890 now embellished the Moscow scene. The extent and expense of the preparations prompted misgivings among officials and members of the court, especially in light of the mass starvation of previous years. After seeing the poor throw their kopeks on the collection plate in St. Isaacs on May 2, Count Vladimir Lamzdorff noted in his diary, “Sad thoughts come to mind about the sumptuous magnificence that we soon intend to put on display in Moscow. In the background of the glitter that puts your teeth on edge, poverty acquires an exalted halo of true dignity and majesty.”12 Grand Duke Constantine lamented the huge expense for the silver and gold plates for the bread and salt to welcome the tsar. “What an unproductive expense! How much good would be and could be done with such money!”13 The English Tolstoyan, Aylmer Maude, derided the show of splendor, “this childish pomp,” while the Moscow population was living four to a room and many were starving. “If the government existed to compete with the circuses in giving shows to the people at the people’s expense, it would all be easier to understand.”14

The Imperial Entry Procession and the Coronation Rites The tsar’s entry into Moscow on May 9 was a veritable cavalcade of empire, parading the triumphs of Russian expansion over the previous century. After a detachment of gendarmes, the procession again opened with the Cossacks of the emperor’s own convoy. The coronation album described these “daring swarthy horsemen” in red Circassian coats and fur hats, brandishing their swords. “At their appearance, the admiration of the crowd burst forth into hurrahs and shouts of pleasure,” the New York Times correspondent wrote. They were followed by a company of Cossacks of the Guard. The album described them as “Handsome fellows, their papakhi cocked to the side, holding frightening lances in their hands like feathers and merrily looking out at God’s world.” Then followed forty-one “Asiatics,” the cynosure of all eyes, according to the album, were led by the khan of Khiva and the emir of Bukhara. The report in Novoe Vremia marveled over the “proud representatives of our Asia.” The procession, the original costumes, “carried the spectator to the hot steppes of Asia, to the Ural mountains, to the canyons of Dagestan, to the expanses of Bukhara.”15 Then followed deputies from the nobility, members of the court, and carriages of the ministers. Later came deputies from the Caucasus and Central Asia, the horsemen bearing standards of the various provinces, and officials with the shields of the towns and the realms that made up the empire. Finally, after deputations from provincial institutions, other officials, and a

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detachment of cavalier guards, rode the tsar “on a pure white horse.” “He sat erect and looked every inch the Caesar he is,” the New York Times correspondent wrote. Saluting to the crowd, he was greeted with “the shout peculiar to Russians, which is a prolonged roar. This was taken up on all sides and swelled into a perfect hurricane of sound.” The two empresses followed, riding in the traditional coronation carriages of the eighteenth century. Maria Fedorovna rode in one decorated with a large gold and silver crown. Alexandra’s gilded carriage followed, escorted by two esquires and two Cossacks. Other carriages followed with the queen of Greece, and officials and ladies of the court.16 The procession stopped for the traditional prayers of the imperial family at the Iberian Mother of God. Then they proceeded on foot to the Kremlin cathedrals. The size of the turnout and the thunderous enthusiasm again were taken as measures of the extent and internal cohesion of the empire. The large number of representatives from within Russia, the Niva correspondent wrote, showed “the immense breadth of power of the state authority that the young tsar possesses.” Foreign correspondents took the response to the procession as a sign of acclaim and power. The French journalist La Pauze, stirred by the hats thrown into the air and the wild enthusiasm of the people, fixed his attention on Nicholas. With the entry, the emperor had “taken possession of the capital.” Foreign correspondents understood the variety of national types in the entry as a demonstration of their devotion to the Russian throne.17 The American journalist Richard Harding Davis marveled at the variety of costume and national groups in a procession that included “the representatives of what had once been eighteen separate governments, each of which now bowed in allegiance to the Russian Emperor.” Each of these representatives, he wrote, “bore himself as though his chief pride was that he owed allegiance to a young man twenty-eight years old, a young man who never would be seen by his countrymen in the distant provinces from which he came, to whom the Czar was but a name and a symbol, but a symbol to which they prayed, and for which they were prepared to give up their lives.” B. A. Engel’gardt, inspired by the rousing acclaim that met the tsar’s bows from the Red Staircase, later wrote, “I looked over the shoulders of the empress at this tumultuous sea of human heads, and I thought that there was nothing equal on earth to the might of the Russian Monarch.”18 Riding to the Kremlin, Nicholas felt the elation of being in Moscow. “About the welcome there is nothing to say but that it was joyous and festive, as it can be only in Moscow,” he wrote in his diary. However, he awaited the long and arduous coronation ceremonies on May 14 with considerable apprehension. According to Sophie Buxhoeveden, he wanted to be crowned with the Monomakh cap, which, aside from its historical associations, was considerably lighter than the diamond-studded five-pound imperial crown of Catherine II. But court etiquette dictated that he adhere to traditional practice.19

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On the day of the coronation, Nicholas wore the uniform of the Preobrazhenskii Guards Regiment, Alexandra a silver brocade gown with an old Russian design, the work of nuns from the Ivanovskii Convent. The procession from the palace to the cathedral was long because of the large numbers of the delegates from zemstva, estates, and foreign dignitaries. This time the coronation album made no mention of the peasant deputies who as in 1883 marched at the beginning of the procession. The emperor was invested in the mantle and the chain of St. Andrew; the chain broke and fell to the ground while the mantle was being adjusted. Then Nicholas crowned himself and sat on his throne in full regalia. The crowning was made known by the thunder of cannon, the tolling of the bells of the capital, and the playing of “God Save the Tsar.” The empress knelt before him. He touched the imperial crown to her forehead, then placed the small crown on her head. She then ascended the steps of the throne to him, and before they received congratulations, they kissed. The touching moment, of the young emperor and empress, both in crowns, kissing, was illustrated in the coronation album (fig. 26).20 Nicholas fell to his knees, while the entire congregation stood, and he pronounced the prayer of Solomon vowing before God to embark on the “great service” of rule. “The tsar’s voice was strong and assured,” the correspondent of Le temps wrote, but Aleksei Suvorin claimed that it was faltering and that the prayer had been abbreviated to reduce the time Nicholas would have to spend on his knees.21 The coronation ceremonies took place before about a thousand representatives of the Russian and European elite, and the press, in the close confines of the Assumption Cathedral. Again it was the popular demonstrations of support outside the church in the Kremlin and outside its walls that gave the ceremony its popular amplitude and meaning. Shouts of the crowds greeted the emperor and empress as they made their way from the Assumption to the Archangel and Annunciation Cathedrals. The enthusiasm reached its climax when Nicholas performed the triple bow from the Red Staircase. The French journalist LaPauze, astonished at the acclaim at the Red Staircase, once again described the coronation as a “taking possession.” Moskovskie Vedomosti proclaimed that the roar from the Kremlin “echoed everywhere across the extent of great Russia.” The author described the inspired feelings of the crowd. “No one lived his own personal life. Everything fused into one whole, into one soul, pulsing with life, sensing and aware that it was the Russian people. Tsar and people created a great historical deed and as long as this unity of people and Tsar exists, Rus’ will be great and invincible, unfearing of external and internal enemies.”22 The procession returned to the palace. Before the banquet, however, Nicholas and Alexandra, in full regalia, emerged from the balcony of the Great Kremlin Palace overlooking the Moscow River and bowed to the city of Moscow and the Russian people three times. This gesture was an innovation meant to recall early Russia, when the tsar ostensibly could be seen by “the masses of the people.”

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26. Embrace of Emperor and Empress, Nicholas II coronation album, Koronatsionnyi Sbornik.

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The vast expanse of the emperor’s land and Russia’s imperial destiny were the themes of the cantata performed at the banquet, a work written by Alexander Glazunov and the popular playwright and chief of repertoire of the imperial theaters of St. Petersburg, Victor Krylov. The singers gave voice to the joy of the parts of the empire, north, south, east, and west at the coronation of its sovereign. “Russia is united in a single feeling,” the chorus sang. The mezzo-soprano, in the role of the south, sang of their forefathers’ defeat of the Tatars. The basso, as the north, told how nature fell silent “before the great celebration.” The east, a soprano, announced that Russia was awakening Eastern nations, while the west, again the mezzo-soprano, told how Europe had shared enlightenment with Russia. Russia was the force of progress in the East. The Kamchatkian, the Kalmyk, and the Sarmat, Leave their wretched hovels, And they greet the softening influence of morals, The mercy and kind impulses, Like sons, with open arms.

Then Russia, “conscious of its strength,” turns in friendship to the West, “in mutual love and accord,” a reference to the image of the Russian tsar as bringer of peace. The cantata ended with the chorus’s apostrophe to Moscow. Moscow of the golden cupolas. In your walls was born the start, Of all these sovereign labors.23

The ensuing festivities had a modern flair and éclat seemingly unrelated to the solemnity of the event. In the evening, the city was brilliantly lit with electric lights. No account of the coronation failed to mention the cascades of lights. The metaphor invariably invoked was of gems, the image of incandescence and glitter obscuring the historical scene and memory. The gala performance at the Bolshoi theater was a mélange of the diverse styles and themes of the coronation events. The audience first witnessed the scenes of old Moscow in Glinka’s Life for the Tsar, culminating in the majestic procession to the Kremlin and the Glory chorus. Then they saw the ballet The Splendid Pearl, a fairy tale set on the floor of the ocean, in a grotto of pearls. The ballet concluded with an Apotheosis of Triton and Amphitrite reigning over the denizens of the deep. The illustration of the official program, reproduced in the coronation album, renders the ballet in the erotic idiom of the art nouveau. E. Samokish-Sudkovskaia’s pearls are shapely maidens, wearing diaphanous skirts, their breasts and nipples bared. The apotheosis is a scene of semi-nude sea nymphs and sirens, looking out languorously as they bathe before an Adonis-like Triton. The king of metals stands in the rear, his arm around a voluptuous “magnificent pearl.” Many of the paintings in the coronation album introduced a sensibility at odds with the spiritual tenor of the ceremonies. The watercolors, repro-

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duced in chromolithography, dissolved the masses of the Kremlin buildings into iridescent and translucent forms caught in a play of light, expressing the pictorial brilliance, rather than the gravity of the occasion. Albert Benois’s painting of the illumination turns Moscow into a fantasy of yellows, whites, and blues against a somber background. V. A. Serov turns the anointment ceremony into a study of color and form of the white robes of the tsar and the blue of the courtiers, the yellow of the clergy, with patches of red visible from the rear of the cathedral. The artists transformed the event into personal visual statements that betray the influence of contemporary Paris more than that of seventeenth-century Moscow.

Khodynka The principal historical memory left by the coronation of Nicholas II was not glorious ceremonies and celebrations, prepared with such great cost and effort, but the massacre of more than one thousand Russians on Khodynskoe Field, gathered for the great popular feast in honor of the tsar. The coronations of Russian monarchs, I have emphasized, announced the beginning of each reign by celebrating a monarchy reborn and transformed. At the same time, the events displayed the efficacy of the monarch’s will, his power of control, demonstrated by the mass of conquering guardsmen from the capital, and the “exemplary order” of the masses remarked on repeatedly in the press. The massacre, on the contrary, disclosed a regime bereft of control. The message was trumpeted to the world by the mass of horrified journalists whom the tsarist state had itself assembled to make known the glory of the monarchy. Khodynka was hardly accidental. It was made possible by two presumptions held by the less critical adepts of the National myth: first, that the people absolutely were devoted and obedient to the authorities, and second, that the authorities could easily cope with mass gatherings. The people’s feast had grown larger at each coronation, and as we have seen, the order observed at the Khodynskoe Field celebration in 1883 was a matter of especial pride in official publications. The crowds at this coronation seemed to be larger than those in 1883, and the number of booths on Khodynskoe Field had been increased from 100 to 150. The problem of crowd control had arisen in the first days of the celebration when several episodes had been reported in the press. During the ceremonial promulgation of the date of the coronation, eighteen were killed in a scramble for the souvenir announcements. At one point during Nicholas’s entry, the crowds broke the cordon, wrecking a carriage. Yet the authorities failed to take measures to ensure the safety of the crowds at the feast. Grand Duke Sergei, the governor-general of Moscow, believed that the exemplary order shown in 1883 and at Alexander’s funeral observances in 1894 proved the peasants’ devotion and submissiveness.

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He therefore avoided the concentration of troops that had contained the crowds in 1883. He limited the security forces to a few dozen Cossacks and guards who were responsible for containing over a half-million persons. Four hundred infantrymen were deployed on the field, but they received instructions not to touch the people. Most of the units were reserved for the moment of the tsar’s arrival. The field was broken by ditches and pits that had not been filled; these presumably would discourage the crowds from descending suddenly on the fairground area. They served instead as death traps. The peasants converging on Moscow from the surrounding region slept on the ground in the area and awakened early in the morning though the booths were scheduled to open only at ten. At six, the crowd began to surge forward, and the officers in charge of the Cossacks gave the order to begin the festivities. Many people fell underfoot and were trampled; others tumbled into ravines and wells. The panic lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, but by that time the field was covered with injured and dead, 1,350 fatalities by official count; by others 2,000. The foreigners invited to attest to the grandeur and might of the Russian emperor witnessed carts winding along the streets of Moscow carrying corpses emitting the odor of rotting flesh. The publicity courted by the regime now spread the news of its incompetence and inhumanity to the world. It became known that the authorities ignored the desperate calls for help from the officers in charge. The many accounts in the Russian press broadcast the extent and horror of the disaster. It was at this point, at a moment of national mourning, that the tsar could have shown his solidarity with the people. Nicholas was undoubtedly deeply aggrieved by the catastrophe and made the necessary public statements of regret. He promised financial assistance to the victims of the massacre, and he and the empress spent the day visiting hospitals. He established a commission to look into the catastrophe. But the people’s feast went on as if nothing had taken place, indeed before all the corpses had been cleared from the field. Nicholas appeared at the pavilion and bowed to the cries of the people. The zemstvo activist F. A. Golovin wrote, “Rather than a prayer for the peace of the thousand perishing at the people’s festival as a result of the inefficiency and inaction of the tsar’s servants, the orthodox tsar marked the catastrophe with the idiocy of balagan barkers, songs, and dances of the skoromokhi.”24 The ball at the French ambassador’s residence took place as scheduled that evening. Many urged Nicholas to send his regrets, but his ministers pressed him to attend, pointing to the elaborate preparations made by Russia’s principal ally for the event. Grand Duke Sergei importuned him to appear. Nicholas had intended to follow his mother’s advice, which was to attend but to retire before supper. But when supper was served, his uncles Sergei, Vladimir, and Aleksei prevailed upon him to remain. Composure and imperturbability were now the signs of power. To leave, they insisted, would be “sentimentalizing” (santimental’nichan’e).25

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The remarks of the grand dukes spread through officialdom and society. Suvorin heard that they had claimed that leaving the ball would show sentimentality, that this was the time to show autocratic power, that fourthousand had presumably perished in London at Victoria’s fiftieth jubilee, and that no one there had shown concern.26 The callous derision and Nicholas’s response indicated that any display of sympathy or feeling evoked the discredited scenario of Alexander II and, in the framework of the National myth, would be understood as a sign of weakness. The response of the tsar shook the faith even of convinced monarchists. Grand Duke Constantine, who retained the humanitarian sensibility of an earlier era, wrote in his diary, “Everything bright and joyous, everything that was touching and tender experienced these days has been darkened and spoiled by the Khodynskoe catastrophe. And not so much the catastrophe, which represented God’s will, as much as the attitude of responsible figures towards it.” Nine days after the tragedy, he sent a note to Nicholas suggesting that the tsar arrange and attend a memorial service for the dead. “What a calming impression it would make!” But Nicholas did not reply.27 For General Alexei Kuropatkin, the event proved the emptiness of the popular demonstrations for the tsar. He wrote in his diary, “From this the view follows that the people’s feast is organized not for the people. That the people should present only a majestic living decoration, and that this decoration at the appropriate moment must cry ‘Hoorah’ and throw their hats into the air.”28 The news of Nicholas’s appearance at the ball reached Europe quickly, giving substance to the notion that the emperor was a man who lived idly and lavishly at the expense of his suffering subjects. The term “massacre,” suggesting intentionally inflicted violence, became attached to the catastrophe. Aylmer Maude wrote, “Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and Nicholas II danced at the French ball on the night of the Khodynskoe massacre.”29 Russian newspapers juxtaposed the account of the disaster with descriptions of the magnificent celebrations of the previous week. The May 21 issue of Novoe Vremia set Khodynskoe against an account of the ball at the French ambassador’s residence. “A kaleidoscope of guests, a kaleidoscope of beauty, youth, elegant toilets and glittering uniforms” appeared in a mansion decorated with priceless tapestries brought from France, works of Watteau and Froment. The next paragraph opens without a subheading with the words found in most newspapers in these days, “A great misfortune has darkened the joyous course of the celebrations.” The following day the editors placed the report of the memorial service and burial of the dead above the description of the elegant ball at Grand Duke Sergei’s mansion, which they called “one of the outstanding celebrations of the coronation.”30 The effect of the event on the people of Moscow who witnessed or heard about it is difficult to assess, but it clearly heightened the distrust of the government. Semen Kanatchikov and his fellow workers arrived after the crush and heard shouts about people falling into wells and saw carts piled with corpses. They were outraged at the low official estimates and the inability to

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find “the guilty party.” “What aroused people’s indignation most of all was the irresponsibility, the impunity of the authorities who had destroyed thousands of lives.”31 Peasant deputations returning to the village brought news of the catastrophe and, Princess Radziwell claimed, were disappointed that the tragedy, rather than providing the occasion for a display of common mourning, had been met with “indifference and icy impassiveness.”32 The speech of Nicholas at the dinner of peasant elders, starshiny, at the Petrovskii Dvorets took place later on the day of his appearance at the people’s feast. The meeting had the same tone of admonition as his father’s thirteen years before. Indeed, assuring them of his constant care for their well-being, he reminded them of Alexander III’s words to the peasants at the 1883 coronation, warning them to follow the advice of their marshals of the nobility and not to believe the rumors about a redistribution of the land. “Among you are many who heard them yourselves,” he said, revealing that these were an especially chosen group of peasant leaders. “I want these words always to serve as your firm guide.”33 On May 22 Nicholas made the traditional visit to the Trinity Monastery, where he suffered through the numerous offerings of refreshments and the terrible heat. The last day of his stay, May 26, was the occasion of a large parade near the Petrovskii Palace. “The parade was brilliant in every respect and I was delighted that all the troops appeared at their best (molodtsami) before the foreigners.” He was even more delighted to reach Sergei’s estate, Ilinskoe, a word that he underlined in his diary. “It was an indescribable joy to reach this fine and quiet place! And the chief consolation is knowing that all these celebrations and ceremonies are over!”34 At Ilinskoe, Nicholas and Alexandra spent three tranquil weeks with members of the imperial family. Sergei remained imperturbable and announced that he was concerned only to protect his young nephew from “annoyances” (nepriiatnosti) during his stay. Nicholas amused himself with the sports and outdoor activities he loved—horseback riding, lawn tennis, and even waterskiing. He began photographing the imperial family at play with a newly acquired camera. In 1896 he placed snapshots of members of his family in his diaries and compiled his first photo album. Later, his daughters took up his interest and carefully glued their snapshots into numerous albums, which they enjoyed with friends and relatives. The fascination with photography reflected the preoccupation of the members of the imperial family with their own activities—the focus of their admiration and interest.

Demonstrations of Godliness

Easter Visits to Moscow The coronation of 1896 failed to present a coherent image of Nicholas II as incarnation of the nation. But once the opposition began to gain force and embrace broader circles, including the zemstva, educated society, students, peasants, and eventually workers, Nicholas responded by claiming his own bonds with the people. Nicholas II remained true to the National myth, but his scenario was very different from his father’s. Alexander III sought to unite the monarchy with the people through the Orthodox church, a revitalized administration, and a system of estates—the foundations that presumably persisted from early Russia. Distrusting institutions, both governmental and ecclesiastical, Nicholas claimed a direct though unspoken and invisible spiritual bond with the people—a shared sense of piety that he believed had persisted from ancient Russia. At the beginning of the century, he began to appear before and among the peasantry to display this bond and to compete with opposition movements for popular support. In public demonstrations of godliness, he felt himself communing with the people as they prayed together. At such moments, he was moved by an almost mystical spiritual exaltation, a bond that united him at once with the people, God, and history. This type of personal rapport with the common people was more akin to Russian populism than to the liturgical collectivism of the Slavophiles and Pobedonostev. The feeling of exaltation arose as he began to play varied ceremonial roles that would endow him with the national image demanded by the myth. He appeared as Muscovite tsar, as pilgrim, as everyman, and later, after the revolution of 1905, as heir to the mantles of great national leaders exemplified by Peter the Great and Alexander I. The disjunctures between his roles lent his scenario an aspect of fantasy and make-believe alien to previous imperial presentations. But Nicholas clearly believed that the roles reflected his national self, and he came away from these appearances with a heightened sense of mission and determination to restore pure autocracy. As a result, in the opening years of the twentieth century, we witness the collision of two violently opposed insurgent forces: between a Russia awakening politically and demanding to be heard, and a monarch seeking to create a pure autocracy, drawing personal authority from God and the people, unencumbered by institutions of state. The visits to Moscow took place in the aftermath of increasing troubles in Petersburg. In 1896 and 1897 the capital was paralyzed by a general strike, which ended in concessions from

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the owners and the government, including the 111⁄2-hour day. The workers strikes were followed in February 1899 by a student strike in Petersburg prompted by incidents of police brutality that quickly spread to other cities including Moscow, Kiev, and Kharkov. At the end of March 1900, Nicholas and Alexandra traveled to Moscow, to celebrate Easter among the shrines and relics of Moscow with the grand duke Sergei and the grand duchess Elizabeth. It was the first visit of a Russian tsar to the city for Easter since Nicholas I’s in 1849. Merely leaving Petersburg improved Nicholas’s spirits. He wrote in his diary on March 31, “It is pleasant to be in the railroad car beyond the reach of all those ministers!” On April 2 he described his feelings as he bowed from the Red Staircase. “I found the minutes of the bow deeply touching and spiritually exalting (vozvyshaiushchee).”1 The tsar’s arrival and the Easter services were surrounded by great publicity. Besides newspaper communiqués for the press, the government published an account that was sent free of charge to the 110,000 subscribers to Sel’skii Vestnik. The brochure made explicit the parallels between Nicholas and the pious tsars of Muscovy. Nicholas had come to Moscow “by sacred precept of our native ancient times” to spend Easter “in close union with the faithful orthodox people, as if in sacred communion with the distant past . . . with that past when Moscow was ‘the capital town,’ when the tsar and Moscow Patriarch lived there, when the life of the first capital was an uninterrupted and undeviating observance of the Church Statutes, and the example of such a life was the Moscow Tsar himself.” The brochure related the ceremonies and processions of the Lenten and Easter seasons in old Moscow, along with Nicholas and Alexandra’s devotions. A lengthy section described the ritual preparation of holy oil in the Kremlin, which the emperor and empress witnessed. Photographs showed crowds of people watching the procession to the Chudov Monastery and to the Assumption Cathedral.2 The climax was the great Easter Night procession to the Church of the Savior. At midnight, Nicholas, in the uniform of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment, and the empress in a white dress and wearing a kokoshnik studded with gems and pearls, followed the leading court ranks from the Kremlin Palace to the church. Nicholas’s rescript to Grand Duke Sergei declared the attainment of his “intense wish” to spend Holy Week in Moscow “among the greatest national shrines, under the canopy of the centuries-old Kremlin.” He declared that he had found his communion with his people, “with the true children of our beloved Church, pouring into the temples,” and a “quiet joy” filled his soul. Sharing the Easter holiday with the worshipers gave him a spiritual mandate. “In the unity in prayer with My people, I draw new strength for serving Russia, for her well-being and glory.”3 On April 5 he wrote to his mother, describing how he and Alexandra had spent their days visiting the sights and reading about Muscovite history.

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“I never knew I was able to attain such religious ecstasy as I experienced during this Passion Week. This feeling is now much stronger than it was in 1896, which is understandable. This time my soul is so calm, everything here makes for the peace of prayer and the spirit.” On April 6 he noted in his diary, “It was gratifying to receive communion here in the Kremlin close to all its shrines. I worked on tiresome papers brought this morning by the Feld-Jaeger.”4 Nicholas’s second and last Easter visit to Moscow in April 1903 occurred during the revival of the constitutional demands and after the outbreak of peasant insurrections in the southern black-soil provinces. As in 1900, he felt a spiritual uplift. “The procession to the Red Staircase as always made a tremendous impression on me,” he wrote in his diary on March 30, and when he left on April 16, he expressed his regrets about leaving “nice Moscow.”5 The worship and the visit to the shrines repeated the schedule of Easter 1900, but now also brought him into direct contact with workers from the Zubatov organizations, the police unions that mobilized support for the tsar. On the second day, Nicholas held a warm meeting with a delegation of button makers, confectioners, perfumers, and tobacco workers in the Kremlin. The worker Fedor Slepov, who described the scene in Moskovskie Vedomosti, added that “the tsar knows about our organization” and that the workers would earn his favor, “if we ourselves take the peaceful road.” Slepov’s articles, reprinted in a pamphlet of 1909, conveyed the sense of his comrades’ delirious joy at the sight of their tsar. The workers asked why the tsar did not come to live in Moscow. The tsar was happy, like a “father, finding himself among his children, seeing them after a long absence.”6 The editors of Moskovskie Vedomosti also expressed regret that the tsar did not remain in Moscow. Petersburg, they wrote, could not provide “the tranquil, clear, national setting for governmental work that exists here in old Moscow, with the walls of the sacred Kremlin, in the center of native Russia, which can conceive only of age-old Russian foundations (ustoi).”7 Nicholas was presented as the religious exemplar for his people. And our Sovereigns appear not only in name but in fact truly the most pious ones, giving their people a great example of observance of church laws and reverential respect for the representatives of Church Authority. And how much the Russian people cherish this example! The people are filled with tender feelings seeing how strictly the Tsar and Tsaritsa observe all the rites of the Orthodox Church.8

By Eastertime 1904 the disasters of the Russo-Japanese War had already begun, and the imperial family remained in Petersburg. Nicholas gave Alexandra a present of a Fabergé egg in the form of the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow. A single golden cupola of the church rises from an elaborate rendering of the gates and staircases of the Kremlin in multicolored

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gold. Through the window of the cupola a replica of the interior of the cathedral is visible, including altar and icons. A music box inside plays the Cherubimic Hymn.

Nicholas in Petersburg: Le Bal D’Hiver After 1900 Nicholas increasingly disregarded the advice of his ministers and formal channels of government. He ignored the pleas for caution from the foreign minister Vladimir Lamzdorff and the war minister Alexei Kuropatkin regarding the aggressive pursuit of Russian interests in the Far East. He rejected the majority opinion of the State Council and supported the ruthless imposition of the Russian legal code by Nicholas Bobrikov in Finland, which revolutionized the previously quiescent Finnish population. In July 1901 A. A. Polovtsov, state-secretary (gosudarstvennyi sekretar’) under Alexander III and now a member of the State Council, wrote of the tsar’s contempt for “the organs of his own power,” and his belief in “the beneficial power of his own autocracy.” Polovtsov, who had been reading N. K. Shilder’s biography of Paul I, was struck by the similarities between the two emperors.9 At the same time, Nicholas openly displayed his preference for Muscovite cultural forms—art, dress, and ritual. He shared the belief, gaining widespread acceptance among the public, that ancient icons represented a true Russian art form, uncorrupted by the Western spirit, and revealed the spiritual reality of God’s grace to Russia and the Russian people. In 1901 he established a Trusteeship for Icon Painting, whose purpose was to create “active bonds” of national painting “with religious painting in general and church painting in particular.” The chairman, the Slavophile nobleman S. D. Sheremet’ev, wrote that the trusteeship represented the rebirth of “imperial patronage that appeared with particular force under tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich.”10 Nicholas found a common language and conception of power with Dmitrii Sipiagin, his minister of interior from 1900 to 1902. Sipiagin, a wealthy landowner, had served as provincial marshal of the Moscow nobility in 1894. He rose through the Ministry of Interior and served as vice governor of Kharkov, governor of Kurland and then Moscow Province. Sipiagin envisioned the Russian state as a patriarchal organization, inherited from Muscovite Russia, of benevolent landlord-administrators advancing the well-being of the peasants who worked for them. He viewed petitions to the tsar as a way to overcome the shortcomings of the administration and to establish a patriarchal justice resembling the petitions (chelobitiia) of Muscovite Rus’. Such ideas appealed to Nicholas. In the census of 1897, the tsar categorized himself as “landowner” (zemlevladelets) and as khoziain russkoi zemli—as “proprietor” or “master of the Russian land.” Khoziain had been used to describe the first Russian tsars.11

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Sipiagin’s political ideas were inspired by feelings rather than thought or calculation, and his strongest feeling was devotion to his sovereign. He hardly resembled an official and for that reason enjoyed Nicholas’s trust. He encouraged Nicholas’s belief in himself as Muscovite tsar who ruled by divine inspiration and could recreate a national Russia. As minister of interior he plied Nicholas with memoranda on the restoration of the power of the state, the elimination of non-Orthodox religions, and the Russification of nationalities. He acted to curtail the privileges of the zemstva, and in 1900, he issued an order to draft students involved in the student movement into the army. The assassination of the minister of education, N. P. Bogolepov, was followed by a wave of protests by students and intellectuals across Russia, culminating in the great demonstration on Kazan Square in St. Petersburg on March 4, 1901. On that day, Sipiagin dispatched Cossacks and mounted police to the square to disperse the demonstrators, and the resulting melée caused outrage both in educated society and among the officialdom. The Cossacks beat many participants, and 1,500—among them IvanovRazumnik, Peter Struve, M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii—were arrested. A wealthy, aristocratic member of the State Council, Prince Leonid Viazemski, who happened on the demonstration, admonished the police for violence administered to ladies, for which he was repimanded and ordered out of the capital. At a meeting of the State Council held on March 5, many of Viazemskii’s fellow members of the Council welcomed him as a hero. When the St. Petersburg Writers Union met a week later to protest the government’s reaction, Sipiagin promptly had the meeting terminated. Ill at ease in Petersburg, Sipiagin acted out the return to the past by wearing seventeenth-century attire and, when he visited the tsar, observing seventeenthcentury forms of address. He had the dining hall in his neoclassical mansion redesigned with vaults to resemble the Hall of Facets in the Kremlin. The walls and ceilings were painted in crimson, with gold patterns, on a crimson background, the Sipiagin family coat of arms, and a mural of the summoning of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich in 1613. An inscription in Slavonic script at the edge of the paneling read, “The Boiar Dmitrii Sergeevich Sipiagin and his Boiarinia Alexandra Pavlovna Sipiagin built this dining hall (palata).”12 Sipiagin, an amicable and magnanimous nobleman of the old type, loved to indulge his Russian largesse—razmakh—by giving lavish feasts for his friends, which, his physician N. A. Vel’iaminov wrote, he regarded as “a sacred ritual that he performed artfully.” He treated his guests to great portions of the Moscow Russian dishes he loved, especially suckling pig. He dreamed of receiving the tsar in his “dining hall” with Muscovite ritual and hospitality. When Nicholas accepted his invitation, he ordered an elaborate Russian supper with a Gypsy orchestra brought from Moscow. But the day before the occasion was to take place, on April 2, 1902, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. Vel’iaminov concluded, “Russia lost little in Sipiagin, but Nicholas lost much—a sincere faithful, and truly devoted servant.”13

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The political events during Sipiagin’s tenure and the sympathy shown for Prince Viazemskii by members of the State Council only confirmed and strengthened the tsar’s distrust of high officials. On the occasion of the centenary celebrations of central state institutions—the ministries, the Committee of Ministers, the State Council—Nicholas openly distanced himself from the system of the previous century. At the jubilee of the ministries and the conferring of a commemorative charter on the Committee of Ministers in 1902, Alexander Polovtsov observed, “none of those present heard a single word of favor from the tsar.” Neither celebration prompted special bonuses or awards to the officials. Yet unlike his father, whose gruff aloofness met all servitors equally, Nicholas made demonstrative and invidious shows of his attachment to the elite world of the military. On the anniversary of the Page Corps—the training school for most of the officers of the guards—he bestowed numerous awards on officials connected to the Corps, held gala receptions, and allowed all those who had received training in the Page Corps to wear the Maltese Cross, the legacy of tsar Paul.14 •

The most spectacular evocation of Muscovy took place at the celebrated “winter balls,” bals d’hiver, of February 7 and February 11, 1903. The court received instructions to appear in seventeenth-century dress. Museums were searched for pictures, artists and couturiers hired to design and make costumes at enormous cost. Courtiers came dressed as boyars, okol’nichie, and other service ranks of seventeenth-century Muscovy. Their wives were bedecked in robes patterned on those of the seventeenth-century and studded with ancestral jewels. The guards were in uniforms of the strel’tsy, the musketeers of old Russia. Nicholas wore the gold-brocaded processional robe and the crown of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, while Alexandra came as the first of Alexei’s wives, Maria Miloslavskaia, and wore a specially designed gown, brocaded in silver, and a miter set with a huge emerald pendant surrounded by diamonds. On February 7, the ball in the Hermitage Theater opened with a Russian dance choreographed for the occasion, then the couples proceeded to dance a waltz. The tsar wrote in his diary that “The hall looked very pretty filled with ancient Russian people.” Others present were also enchanted by the evening. Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich wore a red uniform of the chief of the strel’tsy of 1674, with gold embroidery and ermine collar. He found the gathering “astonishingly beautiful.” The grand duchess Maria Georgievna recalled that “Some mysterious magic seemed to have changed all these familiar figures into splendid visions of Russia’s oriental past.” V. N. Voeikov, a member of the tsar’s suite, wrote, “The imagination was transported back several centuries. . . . it gave the impression of a living dream.”15 Fedor Chaliapin played the lead in a performance of the second act of Boris Godunov. The event was repeated two days later in the Concert Hall on a larger scale for the dowager, who had been abroad, and for

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27. Nicholas II in Robes of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Portrait in M. S. Putiatin, ed., Letopisnyi i Litsevoi Izbornik.

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members of the diplomatic corps who wore their usual evening dress. The guests came in pairs to bow before the imperial family, and again there was a Russian dance. A concert of Russian songs entertained the guests at the supper in Nicholas Hall. The chorus and soloists sang byliny, songs by Alexander Dargomyzhskii and Tchaikovsky, as well as the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” The balls received considerable publicity. A deluxe three-volume album of photographs presented all the guests in their costumes, with indications of their contemporary and seventeenth-century ranks.16 The newspaper SanktPeterburgskie Vedomosti published three articles on the occasions. The accounts described the costumes in detail, noting their seventeenth-century provenance and the sumptuous jewels, particularly those worn by the imperial family. “The magnificent sarafans of brocade and silver, the silk of the ladies and the variety of costumes of the time of Alexei Mikhailovich carried the imagination back to the pre-Petrine period.”17 What did the ball mean? Members of the court thought of it as a masquerade, a diverting evocation of a distant exotic moment in the national past. Alexander Mosolov, the head of the Chancellery of the Ministry of the Court, wrote that Nicholas regarded the event as a first step to restoring Muscovite court ritual and dress, and had the designs drawn up, but was dissuaded by the high costs.18 Nicholas and Alexandra did not again appear in public in seventeenth-century dress. But portraits of him and the empress in their costumes appeared in many publications during the next decade, keeping alive the association between the monarch and his Muscovite forbears (fig. 27). Such portraits contrast with the scene of Alexander III in general’s uniform at the costume ball of January 25, 1883.19 They show Nicholas as the exemplification of a different type of monarch and suggest his wish to have a different type of court. The masquerade set the tsar and the tsaritsa in a different time-space continuum, a cultural and aesthetic universe distant from Petersburg society.

The Tsar as Pilgrim The assassination of Dmitrii Sipiagin in April 1902 introduced a new stage of social unrest and political organization. That same month, peasant unrest swept through Kharkov and Poltava Province where crop failure had struck the previous year. Large scale peasant disturbances gripped entire provinces, with the seizures of noble estates, looting, and burning. The constitutional opposition now began to reach beyond the zemstvo constitutionalists who had been organizing congresses and preparing addresses since 1900. The professional intelligentsia organized a network of groups in zemstva and the cities to unite all liberal opinion to the end of securing a constitution. The movement Liberation, Osvobozhdenie, began publishing a journal by that name in Stuttgart in the summer of 1902. Its initial programmatic statement

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announced the intention of uniting “diverse groups” with the aim of forming a constitutional party. Nicholas’s display of unity once more assumed the form of ceremony. In August 1902, Sipiagin’s successor as minister of interior, Viacheslav Plehve, arranged a well-publicized visit to the town of Kursk during maneuvers the tsar was attending nearby. The visit provided an occasion for a show of force in a region that bordered on the two troubled provinces of Poltava and Kharkov and for a show of the tsar’s authority before the heads of the local administration and estates. The tsar met with the governor of Kursk and governors of adjacent provinces. The warmest meetings took place with the nobility. At the unveiling of a monument to Alexander III in the Noble Assembly, Nicholas praised the nobles for their role in administering the peasants and promised to involve representatives of the local nobility and the zemstva in the reform of laws governing the peasantry. The speech seemed to mark a change in direction from the refusal to consider any participation of others in the consideration of projects of reform. The most significant innovation of the Kursk trip was the prominence given to the tsar’s meetings with peasant elders from Kursk and six other provinces, including Kharkov and Poltava. When Nicholas arrived, a delegation of eighty-seven volost’ elders greeted him with bread and salt. With Plehve at his side, Nicholas threatened punishment for those who disobeyed, but promised his own attention to the peasants’ well-being and recalled the words of admonition to obey the marshals of the nobility and the demand to ignore “foolish rumors,” which Alexander III had addressed to the peasant elders at his coronation. The Kursk meetings marked a return to the practice of Alexander II—the use of ceremonial gatherings in the provinces to seek and display popular support. But Nicholas understood these meetings in terms of his scenario, as expressions of his particular personal and spiritual bond with the peasants, not as manifestations of their love for their sovereign. In a letter to Alexandra of September 1, 1902, he described the Kursk events, mentioning a visit to the Znamenskii Monastery, where he kissed the Virgin’s image, then he wrote that the speech to the peasants went off well “because it is much easier to talk to simple people.”20 On October 20 he wrote to Prince Meshcherskii that he had returned from Kursk “in a very elevated and cheerful frame of mind.” “We ourselves have constantly wanted to go to the interior of our Native Land but circumstances have prevented it. In the future, I hope that such trips will follow one after another.”21 •

In 1902 and 1903 Nicholas and Alexandra began to seek direct expressions of the will of God in charismatic holy men from the people. Their quest for a personal mystical faith was in part a result of their longing for the birth of a son, in part a response to Alexandra’s reading of mystical texts and the lives of Russian saints in these years.22 They were particularly inspired,

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Robert Nichols has shown, by recent literature from the West, particularly August Jundt’s Les amis de Dieu. Jundt portrayed a group of fourteenthcentury mystic reformers whose example influenced other prophetic religious figures in later centuries. Nicholas and Alexandra began to seek their own friends of God among the Russian people. These were not ordained priests, like Ioann of Kronstadt, but simple people presumably endowed with a special grace who felt and expressed God’s spirit.23 Their new form of devotion showed Nicholas and Alexandra as one with the Russian people, sharing their religious feelings and taking on their humility and holiness. They took up the cult of the elder, starchestvo—the idealization of monastic ascetics who had broken with the usual monastic rule to serve as teachers and healers for the laity. Holy Russia meant not only a Russian population devoutly observing the rites of the Orthodox church, but a nation where Christianity in its earliest sense had been reborn. It was a literal return to ascetic Christianity, a sense that Russia was the actual site of Christ’s rebirth. This sense was vividly expressed in Michael Nesterov’s 1905 painting, Holy Rus’, which showed Christ appearing among the people in a landscape of rural Russia. Mystical experiences and apparitions of the Virgin had been accepted by the Roman Catholic Church in the second half of the nineteenth century in answer to the appeals of liberalism, socialism, and positivism. In Russia the Orthodox church remained wary of individual mystical experience, and it was the tsar who turned to charismatic religious figures to prove the sanctity and national character of imperial authority. Nicholas and Alexandra may have learned of such potentialities for popular religion from “Monsieur Philippe,” Philippe Nizer-Vachot of Lyon. Phillippe, a French hypnotist and medium, claimed to have the power to induce pregnancy and even to determine the sex of the child. He was summoned by Alexandra in 1902 at the suggestion of her Montenegrin cousins. An active figure in conservative nationalist circles in France, and a champion of the canonization of Joan of Arc, “Philippe” brought the example of French religious nationalism to the attention of the imperial family. At the home of Nicholas’s great-uncle, the grand duke Peter Nikolaevich, he suggested the canonization of Serafim of Sarov, as a Russian national saint. Serafim, the abbot of the Monastery at Sarov in Tambov Province, was an early nineteenth-century elder known for his holy life, his visions, and his powers of curing and prophesy. It was said that he foretold a long and glorious reign following a period of troubles at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, a movement began in the church for his canonization, but it encountered resistance from the church hierarchy and the Synod. Whether the church’s opposition resulted from the modesty of Serafim’s achievements or the usual skepticism of the institution toward popular saints is a matter of historical dispute. It is clear that the order for canonization came from the throne. In July 1902 Alexandra told Pobedonostev that she wanted Serafim canonized

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within six days. The chief-procurator resisted her demands but yielded when Nicholas insisted that the elder’s canonization take place the following year. The fact that Serafim’s remains had decayed threw some doubt on the canonization, but the metropolitan of St. Petersburg insisted that it proceed. The Serafim cult represented a Russian counterpart to the Marian revival in the Catholic church—an evocation of miracle to provide a form of emotional, participatory, collective religion with a mass following. Sarov, the scene of miracles, would become a center of pilgrimage for those in need of cure or succor, a Russian Lourdes. The life of Serafim of Sarov was a unique example of a Russian starets, who propagated a cult of virginity, unusual in Russian Orthodox practice. The nuns in the Diveevo Convent near Sarov became Serafim’s confidantes and followers. He witnessed numerous visions of the Virgin Mary; in one she confronted him with twelve Virgin saints. He insisted that the virgins live separately from the widows. Serafim attained, one biographer remarks, “an astounding intimacy with the Mother of God,” who brought him “mysterious fruits of strange flavor.” The nuns at Diveevo also claimed to have received visits from “a beautiful lady” in their church.24 Earlier in the nineteenth century, Russian empresses were the principal adepts of the Serafim cult. They found his teaching of the virgin congenial to their Western concept of the Mother of God. Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of Nicholas I, had surrounded herself with artistic representations of the Virgin. Tradition said that she died wrapped in Serafim’s cloak, declaring, “I am sure that this little old man will help me to die well.” Anna Tiutcheva wrote that she gave the empress Maria Aleksandrovna an icon of Serafim on New Year’s Day 1856 and cited his prophesies that Maria would be a mother who brought grace both to Russia and to the Orthodox church.25 In Serafim, these Russian empresses found a Russian monk who reflected their own conceptions of feminine purity and devotion. Now Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of Nicholas II, had the religious conviction and will to make Serafim a Russian saint. The decision to turn the canonization ceremony into a great public celebration seems to have been made in the Ministry of Interior. Plehve organized the event as an immense display of the “union of tsar and people.”26 In July 1903, nearly 150,000 worshipers converged at the Sarov Monastery, many of them sleeping in barracks or the open air. They came by train, on horseback or foot from different areas—Russian, Ukrainian, Mordvinian peasants. Most of them, judging from the pictures, were women. The ceremony of canonization presented a spiritual and symbolic union of three elements—the “people” represented by the pilgrims, the church by the participating clergy and the volunteer gonfalon-bearers, and the monarch with his family and his entourage. They were united in a great procession of the cross, which, on the evening of July 18, started out from the Sarov Assumption Cathedral led by the metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Antonii, to the Church of Saints Zosima and Savvatii where Serafim had

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held his last service and taken communion for the last time and where his coffin had been placed after the disinterment. Nicholas and the grand dukes—the “August Pilgrims”—lifted the coffin of Serafim and carried it in procession into the square before the hushed crowd. The tsar and the grand dukes carried the remains around the Assumption Cathedral, with prayers uttered at each side, then brought the coffin into the cathedral in a procession of the cross followed by the metropolitan, the bishops, and members of the imperial family. When the coffin approached, many fell to their knees and wept. In the background was a great crowd of people, holding candles and in prayer. The newly appointed bishop of Tambov, Inokentii, delivered a sermon that extolled the canonization as an indication of Russia’s holiness and destiny. “These holy remains are a new sign of the mercy and grace to the Russian people and the Orthodox church, for in the unfolding of the heavens a new man of prayer, a new intermediary and intercessor for us unworthy ones, stands at the altar of the Lord.” The metropolitan opened the coffin exposing Serafim’s remains, and the choir sang a hymn to Serafim’s glorification as a saint.27 Despite her poor health, the empress stood for the entire 41⁄2 hours of the canonization service. “During the entire procession,” Nicholas wrote in his diary, “we carried the coffin on a stretcher. The impression was tremendous to see how the people, and especially sick cripples and the unfortunate, regarded the procession of the cross. The moment when the beatification began and then the kissing of the remains was most solemn.” The next day he wrote, “The procession of the cross was just as touching as yesterday, but with the coffin open. The elevation of the spirit was enormous ( pod’em dukha).” The scene overwhelmed the Pan-Slavist writer and confidant of the empress General A. A. Kireev as well. “It was touching and exalting to see the tsar and the tsaritsa kneeling with hundreds of thousands of their subjects.”28 The canonization was made known in a special service, performed on July 19 in all Russian Orthodox churches. On that day, the imperial family and their entourage participated in a morning service at the Assumption Cathedral. Serafim’s coffin was moved from the altar to a special shrine donated by the emperor and empress. The shrine was designed to resemble a flamboyant old-Russian chapel with a tent canopy and small cupola. The tsar and the grand dukes again bore the coffin in a procession of the cross around the monastery grounds with the sacred remains open. On July 20, before their departure, the imperial family rode in carriages to the Diveevo Convent. Along the way, they were greeted by peasants who showed them their handiwork, as well as the provincial marshal of the nobility. A procession of the cross from the convent met them. At the convent cathedral the emperor and empress kissed the icons and received icons as gifts from the nuns, then toured the convent buildings and grounds.29

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The canonization and the presence of the imperial family was widely publicized. Newspapers and church journals described the proceedings in detail. Novoe Vremia and Niva printed photographs of the processions and the imperial family at various sites. A photograph of the tsar and grand dukes carrying the bier was circulated in large numbers; it appeared on the Easter egg Fabergé made to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Nicholas’s reign in 1911. Copies of icons of the bent, “wretched Serafim” as the symbol of innocent suffering were reproduced in large numbers for the church’s campaign of moral edification. Sarov, like the sites of European pilgrimage, provided the demonstrations of miraculous cures that could answer the challenges of skeptics and unbelievers. Articles in Niva, Moskovskie Vedomosti, and Novoe Vremia described the many cures of those who bathed in these days in the Sarov stream. Nicholas noted in his diary the reports of cures, one of which presumably occurred while the remains were being carried around the altar. “Wondrous is God in all His saints. Great is His ineffable mercy to dear Russia; indescribably consoling is the obvious new manifestation of the Lord’s grace towards all of us.”30 The empress, with her sister, the grand duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna, and her sister-in-law, the grand duchess Olga Alexandra, also bathed in the Sarov stream.31 After Sarov, A. A. Mosolov recalled, the words “tsar” and “people” followed each other directly in many of the tsar’s statements, and Nicholas increasingly looked upon peasants as “half-grown youths.” He felt a desire to come close to them, to “show physical affection to the people he loved,” but he was prevented by the size of the crowds and fears of another Khodynka.32 For Nicholas, this was a spiritual bond between likes, rather than an attraction of opposites. It expressed the sense that peasants shared a faith like his own, exemplified in the veneration of Serafim. When in 1904 Alexandra finally gave birth to a son, she believed it the work of Serafim, the result of bathing in the stream. Thereafter the cult became a focus of the life of the imperial family. Nicholas hung the icon of Serafim in his study. Alexandra later placed his relics in the Fedorov Cathedral at Tsarskoe Selo. They named the child Alexei, after Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He was the first heir to the throne to receive the name since the murder of Peter the Great’s firstborn son in 1718. •

Nicholas increasingly identified his religious mission with Russia’s advance into the Far East. In 1897 he abandoned his father’s caution and backed the recommendation of Foreign Minister M. N. Murav’ev to occupy Port Arthur in response to the German seizure of Kiaochow. He overruled recommendations of restraint by Witte; the war minister, Peter Vannovskii; and the acting minister of the navy, Pavel Tyrtov. On December 4, 1898, three Russian war ships were welcomed in to Port Arthur harbor and on

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March 15, 1898, China signed an agreement leasing the city and Dalien to Russia. Nicholas approved of a proposal for an Orthodox church in old Russian style, set on the highest promontory overlooking the city and the sea, which would attest to the fact that Port Arthur was Russian land.33 The minister of war, General A. N. Kuropatkin wrote in his diary early in 1903 about the “grandiose plans” Nicholas had for Russia in the Far East. Nicholas wanted “to absorb Manchuria into Russia, to begin the annexation of Korea. He also dreams of taking Tibet under his orb. He wants to rule Persia, to seize both the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.”34 The pilgrimage to Sarov confirmed Nicholas’s vision of a holy mission in the East. Many of the clergy at Sarov who had participated in the movement to canonize Serafim were also involved in missionary work in the Far East. A fortnight after the canonization, Nicholas issued a decree, without consulting his ministers, establishing a Vice-Royalty of the “Amur region,” and appointed A. E. Alexeev, an advocate of vigorous Russian expansion in the Far East, viceroy. Alexeev reported directly to the tsar and exercised virtually unlimited power over the region. Two weeks later, Witte, who continued to urge restraint, was dismissed. In July 1903 Nicholas allowed two young aristocrats who were officers in the Cavalier-Guards, A. M. Bezobrazov and V. M. Vonliarliarskii, to develop a timber concession they had been seeking on the Yalu River. Bezobrazov and Vonliarliarskii were less interested in producing timber than establishing a Russian presence in Northern Korea. Their contempt for formalities and their determination to show Russia’s superiority to orientals won Nicholas’s admiration. The growing Russian presence in Korea, as Witte had feared, antagonized the Japanese, who now demanded Russian recognition of Japanese dominance in Korea. In late 1903 Nicholas faced the dilemma of how to respond. On the one hand, he informed Alekseev that he did not want a war. On the other, he recalled that the Japanese had given in after the seizure of Port Arthur. On January 27, 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur. Nicholas dismissed the move as “a flea bite.” At the outset, the government presented the war as a religious struggle, with Serafim as its patron saint. Officers setting out for the front made pilgrimages to Sarov, and parents of soldiers traveled to Sarov to beg Serafim’s protection. Priests blessed the troops with his icon. The grand duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna carried the relics of Serafim with her when she attended to the casualties of the war in the military hospitals of Moscow. Serafim’s portrait was placed next to those of St. Sergei of Radonezh, the patron saint of Moscow, and the Archangel Michael, in a silver triptych presented to the minister of war, Kuropatkin, to protect the Russian armies. But the grand duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled that the soldiers did not recognize the new saint on the icon and felt confused and distressed.35

Nicholas II and the Revolution of 1905

The National Myth during the Revolution By the end of 1904, the movement, Liberation, led by such figures as Peter Struve, the editor of the journal Osvobozhdenie; the historian Paul Miliukov; and the zemstvo leader, Ivan Petrunkevich, comprised a broad front extending from the social revolutionaries on the left to zemstvo constitutionalists on the right. The beginning of the war brought an outpouring of patriotic enthusiasm from educated society. But the news of the failure of Russian arms dispelled hopes for an easy victory. The successive setbacks, culminating with the surrender of Port Arthur on December 20, 1904, with enormous losses, made it evident that Russia was facing defeat at the hands of a people that the government and many in educated society regarded as Russia’s inferiors. The failures at the front were accompanied by terrorist attacks on government officials. On June 4 the governor-general Nicholas Bobrikov, who had been ruthlessly enforcing Russification policies in Finland, was assassinated. On July 15, 1904, the social-revolutionary E. S. Sazonov hurled a bomb at the carriage of the minister of interior, Viacheslav Plehve, and blew him to bits. The murder was met by general indifference, and in some quarters, among them the upper echelons of the government, rejoicing at the fall of a hated, rigid bureaucrat. To replace Plehve, Nicholas appointed Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii, a liberal member of his suite and a protegé of the dowager empress. With Mirskii’s appointment, Nicholas embarked on an uncertain course of promised concessions alternating with repression. Under pressure of the revolutionary events and the insistent advice of officials and members of the imperial family, Nicholas granted concessions when absolutely necessary. But he understood these concessions in the framework of myth, as temporary obstacles to the triumph of a national monarchy. Throughout the demonstrations, strikes, mutinies, and violent peasant insurrections, he never wavered in his confidence, which was sustained by a faith in the invincible punitive capacities of Russian autocracy. He knew what was occurring in Russia, but comprehending the events in terms of myth, regarded them as the result of foreign revolutionaries, Jews, and intelligentsia, whom incompetent ministers had left free to wreak havoc. Mirskii accepted the position of minister of interior under the condition that the tsar announce a program of reforms, including civil liberties and a measure of public participation. Nicholas promised him full support. But Nicholas conceived political reform within his vision of seventeenth-century

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Rus’. He proposed an Assembly of the Land, a Zemskii Sobor, which could express his direct bond with the people and circumvent, “society.” The image of the Assembly of the Land, borrowed from an idealized Slavophile conception of the Muscovite Rus’, suggested a direct meeting of the people with the tsar, without institutional mediation and limitations. It would enable him to retain absolute power while presumably heeding the wishes of the people. The increased tolerance of Mirskii’s ministry allowed the oppositional movement to spread. A congress of zemstvo delegates that he permitted to take place in Petersburg in November 1904 was taken over by constitutionalists, who rejected moderate plans for participation. A banquet campaign, following the example of the revolution of 1848 in Paris, spread to twenty-six cities of Russia. The participants issued calls for participation in government or for a constituent assembly. All demanded the granting of freedoms and appealed for support from students and workers. Covered widely in the press, the banquets continued into January. On January 9, 1905, a mass of workers led by Father Gapon, a figure active in police unions, marched peacefully to the Winter Palace to present demands for a representative assembly in addition to the rectification of their particular economic grievances. The massacre that ensued, when the troops protecting the palace fired on the workers leaving hundreds dead, marked the Winter Palace as a symbol of brutal despotism and the tsar as executioner of his own people. Bloody Sunday unleashed strikes of workers and professional organizations and gave impetus to the formation of political parties that would contest the autocracy’s monopoly of power. At the same time, the authorities became concerned for the loyalty of the army. Disturbances among sailors on the Black Sea culminated in the mutiny of the crew of the battleship Potemkin and the temporary deactivation of the entire Black Sea fleet. In the spring and summer of 1905, the revolution spread to the village. Peasants, particularly in the central Russian provinces where communal land tenure predominated, began to pillage, loot, and set fire to estates. Kursk, the town where Nicholas had cordially spoken with peasant deputies in February 1902, became the scene of the first significant agrarian disturbances of 1905, which brought extensive destruction of property and incited unrest in neighboring provinces. Tambov province, the site of Nicholas’s Sarov celebrations, witnessed some of the most violent disturbances of the year. The 1905 revolution seemingly belied the fundamental premise of the National myth—the Russian people’s unswerving devotion to the tsar, which had spared Russia the upheavals of the West. Under the blows of Bloody Sunday, the concern about foreign loans, the lack of confidence in the loyalty of the army, Nicholas relented and accepted the principle of popular participation, but cast in the image of an Assembly of the Land. On January 31, 1905, the minister of agriculture, Alexei Ermolov, presented a report, couched in early Russian rhetoric, calling for a zemskii sobor. Nicholas had to hearken to the people’s voice “before Rus’

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loses faith in its God-given Tsar, in his force and his might.” He should summon elective representatives, “from all estates of the Russians land.”1 In a rescript to the new minister of interior, Mirskii’s successor, Alexander Bulygin, Nicholas announced his wish to assemble “the worthiest people” to head a commission to draft plans for a representative institution. These directives flowed from Nicholas’s twin beliefs in his obligation to rule forcefully and in the bond between him and the Russian people. He declared his beliefs before a delegation of fourteen zemstvo workers he received at Peterhof on June 6. Nicholas declared, “Let there be, as there was of old, that unity between Tsar and all Rus’, the meeting between me and the people of the land that forms the basis of the system resting on unique (samobytnye) Russian principles.”2 In the complex formulation of an election law, Nicholas, the grand duke Vladimir, and Constantine Pobedonostsev worked to ensure a substantial representation of the peasantry. The conference introduced a provision guaranteeing the peasants at least fifty-one deputies. This part of the Bulygin project would be carried over to the law of December 11, 1905, which governed the elections to the State Duma. Most of the urban population including the entire working class was left without franchise. Furthermore, the Duma would have only a consultative voice. It would pass on all legislation, but the government could issue laws without its approval if it gained the consent of the State Council, which remained an entirely appointive body. Nicholas considered that the proposed “Bulygin Duma” would make known the needs of the people but not conflict with the principle of autocratic power. In the manifesto of August 3, he expressed the hope that the deputies would justify his confidence and that they would “render to Us useful and zealous assistance in Our toils for the sake of Our common Mother Russia, to uphold the unity, security, and greatness of the State as well as national order and prosperity.”3 He clearly felt confident that the project did not jeopardize his absolute power. When several officers of the Preobrazhenkii Guards asked whether military men could serve as deputies, Nicholas replied, “Military men, members of the Duma? On the contrary, they must dissolve the Duma if this is required.”4 The plan convinced the leaders of the Liberation Movement that they could no longer count on major reforms by personal appeals to the tsar. They increasingly sought democratic support among the urban workers and the peasants. Despite the conclusion of hostilities with Japan, the strike movement continued, culminating in the great general strike of October 1905. On October 17, 1905, Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, drafted under the guidance of Sergei Witte, which promised the establishment of a State Duma, elected by all classes of the population, without whose agreement no law could go into effect. The manifesto also granted the basic civil liberties, personal inviolability, freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and association. On the same day, Nicholas appointed a cabinet headed by Witte, Russia’s first prime minister, who was responsible to the tsar.

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The manifesto brought general rejoicing at what society regarded as the end of absolute monarchy. It is clear, however, that Nicholas believed that the very issuing of the manifesto was a confirmation of autocratic authority. His reasoning came out in a disagreement over the form the announcement of the concessions would take. Witte had urged Nicholas merely to declare that he had asked him as prime minister to formulate the projects for the new institutions, and to leave the details for him to work out. In this way, he argued, the tsar would not bind himself with promises. But, Andrew Verner has shown, such a measure would make it seem that the reform came from state officials, representing a break from the system of personal rule of the tsar himself. Nicholas insisted on a manifesto, which made it clear that the reform was the tsar’s grant for the benefit of the people. In this way, he denied a break between the autocracy and the new order. He appeared as the founder of the new system and, having founded it, clearly felt himself entitled to change it when he saw fit.5 Disturbances continued through November and December. Nicholas found the person who would respond ruthlessly and energetically to the challenge in his new minister of interior, Peter Durnovo. Durnovo was hated in educated society for his unscrupulous repression of the opposition, and lived up to his reputation. As minister, he reorganized the administration and sent governor-generals to provincial towns to quell the uprisings. Nicholas’s correspondence expressed his approval of the brutal but effective retribution Durnovo encouraged. At the same time, he remained convinced that the majority of the people remained personally loyal to him. Nicholas wrote to his mother on October 25, 1905, defending the pogroms. He claimed that “nine-tenths of the trouble makers are Jews” and that the people had turned against them violently for that reason. “But not only the kikes suffered; so did the Russian agitators, engineers, lawyers, and all kinds of other bad people.”6 Because of his hatred of Jews and any group opposed to the monarchy, Nicholas regarded the pogroms as an expression of the unity of tsar and people and sympathized with the extreme right anti-Semitic organization, the Union of Russian People. He approved all petitions for pardon submitted by members convicted for participation in pogroms. On December 23, 1905, a delegation of the Union of Russian People presented Nicholas with two badges of the Union, one for himself and one for the tsarevich. Nicholas accepted the badges with thanks, then declared, “The burden of power placed on Me in the Moscow Kremlin I will bear Myself, and I am certain that the Russian people will help Me. I will be accountable for My authority before God.” The meeting was described in the pages of the nationalist, monarchist newspaper, Moskovskie Vedomosti.7 The election law of December 11, 1905, worked out by Witte and S. E. Kryzhanovskii, merely extended the system proposed for the Bulygin Duma, to the workers and urban population. The workers would elect their own deputies, but without the minimum of seats allotted to the peasants.8 The

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peasant representation, though less than their numerical weight in the population, would determine the complexion of the next Duma. Many officials, including Witte himself and those close to the tsar thought this a good thing, since they believed that the peasants remained devoted to the tsar. The grand duke Constantine Konstantinovich also placed his hopes in the peasants. He wrote in his diary on October 26, 1905, “My companions and I all maintain our support for autocratic government and nurture the hope that if many peasant deputies are elected to the State Duma, then it may be possible to return to the autocratic model of government, which undoubtedly has the support of our peasant masses.”9 In February 1906 a new State Council was created, half-elective from estates and institutions, half-appointed by the emperor to act as a counterweight to the Duma. In April 1906, shortly before the elections, deliberations began on new Fundamental Laws to formalize the changes in the state system introduced since October. The question arose of the definition of the monarch’s power in Article One of the Fundamental Laws as “autocratic and unlimited” samoderzhavnyi i neogranichennyi. Both adjectives had been removed in the draft of the Duma charter of February 20, 1906, but Nicholas insisted on retention of the term “autocratic.” By the April conference, Nicholas wanted the word “unlimited” restored as well. He had been encouraged to assert his prerogatives by the campaign of letters and telegrams organized by those in the government and the far right parties opposed to the October Manifesto. He described “the touching feelings of loyal subjects, together with their plea not to limit My power.” Reproach, Nicholas declared at the conference, would come from “the so-called educated element, the proletarians, the third element. But I am certain that 80 percent of the Russian people will be with me.”10 Nicholas relented on the term “unlimited,” but “autocratic” remained in the Fundamental Laws issued on April 23, 1906. For him it meant that he remained sovereign, that he retained the primary legislative authority that allowed him to issue the October Manifesto, that he was the creator of the new institutions, and that he alone could change them. The conviction that the Duma was an extension of the autocratic will and that therefore its deputies were obliged to earn his confidence was expressed in his speech to the first Duma on April 27, 1906.

The Monarchy and the Dumas The results of the elections to the first State Duma dispelled the illusion of a conservative, monarchist peasantry. The peasants voted heavily for the the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets, and the Laborer (Trudoviki) Party, who promised expropriation of noble estates. Nicholas used the official reception of Duma deputies to make clear that he remained sovereign. His moderate advisors had urged him to appear at the Tauride Palace, in the precinct of the Duma as a gesture of conciliation. He chose instead to follow

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the German example for the opening of the Reichstag, that is to address the deputies in sovereign precincts amid sovereign symbols. The reception took place in the throne room of the Winter Palace. The ceremony impressed the deputies and the world with the distance between the autocracy, comprising the emperor, the imperial family, the members of the court and the officials in the State Council, and the elected deputies of the Duma. On the left side of hall stood the members of the State Council, courtiers and generals, wearing braided uniforms decorated with medals, and the ladies of the court in the decolleté‚ “Russian dress” and kokoshnik tiaras worn at the highest state occasions. V. I. Gurko, assistant minister of interior, wrote that the women of the imperial family were bedecked in jewels “naively believing that the people’s representatives, many of whom were peasants, would be awed by the splendor of the Imperial court.”11 While the left side was harmonious in its uniformity, the Duma deputies standing on the right presented a motley picture revealing the political and national diversity of the empire. Some of the liberal deputies dressed simply to make clear their identification with the common people. The English journalist Henry Nevinson described a microcosm of the empire on the left side. Sturdy peasants in homespun cloth, one Little Russian in brilliant purple with broad blue breeches, one Lithuanian Catholic bishop in violet robes, three Tatar Mullahs with turbans and long grey cassocks, a Balkan peasant in white embroidered coat, four Orthodox monks with shaggy hair, a few ordinary gentlemen in evening dress, and the vast body of the elected in the clothes of every day.12

The tsar set himself apart from both groups by entering in a formal imperial procession to the strains of “God Save the Tsar.” Masters of ceremony led with their maces; behind them court officials carried the imperial regalia. Following them came twelve Palace Grenadiers, then the emperor, flanked by the two empresses and followed by the members of the imperial family. After entering, the tsar kissed the metropolitan of St. Petersburg, who then held a brief prayer service. He ascended the steps and sat upon the throne, which had been draped with the imperial mantle, it was said by the empress herself, in artistic folds. The imperial crown and other items of regalia were visible on stools at his side. The scene was caught in photographs published in newspapers and leading periodicals (fig. 28) and in a large painting that was publicly exhibited. The reception was staged to place the regalia at the focal point of the hall. Brought from Moscow for the occasion, the items confirmed the sacred sources of Nicholas’s authority. They demonstrated the tsar’s abiding preeminence as spokesman of the nation. Speaking down to the Duma representatives from the steps of the throne, Nicholas declared that Providence had moved him “to summon elected deputies from the people to help in legislation.” He expressed his trust in them both to clarify the needs of the

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28. Nicholas II Speech to Duma Deputies, April 17, 1906. L’Illustration.

peasantry and to advance the education and prosperity of the people. He admonished them that for these goals, “not only freedom is necessary, order on the basis of law is necessary.” He declared his “intense desire to see My people happy and to bequeath my son an inheritance of a strong, wellordered and enlightened State.” He called upon God to bless his labors “in union with the State Council and State Duma,” and asked that the day mark “the renewal of the moral face of the Russian Land, the day of the rebirth of its best forces.” Nicholas concluded by exhorting the deputies to turn to their work with “reverence” (blagogovenie) and asked them to justify the trust of tsar and people.13 The speech received loud applause from the left of the hall and hostile silence from the right. Not only had Nicholas continued to speak of “my” people; he had failed to make a gesture of conciliation—an amnesty for political prisoners. The deputies returned to the Tauride Palace where they drafted an indignant response. Later that day Nicholas wrote in his diary that he had worked for a long time, “but with a light heart after the successful completion of the ceremony.”14 •

The meetings of the first Duma from April to July 1906 witnessed a struggle between the government and the Duma leadership. Witte had resigned over

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a disagreement concerning the government’s land policy and was replaced by Ivan Goremykin, a courtier completely amenable to the tsar. The Kadets and the Trudovik (Laborer) party demanded expropriation of land for the benefit of the peasants and a cabinet responsible to the Duma, neither of which the tsar would accept. In the meantime, disturbances in the countryside and terrorist attacks on officials continued, leading to a continuation of siege conditions. On June 20, 1906, the government issued a warning not to believe the deputies’ promises of land. On July 6 the Duma issued a statement vowing to pass a law of expropriation. On July 9 Nicholas dissolved the first Duma, which had met for less than three months, and appointed the minister of interior, Peter Stolypin, prime minister, to bring the crisis to an end. Stolypin had distinguished himself as governor of Saratov Province, where he had won the tsar’s admiration by his courageous and decisive use of force to pacify widespread insurrections among the peasants and the military. As prime minister, he combined a policy of ruthless repression of insurrection with conciliatory gestures toward moderate society. He set before himself the task of restoration of order, using force if necessary, but at the same time insisting on the observation of strict legal norms. Nicholas continued to consider force the means to defend authority. On August 12, 1906, when a bomb planted by Socialist Revolutionaries in Stolypin’s suburban villa left twenty-six dead and Stolypin’s son and daughter seriously injured, Nicholas demanded that the prime minister find ways to realize his “inexorable will to eradicate sedition and restore order.” Fearing that the tsar might choose to establish a dictatorship, Stolypin submitted a proposal for field courts-martial to counter terrorism. It was issued on August 19, 1906, as an emergency decree, under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws. The decree assigned governor-generals the power to bring revolutionaries before military courts, which could issue summary sentences, including death. The law of August 19, 1906, dispensed with an investigation since guilt was “so obvious” that one was not necessary. Of the members of the cabinet, only Stolypin and the minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, opposed this step but, under pressure from the tsar and rightist opinion, the cabinet gave its approval. The decree turned the countryside into a battlefield. Between 1906 and 1909, the field courts-martial sentenced nearly 2,700 people to execution. In these three years, more people lost their lives for political crimes than during the entire nineteenth century. In addition, over 22,000 were sent into administrative exile.15 While Stolypin defended and supported the field courts-martial, his goal was the creation of a new political nation made up of property owners who would have a stake in defending the state and the monarchy. This grew out of the view embraced by Witte and others in the bureaucracy that the government could lead society. But it also involved a transformation of the peasantry, by dissolving the commune. Provinces with communal land tenure were the site of the most frequent and violent insurrections, convincing many officials and noblemen that the commune, rather than a bulwark of order, had become

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a hotbed of peasant rage. The landed nobility supported Stolypin’s program for the protection of property and the dissolution of the peasant commune, while calling for a narrowing of the electorate for the Duma. In November 1906, under Article 87, Stolypin began issuing the laws that would permit the breakup of peasant communes and the establishment of separate farms, which would be held with individual property rights. Article 87 required confirmation of the decrees by the Duma when the next assembly resumed sessions. But the elections to the second Duma, which convened in March 1907, increased the strength of the left. The majority of deputies continued to demand expropriation of land and refused to approve the laws. On June 3, 1907, Nicholas issued a manifesto announcing the dissolution of the Second Duma. A new electoral law was introduced under Article 87. This violated the Fundamental Laws, which specifically barred the use of the emergency provisions to change the electoral law. The decree of June 3, 1907, is usually termed the Stolypin “coup d’état.” But as Abraham Ascher has shown, the prime minister once more had acted only under the insistent prodding of the emperor. On June 2, when Nicholas signed the law, he wrote to Stolypin that delay in dissolving the Duma was “intolerable.” “It is necessary to display decisiveness and firmness to Russia. . . . There must be no delay, not one minute of hesitation! God favors the bold!” In the decree of June 3 announcing the dissolution of the Duma, Nicholas declared that he would continue to honor the rights granted by the October Manifesto, but would change only “the means of summoning deputies from the people” to the Duma. He insisted that the Duma “created for the strengthening of the Russian State (Gosudarstvo Rossiiskoe) must be Russian (russkii) in spirit as well” and while other nationalities should have deputies they should not be allowed to decide “purely Russian” questions. These problems could not be decided by legislative means, but only by the authority giving the first law, “the historical Power of the Russian Tsar.” He emphasized, “It is from the Lord, God, that imperial power over our people is entrusted to us. Before his throne we will answer for the fate of the Russian state.”16 The call for a legislature “Russian in spirit” meant in practice the sharp reduction in the representation of other nationalities such as Poles, Tatars, and Armenians, and the exclusion of deputies from eastern borderlands such as the Steppe and Turkestan regions. It also reflected the central theme of the National myth that identified all those who resisted the monarch’s power as not truly Russian, as enemies of the state. Nicholas’s telegram to the Union of the Russian People, which had campaigned for the Duma’s dissolution and for a restoration of true autocracy, gives a sense of the future reality he envisioned for Russia. “I am confident that now all the truly faithful and affectionate sons of the Russian homeland will unite still more closely, and as they continually increase their numbers they will assist Me in bringing about a peaceful renewal of our great and holy Russia and in improving the goodly way of life of her people.”17

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Stolypin also desired a legislature “Russian in spirit,” but his concept of the Russian nation differed sharply from Nicholas’s belief in a unity between tsar and people. Stolypin strove to make the state the focus of national unity. The state would unite landholders of all classes, including peasant proprietors and merchant and industrial capitalists. Property would ensure a stake in the regime and break down estate barriers; it would inspire a state spirit, gosudarstvennost’, among all groups in Russia who would find in it an instrument of Russian domination in the empire and abroad. The prime minister shared the sense of Russian ethnic supremacy widespread in the state administration, which increasingly regarded other nationalities not as participants in the empire, but as subject people. Their attitudes were reflected in the broadening of the meaning of the word “aliens,” inorodtsy, beyond its original significance of Jews and nomadic people, to include all non-Russian nationalities.18 During Stolypin’s tenure, the policies of Russification suspended during the revolution were revived with the support of nationalists in the Duma, particularly in regard to Finland, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic and western provinces. The new electoral law attained Stolypin’s goal of strengthening the conservative and nationalist forces in the third Duma, which served its full term from 1907 to 1912. The Octobrist party, the party of landholders and industrialists, held a plurality, and at least for a while the prime minister was able to develop a working relationship with its leader, the Old-Believer industrialist Alexander Guchkov. The Duma approved Stolypin’s land laws providing for the dissolution of the peasant commune. The Octobrist leadership cooperated with Stolypin to introduce reforms of the army and navy and laws for the development of universal primary education. But the coalition was precarious. Stolypin’s vision included an “all-class zemstvo” that had been discussed in the bureaucracy since the meetings of the Kakhanov Commission in the early 1880s. The conservative landed nobility began to organize to defeat such proposals. His attempt to introduce zemstva institutions in the western provinces, which favored Russian peasants against Polish and Lithuanian landlords, also encountered stiff resistance among conservative nobles both inside and outside the Duma. Although Stolypin remained in power until his assassination on September 1, 1911, he no longer commanded the support of a moderate bloc that could allow him to speak for the nation. Octobrists and Kadets objected to his use of Article 87 and the continued abridgment of freedoms by the government. Conservatives were alienated by projects that threatened the interests of the landed nobility.

Bonds with the People Stolypin’s state nationalism presumed the development of a cultural and historical sense that united a nation apart from the tsar, a view that could hardly win Nicholas’s sympathy. Nicholas’s family life at Tsarskoe Selo

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became the principal site of his communion with the people. There he gathered around him those who shared his views, his symbolic elite, now shrunk to those hostile to the institutions of state. Nicholas felt closest to the heads of his security corps, the guards officers he knew—the minister of the court, Count Fredericks; the palace commandants Vladimir Dediulin and Vladimir Voeikov; the chief of the palace administration, Michael Putiatin. The one person who enjoyed Nicholas’s complete trust was the empress. Mark Steinberg has made clear that Alexandra’s political views were identical to her husband’s on all significant issues—the importance of the assertion of autocratic power, its divine sources, and the devotion of the people to the throne. Her impassioned advocacy of her husband’s views reinforced his beliefs and gave him the reassurance that he sought among all he trusted.19 Nicholas and Alexandra found further support for their views in the “men of God” who congregated in their chambers at Tsarskoe Selo. They met Rasputin shortly after the issuing of the October Manifesto on November 1, 1905, and thought him a man of the people absolutely devoted to his tsar. In addition to his seemingly miraculous power to stop the tsarevich’s bleeding, Rasputin shared their distrust of educated and aristocratic society. He praised both the emperor and empress as defenders of the people and religion against the enemies of God. Rasputin addressed Alexandra almost as a saint. She wrote in her notebook a remark he uttered in 1907, “She is the ascetic (podvizhnitsa), who with experience and intelligence struggles in a holy manner and with skill.”20 Nicholas was also impressed by Rasputin. His concern for the tsarevich was as great as Alexandra’s and grew as he began to present his son as the hope for Russia’s future. He wrote to Stolypin in October 1906, “He [Rasputin] made a remarkably strong impression both on her Majesty and myself, so that instead of five minutes our conversation went on for more than an hour.” He told General Dediulin that Rasputin was “just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian. When in trouble or assailed by doubts, I like to have a talk with him and invariably feel at peace with myself afterwards.” His diaries mention numerous long conversations with Rasputin, without however suggesting their content. Stolypin warned Nicholas about having Rasputin close to him and in 1911 banished him from the capital. This step only confirmed Nicholas’s beliefs. That same year he sent Rasputin as a personal emissary to Nizhnii-Novgorod to determine the qualifications of the governor of the province, A. N. Khvostov, to serve as Stolypin’s replacement as minister of interior (which he held jointly with the office of prime minister until the spring of 1911).21 At Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas and Alexandra created a replica of an early Russian town, the Fedorovskii gorodok, built for the tsar’s personal convoy and his sharpshooter regiment. The centerpiece was the Fedorov Cathedral (1908–1912), dedicated to the Fedorov Mother of God—the protectress of the dynasty. The official name of the church, Fedorovskii Gosudarev Sobor, the Sovereigns’ Fedorov Cathedral, made it clear that it was the domain of

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the tsar and tsaritsa. The sums for the church came from the tsar’s Cabinet and his personal funds. The architect Vladimir Pokrovskii designed the cathedral in the spirit of the neo-Russian school, which sought sources of inspiration for a reborn national architecture in all periods of early Russian architecture. Pokrovskii took the model of the fifteenth-century Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin, which had served as the private chapel of the Moscow tsar’s family, but attached tent-shaped roofs above the main entrance and the covered vestibules, adding flamboyant elements recalling seventeenth-century churches. He also drew on Novgorod motifs for the bell tower. In this respect, the church created its own aesthetic, which erased the historical and stylistic distinctions of early Russian architecture and strove for a contemporary design true to the past rooted in a popular spirit. Pokrovskii’s railroad station at Tsarskoe Selo, 1910–1911, used seventeenth-century kokoshniki, a tent roof, and elaborately painted, vaulted chambers that recalled early Russian palaces. The cathedral was intended as a museum of early Russian religious art that would attest to the rebirth of a national religious art. Mosaics in old Russian style, early Russian religious items, gold and gems, and icons— among them a copy of the Fedorov Mother of God donated by inhabitants of Kostroma—decorated the interior of the church. For Alexandra, Pokrovskii’s assistant, Vladimir Maksimov, constructed a “cave church” in honor of Serafim Sarov below the cathedral, where the imperial family could worship before communion. The walls were painted with motifs from the terems, the chambers where women had been kept sequestered in old Russia. The vestibules were decorated with scenes of Hell and Paradise and on the ceiling the fortress of heaven. The chapel held a pitcher of water from the stream at Sarov in which the imperial family had bathed, an icon of Serafim, a box with a relic, and a copy of the “Tenderness” icon, which Serafim had kept in his cell, and his pectoral cross. The cathedral thus incorporated the symbols of popular charismatic religion into the artistic motifs of early Russia. The town was to represent a spiritual model of a reborn nation taken from Russia’s distant past. Stepan Krichinskii designed a Kremlin with walls and towers of elaborately decorated white Staritskii limestone. Krichinskii and other architects of neo-Russian style favored Kremlin walls, which emphasized the separation of the church and the town from the outside world. If the models for Alexander III’s official Russian style were urban churches in popular style like Vasilii the Blessed and Moscow-Iaroslavl Churches, the models for Nicholas II’s were old Russian monasteries sequestered by walls from intrusion. The purpose was not admonitory but exemplary, showing the survival and revival of old Russian piety by those foreswearing the contestation and distractions of modern society. The officers and soldiers of the convoy and sharpshooter regiment worshiped in the church and lived in the Old Russian–style barracks. They joined in a reenactment of an imagined seventeenth century. A contempo-

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rary wrote, “As if by magic you were transported to the era of the first Romanovs. Your feet sank into thick carpets. You were met by soldiers dressed in the Russian costumes of the time of Michael Fedorovich.” The costumes were designed by Victor Vasnetsov. The empress often prayed not with the congregation, but like seventeenth-century tsaritsas followed the service from a cell on the side. The cell was dimly lit, the faces of saints peering out, while the brilliant decorations of the altar could be seen through the doors. “From there the service seemed unearthly, the unseen capella sounded like a chorus of angels.” The heir at this and other services wore national dress, a Russian rubashka, sharovary, and high boots, or later, a Little Russian costume and a sailor hat.22 •

With the ebbing of the revolution, Nicholas reaffirmed his bonds with both officers and the rank and file. The use of guards regiments to suppress the revolution made clear his dependence on elite officers, and this ensured the continued aristocratic domination of the military. After the revolution, Nicholas resisted the campaign to professionalize the army led by the Octobrists in the Duma, which would shift authority from status to ability and destroy the world of military show that elevated his power. He fought the initiative of Guchkov, supported by Stolypin and the war minister, A. F. Rediger, to oust the grand dukes from their high positions. In 1908 he announced, “I intend to take military affairs more into my own hands.”23 For the elite of the military, Nicholas restored the glitter of the parade ground that they craved and had been lost during his father’s reign and greatly enlarged the imperial suite. He shared the guards officers’ passions for military dress and parades. In 1907 and 1908 he introduced new designs for uniforms that returned to the dashing styles of the nineteenth century. Shakos like those worn by Russian officers in 1812 replaced the Russian hats; stylish gilt braiding and the tsar’s initials decorated officers’ jackets. He restored the Hussar and Uhlan regiments that had been dissolved and incorporated with the Dragoons by Alexander III and provided them with elaborate and colorful uniforms, though they continued to serve together during military operations. Nicholas II presented himself as comrade in arms, both to elite officers of the guards and to the suite. To them, he appeared not as an embodiment of power, evoking awe, but as a comrade and equal. He revealed this simple manner at regimental banquets, which he attended regularly. These gatherings “were to have a strictly family character. The tsar in the camp of his regiment,” B. V. Gerua wrote.24 Singers and balalaika bands performed, wine flowed, the mood was one of joyous camaraderie. Nicholas allowed soldiers to join the officers in hoisting him into the air. Many in high society found such conduct unbecoming to an emperor. Nicholas also embarrassed the military elite by publicly displaying his rank of colonel in the Preobrazhenskii guards regiment. The celebration of

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the twenty-fifth anniversary of his service in the Preobrazhenskii regiment took place on June 12, 1912, at Peterhof with the fountains playing and the park decorated. At the parade before the palace, Nicholas told the commander of the regiment, General Gulevich that he would serve, as he had before 1894, as battalion commander, and therefore marched behind the general. In his memoirs, A. F. Giers described his amazement at the scene. “For the entire history of Russian armies there has been no example of a Sovereign Leader placing himself under a regimental commander.”25 The navy also figured in Nicholas’s presentation of himself as a monarch who enjoyed close rapport with the nation’s military. Between 1908 and 1913, he encouraged a rapid and costly rebuilding of the Russian fleet.26 Public ceremonies restored the symbolic bond between him and his navy, which had been destroyed by the mutinies of 1905. On his way to Livadia, at the end of August 1909, Nicholas reviewed the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol and found the national spirit reborn in the sailors’ response. He tried to be “cold and dry” with them, he wrote in his diary, so that they would sense that “the abominations of 1905 are not soon forgotten.” But his mood changed the moment he saw “their efforts to merit forgiveness, their desire to work with all their forces to attain good results, particularly in relation to combat. . . . I was moved by the shouts of ‘Hoorah!’ that the crews gave every time they passed the yacht and particularly when they saw Alexei and his sisters.”27 Thereafter, naval ceremonies became a frequent subject of publicity. Scenes in photographs and films showed the tsar in his smart, white naval uniform on the imperial yacht, the Standard, with the tsarevich in his sailor suit, and the tsar tasting the sailors’ rations (fig. 29). Nicholas increasingly advanced his son, Alexei, as the symbol of recrudescence of the Russian military. Alexei became the focus of a new youth organization, the Poteshnye, the play regiments, named after youthful army detachments formed by Peter the Great. The idea for the Poteshnye came from an inspector of schools in Odessa, A. A. Lutskevich, who had founded a boys regiment. In 1908 Nicholas handed the minister of war a sheet from his notebook indicating his intention to introduce instruction in drill and calisthenics in Russian schools throughout the empire, to be led by retired, reserve, noncommissioned officers. Play regiments began to form at schools, churches, and under the auspices of various military units. They heard speeches praising the church and autocracy and sang patriotic songs. The periodical of the play regiments, Poteshnyi, began publication in 1910. The first issue described a review of Lutskevich’s company, now named “The Grand Duke, Tsarevich, Alexei Nikolaevich’s First National Class of Military Drill and Calisthenics” before the tsar and tsarevich. A photograph shows Nicholas and Alexei reviewing the boys standing stiffly at attention in military uniform holding wooden rifles. The next year, the magazine carried an account of the imperial review of 6,500 boys on the Field of Mars. After the parade, the boys were taken to a “People’s House,” where they were entertained by jugglers, gymnasts, players of the gusli, and

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29. Nicholas Tastes Sailors’ Rations on the Yacht the Standard. From A. Elchaninov, The Tsar and His People.

singers. An article, “The Tsar and Children,” told of one of their number, sent to Petersburg by his father, who said “When you see the Tsar you should pray!” When the boy saw Nicholas, he wept from joy. These boys, the article explained, would share their memories with brothers, sisters, and friends, stirring the devotion of the young generation to their tsar.28 A review of Poteshnye took place in the Moscow Kremlin on August 29, 1912, in the midst of the Borodino festivities. The magazine published historical articles that presented Peter’s forming of his poteshnye in the late seventeenth century as an act of renewal undertaken from the throne. The cover for the first issue of the journal was in old Russian style, decorated with elaborate floral patterns. In the center, Peter the Great is shown learning fortification from a bearded instructor in the

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Kremlin. An illustration on the editorial page—“Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich and his ‘Play Regiments’: The Storm of the Fortress”—sets the motif of military change in a seventeenth-century religious landscape. Two clerics dominate the foreground, and cupolas of early Russian churches appear in the rear of a scene of Peter and his young soldiers preparing to capture the hill.29 The play regiments were clearly influenced by the example of Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, though they were founded in the same year. The Boy Scouts inculcated patriotism, Christian idealism, and loyalty to the throne and in the years before World War I trained members in military exercises. Most English scout groups were led by retired officers. Boy Scouts served as altar boys at George V’s coronation in 1911, and in 1912 the organization was incorporated by Royal Charter.30 But the English monarchy neither founded nor administered the Boys Scouts, whose fundamental myth, moreover, was more imperial than military. Venturesome explorers were the models for the boys, who read tales of the exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain John Smith and wore the round hats and short pants of a scout in the tropics. Inspired by a myth of empire and frontier, the organization taught skills of survival in the wild—bushwacking, tying knots, building fires—instilling pluck and resourcefulness in addition to discipline. The play regiments in contrast wore army and navy uniforms as if they were military units. They strove above all to inspire devotion and obedience to the tsar. The monarchy that the journal described took its origin from the seventeenth century and had little to do with governmental changes since that time. An article, “Tsarist Autocracy,” in 1911, told the story of the Moscow tsars’ unification of Rus’. As “truly orthodox” people, the tsars looked upon their office, “before the face of the Lord, as a great service and on their power as a God given means to realize everything for the secular and spiritual benefit of the people.” The boys were to look back to the origins of the Russian state for the model of their current government. “Tsarist Autocracy is the dearest child of Holy Rus’. [Holy Rus’] conceived, nurtured, and brought it up. As a person cannot stop loving and cannot abandon his own mother, so Rus’ cannot renounce Autocracy.”31

Historical Celebrations

The Poltava Jubilee The great historical celebrations from 1909 to 1913, the anniversaries of the Battle of Poltava in 1709, the Battle of Borodino in 1812, and the election of the first Romanov tsar in 1613, represented something new in their scale and the extent and character of their publicity. A mass-circulation press brought accounts of the celebrations and photographs of the principal moments into the homes of millions of readers. Historical works, popular brochures, and literature about the events were published under both governmental and private auspices in unprecedented numbers. During the Borodino jubilee, the books and pamphlets circulated by the official newspaper Sel’skii Vestnik and the publisher I. V. Sytin reached 2,860,000 copies. Sytin claimed that his house alone printed and issued 3.8 million copies of books and pamphlets for the Romanov tercentenary. The new medium of film also became part of the publicity of the celebrations. Alexander Khanzhonkov’s battle spectacle, 1812, opened simultaneously in movie theaters throughout the empire on the anniversary of Borodino and was reviewed widely in newspapers. The celebrations emulated the spectacular arrays and mass appeals of the jubilees of Queen Victoria in 1887 and 1897, Franz Josef in 1908, and Kaiser Wilhelm in 1912. Jubilees brought monarchs out of the palace and made them objects of mass popular love and acclaim, attracting attention to their person rather than to the office of sovereign, and connecting the monarchy with a nation’s history. In this way, the monarch represented not only head of society or of state, but head of the nation as well, what David Cannadine called “a symbol of consensus and continuity to which all might defer.”1 Nicholas endeavored to present himself as a symbol of the nation, but hardly as a symbol of consensus. Rather, at the celebrations, he tried to show that he, not the Duma and the political parties, represented the nation. At the sacred sites of great national battles, he appeared as heir to the heroic achievements of his forebears. On the other hand, the anniversaries of the Great Reforms received only perfunctory observance. In 1911 the Ministry of Interior forbade the showing of two films issued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation. The Poltava celebration in June 1909, commemorating Peter the Great’s defeat of Charles XII in 1709, revealed Nicholas’s scenario as heroic leader of his people. Parades, arranged meetings with peasants, and speeches of a

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patriotic character cast him as successor to the historical figure being glorified. The Duma and state institutions were relegated to the background or ignored completely, while he proudly displayed his sentiments for the guards regiments and the peasantry. On the evening of June 25, wearing the uniform of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment, the first established by Peter the Great, Nicholas joined the regiment for a dinner at their bivouac and mingled with the officers. On the afternoon of June 26, he showed his rapport with peasants of the region. More than two thousand peasants stood in a circle grouped by districts (uezdy) around Nicholas and Peter Stolypin. The tsar was relaxed as he chatted amicably with ordinary peasants as well as the elders. The peasants felt, Alexander Spiridovich, the chief of palace security, wrote, that “one could tell the tsar everything, as at confession.” Nicholas spent more than three hours in animated conversations; he burst into laughter at the peasants’ good-humored and apt replies. Nicholas was delighted with the meetings and asked that the people be allowed to approach him when he visited Kiev after the Poltava celebration. At the conclusion, he declared, “Thank you for your love and devotion, little brothers,” to cries of “Hoorah!” from the crowd. “It was deeply touching and significant,” Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich wrote in his diary.2 The next day, June 27, at a luncheon for the cadets and officers attending the celebration, Nicholas delivered an impassioned speech, intended for mass circulation, on the contemporary significance of the celebration. Omitting all mention of the government and the Duma, he spoke of the reaffirmation of the unity “of the tsar with the people” and the “close bond of the entire population of Our native land with their Sovereign.” Grand Duke Constantine wrote in his diary, “In the cries of hoorah drowning out the Tsar’s words, you could detect the extraordinary spiritual elevation they prompted—a feeling that we had not experienced for a long time.” When the tsar left, he was greeted with acclaim by the officers on the staircase and, from the brigades waiting downstairs, with another rendition of the anthem. Stolypin commented, “This marks the end of the revolution.”3 The success of the celebrations produced a sense of euphoria in the imperial party, whose members took the response as proof that the social revolution was over and that the nation had rallied around the tsar. Nicholas wrote on June 27 that he was leaving Poltava, with “the very best impression of the days we have spent here and of the moving reception by the population of Poltava province.”4 The Poltava celebration provided a model for meetings with peasants, staged by the Ministry of Interior at Kharkov and Chernigov in 1911 and at Belovezh in 1912. Nicholas also donated two statues of Peter that were placed opposite the admiralty building in St. Petersburg. One showed Peter saving drowning sailors at Lakhta, the other Peter building a boat. Both presented the emperor as descending from his throne and sharing the lives of his subjects. Nicholas now was beginning to see himself as military leader in the image of

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Peter and Alexander I. The war minister, General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, recalled that at this time the tsar constantly remarked that he would take on the role of commander in chief in the event of war.5

The Return to Moscow and the Borodino Celebrations The months before the Borodino celebrations, which began on August 25, 1912, were marked by increasing political and social conflict and signs that the opposition to the monarchy was resuming and gaining momentum. The assassination of Stolypin on September 1, 1911 created circumstances for renewed conflict between the tsar and the Duma. The success of the Poltava celebrations gave confirmation to Nicholas’s belief in the resurgence of autocracy and its national destiny, and he now was rid of the figure he saw as threatening his power. But he still had to contend with the Duma, which though overwhelmingly conservative in makeup, continued to represent for him an illegitimate encumbrance on his rule. Relations with the Duma became particularly strained when the deputies raised the question of Rasputin, whose contacts with the emperor and empress and dissolute behavior were widely known. Copies of letters of the empress and the children to Rasputin expressing their warm feelings circulated in society. Led by the successive presidents of the Duma Alexander Guchkov and Michael Rodzianko, the assembly openly condemned the influence of Rasputin on the imperial family. Nicholas had also to cope with the press, which in the major cities had been given freedom from preliminary censorship by the laws of 1906. On January 24, 1912, Guchkov’s newspaper, Golos Moskvy, printed an article condemning Rasputin, which was cited in its entirety during the Duma debate and then carried widely in other newspapers. Guchkov gave a rousing speech stating that “dark phantoms from medieval times trouble our state.” At Nicholas’s instance, an order forbade the mention of Rasputin’s name in the press, a measure that was contrary to the censorship law of 1906. It was during 1911 and 1912 that the central government, with Nicholas’s tacit approval, became involved in the ritual murder case of Mendel Beilis in Kiev. The trial had been pressed by the Kiev organization of the Union of Russian People and right-wing deputies of the Duma, when the Duma had begun consideration of proposals to eliminate the Pale of Settlement and to extend equal rights to Jews. Despite the absence of evidence of ritual murder in the autopsy, or any proofs, local authorities supported by the minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, decided to prosecute Beilis. While there is no indication that Nicholas played a role in the case, he received numerous reports on its progress and clearly believed in the possibility of ritual murder. Most important, he continued to regard the extreme right as true Russians who deserved his support. The prosecution was a clear example of action prompted by Nicholas’s scenario of national tsar, acting in accordance with what he understood to

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be the instincts of the Russian people. Hans Rogger concludes that Shcheglovitov acted “because he had come to accept and to share the imperial self-image.” By the summer of 1912, the case had become a symbol of the monarchy’s backwardness and obscurantism and prompted outraged condemnation from educated society. Left deputies asked the government to investigate the case just before the third Duma terminated its sessions in June 1912. The case had already begun to draw censure from newspapers abroad.6 The months before the Borodino celebrations also witnessed the revival of the strike movement. On April 4 soldiers fired on workers peacefully gathering to submit demands to the authorities at the Lena gold fields in Siberia, leaving nearly two-hundred dead. This repetition of Bloody Sunday unleashed a wave of strikes and protests. In the month following the massacre twice as many workers walked out as had in the previous four years. Over the course of the year, three-quarters of a million workers would go out on strike, more than during any year except 1905 and 1906. Newspapers carried articles reporting investigations of the causes of the massacre. The event brought forth condemnations from the increasingly oppositional Moscow industrialists, who saw the strike as proof of the danger posed by the “police perspective” to Russian industrial development. The Borodino celebrations allowed Nicholas to ignore these problems and to evoke the grandeur of the battle and the heroism of his ancestors. The Duma was again excluded from the scene. Only the chairmen of the Duma and of the State Council were invited to the observances on the field of battle. To deepen the insult, members of the half-appointive State Council received invitations to the Moscow events, but the Duma deputies did not. This act led Michael Rodzianko, the chairman of the Duma and a chamberlain of His Majesty’s Court, to boycott the Moscow celebration. On August 25 the tsar with the tsarevich at his side reviewed the units whose forebears had fought at the battle. Nicholas chatted with several old men who he had been told had been present at the battle. One of them, Sergeant-Major Voitiniuk, claimed to be 122 years of age, and astonished the tsar by recounting the exact details of the battle. That the old soldiers were well rehearsed seems to have been known to all but the tsar himself.7 Photographs of them, identified as veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, appeared in the journals L’Illustration and Niva, and in Andrei Elchaninov’s 1913 biography of Nicholas II (see chapter 22). The procession of the cross bearing the miracle icon of the Smolensk Mother of God, which had blessed Field Marshal Kutuzov’s armies before the battle, was a principal ceremony of the celebration. The procession brought the icon all the way from Smolensk to Borodino, a distance of more than 140 miles. On August 28 several soldiers bore it on poles across the field toward the emperor, who wore the uniform of the Horse-Guards, a unit that had distinguished itself at Borodino. V. F. Dzhunkovskii, the governor of Moscow, had introduced new security arrangements that permitted

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the crowd to view the procession close-up. The clergy, wearing crimson chasubles with gold embroidery, moved slowly and with great dignity. To the strains of the hymn, “Kol’ slaven,” Nicholas met the procession, and moved with it to the Campaign Chapel of Alexander I for a prayer service. Then the icon was carried past those units that had fought at Borodino, reenacting the blessing of 1812. Accompanying the icon, the emperor and his suite passed by three lines of troops that extended nearly three miles. Arms were held at prayer position, while the bands once again played “Kol’ slaven.” “The movement of the Sovereign with his brilliant Suite behind the icon along the line of the troops left an extraordinarily solemn and festive impression,” Dzhunkovskii wrote. A. N. Naumov remarked to the minister of foreign affairs S. D. Sazonov, “Look at these armies! Isn’t this might?” He was surprised to hear Sazonov reply that everything was superficial and that the Russian armies were not ready.8 Nicholas wrote to his mother, “a common feeling of deep reverence for our forbears seized us all there. No description of the battle can ever produce an impression comparable at all to the one that penetrates to the heart on setting foot on the soil where the blood was shed of fifty-eight thousand of our heroes, dead and wounded in the days of the battle of Borodino.” He mentioned the presence of the icon at the Te Deum services, “the same that had been at the battle a hundred years ago, the carrying of it along the front of the massed troops, these were moments that one rarely experiences in our own days.”9 August 26, the day of the battle itself, combined the three ceremonies— procession of the cross, parade, and meeting with peasants. After a mass in the Spaso-Borodinskii Monastery, a procession of the cross accompanied the Smolensk Mother of God to the Borodino Monument. Peasants were lined up along the road. Nicholas rode on horseback past the lines of the regiments, then they passed by him in ceremonial march. “The parade was very pretty,” he noted in his diary, “because of the variety of the uniforms.” Along the way, he stopped at the peasant bivouac and was greeted by 4,550 peasant elders. He spoke to them of the battle “where your grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought against the courageous foe and defended the native land with the help of faith in God, devotion to the Tsar and Love for the Native land.” To the tsar, his trusted officials, and nationalist newspapers, the peasants on the field represented the Russian peasantry as a whole. Moskovskie Vedomosti, relating the joyous response of the peasant elders, asserted that each of them “carried in his soul bright and exalted memories of visiting the camp of Little Father-Tsar, and the words of the Tsar, undoubtedly, will meet a warm response in all villages and hamlets where they will be transmitted by the fortunate participants in the Borodino festivities.”10 The Moscow celebrations in the next few days maintained the heightened religious tone of the celebration. Nicholas was greeted by enthusiastic crowds when he visited the Iberian Mother of God and bowed to the people in the Kremlin. The partisan theme of the celebration was voiced strongly at the

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reception the Moscow nobility gave for the emperor and empress. After the singing of “God Save the Tsar” and a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” a group of marshals of the nobility entered in pairs, led by A. D. Samarin of Moscow, and I. N. Saltykov from Petersburg. They formed a semicircle before the tsar, who stood upon the stage. Samarin presented a banner designed on an early Russian pattern as an emblem of the unity of nobility and crown. He then delivered an impassioned speech in the name of the Russian nobility of the entire empire, vowing that they would sacrifice their lives for the tsar, the “Sovereign Leader,” and native land as they had one-hundred years before. The banner would be a reminder of “that glorious year, when all of the might of the Russian land told in the union of Tsar and people.” The speech ended with lines of “God Save the Tsar,” and then all joined in singing the anthem to their sovereign.11 The celebration concluded on August 30, the day of the patron saint of Alexander I, Alexander Nevskii, with a massive prayer service on Red Square in memory of Alexander I. Nicholas and Alexandra followed a procession of the cross from the Assumption Cathedral to Red Square, reversing the usual direction of movement to the church from the square. They ascended a dais constructed in old Russian style with a tent roof near the monument to Minin and Pozharskii. “The crowd in the square was enormous, a sea of heads, and stood in perfect order and quiet,” Nicholas wrote to his mother.12 A protodeacon declaimed the manifesto commemorating the battle. This was followed by a prayer service conducted by the metropolitan, joined by the synodal choir, and a people’s choir of over three thousand. The emperor and empress and the immense crowd then fell to their knees as the choirs intoned a prayer in memory of Alexander I. The ceremony ended with a triple salvo from the troops on the square and the tolling of bells of the churches of Moscow as the metropolitan made the sign of the cross with the icon of the Moscow miracle workers—the metropolitans Peter, Alexei, Iona, and Phillip. Moskovskie Vedomosti hailed the festivities for “dealing the final blow to the harmful legend of the so called revolutionary character of Moscow.” According to the editorial, the revolutionary events in Moscow were the result of outside insurgent bands, which were clumsily suppressed by officers sent from outside of Moscow.13 The use of domestic memorials to mark the tsar’s ceremonial triumphs is exemplified by “the fifteenth-anniversary egg,” Nicholas’s gift to Alexandra on the anniversary of his coronation in 1911. “The fifteenth-anniversary egg” memorialized nine outstanding moments of Nicholas’s reign in delicate ivory panels painted by Vasilii Zuev from photographs and drawings. Six of the events were ceremonial. Two miniatures depict the coronation—the tsar and the empress in the procession to the cathedral, and Nicholas placing the crown on his head—one is a copy of the photograph of Nicholas carrying the bier at Sarov, others show him before the throne at the reception of the Duma, descending the steps from the monument at Poltava, and at the unveiling of a statue to Peter the Great in Riga.

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The Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty: The February Celebrations The anniversary of the coming to the throne of the first Romanov tsar in 1613 assumed a far greater scope than previous jubilees. The opening celebrations, marking the election of Michael by the Assembly of the Land, took place in Petersburg in February 1913. In May the imperial family journeyed to the Volga towns including Kostroma, the ancient Romanov patrimony where Michael Fedorovich at the Ipat’evskii Monastery received the invitation to rule from the Great Embassy of the assembly of 1613. They then proceeded to Moscow to commemorate Michael’s gala entry to the city and coronation. The Tercentenary Committee, the organization established to plan the events, chose February 21, the anniversary of Michael’s election, as the principal date of the celebration. The committee rejected the proposal of the representatives of the Holy Synod to celebrate on July 11, the anniversary of the coronation. The committee’s journal stated the opinion that the “autocratic power of the Russian Tsar” did not have “an ecclesiastical origin, like some western countries where kings depended on the papal throne.” It was the election of Michael that gave the dynasty its popular mandate. February 21 was the day, the committee’s chairman, Alexander Bulygin, concluded that would have “the broadest, truly state and all-Russian character.”14 Having chosen the election, the committee had to defend it as the beginning of the dynasty, while removing the principle of electoral and participatory government, which would have given grounds to include Duma deputies. The election was unconditional, the committee held, implying no constraints on the monarch’s power: “the autocratic power of the Russian Tsar has never rested on any contractual legal basis.” Bulygin shifted the focus from the electoral body to the consciousness of the whole people—the “national soul,” and “the historical habit never to separate the sacred image of the Tsar from the image of the native land (rodina), which is equally sacred to the Russian heart.” The deputies merely expressed the promptings of the national soul. When the first Romanov tsar arrived in Moscow, the people “like a single person cried that they wanted Tsar Michael Fedorovich. . . . For His name alone people were ready to die and went to their death. His reign began in the hearts of Russian people from this point.”15 The political mood of the capital before February was antagonistic. In December 1912, Nicholas had appointed Nicholas Maklakov acting minister of interior, and in February he was confirmed in his position. Maklakov made it immediately clear that he, like Viacheslav Plehve ten years before, intended “to strengthen authority.” He assigned new police powers to the governors and announced that he wanted changes in the press law. Zemstvo and town assemblies, the Duma and the State Council all called for a true amnesty. An article of January 27, 1913, in the newspaper Russkoe Slovo

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concluded, “Now when ‘the Time of Troubles’ has passed even by official announcement of the ministry . . . the belief has been born in the public consciousness that a free and generous hand will bear a new cup of mercy.” It was especially important to free those convicted for political crimes in the struggle for the very institutions that had been established.16 The decree issued on the day of the celebration was not an amnesty but rather a carefully measured forgiveness designed to show Nicholas’s determination not to yield even in spirit to the entreaties from moderate society. The type of crimes eligible for reduction or elimination of sentences was determined by the maximum sentence possible for each crime rather than the sentence actually given, a measure that put many political crimes with high maximum sentences outside the scope of the law. The reductions of sentences amounted to about one-third of the remaining term, rather than two-thirds as in the 1904 act of clemency. The law also left the question of whether years were to be calculated on the basis of time served or the original sentence to be decided by administrative officials. The government was most generous in cases of press crimes. It halted prosecution of the newspapers Den’, Luch, Pravda, and Rech’ and the editors of Pravda and Luch were released from prison. Writers such as Maxim Gorky, Constantine Balmont, and Nicholas Minskii were allowed to return to Russia. The principal ceremonies at the tercentenary celebrations were processions of the cross. The tercentenary committee urged the staging of processions of the cross, “everywhere.” “This ceremony, as something unusual, would give greater meaning to the day of the ceremony and may arouse a general upsurge of patriotic sentiment in the people.” Similar ceremonies would take place in all the villages of Russia, accompanied by parades. The committee decided that the celebration would begin on February 21 with a solemn religious service in the Kazan Cathedral, officiated by the St. Petersburg metropolitan and attended by the dignitaries of the state and the church. The Kazan Cathedral was chosen, the committee’s journal indicated, because of the great reverence inspired by the Kazan Mother of God. The tsar, it was agreed, would ride to the Kazan cathedral along Nevskii Prospect from the Winter Palace.17 Miracle icons of the Mother of God, the symbols unifying the religious ceremonies with the Russian people, combined the religious and the political messages of the celebration. Two of the principal icons in the service, the Kazan Mother of God and the Pochaev Mother of God, expressed the national, imperial mission of Russian Orthodoxy. The Kazan Mother of God had revealed the divine blessing over the extension of the empire’s eastern territories. It had been discovered in 1579, when Hermogen, serving as bishop in Kazan, began efforts to convert the Tatars in the city. The icon accompanied Russian troops both in 1612 against the Poles and again along with the Smolensk Mother of God in 1812 against Napoleon. Beside the Kazan icon was the Pochaev Mother of God, from the Pochaev Monastery in Volynia, five miles from the Austrian border. The Pochaev

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Monastery had accepted the Uniate faith in the eighteenth entury. In 1831 Nicholas I had placed it under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox church, and from that time it had represented an outpost of Orthodoxy and the imperial national mission on the western frontier. The abbot, Vitalii, was a spokesman of the Union of the Russian People, and the monastery published Pochaevskii Listok, an anti-Duma, anti-Semitic organ of the Union. The Petersburg tradition would be represented by Peter the Great’s beloved Icon of the Savior, which accompanied him into battle and hung in a chapel near Peter’s small house on the Neva. •

The February celebration immediately assumed a partisan character. Despite the Committee’s objections to the involvement of right-wing political groups in the celebration, members of the Union of the Russian People and of the Union of the Archangel Michael were prominent figures in the religious processions on February 21. The evening before, the Sixth Congress of monarchist organizations of “Russian People” (S’ezd russkikh liudei) opened in the mansion of the chief-procurator of the Holy Synod, Vladimir Sabler. After prayers and hymns sung by the chorus of the Egerskii Regiment, the members of the Tercentenary Committee of Monarchist Organizations announced the sending of a telegram to Nicholas, declaring “We can say to the Tsar, ‘Lead us boldly, the cross of Christ is above you and the Russian people and the Russian land is with you and no one is frightened now for Rus’.’ ”18 Their presence and acceptance by the government immediately identified the celebration with the extremist right, anti-Semitic groups, whom Nicholas was protecting. At eight in the morning on February 21 a salvo resounded from the PeterPaul fortress, and twenty-five processions of the cross began to wind through the streets of the capital to meet at seven cathedrals. The three principal processions converged at the Kazan Cathedral. The procession from the Nevskii Monastery bore an icon of Nevskii; that from the Synodal Center, the Pochaev Mother of God; and the third, from the Peter-Paul Cathedral, the Icon of the Savior. The clergy marched with icons, accompanied by phalanxes of monarchist organizations, the Union of the Archangel Michael and the Chief Council of the Union of Russian People, carrying their banners and national flags. The reporter in Moskovskie Vedomosti wrote “over the gigantic rectangle of flags rose crosses and banners. . . . as well as the banners of monarchist organizations.” They marched to the singing of the monks and members of the temperance society. At the Anichkov Palace, they halted and joined in the chorus of a hymn, “Save Lord, Your people” (Spasi, Gospodi, liudi Tvoia) and a chorus of “God Save the Tsar.” The three processions were greeted on the steps of the cathedral by the metropolitan of Vladimir, and the icons were brought inside, the Pochaev icon being placed before the altar. The monarchists stood in a semicircle before the cathedral, holding their flags aloft during the

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entire service. Across Nevskii Prospect, members of the clergy held crosses and gonfalons. The religious processions had taken on the aspect of a political demonstration on behalf of the tsar. The elite of the Russian state, the State Duma, and the diplomatic corps, marshals of the nobility, representatives of the urban estate, peasant elders made up a throng of 4,000 gathered in the neoclassical magnificence of the Kazan Cathedral. The scene, Novoe Vremia reported, was equal to the requirements of solemnity, torzhestvennost’. “It was all brilliance, the brilliance of the ladies’ diamonds, the brilliance of the medals and the stars, the brilliance of the gold and silver of the uniforms.”19 In the rear of the cathedral stood representatives from Finland and “aliens” (inorodtsy). Peasant elders from villages across Russia were placed behind the columns and along the windows. On the dais waited the court choir in crimson caftans, and the metropolitan’s choir in blue. Political conflict intruded into the cathedral as well. Michael Rodzianko’s memoirs tell of an altercation over placement of the senators, who were supposed to stand in front of the Duma. Such an arrangement, he protested, made it appear that the deputies representing the people of Russia had been placed behind the appointive officials of an administrative institution. Rodzianko remonstrated with the master of ceremonies and convinced him to move the Senate back. He defended their new position by posting sergeants-at-arms of the Duma. At this point, Rasputin appeared in a crimson, silk tunic and stood before the space reserved for the Duma. After a confrontation with Rodzianko, he withdrew. The incident was reported in the press, but without mentioning Rasputin. As the patriarch of Antioch, a special guest for the occasion, conducted a memorial service in the cathedral, Nicholas left the Winter Palace to ride down Nevskii Prospect. Members of the Union of the Russian People and the Union of the Archangel Michael lined the avenue and stood before the cathedral. Phalanxes of guards and cadets from military schools guarded the avenue. Shutters along the way were closed. Convoy Cossacks in scarlet uniforms led the way. The emperor and the heir followed in an open victoria, both of them wearing the uniforms of the Imperial Rifles. The heir, the London Times’ correspondent wrote, “looked as well as any boy his age.”20 Behind them rode the two empresses in a gilded state carriage drawn by four horses. Two large cossacks stood on the rear platform. Another carriage followed with the grand duchesses. A company of Convoy Cossacks brought up the rear. As the procession approached, bands struck up “God Save the Tsar” while the crowd and the guards shouted “Hoorah!” The imperial family was met by the Petersburg metropolitan on the cathedral steps. Followed by an honor guard from his suite, Nicholas proceeded to the “tsar’s place,” a sumptuous marble throne located beneath the words, “The Tsar is in the Hands of God.” A protodeacon declaimed the imperial manifesto, written by the chief of the Department of Land Tenure and Agri-

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culture , A. V. Krivoshein, which would be read from the pulpits of churches across Russia that day. The first part of the manifesto attributed Russia’s emergence from the troubles and the vast expansion of Muscovite Rus’ into the Russian empire to the union of tsar and people. The tsar announced his intention to lead the state in union with his people in building a “national life” (zhizn’ narodnaia). But the phrase pointedly omitted mention of the Duma. Nicholas had excised words in Krivoshein’s draft about the union “with deputies from the people . . . who have been summoned to participate in the work of legislation.” Nicholas mentioned no specific institutions. In the second part of the manifesto, he cited “with grateful emotion,” those who had given great service to Russia, referring to them as the tsars’ “comrades-inarms”: the clergy; the nobility; the military; serving people of all ranks; the practitioners of sciences, literature and the arts; those working in industry and agriculture; and finally the tillers of the soil.21 Those present heard whispered rumors that Rasputin was in the cathedral, and as the clergy intoned their prayers and the choruses lifted their voices in hymns, necks craned to catch a glimpse of him. Nicholas looked troubled and distracted. Alexandra was visibly nervous. When the congregation knelt in prayer, the tsar and tsarevich stared upward at two pigeons flying about in the dome. At the close of the service, the Antioch patriarch recited a blessing. This was followed by readings of the Gospel, by the Antioch in Greek and the metropolitan in Church Slavic. The choirs intoned a hymn, the congregation and emperor and empress knelt, and the metropolitan delivered a prayer of thanksgiving. After the prayer for the tsar’s long life, the cannons of the Peter-Paul fortress fired a salute, and the bells of the churches of the capital tolled in the background. The imperial family moved to the dais and kissed the miracle-working icons that they believed had bestowed the grace of God on Russia. Receptions, balls, and theatrical presentations followed the service. On the afternoon of February 21, Nicholas received congratulations from the hierarchs of the church and the heads of state institutions in the Winter Palace. Presidents of the State Council and the Duma presented icons to Nicholas. Rodzianko, the president of the Duma, also presented an ancient cloth depicting Tsar Michael welcoming his father, the patriarch Filaret on his return from captivity. Then he insisted on delivering a speech of loyalty to the tsar. In addition, Nicholas and Alexandra received representatives of the estates of the realm and the nationalities. Also present were the descendants of the signers of the manifesto inviting Michael to be tsar in 1613, among them members of the oldest aristocratic families of Russia—a Trubetskoi, a Golitsyn, a Lobanov-Rostovskii, and a Putiatin. The emperor and empress performed these ceremonies, meant to display the solidarity between the monarch and his state, with little spirit. A. N. Naumov and Alexander Spiridovich recalled Nicholas’s striking disregard for the representatives of the noble and merchant estates, and even for the

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descendants of the signers of the 1613 manifesto. Nicholas stood chatting with the adjutants of his suite, leaving the estate representatives feeling perplexed and offended. Men who journeyed to the capital for perhaps their single opportunity to meet the tsar were filed past rapidly, many of them unable even to glimpse his face. The aristocratic scions of the illustrious figures of 1613 felt snubbed. According to Naumov, one nobleman asked his friend, “Tell me Alexander Nikolaevich, when we passed by, was he there or not?”22 Alexandra failed to appear at most of the receptions. She did attend the gala performance of Life for the Tsar at the Mariinskii Theater, but left after the first act. “A wave of resentment rippled over the theater.”23 The empress was equally distant at the ball at the Noble Assembly the next evening, the first appearance of the empress and emperor at a ball since the 1903 masquerade pageant. She looked haggard and left early, inflicting more wounded feelings. Many also resented the emperor and empress’s failure to give their own court ball. The banquet held for the upper ranks of the state and church, as well as marshals of the nobility, was another divisive event. The imperial family dined at a lavishly decorated table in the throne room. During the dinner an orchestra and several military bands played Russian music. Members of the State Council were invited, but only the chairman and vice-chairman of the Duma. According to one account, Rodzianko was not given the honor of dining in the hall with the emperor and stormed out of the palace. On the other hand, 1,320 members of monarchist organizations, the Union of Russian People, and the Union of the Archangel Michael enjoyed the privilege of standing in the halls to witness the great procession of the imperial family and the court from their apartments to the banquet tables. In each room, the monarchists, many of them peasants, shouted “Hoorah!” and broke into a chorus of “God Save the Tsar!” They had been allowed a privilege not granted to other political groups. At the dinner for peasant elders held on February 23, Nicholas showed his attention to the peasantry. The elders bowed to Nicholas and he spoke informally with them. Then he greeted them as “the representatives of Great Mother, Russia.” He declared, “Our Russia grew strong from faith in God, and love of the tsar for the people and the devotion of the Russian People to the Imperial throne.” The oldest of the peasants, from the Shlisselburg district of Petersburg Province, responded with the traditional words to the tsar. He thanked him for his kindness and prayed God to bless the tsar and tsarevich. “And believe Sovereign, that our life is for You.”24 In planning the festivals for the people in St. Petersburg, the authorities sought to avoid large concentrations of people, which might encourage demonstrations. They organized subdued gatherings at six sites far from the center, where the people would be entertained with plays, panoramas, and magic-lantern pictures with explanations from the history of the Romanov dynasty. Bands played military music and the celebrations ended

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with solemn singing of the hymn “Kol’ slaven” as the halls were illuminated with Bengal lights and projectors. A battalion of infantry, a company of Cossacks, and seventy police officers provided security at each location. The committee decided to refrain from public distribution of free food and souvenirs, lest they lead to disorders, as at the coronation. Instead, the organization of Sobriety Trusts served meals in people’s cafeterias, and tea with sugar in lodging houses. The people’s entertainments proceeded without incident. Many newspaper and memoir accounts give the sense that the celebration remained an official one with little popular resonance. Nicholas, however, was pleased. He wrote in his diary on February 21, “The mood was joyous, reminding me of the Coronation.” After the celebrations, he wrote “Thanks be given to the Lord, God, bestowing grace on Russia by allowing us to celebrate the days of the tercentenary of the accession of the Romanov dynasty in so worthy and radiant a manner.”25

The May Celebrations The May celebrations took Nicholas and Alexandra to the scenes of the events of 1613, the Volga towns, where Nicholas had not appeared since the summer of 1881, when he was thirteen years old. Alexandra had longed to make the tour of the Volga region and to see the sites of the first Romanovs since her arrival in Russia in 1894. Their trip began on May 16 in Vladimir. The imperial party traveled by automobile to Nizhnii-Novgorod, then boarded a steamship for a trip along the Volga, to Kostroma and Iaroslavl. In each town, they heard a religious service, received the dignitaries of various estates, and gave dinners for the peasant volost’ elders. They also visited historical sites and, at the empress’s request, monasteries, ten of which were listed on the itinerary before they reached Moscow. General E. E. Bogdanovich aptly described the trip in a book published at the time as a “pilgrimage.”26 On the ship, Nicholas traveled in much the same company that surrounded him at the Alexander Palace and the other suburban palaces—his family, the security officials of Tsarskoe Selo, officials of the Ministry of the Court, and adjutants from his suite. For the Volga leg of the trip, the imperial party lived on a flotilla of four steamships that both reproduced the comfort and opulence of the imperial palaces and eased the problem of security. Except for the prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, and the ministers of the court and communications, the cabinet was not invited to join the river trip. Kokovtsov, to his chagrin, had to provide his own transportation to the point of embarkation in Nizhnii-Novgorod. The emperor’s aloofness to his ministers remained evident throughout his trip. Nicholas, Kokovtsov observed, viewed the principal officials of state as a “dividing wall” that hampered his direct bond with the people. He

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“became convinced more and more that the Sovereign could do everything by himself, because the people were with Him, knew and understood Him, and were blindly devoted to Him.” He was impatient with the ministers, the Duma, everything boring him with the details of government, anything “diminishing the former prestige and darkening the aureole of ‘The Muscovite Tsar,’ ruling Russia as his patrimony.”27 Nicholas’s visits to churches and his veneration of icons along the way enhanced this sense of closeness to Muscovy and distance from the present. The May celebrations began in Vladimir, where Nicholas arrived by train on May 16, 1913. He proceeded by automobile through the town, then to Bogoliubova and to Suzdal, stopping along the way to visit the historical sites, the churches and icons of early Russia. Peasants flocked to see him, spreading out along the road. They arrived in Nizhnii-Novgorod on May 17. The center of the movement of resistance to the Poles in 1612 and 1613 was the home of Kuz’ma Minin, who, with Prince Pozharskii, had organized and led the militia in patriotic resistance to the foreign invader that had ended with the restoration of the monarchy. Despite shows of cordiality, a strain between the themes of imperial and governmental leadership and the participation of the population ran through events. The officials of the Ministry of the Court tried to limit contact between the emperor and empress and local dignitaries, especially since the empress was ailing and had to absent herself from several functions. At the farewell celebrations, the members of the town government were to be allowed to greet their majesties only before they stepped onto the wharf, without a formal reception. The mayor, angered at the arrangement, took the initiative of publishing his own ceremonial in a local newspaper. After discussions, Count Fredericks, the minister of the court, agreed to arrange a champagne reception with the imperial family and a gathering for the ladies of the town and the tsar’s daughters. On the evening of May 18, the imperial party boarded the four steamships. The fervent demonstrations near the wharf submerged the tensions of the previous day. On the trip up the Volga to Kostroma, sailboats covered with flags went out to meet them. At the prompting of the Ministry of Interior, scenes and ceremonies of welcome took place along the riverbanks. Villages put up triumphal arches decorated with plants and the words “God Save the Tsar.” Peasants gathered in camps stood on the shore and even ventured into the river up to their waist to see the tsar. As the flotilla approached each town, church bells sounded and priests led processions of the cross from their churches to the banks, where they blessed the ships. Peasants knelt, crossing themselves, and shouting, many with tears, “God protect the little father, the tsar.” Just before Kostroma the ships passed the village of Kinesha slowly to permit the tsar to be seen. The docks were decorated with an arch glowing with lightbulbs spelling the words “God Save the Tsar” and the tsar’s initials; these were donated by the local chapter of the Union of Russian Peo-

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ple. Town and zemstvo officials stood on the dock waiting to present the tsar with bread and salt. But the ships did not stop, and the presentation was carried back by the motorboat dispatched to collect official telegrams. The ships then passed the Konovalov cloth factory at Kostroma adorned with national flags, greens, the imperial initials in electric lights, and the state coat of arms. Passing by the town of Kostroma, they anchored opposite the nearby Ipat’ev Monastery, where the first ceremonies were to take place. •

The visit to Kostroma was a return to the original Romanov patrimony. The Ipat’ev Monastery, the site of the dramatic meeting of Michael Romanov with the delegation sent from Moscow to offer him the throne, held the guardian icon of the Romanov house, the Fedorov Mother of God. But Kostroma in 1913 was hardly a felicitous site for a commemoration of the National myth. The region typified the rapid economic change and the social and political turbulence of contemporary Russia. Kostroma province in 1913 had numerous textile mills owned by Moscow entrepreneurs and more than 90,000 workers. The town of Kostroma had a population of 43,000, and twenty-one mills. In 1905 the workers of Kostroma had taken an active part in the strike movement under predominantly Bolshevik leadership. In 1912 the region had remained quiet. But fearing socialist agitation would foment strikes, the authorities dispatched a special official to reorganize the local police, and the governor, Shidlovskii, was replaced by P. P. Stremoukhov, who had served as governor of Saratov and Suval Province under Stolypin. Stremoukhov fulfilled his duties effectively. The workers were unable to stage demonstrations on February 21 or on May 1, 1913, though they did succeed in distributing leaflets. A year later, however, a major strike movement erupted in the province, which continued even after the outbreak of the war. Kostroma was also a stronghold of noble liberalism and Kostroma nobles were among the most active and confrontational from 1905 until 1907. The Kostroma Noble Assembly voted to admit the noble signatories of the Vyborg Manifesto of July 1906 who called for civil disobedience after the dissolution of the first Duma and had been expelled from their own local assemblies. The town had elected many leftist and liberal deputies to the Dumas, among them the Kostroma provincial marshal of the nobility, B. N. Zuzin, an outspoken critic of the government and defender of constitutional rights. According to a later monarchist account, the alienation between society and administration in Kostroma was “complete.”28 The principal ceremonies on May 19 were a meeting with the peasants and a procession of the cross. At 9:45 a.m., the emperor and the empress disembarked onto a wharf built especially for the occasion to a salvo of cannons and band music. Nicholas appeared in the uniform of the Erevan Regiment, the empress and the grand duchesses wore billowing white dresses. The heir was carried in the arms of a sailor. Governor Stremoukhov welcomed

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them and delivered a report on the state of the province. Nicholas then descended to meet a delegation of peasants from the volost’. He stood on what had been part of the monastery lands in the seventeenth century. After a presentation of bread and salt, the elder gave a speech declaring that just as their predecessors had bowed to Michael before his departure, they bowed to him in thanks for his and his ancestors’ concern for the peasants. After a greeting from Bulygin, and a review of the local garrison, Nicholas entered the monastery through the “green tower.” Inside the monastery, he met descendants of the participants in the Great Embassy of 1613, including members of the Sheremet’ev and Golovin families, who held relics from the period. He toured the monastery grounds, inspected the candle factory then met an assembly of town dignitaries. Before the monastery walls, Nicholas was blessed with the Fedorov Mother of God icon, which, in the hands of the abbess Martha, had blessed Michael in the Trinity Cathedral in 1613. The moment was the emotional climax of the morning’s events. Crowds of peasants watched the scene. The tsar approached the Archpriest Tikhon, knelt and kissed the Fedorov icon. The official accounts emphasized that the tsar had descended from the heights and appeared as a humble mortal. The correspondent from Moskovskie Vedomosti wrote, “Everyone crossed himself and wept from the deep feelings of love for the Sovereign-Leader.”29 Nicholas then returned to the monastery for a thanksgiving service. Members of the State Council, court officials, ministers, and the imperial suite assembled in the Trinity Cathedral along with the nobility and officials of Kostroma and the descendants of the Great Embassy. Nicholas occupied “the Tsar’s Place” that had been donated to the cathedral by Michael. The morning’s ceremonies concluded with visits to the house of Michael Romanov to see the icons and gold and silver vessels in the collection. In the afternoon, the flotilla sailed the short distance to the town of Kostroma. Nicholas was met at the wharf by the town fathers then rode through the streets of the town before lines of schoolchildren and peasants. Peasants in large numbers had come from the surrounding countryside and stayed in camps built on the outskirts. The emperor and empress stopped at the new Romanov Museum, which had been built in Old Russian Style. They examined the museum’s collection, including portraits of the members of the dynasty, historical objects connected with them, and a large painting of Ivan Susanin donated by the owners of the Kostroma flax factory. Then they proceeded to the Noble Assembly receptions with local officials and noblemen. It was in the Assembly that the only mishap of the visit occurred. Zuzin welcomed the tsar with a provocative address that shocked the emperor and empress. The content of the speech was not made known, but it was clearly oppositional in spirit. The tsar responded with a curt, “Are you finished?” The ceremonies resumed with the presentation of bread and salt and an icon. But the atmosphere was strained. Alexandra conversed only with the governor’s wife, snubbing Zuzin’s, and remained aloof and troubled.

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In Kostroma, however, the spirit of celebration submerged the ill feeling. Even Kokovstov was impressed by the response. “The Tsar and His family were surrounded by a massive crowd of people. Unaffected expressions of joy resounded and, like warmth returning, their hearts melted.”30 In the evening, a gala dinner was held on the ship the Tsar Michael Fedorovich for the imperial party, members of the government, local officials, and the nobility. The lighting of the town with electric bulbs gave it a “fairy tale” quality, taking it out of the ordinary. The crowds on the shore, and the imperial family on their boat, witnessed a crescendo of fireworks concluding with a single great explosion of light. On the other side of town, popular entertainments included clowns, harmonium players, magicians, and games. A “Russian orchestra” played tunes from Life for the Tsar, and a Petersburg dramatic troupe performed the story of Ivan Susanin at the theater of the Sobriety Trusteeship. The Trusteeship also served food and tea, as it had in Petersburg. The second day was the high point of the Volga trip, and perhaps of the entire tercentenary celebration. From morning to night enthusiastic crowds, shouting their acclaim for the tsar, filled the streets of Kostroma and covered the banks of the river, maintaining “exemplary order.” The morning began with services in the Assumption Cathedral, during which the tsar was again blessed with the Fedorov icon. Then he followed a procession of the cross through the town to the Romanov monument. The emperor and the empress, to the singing of a chorus, placed bricks sprinkled with holy water on the monument’s foundation. They proceeded to the town pavilion, which was decorated with state flags and the Romanov coat of arms. Nicholas was greeted with a thunderous hoorah and an ovation from the crowd. The regimental band gave a show of marches to tunes from A Life for the Tsar. When the moment came to sing the tsarist anthem, the crowd sank to their knees. As Nicholas stood before the thousands of kneeling peasants, his eyes moistened. Those present also felt moved, convinced that this was a significant show of popular devotion for the tsar. The Duke of MecklenburgSchwerin, unable to contain his tears, exclaimed, “What joy it must be to be monarch of such a people!” A foreign attaché‚ remarked to Naumov, “What power! What unity of national feeling! All our constitutions are nothing compared to what we are seeing.” Among his entourage, only the grand duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, the tsar’s cousin and an accomplished historian, sensed the danger lurking in popular support. As the two cousins looked down upon the crowds, Nicholas Mikhailovich was heard saying, “They are just as they were in the seventeenth century when they chose Michael as Tsar, just the same; this is bad, what do you think?” The tsar remained silent.31 •

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The May celebrations reached their climax in Moscow. The festivities resembled those surrounding the coronation. The gala entry on horseback down Tver Boulevard to the Kremlin, the services at the cathedrals, visits to the graves of ancestors, the bowing to tumultuous acclaim from the “sea of heads” on the Kremlin square. Nicholas also held a meeting with peasant elders, receptions with the estates, gala balls, and dinners. Again the present intruded with reminders of social and political discord. The prime minister, Kokovtsov, could not persuade the tsar to admit Duma deputies to the imperial reception at the Kremlin Palace. The authorities in the court and the Ministry of Interior showed their displeasure with the leadership of the Moscow town government. The minister of interior, Nicholas Maklakov, had refused to confirm the Moscow Duma’s elected candidate for mayor, Prince G. E. L’vov, who then was excluded from several ceremonies, though he attended the Kremlin reception. The Town Bureau extended an invitation for the tsar to visit Moscow institutions, but it was not presented to him, and a reception at the Town Duma was canceled without explanation. The Moscow industrialists, the highest ranks of the merchantry, had more success. At the Kremlin, they were expected to meet the tsar, as was traditional, with the merchantry and lower middle class, the meshchanstvo, in St. Vladimir Hall, while the town counselors joined the nobility in St. George Hall. The representative of the industrialists, I. A. Krestovnikov, protested to the minister of the court, Count Fredericks. “We are the masters (khoziaeva) of Moscow. The second hall does not suit us.” Fredericks finally yielded, permitting them to stand with the nobility in the George Hall.32 These differences were overshadowed by the warmth of the reception by the Moscow nobility and merchantry. The usual spectacles amid the landmarks of the seventeenth century showed that Moscow’s tradition of demonstrative hospitality to the Russian tsar lived on. The sense that the scenes of the celebration were those of 1613 produced a powerful effect on those present. The Kremlin had been “sanctified by centuries,” Naumov wrote, and gave “special meaning to the celebration I saw.” The response was exultant and contrasted with the apathy of the Petersburg celebrations. “The mass emotion this visit engendered was overwhelming,” Bruce Lockhart, then serving in the British Consulate in Moscow, recalled. E. E. Bogdanovich described it as a “wonderful hymn of mutual love,” which showed that it was “not the citizens of the white-stone city who were guilty of the disorders of 1905.” The receptions, balls, and dinners radiated a warm cordial spirit. “There is good reason for Moscow to be called the heart of Russia.”33 The celebrations also made known the poor condition of the tsarevich’s health and the empress’s frequent indispositions, which caused her to miss many of the functions. At the end of the gala entry to Moscow, when the tsar and the imperial family walked through the Spasskii Gate into the Kremlin, the crowd was shocked to see the tsarevich carried in the arms of the sailor Nagornyi. The ceremony of bowing to the people from the Red

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30. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexei on Red Staircase, May 25, 1913. L’Illustration.

Staircase on May 25 was also marred by the sight of the nine-year-old boy held by Nagornyi, a scene captured in a photograph published in L’Illustration (fig. 30). Many shed tears and made the sign of the cross. Nicholas and his entourage regarded the May celebrations as a great success. He expressed his own sense of the meaning of the trip in his speech of thanks to the marshals of the nobility for a scroll decorated with old Russian motifs that they had given him to mark the event. Nicholas declared that his trip to the Volga and old Russian towns “has proved once more that the bond between Tsar and people that distinguished our Mother Russia in olden times exists indestructibly now as well.”34 Nicholas returned to Tsarskoe Selo convinced that he had made contact with the Russian nation, both in his visits to the artifacts of early Russian history and in his appearance before the people of the Russian heartland. He wrote his mother on

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May 29 of the forty-four churches that he and Alexandra had visited, “one more beautiful and interesting than the other.” He wrote that the people “were as touching as always. On the Volga they left their villages and hamlets and stood all along the embankments on both sides.” The visit to Moscow again recalled the coronation, “but the reception from the population seemed to me and to others even warmer. There were immense crowds of people on the streets and the order was remarkable.”35

Nicholas II and World War I

The Tsar and the Duma A. I. Savenko, a leader of the conservative Nationalist Party, wrote his wife on June 1, 1913: “The rapture with which the country met the tsar during his trip has led [the tsar and Minister of Interior Nicholas Maklakov] to the loyal conclusion that the country is to the right of the Duma. Oh, that is a bitter error. In reality, the country is far to the left of the Duma.”1 In addition to the celebrations, Nicholas employed the instruments of mass publicity to overshadow the Duma and claim a direct bond with the people. The government issued coins, stamps, souvenirs, and books to disseminate the tsar’s image and to acquaint the people with his personal life. Newsreels transmitted scenes of imperial ceremonies and episodes from Russia’s past to a mass audience. Publicity substantiated Nicholas’s own beliefs in his mission. The most important publication in this respect was an unprecedented biography of a living tsar, The Reign of the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Aleksandrovich, written by a member of Nicholas’s suite, Professor and Major-General Andrei Georgievich Elchaninov. Released in early 1913, before the beginning of the February celebrations, the excerpts from the biography appeared in many newspapers during and after the events. French and English translations appeared in 1914. Elchaninov presented Nicholas as a democratic ruler on the Russian throne, a tsar who understood the needs and promoted the interests of his people. He portrayed him as a model ruler who took charge of all decisions and worked indefatigably. The chapter “The Crowned Toiler” detailed Nicholas’s work schedule, concluding with his own words, “I do the work of three men. Let every one learn to do the work of at least two.” Elchaninov credited Nicholas with establishing the Duma, introducing other reforms after 1905, and personally directing all military affairs. He emphasized that he was an able leader of the armed forces “who personally directs all military affairs.” He extolled the tsar’s love for his family, and especially his son, and described the strong bonds he felt with the peasantry. Nicholas reviewed and corrected the page proofs of the book, making only one significant change: he insisted that Elchaninov delete the sentence, “In his work, the Sovereign Emperor considers his closest assistants in legislative work the reformed State Council and the State Duma, which he has summoned to life.”2

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Elchaninov’s biography sustained Nicholas’s idealized conception of himself: it was a mirror reflecting his grandiose belief in his virtues as father and Christian and in his capacities as ruler of the Russian government and leader of its armies. It glorified him apart from the institutions of the Russian state. This image distinguished him from all his predecessors, who identified their own supremacy, to greater or lesser degree, with the supremacy of the state. Elchaninov narrowed the mythical reality of the Russian sovereign to the personal world of the all-competent monarch isolated from the institutional and social realities of Russia. In 1913 Nicholas showed new resolve in his task of restoring autocratic power. Those seeking his favor encouraged these intentions. The aging prince Meshcherskii now made amends for his constitutional lapses of 1905 and 1906 with passionate restatements of Nicholas’s own views of himself. An editorial of February 21, 1913, in the newspaper Grazhdanin related Meshcherskii’s boyhood feelings regarding 1613, when God had wrought “the most majestic miracle” and had chosen the Romanovs as “the path of salvation for Russia.” Nicholas responded with a note expressing his “great satisfaction” with Meshcherskii’s “splendid article, ‘The Great and Holy Day,’ that came from the heart. It is the symbol of faith, so to speak, of every honorably-thinking Russian. You have rarely written something so deeply felt.”3 Meshcherskii’s protegé‚ the minister of interior, Nicholas Maklakov made open statements echoing Nicholas’s beliefs that politicians and officials in the capital did not express the mood of the country. In April and May 1913, before the May celebrations, Maklakov gained the agreement of the Council of Ministers to a restriction of the Duma members’ right of interpellation. The prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, struggling to maintain a “unified government” of the ministers, drafted a plan in June 1913 to democratize suffrage in zemstvo institutions, in response to zemstva and town activists. During September and October, Meshcherskii conducted a campaign in the pages of Grazhdanin to drive him from office. He accused Kokovtsov of acting as a grand vizier and usurping the powers of the emperor by trying to introduce “parliamentarianism.” Meshcherskii called for an end to these “West European innovations,” including the abolition of the Council of Ministers, and demanded the restoration of a Committee of Ministers each of whom would be directly responsible to the emperor.4 In October 1913, while Kokovtsov was away from the capital, Maklakov suggested that the tsar decree a state of extraordinary security and threaten the Duma with dissolution. The pretext was the restlessness of the workers and the intelligentsia of the capital. Nicholas contemplated the more radical step of reducing the Duma’s powers to the purely consultative right to submit majority and minority opinions—a change in the Fundamental Laws and an abrogation of the promises of the October Manifesto. He wrote Maklakov that such a measure would be “a good way of returning to the previous tranquil course of legislation”; it was “in the Russian spirit.” But

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Maklakov encountered opposition and refrained from submitting Nicholas’s recommendation to the Council of Ministers.5 As Nicholas made clear his hostility to the Duma and his contempt for the legal order, moderate leaders began to despair of finding a way to reconcile representative government and the monarchy. Kadets, Octobrists, and the industrialists in the Progressist Party feared the growing radicalism of workers and the loss of faith in the authority of the tsarist government, which was going back on its promises and discrediting the very possibility of consensual parliamentary government. The influential liberal wing of the Moscow industrialists now looked to the left for support. In the first months of 1914, their leaders—A. I. Konovalov, S. M. Tretiakov, N. D. Morozov, and P. P. Riabushinskii—entered into negotiations with the Kadets, the Mensheviks, and even the Bolsheviks to coordinate opposition to the tsarist government. Nicholas was convinced that the people remained devoted to him and that the Duma politicians did not represent their opinion. This belief was sustained by the relative tranquillity of the countryside. A combination of martial law and agricultural reform had apparently quelled the urge to rebel. But the quiet was misleading. While the peasants might have returned to their humble loyal posture, the majority still coveted landlords’ estates, which they believed to be theirs by right. They looked to the Duma and the government for the completion of the confiscation and redistribution of landlords’ estates, the “Black Partition.” Complicated procedures for the elections to the fourth Duma allowed nobles and officials to exert considerable influence on the peasants’ voting, and over half the peasant deputies belonged to right-wing or conservative parties. But regardless of party affiliation, nearly all peasant deputies from estate provinces were concerned exclusively with the question of land and looked to the “Black Partition,” which Nicholas and all his ministers had disavowed.6 Peasants dealt the regime a rebuff in the verdict of the blood murder trial of Mendel Beilis. The minister of justice, Shcheglovitov, crudely meddled in the trial ensuring that a majority of the jurors would be peasants and none would be intellectuals. “It is the fate of the simple Russian peasant to show the entire world the truth in this case,” declared the Kiev monarchist newspaper, Dvuglavyi Orel. But in the autumn of 1913, the jury voted to acquit. An officer of the police called the case a “police Tsushima,” comparing the trial to the great naval disaster in the Russo-Japanese War. Maklakov and the tsar, however, insisted that though Beilis was acquitted, ritual murder had taken place, and on the eve of the war, the Ministry of Justice was making preparations for another ritual murder trial.7 After a lull in 1913, the strike movement regained momentum. During the first six months of 1914, factory inspectors reported 1,254,441 strikers or almost as many as for the entire year 1905. To be sure, the number of strikes rose across Europe before the war, but they were neither as numerous nor as militant as those in Russia. The Russian strikes were concentrated in or near

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the capital: workers in Petersburg province accounted for half of the total. Bolshevik influence spread among the workers, who reacted to government restrictions on trade unions by heeding appeals for revolutionary political action.8 On the eve of the outbreak of the war, in July 1914, St. Petersburg witnessed a violent general strike. Barricades went up in the Vyborg district and Vasilievskii Island. Trams were overturned. Bands of strikers broke through the cordons of troops to enter the center of the city onto Nevskii Prospect. They were driven back only by a charge of Cossacks at full gallop. To Nicholas such action pointed to the need for resolute action, a reassertion of his autocratic prerogatives, and curtailment of the powers of the Duma. In January 1914 Kokovtsov had turned in his resignation and had been replaced by the aged and servile Ivan Goremykin. This represented the end of “united government”—a government headed by a prime minister to whom the individual ministers were responsible—and made the tsar, once more, the dominant figure in the government. Meshcherskii strengthened Nicholas’s resolve by sending him a political diary that contained such observations as: “No matter how one kindles constitutionalism in Russia, it is hampered in Russia by Russia itself, for the first day of the constitution is the beginning of the end of monocracy”; “As long as imperial power is not decorative and not dependent on party passions, the tsar is the defence of the people”; “The stronger the authority of any regime, the more helpless are the revolutionary elements.”9 In an interview published in the February 4, 1914, issue of Russkoe Slovo, Meshcherskii declared that the government was “not obliged to submit to any bare principles or dead letters.” The editors observed that the government, meaning Nicholas himself, intended to introduce restrictions on the Duma’s authority gradually, with agreement of members of the State Council.10 On June 18, 1914, three days after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Nicholas, frustrated over the Duma’s refusal to pass the budget and changes in the press law, again sought to revoke the October Manifesto. He suggested a return to a consultative Duma, like that proposed in the Bulygin project of August 1905. Only Maklakov took the tsar’s side. The other members of the Council of Ministers, including the usually amenable Prime Minister Goremykin, demurred.

War and Revolution On July 20, 1914, the day of the declaration of war, Nicholas appeared in Petersburg at the Winter Palace. He arrived along the Neva to deafening cheers and was rushed through the crowds to the palace. At the religious service, he repeated Alexander I’s vow that he could not make peace as long as one of the enemy remained on the soil of the fatherland. After a priest read the manifesto, Nicholas addressed the assembled officers as “the whole

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army, united in nation and spirit, strong as a granite wall” and received a wild roar of approval. Then he and the empress went out onto the balcony to greet the crowds filling the vast palace square. The throng fell to their knees and sang the national anthem. The emperor crossed himself and wept. The Novoe Vremia reporter wrote, “it seemed as if the Tsar and his people embraced each other strongly, and in this embrace stood before the great Russian land.” Nicholas returned to Peterhof at 6 p.m. on his yacht. An English vicar M. Mansell Merry described “a solitary figure on the vessel’s bridge, erect and rigid, the hand raised in unrelaxed salute to the peak of his naval cap, amid such a tumultuous demonstration of his people’s reverence and love, as, surely, it has seldom fell to the lot of any ruler to receive.”11 On August 31, the name of the city was changed to Petrograd. The Petersburg ceremony, though stirring, was brief and fastidious. His appearance on August 5 in Moscow was more extended and the ceremonies more inclusive. He entered the city on the traditional route along Tver Boulevard, riding in an open carriage to popular acclaim. In the Kremlin Palace, he received not only high officials but representatives of the estates. His speech was more inclusive than the Petersburg proclamation and evoked national and Pan-Slavic sentiments. “In your persons, the people of the first capital, Moscow, I greet the Russian people, loyal to me. I greet them everywhere, in the provinces, the State Duma, the State Council, unanimously responding to rise as one and cast aside discord for the defence of the native land and Slavdom.”12 The scene of Nicholas bowing from the Red Porch to the frenzied crowd on the Kremlin square impressed foreign visitors. The English ambassador wrote that “the heart of Russia voiced the feelings of the whole nation.” The ambassador’s daughter felt that she was no longer in the twentieth century. “This was the old Moscow of the Tsars. Little Mother Moscow, threatened and besieged over and over again, and yet always miraculously emerging from her smoking ruins!” The French ambassador also felt himself transported back beyond the eighteenth century and admired “the frantic enthusiasm of the Muscovite people for their Tsar.”13 Nicholas returned from Moscow inspired by the fervent reception. He believed that the country had united behind him and submerged their political differences. This sense was shared by liberal and moderate members of the Duma who welcomed the war as a means to unite the nation for the defense of Slavdom. The Duma adjourned after one day, its president, Michael Rodzianko, declaring that “We shall only hinder you.” Peter Struve hoped that the war would finally bring about the unity of holy Rus’ with great Russia.14 The “embrace” of tsar and people evoked by the Novoe Vremia reporter expressed the patriotic exaltation of the first moments after the declaration of war. A new national flag was designed in order to symbolize the unity of tsar and people. The Russian tricolor—white, blue, and red—had become established as the national and state flag in the 1880s and 1890s. In the

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years before the war, monarchist groups had campaigned to introduce the imperial standard as the national flag—the black double-headed eagle on a gold background, with the crest of Moscow (St. George and the Dragon) in white on its breast. The new flag represented a compromise. The imperial standard was placed in a canton on the Russian tricolor, uniting imperial and national symbols and colors on a single field. For the most part, the lower classes remained indifferent to the displays of enthusiasm. With the declaration of war, patriotic demonstrations, most of them organized by the police, marched through the streets of the capital challenging foreigners. The peasants and the workers appear to have accepted the mobilization passively as their lot. Disturbances, however, marred the recruitment efforts. In Mogilev and Kazan, mobilized reservists led groups of peasants in burning and plundering estates. These outbreaks could be contained, but their meaning was clear to provincial officials. One governor phrased the thoughts of the mobilized soldiers as that “the lords thought up this war” and that the reckoning would take place when it was over.15 The defeats and colossal losses of the first months of the war dispelled the initial euphoria. In August and September, Russian armies moved into East Prussia and Galicia. But the rout at the hands of the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg and the Mansurian Lakes in East Prussia stemmed their advance and made clear the problems of command and supply in the military. The provisioning of the troops and of the cities became increasingly difficult. Prices soared, but grain prices lagged behind industrial products, and the peasants began holding back their crops. Each year a diminishing percentage of the harvest reached the cities, whose populations were growing rapidly. By the spring of 1915, the strike movement had resumed as workers lost patience with spiraling inflation and the bleak prospects in the war. Shortages and disruptions of supply energized Russian society to independent action. The zemstva and the towns formed a national organization, Zemgor, to deal with these problems. The leading industrialists came together in a national network of War Industrial Committees to coordinate private production with governmental institutions. Overall, by 1916 these efforts coped with the problems of materiel, but the problem of manpower proved less tractable. The social and administrative problems of mass conscription exceeded the powers of the tsarist state. The Russian armed forces numbered only a little more than 14 million men for a population of about 180 million, only slightly larger than France’s armies, though France had less than a quarter of Russia’s population. From the beginning of the war, Nicholas made clear that the leadership of the armed forces was to remain with the imperial family. According to Goremykin, at the outset Nicholas intended to appoint himself commander in chief. But he was dissuaded and instead named his cousin, the popular grand duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. After the initial setbacks, the tsar frequently visited headquarters and appeared before the troops along the front. His direct and passionate involvement in the war became the theme of a

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four-volume book, Tsar Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich with the Active Army, composed by Major-General D. N. Dubenskii, the editor of the newspaper Russkoe Chtenie and a member of Nicholas’s suite.16 Dubenskii’s account continues the scenario set forth by Elchaninov. Although the work gives a sense of the scope, the tragedy, and the moment of the war there are only two major actors, the people, now assuming the form of the army, and the tsar. The traditional meetings with estates take place as the tsar enters each town, but the Duma and the independent organizations are treated only in passing. According to Dubenskii, the news that the tsar was joining the army awakened rejoicing in Russia. Volume 1 covers Nicholas’s visits to headquarters and the front in September and October 1914. The author points out that although Nicholas Nikolaevich was commander in chief, the tsar watched closely over the conduct of war. The headquarters, he emphasizes, was called the “imperial” or “tsar’s” headquarters. Nicholas is shown standing side by side with the grand duke, and sitting at a desk over a large battle map, presumably discussing strategy. He appears in a trench, reviewing guards regiments dressed in combat attire, visiting Kholm and Liuban, inspecting churches destroyed by the enemy and fortresses that had been besieged. Cordons of soldiers cheer everywhere. At hospitals, he, like Nicholas I and Alexander II before him, stops at beds to ask the soldiers about their injuries and to praise their service. The author, like Elchaninov, includes numerous excerpts of the tsar’s conversations with soldiers and peasants he met along the way. The March 28, 1915, issue of the journal Niva reviewed the first volume, reprinted several photographs, and cited some of the emperor’s bedside conversations. “The Russian man, the simpler he is, the freer he talks with his Tsar,” the editors observed.17 The first volume also presents the empress as an important figure in the family’s leadership of the war. She takes charge of the care of the wounded. She presides over the Permanent Council for the Unification of Governmental, Public, and Private Activity for the Care of Families of War Casualties; the vice-presidents are her sister, the grand duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna, and her sister-in-law, the grand duchess, Olga Aleksandrovna. The Winter Palace, the book explains, had been turned into a gigantic workshop where women prepared linens and bandages for the war. The empress and the daughters worked as nurses in the Tsarskoe Selo Court Hospital, which now occupied the Great Catherine Palace, and often attended operations and bandaged wounds. They also visited the wounded at other hospitals. The text is interspersed with many photographs of their visits and of the empress, her daughters, and other grand duchesses as nurses. The second volume describes Nicholas’s long journey from November 18 to December 19, 1914, through central Russia, the Caucasus, ending in Moscow, with another display of national union from the people and estates of Moscow. Nicholas began the trip with a visit to headquarters where he informed himself of the situation on Russia’s western front. There was a

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brief summary in Niva with photographs of the tsar meeting troops in the Caucasus. In Voronezh, he is joined by the empress and his daughters, who accompany him on the stops at Tambov and Riazan on the way to Moscow. In Riazan, Dubenskii notes the people’s “moral attraction” to the tsar. The attraction was powerful because “they are aware and esteem the fact that in these difficult days the tsar himself tours Russia and personally visits the injured, sees His armies Himself and in this way shows all of Russia how near he is to her, how dear her sorrow is to Him.”18 The account of Nicholas’s army life created a picture of reality that sustained and developed the sense that the tsar and the heir were inspiring a unified national war effort. The third volume, devoted to the his trip to Kiev, Ukrainian cities, and the Galician front from January to June 1915, opens with a statement declaring that after a half-year of war all of Russia was rallying behind the war effort. The people, Dubenskii emphasized, were appreciating the commander in chief’s “firm will” more and more. Workers and peasants were showing “their sincere devotion to the tsar, and never in the previous years has the supreme power, the autocracy of the tsar been so highly esteemed in the general awareness of the mass of the people, as in this difficult time in Rus’.” His visits to the Galician front in April asserted Russia’s claims to this border region. According to Armeiiskii Vestnik, his appearance in L’vov reaffirmed Galicia’s “historic ties” with Russia.19 The spring and summer of 1915 witnessed Russian armies in retreat before a powerful offensive of Austro-Hungarian and German armies. By August, the enemy occupied all of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland and was threatening Belorussia. Leaders of the new national town and zemstva organizations, such as Alexander Guchkov and Alexander Konovalov, voiced demands for increased participation in government and particularly for a Council of Ministers responsible to the Duma. Nicholas responded by appointing several ministers who could work with the Duma and independent organizations—most notably, Alexei Polivanov, the minister of war; Nicholas Shcherbatov, the minister of interior; and Vsevolod Shakhovskoi, the minister of trade and industry. In July the Duma was reconvened. Political groups from the Nationalists on the right to the Kadets on the left united to form a “Progressive Bloc,” supporting a call for a “Ministry of Confidence,” all of whose members would enjoy the confidence of the nation. In August 1915, the Moscow Town Council, at the instance of Konovalov, passed a resolution, soon to be endorsed by other town councils and zemstva, calling for a meeting with the tsar and a cabinet that could win the support of the nation. Such a proposal clashed with Nicholas’s belief that he was the historical embodiment of the nation and knew its interests better than representatives chosen from the educated classes. He refused to receive a delegation from the zemstva and the towns. Then in September, he prorogued the Duma, which had met for only six weeks. Thus ended the effort to create a govern-

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ment of national unity, like those introduced by other combatant powers, which could put aside political differences until the end of hostilities. The national emergency, indeed, emboldened Nicholas to perform his role of masterful and sympathetic commander who felt one with the people and the army. In August 1915, he declared to the horror of nearly everyone in government that he had decided to appoint himself commander in chief. Despite the setbacks, the grand duke enjoyed considerable popularity. He had cultivated good relations with the leaders of the Duma and other public institutions as well as the press. Most of the ministers deplored the move. The prime minister, Goremykin, disagreed with them, but only because he thought it his duty to obey his sovereign under all circumstances. The other ministers argued that by taking command the tsar would bear responsibility for military setback. Their unspoken fear, however, was that he would be leaving government in the hands of the empress, thus giving Rasputin free rein. Nicholas, Goremykin told the Council of Ministers, never forgave himself for failing to take command during the Russo-Japanese War. He explained, According to his own words, the duty of the Tsar, his function, dictates that the Monarch be with his troops in moments of danger, sharing both their joys and their sorrow. Many of you gentlemen probably remember the measures which were being prepared after the declaration of the present war, and how difficult it was to dissuade the Emperor then. Now, when there is a virtual catastrophe at the front, His Majesty considers it the sacred duty of the Russian Tsar to be among the troops, to fight with them against the conqueror or perish. Considering such purely mystical feelings, you will not be able to dissuade the Emperor by any reasons from the step he has contemplated.20

Eight members of the Council of Ministers drafted a letter predicting dire consequences and pleading with the tsar to reverse his decision. Such remonstrations merely confirmed Nicholas’s belief that the ministers were out of touch with the people. On September 9, 1915, he wrote to Alexandra, “The people accepted this move as a natural thing and understood it as we did.” He had received telegrams “with touching expressions” of support for him. This showed him that “the ministers always living in town know terribly little of what is happening in the country as a whole. Here I can judge correctly the real mood among the various classes of the people.” The empress agreed that “the ministers are rotten . . .” and in subsequent months most of those who objected were replaced, among them Polivanov and Shcherbatov, who had been appointed only in the spring of 1915.21 By the end of 1915, Nicholas had entered fully into his role of commander in chief leading his people in war. His leadership was largely symbolic, for he lacked the training or capacity to deal with problems of command. He did, however, continue to promote aristocratic generals with courtly manners and little military talent to the highest command positions.

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As the war progressed, the scenario of selfless patriotic leader in contact with his army and people, became increasingly self-referential and remote from military realities and public opinion. Dubenskii’s book reflected Nicholas’s scenario and reached a limited audience of those in official circles and the tsar’s admirers outside the government. Aside from occasional portraits, he did not figure prominently in reports in the popular press or in popular entertainments, which rather emphasized the patriotic struggle of the Russian people for their native land, rodina.22 Nicholas expressed his own sense of his role most poignantly in his “speech” of December 20, 1915, which was printed on a single sheet that was circulated to the civilian population and the armies. Nicholas replied to rumors that the government was not prosecuting the war effectively and was seeking a separate peace. Such rumors, he declared, “had been planted by German spies and like poison gas, cloud the mood of Russia.” Nicholas answered the allegations by describing, in the third person, how he shared in the sacrifices of the war. He ended the speech by repeating Alexander I’s vow that there would be no peace until the last enemy soldier was driven from Russia, and these words, written in large cursive script, provided the heading for the sheet. Nicholas’s portrait in military uniform, decorated with the Cross of St. George, was placed beneath the scroll. Photographs in the corners showed him standing with the tsarevich at his side, reviewing troops, and meeting with a general.23 Volume 4 of Dubenskii’s account covers the period between July, 1915, and February 1916. It opens with a photograph of Nicholas sitting before a battle map with the chief of staff, M. V. Alexeev, and the quarter-master general, M. S. Pustovoitenko standing at his side. The description follows Elchaninov’s format of trying to convey a sense of the tsar’s person by enumerating the details of his daily life. Nicholas lives an austere Spartan life in two simple rooms of the governor’s house. Photographs show the spare furnishings of the room, focusing on his camp bed, the symbol of the selfdenying sovereign as military leader, next to the heir, who arrived at headquarters on October 1, 1915. Like Elchaninov’s text, Dubenskii’s emphasizes Nicholas’s determination to learn things for himself. “The tsar not only listens to the report of his Chief of Staff, but directly receives impressions of the actions of his army in telegrams.”24 The book also singles out Nicholas’s unswerving, self-sacrificing, diligence. At nine, he walks to the General Staff where he receives reports from Pustovoitenko. At twelve-thirty, he has a simple lunch with the military attachés of his allies. Between one and two, he returns to his study for work on reports. One and one-half or two hours later, he takes an automobile ride through the neighboring countryside. Then he, the “imperial toiler,” returns to his desk to labor over reports, while his mind and heart suffer everything that has occurred in his country. After dinner, he labors deep into the night. Through all of the troubling news, the tsar maintains calm. “No one has ever seen the tsar lose self-control.” The tsar’s impassivity, which so exas-

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perated the ministers, here is presented as a sign of his “strength of will,” “restraint,” and “clear understanding of circumstances,” all of which is made possible only by faith in divine Providence.25 Dubenskii describes Alexei as a vigorous youth. The boy dashes about headquarters and reads the war dispatches. He represents the revitalized army and monarchy. On October 17, 1915, Alexei received the medal of St. George fourth degree. A week later, Nicholas himself was decorated with the coveted cross of St. George of the fourth degree. Exhilarated, Nicholas noted in his diary, “An unforgettable day for me, of receiving the cross of St. George. . . . The whole day I walked around as if intoxicated.”26 The recommendation for the decoration appeared in the journal Niva, next to V. L. Borovikovskii’s painting of the archangel Michael descending from the heavens holding a bolt of lightning and followed by helmeted goddesses. The award placed Nicholas in the tradition of emperors courageously joining their army in wartime. A composite photograph in volume 4 sets a portrait of Nicholas beneath vignettes of Alexander I, Alexander II, and Alexander III, who had also received the order for bravery; Nicholas’s picture is the largest. On October 27 the tsarevich joined Nicholas on a grueling month-long journey along the western front and down to Odessa and New Russia. The photographs in Dubenskii’s volume show Alexei in the uniform of an ordinary soldier at the tsar’s side reviewing troops and meeting with soldiers.27 Inspired by his mission of inspiring his army, Nicholas became almost indifferent to the events on the home front. The ministers who reported to Nicholas at the headquarters at Mogilev were struck by his placid temperament when they posed critical problems of policy. Such deliberations prompted in Nicholas the same feelings of weariness that he had felt as heir when forced to attend to state matters. He wrote to Alexandra that ministers “persist in coming here nearly every day, and take up all my time.” During the report of the minister of agriculture, A. M. Naumov, in June, 1916, on the mounting food-supply crisis, Nicholas constantly digressed into talk about children and flowers. He told the finance minister Peter Bark how good he felt among his army and how unpleasant the atmosphere of the capital seemed to him when he returned to Tsarskoe Selo.28 In 1916 the government seemed deprived of all direction. Three replacements of prime ministers occurred in less than a year, the so-called ministerial leapfrog. Alexandra and Rasputin were blamed, but the changes could hardly have been made without Nicholas’s consent. In the fall of 1915, Russian armies repulsed the enemy’s offensive in the west. Dubenskii wrote “The Russian emperor, according to the ancient belief of the orthodox people, the Anointed of God, the All-Russian Autocrat, taking the sword into His hands, halted the enemy invasion.” The Brusilov offensive of 1916 penetrated into Austria, and the Russian army moved forward elsewhere on the front. To Nicholas, these successes indicated divine intervention. He had the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God

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brought from Moscow to headquarters. “I am quite convinced that its blessing will be of great help to us.” On May 28, 1916, the troops carried the icons along the streets of Mogilev. This reminded him of Borodino.29 But the tide soon turned, and the cost in lives again was enormous. Supplies in the cities dwindled, rations were reduced for the army. Widespread dissatisfaction increasingly focused on the imperial family. Rumors circulated that the empress, her ministers, and Rasputin were German spies. The rumors had no grounds in truth. But they expressed a growing distrust and belief that, contrary to the myth, the imperial family was betraying the Russian people, whom they had presumed to represent. The officer corps that Nicholas felt close to had been decimated in the first two years of the war and replaced by many of lesser birth and education, who had little sympathy for the tsar or the monarchy. By 1916 seventy percent of the junior officers were of peasant background. The enormous loss of men led to massive recruiting of young soldiers, many of whom brought the dissatisfaction of the towns and villages into the army. When Petrograd erupted with strikes and bread riots at the end of February 1917, the 180,000 troops in the capital consisted largely of new recruits to the reserve battalions of the guards. Nicholas was aware of the massive turnover. But he continued to believe that the troops at the front remained loyal, and he urged that several regiments be dispatched to Petrograd to suppress the disturbances. The prime minister, Nicholas Golitsyn, pleaded with the tsar to appoint a new ministry, acceptable to the Duma, but the tsar remained intransigent. In the midst of the crisis, on February 27, Nicholas decided to return to Tsarskoe Selo to be near his family. He started out, but the generals could not guarantee his safety in passing through the Petrograd region, and so he waited in Pskov. In the meantime, crowds in the capital demanded his abdication, and a soviet of workers deputies took form. At headquarters in Mogilev, Nicholas de Basily, the director of the Diplomatic Chancellery, drafted an abdication manifesto, which the leaders of the Russian army sent to the tsar.30 According to the Fundamental Laws, de Basily reasoned, the tsar could only abdicate to the next in succession, Alexei, who at age twelve, would not be able to rule until his majority, at age sixteen. The draft declared that Nicholas was abdicating according to the Fundamental Laws, and his brother Michael would serve as regent. The draft enjoined Alexei and Michael “to conduct the affairs of the state in complete and inviolable union with the representatives of the people in the legislative bodies on the principles to be established by them.” It ended with an appeal to “all true sons of the Fatherland” to obey the tsar and help him, “together with the people’s representatives” to lead Russia into victory and prosperity. But Nicholas revised the manifesto to leave the throne to Michael. He believed that his son’s illness made it impossible for him to live apart from his family. He also deleted the words “on the principles to be established by

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them.” To the very end, Nicholas refused to grant the Duma the authority to change the governmental system. He felt not disillusioned but betrayed. “All around there is treason, cowardice, and deceit,” he wrote in his diary. In the midst of the turmoil, Michael renounced the throne conferred on him by his brother. The news reached the public at the same time as Nicholas’s abdication. Michael declared, “I will accept the supreme power only if that be the desire of our great people, expressed at a general election for their representatives to the Constituent Assembly.” Election, he stated, should be by the four-tail suffrage sought by the liberals, that is, universal, direct, equal, and secret ballot. Thus, though Michael’s renunciation of the throne was taken by all as an abdication, he left open the possibility of a constitutional monarchy. Michael, who had not been inculcated in the National myth as Nicholas had been as heir, abandoned the realm of myth for the realm of politics. Nicholas viewed this act as a profanation, an incomprehensible descent into political squalor. He wrote in his diary, “God knows who got him to sign such filth!” (Bog znaet, kto nadoumil ego podpisat’ takuiu gadost’!)31

The political conflict of early twentieth-century Russia took on its particularly violent and destructive forms in part as a result of the modes of thinking inculcated in the emperors, heirs, and their advisors. The myths of supreme, transcendent ruler defined the way the monarchs thought, viewed reality, and took action from Peter the Great to the demise of Russian monarchy. When we remark on how the tsars, particularly the last ones, were “isolated from reality,” it was not because they failed to take the Russian world outside the court into account. They rather viewed reality in a different way, as episodes in the narrative of the myth. This book traces the persistence and influence of the myths of Russian monarchy as they evolved in the scenarios of successive rulers who transformed its themes to fit the cultural and political circumstances of each period. Ceremonies, art, architecture, and literature constituted a symbolic realm that elevated the ruler as mythic hero in the style and idiom of the current scenario. These presentations and representations of monarchy served not merely as elaborate, lavish ornaments of power, but also as instruments integral to its definition and exercise. They enabled the noble elite to display their loyalty to the sovereign, to share in his preeminence, wealth, and majesty and thereby to lift themselves above the subject population. The lines of brilliantly clad guardsmen performing before the monarch in perfectly ordered drill formation, stately balls dazzling Western visitors, public celebrations that focused on his person, were spectacles of the unity of the emperor with his Westernized elite. They demonstrated the monarch’s capacity to dominate subordinates, to serve as their cultural model, and to mobilize them in efforts to expand and transform his empire. The symbolic preeminence of each ruler, enacted in his scenario, glorified the categorical and unequivocal character of his power and precluded compromises such as prime ministerial rule and limited public participation accepted by European monarchs. Such compromises were entertained by Alexander I, Alexander II, and several of their advisors, but were ruled out because they would dispel the monarch’s aura of transcendence. The preservation of absolute autocratic power was rationalized by reference to the backward state of the Russian people and the multinational character of the empire. From such a viewpoint, the alternative to absolute power appeared to be disintegration of the empire and international humiliation. The European and National myths presented sharply divergent conceptions of Russian monarchy. The European myth both displayed the monarch as the embodiment of the institutions of the Russian state and elevated him above state institutions as a figure not subject to formal constraints or legal limitation. In the former capacity, the monarch was the leading official,

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“the first servant of the state,” who set an example of selfless service and civilized behavior for those who served in administrative positions. Imperial ceremonies united the nobility of the various nationalities and the Westernized Russian nobility in displays of their loyalty to an emperor exemplifying European aristocratic and monarchical culture. The nobles from the various national regions joined Russian noblemen as members of a cosmopolitan elite heading the civil and military service of the empire. The National myth expressed the rift that opened in 1881 between a Russian tsar and a reformed state embodying Western ideas of legality and independent state government. Alexander III distinguished between the officials devoted to these goals and “true Russians” who accepted his unquestioned personal power. The National myth replaced the multinational empire with the image of an empire dominated by an ethnic Russian elite elevated as a ruling nation over other nationalities, making Russification an important goal of policy. Nicholas II’s distrust of officials was more far-reaching and undiscriminating than his father’s. The sense that he was heir to the legacy of Russia’s past, a true representative of the Russian people, hardened his belief in his mission to resist or reverse the parliamentary reforms of 1905 as foreign intrusions into a native system of executive supremacy. His determination to restore a personal authority patterned on an imaginary seventeen century allowed him to thwart the development both of moderate political forces and a state governed by concepts of legality. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the participants in imperial ceremonies belonged to the noble court elite. The nineteenth century witnessed the increased involvement in court ceremonies of government officials and the people, who gave choral acclamations particularly during coronations and other visits to Moscow. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the presence of large numbers of peasants gave historical celebrations the character of mass spectacles. The order and submission the common people displayed attested both to the ruler’s powers of discipline and command and to the popular support he enjoyed. The celebrations were presented as displays of “the union of tsar and people,” simulacra of the Russian nation. Michel Foucault, after Frederick Nietzsche, has described the adoption of historical identities as the “buffoonery of history”—drawing on figures from the past to conceal the emptiness of identities in a perpetual masquerade.1 A variant of this “buffoonery of history” is observable throughout the past of Russian monarchy. The assumption of alien and distant identities was an essential attribute of the tsar’s image. The protean capacity to assume the identity of other examples of sovereignty and achievement—hero, conqueror, reformer, national leader—gave the monarch the superhuman aspect necessary to wield power absolutely. Russian rulers were expected to present themselves as someone else, to pretend to inhabit superior spheres or ages and to demonstrate their distant origins in ceremonies or acts of conquest. The National myth reproduced dramas of conquest, the Russian ruler

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representing the hero from the remote reaches of the past crushing the alien elements endangering the Russian nation. In elevating the image of each monarch, the scenarios exposed the failures and weaknesses of the previous regimes, creating a dynamic of repudiation and rebirth. The last two tsars continued this practice, recreating the image of distant savior with new visions, now of a resurgent national monarchy in Russia. Looking back from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, one is struck by the persistence of a mindset encouraging the rejection of the legacy of the recent past with the goal of a revitalized executive power that reveals a new symbolic identity. These disjunctures continued through the twentieth century. The end of the monarchy was followed by Lenin’s determination to erect a new socialist state, the collapse of that state by Yeltsin’s signal break with Soviet communism. Now, when it seems that the expulsion of the Poles from the Kremlin in 1612 will replace the October Revolution as the anniversary to mark the emergence of the Russian nation, the seventeenth century again beckons as a scene of primeval unity, an antidote to the upheavals and conflicts of the recent past.

Introduction: Scenarios of Power 1. On the symbolic force of foreignness, see Ju. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (Up to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in Ju. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, eds., The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 3–35. 2. Max Rheinstein, ed., Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (New York, 1967), 335–37. 3. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 11. 4. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985), 51. 5. This refers to the absence in Russia of the distinction, analyzed by Ernest Kantorowicz’s famous study, between the king’s mortal body and his body politic, which arose in England and to a lesser degree in other European states. The king could be an ordinary human being, but in his political imagery, he took the form of an abstraction, a symbol of state. In Russia, Michael Cherniavsky observed, the separation between the “body-mortal” and the “body-politic” did not take hold. Russian monarchs themselves had to display the transcendent features of the political order in performances constantly reaffirming the superhuman, heroic attributes attached to the state. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J., 1957), 383–450; Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York, 1969), 82–90. Chapter One: Signs of Empire 1. The words are of the seventeenth-century chancellery official G. O. Kotoshchikhin, cited in Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 16–19; see also Nancy Kollman, “The Seclusion of Elite Muscovite Women,” Russian History, vol. 10 (1983), 486–502. 2. For the theological disputes and for Peter’s activities at this time, see Hughes and Ernest Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), 53–54. Chapter Two: Peter the Great 1. George Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology (Belmont, Mass., 1979), 1:114. 2. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History, 80. 3. Boris Uspenskii, “Historia sub specie semioticae,” in D. P. Lucid, ed., Soviet Semiotics (Baltimore, 1977), 109. 4. Grigorii Kaganov, “ ‘As in the Ship of Peter,’ ” Slavic Review (Winter 1991), Vol. 50, N. 4:755–67. 5. Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789 (New York, 1987), 55–57. 6. Uspenskii, “Historia sub specie semioticae,” 121.

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7. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 162–63. Chapter Three: Olympian Scenarios 1. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, 1983), 128–29, 117. 2. Cynthia Hyler Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (De Kalb, Ill., 2003), 33–58. 3. Ibid., 60–65. 4. On Prokopovich’s adaptation of Natural Law theory of consent, see Georgii Gurvich, Pravda Voli Monarshei Feofana Prokopovicha I eia zapadnoevropeiskie istochniki (Iur’ev, 1915), 12–13. 5. See Iu. A. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 233. 6. PSZ, 8473, November 25, 1741, 8476; November 28, 1741; Anisimov, Rossiia v seredine XVIII veka: bor’ba za nasledie Petra (Moscow, 1986), 28–29, 42, 46, 134–35. 7. M. V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochenenii (Moscow, 1959), 8:96–101. 8. L. V. Pumpianskii, “K istorii russkogo klassitsizma (Poetika Lomonosova),” Kontekst, 1982, 14:310. 9. Lomonosov, 8:85; V. M. Zhivov and B. A. Uspenskii, “Tsar i Bog; Semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossi,” in B. A. Uspenskii, ed., lazyki kl’tury i problemy perevodimosti (Moscow, 1987), 125–30. 10. Stephen L. Baehr, “ ‘Fortuna Redux’: The Iconography of Happiness in Eighteenth-Century Courtly Spectacles,” in A. G. Cross, ed., Great Britain and Russia in the Eighteenth Century: Contacts and Comparisons (Newtonville, Mass., 1979), 110. 11. Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, 1991), 58–60; Stephen L. Baehr, “ ‘Fortuna Redux’; Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789 (Geneva, 1964), 53–56. 12. Peter II’s coronation in February 1728 was the first to open with a great triumphal entry to Moscow, with Roman arches and a speech of welcome from the governor. (Anna was in Moscow in 1730 dispensing with the need for an entry.) 13. Obstoiatel’noe opisanie torzhestvennykh poriadkov blagopoluchnogo vshestviia v tsarstvyiushchii grad Moskvu i sviashchenneishei koronovaniia eia Avgusteishego imperatorskogo velichestva vsepresvetleishiia derzhavneishiia velikiia gosudaryni Elicavety Petrovny, samoderzhitsy vserossiiskoi (St. Petersburg, 1744). 14. Materialy dlia istorii Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk (St. Petersburg, 1889), 5:1025 (St. Petersburg 1895), 7:620–21. 15. Ibid., 5:1027; 7:40, 776. 16. Obstoiatel’noe opisanie, 94–112. 17. Materialy . . . , 7:36; Obstoiatel’noe opisanie, 128, 161–63. 18. Obstoiatel’noe opisanie, 162–65. 19. Anisimov, Rossiia v seredine XVIII veka, 154–56, 164–65. 20. Geremie Pauzié, “Zapiski brillianshchika Poz’e,” Russkii Arkhiv 1870, no. 1:86–87. 21. S. M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (Moscow, 1964), 12:639.

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22. This manifesto was printed and circulated in both church and civil script. It was omitted from The Complete Collection of Laws in 1832. Peter Bartenev, Osmnatstaty vek: istoricheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1869), 4:217; David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 70–71. 23. This manifesto was printed and circulated in both church and civil script. It was omitted from The Complete Collection of Laws in 1832. Peter Bartenev, Osmnatstaty vek: istoricheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1869), 4:217–19. 24. John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York, Oxford, 1989), 65; Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 574. 25. Carol S. Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 138–47; Solov’ev, 13:89–103. 26. Bartenev, 4:223. 27. Pauzié, “Zapiski brillianshchika Poz’e,” no. 1:112; the robe is on display in the Kremlin Armory. I. A. Bobrovnitskaia et al., ed. Gosudarstvennaia oruzheinaia palata, 340–41. 28. Opisanie Vshestviia v Moskvu i Koronovaniia Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, which remained unpublished during her reign. It was printed in Kamerfur’erskii tseremonial’nyi zhurnal, 1762, vol. 63 (St. Petersburg, 185?). 29. Opisanie Vshestviia, 102. 30. V. A. Bil’basov, Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi (London, 1895), 2:159–61; Alexander, 65. 31. Opisanie Vshestviia, 125, 135; Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, October 1, 1762, no. 80, pribavlenie, 3; Bil’basov, 2:153–55. 32. Opisanie Vshestviia, 150–51. 33. Opisanie allegoricheskoi illiuminatsii predstavlennoi vo vseradostneishii den’ koronatsii eia Imperatorskogo Velichestva Ekateriny Vtorye v Moskve pred Universitetskim domom v 1762 godu (Moscow, 1762). 34. The booklet was reprinted in 1850. “Torzhestvyiushchaia Minerva,” Moskvitianin (October 1850), Otd. Nauki i khudozhestva, 109–28; Bil’basov, 2:161–65; Baehr, “Fortuna Redux,” 117–18. 35. “Torzhestvyiushchaia Minerva,” 115, 128. 36. Opisanie vseradostneishego vshestviia Blagochestiveishei Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Ekateriny Alekseevny v Sviatuiu-Troitskuiu Lavru (Moscow, 1762); Summarized in Bil’basov, 2:156–58 37. Bil’basov, 2:165–67; Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 113–17. 38. Bil’basov, 2:290–92; Soloviev, XIII, 315–22. 39. V. M. Zhivov, “Gosudarstvennyi mif v epokhu Prosveshcheniia i ego razrushenie v Rossii kontsa XVIII veka,” in Vek Prosveshcheniia: Rossiia i Frantsia, Vipperovskie chteniia (Moscow, 1989), 22:150. 40. G. S. Knabe, “Rimskaia tema v russkoi kul’ture i v tvorchestve Tiutcheva,” in Iu. Lotman, ed., Tiutchevskii Sbornik: stat’i o zhizni i tvorchestve Fedora Ivanovicha Tiutcheva (Tallin, 1990), 255–56. 41. Citations from Alexander, Catherine the Great, 101. 42. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951), 243–44. 43. W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great (New York, 1971), 216–19, 235–36. 44. Baehr, The Paradise Myth, 121–22; Stephen L. Baehr, “From History to

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National Myth: Translatio imperii in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Russian Review (January 1978), vol. 37, no. 1, 6. 45. Solov’iev, 14:74. 46. Ibid., 14:75, 119–20. 47. PSZ, November 7, 1775, no. 14,392. 48. Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russsian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 247–50. 49. PSZ, 16,187 (April 21, 1785). 50. The newspaper reported is cited in G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1868), 1:287, 295. 51. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend, 223–26. 52. On the neo-Stoicism of the first part of Catherine’s reign, see Walter J. Gleason, Moral Idealists, Bureaucracy, and Catherine the Great (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 90–92, 96–98. 53. Karen Rasmussen, “Catherine II and the Image of Peter I,” Slavic Review (March 1978), vol. 37, no. 1, 60. 54. Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, 19th-Century Art (New York, 1984), 98. Janson takes issues with the usual viewpoint that the statue was directly copied from the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome. 55. I. Grabar’, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva (St. Petersburg, 1909), vol. 6:370–72. 56. Baehr, The Paradise Myth, 50. 57. See Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich; Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992), 135–38. 58. Kappeler, 99; PSZ, 16,187 (April 21, 1785). 59. Cited in Kappeler, 121. 60. Andrew Kahn, “Readings of Imperial Rome from Lomonosov to Pushkin,” Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 745–68; Baehr, “From History to National Myth,” 10–12. 61. George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (Kingsport, Tenn., 1983), 289–313. 62. Baehr, The Paradise Myth, 48–49; E. P. Karnovich, Tsesarevich Konstantin Pavlovich (St. Petersburg, 1899), 5–6, 9. For a recent study, see Andrei Zorin, Kormia Dvuglavogo Orla . . .: literature i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII–pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow, 2001), 95–122. 63. Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1901), 2:259–304. 64. Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, 294–304. 65. A. Brückner, “Puteshestvie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II v poludennyi krai Rossii v 1787 godu,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, vol. 162 (1872): part 2, 4. 66. A. V. Khrapovitskii, Zhurnal Vysochaishego puteshestviia eia Velichestva Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Ekateriny II Samoderzhitsy Vserossiiskoi v Poludennye Strany Rossii v 1787 g (Moscow, 1787). 67. Khrapovitskii, 10–12; de Madariaga, 370–71. 68. A. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova (St. Petersburg, 1873), 4: 147–71. 69. Khrapovitskii, 77–78; Brückner, “Puteshestvie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II,” 44–45, 51; de Madariaga, 373. 70. A. M. Panchenko, “ ‘Potemskie derevni’ kak kul’turnyi mif,” in XVIII vek (Leningrad, 1983), 14:93–104.

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Chapter Four: The Education of Princes and the Dilemma of Neoclassicism 1. De Madariaga, 493–502; J. L. Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Boulder, Colo., 1979). 2. Leibniz’s De educatione Prinipis commentatio, in French, in Magazin fur das Kirchenrecht die Kirchen und Gelehrten-Geschichte (1787). 3. A. Lefevre, O nadzirateliakh pri vospitanii iz Entsiklopedii (St. Petersburg, 1770), 95, 96–97, 100. 4. Otto Brunner, “Vom Gottesgnadentum zum monarchischen Prinzip,” in Das Königtum (Lindau, 1956), in series 298–99. 5. N. I. Panin, “Vsepoddannaishee pred’iavlenie slabogo poniatiia i mneniia o vospitanii Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Pavla Petrovicha,” Russkaia Starina (1880), vol. 36, 315–17. 6. David Ransel, “An Ambivalent Legacy: The Education of the Grand Duke Paul,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Paul I: A Reassessment of His Life and Reign (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1979), 13–14. 7. “Tsesarevich Pavel Petrovich: istoricheskie materialy khraniashchiesia v biblioteke dvortsa goroda Pavlovska,” Russkaia Starina, 9 (1874), 676–83. 8. N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Pavel Pervyi (St. Petersburg, 1901), 60–61. 9. Roderich E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia (Oxford, 1992), 152–63; Dmitrii Kobeku, Tsesarevich Pavel Petrovich, 1759–1796 (St. Petersburg, 1887), 102; N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi: ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie (St. Petersburg, 1897), 1:94. 10. On the “Olympus of the Ceilings,” see Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 58. 11. G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia Derzhavina (St. Petersburg, 1864), 1:50–53. The ode was published in December 1779, in Sankt-Peterburgskii Vestnik. 12. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 1:27–28, 21. 13. Catherine II, Skazka o tsareviche Khlore (St. Petersburg, 1787). 14. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi . . . 1:32; “Sobstvennoruchnyi imennoi ukaz i nastavlenie Imp. Ekateriny II gen.-an-shefu Nikolaiu Ivanovichu Saltykovu o vospitanii velikikh kniazei Aleksandra i Konstantina Pavlovichei,” Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, 27:307–20; A. Kornilov, Kurs istorii Rossii XIX v. (Moscow, 1918), I, 78–79. 15. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi . . . 1:36. 16. Ibid., 1: 37–39; Jean Charles Biaudet and Françoise Nicod, Correspondance de Frédéric-César de la Harpe et Alexandre Ier (Neuchatel, 1978), 1:12–13. 17. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi . . . 1:39; Biaudet and Nicod, 1:15, 90. 18. A. Fateev, “Le problème de l’individu et de l’homme d’état dans la personnalité historique de Alexandre I, empereur de toutes les Russies,” in Russkii Svobodnyi Universitet v Prage, Zapiski nauchno-issledovatel’skogo ob’edineniia (1936), 3:150–51. 19. M. M. Safonov, Problema reform v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii na rubezhe XVIII i XIX vv (Leningrad, 1988), 43, 128. 20. He composed the reading list just before he left St. Petersburg for Switzerland. It is dated April 6, 1795; Biaudet et Nicod, 1:111–39. 21. Biaudet et Nicod, 1:73–74.

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22. N. M. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1966), 234. 23. Biaudet et Nicod, 1:88–89, 96, 141–43; Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi 1:111–17. 24. Ibid.; A. N. Pypin, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Alexandre I (Petrograd, 1918), 36–37; V. K. Nadler, Imperator Aleksandr I i ideia sviashchennogo soiuza (Riga, 1886), 1:15; Fateev, 5–8. 25. Safonov, Problema reform v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii, 46–53. Chapter Five: The Emperor Paul I 1. Memoirs of Adam Czartoryski (London, 1888), 1:141. M. Glinka, Russkii voennyi kostium, XVIII–nachala XX veka (Leningrad, 1988), 35, plates 28, 29. 2. PSZ, 17,530, November 6, 1796. 3. PSZ, 17,910, April 5, 1797; B. Nol’de, “Zakony osnovnye v russkom prave,” Pravo, 1913, no. 9, 524–26. 4. PSZ, 17,906, April 5, 1797. 5. PSZ, 17,908, April 5, 1797. 6. Czartoryski, 155. 7. Roderick E. McGrew, “A Political Portrait of Paul I from the Austrian and English Diplomatic Archives,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas Band 18, Heft 4 (December 1970), 515; Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia (Oxford, 1992), 213; V. N. Golovine, The Memoirs of Countess Golovine (London, 1910), 153; Comte Fédor Golovkine, La cour et le règne de Paul Ier (Paris, 1905), 148. 8. N. P. Zagoskin, Imperator Pavel Pervyi v Kazani (Kazan, 1893), 17, 23; Bartenev, 4:466, 468; Shil’der, Imperator Pavel Pervyi, 384–88. 9. McGrew, “A Political Portrait,” 514; John L. H. Keep, “Paul I and the Militarization of Government,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Paul I: A Reassessment of His Life and Reign (Pittsburgh, PA. 1979), 91–99. 10. McGrew “A Political Portrait,” 513–15; Keep, 100. 11. S. Kaznakov, “Pavlovskaia Gatchina,” Starye Gody, July–September 1914: 163–64; Czartoryski, 189; O. A. Medvedkova, “Russkii paradnyi portret rubezha XVIII–XIX vekov: transformatsiia obraza,” in Aktual’nyi problemy otechestvennogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1990), 42. 12. S. Kaznakov, “Pavlovskaia Gatchina,” Starye Gody, July–September 1914:141, 126–27, 134–38. 13. Ibid., 149–50; E. S. Shumigorskii, Imperator Pavel I; zhizn’ i tsarsvovanie (St. Petersburg, 1907), 152–58. 14. The title was given as a reward for Constantine’s exploits with Suvorov in Italy and Switzerland, but was motivated, in part, by Paul’s suspicions of Alexander. I thank Mikhail Safonov for his observations on this matter. 15. For a discussion of Paul’s role in the nineteenth century, see McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 354–57. Chapter Six: The Angel on the Throne 1. PSZ, 19,779, March 12, 1801. 2. N. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow, 1966), 261. 3. Marc Raeff, Plans for Political Reforms in Imperial Russia (Englewood, N.J., 1966), 75–84.

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4. Safonov, Problema reform v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii, 146–64; Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I, Paternalistic Reformer (New York, 1970), 35–37. 5. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi 2:69–70; M. I. Bogdanovich, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia Imperatora Aleksandra I i Rossii v ego vremia (St. Petersburg, 1869), 1:49. 6. G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1869), 2:244–47. 7. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 265–68; on the thematic connection between Karamzin’s and Derzhavin’s odes, see Baehr, The Paradise Myth, 159. 8. I. M. Snegirev, Ocherki zhizni Moskovskogo Mitropolita Platona (Moscow, 1891), 2:174; on the use of this phrase in the eighteenth century, see Zhivov and Uspenskii, 107–9. 9. Snegirev, 2:175. 10. The St. Petersburg metropolitan customarily officiated at coronations. The metropolitan Platon was asked to officiate as a gesture of special respect. 11. Shilder, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 2:66, 274; Snegirev, 2:7–8; K. A. Papmehl, Metropolitan Platon of Moscow (Petr Levshin) 1837–1812 (Newtownville, Mass., 1983), 122. 12. Imperator Aleksandr v Rige; maia 24, 25, i 26 chisl 1802 goda (St. Petersburg, 1802), 6–14; Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 2:88–89. 13. S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika (Moscow, Leningrad, 1934), 1:203, 208, 362; 2:38. 14. Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (The Hague, 1969), 41–46; Marc Raeff, Plans for Political Reform in Imperial Russia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), 88–91. 15. On the introduction of a ministerial system, see George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 193–96. 16. Nicholas Karamzin, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, edited by Richard Pipes (New York, 1969), 149, 201. 17. Ibid., 197. 18. La Comtesse de Choiseul-Gouffier, Réminiscences sur l’empereur Alexandre Ier et sur l’empereur Napoléon Ier (Paris, 1862), 26. 19. Lotman and Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, 154–55. 20. Shilder, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3, 80–87. 21. S. Glinka, “Vospominanie o Moskovskikh proizshestviiakh v dostopamiatny 1812 god, ot 11 iulia do izgnaniia vragov iz drevnei Ruskoi Stolitsy,” Ruskoi Vestnik (1814), 9:3–21; For example, Glinka’s description was the basis for the account in Izbranneishiia cherty znamenitykh deianii, dostopamiatnykh deianii i dostopamatnykh izrechenii ili anekdoty, avgusteishego Imperatora Aleksandra I, mirotvortsa Rossii (Moscow, 1814), 13–16. Glinka’s embellished version of the event appeared in his Zapiski o 1812 gode (St. Petersburg, 1836), 6–14; excerpts of the 1836 version of the event were reprinted in V. V. Kallash, Dvenadtsatyi god v vospominaniakh i perepiske (Moscow, 1912), 80–83. 22. Snegirev, 20–21; Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3:90. 23. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3:90; Alan Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace (New York, 1974), 235; IGK, ts. Al. I:218. 24. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3:92–93; S. Mel’gunov, Dela i liudi Aleksandrovskogo vremeni (Berlin, 1923), 58. 25. Admiral A. S. Shishkov, Zapiski, mneniia, i perepiska (Berlin, 1870), 1:156–59;

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V. K. Nadler, Imperator Aleksandr I i ideia sviashchennogo soiuza (Riga, 1886), 2:54–57. 26. PSZ, I, 25, 296, December 25, 1812. 27. Mel’gunov, 241. 28. Lieutenant-General Khatov, Dva znamenitye smotra voisk vo Frantsii (St. Petersburg, 1843), 50. 29. Khatov, 58–61. 30. The Times of London, September 23, 1815, 2. 31. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3:343–44. 32. Nadler, 5:631–33. 33. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 4:50; S. Glinka, “Stikhi na pribytie Gosudaria Imperatora v Moskvu,” Ruskoi Vestnik (1816), 9:5. 34. Florovsky, 1:188. 35. B. M. Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Vienna, 1992), 161–75. 36. “O prebyvanie Ego Velichestva Gosudaria Imperatora v Orenburge, (Pis’mo k izdateliu),” Otechestvennye Zapiski (1825), 21:404–27. 37. “Izvestie o vysochaishem prebyvanii ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva na Zlatoustovskikh zavodakh,” Otechestvennye Zapiski (1824), 20:265–95. 38. Palmer, 395–96; Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 4:327. 39. Ibid., 4:324, 327–28; Palmer, 396. Chapter Seven: Nicholas I 1. Heinz Dollinger, “Das Leitbild des Burgerkönigtums in der Europäischen Monarchie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Karl Ferdinand Werner, ed., Hof, Kultur, und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1985), 325–62. 2. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1648–1840 (New York, 1964), 2, 375–76; Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns, Rolf Parr, Historische Mythologie der Deutschen (Munich, 1991), 59–60; Dollinger, 347; Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, “Der Hof Friedrich-Wilhelm’s III. Von Preussen 1797 bis 1840,” in Karl Möckl, ed., Hofgesellschaft in den deutschen Staaten im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert (Boppard am Rhein, 1990). 3. E. P. Karnovich, Tsesarevich Konstantin Pavlovich (St. Petersburg, 1899), 141–48; N. K. Shil’der Imperator Nikolai Pervyi: ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie (St. Petersburg, 1903), 1:128. 4. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 1:61–63. 5. Severnaia Pochta, August 12, 1816. 6. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 1:72; W. Bruce Lincoln Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), 67. 7. I. N. Bozherianov, Zhizneopisanie Imperatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny, suprugi Nikolaia I (St. Petersburg, 1898), iv; “Imperatritsa Aleksandra Fedorovna v svoikh vospominaniiakh,” Russkaia Starina, 88 (1898), 25, 52–54. 8. See Laqueur, chapter 5. 9. S. V. Mironenko, Stranitsy tainoi istorii samoderzhaviia (Moscow, 1990), 89–90. 10. Lincoln, Nicholas I, 35. 11. M. A. Korf, Voshestvie na prestol Imperatora Nikolaia Iogo (St. Petersburg, 1857), 221.

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12. Kiselevskii fond, Bakhmetev Archive, Columbia University. 13. Nikolai Danilevskii, Taganrog ili podrobnoe opisanie bolezni i konchiny imperatora Aleksandra I (Moscow, 1828). 14. Poslednie dni zhizni nezabvennogo monarkha v boze pochivaiushego gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra I (St. Petersburg, 1827), 36–39. 15. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 1:456–58. 16. Ibid., 1:704–6; Korf, Voshestvie na prestol Imperatora Nikolaia Iogo, 229. 17. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 1:459. 18. Lincoln, 187. 19. Georges Clause, “Les réactions de la presse et de l’opinion au sacre de Charles X,” in Le sacre des rois (Paris, 1985), 290, 298. 20. Vues des cérémonies les plus intéressantes du couronnement de leurs majestés Impériales l’empereur Nicholas Ier et l’impératrice Alexandra à Moscou (Paris, 1828). The brief explanatory text was written by one Henry Graf, whom I have been unable to identify. 21. “Istoricheskoe opisanie Sviashchennogo Koronovanie i Miropomazaniia ikh Imperatorskikh Velichestv Gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaia Pavlovicha i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Aleksandry Feodorovny,” Otechestvennye Zapiski, 1827, 31:26–44. Henceforth, “Istoricheskoe opisanie.” 22. “Moskovskiia sovremennye letopisi: perepiska izdatelia Otechestvennykh Zapisok,” Otechestvennye Zapiski, 1826, 27:281–82. 23. Severnaia Pchela, August 5, 1826. 24. “Moskovskie sovremennye letopisi,” 288–89. 25. Ibid., 284. 26. “Dva pis’ma gr.D.N. Bludova k supruge ego,” Russkii Arkhiv, no. 5 (1867), 1046–47. 27. Ibid. 28. The rules designated Grand Duke Michael regent in the circumstance that there was no heir of age to ascend to the throne. PSZ, 537, August 22, 1826. 29. Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi Slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow, 1955), 1:251, 4:493.; B. I. Berman, “Chitatel’ zhitia,” in Khudozhestvennyi iazyk srednevekov’ia (Moscow, 1982), 166–67, 179. 30. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 31:170–71. 31. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 31:183; S. Panchulidze, Istoria kavalergardov, 1724–1799–1899 (St. Petersburg, 1899), 1:58–59. 32. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 31:188–95; I. A. Bobrovitskaia et al., Gosudarstvennaia Oruzheinaia Palata (Moscow, 1988), 367–69. 33. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 31:195–99, 205–8. 34. Ibid., 31:199–202, 208–10; Maréchal de Marmont, Mémoires (Paris, 1857) 8:132–33; Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 2:6–7. 35. Marmont, 8:132–33. 36. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 31:371–73. 37. Ibid., 31:375. I have found no explanation of the source or the purpose of this innovation. 38. Ibid., 31:374–75. 39. “Pis’ma Imperatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny k B. A. Zhukovskomu 1817– 1842.” Russkii Arkhiv, no. 1 (1897): 499. 40. The gesture could prompt criticism from those more fastidious than Nicholas

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about the tsar’s debt to the people. See Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 148–49, for grand duke Michael Pavlovich’s anger at a report in Severnaia Pchela of the tsar’s bowing from the Red Staircase in 1834. 41. “Istoricheskoe opisanie,” 32:26–34. 42. Ibid., 32:358–64; Vues, 13. Chapter Eight: Epitomes of the Nation 1. The Marquis of Londonderry, Recollections of a Tour in the North of Europe in 1836–1837 (London, 1838), 1:275. 2. Russkii Invalid, September 21, 1836: 959–60. 3. On the synecdoche as the expression of the identity of microcosm and macrocosm, see Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in his A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland, 1962), 508. 4. Ibid. 5. M. P. Pogodin, Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki (Moscow, 1846), 6–8. 6. Andrei Zorin, “Ideologiia ‘Pravoslaviia-Samoderzhaviia-Narodnosti’: Opyt rekonstruktsii,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 26, 1996, 86–87, 92–101. 7. Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825– 1855 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Calif., 1959), passim. 8. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, 1983), 134–36. 9. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 2:600–601. 10. Severnaia Pchela, March 15, 1830. 11. Ibid., April 1, 1830. The supplement was reprinted in Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, 2:565–71. 12. Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (Brussels, 1843), 2:137. 13. Severnaia Pchela, August 24, 1836: 767; Russkii Invalid, August 22, 1836, 851–53. 14. Russkii Invalid, September 9, 1836: 919–20; September 21, 1836: 958–60; Severnaia Pchela, August 29, 1836: 785; September 1, 1836: 793. 15. Baron August Haxthausen, The Russian Empire, Its People, Institutions and Resources (London, 1856), 1:7. 16. Marquis of Londonderry, 1:208; Prince Joseph Lubomirski, Souvenirs d’un page du tsar Nicolas (Paris, 1869), 65; A. Karasev, “Levyi glaz Nikolaia vtorogo,” Istoricheskii Vestnik (1902), 89:106–8. 17. V. I. Den, “Zapiski,” Russkaia Starina (1890), 65:79. 18. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 21. 19. D. G. Kolokol’tsov, “Leib-Gvardii preobrazhenskii polk v vospominaniiakh ego starogo ofitsera, s 1831 po 1846 g.,” Russkaia Starina, vol. 38 (1883): 293–94, 297. 20. Ivan Butovskii, Ob otkrytii pamiatnika Imperatoru Aleksandru Pervomu (St. Petersburg, 1834). Zhukovskii’s account was published in both Severnaia Pchela and Russkii Invalid; Vasilii Zhukovskii, “Vospominanie o torzhestve 30ogo avgusta 1834 goda,” in Severnaia Pchela, September 8, 1834: 807–8; Russkii Invalid, September 9, 1834: 906–8. It was reprinted in V. A. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1902), 10:28–32. 21. Butovskii, 8–12. 22. Ibid., 23, 28.

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23. The column at 154 feet was the largest in the world. Lest doubts linger, Montferrand included in his celebratory album a scaled drawing showing his column rising above the Napoleon, Trajan, Antonine, and Pompeian columns. A. Ricard de Montferrand, Plans et détails du monument consacré à la mémoire de l’Empereur Alexandre (Paris, 1836), iii, plate 48. 24. A. Th. Von Grimm, Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia (Edinburg, 1870), 2:31. 25. Marquis of Londonderry, 1:252–55. 26. Lady Londonderry, 110–11; Custine, 2:142–43; Lubomirski, 203. 27. John S. Maxwell, The Czar: His Court and People (New York, 1854), 153. 28. Grimm 2:47–49; A. I. Iakovleva, “Vospominaniia byvshei kamer-iungfery imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny,” Istoricheskii Vestnik, vol. 31 (1888): 173. 29. Custine, 3:93–95. 30. Grimm, 2:53. 31. Konstantin Ton, Tserkvi, sochinennye arkhitektorom Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Professorom Arkhtektury Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv i chlenom raznykh akademii Konstantinym Tonom (St. Petersburg, 1838), n.p. 32. The most thorough study of the historical circumstances and the construction of the cathedral is E. I. Kirichenko and A. M. Denisov, Khram Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve (Moscow, 1997). 33. A. F. L’vov, “Zapiski,” Russkii Arkhiv, vol. 2 (1884): 243. 34. On the changes in Zhukovskii’s text, see L. N. Kiseleva, “Karamzinitsy— tvortsy ofitsial’noi ideologii (zametki o rossiiskom gimne) Tynianovskii sbornik, vyp. 10” (Moscow, 1998). 35. Severnaia Pchela, May 3, 1840: 389. 36. M. I. Glinka, “Pervonachal’nyi plan ‘Zhizn’ za Tsaria’ 1835 g.” Russkaia Starina (1881), vol. 30, 174–75. 37. M. I. Glinka, Baron Rozen, Zhizn’ za Tsaria (St. Petersburg, 1878), 17. 38. A. A. Orlova, Glinka v Peterburge (Leningrad, 1970), 101–3. 39. PSZ, 22087, March 14, 1848. 40. Alexander Vel’tman, “Osviashchenie novogo moskovskogo dvortsa v kremle,” in “Moskovskaia letopis’ o,” Moskvitianin (April, 1849), 150–54. 41. Nikolai Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina (St. Petersburg, 1896), 10:250–52; N. N. Mazur, “Delo o borode,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, no. 6 (1993–94), 127–38. 42. Mikhailov, “Moskva, 19-go avgusta 1851 goda,” Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, 31 (1851), 2. 43. B. F. “O tsarskikh vykhodakh,” Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok (1852), no. 1:1–2. Chapter Nine: Parents and Son 1. Florent Gille, À la mémoire de l’impératrice Alexandra Féodorovna (Paris, 1864), 22. 2. D. D. Blagoi, Dusha v zavetnoi lire: ocherki zhizni i tvorchestva Pushkina (Moscow, 1977), 415–16; Anna Fedorovna Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov. Vospominaniia, dnevnik, 1853–1882 (Moscow, 1928–29), 1:88–89, 179–80. It is difficult to determine how much substance there was to the rumors of frequent infidelities, though they do not defy credibility. In any event, they are completely

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consistent with the pattern adopted by Nicholas of the display of family morality and the dual standard ascendant in the West. 3. Marc Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, Conn., 1978), 273; A. Shemanskii and S. Geichenko, Krizis samoderzhaviia: Petergofskii kottedzh Nikolaia I (Moscow, 1932), 10–11, 18–19, 30–31; Gille, 24–25. 4. Londonderry 1:127, 206, 128. 5. V. A. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1885), 6:508. 6. I. I. Bozherianov, Detstvo, vospitanie i leta iunosti Russkikh Imperatorov (St. Petersburg, 1914), 99. 7. E. M. Arndt, Entwurf der Erziehung und Unterweisung eines Fürsten (Berlin, 1813), 22–23, 31, 35–36, 48–52. 8. On the relations between mothers and heirs in the nineteenth century, see my article, “The Russian Empress as Mother,” in David L. Ransel, ed. The Family in Imperial Russia; New Lines of Historical Research (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 60–74. 9. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1902), 2:126. 10. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia 6:375–76; Gody ucheniia ego Imperatorskogo Vysochestva Naslednika Tsesarevicha (Sbornik Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva 31 (St. Petersburg, 1881), 167–68. 11. Ibid., 493–94. 12. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia, 6:461, 493–94. 13. Ibid., 6:461. 14. “Aleksandr II: Dnevnik, 1830 g. (sent.-dek.),” GARF, 678-1-274, 4; Gody ucheniia, 69–70; on Pavskii, see, Petr Ivanov, “Zakonouchitel’ imperatora Aleksandra IIogo i mitropolit Filaret,” Vozrozhdenie, vol. 35 (Sept.–Oct. 1954): 148–64. 15. Gody ucheniia, 364–71. 16. K. K. Merder, “Zapiski K. K. Merdera, vospitatelia Aleksandra Nikolaevicha,” Russkaia Starina (1885), 45:538–29; 46:489–90; 47:228. 17. Ibid., 46:101, 490; 47:227–28. 18. Gody ucheniia, 99–101. 19. Merder, Russkaia Starina (1885), 45:347. 20. Robert H. McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, 1855–1914 (Oxford, 1987), 1–5. 21. Severnaia Pchela, September 7, 1831. 22. “Aleksandr II: Dnevnik, 1830 g.,” 9–10; “Aleksandr II: Dnevnik, 1834 g.,” GARF, 678-1-280, 1, 22–23. 23. V. A. Zhukovskii, Dnevniki V. A. Zhukovskogo (St. Petersburg, 1901), 509. 24. S. S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie (St. Petersburg, 1903), 1:62. 25. “Aleksandr II: Dnevnik, 1834 g.” GARF, 678-1-280, 1. 26. Ibid., 21. 27. Severnaia Pchela, April 26, 1834: 365–66; Russkii Invalid, April 27, 1834: 407–8. 28. Tatishchev, 1:63–64. 29. Russkii Invalid, May 1, 1834: 419; Tatischev, 1:65–66. 30. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:22–23. 31. A. G. Zakharova and L. I. Tiutiunnik, Venchanie s Rossiei: perepiska Velikogo Kniazia Aleksandra Nikolaevicha s Imperatorom Nikolaem I 1837 god (Moscow, 1999), 21–26.

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32. Ibid., 25. 33. Ibid. 34. V. A. Shompulev, “Poseshchenie Saratova Naslednikom Tsesarevichem Aleksandrom Nikolaevichem v 30-kh godakh XIX stoletiia,” Russkaia Starina, vol. 138 (1909): 44; A. Mansurov, “Naslednik Tsesarevich Aleksandr Nikolaevich v gorode Kasimove,” Russkii Arkhiv, vol. 2 (1888): 477–78; Severnaia Pchela, May 22, 1837: 443. 35. Shompulev,” 45; Mansurov, 478; Severnaia Pchela, July 17, 1837: 636; Iur’evich, “Dorozhnye pis’ma S. A. Iur’evicha,” Russkii Arkhiv, vol. 1 (1887): 447. 36. Severnaia Pchela, May 22, 1837: 443. 37. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:74–75. 38. Ibid., 1:89. 39. Zhukovskii, Sochineniia, 6:298–99; “Dnevnik B. Kn. Aleksandra Nikolaevicha vo vremia poezdki po Rossii, May 1–December 12, 1837,” GARF, 678-1-287, 15–16. 40. Severnaia Pchela, August 3, 1837: 685. 41. Pogodin, Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki (Moscow, 1846), 154–59. 42. Russkii Invalid, November 24, 1837: 1182–83; Severnaia Pchela, November 2, 1837: 989; Tatishchev, 1:89; “Dnevnik B. Kn. Aleksandra Nikolaevicha vo vremia poezdki po Rossii, May 1–December 12, 1837,” 95–96. 43. Korf, Materialy, 99–100. 44. “Zhizneopisanie Imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny,” GARF, 641-113, 1–4. 45. Ibid., 35–37. 46. Severnaia Pchela, April 19, 1841: 334–35. 47. Hesse State Archive, D-23-32/34. 48. A. Fet, Moi vospomianiia (Moscow, 1890), 195–96. 49. A, F. Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov: Vospominaniia, Dnevnik, 1853–1882 (Moscow, 1928–1929), 1:93–94. 50. Tiutcheva, 1:36, 95, 121. 51. Lincoln, 291. 52. See W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform; Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (De Kalb, Ill., 1982), 41–76; Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976), 197–234. 53. Honoré de Balzac, Oeuvres diverses (Paris, 1940), 3:654, 674–80. These were remarks in his “Letter on Kiev,” written in 1847 during a visit to Russia. 54. Tiutcheva 1:194–95. 55. N. Ia. Eidel’man, Gertsen protiv samoderzhaviia: Sekretnaia politicheskaia istoriia Rossii xviii-xix vekov i Vol’naia pechat’ (Moscow, 1973), 10–11. 56. Opisanie pogrebeniia blazhennoi pamiati imperatora Nikolaia Igo s prisovokupleniem istoricheskogo ocherka pogrebenii tsarei i imperatorov vserossiiskikh i nekotorykh drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarei (St. Petersburg, 1856). 57. The accounts include one in Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, 1855, no. 12. This issue also reprints a Severnaia Pchela report. The descriptions were issued in part to dispel rumors that Nicholas had ended his own life. See N. Ia. Eidel’man, Gertsen protiv samoderzhaviia (Moscow, 1973), 9–20; Tiutcheva, 1:189. 58. D. N. Bludov, Poslednie chasy imperatora Nikolaia pervogo (St. Petersburg, 1855), 7; Les dernières heures de la vie de l’empereur Nicholas I (Vienna, 1855), 5. 59. Bludov, Poslednie chasy, 10–11, Les dernières heures, 7. 60. Bludov, Poslednie chasy, 18–22, Les dernières heures, 12–15.

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Chapter Ten: Alexander II and the Scenario of Love 1. PSZ, 29043, February 18, 1855. 2. B. P. Chicherin, Vospominaniia: Moskovskii Universitet (Moscow, 1929), 131; Tiutcheva, I, 82, 188. 3. M. P. Pogodin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1874), 4:314–17. 4. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:161–62. 5. A. Garainov, O vysochaishem puteshestvii i neskol’ko slov o poleznykh sobytiiakh (St. Petersburg, 1855), 7–8. This pamphlet was a reprint of articles in Severnaia Pchela. 6. Prince D. A. Obolenskii, “Dnevnik,” BAR, Folder 2:24–25. 7. PSZ, 30273, March 19, 1856. 8. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:227–29. 9. Ibid., 1:302. 10. N. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina (St. Petersburg, 1900), 14:217. 11. Tatishchev, Imperator Alexander II, 1:209–10. 12. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, no. 23 (August 10, 1856), 1–4. 13. Opisanie sviashchenneishago koronovaniia Ikh Imperatorskikh Velichestv Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra Vtorago i Imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny Vseia Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1856); “Koronatsionnyi sbornik i khudozhestvennyi al’bom,” RGIA, 472-65-113, 1. The 1856 publication date is fictional; the work was not published until 1861. “O rasporiazheniiakh dlia sostavleniia opisaniia koronovaniia,” RGIA, 472-64-69, 203–4; Sacherevell Sitwell, Valse des fleurs: A Day in St. Petersburg and a Ball at the Winter Palace in 1868 (London, 1941), 64. 14. Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, no. 27 (September 20, 1856). 15. Ibid., no. 28 (October 1, 1856), 1–2; no. 30, (October 20, 1856). 16. Ibid., no.29 (October 10, 1856), 1. 17. “Sovremennaia letopis’,” Russkii Vestnik (September, 1856), 171. V. V. Grigor’ev, who was serving in Orenburg at the time of the coronation, arranged to have several Kirgiz deputies invited. In addition to the effect of their colorful costumes, he emphasized the “governmental significance” of their presence. “I do not doubt that this measure will be ten times more effective in instilling a favorable disposition towards and respect for Russia in the members of the [Kirgiz] horde than ten military expeditions to the Steppe and all possible circulars from the Commission.” I. I. Veselovskii, V. V. Grigor’ev po ego pis’mam i trudam, 1818–1881 (St. Petersburg, 1887), 146. I thank Nathaniel Knight for directing my attention to this citation. 18. “Sovremennaia letopis’,” Russkii Vestnik (September 1856), 170–71; Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, no. 27 (September 20, 1856), 1–2. 19. Severnaia Pchela, August 31, 1856: 973, September 1, 1856: 981–82, September 5, 1856, 995–96. 20. Opisanie sviashchenneishago koronovaniia . . . Imperatora Aleksandra Vtorago i Imperatritsy Marii Aleksandrovny, 41. 21. Metropolitan Filaret, Slova i rechi, 1859–1867 (Moscow, 1885), 5:384–85; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:218. 22. MV, August 30, 1856: 913; Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok, no. 31, (November, 1, 1856). 23. Sacherevell Sitwell, Valse des fleurs: A Day in St. Petersburg and a Ball at the Winter Palace in 1868 (London, 1941), 65.

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24. Obolenskii, folder 2:46–47, 49. 25. Filaret, Slova i rechi, 5:385–87; Tatishchev, 1: 219–20. 26. V. Komarov, V pamiat’ sviashchennago koronovaniia Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra III i Gosudarynia Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny (St. Petersburg, 1883), 31–33. The introduction to this volume contains details of Alexander II’s coronation. 27. [Henry] Sutherland Edwards, The Russians at Home: Unpolitical Sketches (London, 1861), 240–44. 28. Gr. G. A. Miloradovich, Vospominaniia o koronatsii Imperatora Aleksandra II kamer-pazha dvora Ego Velichestva (Kiev, 1883), 16–17. 29. A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1900), 259. 30. MV, September 4, 1856: 447–48; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:225. 31. H. W. Janson, The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument (New Orleans, La., 1976), 29; Louis Réau, Saint Petersburg (Paris, 1913), 41. 32. Théophile Gautier, Russia (Philadephia, 1905), vol. 1; and Théophile Gautier, Oeuvres complètes (Geneva, 1978), vol. 1. 33. Russia, 1:209–18; and Oeuvres complètes, 1:138–47. 34. Russia, 1:212–13; Oeuvres complètes, 1:142–43. Compare the description by Marquis de Custine, La russie en 1839, 2:140–48, which mentions only a Kirghiz khan and an ugly Georgian princess, “languishing without honor in the court of her conquerors.” 35. See the excellent description of Shamil’s reception in Thomas M. Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of Dagestan: Shamil in Captivity,” Russian Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (July 1994), 353–66. 36. Ibid., 355–56; M. N. Chichagova, Shamil’ na Kavkaze i Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1889), 107. 37. Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti, October 3, 1859: 929; Barrett, 356–57. 38. Cited in Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:115–16. Chapter Eleven: The Tsar-Emancipator 1. Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 96–100; S. M. Solov’ev, Izbrannye trudy: Zapiski (Moscow, 1983), 339. 2. Field, 77–86. 3. Materialy dlia istorii uprazdneniia krepostnogo sostoianiia pomeshchich’ikh krestian’ v Rossii v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra II (Berlin, 1860), 1:366. 4. Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 8 (1858), part 2, 27. 5. Alexander II to Alexandra Fedorovna, GARF 728-1-2496, June 25, 1858. 6. MV, August 30, 1858, 976; Tiutcheva, 2:159–60. 7. L. G. Zakharova and L. I. Tiutiunnik, eds., 1857–1861: Perepiska Imperatora Aleksandra II s Velikim Kniazem Konstantinom Nikolaevichem: Dnevnik Konstantina Nikolaevicha (Moscow, 1994), 65–66. 8. “Lettres de Th. I. Tjutsheff a sa seconde épouse née Baronne de Pfeffel,” Starina i Novizna, 19 (1915), 189. 9. MV, August 28, 1858: 965. 10. L. G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava 114; Tiutcheva, II, 157; Field, The End of Serfdom, 186. 11. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava, (Moscow, 1968), 114; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:339–40.

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12. On the role of the Editing Commission in shaping the reform, see M. D. Dolbilov, “Aleksandr II i otmena kpepostnogo p’ava,” Voprosy Istovii, 1998, no. 10, 32–51. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 376–77; Field, 351–56. 13. A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik (Leningrad, 1955–1956), 1:179; Irina Paperno “The Emancipation of the Serfs as a Cultural Symbol, The Russian Review, 50 (October 1991), 426–27. 14. P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik P.A. Valueva (Moscow, 1961), 1:80. 15. Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge, 1968), 340–50; V. G. Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika tsarizma s serediny 50-kh do nachala 80-kh gg. XIXv (Leninegrad, 1978), 26. 16. B. E. Nol’de, Peterburgskaia missiia Bizmarka, 1859–1862 (Prague, 1925), 259. 17. L. G. Zakharova, “Aleksandr II,” in Rossiiskie samoderzhtsy, 1801–1917 (Moscow, 1994), 190–91. 18. Severnaia Pochta, September 8, 1862: 786; September 14, 1862: 80. 19. [P. A. ] “Pis’ma iz Novgoroda,” Severnaia pochta, September 8, 1862: 785. 20. Graf D. N. Tolstoi, “Zapiski,” Russkii Arkhiv, 1885, 2:56–57. 21. Tolstoi, “Zapiski,” 2:57–58. 22. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 1:403–4. 23. E. N. Maslova, Pamiatnik “Tysiacheletiiu Rossii” (Leningrad, 1977), 14–17. 24. P. N. Petrov, Pamiatnik tysiacheletiiu gosudarstva rossiiskogo v Novgorode (St. Petersburg, 1862), 3. The brochure was printed at the presses of the Second Section, the codification bureau, of the Imperial Chancellery. 25. Petrov, Pamiatnik tysiacheletiiu gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 10–11. 26. Maurice Rheims, 19th Century Sculpture (New York, 1977), 85. 27. N. Otto and I. Kuprianom, Biograficheskie ocherki lits izobrazhennykh na pamiatnike tysiacheletiia Rossii vozdvignutom v. g. Novgorode (Novgorod, 1862). 28. F. I. Buslaev, Moi dosugi (Moscow, 1886), 187–208. 29. “Lettres de Th. I. Tjutsheff a sa seconde épouse née Baronne de Pfeffel,” Starina i Novizna, 21 (1916), 197; Barsukov, 19, 280–84. 30. E. S. Shumigorskii, “Iz zapisnoi knizhki istorika,” Istoricheskii Vestnik, no. 138 (November 1914), 629. 31. K. P. Pobedonostsev and I. Babst, Pis’ma o puteshestvii gosudaria naslednika tsesarevicha po Rossii ot Peterburga do Kryma (Moscow, 1864), 85–87. 32. Pobedonostsev and Babst, 356–57. 33. Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, 408–9; A. A. Kornilov, Obshchestvennoe mnenie (Paris, 1905), 171–72. 34. Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, 410–11. 35. GARF, 665-1–13. 36. “Pis’ma v.k. Nikolaia Aleksandrovicha Aleksandru II,” GARF, 678-1-814, 188–89. Chapter Twelve: The Crisis of Autocracy 1. Valuev, 2:46. 2. [Iu. Got’e], “Pobedonostsev and Alexander III,” Slavonic and East European Review (June 1928), 7:34–35. Letter is of April 20, 1865. 3. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:4; N. N. Firsov, “Aleksandr II, lichnaia kharakteristika,” Byloe (1922), no. 20:130; N. I. Kostomarov, Avtobiografiia (Moscow, 1922), 377–78.

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4. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:4–6. 5. PSZ 2, n. 43164. 6. Kostomarov, 377–78; N. N. Firsov, “Aleksandr II, lichnaia kharakteristika,” Byloe, 20 (1922), 131. 7. A. N. Maikov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1914), 2:188–89. 8. 4oe aprelia 1866g: Polnyi sbornik izvestii, adresov, telegramm i stikhotvorenii po sluchaiu chudesnogo spaseniia zhizni imperatora Aleksandra II. Vypusk pervyi (St. Petersburg, 1866), 3. I have not been able to find the second volume of these messages. 9. A. Kornilov, Kurs istorii Rossii XIX veka (Moscow, 1918), 3:4–6; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:8–10. 10. Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 34–37, 167–70; Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 277–78. 11. Nikitenko, 3:24. 12. For a discussion of Alexander as “managerial tsar,” and the Miliutin and Shuvalov factions, see Alfred J. Rieber, “Interest-Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms,” in Eklof et al., eds., 72–80; Shuvalov’s domination of the government in the late 1860s and 1870s is assessed in T. A. Filippova, “Petr Andreevich Shuvalov,” in Rossiiskie konservatory (Moscow, 1997), 199–219. 13. Tiutcheva, 2:75–76. 14. Letter to Elizabeth, December 4, 1840, Hesse State Archive, D 23, 32/34; Rieber, Introduction to Tiutcheva, n.p.; Tiutcheva, 1:78–79, 2:117. 15. Boris Chicherin, Vospominania . . . ; Zemstvo i Moskovskaia Duma (Moscow, 1934), 4:118. 16. Obolenskii, folder 5:295–96, 345–46. 17. Fanny Lear [Henrietta Blackford], Le roman d’une americaine en Russi (Brussels, 1875), 164–65. 18. Obolenskii, 5:343. Entry of December 4, 1875. 19. Golos, June 6, 1872: 1–2. 20. Obolenskii, 5:269–70. Entry of November 25, 1873. 21. V. V. Voeikov, “Poslednie dni Imperatora Aleksandra II i votsarenie Imperatora Aleksandra III,” Izvestiia Tambovskoi Uchenoi Arkhivnoi Komissii, Vyp. 54 (Tambov, 1911), 71–73; V. Vonliarliarskii, Moi vospominaniia (Berlin, 1939), 47. 22. Vonliarliarskii, 47–48; John F. Baddeley, Russia in the ‘Eighties’: Sport and Politics (London, 1921), 14–15. 23. Hans Rogger, “The Skobelev Phenomenon: The Hero and His Worship,” Oxford Slavonic Papers (1976), 9:69. 24. V. A. Sollogub, Dnevnik vysochaishchego prebyvaniia za Dunaem v 1877 godu (St. Petersburg, 1878). 25. Ibid., i–xxxi. 26. Ibid., 13–14, 231, 115. 27. Ibid., 113, 117–18. 28. Ibid., 8, 10, 107–8. 29. GARF, 678-1-1027. 30. Sollogub, xliii, 114–15. 31. General [Heinz Lothar] Von Schweinitz, Denkwürdigkeiten (Berlin, 1927), 1:439. 32. The War Correspondence of the “Daily News,” 1877–1878 (London, 1878), 225–29, 232–33.

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33. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:416–17. 34. Ibid., 2:400–401. 35. Previously the emperor had purchased several of Vereshchagin’s battle scenes. O. Ia. “Aleksandr II—tsenitel’ i sobiratel’ predmetov iskusstv,” Muzei Rossii 4 (St. Petersburg, n.d.), 19. 36. N.G.O. Pereira, Tsar-Liberator: Alexander II of Russia, 1818–1881 (Newtonville, Mass., 1983), 131–32. 37. D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik, 1878–1880 (Moscow, 1950), 205. 38. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 279–81; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2:594–96. 39. Wortman, 282–83. 40. Voeikov, 60–61; Firsov, 134. 41. The War Correspondence of the “Daily News”, 1877–1878, 235. 42. On April, 6, 1879, the heir wrote in his diary, “Today for the first time I had to ride in the carriage with a convoy! I cannot express how sad, painful and pitiful this was! To ride with cossacks at our side in our always peaceful and quiet Petersburg as if in wartime is simply horrible and there is nothing to do about it.” “Dnevniki Aleksandra III,” GARF, 677-1-307, 243. Alexander II wrote to his daughter Maria Aleksandrovna on December 4, 1879, “I sit home nearly all the time, and I go out only in a carriage with a convoy, which is horribly unpleasant to me, but what is to be done, these are such times that I must submit to necessity.” Letters of Alexander II to the grand duchess Maria Aleksandrovna, San Francisco Museum of Russian Culture. 43. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-kh godov (Moscow, 1964), 291n. Shuvalov was referring to Alexander’s permission to convoke the Finnish Seim, which met regularly from 1863 in Helsinki and his agreement to a constitution and elective assembly for the newly independent Bulgaria after the Russo-Turkish War. 44. Ibid., 283–90. 45. Alexandre Tarsaidzé, Katia: Wife before God (New York, 1970), 196–97. 46. According to Alexandra Andreevna Tolstoi, he had warned the heir, Alexander Aleksandrovich, never to allow morganatic marriages in the imperial family: “that shakes the foundations of the throne.” A. A. Tolstaia, Zapiski freiliny: pechal’nyi epizod iz moei zhizni pri dvore (Moscow, 1996), 89. 47. Carl Graf Moy, Als Diplomat am Zarenhof (Munich, 1971), 162; Baddeley, 173. 48. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Once a Grand Duke (New York, 1932), 53; Tarsaidze, 235–37. 49. E. M. Feoktistov, Vospominaniia E. M. Feoktistova: za kulisami politiki i literatury (Leningrad, 1927), 196–97; D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik, 1881–1882 (Moscow, 1950), 78–79; B. V. Anan’ich and R. Sh. Ganelin, “R. A. Fadeev, S. Iu. Vitte i ideologicheskie iskaniia ‘okhranitelei’ v 1881–1883 gg,” in Issledovaniia po sotsial’nopoliticheskoi istorii Rossii (Leningrad, 1971), 304n; B. V. Anan’ich and R. Sh. Ganelin, “Aleksandr II i naslednik nakanune 1 marta 1881 g,” 204–13. 50. V. Voeikov, 77–79. 51. Ibid., 84–89; Tarsaidze, 247–48; G. K. Gradovskii, Itogi (1862–1907) (Kiev, 1908), 78. 52. Cited in MV (March 6, 1881), no. 65, 3; see also MV (March 3, 1881), no. 62, 1.

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Chapter Thirteen: The Making of a Russian Tsar 1. Karel Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Michael Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871–1887 (Boulder, Colo., 1988), 118–19. 2. V. A. Tvardovskaia, Ideologiia poreformennogo samoderzhaviia, (Moscow, 1978), 37, 49–51, 55–57. 3. S. S.Tatishchev, “Imperator Aleksandr III; ego zhizn’I tsarstvovanie’; chast’ I: 1845–1865” RGIA, 878-1-4, 8; Maria Aleksandrovna to Elizabeth, September 6, 1854, Darmstadt Archive, D23-32/5; Tolstaia, 43n. 4. K. Golovin, Moi vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1910), 1:38. 5. A. A. Polovtsov, “Iz dnevnika,” Krasnyi Arkhiv (1929), no. 2 (33), 187. Polovtsov describes a conversation of March 1878; E. A. Perets, Dnevnik, (1880–1883) (Moscow, Leningrad, 1927), 46. 6. Charles Lowe, Aleksander III of Russia (New York, 1895), 18–20; Countess M. Kleinmichel, Memoirs of a Shipwrecked World (New York, 1923), 25. 7. Letters of Maria Aleksandrovna to Elizabeth, May 8, 1853, July 16,1853, Darmstadt Archive, D 23-32/5; N. N. Firsov, “Aleksandr III; lichnaia kharakteristika, chast’iu po ego neizdannym dnevnikam,” Byloe no. 29 (1925), 85–86; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie (Moscow, 1970), 36. 8. E. Kamenskii, “Ot detstva do prisiagi: iz zhizni avgusteishikh detei imperatora Aleksandra II,” Istoricheskii Vestnik (February 1917), 430. 9. Gershel’man-Shvartz fond, BAR, folder 3, part 2, 29. 10. S. A. Iur’evich, “Pis’ma ob avgusteishikh synoviakh Imperatora Aleksandra II,” manuscript in New York Public Library, 2, 62–63, 138; Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie . . . , 36; Kamenskii, “Ot detstva . . . ,” 100. 11. “Pis’ma Aleksandra IIIego k materi, 1864–1879,” GARF, 641-1-115, 7, 9, 11, 15. 12. “Zapisnaia knizhka Aleksandra III, 1861–1862, g,” GARF, 677-1-250, 20, 22, 24. 13. “Pis’ma Aleksandra IIIego k materi, 1864–1879,” 21. 14. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1866g,” GARF, 677-1-299, 27. Entry for April 12, 1866: “Pis’ma Aleksandra IIIego k materi, 1864–1879,” 49, 95. 15. K. Ia. Grot, Imperator Aleksandr III v otnosheniiakh svoikh k nastavniku svoei iunosti (St. Petersburg, 1906), 1–2; V. L. Meshcherskii, Moi vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1898), 2:1–2. 16. This ceremony marked his majority as heir, designated by the Law of Succession at age sixteen, and celebrated on the heir’s sixteenth birthday. The majority ceremonies of other grand dukes took place after they had passed age twenty on the holiday of the Order of St. George, November 26. If Nicholas Aleksandrovich had not died, Alexander would have taken the oath on November 26, 1865. “O prisiage E. I. Vysochestva Naslednika i Velikogo Kniazia Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha,” RGIA, 473-1-1080, 4. 17. Quoted in Russkii Invalid (July 20, 1865), 158:2. 18. Valuev, 2:60. 19. Letter of Maria Alexandrovna to Elizabeth, July 17, 1865, Darmstadt State Archive, D 23-32/5; Tiutcheva, 2:12. 20. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1866g,” 287–89.

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21. P. N. Petrov, Illiustrirovannye opisaniia torzhestv brakosochetannia Gosudaria Naslednika Tsesarevicha i Gosudaryni Tsesarevny (St. Petersburg, 1867), 2. 22. Puteshestvie Gosudaria naslednika tsesarevicha i Gosudaryni tsesarevny v 1869 godu (Moscow, 1869), 15–16, 40–45, 67–68, 75–81. 23. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1869–1870g.” GARF, 677-1-303, 14, 16, 28. 24. Kamenskii, “Naslednik Tsesarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich” (March 1917), 645–46; Robert H. McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, 1855–1914 (New York, 1987), 4–5, 173–74. 25. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1875–1880 g,” 34. 26. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1865–1866 g,” 185. 27. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1866 g,” 27–28. 28. “Pis’ma Aleksandra III Marii Fedorovne, 18 aprelia–18 sentiabria, 1884g,” GARF, 642-1-709, 15. 29. Pis’ma Pobedonostseva k Aleksandru III (Moscow, 1925), 1:7. 30. Ibid., 1:5–6. 31. See Olga Maiorova, “Mitropolit moskovskii Filaret v obshchestvennom soznanii kontsa XIX veka,” in Lotmanovskii Sbornik, 2 (Moscow, 1997), 615–16. 32. Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 196–98. 33. Igor Vinogradoff, “Some Russian Imperial Letters to Prince V. P. Meshcherskii (1839–1914),” Oxford Slavonic Studies XI (1962), 112. 34. Ibid., 115. 35. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1867g,” 66. 36. For her letter to Alexander II, see GARF, 642-1-604, 5–6. 37. Vinogradoff, “Some Russian Imperial Letters,” 118. 38. “Pis’ma Aleksandra IIIego k materi, 1864–1879,” 121–22. 39. Von Schweinitz, 1:410–11. 40. “Pis’ma v. kn. Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha v. kn. Marii Fedorovna, 30 iiulia 1876–26 maia, 1877 g,” GARF, 642-1-705, 20, 22. 41. Pis’ma Pobedonostseva k Aleksandru III 1:53. 42. Ibid., 1:67. 43. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1875–1880 gg,” 156–57; S. S. Tatishchev, “Tsesarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich v vostochnuiu voinu, 1877–1878,” RGIA, 878-1-9, 2. 44. Letters of September 4–5, and November 18, 1877, “Kopii pisem Aleksandra III Imperatritse Marii Fedorovne,” GARF, 642-1-707, 70, 197. 45. Tatishchev, “Tsesarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich v vostochnuiu voinu, 1877–1878,” 14–15; “Pis’ma Aleksandra IIIego k materi, 1864–1879,” 250–51; Letter of October 10, 1877; Kopii pisem Aleksandra III Imperatritse Marii Fedorovne,” 149–50. 46. “Kopii pisem,” 12. 47. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1875–1880 g,” 187. 48. Pis’ma Pobedonostseva k Aleksandru III, 1:116–18. 49. Leonid Grossman, “Dostoevskii i pravitel’stvennye krugi 70-kh godov,” Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, vol. 15 (Moscow, 1934), 87–92, 114–17. 50. “Dnevnik Aleksandra III, 1875–1880 g,” 332; “Dnevnik Naslednika Tsesarevicha Velikogo Kniazia Aleksandra Alexandrovicha, 1880g,” 355. 51. “Pis’ma Aleksandra III Marii Fedorovne, 18 aprelia–18 sentiabria, 1884g,” 13. 52. Tatishchev, “Tsesarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich v vostochnuiu voinu, 1877–1878,” 29–30.

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Chapter Fourteen: The Inauguration of a National Myth 1. PSZ, Sobranie 3, no. 1. March 1, 1881. 2. PSZ, Sobranie 3, no. 118, April 29, 1881. 3. Charles Lowe, Alexander III of Russia (New York, 1895), 322, 3300. 4. V. V. Voeikov, 133. 5. N. A. Epanchin, Na sluzhbe trekh imperatorov (Moscow, 1996), 194. 6. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Russian Past (Stanford, 1939), 340. 7. For more on this theme, see my article “Moscow and Petersburg: The Problem of Political Center in Tsarist Russia, 1881–1914,” in Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, Pa., 1985), 244–74. 8. On Michael Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, see Katerina Clark, “Political History and Literary Chronotope: Some Soviet Case Studies,” in Gary Paul Morson, Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (Stanford, 1986), 230–46. 9. Cited in MV, March 11, 1881: 3. 10. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 337–39. 11. V. V. Voeikov, 146. 12. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (1881), no. 656, 102. 13. Ibid. 14. V. V. Voeikov, 148–49. 15. Ibid., 151–54; Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (1881), no. 657, 120–22; no. 658, 142. 16. Katkov, Sobranie peredovykh statei, 337–39; MV, July 18, 1881: 3. The dating of Katkov’s editorials in the Sobranie is erroneous. 17. MV, July 26, 1881, 3. 18. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 461–65, 468; Katkov, Sobranie peredovykh statei 233–34; MV, May 12, 1882: 2. 19. B. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, Dnevnik, 5 marta–25 iulia, 1883g, GARF, 660-1-21, 61. 20. PSZ, May 16, 1883, no. 1583. 21. See K. Golovin, Moi vospominaniia, 2:34–36, about the joy in St. Petersburg that followed the successful completion of the coronation festivities. 22. V. Komarov, V pamiat’ sviashchennago koronovaniia Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra III i Gosudarynia Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny (St. Petersburg, 1883). 23. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia Ikh Imperatorskikh Velichestv Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny Vseia Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1883). The album came out in an edition of 500 copies, 300 of which were in Russian, 200 in French. It cost 92,376 rubles to produce the 500 copies compared to 120,000 rubles for the 400 copies of Alexander II’s album. “Koronatsionnyi sbornik i khudozhestvennyi al’bom,” RGIA, 472-65113, 1. It was published under the Office for the Production of State Papers (Ekpeditsiia Zagotovleniia Gosudarstvennykh Bumag), which introduced more advanced technological capacities for state publications and paper money. 24. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia . . . Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia, 2. 25. On Alexander III’s encouragement of the Russian realists, see Elizabeth

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Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977), 123–27, 132–34; John O. Norman, “Alexander III as a Patron of Russian Art,” in John O. Norman, ed. New Perspectives on Russian and Soviet Artistic Culture (New York, 1994), 28–33. 26. The Times, May 23, 1883: 5. 27. John Le Donne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York, 1997), 132; Prince A. Lobanov-Rostovskii, Russia and Asia (New York, 1933), 172. On the influence of the new sense of colonial superiority on imperial policy toward newly subjected territories, see Kappeler, 174–75. 28. Komarov, 56–57. 29. The Times of London, May 23, 1883: 5. 30. Komarov, 57–58. 31. Ibid., 109–10. 32. Ibid., 110–11. 33. “The building,” Lowe wrote, “does not at all correspond to the general idea of a cathedral, being rather a superb and exquisitely finished imperial chapel.” The Times of London, May 28, 1883: 7. 34. Komarov, 111. 35. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia . . . Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia, 17. 36. Komarov, 119–20. 37. Ibid., 130–33. 38. Ibid., 133–34. 39. Tvardovskaia, “Aleksandr III,” 258. 40. D. N. Liubimov, “Russkaia smuta deviatisotykh godov, 1902–1906,” BAR, 93. 41. A. A. Polovtsov, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1966), 1:95. Among the Russians, he mentioned Golitsyn, Gagarin, Iusupov, Meshcherskii, Uvarov; among the Germans, Nesselrode, Grot, Pahlen, and Sivers. 42. Komarov, 138. 43. Ibid., 138, 150. 44. Aida Nasibova, The Faceted Chamber in the Moscow Kremlin (Leningrad, 1978), 13; Komarov, 89–93. 45. André Lischke, Piotr Ilyitch Tschaikovski (Paris, 1993), 989–92. 46. Komarov, 143–47; Maikov, 2:413–20. 47. Komarov, 308–11. 48. M. V. Lentovskii, “Zaiavlenie v koronatsionnuiu komissiu o plane narodnogo prazdnestva v dni koronatsii [Aleksandra III],” Tsentral’nyi Teatral’nyi Muzei imeni A. A. Bakhrushina 144-1-904, 1–6. 49. Vesna krasna: allegoricheskoe shestvie ustroennoe na narodnom gul’iane v Moskve, 21 maia, 1883 g (Moscow, 1883). 50. Komarov, 350–60. 51. Ibid., 366–72; Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia . . . Gosudaria Imperatora Aleksandra tret’ego i Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny, 53–54. 52. Komarov, 445–46; PSZ, 3, no. 1602, May 26, 1883; on the manifesto and the ceremony, see Kirichenko and Denisov, 139–49. 53. Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York, 1991), 380; Anthony Holden, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York, 1995), 203–5.

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54. Komarov, 436–41. 55. Ibid., 441–44. Chapter Fifteen: The Resurrection of Muscovy 1. GARF, 642-1-709, 24–25. Letters of May 14 and May 16, 1884. 2. S. Petrovskii, Pamiati Imperatora Aleksandra III (Moscow, 1894), 175, 286. 3. K. Golovin, Moi vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1910), 2:39. 4. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 337–39, P. A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1976), 16. 5. Polovtsov, 2:447. The quote is from April 1892; Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London, 1993), 25–26. 6. A. Iu. Polunov, Pod vlast’iu ober-prokurora: gosudarstvo i tserkov’ v epokhu Aleksandra III (Moscow, 1996), 46–48. 7. Thomas C. Sorenson, “Pobedonostev’s Parish Schools: A Bastion against Secularism,” in Charles E. Timberlake, ed., Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia: Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold (Seattle, Wash., 1992), 185–89, 198. 8. Prazdnovania deviatisotletiia, Kreshcheniia russkogo naroda (Kiev, 1888), 14; NV (July 12, 1888). 9. Ibid., 39, 136–38. 10. MV, April 9, 1882; A. A. Parland, Khram Voskresenie Khristova sooruzhennyi na meste smertel’nogo poraneniia v Boze pochivshego Imperatora Aleksandra II na ekaterinskom kanale v Sankt-Peterburge (St. Petersburg, 1909), 2. 11. Polunov, 76. 12. M. S. Flier, “The Church of the Savior on the Blood: Projection, Rejection, Resurrection,” in Christianity and the Eastern Slavs (Berkeley, 1994) vol. 2:32–43. 13. Louis Réau, Saint Petersburg (Paris, 1913), 67–68. 14. More than twenty Russian-style churches went up in Petersburg in the years 1881–1914; at least eighteen of these were demolished or transformed beyond recognition after the revolution. For listings of Slavic revival churches built after 1881 and information on their fate, see Utrachennye pamiatniki arkhitektury Peterburga-Leningrada; katalog vystavki (Leningrad, 1988), 31–39; S. Shul’ts, Khramy Sankt-Peterburga: istoriia i sovremennost’ (St. Petersburg, 1994), 52, 79–82, 104, 106, 119–21, 173–74, 177–80, 200, 203–4, 212, 218. 15. M. Preobrazhenskii, Revel’skii Pravoslavnyi Aleksandro-Nevskii Sobor (St. Petersburg, 1902), 3–4; Toivo U. Raun, “The Estonians,” in Edward Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), 323–25. 16. Sylvain Bensidoun, Alexandre III, 1881–1894 (Paris, 1990), 47. 17. Iu. B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka (Leningrad, 1973), 90. 18. Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 63–82, 94. 19. A. D. Pazukhin, “Sovremennoe sostoianie Rossii i soslovnyi vopros,” Russkii Vestnik (January 1885), 1–58. 20. Ibid., 6, 38–39. 21. Ibid., 41–46. 22. Ibid., 43, 47.

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23. Tvardovskaia, 235. 24. Wcislo, 101–2. 25. Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local SelfGovernment, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1989); Wcislo, 105–6. 26. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III, 237–39. 27. Wcislo, 114–16. The Ministry document cited is from 1902. 28. Ibid., 101. 29. PSZ, 3, no. 2882, April 21, 1885. 30. Polovtsov, 1:392–93; Epanchin, 193–94. 31. Marc Raeff, “The Romanoffs and Their Books: Perspectives on Imperial Rule in Russia,” Biblion, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 53. 32. Jonathan W. Daly, “Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 602–19; Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III, 55, 88, 97–103. 33. The circular, printed in Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik on March 6, is cited in V. V. Voeikov, 106–7; Lowe, 77–80. 34. “Zapiska A. I. Nelidova v 1882 o zaniatii prolivov,” Krasnyi Arkhiv, vol. 46 (1931), 180–81. 35. Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York, 1969), 120–22. 36. New York Times, May 24, 1896, 1. 37. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, 111–12, 198. 38. Tvardovskaia, 74–81, 100–12. 39. Iu. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka, 282. 40. Von Laue, 62–67. 41. S. Ia. Witte, Vospominania (Moscow, 1960) 1:407. 42. Cited in Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 7–10. 43. Von Laue, 121–22; Marks, 125, 136–38. 44. Cited in David Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (De Kalb, Ill., 2001), 146. Chapter Sixteen: The Life and Death of a Russian Tsar 1. Ekaterina Radziwill (Count Paul Vasilli), Behind the Veil at the Russian Court (New York, 1914), 159. 2. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia, February 19, 1883: 162–65. 3. Ibid., February 18, 1884: 182. 4. See Chapter 8. 5. Véra Galitzine, Reminiscences d’une émigrée (Paris, 1925), 71–72. 6. Zodchii (1889): 74–77. 7. V. S. Krivenko, ed., Obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Imperatorskogo Dvora (St. Petersburg, 1901), part 2:32–37. 8. See Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 21, 30–33, 38. Silverman also shows the political significance of rococo as cultural grounding for the Franco-Russian alliance, 159–71. 9. N. N. Kalinin and M. A. Zelianichenko, Romanovy i Krym (Moscow, 1993), 58–59.

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10. Krivenko, Obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Imperatorskogo Dvora, part 2:194–200; Lowe, 314. 11. MV, September 11, 1888: 2. 12. Ibid., September 26, 1888: 2. Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal and Kingston, 2002), chapter 4. 13. Raeff, “The Romanoffs and Their Books,” 63. 14. E. V. Bogdanovich, Sila vsevyshniago chudodeistvenno iavlennaia 17 oktiabria 1888 g (St. Petersburg, 1889), 20–25. 15. B. V. Sapunov, “Nekotorye siuzhety russkoi ikonopisi i ikh traktovka v poreformennoe vremia,” in Kul’tura i iskusstvo Rossii XIX veka: Novye Materialy i issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1985), 141–42. 16. Arkhimandrit Ignatii, 17 oktiabria: Dva chuda: pervoe v Vologde, 1655 goda, vtoroe, pod khar’kovom, 1888g (St. Petersburg, 1890). 17. E. Poselianin, Iasnye dni. 17 oktiabria. 29 aprelia. 28 oktiabria (Moscow, 1892), 10–13. 18. Poselianin, Iasnye Dni, 5. 19. See, for example, Witte, Vospominaniia, 2:14–15. 20. Alexander Mikhailovich, 173. 21. MV, May 18, 1891:2. 22. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy, 76, 97. 23. “Dnevnik V. K. Konstantina Konstantinovicha, 1893 g,” GARF, 6601-40, 65. 24. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia, May 22, 1893: 378. 25. Epanhchin, 165–67. 26. There is a good discussion of these responses in Bensidoun, 294–95. 27. Lowe, 240. 28. L’Illustration (November 24, 1894), 432; Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (1894), 398; K. Korol’kov, Zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie Imperatora Aleksandra III (Kiev, 1901), 241–47. 29. Quoted in Lowe, 295. 30. S. Petrovskii, Pamiati Imperatora Aleksandra III (Moscow, 1894), 320–22, 288–89. 31. Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (1894), 347. 32. Petrovskii, 317–19. 33. NV, November 1, 1894, 1. 34. Kliuchevskii also extolled Alexander’s patronage of historical studies and historical restoration, his knowledge of Russian archaeology and iconography, and his work as chair of the Russian Historical Society. V. O. Kliuchevskii, “Pamiati v Boze pochivshego Imperatora Aleksandra III,” Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete, 1894, 4:1–7. 35. “Poslednie chasy Gosudaria Imperatora, Aleksandra III,” Tserkovnye Vedomosti, 1894: 1656; NV, November 20, 1894: 2. 36. Bolezn’ i smert’ Aleksandra III: Pravdivye zametki (London, 1900), 19. Chapter Seventeen: Nicholas II as Heir and Husband 1. Il’ia Surguchev, Detstvo Imperatora Nikolaia II (Paris, 1953), 88, 92, 108–9, 132, 135–36.

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2. Pis’ma Pobedonosteva k Aleksandru III, 1:109. 3. “Iumoristicheskii rasskaz ‘Dva nemtsa,’ napisannyi v. kn. Nikolaem Aleksandrovichem,” GARF, 601-1-162; Lowe, 342. 4. Surguchev, 89–90, 93. 5. Alexander Mikhailovich, 165–66, 178–79; G. Lanson, “Le tsar Nicolas II raconté par son ancien professeur,” Les annales politiques et littéraires (September 1, 1901), 133. 6. Polovtsov, Dnevnik gosudarstvennogo sekretaria A. A. Polovtsova, 2:440; Mosolov, 17–18, 20; A. A. Polovtsov, “Dnevnik,” Krasnyi Arkhiv (1931), no. 3 (46), 131. 7. Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London, 1993), 41. 8. Ibid., 35. 9. Epanchin, 199. 10. K. P. Pobedonostev, “Konspekt lektsii po kurs ‘Gosudarstvennoe pravo’ sostavlennyi dlia v. kn. Nikolaia Aleksandrovicha,” GARF, 601-1-208, 22–23, 28–30, 42–43. 11. Lieven, Nicholas II, 28–29. 12. “Uchenicheskie tetradi Nikolaia Aleksandrovicha po russkomu iazyku,” GARF, 601-1-163. “Dnevnik, 1882,” GARF, 601-1-217. 13. Andrew M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 11. 14. “Uchenicheskie tetradi Nikolaia Aleksandrovicha po russkomu iazyku (sochineniia),” GARF, 601-1-167, 26–27, 46–47, 57–60, 97. 15. Ibid., 29–30, 38. 16. Von Schweinitz, 2:272. 17. Nicholas II, “Dnevnik, 1884g,” GARF, 601-1-219, 131. Following tradition, Nicholas became honorary ataman of the Cossack host when he became heir to the throne on March 1, 1881. 18. “Uchenicheskie tetradi v. k. Nikolaia Aleksandrovicha po russkomu iazyku i literature,” GARF, 601-1-170, 67–68. 19. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II, 1884g,” GARF, 601-1-219, 220–27, 345. 20. “Dnevnik, Nikolaia II, 1887g,” GARF, 601-1-221, 39. 21. See issues of MV, May 9–14, 1887. An editorial on the investiture appeared in MV on May 9, 1887: 2. 22. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II, 1887 g,” 178–223; Letters to Alexander III, June 24 and June 25, 1887, GARF, 677-1-919, 107–10; Letter to Maria Fedorovna, June 25, 1887, GARF, 642-1-2321, 55–56. 23. Epanchin, 205–5. 24. Mrs. Lathrop, The Court of Alexander III (Philadephia, 1910), 69; V. N. Lamzdorf, Dnevnik (Moscow, Leningrad, 1934), 2:259; Alexander Mikhailovich, 173. 25. N. F. Dubrovin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Przheval’skii: biograficheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1890), passim. 26. Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, 37. 27. “Pis’ma Przheval’skogo, N.M., puteshestvennika, o svoem puteshestvii po Tibetu, dlia goklada v. k. Nikolaiu Aleksandrovichuy,” GARF, 601-1-1329, 1–2. 28. Kn. E. E. Ukhtomskii, Puteshestvie na vostok ego Imperatorskogo Vysochestva, Gosudaria Naslednika Tsesarevicha, 1890–1891 (St. Petersburg, 1893–1897). 29. Ibid., 2:104; 3:213–14.

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30. GARF, 677-1-919, 190. Letter of June 11, 1891, to Alexander III, GARF, 642-1-2321, 113. Letter of December 10, 1890 to Maria Fedorovna. See also Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 1891 g, GARF, 601-1-225, 66–67. 31. For example, Alexander Mikhailovich, 167. 32. Letters of Alexander III to Nicholas II, GARF, 601-1-1139, 30. Letter of December 18, 1891; 677-1-919, 144, 172. Letters of January 20 and April 1, 1891; Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 1891 g, 177. Entry of April 24, 1891. 33. Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 1891 g, 42, 95, 97. Entries of January 28, March 8, and March 9, 1891. 34. Ibid., 125, 163–64, 172, 184, 195–96. Entries of March 24, April 16, April 22, April 27, May 1, 1891. 35. “Pis’ma imperatora Nikolaia II, imperatritse Marii Fedorovne,” 642-1-2321, 123. Letter of February 21, 1891. 36. Ukhtomskii, Puteshestvie, 4:210–13. 37. Dnevnik Nikolaia II, 1891 g (second part), 10–11, 18–21; in the last decades of the century, the government undertook massive resettlement of Cossacks from other regions—the Don, the Kuban, the Urals, and Orenburg to the new frontier in the east. A. T. Topchii, “Romanovy, kazachestvo i osvoenie vostochnykh territorii Rossii, in Dom Romanovykh v istorii Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1995), 134–39. 38. Dnevnik Nikolaia II, 1891 g (second part), 25–44. 39. In comparison, Alexander I wed at sixteen, Nicholas I at twenty-one, Alexander II at twenty-three, and Alexander III at twenty-one. 40. “Dnevnik Nikolaia IIogo, 1884 g,” GARF, 601-1-219, 152, 328; Verner, 30. 41. Verner, 31. 42. Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra, Their Own Story (London, 1996), 70. 43. Dnevniki Nikolaia II (Moscow, 1991), 48. 44. James Russell Miller, 1840–1912, was a leading organizer of the United Presbyterian Church, the founder and editor of the journal Forward, as well as the author of numerous books. Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1943), 12:627–28. 45. “Zapisnaia knizhka Imp. Aleksandry Fedorovny s vypiskami iz knig religioznogo soderzhaniia, 1897–1901,” GARF, 640-1-301, 1–2, 4, 5, 7, 29–30, 33, 48, 85–108. 46. See, for example, a sketch printed in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. XCVI, no. DLXXDVI (May 1898). Nicholas bends over Olga, who sits on a couch being held by Alexandra kneeling at her side. It is entitled, “The Most Popular Picture in Russia.” A number of these are held in the Print and Photographic Collection of the New York Public Library. Chapter Eighteen: The Accession and Coronation of Nicholas II 1. PSZ, Sobranie 3, no. 11014, October 21, 1894. 2. B. V. Anan’ich and R. Sh. Ganelin, eds. Nikolai Vtoroi: Vospominaniia, Dnevniki (St. Petersburg, 1994), 34–35; S. Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, 2:8–15. 3. Cited in Lieven, Nicholas I, 55. 4. NV, January 18, 1895, 1; see S. S. Ol’denburg Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II (Washington, D.C., 1981) 47, for the response of liberal periodicals.

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5. Radziwill, Behind the Veil, 255–56. 6. Koronatsionnyi Sbornik: Koronovanie v Moskve; 14 Maia 1896 (St. Petersburg, 1899). 7. MV, May 15, 1896: 4. 8. Forty-nine foreign correspondents had been invited by the government to the 1883 coronation, the largest number to that date, and a total of not more than eighty attended. 9. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Niva (April 27, 1896), 451; (April 29, 1896), 505; (May 10, 1896), 21:527. 10. Vel. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1896 g.,” GARF, 660-143, 49–54. 11. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Niva (April 27, 1896), 451; (April 29, 1896), 505; Carl Graf Moy, Als Diplomat am Zarenhof (Munich, 1971), 16; Reginald Zelnik, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 39–40. 12. V. N. Lamzdorff, Dnevnik, 1894–1896 (Moscow, 1991), 380. 13. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1896 g.,” 62–63. 14. Aylmer Maude [De Monte Alto], The Tsar’s Coronation (London, 1896), 10–15, 23, 38–39. 15. Koronatsionnyi Sbornik, 1:209–10; New York Times, May 22, 1896: 7; NV, May 11, 1896:1. 16. New York Times, May 22, 1896: 7; Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1896 g.,” 58. 17. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Niva (1896), 20:505; Henry LaPauze, De Paris au Volga (Paris, 1896), 79, 85. 18. Richard Harding Davis, A Year from a Reporter’s Notebook (New York, 1898), 28–34; B. A. Engel’gardt, “Torzhestvennyi v’ezd v Moskvu gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaia II,” in Sergei Zavalishin, Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai II Aleksandrovich (New York, 1968), 23–24. 19. Sophie Buxhoeveden, The Life and Tragedy of Aleksandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia (London, 1928), 64. 20. Koronatsionnyi sbornik, 1:253. 21. Le temps, May 28, 1896: 1; Koronatsionnyi Sbornik, 1:262; Suvorin, 123–24. Buxhoeveden recalled that her father told her that everyone was impressed with “how deeply he felt every word. His voice was tense with emotion.” Buxhoeveden, 150–51. 22. La Pauze, 111; MV, May 15, 1896: 2–4. 23. Koronatsionnyi Sbornik, 1:280–83. 24. Suvorin, Dnevnik; F. A. Golovin, “Zapiski,” Krasnyi Arkhiv (1926), no. 6, 114. Kuropatkin in his diary also remarked on the need for a solemn state funeral. Anan’ich and Ganelin, Nikolai Vtoroi, 47. 25. Vel. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1896 g.,” 66. 26. Suvorin, Dnevnik, 134. The source of the tale seems to have been the Duke of Edinborough, who, the grand duke Vladimir informed Kuropatkin, had told him that 2,500 had perished at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. Anan’ich et al., eds., Nikolai Vtoroi, 48. 27. Vel. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1896 g.,” 69–71. 28. Cited in Anan’ich et al., eds., Nikolai Vtoroi, 51. 29. Maude, 73–100. 30. NV, May 21, 1896: 2; May 22, 1896: 1.

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Zelnik, 45. Radziwell, Behind the Veil, 278. Koronatsionnyi Sbornik, 1:327–28. Dnevniki Nikolaia II, 147–48. Chapter Nineteen: Demonstrations of Godliness

1. Nicholas II, “Dnevnik” (December 1, 1899–July 27, 1900) GARF, 601-1-241, 92–93. 2. Tsarskoe prebyvanie v Moskve v aprele 1900 goda (St. Petersburg, 1900), 15, 23–24, 27–33. 3. Ibid., 56. 4. Nicholas II, “Dnevnik” (December 1, 1899–July 27, 1900), 95–99; “Pis’ma imp. Nikolaia II imp. Marii Fedorovne, 23 ianv. 1899–22 dekabria 1900,” GARF, 642-1-2326, 56–57. 5. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (September 17, 1902–May 18, 1903), GARF, 601-1245, 146, 166–67. 6. Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), 184; MV March 29, 1903: 1; April 1, 1903: 2–3; Russkii tsar’ s tsaritseiu na poklonenii Moskovskim sviatynam (St. Petersburg, 1909), 25–26. On the Zubatov program as an expression of the National myth, see Scenarios, vol. 2:370–74. 7. MV, April 16, 1903: 1; NV, April 18, 1903: 3. 8. MV, April 2, 1903: 2. 9. A. A. Polovtsov, “Dnevnik,” Krasnyi Arkhiv (1923), 3:99. 10. O. Iu. Tarasov, Ikona i blagochestie: ocherki ikonnogo dela v imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1995), 236–39, 243. 11. B. V. Anan’ich, “The Economic Policy of the Tsarist Government and Enterprise in Russia from the End of the Nineteenth through the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Gregory Guroff and Fred V. Carstensen, eds., Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton, N.J., 1983),136–37. 12. E. I. Kirichenko, Russkii stil’ (Moscow, 1997), 208. 13. N. A. Vel’iaminov, “Vospominaniia N. A. Vel’iaminova o D. S. Sipiagin,” Rossiiskii Arkhiv, vol. 6 (1995), 391. 14. Polovtsov, “Dnevnik,” Krasnyi Arkhiv (1923), 3:162–65. 15. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (September 17, 1902–May 18, 1903), GARF, 601-1245, 113; L. G. Zakharova, “Krizis samoderzhaviia nakune revoliutsii 1905 goda,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 8 (1978), 131; Vel. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 1903 g,” GARF, 660-1-51, 20–21; Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna, Memoirs (Personal Collection of David Chavchavadze), 129–32; V. N. Voeikov, S tsarem i bez tsaria (Helsinki, 1936), 38–40. 16. Al’bom kostiumirovovannogo bala v Zimnem Dvortse v fevrale 1903 g. (St. Petersburg, 1904). 17. Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, February 9, 1903: 4; February 15, 1903: 3; February 13, 1903: 3. 18. A. A. Mosolov, Pri dvore poslednego Rossiiskogo imperatora (Moscow, 1993), 29. 19. See chapter 16. 20. Maylunas and Mironenko, 221–22.

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21. Igor Vinogradoff, “Some Russian Imperial Letters to Prince V. P. Meshcherskii 1839–1914,” Oxford Slavonic Studies, no. 11 (1962), 134. 22. Her notebook from 1901 to 1905 includes citations from German mystical and pietist writers Meister Eckhardt and Jacob Boehme, French religious philosophy, and even the Bhagavad-Gita. In the last sections, there are lengthy quotes from the Lives of the Fathers of the Orthodox church and Serafim of Sarov. “Zapisnaia knizhka Imp. Alekandry Fedorovny s stikhami, vypiskami iz filosofskikh i religioznykh sochinenii, 1901–1905,” GARF, 640-1-304, passim. 23. Robert L. Nichols, “The Friends of God: Nicholas and Alexandra at the Canonization of Serafim of Sarov, July, 1903,” in Charles E. Timberlake, ed., Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia (Seattle, 1992), 218–19. 24. Valentine Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov (Crestwood, N.Y., 1975), 81. 25. Ibid., 35; Tiutcheva, 2:92–93. 26. Iu B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvoriantsvo v 1902–1907, g. (Leningrad, 1981), 75. 27. Nichols, “The Friends of God,” 209–11; NV, July 20, 1903: 2. 28. Anatolii Timofievich, Prepodobnyi Serafim Sarovskii (Spring Valley, N.Y., 1953), 110–11; Mosolov, 117–19; MV, July 27, 1903: 2; “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (May 19–December 31, 1903), GARF, 601-1-246, 42–47; Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v 1902–1907 g, 75n. 29. NV, July 24, 1903: 2–3. 30. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (May 19–December 31, 1903), GARF, 601-1-246, 47. 31. Zakharova, “Krizis samoderzhavio,” 128; Timofievich, 111–18. 32. Mosolov, 119–21. 33. Nichols, “The Friends of God,” 213–14, 223–25. 34. Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, 55. 35. Alexander Mikhailovich, 218. Chapter Twenty: Nicholas II and the Revolution of 1905 1. Verner, 170–73. 2. Polnoe sobranie rechei Imperatora Nikolaia II (St. Petersburg, 1906), 57–58; Verner, 195–96. 3. Verner, 213–14. 4. Epanchin, 324–25. 5. Verner, 239–41. 6. Ibid., 260. 7. MV, January 15, 1906: 2. 8. For the rules for the Duma elections see, Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 12–14. 9. “Dnevnik v. kn. Konstantin Konstantinovich, 10/8/05–11/6/06,” GARF, 6601-55, 90. 10. Verner, 299–300. 11. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 83–85. 12. Henry W. Nevinson, The Dawn in Russia: Or Scenes in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1906), 322. 13. NV, April 28, 1906: 1.

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14. Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II, 312. 15. While most studies have attributed the introduction of the courts-martial to Stolypin, Ascher has shown clearly that it was Nicholas who insisted on this step. See Ascher, 244–49; See, also, William C. Fuller, Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 173–74. 16. Ascher, 351; PSZ, Sobranie 3, 29240, June 3, 1907. 17. Ascher, 357–58. The telegram was immediately printed in the party newspaper. 18. John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of “Aliens” in Imperial Russia,” The Russian Review, vol. 57 (April 1998), 173–90. 19. For an excellent analysis of Alexandra’s ideas and their relationship to Nicholas’s, see Mark Steinberg, “Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intellectual Portrait,” in The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution, Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev, eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 34–36. 20. “Zapisnaia knizhka imp. Aleksandry Fedorovny s vyskazyvaniiami Grigoriia Rasputina (1907–1916) s darstvennoi nadpis’iu Rasputina,” GARF, 640-1-309, 38–39, 52–54. 21. Maylunas and Mironenko, 296–97, 314, 320–22, 328–30, 341, 343, 350–74, 376; M. V. Rodzianko, The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire’s Collapse (London, 1927), 11; Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (New York, 1961), 143; A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma (Moscow, 1981), 255. 22. S. Ia. Ofrosimova, “Tsarskaia sem’ia (iz detskikh vospominanii)” Russkaia Letopis’ (Paris, 1925), 7:240–41. 23. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, “Vyshee voennoe upravlenie Imperator i tsarstviushchii dom” in L. G. Zakharova et al., ed. P. A. Zaionch Kovskii, 1904–1983, gg. (Moscow, 1998), 78–83; Fuller, Civil Military Conflict, 220–23. 24. B. V. Gerua, Vospominaniia o moei zhizni, 1:114. 25. A. F. Girs, “Vospominaniia byvshego ofitsera Lb.-Gv. Preobrazhenskogo Polka i Minskogo Gubernatora, A.F. Girsa o svoikh vstrechakh s Gosudarem Imperatorom Nikolaem II,” Girs collection, BAR, 16. Peter the Great of course marched as “Great Captain” under the command of generals (see chapter 2). But this was understood as play acting, and providing an example for the nobility. Girs’s response suggests that Nicholas rather was demeaning his office as emperor. 26. Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry, and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism (Cambridge, 1994) 138, 160, 300, 327. 27. Kalinin and Zemliachenko, 78. 28. Poteshnyi, no. 1 (1910), 1, 6–8; no. 19 (1911), n.p. 29. Ibid., no. 1 (1910), 6. 30. On the English Boy Scouts, see Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto, 1993). 31. Poteshnyi, no. 19 (1911), n.p. Chapter Twenty-one: Historical Celebrations 1. David Cannadine, “Splendor Out of Court; Royal Spectacle and Pageantry in Modern Britain, c. 1820–1977,” in Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power; Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985), 218–21. 2. A. Girs, “Svetlye i chernye dni, Chasovi” (April 1953): 9; Alexandre Spiridovitch, Les dernières années de la cour de Tsarskoe-Selo (Paris, 1928) 1:326–27;

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MV, June 30, 1909: 3; Vel. Kn. Constantine Konstantinovich, “Dnevnik, 5 marta–12 dekabria, 1909 g.,” 67. 3. “Dnevnik Konstantina Konstantinovicha, 5 marta–12 dekabria, 1909 goda,” 68–69; Spiridovitch, 1:324–26, 329–30. 4. Spiridovitch, 1:332–33; “Dnevnik Nikolaia II, 1909,” GARF, 601-1-254, 55–56, 58. 5. V. Sukhomlinov, Vospominaniia Sukhomlinova (Moscow, Leningrad, 1926), 191–92. 6. Hans Rogger, “The Beilis Case: Anti-Semitism and Politics in the Reign of Nicholas II,” Slavic Review, vol. 25, no. 4 (December 1966), 615–29; A. S. Tager, Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa (Moscow, 1933), 46–47, 88, 144, 155–62; HeinzDietrich Löwe, Antisemitismus und reaktsionäre Utopie: Russischer Konservatismus im Kampf gegen den Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft (Hamburg, 1978), 37–39. 7. Dzhunkovskii described meeting with the old soldiers on August 22 and recalled that they remembered little about the battle, but were accorded special treatment. They rode about in carriages and received the best accommodations and places at the ceremony. One even described Napoleon, as a “fine fellow” with a “beard down to his waist.” V. F. Dzhunkovskii, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1997), 2:19. 8. Ibid., 2:27–28; Niva (September 1912), no. 36, 722–23; MV, August 28, 1912: 3. Naumov was referring to the crises in the Balkans where Russia’s allies were mobilizing for war against Turkey, A. N. Naumov, Iz utselevshikh vospominanii, 1868–1917 (New York, 1955), 2:224. 9. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (August 25, 1912–May 6, 1913), GARF, 601-1-259, 2; “Pis’ma imp. Nikolaia II imp. Marii Fedorovne, 6 aprelia 1912–20 iulia 1916,” 14; Edward J Bing, ed., The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar (Toronto, 1938), 270–71; Spiridovitch, 1:324–31. 10. “Dnevnik Nikolaia II” (August 25, 1912–May 6, 1913), GARF, 601-1-259, 3–4; Dzhunkovskii, 2:35–36; Niva, September 8, 1912: 722–23; MV, September 8, 1912: 2. 11. NV, August 28, 1912: 2. 12. Bing, 272–73. 13. MV, September 8, 1912: 1–2. 14. “Po voprosu o dne vserossiiskogo prazdnovaniia 300-letiia Tsarstvennogo Doma Romanovykh,” RGIA, 1320-1-20, 4–5. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Russkoe slovo, January 27, 1913: 2–3, 5. 17. “Zhurnaly ustroistva prazdnovaniia trekhsotletiia Doma Romanovykh,” RGIA, 1320-1-30, 58, 60. 18. MV, February 23, 1913: 3; NV, February 20, 1913: 5. 19. NV, February 22, 1913: 3. 20. The Times of London, March 7, 1913: 7. 21. MV, February 23, 1913: 1; V. S. Diakin, Burzhuaziia, dvorianstvo, i tsarizm v 1911–1914 gg:razlozhenie tret’ei-iun’skoi sistemy (Leningrad, 1988), 114–15. 22. Naumov, 2:234; Spiridovitch, 2:317. 23. Meriel Buchanan, The Dissolution of an Empire (London, 1932), 36–37. 24. MV, February 24, 1913: 2. 25. Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II, 384–85. 26. E. E. Bogdanovich, Istoricheskoe palomnichestvo nashego tsaria v 1913 godu (St. Petersburg, 1914).

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27. V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo (Paris, 1933), 2:155–56. 28. V. I. Nazanskii, Krushenie velikoi Rossii i doma Romanovykh (Paris, 1930), 110. 29. MV, May 21, 1913: 1. 30. Kokovtsov, 2:169. 31. V. N. Shakhovskoi, Sic transit gloria mundi: 1893–1917 (Paris, 1952), 42; Naumov, 2:233; Maxim Gorky, “On the Russian Peasantry,” in R.E.F. Smith, The Russian Peasant, 1920 and 1984 (London, 1977), 16. 32. Lev Rabenek, “Moskva i eia khoziaeva,” Vozrozhdenie (1960), no. 105:101–4. 33. Naumov 2:236–37; R.H. Bruce Lockhart, “Preface,” in Bing, ed., 10; E. E. Bogdanovich, 141, 163, 174. 34. MV, May 26, 1913: 2. 35. “Pis’ma imperatora Nikolaia II Marii Feodorovne, 6 aprelia 1912–20 iulia, 1916,” GARF, 642-1-2332, 34, 44. Chapter Twenty-Two: Nicholas II and World War I 1. A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma (Moscow, 1981), 261. 2. A. Elchaninov, The Tsar and His People (London, 1914), 48, 91–97. For an extended discussion of the new forms of publicity and Elchaninov’s biography, see Scenarios, vol. 2, chapter 14. 3. Grazhdanin, February 21, 1913: 11–13; Vinogradoff, “Some Russian Imperial Letters to Prince Meshcherskii,” 127, 139, 150. 4. V. S. Diakin, Burzhuaziia, dvorianstvo, i tsarizm, 113, 120, 155–58; Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907– 1914 (Cambridge, 1973), 201. 5. Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 114–15. 6. Eugene D. Vinogradoff, “The Russian Peasantry and the Elections to the Fourth State Duma,” in Leopold Haimson, ed., The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905– 1914 (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), 228–33. 7. Tager, 221–23, 272; Rogger, “The Beilis Case,” 628. 8. Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, 1983), 390–438. 9. Avrekh, 258. 10. Diakin, Burzhuaziia, 189. 11. Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassadors’ Memoirs (New York, 1925), 1:50–52; NV, July 21, 1914: 4; Spiridovitch, 2:482–83; M. Mansell Merry, Two Months in Russia, July–September 1914 (Oxford, 1916), 85. 12. MV, August 6, 1914, 2; V. N. Voeikov, S Tsarem i bez tsaria, 104–5. 13. Sir George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia (Boston, 1923), 1:214–15; Meriel Buchanan, 103; Paléologue, Memoirs, 1:93, 95. 14. Hans Rogger, “Russia in 1914,” Journal of Contemporary History (October 1966), vol. 1, no. 4: 110–13. 15. Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Army: The Old Army and the Soldier’s Revolt (March–April, 1917) (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 76–80. 16. General-Maior Dubenskii, Ego Imperatorskoe Velichestvo Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai Aleksandrovich v Deistvuiushchii Armii (Petrograd, 1916), 4 vols. 17. Niva, March 28, 1915: 246–48. 18. Dubenskii, 2:112.

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19. Ibid., 3:3–4, 91–93. 20. Michael Cherniavsky, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), 166–67. 21. Nicholas II, The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa (London, 1929), 85. 22. Hubert Jahn has concluded that folk images and other personifications of military heroism attracted more attention than ritualized mentions of the tsar. He finds that the images of Nicholas II in postcards and other representations were much less numerous than for Kaiser Wilhelm. See Hubertus Jahn, “For Tsar and Fatherland? Russian Popular Culture and the First World War,” in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg, Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 143–44, and Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995). 23. Dubenskii, 4: 232–33. 24. Ibid., 4:58–60. 25. Ibid., 4:62–63. 26. Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II, 553–54. 27. S. G. Kashchenko and N. G. Rogulin, “Predstaviteli Doma Romanovykh– kavalery ordena Sviatogo Georga” in Dom Romanovykh v istorii Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1995), 263; Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II, 553–54. 28. Lieven, Nicholas II, 220–21; Nicholas II, The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa, 207. 29. Dubenskii, 4:16–17; Nicholas II, The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa, 192–93. Letters of May 28 and May 29, 1916. 30. The following account follows the description of Nicholas de Basily, The Abdication of Nicholas II of Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 111–33, 151–53. 31. Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II, 625; Nicholas’s convictions were hardly shaken by the revolution. See Steinberg, 14, 23, 25, 31, 36–37. Conclusion 1. Michael Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed., Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 93–94.

These brief suggestions are meant for those interested in additional reading on the subject of imperial Russian myths and ceremonies and those seeking materials that have appeared in English and in Russian since the publication of the two-volume edition of Scenarios of Power. The literature on the subject remains thin, though it is more abundant than when I began my research. Muscovite Russia and Petrine Russia account for the greatest number of useful works; tsarist myths and symbol of later periods have attracted less interest. In terms of general studies, the basic work remains Michael Cherniavsky’s Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York, 1969). Those interested in the evolution of architectural styles should turn to William Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Seattle, 2004). E. I. Kirichenko’s Zapechatlennaia istoriia Rossii (Moscow, 2001), 2 vols., is a magisterial account of Russia’s past as it emerges from its edifices and monuments. Michael S. Flier’s semiotic analysis of sixteenth-century ceremonies provides brilliant insights into the symbols and mentality of Muscovite Russia. See, for example, “The Iconography of Royal Procession: Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual,” in Heinz Durchardt, Richard A. Jackson, and David Sturdy, eds., European Monarchy: Its Evolution and Practice from Roman Antiquity to Modern Times (Stuttgart, 1992), 109–24; “The Throne of Monomakh and the Architectonics of Destiny,” in James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, eds., Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 21–33; “Court Ritual and Reform: Patriarch Nikon and the Palm Sunday Ritual,” in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (De Kalb, Ill., 1997), 73–95; “Filling in the Blanks: The Church of the Intercession and the Architectonics of Medieval Muscovite Ritual,” in Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19, nos. 1–4, 1995:120–37. Seventeenth-century rituals are analyzed in two important articles, Paul A. Bushkovitch, “The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Russian Review vol. 49, no. 1, (January 1990): 1–18, and Robert O.Crummey, “Court Spectacles in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Illusion and Reality,” in Daniel Clarke Waugh, ed., Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), 130–58. Russell E. Martin gives a learned and detailed account of the evolution of Muscovite royal weddings in “Choreographing the ‘Tsar’s Happy Occasion’: Tradition, Change, and Dynastic Legitimacy in the Weddings of Tsar Mikhail Romanov,” in Slavic Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 794–817. On the reign of Peter the Great, Ernest Zitser’s The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the

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Great (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004) advances an original reinterpretation of the “sacred parody” of Peter’s reign and its use to create monarchical charisma. Victor Zhivov’s Iz tserkovnoi istorii vremen Petra Velikogo: Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow, 2004) provides a different semiotic take on these rites. Lindsey Hughes’s Russia in the Reign of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1998) has a wealth of material on the Petrine court and rituals. James Cracraft examines in depth the changes in art and architecture during Peter’s reign in The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, 1988) and The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago, 1997). Grigorii Kaganov’s brilliant semiotic analysis of the visual imagery of St. Petersburg, Images of Space: Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts (Stanford, 1997), the first chapter of which is devoted to the Petrine era, should not be missed. Elena Pogos’ian’s Petr I-arkhitektor rossiiskoi istorii (St. Petersburg, 2001) provides a detailed examination of the activities of the Petrine court based on court calendars and other primary sources of the reign, as well as a discussion of the official historiography of the reign. In his Ofitsial’nye svetskie prazdniki kak iavlenie russkoi kul’tury kontsa XVIIpervoi poloviny XVIII veka, D. D. Zelov examines the use of festivals, centering on triumphs and fireworks displays, as an expression of absolutist ideology. O. G. Ageeva analyzes the motivation and meaning of Peter’s assumption of the title emperor, imperator, in “Imperskii status Rossii: k istorii politicheskogo mentaliteta russkogo obshchestva nachala XVIII veka,” in Tsar’ i tsarstvo v russkom obshchestvennom soznanii (Moscow, 1999), 112–40. Kaganov’s Peterburg v kontekste barokko (St. Petersburg, 2001) discusses the symbolic significance of palace construction in the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. Stephen L. Baehr’s groundbreaking The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1990) focuses on the evolution of literary imagery and myth in the ceremonies of the eighteenth-century court. Andreas Schönle’s “Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea” in Slavic Review, vol. 60, no. 1 (Spring 2001) provides a perceptive explication of the trip and its significance on the basis of literary imagery. A thorough recent study of Falconet’s Peter the Great statue is Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn., 2003). Two works of art history focus on the adoption of neoclassicism as the architectural idiom of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century autocracy: Dmitrii Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1996); Valerii Turchin, Aleksandr I i neoklassitsizm v Rossii: stil’ imperii ili imperiia kak stil’ (Moscow, 2001). To learn about events at the courts of later Russian rulers, the reader must turn to biographies of the individual emperors and empresses too numerous to mention here, though their descriptions of ceremonies and their significance tend to be few and cursory. The Russian-language literature has more to offer. Andrei Zorin’s Kormia dvuglavogo orla: literatura i gosudarstven-

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naia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII-pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow, 2001) is a compelling account of the interplay of literary myths and philosophy in the sphere of governmental ideology from Catherine the Great’s “Crimean myth” to the doctrine of Official Nationality in the writings of Sergei Uvarov. The work of Olga Maiorova, now in progress, takes up this theme in the letters and political ideology of the second half of the nineteenth century. See “Bessmertnyi Riurik: Prazdnovanie ‘Tysiacheletiia Rossii’ v 1862,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 43, no. 3 (2000): 137–65, and “Mitropolit moskovskii Filaret v obshchestvennom soznanii kontsa XIX veka,” Lotmanovskii Sbornik, 2 (Moscow, 1997), 615–38. Many catalogs from recent exhibitions about the tsars and the members of their families provide visual materials and documents that give a vivid sense of the imperial milieu. One of the best is Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia (London, 1998), an exhibition from the collections of the State Hermitage, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the State Palace Museum at Tsarskoe Selo, which took place in Wilmington, Delaware. Recent publications on the imperial family have materials related to their ceremonies and imagery, for example Valerii Durov’s Kniga v sem’e Romanovykh (Moscow, 2000). The journal Nashe Nasledie carries richly illustrated articles on the imperial family and court life. The issue numbered 67–68, for 2003, is devoted primarily to the reign of Alexander II.

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. absolutism: of Alexei, 15; of Catherine II, 57, 63; and ceremonies of eighteenthcentury empresses, 43; coronations as ceremonies of, 10; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 44; French revolution challenging, 85; of Nicholas I, 133, 154; persistence of Russian, 1; Peter borrowing from Western, 21, 27; Russia as only absolute monarchy left, 186; of Sofia, 19. See also autocracy Academy of Arts, 304, 306 Academy of Sciences, 56, 306 accession manifestoes: of Alexander I, 98–99; of Alexander II, 189; of Alexander III, 263; of Catherine II, 53; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 42; of empresses of eighteenth century, 41; of Nicholas I, 129; of Nicholas II, 334; of Paul I, 87 Adlerberg, Alexander, 227, 240, 258, 305 Adlerberg, Iulia, 124 Adlerberg, Vladimir, 227, 305 Adrian, Patriarch, 25 Aeneid (Virgil), 68 Afghanistan, 298 Aksakov, Constantine, 163, 190 Aksakov, Ivan: Alexander III as heir attending discussions including, 255; beard and Russian dress worn by, 163; and Golokhvastov, 270; on millennium celebration, 216; on Orthodoxy and prePetrine culture, 246; romantic nationalism of, 246; on Russians and other Slavs, 247; and Russkaia Beseda, 191 Alexander, John, 65 Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 98–119 —ceremonial under: coronation of, 101–2; elaborate ceremonials abandoned by, 98, 117; funeral of, 130–31; military reviews in France in 1815, 113–15, 125; parades of, 85, 106, 108, 114 —domestic policy of: Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer planned by, 112, 155, 156; centralization under, 93, 105; Charter of the Russian People proposal, 100; on constitution for Russia, 83, 103; major cathedrals of, 155; Manifesto of September 15, 1801, 100; military colonies established

by, 114–15, 117; Petersburg flood of November 9, 1824, 119; reforms of, 99–101, 102, 103–5 —early life of: Catherine II’s influence on, 79; education of, 65, 73, 79–84; as heir to the throne, 88–89; Paul I distrusts, 95; Paul I knights, 93; Paul I’s assassination, 98; at Paul I’s coronation, 88 —family life of: as childless, 122, 128, 129; marriage of, 82; on Nicholas I’s marriage, 124 —foreign policy of: Holy Alliance, 82, 115 —as monarch: accession of, 98–99; breaks with Paul I’s reign, 98, 101; Catherine II as model for, 98; compromising autocracy ruled out by, 411; imperial suite of, 92, 106, 108; Nicholas I breaks with reign of, 129, 131; Nicholas I named heir to, 127, 128; and the nobility, 99, 105, 109; and the people, 102–3, 108–11; and Peter I, 81, 119; response to challenge of French revolution, 85; succession crisis at death of, 128, 129 —personal characteristics of: friendships of, 82–83; manner of, 4, 101; Protestant pietism of, 115–16; religious revelation of, 111–13; republicanism of, 83–84 —representations of: angel metaphor for, 99, 102, 103, 110, 112, 120, 142; as “Blessed,” 112, 142; death literature about, 187; devil identified with, 117; gentleness in scenario of, 101, 102; as “human being on the throne,” 79, 99, 101–2, 120, 142; Nicholas I’s monument to, 149–50, 150, 425n23; Nicholas II having bust of, 333; scenario of love and, 99, 102 —as soldier: at Austerlitz, 106, 234; military propensity of, 82, 106–8; military victories of, 85; morning military exercises at Gatchina, 94; uniforms worn by, 106 —travels of: with his father, 92; in last years, 118–19; in Moscow during Napoleon’s invasion, 108–11; Riga visit of, 102–3 Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, 189–242 —assassination of, 240–42; attempts on, 220–21, 236–38, 432n42; bomb-proof

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Alexander II (continued) carriage of, 241; Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ on site of, 288, 290 —ceremonial under: bicentennial of Peter I’s birth, 225; coronation of, 194, 195–201; dedication of monument to Catherine II, 225, 226; military reviews, 175, 226, 227; millennium celebrations of 1862, 211–16; and millennium monument, 213–16; Nicholas II returns to practices of, 355; twenty-fifth anniversary of accession of, 238; wedding of, 183; at Winter Palace ball of 1859, 203 —domestic policy of: compromising autocracy ruled out by, 411; and constitutional movement, 210–13, 218; on emancipation of serfs from above, 193–94; military reform by, 227–29; and the nobility, 179, 194, 199, 210–13, 216, 218, 220, 233; Official Nationality, 5, 189, 193; reforms of, 173, 190–91, 193–94, 220, 240; and revolutionary movement, 235–36, 238; Russian-style churches built in reign of, 290; serfs emancipated by, 205–10 —early life of: as adjutant-general, 185, 226; as Cossack ataman, 174–75, 180–81; education of, 169–74, 178, 181, 189; as lieutenant-general in Nicholas I’s suite, 185; military appointments of, 174–75; and Nicholas I and Decembrist revolt, 129–30; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 136, 137, 174; oath of majority of, 175–78; portrait with mother and sister, 167, 168; public role as Grand Duke, 174–78; relationship with his mother, 167, 171; as tsarevich, 175; Zhukovskii as tutor of, 170, 171–74 —family life of: affair with Catherine Dolgorukova, 223–24, 225; family values inculcated in, 222; first child of, 185; and Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich, 253–54, 255–56, 262; marital infidelity of, 222–24; marriage to Catherine Dolgorukova, 239–40; marriage to Maria Aleksandrovna, 181–84; Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death, 219; romantic involvements before marriage, 181, 182; second family with Catherine Dolgorukova, 224 —foreign policy of: Crimean War, 189–90, 192–93; Polish uprising of 1863, 216–17; Russification policy of, 283; RussoTurkish War, 229–35 —as monarch: breaks with Nicholas I’s

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reign, 189, 190, 191; Caucasian bodyguards of, 227; conservative opposition to, 245; court of, 203, 305; imperial suite of, 226–27; isolation from Russian society, 235; loss of conviction of, 219–22; popular national leadership sought by, 190–91; and Shamil, 203–4; as withdrawing from public eye, 225–26; withdrawal from direct involvement in government, 222 —personal characteristics of: assurance lacking in, 190; as born in Moscow, 136, 177; German sympathies of 226-27, 257; humility of, 174; Maria Aleksandrovna contrasted with, 329; unassuming manner of, 110; uniforms as interest of, 231 —representations of: European myth in, 3; humanitarian image sought by, 205; love in scenario of, 193–94, 195, 197–201, 203–4, 206, 207–9, 221, 230, 232, 235–36, 237–38, 239; in monument to Nicholas I, 130, 145, 201–3, 202; Napoleon III imitated by, 191; and Nicholas II’s coronation album, 336; portraits of, 174 —travels of: the empire in 1837, 178–81; Finland, Poland, and Baltics in 1856, 194; Moscow visit of 1837, 180; Moscow visit of 1862, 216; the provinces in 1858, 207–9; the provinces in 1862, 211; the south in 1855, 191–92 Alexander II Monument (Kremlin, Moscow), 313 Alexander III, Emperor of Russia, 245–316 —ceremonial under: Alexander II Monument cornerstone laid by, 313; Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer dedication, 156, 280–81; coronation of, 270–81; funeral of, 313–14; jubilee celebrations under, 286–87; military style changed by, 264–66; tenth anniversary of coronation of, 312–13; twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of, 308; uniforms redesigned by, 264–65; at Vladimir Aleksandrovich’s costume ball, 304, 305, 354 —domestic policy of: counter-reforms of, 293–97, 312; economic policy of, 299–302; famine of 1891, 302, 312, 315; introduced to nationalist circles, 254–55; Moscow as national center for, 255; and the nobility, 295–96; press restrictions, 292; revolutionary movement opposed by, 5, 259, 283, 292, 313; Sergei Aleksandrovich made governor-general of Moscow by, 311–12; Slavophile and statist supporters in conflict, 269–70, 271;

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on “true Russians,” 283, 292, 323, 412; universities brought under state control by, 293 —early life of: at Alexander II’s last review, 240; and attempt to crown Catherine Dolgorukova, 240; and brother Nicholas Aleksandrovich, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254; as Cossack ataman, 252; and Dostoevskii, 255, 260–61; education of, 247–49; father Alexander II and, 253–54, 255–56, 262; guards required after attempt on Alexander II, 432n42; on A Life for the Tsar after assassination attempt on Alexander II, 221; mother Maria Aleksandrovna and, 247, 248, 250, 253–54, 257, 261, 291; oath of majority of, 250; Pan-Slavism influencing, 254, 257, 260; Pobedonostsev as tutor of, 254–55; relationship with his parents, 247–48; romance with Maria Meshcherskaia, 250; romantic nationalists looking to, 247 —family life of, 306–8; marriage to Maria Fedorovna (II), 250–51; on Nicholas II’s education, 317, 320; and Nicholas II’s majority ceremony, 321, 322; as withdrawing into his family, 252–53 —foreign policy of, 297–99; expansion to the East, 324; Franco-Russian Alliance, 298; as “peace-loving tsar,” 298, 316; Russification policy of, 283, 284; Three Emperors League, 298 —as monarch: accession of, 263; associating himself with Russian people, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273; autocracy reaffirmed by, 263, 283, 314; Church of Maria Magdalena commissioned by, 291; court of, 303–6, 335; as distancing himself from Westernization, 245, 253, 264, 283, 303, 314; and imperial family, 306; imperial suite of, 264, 265; as increasingly dependent on his generals, 313; Muscovite church architecture introduced by, 287–92; vigorous use of tsar’s power by, 292 —personal characteristics of: as antiGerman, 255, 256–57; anti-Semitism of, 284; as awkward in public, 249–50; beard worn by, 260, 261–62, 265–66; brusqueness and arrogance of, 283; change in personal appearance at end of 1870s, 261–62; as crude and uncouth, 247, 253; decorative art collected by, 307; diligence and determination of, 248–49; as displaying his feelings, 249; frugality of, 306;

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gruff and surly manner of, 264; Maria Fedorovna (II) contrasted with, 251, 329; piety of, 253–54; practical aptitudes of, 248, 256; Russian art loved by, 314; Russian spoken by, 253; taciturnity of, 253 —representations of: animal metaphors for, 248; as bogatyr’, 262, 265, 265–66; efficacy in scenario of, 292; eulogies for, 314–16; European myth rejected by, 3, 5; Fabergé eggs and, 307–8; idealized image of Muscovy in scenario of, 263–64, 282–302; monument in Kursk, 355; as most Russian of the Russians, 5; a national image shaped by, 253–62; National myth, 3, 5, 245, 263–81, 334; in Nicholas II’s coronation album, 336; Orthodox Church in scenario of, 5, 282–92, 310, 347; resurrection in scenario of, 288, 307–8; Russian land in, 263–64; scenario of love eschewed by, 263; synchronic mode introduced by, 282–83 —as soldier: cross of St. George for, 260, 407; general’s uniform worn by, 260, 304; in military exercises in 1864, 249; in Russo-Turkish War, 230, 231, 257–58 —travels of, 308–11; Borki train derailment, 309, 310–11; the empire in 1869 and 1870, 251–52; the empire in 1888, 308–9; Moscow and Volga towns of 1881, 267–68; after oath of majority ceremony, 250 Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 312, 318, 360 Alexander Nevskii, Order of, 151 Alexander Nevskii Cathedral (Tallin), 290, 291 Alexander Nevskii Monastery (St. Petersburg), 87, 385 Alexander of Battenberg, King of Bulgaria, 298 Alexander Palace (Tsarskoe Selo), 331 Alexandra Fedorovna (I), Empress (wife of Nicholas I): accustoming herself to life in Russia, 126; and Alexander II’s marriage, 181, 183, 185; benefactions of, 167; birthday celebrations of, 153–54; conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, 126–27; coronation of, 138, 140; Cottage built for, 167, 169; distancing herself from politics, 127; family life of, 127; and Friedrich’s On the Sailboat, 127–28, 169; marriage to Nicholas I, 123–24; maternal love epitomized by, 167, 171; military reviews enjoyed by, 126; music patronized by, 169; Nicholas I contrasted with, 329; and Nicholas I’s

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Alexandra Fedorovna (I) (continued) death, 188; in Nicholas I’s domestic sphere, 166–69; at Nicholas I’s name-day celebrations, 153; portrait with children, 167, 168; regiment commanded by, 148; and Serafim cult, 357; upbringing of, 122; on Winter Palace, 307 Alexandra Fedorovna (II), Empress (wife of Nicholas II): at bals d’hiver of 1903, 352, 354; at Borodino jubilee, 382; breastfeeding her children, 330; on canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 356–59; charismatic holy men sought by, 355–59; conversion to Orthodoxy of, 329; coronation of, 340, 341; on the court, 335; depicted with family, 331, 332, 441n46; dissatisfaction with in World War I, 408; English influence on, 329, 331; family life of, 330–33; at Fedorovskii gorodok, 373; feminized religion of, 330; gives birth to a son, 359; marriage to Nicholas II, 328–30; ministerial leapfrog blamed on, 407; mystical texts read by, 355, 444n22; and Nicholas II as similar, 329–30; and Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348–49; and Nicholas II sharing bed, 331; political views as identical to Nicholas’s, 371; and Rasputin, 371, 379; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 394, 395; and Ukhtomskii’s book on Nicholas II’s journey to Asia, 325; Queen Victoria and, 329, 331, 335; in World War I, 403, 404 Alexeev, A. E., 360 Alexeev, M. V., 406 Alexei, Metropolitan, 157 Alexei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander II), 224, 247, 306, 344 Alexei Mikhailovich, Emperor of Russia: Alexander III compared with, 296; Blessing of the Waters under, 15–17; church reform under, 14; conquests of, 14; Glinka using as national image, 110; and Great State Book, 13; imperial patronage of, 350; liturgical routine of, 14–15; military reform of, 18; Nicholas II wearing robe and crown of, 352, 353; in Peter I’s triumphal arch of 1703, 25; and The Play of Ataxerxes, 13; portraits of, 13, 16; Preobrazhensk estate of, 13, 19; state authority consolidated by, 12, 296; state seal of, 14; throne of, 138; and Ulozhenie, 12

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Alexei Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (son of Nicholas II): and abdication of Nicholas II, 409; birth of, 359; at Borodino jubilee, 380; father’s bond with, 397; ill health of, 394–95; and the navy, 374; in play regiments, 374–76; and Rasputin, 371; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 386, 387, 391, 394–95, 395; in World War I, 404, 407 Alexei Petrovich, 29, 33, 182 Alice of Hesse, Princess, 329, 336 allegory, 24, 25, 43 “All-Kind-Christ” icon, 311 altruism, 55, 206 Ambrosii, Archbishop of Kazan, 71 Ambrosii, Archbishop of Novgorod, 47, 48–49 Ambrosii, Bishop of Kharkov, 281 Amur region, 327, 360 Andrew the First Called, Order of, 22–23, 138, 274 Andromeda, 23 Anichkov Palace: Alexander II at, 184; Alexander III at, 252, 263, 303, 306; Nicholas I at, 127, 307; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 385 Anisimov, Evgenii, 42, 51 Anna, Duchess of Courland, 36 Anna Fedorovna, Grand Duchess, 122 Anna Ioannovna, Empress of Russia: crisis at succession of, 40; German favorites of, 42; as identified with Europeans, 50, 53; palaces built by, 51 Anna Pavlovna, 123 Anna Petrovna of Holstein, Grand Duchess, 36, 47 Annunciation Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow), 17, 49, 55, 276, 340, 372 anointment, 11, 37 anti-Semitism, 284, 364, 385 Appanage Department, 89, 151 appanage system, 312 Arakcheev, Alexei: in Alexander I’s military education, 82; Alexander I urged to sue for peace by, 111; in Gatchina terror, 78; in Golitsyn resignation, 116; Kovno troops disciplined by, 92; and military colonies, 114, 117; as ruling in Alexander I’s name, 117 Archangel Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow): Alexander III lying in state in, 314; in Alexander III’s coronation, 276; in Catherine II’s coronation, 55; in Elizabeth

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Petrovna’s coronation, 49; in Fedor Alekseevich’s coronation, 17; in Muscovite funerals, 38; in Nicholas II’s coronation, 340; shell motif of exterior of, 9 architecture: Gothic style, 134, 155, 167; kokoshniki, 290, 291–92, 372; neoclassicism, 68, 108, 150; of Peter I, 27–28; Russian style under Alexander III, 304. See also church architecture; monuments Armenians, 139, 197, 218, 369 army. See Russian army Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 125, 170–71 Arseniev, Constantine, 173 Arsenii, Archbishop of Rostov, 58 art: Academy of Arts, 304, 306; Alexander III loving, 314; Russian style under Alexander III, 304. See also architecture; decorative art; icons; music; paintings; poetry; prints; sculpture art nouveau, 330, 331, 333, 342 Ascher, Abraham, 369 Asia: China, 324, 326, 360; India, 325, 326; Korea, 360; Nicholas II’s desire to expand into, 359–60; Nicholas II’s trip to, 324–28; Siam, 325, 326; Tibet, 324, 360. See also Central Asia; Japan assamblei, 28–29, 64 assassinations: of Alexander II, 240–42; attempts on Alexander II, 220–21, 236–38; of Bobrikov, 361; of Bogolepov, 351; Karakazov’s attempt on Alexander II, 220–21; of Paul I, 95, 98; of Plehve, 361; of Sipiagin, 351, 354; of Stolypin, 368, 370, 379; Zasulich attempt on Trepov, 236, 260 Assembly of the Land: Aksakov calling for, 190; Alexander III representing Russia without, 283; authority restored after Time of Troubles by, 294; bond between Russian people and tsar expressed by, 261, 362; democratic mandate provided by, 5; Dostoevskii on, 261; in election of Michael Romanov, 5, 12, 160, 383; in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160; Ignat’ev calling for, 267, 269, 270; Katkov rejecting, 246, 259, 269, 270; Nicholas II proposes, 362–63; Slavophiles supporting, 5, 246, 259, 269, 362 Assumption Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow): in Alexander I’s coronation, 102; Alexander I’s visit during Napoleon’s invasion, 110; in Alexander II’s coronation, 197–98; in Alexander III’s coronation, 273–74; archi-

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tecture of, 9; Borodino jubilee service at, 382; in Catherine I’s coronation, 35, 36; in Catherine II’s coronation, 55; and dedication of Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, 280; in Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation, 47; Fabergé egg in form of, 349–50; in Fedor Alekseevich’s coronation, 17; fivecupola form of, 156; mass for commission to codify laws at, 60; in Nicholas I’s coronation, 136; in Nicholas II’s coronation, 337, 340; in Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348; at twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164 Assumption Cathedral (Vladimir), 9, 155, 156 Astraea, 59 Astrakhan, 12, 14, 217–18 “August 26, 1856” (Khomiakov), 201 Augustine, Archbishop, 110 Augustus, Emperor, 9, 10, 13, 59 Austerlitz, Battle of, 106, 234 Austria: administrative reform in, 120–21; in Alexander III’s foreign policy, 298; at Congress of Berlin, 235; and Crimean War, 186, 192; Francis II, 120; Franz Joseph, 186, 227, 377; Hungarian revolution crushed, 186; Joseph, 71; national anthem of, 159; representative government in, 186; in Three Emperors League, 298; Vienna, 290; in World War I, 404, 407 autocracy: Alexander II’s belief in, 189; Alexander III reaffirming, 263, 283, 314; Assembly of the Land and, 270; conservatives calling for reaffirmation of, 264; Crimean War setbacks erode, 187; domestic morality and, 166; Duma contrasted with, 366; election of Michael Romanov and, 383; emancipation of serfs and, 205; in Fundamental Laws, 365; Ivan III assumes emperor’s title of autocrat, 9; National myth as basis for, 5; national roots of, 143; Nicholas I upholding, 130, 133, 142; Nicholas II and, 6, 317, 335, 347, 361, 364, 365, 397, 404; in oath of majority, 175, 176; “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” 143; peasants and, 365; Poltava jubilee and resurgence of, 379; Rus’ associated with, 376; Speranskii on, 173; Union of Russian People calls for restoration of, 369; universities opposing, 217; utilitarian justification of, 144; zemstvo reform and, 293; Zhukovskii’s definition of, 172 Avvakum, Archpriest, 15

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Babst, Ivan, 217–18, 251, 255 Baden-Powell, Robert, 376 Badmaev, Peter, 302 Baehr, Stephen, 43, 60 Bakhtin, Michael, 267 balagan, 278 Balkans, 235, 247, 297, 298 balls: at Alexander II’s oath of majority ceremony, 178; at Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 179, 181; after Alexander II’s wedding, 184; at Alexander III’s court, 303; at Alexandra Fedorovna (I)’s birthday celebrations, 154; bals d’hiver of 1903, 352–54; at Nicholas I’s name-day celebrations, 153; on night of Khodynka massacre, 345; during Paul I’s reign, 92, 94–95; as spectacles of unity, 411; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387, 388, 394; Vladimir Aleksandrovich’s costume ball, 304, 354; in Winter Palace in 1859, 203. See also masquerades Balmont, Constantine, 384 bals d’hiver of 1903, 352–54 Baltic provinces, 12, 194, 284, 370 Balugianskii, Michael, 133 Balzac, Honoré de, 186 banquet campaign (1904), 362 banquets: at Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 177–78; after Alexander III’s coronation, 276–77, 278; at Catherine II’s visit to Ekaterinoslav, 71; for chivalric orders, 151; after Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation, 49; after Fedor Alekseevich’s coronation, 18; at Nicholas I’s name-day celebrations, 153; Nicholas II at regimental, 373; after Nicholas II’s coronation, 342; Sipiagin giving, 351; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 393; at wedding of Peter I and Catherine I, 31. See also people’s feasts after coronations Baranov, Edward, 274 Baratta, Pietro, 30 Bariatinskii, Alexander, 222, 228 Bariatinskii, Vladimir, 325 Bark, Peter, 319, 407 barmy, 10, 11, 12, 14, 36 Bashkirs, 62, 118, 197 Batum, 309 beards: Alexander III wearing, 260, 261–62, 265–66; officers wearing, 266; Peter I never wearing, 22; Slavophiles wearing, 163–64 “beautiful death,” 131 Beautiful Spring (Vesna krasna) (illustrated volume), 278

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Beilis, Mendel, 379–80, 399 Beketov, Nicholas, 319 belopashtsy, 274 Belorussia, 404 Benckendorff, Alexander, 133, 144, 159 Benois, Albert, 343 Benois, Leontii, 290 Bergholz, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 36 Berman, B. I., 137 Bessarabia, 192 Bestuzhev-Riumin, M. P., 131 Betskoi, I. I., 73 Bezborodko, Alexander, 87 Bezobrazov, A. M., 360 Bible: Alexander I orders translation of, 115–16; Peter I using biblical imagery, 25–26 Biron, Ernst-Johann, 42 Bismarck, Otto von, 211, 228, 235, 299 Blackford, Henrietta (Fanny Lear), 225 Black Partition, 399 Black Sea: Odessa, 68, 125, 338; Russia gains territories along, 62, 68, 69; Russian fleet, 362, 374; Sevastopol, 71, 192, 252, 308, 374; in Treaty of Paris, 192, 228 blagochinie, 28 Blessing of the Waters, 15–17, 31, 146 Bloody Sunday (1905), 362 Bludov, Dmitrii, 136, 187–88 Bludova, Antonina, 187 Bobrikov, Nicholas, 350, 361 bogatyr’: Alexander III as, 262, 265, 265–66; in Maikov’s Moskva cantata, 277 Bogdanovich, E. E., 389, 394 Bogdanovich, E. V., 310 Bogdanovich, Ippolit, 68 Bogolepov, N. P., 351 Bogoliubov, A. P., 236 Bokhara, 204 Bolotov, Andrei, 70 Bolsheviks, 391, 399, 400 Bolshoi Opera, 277 Bolshoi Theater, 159, 199–200, 277–78, 342 Bon, Girolamo, 48 bond between Russian people and tsar: in Alexander II’s coronation, 195–99; in Alexander II’s journey of 1837, 191–92; Alexander III and, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273; Assembly of the Land expressing, 261, 362; Bludov on, 136; and canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 357, 359; emancipation of serfs and, 211; feeling as basis of, 132; Filaret’s funeral and, 255; Katkov on, 269; in Kholm, Poland, 309; Kliuchevskii

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on, 315; Komarov on, 273; Maria Fedorovna (II) and, 251; miracle icons associated with, 311; Moscow in, 311; in National myth, 324; Nicholas II on, 321, 334, 340, 347, 356, 363, 364, 370–76, 378, 388, 389–90, 394; nobility as link in, 294, 295; in official nationality doctrine, 143, 214; Orthodox Church and, 280; Pobedonostsev on, 259; pogroms as expression of, 364; revolutionary violence and, 238; Shamil on, 203–4; in Slavophile myth, 15; the state as interfering with, 389–90; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387, 394; during Time of Troubles, 294; as voluntary submission, 5, 143; and World War I, 401, 404 Book of Degrees (Stepennaia Kniga), 10 Book of Saints’ Lives (Chet’ia-Minei), 10 Borderlands of Russia, The (Samarin), 256 Boris Godunov (Mussorgskii), 352 Borki, 309, 310–11 Borodino, Battle of, 115, 157 Borodino jubilee, 6, 375, 380–82 Borovikovskii, V. L., 407 Botkin, Sergei, 233 Boy Scouts, 376 bread and salt, 199, 213, 252, 267, 304, 305, 338, 355, 391, 392 “breakfast war,” 234. See also RussoTurkish War Brenna, Vincenzo, 95 Bright Days (Poselianin), 311 Britain. See Great Britain Briullov, K. P., 215 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevskii), 261 Brozh, Karl, 303 Bruce, Jacob, 28, 38 Brunner, Otto, 74 Brusilov offensive, 407 Buckingham, Lord, 53 Bulgaria, 235, 257, 298 Bulgarin, Fadei, 135, 196 Bulygin, Alexander, 363, 383, 392 Bunge, Nicholas, 299–300, 319, 320 bureaucracy: Alexander I raises educational level of, 103, 104; Alexander II drawing into the court, 203; Alexander III on, 256; increasing autonomy of European, 120–21; National myth delegitimating, 282; Nicholas I attempts to create Western-style, 150–51, 186; Nicholas I brings officials into court culture, 150–52; Nicholas II’s hostility toward, 323, 334;

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serfdom opposed in, 205; Slavophiles rejecting Westernized, 246 Burke, Kenneth, 143 Bushnell, John, 228 Buslaev, Fedor, 216 Butkov, B. P., 208 Butovskii, Ivan, 149 Buxhoeveden, Sophie, 339, 442n21 Byzantine empire: in Alexei’s scenario, 14, 15; Blessing of the Waters in, 16; Catherine II seen as heir to legal tradition of, 62; Ivan III claiming heritage of, 9; in lateseventeenth-century coronations, 17; National myth and Byzantine origins, 263–64; Nicholas I influenced by architecture of, 155–56; Peter I shifting to classical imagery from, 21, 22; regalia of Monomakh and, 10; Russia as at periphery of, 1; Russian conception of empire and, 2; Russian sovereignty as derivative of, 11; seal of, 9, 14; symphony between church and state in, 10 Byzantine style, 156, 288 cadet corps, 266 Cameron, Charles, 68, 167 Cannadine, David, 377 canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 357–59 capital punishment, 131 Caravaque, Louis, 51 Cassirer, Ernst, 59–60 Castelbajac, Marquis de, 185 Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer (Moscow), 156–58, 157; Alexander I determines to build, 112; dedication of, 279; Nicholas II on, 321; Vitberg’s project for, 155; zemskii sobor proposed for, 270 Cathedral of St. Isaac (St. Petersburg), 68, 155 Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ (St. Petersburg), 288–90, 289 Cathedral of Vasilii the Blessed (Moscow), 288, 326, 372 Catherine I, Empress of Russia: coronation of, 34–38, 240; dress of, 51; male qualities exemplified by, 53, 127; manner of, 4; marriage to Peter, 29–30, 31; Peter advances, 33–34; Peter creating as new image of Russian monarch, 39 Catherine II, the Great, Empress of Russia, 52–72 —ceremonial under: coronation of, 53–57; fireworks used by, 56, 70 —domestic policy of: Charter of Nobility of 1783, 64, 67, 295, 296; commission to

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Catherine II (continued) codify laws, 59–62; as legislatrix, 58–62, 61; native elites incorporated into Russian nobility, 67; nobility and, 54, 63–65, 67, 70; Provincial Reform of 1775, 63 —family life of: Alexander I and, 79, 98; Paul I seen as rival by, 77, 78, 170, 184 —as monarch: Alexander II and, 189, 190; claim to throne of, 52–53; court of, 64, 67; on education of heirs to the throne, 73, 75, 79–80; on education of the people, 73, 251; empire expanding under, 66–69; favorites of, 64–65; love in scenario of, 53, 54, 70, 102; monument to Peter the Great, 65–66, 66, 119, 202–3; as moral instructor, 57; as Mother of the Fatherland, 55, 62; Paul I breaks with reign of, 86, 87; Paul I made heir of, 86; Peter III deposed by, 52–53; as philosophe on the throne, 58–59; science promoted by, 54 —personal characteristics of: dress of, 53; as the Great, 62; intellectual ambitions of, 56–57; male qualities exemplified by, 53, 127; religious devotion of, 57–58; writings of, 65 —representations of: as Minerva, 53, 54, 56–57, 60; monument to, 225, 226; portraits of, 53; scenario of love in, 53, 54, 70, 102 —travels of: as displays of mutual admiration, 118; as exploiting ceremonial possibilities of, 58; New Russia in 1787, 69–72; pilgrimage to Rostov, 58 Catherine, Duchess of Mecklenburg, 36 Catherine Mikhailovna, Grand Duchess, 241 Caucasus, 85, 290, 309 Cavalier Guards: at Alexander II’s coronation, 195, 196–97, 198; Alexander II wearing uniform of, 231; at Alexander III’s coronation, 273; at Catherine I’s coronation; as drabanty, 35–36; at “great processions,” 151; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 339; at Sunday review before Alexander II’s assassination, 241 Cavos, Catterino, 159 celebrations: of bicentennial of birth of Peter I, 225; Borodino jubilee, 6, 375, 380–82; for Elizabeth Petrovna, 42–43; of jubilees, 286–87, 377; millennium celebrations of 1862, 211–16; Poltava jubilee, 6, 377–79; Russian monarch’s authority justified by, 41; surrounding coronations, 37–38, 49–50, 56, 90, 101, 140–41, 199–200, 276–81, 342–43; of tercentenary of Romanov

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dynasty, 383–96; of twenty-fifth anniversary of accession of Alexander II, 238. See also balls; banquets; fireworks; masquerades censorship, 162, 190–91, 292, 379 Central Asia: and Alexander II’s coronation procession, 197; and Alexander III’s coronation procession, 272–73; conflict with Britain over, 298; and imperial entry procession at Nicholas II’s coronation, 338; Russian imperialist rhetoric on advance into, 204; Ukhtomskii on, 325 ceremonies: Alexander I abandoning elaborate, 98, 117; under Alexei, 15; chiny, 15; newsreels of, 397; of Nicholas I’s court, 151–54; oath of majority, 175–78, 250, 321–22, 433n16; Peter I using, 35; Russian monarch’s authority justified by, 19–20, 41. See also coronations; funerals; parades and military reviews; processions; religious ceremonies; weddings Ceylon, 326 Chaliapin, Fedor, 352 chamber junker (kamer-iunker), 104 chamberlain (kamerger), 104 chancelleries (prikazy), 12 charisma: of Alexander I, 101; of Frederick the Great, 74; of holy men, 355, 356; in Monomakh and Holy Ampulla legends, 11; of Nicholas I, 142; of Peter I, 32; and Peter I’s parody of “sober drunkenness,” 20 Charles X, King of France, 134–35, 155 Charles XII, King of Sweden, 25, 65, 377 Charter of the Nobility (1785), 64, 67, 91, 98, 100, 295, 296 Charter of the Russian People, 100 Cherevin, Peter A., 313 Cherkasskii, Prince, 49 Cherkasskii, Vladimir, 207 Cherkessy, 197 Cherniaev, Michael, 204, 229 Cherniavsky, Michael, 415n5 Chernigov Mother of God, 279 Chicherin, Boris, 190, 223 Chief Magistracy of Police, 28 chin (social order), 294 China, 324, 326, 360 chiny (ceremonial orders), 11, 15, 17 Chivilev, Alexander Ivanovich, 248 Choiseul-Gouffier, Countess of, 106 Christmas, 314 Christ the Redeemer, Cathedral of (Moscow). See Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer Chudov Monastery, 348

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Church, Russian Orthodox: Alexander I on Napoleon’s invasion and, 111; Alexander III’s coronation and, 270, 271–72, 279–81; Alexander III’s devotion to, 253–54; in Alexander III’s scenario, 5, 282–92, 310, 347; Alexandra Fedorovna (I)’s conversion to, 126–27; Alexei’s liturgical routine, 14–15; in Baltic provinces, 284; Catherine II’s devotion to, 57–58; Maria Aleksandrovna and, 223, 254; military under Alexander III and, 266–67; in millennium monument, 213, 215; on mystical experience, 356; in National myth, 286; Nicholas II’s devotion to, 317; nine hundredth anniversary of conversion of Rus’, 287; Old Believers, 14, 15, 19, 191; “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” 143; pastoral movement, 286; Peter secularizes administration of, 25, 32; Pobedonostsev on, 254, 260–61; Pochaev Monastery put under jurisdiction of, 385; Protestant challenge of Alexander I and, 116; reform under Alexei, 14, 19; romantic nationalists on, 246, 247; Russian Patriarchate established, 12; Slavophiles on, 163; state control of, 12; tsar and, 2, 10, 12, 18, 88; Uniates united with, 309; utilitarian justification of, 144; Witte on economic development and, 300–301. See also church architecture; clergy; Holy Synod; monasteries church architecture: Alexander III building Muscovite churches, 287–92; Byzantine style, 156, 288; five-cupola form, 156, 288; Gothic style, 134, 155; MoscowIaroslavl style, 306, 372; MoscowVladimir style, 280; neo-Russian school, 372; Nicholas I as concerned with, 155–58; as symbol of Russia’s national past, 281; “Thon style,” 156, 288 Church of Maria Magdalena (Jerusalem), 291, 311 Church of St. Catherine (St. Petersburg), 155–56 church publications, 285–86 Cicero, 81, 116 city government, reform of, 297 clergy: beards associated with, 262; at Blessing of the Waters ceremony, 31; at Borodino jubilee, 381; and Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer dedication, 280–81; at Catherine I’s coronation, 35, 37; Elizabeth Petrovna having in attendance, 50; at execution of Decembrists, 132; growth

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under Alexander III, 285; missionaries in Asia, 360; Paul I appointing to honorary orders, 89; Pobedonostsev’s vision for, 285, 286; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 385, 386 Clovis, oil of, 11 coat of arms, 187 codification of laws, 59–62, 105 Collins, Edward, 176 Committee of Ministers, 105 Complete Collection of Laws (1830), 133 Congress of Berlin, 235 conquest motif, 3; Alexander III reenacting, 5, 245, 272; in Catherine II, 53; in Elizabeth Petrovna, 42, 49; in National myth, 3, 413; in Nicholas I, 129; in Official Nationality doctrine, 5; in Paul I, 86; in Peter I, 21, 22–23; Pobedonostsev on, 259 conservative nationalism, 245–47, 356 Constantine, Emperor, 21, 39, 58 Constantine Konstantinovich, Grand Duke (son of Constantine Nikolaevich): as Academy of Sciences president, 306; on Alexander III’s coronation, 271; at bals d’hiver of 1903, 352; on Khodynka massacre, 345; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 337, 338; on peasants and autocracy, 365; on Poltava jubilee, 378; on tenth anniversary of Alexander III’s coronation, 313 Constantine Monomakh, 10 Constantine Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (son of Nicholas I): and Alexander II’s visit to central Russian provinces, 208; Alexander III punishing, 306; army reform supported by, 222, 228; as chairman of emancipation commission, 206; and Russo-Turkish War, 230; son Constantine Konstantinovich, 271, 306; son Dmitrii Konstantinovich, 240; son Nicholas Konstantinovich, 224–25 Constantine Pavlovich, Grand Duke: Alexander I urged to sue for peace by, 111; death of, 175; divorce and remarriage of, 122–23; Greek name for, 68; military exercises at Gatchina, 94; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 137, 138; Nicholas I swears loyalty to, 129; Paul I knights, 93; at Paul I’s coronation, 88; in succession crisis, 128, 129; as tsesarevich, 95, 122, 128 Constantinople, 298 constitution: Alexander I on, 83, 103, 117; Alexander II and movement for, 210–13, 218; Meshcherskii on, 400; movement for organized, 354–55; Nicholas Aleksan-

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constitution (continued) drovich on, 218; Nicholas II on, 335; Pobedonostsev on, 320; for Poland, 117; zemstvo constitutionalists, 354, 361, 362. See also representative institutions Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), 365, 368, 370, 399, 404 Convoy Cossacks, 237, 241, 386 coronation albums: of Alexander II, 195, 196; of Alexander III, 271–72, 274, 277, 435n23; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 45; of Nicholas I, 135; of Nicholas II, 336, 338, 341, 342–43 coronation manifestoes: of Alexander I, 100, 102; of Alexander II, 194; of Alexander III, 271; of Catherine II, 53–54 coronations: of Alexander I, 101–2; of Alexander II, 194, 195–201; of Alexander III, 270–81; anointment, 11, 37; of Catherine I, 34–38, 240; of Catherine II, 53–57; celebrations surrounding, 37–38, 49–50, 56, 90, 101, 140–41, 199–200, 276–81, 342–43; eighteenth-century, 44, 134; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 44–51; of Fedor Alekseevich, 17–18; investiture, 17, 47–48; of Ivan IV, 10–11; lateseventeenth-century, 17; of Maria Aleksandrovna, 197, 198, 239; as mechanism of tsarist rule, 1; military reviews at, 137; Muscovite, 11, 34–35, 44; of Nicholas I, 134–41; of Nicholas II, 335–46; nineteenthcentury, 134; of Paul I, 87–91; of Peter I, 22; Peter I’s Opisanie koronatsii, 35; of Peter II, 416n12; Petrine, 34–35; precept (pouchenie), 11, 37, 49; textualization of, 35; of women, 34. See also coronation albums Cossacks: and Alexander I’s 1824 journey, 118; Alexander II guarded by, 237, 432n42; Alexander II as heir made ataman, 174–75, 180–81; at Alexander II’s coronation, 197; Alexander III made ataman, 252; at Alexander III’s coronation, 270, 272; Alexander III visits in 1888, 308; Convoy Cossacks, 237, 241, 386; delegation to Catherine II’s coronation, 55; in Khodynka massacre, 344; Nicholas II as heir made ataman, 308, 322, 440n17; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 338; on Nicholas II’s journey to Far East, 325, 327, 441n37; in nobility, 67; and protests after Bogolepov assassination, 351; Russian tradition of conquest represented by, 322; shakos lost by, 265; strikes put down by, 400; at

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Sunday review before Alexander II’s assassination, 241; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 389; uprising of Ural, 62 costume. See dress Cottage, the (Kottedzh), 167, 169 court, Imperial Russian: Alexander I’s reform of, 104–5; of Alexander II, 203, 305; of Alexander III, 303–6, 335; Alexander III on his father’s, 248; allegories performed for empresses by, 43; at bals d’hiver of 1903, 352, 354; of Catherine II, 64, 67; at celebrations of Catherine II’s coronation, 56; elite in alliance with crown, 40; and imperial camp in RussoTurkish War, 231; under Nicholas I, 150–54; Nicholas II on, 317, 321, 335; Peter I creating Western court culture, 27–31; as semblance of the West, 42; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366 courtly manners, 28 court reform, 216, 235, 236 Crimea: Alexander II’s stays at Livadia in 1870s, 225; Alexander II visits in 1855, 191, 192; Alexander III spends time in, 308; Catherine II visits, 71; Nicholas I visits, 125; Nicholas II’s opinon of as heir, 308; nobility for Tatar aristocracy of, 67; Ottomans attempt to reclaim, 70; Russian conquest of, 64, 68 Crimean War, 186, 187, 189–90, 192–93, 312 crown, imperial: of Catherine I, 36; of Catherine II, 55, 90, 339; Monomakh’s cap, 10, 12, 15, 36, 339; Paul I wearing at court, 90; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366 cuirassiers, 265 cult of memory, 131 cures, miraculous, 359 “Current State of Russia and the Estates System” (Pazukhin), 293–94 Custine, Marquis de, 145, 153, 154, 203 Czartoryski, Adam, 83, 86, 90, 94, 95 Daehn, Vladimir, 147 Dalien, 360 dalmatic, 88 dancing: at Alexander III’s coronation celebrations, 278; at Paul I’s court, 94; polonaise, 92, 94, 153, 154, 161, 203; waltzes, 93, 94, 352. See also balls Danilevskii, Nicholas, 131 Danilevskii, Nicholas Iakovlevich, 246–47 Danilovich, Grigorii, 318–19

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Dargomyzhskii, Alexander, 354 Davis, Richard Harding, 339 Dawe, George, 167 de Basily, Nicholas, 408 Decembrists, 128–30; Alexander II asks for mitigation of punishment of, 179–80; Alexander II releases from exile, 199; loyalty and failure of, 144; national character of monarchy and failure of, 143; Nicholas I remedies some grievances of, 133; popular sovereignty after, 5; sentencing of, 130, 131–32; Western rationalism attributed to, 129 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 80, 100 decorative art: Alexander III collecting, 307; art nouveau, 330, 331, 333, 342; Fabergé eggs, 307–8, 326, 330, 349–50, 359, 382; Russian style in, 304; Victorian decor, 331, 333 Dediulin, Vladimir, 371 Delianov, I. D., 293 Derzhavin, Gavriil R., 79, 86, 99, 101, 171, 215 Description of the Most Joyous Entry of the Most Sovereign Empress Catherine Alekseevna in the Holy Trinity Monastery, 58 Dido, 68 Digest of Laws (1832), 133 Dionysius, St., 157 Dioscuri, 107, 108 Diveevo Convent, 357, 358 Divier, Anton, 28 divine sanction, 2, 144 Dmitrii, Metropolitan of Novgorod, 55, 61–62 Dmitrii Konstantinovich, Grand Duke, 240 Dolgorukaia, Natalia, 240 Dolgorukov, V. A., 311 Dolgorukova, Catherine (Katia), 223–24, 225, 239–40 Dollinger, Heinz, 120 Donizetti, Gaetano, 200, 277 Don Mother of God, 162 Donskoi, Dmitrii, 110, 136, 157, 215, 279 Dostoevskii, Fedor, 255, 260–61, 314 Dragoons, 265, 373 dress: of Alexei, 15; Catherine and “Russian Dress,” 67; of Catherine II, 53; at Catherine II’s court, 67; Central Asian, 273; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 47, 51; at Fedorovskii gorodok, 373; French imitation of Roman, 98; at masquerade at Alexander II’s coronation, 200; national costume in masquerades, 163; at Nicholas I’s corona-

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tion, 140; at Nicholas I’s court, 151; at Nicholas I’s name-day celebrations, 152–53; Paul I regulating, 93; of Peter I, 22; Russian style under Alexander III, 304; seventeenth-century at bals d’hiver of 1903, 352–54; Sipiagin wearing seventeenth-century, 351; Slavophiles wearing Russian dress, 163; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366; at Winter Palace ball of 1859, 203. See also uniforms Dubenskii, D. N., 403–4, 406–7 duels, 266 Duma: amnesty called for by, 383; and Beilis ritual murder case, 379, 380; and Borodino jubilee, 380; Bulygin’s proposal for, 363; and declaration of World War I, 401; election law of December 11, 1905, 364–65; election law of June 3, 1907, 369; as extension of autocracy for Nicholas II, 365; first, 367–68; fourth, 399–400; Nicholas II and, 365–70, 397–400, 412; October Manifesto promising, 363; Pogodin calls for establishment of, 190; and Poltava jubilee, 377, 378; on Rasputin, 379; and revolution of 1917, 408, 409; second, 369; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 383, 386, 387, 388, 394; third, 370; tsar’s reception of the deputies, 365–67, 367; during World War I, 404 Durnovo, Ivan, 312 Durnovo, Peter, 364 Dzhunkovskii, Vladimir F., 380–81, 446n7 “Early Reign of Oleg, The, an Imitation of Shakespeare, Without the Observance of the Usual Rules of the Theater” (Catherine II), 68–69 Easter: Alexander II’s oath of majority on, 176; bond between tsar and servitors reaffirmed on, 152; emancipation of serfs compared with, 210; Nicholas II’s Moscow visits at, 348–49; Nicholas I marking with parades, 146; Paul I’s coronation held on, 88; Thon’s Kremlin palace dedicated on, 162 economic development: Alexander II and, 179, 222; Alexander III and, 298, 299–302; industrialization, 298, 300, 301; industrial policy, 283, 302, 334; Nicholas I and, 186, 187; protectionism, 255, 299, 300, 301, 302 Editing Commission, 209

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education: Alexander I mixing religion and, 116; Alexander I raises level of bureaucracy, 103, 104; of heirs to the throne, 4–5, 73–84; for military officers, 228, 266; for monarchs, 319; National myth on Western, 5–6, 319; Pobedonostsev’s parish schools, 285; policy change after assassination attempt on Alexander II, 221–22. See also universities Edwards, Henry Sutherland, 200 Egerskii Regiment, 385 1812 (film), 377 “1812 Overture” (Tchaikovsky), 280, 382 Ekaterinoslav, 69, 71 Elchaninov, Andrei Georgievich, 380, 397–98, 403 election, principle of, 13, 41, 383 election law of December 11, 1905, 364–65 election law of June 3, 1907, 369, 370 electric lights, 337–38, 342 elevation, 1 Elias, Norbert, 41, 144 elite, the: under Alexei, 15; bond with monarch of, 2, 411–12; as broadening under Catherine II, 55; at celebrations surrounding coronations, 38; in dynastic crisis of 1682, 19; foreign images of power associated with, 1; in National myth, 5–6, 263–64, 412; in Nicholas I’s scenario, 134; in Nicholas II’s scenario, 321–23, 334–35, 350–52, 370–71; Peter on decorum for, 28; play at appearing Russian in masquerades, 163; Westernized educated, 294. See also nobility Elixir of Love (L’Elisir d’Amore) (Donizetti), 200, 277 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 34 Elizabeth Alekseevna, Empress (wife of Alexander I), 82, 119, 131 Elizabeth Fedorovna, Grand Duchess (wife of Sergei Aleksandrovich), 311, 328, 348, 359, 360, 403 Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia: claim to throne of, 42; compared with Peter I, 49, 51; coronation of, 44–51; coup against Ivan VI, 42; crisis at succession of, 40; dress of, 47, 51; male qualities exemplified by, 127; metamorfozy of, 51; military leadership in elevation of, 45; monasteries visited by, 50–51; Nicholas II having bust of, 333; and the nobility, 42, 43, 45, 51; odes celebrating, 42–43; Opisanie (Description) of coronation of, 45; palaces built by, 51–52; portraits of,

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45, 46, 51; revelries of, 51; as savior of the realm, 42 emancipation of the serfs: by Alexander II, 205–10; Alexander II on it coming from above, 193–94; fiftieth anniversary of, 377; reaction to, 210–11 emblem books, 23 emergency decree of August 19, 1906, 368 empire, Russian. See Russian empire Engel’gardt, B. A., 339 England. See Great Britain English Palace (Peterhof), 68 enlightenment: Alexander I and, 102; apriority of law for, 59–60; in cantata at banquet following Nicholas II’s coronation, 342; Catherine II and, 54, 57, 65, 80; Elizabeth Petrovna and, 43, 52; Maria Fedorovna (I), and, 124; models of rule of, 73–74; philosophes, 52, 58–59; Unofficial Committee and, 103; Uvarov influenced by, 144; Voltaire, 59, 75, 95, 116 entries, ceremonial. See procecssions Epanchin, Nicholas, 266, 296, 313, 320 Erevan Regiment, 391 Ermolov, Alexei, 362 Ernest of Hesse, Prince, 331 estate system, 293, 294, 347 Estland Province, 284, 290, 312 ethnic supremacy, 283–84, 370 European myth, 3; educated elite and, 5, 412; on monarch as both embodying and elevated above the state, 411–12; Official Nationality and, 264; power sharing precluded in, 5. See also Westernization Examination Law (1809), 104 excise taxes, 301–2 exile, 297 Fabergé eggs, 307–8, 326, 330, 349–50, 359, 382 Fadeev, Rostislav, 254, 269, 271, 306 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 65, 66, 119, 202–3 False Dmitrii, First, 34 family, the: Alexander I’s family life, 82, 122; Alexander II’s family life, 181–84; Alexander III’s family life, 252–53, 306–8; Maria Fedorovna (I), instilling family values, 122–23; Nicholas I’s family life, 127; Nicholas II’s family life, 330–33, 370–73, 397. See also imperial family; marriage famine of 1891, 302, 312, 315, 323 Far East. See Asia Fedor Alekseevich, Tsar of Russia, 17–18

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Fedor Ivanovich, Tsar of Russia, 12 Fedorov Cathedral (Tsarskoe Selo), 359, 371–72 Fedorov Mother of God, 371, 372, 391, 392, 393 Fedorovskii gorodok, 371–73 Fénelon, François, 79, 80 Feodesii, Archbishop, 37 Ferdinand d’Este, Arch Duke, 130 Fet, Afanasii, 184 Fick, Heinrich, 27 Field, Daniel, 205 field courts-martial, 368 Filaret, Metropolitan: at Alexander II’s coronation, 198, 199; at Alexander II’s oath of majority, 175, 176; Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer’s decoration chosen by, 157; emancipation of serfs opposed by, 208; funeral of, 255; hermitage of Gethsemane founded by, 279; at New Kremlin Palace dedication, 162; welcome speeches for Alexander II in Moscow, 180, 211 Filaret, Patriarch, 14, 387 Filippov, Tertii, 240 Finland, 98, 194, 284, 350, 361, 370, 386 Fioravanti, Rodolfo, 9 fireworks: at Catherine I’s coronation celebration, 38; at Catherine II’s coronation celebration, 56; on Catherine II’s journey to New Russia, 70; at coronation events, 45; at Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation celebration, 45, 50; at Nicholas I’s coronation celebration, 141; Peter I staging, 23; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 393; at wedding of Peter I and Catherine I, 31 First Section of emperor’s chancellery, 133 five-cupola form, 156, 288 flag, Russian, 401–2 Flier, Michael, 288 Florence, 290 Florovsky, Georges, 22, 32 foreign investment, 301 Foucault, Michel, 412 France: Alexander I copying administrative structure of, 103–4; Alexander I holds military reviews in, 113–15, 125; in Alexander III’s foreign policy, 298; Charles X, 134–35, 155; and Crimean War, 192; Franco-Prussian War, 228, 257; French revolution, 85, 87, 113, 120–21; idealized feminine forms in, 29; Louis XV, 45, 51; Napoleon III, 191, 241; national anthem of, 159; Paul I influenced by court of, 90; Paul I’s visit to, 78; Versailles, 27–28, 51,

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78, 108, 337; in World War I, 402. See also Louis XIV, King of France; Napoleon Francis II, Emperor of Austria, 120 Franco-Prussian War, 228, 257 Franco-Russian Alliance, 298 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, 186, 227, 377 Fredericks, Count, 371, 390, 394 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia: on Catherine II’s Nakaz, 59; as model ruler, 74; Paul I influenced by, 74, 75, 77, 86, 90, 93; Peter III influenced by, 53, 77 Frederick William III, King of Prussia, 113, 120, 121–22, 142, 172–73 freedom of speech, 100, 190 freedom of the press, 235 French revolution, 85, 87, 113, 120–21 Friedrich, Caspar, 127–28, 169 friendship, 82–83, 99, 105, 106, 117 Fundamental Laws, 365, 368, 369, 398, 408 funerals: of Alexander I, 130–31; of Alexander III, 313–14; of Nicholas I, 187; of Paul I, 98; of Peter I, 38–39; Peter III’s reburial, 87, 130 Gagarin, P. P., 221 Galakhov, Alexei, 210 Galicia, 404 Gapon, Father, 362 Garainov, A., 192 Gasparov, Boris, 117 Gatchina: Alexander I at, 82; Alexander III at, 253, 263, 307; Nicholas II at, 321; Paul I at, 78, 79, 86, 94–95; Pavilion of Venus at, 79 gathering of the Russian lands, 9 Gautier, Théophile, 203 Geertz, Clifford, 45 Gellner, Ernst, 2 George III, King of Great Britain, 120 George IV, King of Great Britain, 134 George V, King of Great Britain, 319, 376 George Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander III), 318, 321 Georgians, 139, 197 Gerhardt, Paul, 121 Germany: Alexander II’s sympathy for, 226–27, 257; Alexander III as antiGerman, 255, 256–57; and Alexander III’s foreign policy, 297, 298; at Congress of Berlin, 235; and Great Russian ethnic supremacy, 284; Katkov on Russia and, 246; Kiaochow seized by, 359; Nicholas II disliking Germans, 317–18; protective tar-

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Germany (continued) iffs in, 301; Russian monarchy as of German extraction, 334; in Three Emperors League, 298; trade war with Russia, 300; William I, 130, 227, 228, 246; William II, 319, 377; in World War I, 402, 404. See also Prussia Gerua, B. V., 373 Gethsemane, hermitage of, 279 Gibbs, Sydney, 335 Giers, A. F., 374 Giers, Nicholas, 298, 321 Gille, Florent, 166, 171 Glazunov, Alexander, 342 Glinka, Michael, 160–61, 215, 277–78, 342 Glinka, Sergei, 109–10 “God Save the Tsar,” 158–60; at Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 179; at Borodino jubilee, 382; at Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer dedication, 280; and emancipation of the serfs, 210; first time played in Moscow, 136–37; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 340; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 385, 386, 388; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366 Gogel’, Grigorii, 249 Gogol, Nicholas, 215 “going-to-the-people” movement, 235, 236 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, P. V., 126 Golitsyn, A. N., 115–16 Golitsyn, Nicholas, 408 Golitsyn, N. S., 240 Golitsyn, Vasilii, 20 Golokhvastov, P. D., 270 Golos Moskvy (newspaper), 379 Golovin, Constantine, 283 Golovin, F. A., 344 Golovkin, Gavriil, 32–33 Golovnin, A. V., 222 Gorchakov, Alexander, 193, 204, 229, 257 Gordon, Patrick, 21, 38 Goremykin, Ivan, 368, 400, 402, 405 Gorky, Maxim, 384 Gothic style, 134, 155, 167 governor-general (namestnik), 63 “Grand-Dukes’ War,” 230. See also RussoTurkish War Grazhdanin (newspaper), 255, 398 Great Britain: Alexander III reading antiEnglish memoranda, 255; Boy Scouts, 376; conflict with Russia over Central Asia, 298; at Congress of Berlin, 235; coronations in, 44; and Crimean War, 192; Elizabeth, 34; George III, 120;

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George IV, 134; George V, 319, 376; Katkov on Russia and, 246; national anthem of, 159; Nicholas I’s tour of, 126; Nicholas II on colonialism of, 326; representative institutions in, 320; Victoria, 329, 331, 335, 345, 377 Great Palace (Tsarskoe Selo), 51 great procession (bol’shoi vykhod), 151 Great Reforms: anniversaries of, 377; in Official Nationality doctrine, 5; Pazukhin on, 294. See also emancipation of the serfs Great Russia, 67 “Great Russia” (Velikaia Rossiia), 17 Great State Book, 13 Gregory, Johan Gottfried, 13 Grenadiers of the Guards, 35, 86 Grigor’ev, V. V., 428n17 Grimm, August Theodore, 152, 154 Grinevetskii, Ignatii, 241 Grot, Jacob, 248, 249, 250 guards’ regiments: at accessions of Paul I and Nicholas I, 263; Alexander I and, 114; Alexander III and, 264, 265; in alliance with crown, 40; Catherine II wearing uniforms of, 53; in Decembrist uprising, 128; Horse-Guards, 195, 201–2, 241, 380; Nicholas II and, 323, 371, 373; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 337; Semenovskii Regiment, 20, 117–18, 272; in spectacles of unity, 411; in suppressing revolution, 363, 373; symbolic role of, 266. See also Cavalier Guards; Preobrazhenskii Regiment Guchkov, Alexander, 370, 373, 379, 404 Gulevitch, General, 374 Gurko, I. V., 284 Gurko, V. I., 266, 366 Gusev, 290 Gyllenborg, H. A., 58 hairstyles: Elizabeth Petrovna on women’s, 51; Nicholas I on military, 148; Paul I regulating military, 86 Hall of Facets (Kremlin), 44, 276, 351 happiness, 43, 70, 71, 80, 103, 194 Hapsburg Empire. See Austria Haxthausen, Baron, 146–47 head (poll) tax, 27, 299 Heath, Charles, 320–21 heirs to the throne: education and upbringing of, 4–5, 73–84, 317; as kept apart from Russian society, 217; marriage marking coming of age of, 328; oath of majority for, 175–78, 250, 321–22, 433n16 Henry IV, King of France, 75–76

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Hercules, 21, 23, 29, 69 heredity, principle of, 87, 89, 98, 99 Hermitage Theater, 352 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 319 His Majesty’s Rifles, 200 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 holidays: birthdays and name days of imperial family as, 32, 94; Blessing of the Waters, 15–17, 31, 146; celebrations at Nicholas I’s court, 152–54; Christmas, 314; great procession (bol’shoi vykhod) on, 151; Palm Sunday, 20, 25; parades on, 146; tsar appearing on Red Staircase on, 164. See also Easter Holstein, Duke of, 35, 36 Holy Alliance, 82, 115 holy ampulla, 11 holy days: Palm Sunday, 20, 25; Pobedonostsev on observance of, 286. See also holidays Holy Retinue (Sviataia Druzhina), 269, 271, 306 Holy Roman Empire, 9, 14, 88 Holy Rus’ (Nesterov), 356 Holy Synod: on canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 356; Elizabeth Petrovna awarding coronation medals to bishops of, 49; Golitsyn and, 115, 116; Patriarchate replaced by, 32; and Paul I wanting to administer sacraments, 88; Pobedonostsev as chiefprocurator of, 261, 285–86; swearing oath to Nicholas I, 129; tercentenary celebrations of 1913 proposal of, 383 Honorable Mirror of Youth, The, 28 Horse-Guards, 195, 196, 201–2, 241, 380 Horse Guards Manege (St. Petersburg), 107, 108, 149 humility, 28, 171, 172, 173, 174 Hungarian revolution, 186 Hussars, 265, 373 “Hymn to Gentleness” (Derzhavin), 101 Iakovleva, A. I., 154 Iaroslavl, 217, 389 Iaroslav the Wise, 215 Iauza Palace (Moscow), 50 Iberian Mother of God, 136, 339, 381 Icon of the Savior, 385 icons: Alexander III and, 266; Elizabeth Petrovna compared with, 43; of the Moscow miracle workers, 382; in Nicholas II and Alexandra Fedorovna II’s bedroom, 331; Nicholas II on, 350; Nikon on, 14; Palekh shop of icon painters, 276;

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as penetrating all spheres of life, 310; of Serafim of Sarov, 360; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387, 390; umilenie icons, 137. See also miracle icons Ignat’ev, Nicholas: anti-Jewish policies of, 283–84; Assembly of the Land proposed by, 270; on Kakhanov Commission, 293; on nine-hundredth anniversary of conversion of Rus’, 287; on “Polish-Kike group,” 267; Russo-Turkish war urged by, 230, 257, 258; as Slavophile, 269 Ignatii, Abbot, 311 Ilovaiskii, D. I., 282 imperial court. See court, Imperial Russian imperial crown. See crown, imperial imperial family: Alexander III’s relations with, 306; autocracy represented by, 130; birth and name days as holidays, 32, 94, 152–54; Catherine II’s court glorifying, 64; dissatisfaction with in World War I, 408; identification with military, 241; Nicholas I draws young noblemen into, 148; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 136–37, 139; in Nicholas I’s scenario, 134; Nicholas II on political power as belonging to, 334–35; Paul I and the Imperial Family, 87, 89, 184; Peter and the Imperial Family, 30–31; portraits of Nicholas I’s family, 167; private virtue required of, 122; as representing the nation, 143. See also heirs to the throne; and members by name Imperial Historical Society, 320 Imperial Rifles, 386 Imperial Spring Flowers Egg, 308 imperial suite: of Alexander I, 106, 108; of Alexander II, 226–27; of Alexander III, 264, 265; of Nicholas I, 148, 185 Imperial Theater, 286 India, 325, 326 industrialists of Moscow, 399 industrialization, 298, 300, 301 industrial policy, 283, 302, 334 Inokentii, Bishop of Tambov, 358 intellectuals: Alexander II desiring reconciliation with, 201; constitutional movement organized by, 354–55; in “going-to-thepeople” movement, 236; Ignat’ev’s Assembly of the Land as excluding, 269; National myth delegitimating, 264, 282; Nicholas II as suspicious of, 320; protests after Bogolepov assassination, 351; symbolic Moscow not encompassing, 267 investiture, 17, 47–48

468

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I N D E X

Ioakim, Patriarch, 18, 19 Ioann (John) of Kronstadt, Father, 286, 301, 315, 356 Ipat’ev Monastery, 391, 392 Itinerants (peredvizhniki), 272 Iur’evich, S. A., 178, 249 Iur’evskaia, Olga, 224 Iur’evskii, George “Gogo,” 224, 239, 240 Ivan III, Tsar of Russia: emperor’s title assumed by, 9; gathering of the Russian lands under, 9; in millennium monument, 213, 215; seal of, 9, 14; successor designated by, 33; title of king rejected by, 1 Ivan IV, the Terrible, Tsar of Russia: compared to Byzantine emperor, 11; coronation of, 10–11; imperial ambitions of, 11–12; kinship with Augustus, 10; “Rossiia” used by, 12 Ivan V, Tsar of Russia, daughter Anna Ioannovna, 40, 42; death of, 20; in succession crisis, 18, 19 Ivan VI, emperor of Russia, 42 Ivanov-Razumnik, R., 351 Ivan Susanin (Cavos), 159 Jahn, Hubert, 448n22 Janson, H. W., 65 Japan: Nicholas II’s 1891 visit to, 326–27; Russo-Japanese War, 360, 361, 363 Jena, Battle of, 121 Jerusalem, 155, 291, 311 Jesuits, 19 Jews: beards associated with, 262; Beilis ritual murder case, 379–80, 399; expulsion from Moscow, 312; forcible recruitment into army, 191; Ignat’ev’s anti-Jewish policies, 283–84; pogroms, 283, 364 Joseph, Emperor of Austria, 71 Journal of the Ministry of Interior, 207, 208 jubilee celebrations, 286–87, 377 Julius Caesar, 21 Jundt, August, 356 justice, 59, 173, 350 justices of the peace, 295 Justinian, 62 Kachenovskii, M. T., 135 Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), 365, 368, 370, 399, 404 Kaganov, Grigorii, 27 Kakhanov Commission, 293, 370 Kakhovskii, P. G., 131 Kalachev, Grigorii, 47, 48, 48 Kalmyks, 139, 325

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Kamenskii, Mikhail, 77 Kanatchikov, Semen, 345–46 Kantorowicz, Ernest H., 415n5 Kappeler, Andreas, 67 Kapustin, Michael, 319 Karakazov, Dmitrii, 220, 221 Karamzin, Nicholas: on Alexander I as angel, 99; on Alexander I as human being, 101–2, 171; Alexander I’s reforms criticized by, 105–6; Bludov as protégé of, 136; on friendship, 82–83; in millennium monument, 215; Nicholas I advised by, 132; Nicholas I erects statue to, 146; on religion and education, 116; synchronic mode breaking with, 282 Karl, Prince of Prussia, 136 Karlsbad, 290 Katkov, Michael: on Alexander III and university autonomy, 293; Alexander III attending discussions including, 255; on Alexander III’s Moscow visit of 1881, 269; Assembly of the Land opposed by, 246, 259, 269, 270; on Balkans, 247; on Charter of Nobility centenary, 296; on economic policy, 299–300; on estate system, 294; foreign-policy moderates criticized by, 298; on nobility as link between people and tsar, 295; Pobedonostsev and, 254, 259; program of, 222; on Russia and the West, 246; in Russian party, 246; Russification supported by, 217; Russkii Vestnik opened by, 190–91; Slavophile ideas accepted by, 247; state nationalism of, 246; on taking measures against revolutionaries, 221; Witte and, 300, 302 Kaufmann, Constantine, 204 Kavelin, Constantine, 194 Kazan, 12, 14, 92, 116, 146, 402 Kazan Cathedral, 155, 220, 231, 384, 385, 386 Kazan Mother of God, 158, 220, 231, 384 Kazan University, 217, 293 Kaznakov, S., 94 Keep, John, 92 Khalturin, Stepan, 237 Khanzhonkov, Alexander, 377 Kharkov, 348 Kharkov University, 293 Kheraskov, Michael, 57, 60, 65 Kherson, 68, 69, 71, 192 Khiva, 204, 234 Khmelnitskii, Bogdan, 287 Khodynka massacre, 343–46

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Kholm, 309 Kholm Mother of God, 309 Khomiakov, Alexei, 163, 191, 201, 223 Khrapovitskii, A. V., 69, 70 Khrapovitskii, Stepan, 70 Khurulevich, Lavrentii, 14 Khvostov, A. N., 371 Kiev: Alexander III and Maria Fedorovna’s (II) 1869 trip to, 251–52; annexation under Alexei, 14; Beilis ritual murder case, 379–80, 399; Catherine II’s sojourn in, 70–71; electric lights in, 337–38; Fedor Alekseevich’s claims to, 17; Nicholas II visits in 1909, 378; Nicholas II visits in late 1915, 404; and nine-hundredth anniversary of conversion of Rus’, 287; police brutality in, 348 Kireev, A. A., 358 Kireevskii, Ivan, 163 Kirghiz, 118, 139, 428n17 Kiril, St., 215 Kiselev, P. D., 134, 192 Kleinmichel, Countess, 248 Kleinmichel, Peter, 192 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O., 12, 315, 439n34 Klodt, Peter, 201, 202 Knabe, George, 59 Kneller, Gottfried, 23, 24 Knights of Malta, 93, 94 Kochubei, Victor, 83 Kokand, 204, 234 kokoshniki, 290, 291–92, 372 kokoshnik tiaras, 67, 348, 366 Kokovtsov, Vladimir N., 389, 393, 394, 398, 400 “Kol’ slaven” (hymn), 281, 381, 389 Komarov, Vissarion, 229, 271, 273–74, 276, 277, 280 Komissarov, Osip, 221 Koni, Anatole, 297 Konovalov, Alexander I., 399, 404 Konovalova, E. I., 331 Korea, 360 Korf, Modest, 130, 132, 190 Kormchaia Kniga, 10 Koshelev, Alexander, 206–7 Kostroma: Alexander II visits in 1858, 207; Alexander III visits in 1881, 269; Fedorov Mother of God copy donated by, 372; liberal nobles in, 391; Romanov House, 155; Ivan Susanin as from, 160, 221; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 383, 389, 390–93; textile mills in, 391 Kotoshchikhin, G. O., 415n1

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Kovno, 92 Kramskoi, Ivan, 274, 275 Krasnoe Selo, 249, 266, 322 Kremenchug, 72 Kremlin (Moscow): Alexander I’s visit during Napoleon’s invasion, 109–11; Alexander II born in, 136, 177; Alexander II Monument, 313; ancient Muscovy and, 267; Annunciation Cathedral, 17, 49, 55, 276, 340, 372; during celebrations of Catherine II’s coronation, 56; declaration of World War I in, 401; expulsion of Poles in 1612, 413; Hall of Facets, 44, 276, 351; Ivan III gives monumental grandeur to, 9; Komarov on, 273; New Kremlin Palace, 158, 162–63; Nicholas I restores cathedrals of, 155; during Nicholas II’s coronation, 337–38; in Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348, 349; Palace of Facets, 9, 13, 18, 35, 36, 47; as religious center of Muscovite tsars, 164; tercentenary celebrations of 1913 in, 394; Terem Palace, 158, 162. See also Archangel Cathedral; Assumption Cathedral; Red Staircase Krestovnikov, I. A., 394 Krichinskii, Stepan, 372 Krivenko, V. S., 337 Krivoshein, A. V., 387 Krylov, Victor, 342 Kryzhanovskii, Sergei E., 364 Kshesinskaia, Mathilda, 328 Kuchuk Kainardji, Treaty of, 62, 64, 68 Kulikovo, Battle of, 213, 279 Kulomzin, A. N., 240 Kurakin, Alexei, 104 Kuropatkin, Alexei N., 345, 350, 360, 442n114 Kursk, 355, 362 Kutuzov, Michael, 106, 108, 158, 380 Laborer (Trudoviki) Party, 365, 368 La Harpe, Frédéric-César de, 80–81, 82, 83, 98, 100 laissez-faire, 299 Lamzdorff, M. I., 124, 126 Lamzdorff, Vladimir, 324, 338, 350 land, redistribution of the, 279, 346, 368, 369, 399 Land and Freedom, 236 land captains (zemskii nachal’niki), 295 Lanskoi, S. S., 206, 209 LaPauze, Henry, 339, 340 Laqueur, Thomas, 34, 127

470

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I N D E X

Last Days of the Life of the Unforgettable Late Tsar Emperor, Alexander I, 131 Last Hours of Nicholas I, The (Bludov), 187–88 Lavrentii, Archimandrite, 58 Law of Succession (1722), 33, 40, 240 Law of Succession (1797), 88–89, 128, 129, 175 Law of the Monarch’s Will, The (Pravda voli monarshei), 33 laws, codification of, 59–62, 105 Lay of the Host of Igor, The (epic), 277 Lazhechnikov, Ivan, 254 LeFort, François Jacob, 21, 22, 38 Legend of Monomakh, 10–11 Legend of the Holy Ampulla, 11 Leibniz, Gottfried, 73, 74, 75 Lena gold fields, 380 Lenin, V. I., 413 Lentovskii, M. V., 278 Lermontov, Michael, 215 Levshin, A. I., 194, 206, 208 liberalism: Alexander II criticized in liberal press, 225–26; of Catherine II, 190; constitutional movement organized, 354–55; Kliuchevskii and, 315; of Kostroma nobles, 391; Official Nationality recast in more liberal terms, 219; serfdom as incompatible with, 205; symbolic Moscow not encompassing, 267 Liberation (Osvobozhdenie), 354, 361, 363 libraries, imperial, 309–10 Lieven, Charlotte, 124 Lieven, Dominic, 319 Life for the Tsar, A (Glinka), 160–61; at Alexander III’s coronation celebrations, 277–78; after Karakazov attempt on Alexander II, 221; at Nicholas II’s coronation celebrations, 336, 337, 342; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 388, 393 life-giving cross, 10, 12 Lifland Province, 284, 312 Lincoln, Bruce, 129 Lindener, Fedor, 78 List, Friedrich, 301 Lithuania, 404 Little Russia: annexation of left bank of Dnepr under Alexei, 14. See also Ukraine liturgy, Nikon’s simplification of, 14 Litvinov, N. P., 248 Liubimov, D. N., 275–76 Livadia, 308, 374

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Loan Bank, 210 Lockhart, Bruce, 394 Lomonosov, Michael, 42–43, 68, 277 Londonderry, Marquis of, 142, 152, 169, 203 Lopukhina, Anna, 91, 94–95 Loris-Melikov, Michael, 237, 238, 240, 261, 267 Lotman, Iurii, 108 Louis XIV, King of France: ballets staged at Versailles by, 108; Catherine II compared with, 64, 65; Frederick the Great contrasted with, 74; glory of king becoming end in itself, 144; monument to Peter I modeled on statue of, 65; Paul I and, 86, 94; Peter I compared with, 23, 25, 29 Louis XV, King of France, 45, 51 Louise, Queen of Prussia, 121–22, 123 love: Alexandra Fedorovna (I) epitomizing maternal, 167; in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, 200; Maria Fedorovna (I) on value of, 122; marriage for, 29, 30, 127; James Russell Miller on, 331; Peter I introduces Western concept of, 29. See also scenario of love love between Russian people and tsar. See bond between Russian people and tsar Lowe, Charles, 264, 272, 273, 313 loyalty, 144, 146, 151 Lubomirski, Joseph, 153 Ludwig (Louis) of Hesse, Prince, 329, 336 Lutskevich, A. A., 374 L’vov, Alexei, 159 L’vov, G. E., 394 Lycurgus, 60 Lyon, Jane, 124 Macarius, Metropolitan, 10–11 Magnitskii, M. L., 116 Maikov, Apollon, 221, 277 Maikov, V. I., 68 Main Directorate of the Press, 292 majority ceremonies, 175–78, 250, 321–22, 433n16 Maklakov, Nicholas, 383, 394, 397, 398–99 Maksimov, Vladimir, 372 Malachite Hall (Winter Palace), 151 Maltese Cross, 93, 94, 352 Manasein, N. A., 284 Manchuria, 360 Manifesto of September 15, 1801, 100

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Mansurian Lakes, 402 mantle, imperial: of Catherine I, 36–37; Paul I wearing at court, 90 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, 59, 66, 81 Maria Aleksandrovna, Empress (wife of Alexander II): Alexander II contrasted with, 329; and Alexander II’s affair with Catherine Dolgorukova, 224, 225; and Alexander III, 247, 248, 250, 253–54, 257, 261, 291; coronation of, 197, 198, 239; death of, 239, 261; on Filaret’s funeral, 255; living with her in-laws, 184–85; marriage to Alexander II, 182–84; national costume worn by, 200; in Nicholas II’s coronation album, 336; piety of, 223, 254; on Prussia, 257; relations with Alexander II growing distant, 223; and Russo-Turkish War, 230, 257; self-control of, 183; and Serafim cult, 357; wedding of, 183 Maria Aleksandrovna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Alexander II), 208 Maria Fedorovna (I), Empress (wife of Paul I): on Alexander I’s preoccupation with military details, 106; in Alexander II’s education, 170; Catherine II prevents Moscow visit by Paul and, 184; charitable works of, 173; European tour of 1782, 78; family values instilled by, 122–23; and Law of Succession, 88; marriage to Paul I, 77; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 136, 137; in Nicholas I’s education, 124, 125; on Nicholas I’s marriage, 123, 124, 127; and Nicholas I’s tours of Russia and Europe, 125, 178; as product of Enlightenment, 124 Maria Fedorovna (II), Empress (wife of Alexander III): Alexander III contrasted with, 251, 329; on Alexander III’s tour of empire in 1869 and 1870, 251–52; at Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer dedication, 281; coronation of, 274, 276; court social life led by, 304–5, 335; in education of young noblewomen, 251; and Fabergé eggs, 307, 308; family life of, 306; in imperial entry procession at Nicholas II’s coronation, 339; marriage to Alexander III, 250–51; in Nicholas II’s coronation album, 336; personal magnetism of, 251; on Prussia, 257; and son Nicholas II, 318; twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of, 308; at Vladimir Aleksandrovich’s costume ball, 304, 305 Maria Georgievna, Grand Duchess, 352

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Maria Magdalena, Church of (Jerusalem), 291, 311 Marian cult, 311, 357 Maria Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Nicholas II), 330 Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess, 304, 305 marriage: foreign wives as bearers of cosmopolitanism, 251; imperial family marrying outside Russian society, 30–31, 239; for love, 29, 30, 127; Maria Fedorovna (I) on value of, 122; marking coming of age of heirs to the throne, 328; morganatic marriages, 123, 239, 432n46; of Peter I and Catherine I, 29–30; of Peter I’s children, 30–31; sovereign having to present a model for, 181 Mars, 21, 23, 25, 29, 60 marshals of the nobility: Alexander III on obedience to, 279; and centenary of Charter of Nobility, 296; and emancipation of serfs, 206; Nicholas II on obedience to, 346, 355; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 386, 388, 395 Mary, Virgin. See Virgin Mary masquerades: in Alexander II’s coronation celebrations, 200; in Alexander III’s reign, 304; bals d’hiver of 1903 as, 354; in Catherine II’s coronation celebrations, 56; elite play at appearing Russian in, 163; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 51; in Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation celebrations of, 45; “Minerva Triumphant,” 57; at New Kremlin Palace dedication, 163; at Paul I’s move to Michael Palace, 95 Massandra Palace, 308 Masson, C.F.P., 82 Maude, Aylmer, 338, 345 Maxwell, John, 153 May Parade, 184, 192–93 McNeal, Robert, 175 Medvedev, Sylvester, 19 Meltser, Roman, 331 Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (Karamzin), 105–6 Mendeleev tariff, 300 Menelas, Adam, 167 Mensheviks, 399 Menshikov, Prince, 36 Menshikov Palace, 25 merchants, 255, 335, 387, 394 Mercy (statue), 29, 30 Merder, Karl Karlovich, 170, 171, 173, 174 Merry, M. Mansell, 401 Meshcherskaia, Maria, 250

472

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Meshcherskii, Vladimir: Alexander III favoring views of, 256; and Alexander III on Germans, 257; and Alexander III reading Gospel of John, 253; on Alexander III’s censorship policy, 292; and Alexander III’s distrust of people, 250; on Alexander III’s tour of empire, 251; Grazhdanin, 255, 398; on land captains, 295; Nicholas II’s autocratic views supported by, 398, 400; and Nicholas II’s Kursk visit, 355 Methodius, St., 215 Michael Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander III), 318, 408, 409 Michael Castle (St. Petersburg), 95 Michael Fedorovich Romanov, Tsar of Russia: assembly of the land in election of, 5, 12, 13, 383; exhorted to accept throne, 136; and Filaret, 14; and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160, 161, 277, 336; military reform of, 18; in millennium monument, 213; in Peter I’s triumphal arch of 1703, 25; portraits of, 13; state authority consolidated by, 12; tercentenary celebrations of election of, 6, 377, 383–96; throne of, 138 Michael Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 306 Michael Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (son of Nicholas I), 148, 252, 306 Michael Pavlovich, Grand Duke: at Alexander I’s military reviews in 1815, 113, 125; family ties of, 123; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 136, 137; regiment commanded by, 148; as wanting to see combat against Napoleon, 124–25 middle service cavalry, 18 Mikeshin, M. O., 214, 214–15, 287 Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, Alexander, 113, 115 military, the. See Russian army; Russian navy Military-Campaign Chancellery, 92 military colonies, 114–15, 117 military reviews. See parades and military reviews Miliukov, Paul, 361 Miliutin, Dmitrii: on Alexander II as isolated from society, 235; and Alexander II’s intention to crown Catherine Dolgorukova, 240; and Alexander III, 257; army reform supported by, 222, 228; military education reformed by, 228, 266; and Russo-Turkish War, 229, 230 millennium celebration (1862), 211–16 millennium monument, 213–16, 214 Miller, James Russell, 330–31, 441n44

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Miloradovich, G. A., 200 Miloradovich, General M. A., 129 Miloslavskaia, Maria, 18, 352 Miloslavskiis, 18, 19 Mincus, Ludwig, 278 Minerva, 29, 34, 41–42, 53, 54, 56–57, 60 “Minerva Triumphant” (masquerade), 57 Minin, Kuz’ma, 12, 157, 215, 382, 390 Ministry of Finance, 293, 299–302 Ministry of Interior: Alexander III seeks officials to implement his will in, 293; Bulygin as minister, 363; Journal of the Ministry of Interior, 207, 208; land captains as representatives of, 295; Maklakov as minister, 383; Mirskii as minister, 361; Plehve as Minister, 355, 357, 361; and Poltava jubilee, 378; Sipiagin as minister, 350; Temporary Regulations of August 1881 increasing power of, 297; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 394 Ministry of the Court, 151 Minskii, Nicholas, 384 miracle icons, 310–11; “All-Kind-Christ” icon, 311. See also Mother of God icons miracles, 310–11, 359, 382 Mironenko, Sergei, 129 Mogilev, 402 molitvoslovie, 314 monarchist organizations, 385–86, 388, 402 monarchy, Russian. See Russian monarchy monasteries: Alexander Nevskii Monastery, 87, 385; Chudov Monastery, 348; increase of number of under Alexander III, 285; Ipat’ev Monastery, 391, 392; New Jerusalem Monastery, 155; Pochaev Monastery, 384–85; Trinity Monastery, 44, 50, 58, 279–80, 287, 346; Znamenskii Monastery, 355 Mongols, 9 Monomakh, Legend of, 10–11 Monomakh’s cap, 10, 12, 15, 36, 339 Montesquieu, Baron de, 75, 81 Montferrand, Auguste Ricard de, 149–50, 150, 201–3, 202, 425n23 monuments: Alexander II’s to Nicholas I, 130, 145, 201–3, 202; to Alexander III in Kursk, 355; Alexandrine column, 149–50, 150, 425n23; to Catherine II, 225, 226; Catherine II’s to Peter I, 65–66, 66, 119; millennium monument, 213–16, 214; Paul I’s to Peter I, 95, 96; Romanov Monument in Kostroma, 393 morganatic marriages, 123, 239, 432n46 Morozov, N. D., 399

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Moscow: Alexander I comes to during Napoleon’s invasion, 108–11; during Alexander I’s coronation, 101; Alexander II and Maria Aleksandrovna visit in 1841, 184; and Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 177; Alexander II visits in 1837, 180; Alexander II visits in 1855, 191–92; Alexander II visits in 1862, 216; Alexander III on national role of, 255; Alexander III’s visit of 1881, 267–68; ancient Muscovy in shrines of, 267; beggars driven from, 70; in bond between Russian people and tsar, 311; Borodino jubilee celebrations in, 381–82; burning of, 111–12; in cantata at banquet following Nicholas II’s coronation, 342; cholera epidemic of 1830, 144; declaration of World War I in, 401; Elizabeth Petrovna remaining after coronation, 44; enthusiasm for Nicholas I in, 145; as heart of Russia, 47; Ivan III gives monumental grandeur to, 9; Jews expelled from, 312; Komarov on, 273; Nicholas I’s last visits to, 162–65; Nicholas II on shrines of Russia’s past in, 321; during Nicholas II’s coronation, 337–38; Nicholas II’s Easter visits to, 348–49; noble assembly of 1865, 218; police brutality in, 348; Russian party associated with, 245; Sergei Aleksandrovich made governor-general of, 311–12; as symbol of the nation, 162; tercentenary celebrations of 1913 in, 383, 394–95; transformed for Paul I’s coronation, 87; twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164–65. See also Kremlin (Moscow) Moscow-Iaroslavl style, 306, 372 Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee, 246, 255 Moscow University: Alexander I expands, 104; Alexander II attends lectures at, 181; and Catherine II’s coronation, 56, 57; establishment of, 52; Kliuchevskii’s eulogy of Alexander III and, 315; student disorders in 1880s, 293 Moscow-Vladimir church architecture, 280 Moskovskie Vedomosti (newspaper): on Alexander III and Russian period, 283; Alexander III eulogized in, 314; on Alexander III’s trip down Volga, 269; on Alexander III’s trip to Kholm, 309; on Assembly of the Land, 270; on Borodino jubilee, 381, 382; on estate system, 294; on miracle cures at Sarov, 359; on

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473

Nicholas II and Union of Russian People, 364; on Nicholas II’s coronation, 336, 340; on Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 349; Russian party and, 246; Russification supported by, 217; on Sergei Aleksandrovich as governor-general of Moscow, 312; stronger measures against revolutionaries supported by, 221; on tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 385, 392; Vyshnegradskii and Witte writing for, 300 Moskva (Tchaikovsky), 277 Moskvitianin (journal), 144 Mosolov, Alexander A., 354, 359 Most Comical and All Drunken Council, 20 Mother of God icons, 310–11; Chernigov Mother of God, 279; Don Mother of God, 162; Fedorov Mother of God, 371, 372, 391, 392, 393; Iberian Mother of God, 136, 339, 381; Kazan Mother of God, 158, 220, 231, 384; Kholm Mother of God, 309; Nicholas II and, 317; Pochaev Mother of God, 384–85; Smolensk Mother of God, 380, 381, 384; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 384; Vladimir Mother of God, 157, 407–8 Murav’ev, M. N., 359 Murav’ev-Amurskii, Nicholas, 327 Murav’ev-Apostol, S. I., 131 Muscovy: Alexander III building Muscovite churches, 287–92; Alexander III’s coronation and, 271, 276, 277; Alexander III’s scenario evoking idealized image of, 263–64, 282–302; Assembly of the Land associated with, 362; bals d’hiver of 1903 evoking, 352–54; coronations of, 11, 34–35, 44; and dedication of Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, 280; Kremlin as religious center of, 164; Nicholas II preferring Muscovite cultural forms, 350; Nicholas II sees himself as Muscovite tsar, 347, 348, 350, 351, 390; in shrines of Moscow, 267. See also Rus’ music: at Alexander III’s coronation celebrations, 277–78; Alexandra Fedorovna (I) patronizing, 169; at bals d’hiver of 1903, 354; cantata at banquet following Nicholas II’s coronation, 342; “Kol’ slaven,” 281, 381, 389; nationality in, 158–61; Tchaikovsky, 277, 280, 354, 382; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 388–89, 393. See also “God Save the Tsar”; opera

474

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I N D E X

musketeers (strel’tsy): in Blessing of the Waters, 17; in coronation processions, 17; in military reform of Michael and Alexei, 18; Peter crushes rebellion of, 23; uprising during dynastic crisis, 18–19 Muslims, 284 Myshetskii, Prince, 213 Nakaz (Instruction; 1767), 59–60 name days, 32, 94, 152–53 Napoleon: administrative structure of, 103–4; Austerlitz, 106; invasion of Russia by, 108–11; military model of, 106; military review of 1805, 113–14; popular sovereignty in defeat of, 120; on Vendôme column, 149, 425n23 Napoleon III, 191, 241 narod, 85, 282 narodnost’, 144, 216, 225 Naryshkin, D. L., 178 Naryshkin, Semen Kirilovich, 55 Naryshkina, Natalia, 13, 18 Naryshkin family, 19, 20 Natalia Alekseevna, Empress (wife of Paul), 77 nation, the: Alexander Aleksandrovich shaping a national image, 253–62; national character of monarchy, 133, 143, 154; Nicholas I as embodiment of, 142–46; Nicholas I employing motifs of, 154–61. See also nationalism; nationality; National myth national anthem. See “God Save the Tsar” nationalism: Alexander III introduced to nationalist circles, 254–55; bureaucratic nationalism, 246–47; conservative nationalism, 245–47, 356; the “Russian party,” 245–47, 253, 256, 264 nationality: in criticism of Alexander II, 225; millennium monument omitting, 216; in music, 158–61; narodnost’, 144, 216, 225; “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” 143; Pobedonostsev on representative institutions and, 320; Slavophiles on, 163. See also Official Nationality doctrine National myth, 3; administrative authority elevated at expense of law by, 297; Alexander III adopting, 3, 5, 245, 263–81, 334; on bond between Russian people and tsar, 324; on Byzantine origins, 263–64; conquest in, 3, 413; educated elite excluded by, 5–6, 319; intellectuals disdained in, 320; new social and political forces bred by, 302; in Nicholas II’s sce-

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nario, 6, 334, 347; Orthodoxy in, 286; power sharing precluded in, 5; rift between monarchy and state in, 5, 412; on Russian expansion to East, 328; state institutions delegitimated by, 282, 317; synchronic mode of symbolic elevation in, 282–83, 309; on those who resist tsar as enemies, 369 natural law theory, 32, 33, 89 Naumov, A. N., 381, 387, 388, 393, 394, 407 navy, the. See Russian navy Nazimov, V. I., 206 Nazimov rescripts, 206, 208 Near Plevna (Vereshchagin), 234 Nechaev, Sergei, 236 Nechaev-Maltsov, N. C., 290 Nelidova, Catherine, 78–79, 94 Nelidova, Varvara, 167 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasilii I., 337 neoclassicism: in church architecture, 134, 155, 280; in sculpture, 108; in St. Petersburg, 68, 108, 150; Thon style and, 156, 280 neo-Russian school, 372 Nesselrode, Karl, 126, 177, 192, 193 Nesterov, Michael, 356 Nevinson, Henry, 366 Nevskii, Alexander, 32, 113, 172, 314, 382, 385 New Jerusalem Monastery, 155 New Kremlin Palace, 158, 162–63 New (Novyi) Preobrazhensk, 19–20 New Russia, 62, 66, 69, 71, 72, 125, 191 newspapers: Russo-Turkish War coverage by, 234; subsidized, 145. See also press, the; and by name newsreels, 397 Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, 120–88 —ceremonial under: coronation of, 134–41; funeral of, 187; name-day celebrations, 152–53; national anthem played, 159–60; at New Kremlin Palace dedication, 162–63; oath of majority introduced by, 175; orders reformed by, 151; parades, 85, 146–47; twenty-fifth anniversary of coronation of, 164–65 —domestic policy of: beards opposed by, 163–64; and Decembrist rebellion, 128–30, 131–32, 133; foreign travel restricted by, 162, 191; and the nobility, 132–33, 148; Official Nationality under, 314; reforms of, 133–34; revolutionary movement feared by, 162; on serfdom, 133–34, 205, 209

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—early life of: Alexander I names him heir, 127, 128; education of, 124–26 —family life of, 166–69; in Alexander II’s education, 169–74; and Alexander II’s marriage, 181–84; and Alexander II’s public role as Grand Duke, 174–78; and Alexander II’s tour of the empire of 1837, 178–81; in Anichkov Palace, 127; family values of, 122, 123, 222; Friedrich’s On the Sailboat and, 127–28, 169; as “Lord of the Cottage,” 167; marital infidelity of, 167, 425n2; marriage to Charlotte of Prussia, 123–24 —foreign policy of: Crimean War, 186, 187; revolutions of 1848 opposed, 162; Russification, 283 —later life of: death of, 187–88, 427n57; decline in last years of, 185–88; mourning period for, 190 —as monarch: accession of, 128–34; Alexander II breaks with reign of, 189, 190, 191; breaks with Alexander I’s reign, 129, 131; and cholera epidemic in Moscow, 144; church architecture as concern of, 155–58; closeness to the people of, 144–45; court of, 150–54; diminishing confidence in himself, 185; as embodiment of the nation, 142–46; imperial suite of, 148, 185; loyalty as central value of, 144; Moscow’s enthusiasm for, 145 —personal characteristics of: Alexandra Fedorovna (I) contrasted with, 329; charisma of, 142; engravings made by, 147; fear instilled by, 3, 147, 173; gaze of, 147; mustache of, 148; physical appearance of, 147; trumpet played by, 169 —representations of: Alexander II’s monument to, 130, 201–3, 202; Alexandrine column, 149–50, 150, 425n23; death literature, 187–88, 188; dynasty as theme in reign of, 122, 134; as first servant of the state, 142–43; and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160–61; love in scenario of, 145, 146, 147, 164, 170; in millennium monument, 215; mode of presentation of official events in reign of, 137; national motifs employed by, 154–61; press used by, 145; Russian-style churches built under, 290; statue of 1858, 145 —as soldier: at Alexander I’s military reviews in 1815, 113, 125; military organization under, 146–48

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475

—travels of, 145–46; last visits to Moscow, 162–65; Russia and Europe in 1816, 125–26, 178 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 317–409 —ceremonial under: bals d’hiver of 1903, 352–54, 353; Borodino jubilee, 6, 380–82; canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 358, 359; celebrations following coronation of, 342–43; centenary celebrations of central state institutions, 352; coronation of, 335–46; historical celebrations in reign of, 377–96; Page Corps anniversary, 352; Poltava jubilee, 6, 377–79; statues of Peter I donated by, 378; tercentenary celebrations of February 1913, 383–89; tercentenary celebrations of May 1913, 389–96 —coronation of, 335–46; coronation album, 336, 338, 342–43; the coronation rite, 340, 341; electric lights at, 337–38, 342; imperial entry procession, 338–39; Khodynka massacre following, 343–46; Muscovite character of, 337; preparations for, 335–38; press coverage of, 336–37; Trinity Monastery visited after, 346; Western guests at, 337 —domestic policy of: Assembly of the Land proposed by, 362–63; and Beilis ritual murder case, 379–80, 399; on constitutions, 335; and the Dumas, 365–70, 397–400; and field courts-martial, 368; on Fundamental Laws, 365; measures against revolutionary movement, 361–62; and the nobility, 335, 355, 382, 387–88, 394; October Manifesto, 363–64, 369, 398, 400; and reform, 335, 355, 361–65; in revolution of 1905, 361–76; Sipiagin influencing, 350–52; and “Stolypin coup d’état,” 369; and Union of Russian People, 364, 369 —early life of: affair with Kshesinskaia, 328; in Alexander III’s funeral procession, 314; boyhood diaries of, 317, 321; as Cossack ataman, 308, 322, 440n17; education of, 317–21; as famine relief committee chair, 312, 323; majority ceremony of, 321–22; mother Maria Fedorovna (II) and, 318; parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, 308; Pobedonostsev on birth of, 254; on State Council, 323 —family life of, 330–33, 370–73; and Alexandra Fedorovna (II) sharing bed, 331; family as world of, 321; love for his family, 397; marriage to Alexandra

476

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I N D E X

Nicholas II (continued) Fedorovna, 328–30; and son Alexei Nikolaevich, 397 —foreign policy of: Far Eastern expansion desired by, 359–60; Russo-Japanese War, 360, 361, 405; World War I, 400–408 —as monarch: abdication of, 408–9; accession of, 334–35; autocracy upheld by, 6, 317, 335, 347, 361, 363, 365, 397, 404; on bond between Russian people and tsar, 321, 334, 340, 347, 356, 364, 365, 369, 370–76, 378, 388, 389–90, 394; bureaucracy as suspect to, 323, 334; conservative policies in first years of rule of, 334; court distrusted by, 317, 321, 335; as disregarding the government, 350; Elchaninov’s biography of, 397–98; as khoziain, 350; and Petrine cadence, 4; on political power as belonging to imperial family, 334–35; popular support against Duma sought by, 397; public demonstrations of godliness by, 347; publicity used by, 336, 344, 374, 397–98; rift between monarchy and state under, 5–6, 397, 412; state institutions disdained by, 317, 323; Witte appointed prime minister by, 363–64; work schedule of, 397 —personal characteristics of: and Alexandra Fedorovna (II) as similar, 329–30; capriciousness of judgment of, 334; charismatic holy men sought by, 355–59; as English gentleman, 321, 329, 334; Germans disliked by, 317–18; impassivity of, 406–7; on intelligentsia, 320; juvenile appearance of, 324, 334; Muscovite cultural forms preferred by, 350; Orthodox Church embraced by, 317; photography taken up by, 346; and Rasputin, 371, 379; reserve of, 318, 319; on shrines of Russia’s past in Moscow, 321; sports enjoyed by, 324, 346 —representations of: depicted with family, 331, 332, 441n46; and European myth, 3; images of during World War I, 406, 448n22; National myth accepted by, 6, 334, 347; sees himself as Muscovite tsar, 347, 348, 350, 351, 390 —as soldier: bonds with the military, 373–76; as commander-in-chief, 405–8; cross of St. George for, 407; and guards’ regiments, 323, 371, 373; as military leader, 397; military training of, 322–23; in Preobrazhenskii Regiment, 322, 323, 340, 348, 373–74, 378; and Russian navy, 327, 374, 375; sees himself as military leader,

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378–79; to Ukraine and Galician front in 1915, 404; visits to front in autumn 1914, 403; in World War I, 400–408 —travels of: Asian journey, 324–28; central Russia in late 1914, 403–4; Easter visits to Moscow, 348–49; Kursk in 1902, 355; in Moscow with parents in 1881, 321 Nicholas Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander II): ball for in Moscow in 1862, 216; and brother Alexander III, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254; on constitutions, 218; death of, 219–20, 247; at Kazan University, 217; reserve of, 249; tour in spring of 1863, 217–18 Nicholas Konstantinovich, Grand Duke, 224–25 Nicholas Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 393 Nicholas Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (son of Nicholas I): at Alexander II’s military reviews, 227; and Alexander III on Plevna, 260; Alexander III punishing, 306; consultative institution proposal, 261; play regiment for, 148; in Russo-Turkish War, 230, 233 Nicholas Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (son of Nicholas Nikolaevich), 402, 403, 405 Nichols, Robert, 356 Night and Day (ballet), 278 Nikitenko, Alexander, 210, 222 Nikolaev, Iu., 314 Nikon, Patriarch, 14, 155, 156 Niva (magazine), 271, 313, 337, 339, 359, 380, 403, 404, 407 Nizer-Vachot, Philippe, 356 Nizhnii-Novgorod, 145–46, 207–8, 250, 390 nobility: and Alexander I, 99, 105, 109; and Alexander II, 179, 194, 199, 210–13, 216, 218, 220, 233; and Alexander III, 295–96; Alexander III withholds privileges of Baltic, 284; and Catherine II, 54, 63–65, 67, 70; Charter of the Nobility, 64, 67, 91, 98, 100, 295, 296; in constitutional movement, 210–13, 218; in Decembrist rebellion, 128; elevation by bond with the emperor, 2; and Elizabeth Petrovna, 42, 43, 45, 51; emancipation from service of, 63, 64; in emancipation of serfs, 205–10; European myth and, 5, 412; and governorgeneral, 63; increased representation in zemstva assemblies, 297; of Kostroma, 391; as land captains, 295; as link between people and tsar, 294, 295; military colonies and, 115; and Nicholas I,

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132–33, 148; and Nicholas II, 335, 355, 382, 387–88, 394; and Paul I, 86–87, 91–92, 97; Pazukhin on Great Reforms and, 294; in Petrine system, 41; privileges in military, 228; reform ideas taken up by, 117; representations of monarchy for displaying loyalty by, 411; in revolutionary movement, 117–18; sense of dignity of, 92; status accruing through service, 42; Stolypin’s abolishing the commune supported by, 369; and tsar uniting in seventeenth-century, 294–95; Witte and, 300, 302. See also marshals of the nobility Noble Bank, 296 Northern War, 25, 32, 34 Novgorod: Ivan III subjugates, 9; millennium celebrations of 1862, 211–16; millennium monument, 213–16; Viking princes invited to rule by, 143, 212 Novgorod bell, 215 Novocherkassk, 174, 180–81, 252, 322 Novoe Vremia (newspaper), 229, 234, 315, 338, 345, 359, 386, 401 Novorossiisk University, 293 Novosil’stev, Nicholas, 83, 100 Numa, 59, 60, 81 Numa, or Flourishing Rome (Kheraskov), 60 Nystadt, Treaty of (1721), 32 oath of majority, 175–78, 250, 321–22, 433n16 Obolenskii, Prince Dmitrii, 186, 192–93, 198–99, 224, 225, 226, 245 Obol’ianinov, Peter, 78 October Manifesto (1905), 363–64, 365, 369, 398, 400 Octobrist Party, 370, 373, 399 odes, 42–43, 79, 99, 101, 171, 192 Odessa, 68, 125, 338 Odoevskii, Vladimir, 196 Official Nationality doctrine: in Alexander II’s scenario, 5, 189, 193; on loyalty as distinctively Russian, 144; in manifesto promulgating sentence on Decembrists, 132; on monarchical spirit of Russian people, 5, 212, 214; National myth and, 264; and New Kremlin Palace dedication, 163; under Nicholas I, 314; on peasants as bulwark of Russia, 211; Pogodin and, 143; as recast in more liberal terms, 219; sentimental morality of, 246; Shevyrev and, 201 oil of Clovis, 11 Old Believers, 14, 15, 19, 191

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477

Oleg, 68–69 Olga, Princess, 215 Olga Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Alexander III), 359, 403 Olga Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Nicholas I), 167, 168 Olga Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Nicholas II), 330, 331, 332, 441n46 Olympian scenarios, 41–42, 43, 44 “On the Education of a Prince” (Leibniz), 73 On the Sailboat (Friedrich), 127–28, 169 Onu, M. K., 325 opeka, 301 opera: in Alexander II’s coronation celebrations, 200; in Alexander III’s coronation celebrations, 277–78; Catherine II’s “The Early Reign of Oleg,” 68–69; Cavos’s Ivan Susanin, 159. See also Life for the Tsar, A (Glinka) Opisanie koronatsii, 35 orders, honorary and chivalric, 22–23, 89–90, 93–94, 138, 151 Orenburg, 118, 327 Orlov, A. F., 192 Orlov, Alexei, 62 Orlov-Davydov, V. P., 220 Orlov diamond, 90 Orlovskii, Boris, 149 Orthodoxy. See Church, Russian Orthodox “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” 143 Ostrovskii, Alexander, 314 Osvobozhdenie (journal), 354, 361 Otechestvennye Zapiski (journal), 118, 135 Ottoman empire: Catherine II’s wars with, 62, 63, 68, 70; Constantinople as Russian goal, 298; Crimean War, 186; Greek rebellion against, 119; Nicholas I’s wars against, 156, 169; Russo-Turkish War, 229–35, 257–58, 299 pageantry. See celebrations; ceremonies Page Corps, 352 Pahlen, Constantine, 222, 235, 236, 256 paintings: and Alexander III’s coronation album, 272; of Elizabeth Petrovna as Venus, 51; Nesterov’s Holy Rus’, 356; Nicholas I using to disseminate family idyll, 329; in Nicholas II’s coronation album, 342–43; Peter I’s triumphs celebrated in, 23; The Triumph of Catherine, 34; Vereshchagin’s of Russo-Turkish War, 234. See also portraits Palace of Facets (Kremlin, Moscow), 9, 13, 18, 35, 36, 47

478

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I N D E X

palaces: Alexander III declining improvements for, 306; Elizabeth Petrovna building, 51–52; neoclassical, 68. See also by name Palekh shop of icon painters, 276 Palm Sunday, 20, 25 Panegirikos (Prokopovich), 25–26 Panin, Nikita I: Catherine II’s accession manifesto written by, 53; Catherine II studies politics under, 59; in enlightenment reform, 52; on new kind of man, 65, 75; as tutor to Paul I, 52, 74–75, 77 Panin, Peter, 77 Pan-Slavism: Alexander III and, 254, 257, 260; and declaration of World War I, 401; romantic nationalism of, 246–47; on a Russian tsar, 245; Russo-Turkish War supported by, 229. See also Slavophiles parades and military reviews: under Alexander I, 85, 106, 108, 113–15; on Alexander I’s 1824 journey, 118; of Alexander II, 175, 226, 227; of Alexander III, 264–65; Alexandra Fedorovna (I) enjoying, 126; at Alexandra Fedorovna’s (I) birthday celebrations, 154; at Borodino jubilee, 381; at coronations, 137; Maria Aleksandrovna enjoying, 183; national anthem played at, 159; May Parade, 184, 192–93; national anthem played at, 159; under Nicholas I, 85, 146–47; for Nicholas II after coronation, 346; Nicholas II in, 322; under Paul I, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92; at Poltava jubilee, 377; Sunday review before Alexander II’s assassination, 240–42. See also processions Paris, Treaty of (1856), 192, 193, 216 parish schools, 285 Parland, Alfred, 288, 289 Paskevich, I. F., 192 pastoral movement, 286 Patkul, Alexander, 227 Paul I, Emperor of Russia, 85–97 —assassination of, 95, 98 —ceremonial under: coronation of, 87–91; funeral of, 98; parades, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92 —domestic policy of: and the nobility, 86–87, 91–92, 97; peasant labor limited by, 209; revolution feared by, 93 —early life of: and Catherine II’s deposition of Peter III, 52; Catherine II sees as rival, 77, 78, 170, 184; education of, 52, 65, 73, 74–79, 124; Frederick the Great influencing, 74, 75, 77, 86, 90, 93; on Henry IV, 75–76; Peter the Great influencing, 75

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—family life of: marital infidelity of, 78–79, 94–95; marriages of, 77; son Alexander distrusted by, 95 —as monarch: accession of, 86–87; Alexander I breaks with reign of, 98, 101; Alexander II and, 189; break with Catherine II’s reign, 86, 87; centralization under, 93; as despot, 95; disciplinary subordination as principle of, 92–93; Law of Succession of, 88–89, 128, 129, 175; Michael Castle built by, 95; Nicholas I compared with, 185; Nicholas II compared with, 350; Peter III’s memory restored by, 87, 130; as progenitor of Romanov dynasty, 77, 95, 122; reform impulse of, 93; religious mission of, 88, 89, 93; response to challenge of French revolution, 85, 87; Statute of the Imperial Family, 89, 184 —personal characteristics of: as in fear of his life, 95; manner of, 3; as Russian Hamlet, 77 —as soldier: chivalric orders established by, 89–90, 93–94; Military-Campaign Chancellery established by, 92; military victories of, 85; warfare as appealing to, 76–77, 78, 89 —travels of: France in 1782, 78; Moscow after wedding, 184; as tours of inspection, 92 Paul Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander II), 257, 318 Pauzié, Geremie, 51, 55 Pavilion of Venus (Gatchina), 79 Pavlovsk Palace, 68 Pavskii, G. P., 173, 174 Pazukhin, Alexander, 293–95 peasants: at Alexander II’s coronation, 197–99; in Alexander II’s scenario, 5; at Alexander III’s coronation, 274, 279; at Alexandra Fedorovna’s (I) birthday celebrations, 153; and autocracy, 365; beards associated with, 262, 266; in Beilis ritual murder case, 399; Black Partition desired by, 399; at Borodino jubilee, 381; as bulwark of Russia to Alexander II, 211; in Bulygin Duma, 363; Bunge attempts to improve condition of, 299; in election law of December 11, 1905, 364–65; in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160–61; increasing role in ceremony by, 2, 412; insurrections in southern provinces, 349, 354; as junior officers in World War I, 408; Kakhanov Commission reform proposals for, 293; at Khodynka massacre,

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I N D E X

343–46; and land captains, 295; Liberation Movement seeks support from, 363; mobilization for World War I, 402; Nicholas II meets with elders in Kursk, 355; opposition to Nicholas II among, 347; organs of self-government under Nicholas I, 134; Paul I limits labor obligations of, 209; Peter I reduces to bondage, 27; at Poltava jubilee, 378; Pugachev uprising, 62–63; revolts of seventeenth century, 13; in revolution of 1905, 362; Stolypin abolishes the commune, 368–69, 370; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 386, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366; voting for first Duma, 365. See also serfdom people, the. See Russian people people’s feasts after coronations: at Alexander II’s coronation, 200–201; at Alexander III’s coronation, 278–79, 343; at Catherine II’s coronation, 56; at Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation, 49–50; Khodynka massacre at Nicholas II’s coronation, 343–46; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 140 “People’s Fête in the Village on the Occasion of the Coronation of Their Majesty” (lubok), 279 People’s Will, 236, 240 Permanent Council, 100 Perovskaia, Sofia, 237 Perovskii, Boris, 248, 249, 251 Perseus, 23, 29 Pestalozzi, Johann-Heinrich, 121 Pestel’, P. I., 131 Peter I, the Great, Emperor of Russia, 21–39 —ceremonial under: biblical imagery used by, 25–26; classical imagery used by, 21, 22; coronation of, 22; fireworks used by, 23; funeral of, 38–39; pictorial, 23 —criticisms of: by Slavophiles, 163; by Zhukovskii, 172 —early life of: at New Preobrazhensk, 19–20; play activities of, 19–20; succession crisis at death of Alexei, 18, 19 —family life of: marriage to Catherine I, 29–30, 31 —as monarch: Alexander I and, 81, 119; Alexander II contrasted with, 225; church administration secularized by, 25; and coronation of Catherine, 34–38; Elizabeth Petrovna compared with, 49, 51; foreign image of rule of, 26; governmental reform of, 27; as imperator, 32–33; justifying his

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479

power, 2, 31–32; Law of Succession of, 33, 40, 240; legacy of, 40–43; Louis XIV compared with, 23, 25, 29; non-Russians recruited by, 42; Paul I influenced by, 75; Petrine cadence, 4; Russian society transformed by, 26–31; Sofia overthrown by, 20; succession crisis following death of, 40; Western court culture created by, 27–31 —personal characteristics of: charisma of, 20, 32; dress of, 22; patronymic not used by, 24 —representations of: Catherine II’s monument to, 65–66, 66, 119, 202–3; and conquest motif, 3; depicted as god, 25, 39; and European myth, 3; as Father of the Fatherland, 32, 33; in millennium monument, 213, 215; Nicholas II donates statues of, 378; Paul I’s monument to, 95, 96; as Peter Alekseev, 20; as Peter the Great, 33; portraits of, 23, 24; Pygmalion and Galatea as emblem of, 32; Samson compared with, 25–26, 39; triumphal entry of 1696, 21–22 —as soldier: chivalric orders founded by, 90; and Icon of the Savior, 385; play regiments of, 19–20, 23, 374, 375–76; Poltava victory of, 25–26, 377; Preobrazhenskii Regiment founded by, 378 Peter II, Emperor of Russia, 240, 416n12 Peter III, Emperor of Russia: as designated heir, 47; emancipation of nobility from service by, 64; excesses of, 64; Frederick the Great influencing, 53, 77; Order of St. Anna founded by, 89; Paul I restoring memory of, 87, 130; servitors supporting Catherine II’s usurpation, 55; wife Catherine II deposes, 52–53 Peter, Metropolitan, 157 Peterhof: Alexander II and Maria Aleksandrovna at, 185; Alexander III at, 253, 307; Alexandra Fedorovna (I) on, 169; Alexandra Fedorovna’s (I) birthday celebrations at, 153–54; English Palace, 68; Nicholas II’s anniversary in Preobrazhenskii Regiment at, 374; Peter I creates copy of Versailles at, 27–28; Samson statue at, 26; Summer Garden, 29, 30; Summer Palace, 34, 51 Peter Nikolaevich, Grand Duke, 356 Peter Paul Cathedral (St. Petersburg), 38, 87, 130 Petersburg. See St. Petersburg Petersburg University, 116, 293

480

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I N D E X

Petipa, Marius, 278 Petrov, Peter Nikolaevich, 213–14, 251 Petrov, Vasilii, 68 Petrunkevich, Ivan I., 361 philosophes, 52, 58–59 photography, 336, 346, 406 Pindaric odes, 42–43 Plan for the Education and Upbringing of a Prince (Arndt), 125, 170–71 Platon, Metropolitan, 89, 91, 102 Play of Ataxerxes (Ahasuerus), The, 13 play regiments (poteshnye), 19–20, 23, 148, 374–76 Plehve, Viacheslav, 355, 357, 361, 383 Plevna, storming of, 232, 233, 234, 260 Pobedonostsev, Constantine: Alexander III as heir siding with against Alexander II, 256; Alexander III’s attachment and dependence on, 249; on Alexander III’s tour of empire in 1869 and 1870, 251; as Alexander III’s tutor, 254–55; Assembly of the Land opposed by, 269, 270; on bond between Russian people and tsar, 259; and canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 356–57; as chief-procurator of Holy Synod, 261, 285–86; on land captains, 295; manifesto of April 29, 1881, written by, 263; manifesto on Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer written by, 280; new men envisioned by, 258–59; on Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death, 220, 247; on Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s tour of empire, 217–18; Nicholas II’s accession manifesto written by, 334; on Nicholas II’s dislike of Germans, 318; on Nicholas II’s lack of opinions, 319; as Nicholas II’s teacher, 319, 320; Nicholas II versus liturgical collectivism of, 347; on nine-hundredth anniversary of conversion of Rus’, 287; on the nobility, 296; on Orthodoxy, 254, 260–61; on peasants in Duma, 363; police surveillance of, 257–58; on representative institutions, 320; in revitalization of the Church, 285–86; revolutionary movement as preoccupation of, 260; on Russo-Turkish War, 257; Witte and, 300, 301 Pochaev Monastery, 384–85 Pochaev Mother of God, 384–85 Pochaevskii Listok (journal), 385 poetry: for Alexander I’s coronation, 101–2; Derzhavin’s “Hymn to Gentleness,” 101; Derzhavin’s poem on Alexander I’s birth, 79; Karamzin’s poem on Alexander I’s coronation, 101–2; Karamzin’s “To His

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Imperial Majesty Alexander I, All-Russian Autocrat, On His Ascension to the Throne,” 99; Karamzin’s quatrain on friendship, 82–83; Khomiakov’s “August 26, 1856,” 201; of Maikov on assassination attempt on Alexander II, 221; national anthem, 159; odes, 42–43, 79, 99, 101, 171, 192; Tiutchev’s “Rossiia,” 223; of Zhukovskii for Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 178 Pogodin, Michael: Alexander II called upon to establish Duma by, 190; Alexander III reading works of, 254; on emancipation and resurrection, 210; on invitation of Viking princes, 143; Kavelin and, 194; on Moscow as political and religious center, 180; on Napoleon III, 191 pogroms, 283, 364 Pokrovskii, Vladimir, 372 Poland: Alexander I grants constitution to, 117; Alexander II brings elites into his scenario, 194; and Alexander III’s coronation, 274; Alexander III visits in 1888, 308, 309; and Great Russian ethnic supremacy, 284; Kholm, 309; and Nicholas II on legislature “Russian in spirit,” 369; partitions of, 66; Russianstyle churches built in, 290; Russification in, 283, 284, 309, 370; uprising of 1830, 149; uprising of 1863, 216–17; in World War I, 404 police: Alexander II reduces surveillance, 199; Alexander III redesigns uniforms of, 264–65; brutality in strikes, 348; incompetence in, 186; Loris-Melikov unites, 237; Nicholas I’s Third Section, 133, 235; patriotic demonstrations organized by, 402; period of repression after roundup of revolutionaries, 292; Peter I establishing, 28; Preobrazhenskii Chancellery and, 20; and protests after Bogolepov assassination, 351; surveillance after revolutions of 1848, 162; surveillance tightened after Karakazov attack, 222, 235; Temporary Regulations of August 1881 increasing power of, 297 police unions, 349, 362 Polivanov, Alexei, 405 poll (head) tax, 27, 299 polonaise, 92, 94, 153, 154, 161, 203 Polotskii, Semeon, 13, 18, 19 Polovtsov, Alexander A., 276, 284, 296, 350, 352 Poltava, Battle of, 25–26, 377

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Poltava jubilee, 6, 377–79 Popov, Nil, 254 popular sovereignty, 5, 120 Port Arthur, 290, 359–60, 361 portraits: of Alexander III, 265; of Alexei, 13, 16; of Catherine II, 53; of Elizabeth Petrovna, 45, 46, 51; of Nicholas I’s family, 167, 168; of Nicholas I’s officers, 148; of Nicholas II and Alexandra, 353, 354; of Nicholas II in military uniform, 406; personal likeness in, 13; of Peter, 23, 24 Poselianin, E., 311 Potemkin (battleship), 362 Potemkin, Gregory, 64, 69, 71, 82, 87 Potemkin villages, 71 poteshnye (play regiments), 19–20, 23, 148, 374–76 Poteshnyi (periodical), 374–76 Pozharskii, Dmitrii, 12, 157, 163, 215, 382, 390 “Prayer of the Russian People” (Zhukovskii), 159 precept (pouchenie), 11, 37, 49 Preobrazhensk, 13, 19 Preobrazhenskii, M., 290, 291 Preobrazhenskii Chancellery, 20 Preobrazhenskii Regiment: and Alexander III’s coronation, 272; Catherine II wearing uniform of, 52; Nicholas I and, 148; Nicholas II in, 322, 323, 340, 348, 373–74, 378; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 337; and Peter I’s play regiments, 20; at Poltava triumph, 25 press, the: Alexander II criticized in liberal, 225–26; Alexander II loosens controls on, 190–91; Alexander II’s coronation covered in, 195; on Alexander II’s trips of 1858, 207; Alexander III’s coronation covered in, 270; on Alexander III’s death, 313, 314; banquet campaign covered in, 362; on canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 359; censorship, 162, 190–91, 292, 379; freedom of, 235; on Khodynka massacre, 344; Maklakov wants to change press law, 383; Nicholas I’s coronation covered in, 135; Nicholas I using, 145; Nicholas II’s coronation covered in, 336–37; on Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348; Nicholas II’s forgiveness for press crimes, 384; Poltava jubilee covered by, 377; on Rasputin, 379; restrictions under Alexander III, 292; Russo-Turkish War supported by, 229; on tenth anniversary of

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Alexander III’s coronation, 313. See also newspapers primogeniture, 77, 89, 130, 182, 240 prints: of Alexander III’s funeral, 313–14; Nicholas I making, 147; of Nicholas I’s family, 167; Nicholas I using to disseminate family idyll, 329; Peter I using to celebrate his triumphs, 23 processions: at Alexander I’s visit to Moscow during Napoleon’s invasion, 110; at Alexander III’s funeral, 313–14; of Alexei, 15; Blessing of the Waters, 15–17, 31, 146; at coronations, 17, 35–36, 45, 47, 55–56, 88, 135–36, 195–98, 272–74, 338–39; at funerals, 38; great procession (bol’shoi vykhod), 151; after Ivan IV’s conquests, 12; Lentovskii’s “Spring,” 278–79; of Peter I, 21–22; Peter I’s parody, 20; slavlenie, 314; at twentyfifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164. See also processions of the cross processions of the cross: at Borodino jubilee, 380–81; at canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 357–58; at Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer dedication, 280–81; at jubilee celebrations, 286–87; as principal public ritual presenting National myth of Russian monarchy, 281; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 384, 385–86, 391 procuracy, 27 Progressist Party, 399 Progressive Bloc, 404 Prokopovich, Feofan, 25–26, 32, 34, 37, 39 property rights, 100, 222, 279, 369, 370 Protasov, A. Ia., 82 protectionism, 255, 299, 300, 301, 302 Provincial Reform of 1775, 63 Prus, 10 Prussia: administrative reform in, 120–21; Bismarck, 211, 228, 235, 299; and Crimean War, 186; Franco-Prussian War, 228, 257; Frederick William III, 113, 120, 121–22, 142, 172–73; German unification under leadership of, 257; Maria Fedorovna (I) influenced by royal house of, 122; military organization of, 77, 86, 92; Paul I influenced by, 86, 87, 92; “Prussomania,” 85; representative government in, 186; Schleswig-Holstein lost to, 257. See also Frederick the Great, King of Prussia Przheval’skii, Nicholas, 324–25, 327–28

482

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publicity: Alexander II using, 208; under Nicholas II, 336, 344, 374, 397. See also press, the public opinion, 224, 246 Pufendorf, Samuel, 32, 33 Pugachev, Emilian, 62–63, 77 Pugin, A.W.G., 287 Pumpianskii, L. V., 43 Pushkin, Alexander, 66, 119, 176, 215 Pustovoitenko, M. S., 406 Putiatin, Michael, 371 Pygmalion and Galatea, 32 Quakers, 116 Quarenghi, Giacomo, 68, 149 Radolin, Prince H. L., 302 Radziwill, Catherine, 303, 335, 346 Raeff, Marc, 103, 105, 296, 310 railroads: Borki train derailment, 309, 310–11; nationalization of, 299–300, 301; Trans-Siberian Railroad, 302, 323 Ransel, David, 75 Rasmussen, Karen, 65 Rasputin, 371, 379, 386, 387, 407, 408 Rastrelli, Bartolommeo Francesco, 51–52 Rastrelli, Carlo Bartolommeo, 26, 95, 96 rationalism, 31–32, 34, 41, 129 Raun, Toivo U., 290 reason, principle of, 31–32 Réau, Louis, 290 Rediger, A. F., 373 redistribution of the land, 279, 346, 368, 369, 399 Red Staircase (Kremlin, Moscow): Alexander I at in 1814, 110; at Alexander II’s coronation, 198–99; Alexander III’s coronation, 276; in Alexander III’s 1881 visit to Moscow, 267, 268; in Catherine II’s coronation, 56; and declaration of World War I, 401; in Nicholas I’s coronation, 136, 139; Nicholas II on view from, 321; in Nicholas II’s coronation, 339, 340; in Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348, 349; in tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 394–95, 395; tsars appearing on, 276; at twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164 reforms: of Alexander I, 99–101, 102, 103–5; of Alexander II, 173, 190–91, 193–94, 220, 227–29, 240; Alexander III’s counter-reforms, 293–97, 312; national myth delegitimating, 264, 282; of Nicholas I, 133–34; Nicholas II and, 335,

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355, 361–65; nobility taking up, 117; Paul I’s impulse for, 93; of Peter I, 27; Provincial Reform of 1775, 63. See also emancipation of the serfs; representative institutions regalia: of Catherine I, 35, 36–37; of Catherine II, 55; display after Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation, 50; of Monomakh, 10, 11, 15, 16; of Peter I, 36–37; reworked by Paul I, 90; sacralization under Paul I, 87, 88; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366. See also crown, imperial Regarding Nationalism: National Economy and Friedrich List (Witte), 301 regencies, 89, 137 Reign of the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Aleksandrovich, The (Elchaninov), 397–98 Reitern, Michael, 229, 257, 258 rejoicing, scenario of, 44, 51 religion: divine sanction, 2, 144; freedom of, 100; Jesuits, 19; Uniates, 309, 385. See also Church, Russian Orthodox; religious ceremonies religious ceremonies: Blessing of the Waters, 15–17, 31, 146; canonization of Serafim of Sarov, 357–58. See also processions of the cross renovation, 41, 54, 59 Repin, Nicholas, 77 Repnin, Prince A. I., 36 representative institutions: Constantine Nikolaevich’s proposals for, 261; educated society envisioning, 235; for Finland and Bulgaria, 432n43; Loris-Melikov supports, 238; Nicholas II accepts principle of, 362–63; nobles demanding after emancipation, 210; Pobedonostsev on, 320; zemstva assemblies calling for, 237. See also Assembly of the Land; constitution; Duma republicanism, 83–84 resurrection, 210, 288, 307–8 Resurrection egg, 308 Resurrection of Christ, Cathedral of the (St. Petersburg), 288–90, 289 Revel (Tallin), 290, 291 reviews, military reviews. See parades and military reviews revolutionary movement: Alexander II’s response to, 235–36, 238; Alexander III’s defeat of, 5, 260, 283, 292, 313; and assassination attempt on Alexander II, 221; beards associated with revolutionar-

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ies, 262; Bolsheviks, 391, 399, 400; “going-to-the-people” movement, 235, 236; Land and Freedom, 236; Mensheviks, 399; Nechaev, 236; Nicholas I’s measures against, 162; Nicholas II’s measures against, 361–62; nobility in, 117–18; Paul I fearing revolution, 93; People’s Will, 236, 240; show trials for, 235; Socialist Revolutionaries, 361, 368. See also assassinations; Decembrists revolution of 1905, 361–76; Bloody Sunday, 362; emergency decree of August 19, 1906, 368; Moskovskie Vedomosti blames on outside agitators, 382; Nicholas II having to restore autocracy after, 6, 364; October Manifesto, 363–64, 365, 369, 398, 400; pogroms during, 363; Poltava jubilee as marking end of, 378; Vyborg Manifesto, 391 revolution of 1917, 408 revolutions of 1848, 162, 185 Rheims, Maurice, 215 Riabushinskii, P. P., 399 Riabushkin, A., 336 Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 81 Riazan, 404 Ribaupierre, Alexander, 94 Richter, Otto, 313 Rieber, Alfred, 223, 255, 299 Riga, 102–3, 194 Rinaldi, Antonio, 68 ritual murder, 379–80, 399 Riurik, 10, 13, 17, 67, 213, 215 Rodichev, F. I., 335 Rodzianko, Michael, 379, 380, 386, 387, 388, 401 Rogger, Hans, 380 Romanodovskii, F. Iu, 20, 23 Romanov House (Kostroma), 155 Romanov Monument (Kostroma), 393 Romanov Museum (Kostroma), 392 Rome: Alexander I’s cathedrals imitating those of, 155; Augustus, 9, 10, 13, 59; Catherine II influenced by, 59, 60, 67–68, 69; first Russian tsars linking themselves to, 9–10; Julius Caesar, 21; Marcus Aurelius, 59, 66, 81; Trajan’s column, 149 Romme, Gilbert, 83 Rosen, Egor, 160 “Rossiia,” 12, 14, 17, 334 “Rossiia” (Tiutchev), 223 Rostopshchin, Fedor, 111 Rostov, 58 Rostovtsev, Iakov, 209

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 121 Rumiantsev, Field Marshall, 64 Runich, D. P., 116 Rus’: Assembly of the Land associated with, 362; autocracy associated with, 376; millennium monument commemorating, 213; in Nicholas II’s accession manifesto, 334; nine-hundredth anniversary of conversion of, 287; Rossiia compared with, 12, 14, 17, 334. See also Muscovy Ruskoi Vestnik (journal), 109, 110 Russell, William, 197 Russia and Europe (Danilevskii), 246–47 Russian army: Alexander I and, 106–8, 113–15, 117; Alexander II’s reforms of, 227–29; Alexander III changes style of, 264–66; Alexander III’s solidarity with, 260; at Blessing of the Waters ceremony, 31; Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer erected in memory of, 281; at Catherine I’s coronation, 35; in Decembrist rebellion, 128–30; education for officers, 228, 266; military colonies for, 114–15, 117; military reform of Michael and Alexei, 18; Nicholas I disregards problems of, 187; Nicholas I instills discipline in, 146–48; Nicholas II and, 373–74; Peter I transforms, 26–27; Peter III accused of bringing into disarray, 53; as representing the nation, 143; in revolutionary movement, 117–18; in war against Ottoman empire, 62. See also guards’ regiments; military reviews; musketeers (strel’tsy); uniforms Russian Bible Society, 115 “Russian dress,” 67, 151, 200, 366 Russian empire: and Alexander III’s coronation, 273; Alexei’s conquests, 14; Catherine II’s conquests, 62, 66–69; empire in Russian monarchy’s understanding of sovereignty, 1–2, 9; expansion to the east, 204, 324–25, 327–28, 359–60; as horizontally organized, 2; Ivan III assumes title of tsar, 9; Ivan IV’s imperial ambitions, 11–12; prestige erodes in 1850s, 186–87; Witte’s national imperialism, 302 Russian flag, 401–2 Russian land: and Alexander III’s coronation, 270; in Alexander III’s trip of 1888, 309; in presentations of Alexander III, 263–64 Russian monarchy: apparent ruptures in, 3–4; church and tsar, 2, 10, 12, 18, 88; Crimean War defeat affecting, 192–94;

484

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Russian monarchy (continued) cult of memory in, 131; derivative character of Russian sovereignty, 11; distinction between the institution of monarchy and the state, 4, 415n5; empire in understanding of sovereignty of, 1–2, 9; empresses of eighteenth century, 40–41; and European myth, 3; foreign images of power associated with, 1–2; as of German extraction, 334; in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160–61; Ivan III creates unified, 9; marrying outside Russian society, 30–31, 239; modes of thinking inculcated in rulers, 411; monarchical spirit attributed to Russian people, 5, 212, 214, 220, 221; mythological genealogies for, 9–10; national character of, 133, 143, 154; and National myth, 3; nobility and tsar uniting in seventeenth century, 294–95; Paul I’s Law of Succession, 88–89, 128, 129, 175; performative character of, 69; Petrine cadence in, 4; rift between monarchy and state under Nicholas II, 5–6, 397, 412; Romanov coat of arms, 187; rulers representing themselves as someone else, 412–13; seventeenth-century cultural crisis of, 12–20; succession law of 1722, 33, 40, 240; symbolic display as essential mechanism of, 1; synchronic mode of symbolic elevation of, 282–83, 309; tsar as father of his people, 33; tsars as makers of history, 2; “tsar” used for monarch, 9. See also bond between Russian people and tsar; coronations; court, Imperial Russian; imperial family; imperial suite; and monarchs by name Russian navy: Black Sea fleet, 362, 374; development under Alexander III, 313; mutinies in revolution of 1905, 362, 374; Nicholas II on, 327, 374; Peter I creates, 26; in war against Ottoman empire, 62 Russian Orthodox Church. See Church, Russian Orthodox Russian Orthodox Palestine Society, 311 Russian party, 245–47, 253, 256, 264 Russian people: and Alexander I and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, 108–11; and Alexander I’s visit to Riga, 102–3; at Alexander II and Maria Aleksandrovna’s visit to Moscow, 184; at Alexander II’s coronation, 197–99; and Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 179; at Alexandrine column dedication, 149; under Alexei, 15; and Catherine II’s coronation, 54–55;

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and celebrations surrounding coronations, 38; devotion to the monarchy, 143; as human backdrop, 2; increasing role in ceremony, 2, 412; millennium monument omitting, 216; monarchical spirit attributed to, 5, 212, 214, 220, 221; narod, 85, 282; Nicholas I’s closeness to, 144–45; and Nicholas I’s coronation, 136, 139–40; popular sovereignty, 5, 120; public opinion, 224, 246; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 388–89. See also bond between Russian people and tsar; peasants; people’s feasts after coronations; workers Russian style, 304 Russification: under Alexander III, 283, 284, 302, 309; Bobrikov enforcing, 361; Duma nationalists revive, 370; Katkov supporting, 217; in Poland, 283, 284, 309, 370; Sipiagin on, 351; Trans-Siberian Railroad in, 302; in Ukraine, 283, 370 Russkaia Beseda (journal), 191 Russkii Invalid (newspaper), 142, 145, 146, 176, 177, 190 Russkii Khudozhestvennyi Listok (newspaper): on Alexander II in Riga, 194; on Alexander II’s coronation, 195, 196, 197, 198; Nicholas I eulogized by, 187, 188; Nicholas I using, 145; on twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164 Russkii Mir (journal), 229 Russkii Vestnik (journal), 191, 197 Russkoe Slovo (newspaper), 383–84, 400 Russo-Japanese War, 360, 361, 363, 405 Russo-Turkish War, 229–35, 257–58, 299 Ryleev, K. F., 131 Rysakov, Nicholas, 241 Sabler, Vladimir, 385 Sablukov, Nicholas, 94 sacrifice: Alexander II’s affair with Dolgorukova and ethos of, 224; Alexander III and ethos of, 258; emancipation of serfs portrayed as, 206 Sahlins, Marshall, 2, 22 St. Andrew, Order of, 90, 91 St. Anna, Order of, 89 St. Catherine, Church of (St. Petersburg), 155–56 St. Catherine, Order of, 90 St. Dmitrii Cathedral (Vladimir), 158 St. George, Order of, 151, 228, 260, 407 St. Isaac, Cathedral of (St. Petersburg), 68, 155

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St. Petersburg: Alexander I and neoclassical sculpture in, 108; and Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 177; Alexander II’s return after Plevna, 232–33; in Alexander III’s scenario, 267; Alexander Nevskii as patron saint of, 32; Alexandrine column, 149–50, 150; Cathedral of St. Isaac, 68, 155; Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, 288–90, 289; cholera epidemic in, 144; Church of St. Catherine, 155–56; declaration of World War I in, 400–401; as epitomizing Russia, 147; establishment of, 27–28; flood of November 9, 1824, 119; general strike of 1914, 400; general strikes of 1896 and 1897, 347–48; Horse Guards Manege, 107, 108, 149; Kazan Cathedral, 155, 220, 231, 384, 385, 386; Michael Castle, 95; name changed to Petrograd, 401; neoclassical architecture in, 68, 108, 150; Nicholas I constructing government buildings in, 147; Nicholas I strolling through, 144–45; Nicholas I wants to reconstruct provincial towns on model of, 146; Nicholas II donates statues of Peter I to, 378; Peter-Paul Cathedral, 38, 87, 130; protests after Bogolepov assassination, 351; Resurrection Cathedral, 290; Russian party on, 245; Russianstyle churches built in, 290, 437n14; strikes and bread riots in 1917, 408; student strike of 1899, 348; Tauride Palace, 68, 365; tercentenary celebrations of 1913 in, 383–89, 394; zemstvo congress in, 362. See also Winter Palace St. Petersburg Charitable Society, 287 St. Petersburg Writers Union, 351 Saltykov, I. N., 382 Saltykov, Nicholas, 80 Saltykov, Peter, 55 Samara, 252 Samarin, A. D., 382 Samarin, Iurii, 191, 207, 254, 256 Samarkand, 204 Samborskii, Andrei, 81–82 Samokish-Sudkovskaia, E., 342 Samson, 25–26, 39 Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (newspaper), 194, 203–4, 267, 354 Sankt-Peterburgskii Zhurnal, 84 San Stefano, Treaty of (1878), 235 Sapunov, B. V., 310, 311 Sarov, 356, 357, 359, 360 Sarti, Giuseppe, 69, 71, 277 Savenko, A. I., 397

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Savitskii, Constantine, 272 Sazonov, E. S., 361 Sazonov, Sergei, 381 scenario of love, 189–204; Alexander I and, 99, 102; of Alexander II, 193–94, 195, 197–201, 203–4, 206, 207–9, 221, 230, 232, 235–36, 237–38, 239; Alexander III eschewing, 263; of Catherine II, 53, 54, 70, 102; emancipation of serfs and, 206, 207–9; in Filaret’s address at Alexander II’s coronation, 198; Maria Fedorovna (II) and, 251; of Nicholas I, 145, 146, 147, 164, 170; as theme of Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 180 Scepter of Rule (Polotskii), 13 Schelling, Friedrich, 163 Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, David, 324 Schleswig-Holstein, 257 scholarly journals, 52 Schweinitz, Hans Lothar von, 227 science: Academy of Sciences, 56, 306; Catherine II promoting, 54 Scott, Walter, 167, 169 sculpture: Alexandrine column, 149–50, 150, 425n23; Catherine II’s monument to Peter I, 65–66, 66, 119; copies of Dioscuri, 107, 108; Mikeshin’s statue of Bogdan Khmelnitskii, 287; millennium monument, 213–16, 214; neoclassical, 108; Nicholas II donates statues of Peter I, 378; in Nicholas II’s decor, 333; Paul I’s monument to Peter I, 95, 96; in Peter I’s Summer Palace garden, 29, 30; Samson at Peterhof, 26; statue of Nicholas I of 1858, 130, 145, 201–3, 202 seal, state, 14 Second Section of emperor’s chancellery, 133 Secret Expedition, 93, 98, 100 Sel’skii Vestnik (newspaper), 271, 348, 377 Semenovskii Regiment, 20, 117–18, 272 Senate: in Alexander I’s reforms, 104, 105; and assassination attempt on Alexander II, 220; Elizabeth Petrovna restores, 51, 52; and emancipation of serfs, 210; governorgeneral in, 63; oath to Nicholas I sworn by, 129; and police excesses under Alexander III, 297; Secret Expedition of, 93; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 386; Unofficial Committee and, 100 Seneca, 81 seniority, principle of, 33 sentimentalism, 137, 171–72, 189 Serafim, Metropolitan, 176 Serafim of Sarov, 356–59, 360, 372

486

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Serbia, 257 serfdom: Alexander I on improving conditions of serfs, 100; Cossacks reduced to condition approximating, 67; military colonies and elimination of, 115; Nicholas I on, 133–34, 205, 209; Paul I rewarding favorites with serfs, 91; Russia as last absolute monarchy based on, 186, 205. See also emancipation of the serfs Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander II), 247; ball after Nicholas II’s coronation, 345; and Danilovich, 318; as governor-general of Moscow, 311–12; and Khodynka massacre, 343–44; marriage to Elizabeth Fedorovna, 328; and Nicholas II’s Easter visits to Moscow, 348; Nicholas II stays with after coronation, 346; parents as doting on, 306 Sergei of Radonezh, St., 157, 158, 279, 287, 360 Serov, V. A., 343 service ethos, 27, 258 servitors: of Alexander I, 105; Alexander III envisioning new type of, 256; Alexander III instilling confidence in, 283; of Alexei, 12, 15; of Catherine II, 62, 64; in coronation processions, 17; of Ivan III, 9; of Nicholas I, 147–48; personal relationship tsars of, 303; of Peter, 22, 28; sovereign having to present a model for, 181; Table of Ranks for, 27, 28; Ulozhenie of 1649 for, 12, 15, 17 Sevastopol, 71, 192, 193, 252, 308, 374 Severnaia Pchela (newspaper): on Alexander II’s coronation, 195, 197; on Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 176, 177; on Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 180; on Alexander II’s trip south in 1855, 192; on Alexander II’s wedding, 183; on “God Save the Tsar,” 160; on millennium celebrations of 1862, 212; on Nicholas I in Nizhnii-Novgorod, 146; on Nicholas I’s coronation, 135; on Nicholas I’s death, 187; Nicholas I’s family covered by, 145; on “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” 144; on twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation, 164 Shakhovskoi, S. V., 284, 290 shakos, 265, 373 Shamil, 203–4 Shcheglovitov, Ivan, 368, 379, 380, 399 Shcherbatov, Nicholas, 405 Shekhtel’, Fedor, 278 Sheremet’ev, S. D., 350

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Shevyrev, Stepan, 201 Shilder, N. K., 350 shirinki, 290 Shishkov, A. S., 109, 111, 112, 116 Shreder, I. N., 215 Shumacher, Johann Daniel, 45 Shuvalov, Alexander, 55 Shuvalov, Ivan, 49, 52 Shuvalov, Peter (chief of gendarmes under Alexander II), 222, 228, 235, 238 Shuvalov, Peter (favorite of Empress Elizabeth), 49, 52 Siam, 325, 326 Siberia: Alexander I’s visit to, 118; Alexander II’s visit to, 178, 179; Nicholas II’s 1891 visit to, 327, 328; Russification of, 302; strikes in Lena gold fields, 380; symbolized in Alexei’s seal, 14; Ukhtomskii in, 325; Vladivostok, 327 Silverman, Deborah, 307 Simbirsk, 146 Simchenko, A. M., 221 Sipiagin, Dmitrii, 350–52, 354 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 195, 198 Skobolev, Michael, 234 Skobolev at Sheinovo (Vereshchagin), 234 Slavic-Latin Academy, 23–25 slavlenie, 314 Slavophiles: Assembly of the Land supported by, 5, 246, 259, 269, 362; on bond between tsar and people, 15; conflict with statists, 269–70, 271; on emancipation of serfs, 206–7; Maria Aleksandrovna and, 223; national dress and beards worn by, 163; and National myth, 5; New Kremlin Palace dedication inspiring, 163; Nicholas II versus liturgical collectivism of, 347; Pobedonostsev and, 254, 259; romantic nationalism of, 246–47; and “Russian land,” 263; Russkaia Beseda founded by, 191; sentimental morality of, 246. See also Pan-Slavism Slepov, Fedor, 349 Smith, Sidney, 114 Smolensk, 14, 70 Smolensk Mother of God, 380, 381, 384 Smolny Convent, 51 Sobonin, Ivan, 160, 161 Sobriety Trusts, 389, 393 Socialist Revolutionaries, 361, 368 social season, 303, 306 Sofia, Regent of Russia, 18, 19, 20 Sofia Paleologus, 9 Solari, Pietro, 9

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Sollogub, Vladimir, 230–32, 234 Solon, 81 Soloviev, Sergei, 52, 205, 254, 320 “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” 354 Speranskii, Michael, 104, 105, 133, 173, 175–76, 215, 320 Spiridovich, Alexander I., 378, 387 Spiritual Regulation of 1721, 32 Splendid Pearl, The (ballet), 342 “Spring” (procession), 278–79 starchestvo, 356, 357 Starobinski, Jean, 29, 43 Starov, Ivan, 68 state, the: Alexander I’s reforms, 103–5; Catherine II’s commission to codify laws, 59–62; Catherine II’s Provincial Reform of 1775, 63; centenary celebrations of central institutions of, 352; centralization under Paul and Alexander I, 93, 105; distinction between monarchy and, 4, 415n5; as interfering with bond between people and tsar, 389–90; Michael consolidating authority of, 12; National myth delegitimating, 282, 317; Nicholas I’s reforms, 133–34; Nicholas II as hostile toward, 317, 323; Peter I and obligation to serve, 33; Peter I secularizes church administration, 25, 32; Peter I’s governmental reform, 27; as representing the nation, 143; rift between monarchy and state under Nicholas II, 5–6, 397, 412; Slavophiles on, 163; Stolypin on role of, 370. See also bureaucracy; Duma; police; Senate; State Council State Council: Alexander II as heir appointed to, 185; Alexander III as heir appointed to, 255; Alexander III’s counter-reforms opposed by, 295, 296–97, 312; amnesty called for by, 383; and Borodino jubilee, 380; centenary celebrations of, 352; Duma contrasted with, 366; and emancipation of serfs, 209; and Ignat’ev’s anti-Jewish measures, 284; and Karakazov attempt on Alexander II, 220; Nicholas Aleksandrovich appointed to, 323; and Nicholas I’s accession manifesto, 129; Nicholas II rejecting majority opinion of, 350; and Nicholas II’s coronation, 337; reorganization of 1906, 365; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 388, 392; university autonomy eliminated by, 293; Viazemskii supported by, 351, 352 state seal, 14 Statute of the Imperial Family, 89, 184

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Statute on Russian Imperial Orders, 89–90 Stein, Heinrich, 121 Steinberg, Mark, 371 Stites, Richard, 147 stoicism, 79, 81 Stolypin, Peter, 368–69, 370, 371, 373, 378, 379 Storch, Heinrich, 67 strel’tsy. See musketeers (strel’tsy) Stremoukhov, P. P., 391–92 strikes: general strike of October 1905, 363; in Kostroma, 391; in Lena gold fields, 380; in Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, 347–48; in Petersburg in 1914, 400; in Petersburg in 1917, 408; regain momentum in 1914, 399–400; student strike of 1899, 348; during World War I, 402 Stroganov, Paul, 83 Struve, Peter, 351, 361, 401 students: disorders at Moscow University in 1880s, 293; disorders in Petersburg in 1862, 217; drafting of protesters, 351; opposition to Nicholas II among, 347; Petersburg strike of 1899, 348; protests after Bogolepov assassination, 351 Sukhomlinov, Vladimir A., 379 Sultanov, Nicholas, 306 Sumarokov, Alexander, 42–43 Sumarokov, Peter, 55, 57, 65 Summer Garden (St. Petersburg), 29, 30 Summer Palace (St. Petersburg), 34, 51 Supreme Executive Commission, 237, 238 Surikov, V. I., 274–75 Susanin, Ivan: Cavos’s Ivan Susanin, 159; descendants at Alexander III’s coronation, 274; and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160, 161; Karakazov attempt on Alexander III compared with, 221; on millennium monument, 216; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 392, 393; in Zakrevskii’s masquerade, 163 Suvorin, Alexei, 229, 234, 340, 345 Suvorov, Alexander, 241, 266 Svet (newspaper), 271 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Dmitrii, 361–62 Svin’in, Pavel, 118, 135–36, 137–39 Sweden: Charles XII, 25, 65, 377; Lomonosov’s ode on defeat of, 43; as model for Peter, 27; Peter I’s victory over, 23, 25, 65 symbols: becoming ends in themselves, 144; as essential mechanism of tsarist rule, 1; Ivan III claiming Byzantine, 9; Peter using, 23–24, 35

488

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I N D E X

Symbols and Emblems, 23 synchronic mode, 282–83, 309 syphilis, 181 Sytin, I. V., 377 Table of Ranks, 27, 28 Tale of the Tsarevich Khlor, The (Catherine II), 79–80 Tale of the Vladimir Princes, 9–10, 13 Tallin (Revel), 290, 291 Talyzin, Ivan, 55 Tannenberg, Battle of, 402 tariffs, 299, 300, 301, 302, 320 Tashkent, 204 Tatars, 67, 72, 118, 172, 197, 218, 279, 369 Tatiana Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess (daughter of Nicholas II), 330, 331, 332 Tatishchev, S. S., 262 Tauride Palace, 68, 365 Tauris, 68 Tchaikovsky, Peter Il’ich, 277, 280, 354, 382 Temporary Regulations of August 14, 1881, 267, 284, 297 Tenderness icon, 372 Teplov, Grigorii, 53 tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 383–96; books and pamphlets printed for, 377; February celebrations, 383–89; May celebrations, 389–96; and Nicholas II and the peasants, 6; partisan character of, 385 Tercentenary Committee of Monarchist Organizations, 385 Terem Palace (Kremlin, Moscow), 158, 162 theatricality: as attribute of power, 42; balagan, 278; national anthem played in theaters, 159; performances after Nicholas I’s coronation, 140; in Russian nature, 335; at tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387 Third Section, 133, 235 Thon, Constantine: Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, 156–58, 157, 280; Church of St. Catherine, 155–56; New Kremlin Palace, 158, 162–63; “Thon style,” 156, 288 Three Emperors League, 298 Tibet, 324, 360 Tikhon, Archpriest, 392 Time of Troubles, 12, 160, 239, 292, 294 Timm, Vasilii, 188, 188 Timmerman, Franz, 22 Tiutchev, Fedor, 196, 208, 216, 223 Tiutcheva, Anna, 184–85, 190, 208, 222, 223, 357

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“To His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, AllRussian Autocrat, On His Ascension to the Throne” (Karamzin), 99 Tolstoi, Alexandra, 247 Tolstoi, Alexei, 196 Tolstoi, Dmitrii, 212–13, 222, 270, 293, 295, 296 Tolstoi, Leo, 234, 286 Totleben, E. I., 252 Transfiguration, 20 Trans-Siberian Railroad, 302, 323 travel: by Alexander I, 102–3, 118–19; by Alexander II, 178–81, 191–92, 194, 207–9, 211, 216; by Alexander III, 250, 251–52, 267–68, 308–11; by Catherine II, 58, 69–72, 118; by Nicholas Aleksandrovich, 217–18; by Nicholas I, 125–26, 145–46, 348–49; by Nicholas II, 324–28, 355, 389–96, 403–4; Nicholas I restricts foreign, 162, 191; by Paul I, 92, 184; Paul I forbids foreign, 93, 98 Treaty of Nystadt (1721), 32 Treaty of Paris (1856), 192, 193, 216 Treaty of San Stefano (1878), 235 Trepov, F. F., 236 Tretiakov, S. M., 399 “Trinity and Athos Sheets,” 286 Trinity Cathedral (Kostroma), 392 Trinity Monastery, 44, 50, 58, 279–80, 287, 346 triple bow: at Alexander II’s coronation, 198; at Alexander III’s coronation, 276; at Alexander III’s 1881 Moscow visit, 267, 268; at Nicholas I’s coronation, 138, 139, 140, 423n40; at Nicholas I’s 1851 Moscow visit, 164; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 340 Triscorni, Paolo, 107 triumphal arches, 21, 23, 25, 141, 337, 390 Triumph of Catherine, The (Summer Palace), 34 Triumph of Venus (Gatchina), 79 Trubetskoi, Nikita, 45 Trudoviki (Laborer) Party, 365, 368 Trusteeship for Icon Painting, 350 Tsar bell, 215 Tsar Emperor Nicholas Aleksandrovich with the Active Army (Dubenskii), 403–4, 406–7 Tsarskoe Selo: Alexander I at, 117; Alexander II at, 185; Alexander III at, 253, 307; Court Hospital in World War I, 403; Fedorov Cathedral, 359, 371–72;

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Fedorovskii gorodok, 371–73; Great Palace, 51; Nicholas II at, 331, 370–73; railroad station at, 372 Tugan-Baranovskii, M. I., 351 Tula, 70 Turgenev, Ivan, 196 Turkestan, 272, 325, 369 Turkey. See Ottoman empire Turoboiskii, Iosif, 24 Tver, 63, 179, 180, 210–11, 250 Tyrtov, Pavel, 359 Uhlans, 265, 373 Ukhtomskii, Esper, 324, 325, 326, 327 Ukraine: Alexander III visits in 1888, 308; Nicholas II visits in late 1915, 404; Nicholas Pavlovich tours in 1816, 125; pogroms of 1881 in, 283; Russification in, 283, 370. See also Kiev Ulozhenie (1649), 12 umilenie, 137, 177, 274 Uniates, 309, 385 uniforms: Alexander I reforms, 106; of Alexander II at Winter Palace ball of 1859, 203; Alexander II’s interest in, 231; Alexander III redesigns, 264–65; Catherine II wearing guards’, 53; of Cavalier Guards, 36; changing under Alexander II, 99; of His Majesty’s Rifles, 200; Nicholas I designing, 147–48; for Nicholas I’s court, 151; Nicholas II introducing new, 373; at Nicholas II’s coronation, 337; Paul I and, 78, 86 union between Russian people and tsar. See bond between Russian people and tsar Union of Russian People: Beilis trial pressed by, 379; and dissolution of Duma, 369; Nicholas II as sympathizing with, 364; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 385, 386, 388, 390–91; Vitalii abbot of Pochaev Monastery as spokesman for, 385 Union of the Archangel Michael, 385, 386, 388 universities: Alexander I founding, 104; Alexander II loosens controls over, 191; Alexander III eliminating autonomy of, 293; Kazan University, 217, 293; Kharkov University, 293; Novorossiisk University, 293; opposition to autocracy in, 217; Petersburg University, 116, 293; religion in curriculum of, 116, 162; serfdom opposed in, 205. See also Moscow University

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University Charter (1884), 293 Unkovskii, Alexander, 206, 210 Unofficial Committee, 99–100, 101, 102, 103–4 Ushakov, Semen, 276 Uspenskii, Boris, 30 utility, principle of, 31–32, 33, 34, 69, 87, 240 Uvarov, Sergei, 143–44, 285 Valuev, Peter: at Alexander III’s coronation, 274; on Alexander III’s majority ceremony, 250; army reform supported by, 228; and Katkov, 246; on millennium celebration, 212, 216; on millennium monument, 215; on Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s death, 219; on reception of emancipation, 210; on the tsar as a semi-ruin, 237 Vannovskii, Peter, 259, 260, 266, 359 Varangians, 5, 41, 143, 212, 259 Vasil’chikov, Alexander, 276 Vasil’chikov, I. V., 106 Vasilii the Blessed, Cathedral of (Moscow), 288, 326, 372 Vasnetsov, Victor, 276, 336 Vebel’, Lieutenant-Colonel, 327 Vel’iaminov, N. A., 351 Vel’tman, Alexander, 163 Venus, 29, 51, 79 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 234 Verner, Andrew, 321, 364 Versailles, 27–28, 51, 78, 108, 337 Vestnik Evropy (journal), 135 Viazemskii, Leonid, 351, 352 Viazemskii, Prince A. A., 64 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 329, 331, 335, 345, 377 Victorian decor, 331, 333 Viel’gorskii, Count Michael, 178 Viel’gorskii, Joseph, 171, 174 Vienna, 290 Vigel’, F. F., 126 Vinius, Andrei, 21, 22 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 287 Virgil, 68 Virgin Mary: apparitions of the, 356, 357; Marian cult, 311, 357; and umilenie, 137. See also Mother of God icons Vitalii, Abbot, 385 Vitberg, Alexander, 155, 156 Vladimir, 390 Vladimir, Order of, 65 Vladimir, St., 13, 65, 213, 215, 285, 287, 309

490

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I N D E X

Vladimir Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (son of Alexander II): as Academy of Arts president, 304, 306; at Alexander II’s last review, 241; costume ball held by, 304, 305; as feeling neglected by his parents, 247–48; at Filaret’s funeral, 255; and Khodynka massacre, 344; in military exercises in 1864, 248; on peasants in Duma, 363; Russian style favored by, 304; in RussoTurkish War, 230, 231; scandalizing public opinion, 224; as student, 248 Vladimir Monomakh, 10, 135, 215, 288, 321 Vladimir Mother of God, 157, 407–8 Vladimir Princes, Tale of the, 9–10, 13 Vladivostok, 327 Voeikov, V. N., 352, 371 Voeikov, V. V., 241, 266, 267, 269 Voitiniuk, Sergeant-Major, 380 Volkov, Fedor, 57 Voltaire, 59, 75, 95, 116 Von Laue, Theodore, 302 Vonliarliarskii, V. M., 360 Vorob’ev, M. N., 155 Voronezh, 404 Vorontsov, Alexander, 100 Vorontsov, Michael, 49 Vorontsov, M. S., 192 Vorontsova, Countess, 305 Vorontsov-Dashkov, Ilarion, 259, 260, 269, 305–6, 313, 337 vostorg, 137, 192 Voyage of His Imperial Highness, Sovereign Heir, and Tsarevich in 1890 and 1891 to the East, The (Ukhtomskii), 325 V pamiat’ sviashchennago koronovaniia (Komarov), 273 Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia (weekly), 267, 271, 303, 304, 313, 314 Vsiakaia Vsiachina (Catherine II), 65 Vyborg Manifesto (1906), 391 Vyshnegradskii, Ivan, 300, 301 waltzes, 93, 94, 352 War and Peace (Tolstoi), 234 War Industrial Committees, 402 Wcislo, Frank, 293, 295 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 81 Weber, Max, 2 weddings: of Alexander II and Maria Aleksandrovna, 183; of Alexander III and Maria Fedorovna (II), 251; of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna (II), 329, 335; of Peter I and Catherine I, 31

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Wellington, Duke of, 113, 114, 130 Westernization: Alexander III distancing himself from, 245, 253, 264, 283, 303, 314; of Nicholas I, 150–51, 186; of Peter I, 21, 22, 27–31; serfdom as inconsistent with values of, 205 “What Glory Now Shines” (hymn), 277 White, Andrew Dickson, 298–99 White Russia, 14 Whittaker, Cynthia, 41 William I, Emperor of Germany, 130, 227, 228, 246 William II, Emperor of Germany, 319, 377 Wilhelmina Louise of Baden, 182 Winter Palace (St. Petersburg): Alexander I moves back into, 98; Alexander II confined to, 237; Alexander II’s death at, 241; Alexander III disliking, 252, 253; Alexandra Fedorovna (II) on, 307; assassination attempt on Alexander II in, 237; ball of 1859, 203; Bloody Sunday, 362; court functions under Alexander III at, 303; declaration of World War I at, 400–401; first Preobrazhenskii battalion guarding, 148; great procession (bol’shoi vykhod) at, 151; Nicholas I’s study in, 188; Nicholas II’s reception of Duma deputies in, 366; oath of majority ceremony at, 176; Rastrelli’s redesign of, 52; as resembling barracks under Paul I, 86; and tercentenary celebrations of 1913, 387; war work in, 403 Witte, Sergei: in Alexander III’s economic policy, 300–302; dismissal of, 360; and election law of December 11, 1905, 364, 365; Nicholas II keeping in office of Minister of Finances, 334; in October Manifesto’s drafting, 363; as prime minister, 363–64; resigns as prime minister, 367–68; restraint in Far East urged by, 359; on state as leading society, 302, 368 women: and Alexei’s ceremonies, 15; coronation of, 34; dress at Nicholas I’s court, 151, 152–53; empresses of eighteenth century, 40–41; Maria Fedorovna’s (I), work on behalf of, 122; in Paul I’s Law of Succession, 89; Peter I brings into public, 28–31; Russian dress at masquerade at Alexander II’s coronation, 200; Russian dress for court of Catherine II, 67, 151; at tsar’s reception of Duma deputies, 366 workers: Bolshevik influence among, 400; in election law of December 11, 1905, 364;

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growing radicalism feared in Duma, 399; Liberation Movement seeks support from, 363; mobilization for World War I, 402; opposition to Nicholas II among, 347; in police unions, 349, 362. See also strikes World War I, 400–408 Wright, Thomas, 167, 168 Yalu River, 360 Yeltsin, Boris, 413 Zadonshchina (epic), 277 Zagoskin, Mikhail, 254 Zaionchkovskii, Peter, 270 Zakharova, Larissa, 209 Zakrevskii, Arsenii, 163 Zamiatnin, Dmitrii, 222 Zamyslovskii, Egor, 319 Zarudnyi, Sergei, 222 Zasulich, Vera, 236, 260 Zemgor, 402 zemskii sobor. See Assembly of the Land zemstva assemblies: in Alexander III’s counter-reforms, 296–97; amnesty called for by, 383; censorship of periodicals of, 292; establishment of, 216; and famine of 1891, 312; Kakhanov Commission reform proposal for, 293; Kokovtsov’s plan to liberalize, 398; “Ministry of Confidence” called for by, 404; Nicholas II on, 335; opposition to Nicholas II in, 347; on rep-

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resentative institutions, 237; Sipiagin curtailing privileges of, 351; Stolypin on an “all-class zemstvo,” 370; during World War I, 402 zemstvo constitutionalists, 354, 361, 362 Zheliabov, Alexander, 240 Zhikharev, S. P., 103 Zhivov, Victor, 59 Zhukovskii, Vasilii: on Alexander II’s love of parades, 175; at Alexander II’s majority ceremony, 176, 178; on Alexander II’s tour of the empire, 178, 180; as Alexander II’s tutor, 170, 171–74; on Alexandrine column dedication, 149, 424n20; Bludov as protégé of, 136; and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, 160, 161; on living for the people, 171–72; on millennium monument, 215; motto for the Cottage devised by, 169; ode on Alexander II’s birth, 171; on relationship between Nicholas I and Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, 170; words for national anthem written by, 159 Zichy, M. A., 196, 196, 198, 201 Zinov’ev, M. A., 284 Zinoviev, Nicholas, 249 Zitser, Ernest, 19 Zlatoustov, 118 Znamenskii Monastery, 355 Zorin, Andrei, 144 Zubov, Alexei, 25, 26, 27, 31 Zuev, Vasilii, 382 Zuzin, B. N., 391

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The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule by Oliver H. Radkey, Columbia University Press, 1963. Comintern and World Revolution, 1928–1943: The Shaping of Doctrine by Kermit E. McKenzie, Columbia University Press, 1964. Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 1926–1933: A Study in Diplomatic Instability by Harvey L. Dyck, Columbia University Press, 1966. Financing Soviet Schools by Harold J. Noah, Teachers College Press, 1966. Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace by John M. Thompson, Princeton University Press, 1966. The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich, Princeton University Press, 1967. The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932 by Loren R. Graham, Princeton University Press, 1967. Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s by Robert A. Maguire, Princeton University Press, 1968; paperback, Cornell University Press, 1987. Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1967 by T. H. Rigby, Princeton University Press, 1968. Soviet Ethics and Morality by Richard T. DeGeorge, University of Michigan Press, 1969; paperback, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1969. Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895–1903 by Jonathan Frankel, Cambridge University Press, 1969. Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956–1967 by William Zimmerman, Princeton University Press, 1969. Kronstadt, 1921 by Paul Avrich, Princeton University Press, 1970. Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia by Ezra Mendelsohn, Cambridge University Press, 1971. The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature by Edward J. Brown, Columbia University Press, 1971. Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 by Reginald E. Zelnik, Stanford University Press, 1971. Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad by Patrica K. Grimsted, Princeton University Press, 1972. The Baku Commune, 1917–1918 by Ronald G. Suny, Princeton University Press, 1972. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution by Edward J. Brown, Princeton University Press, 1973. Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov by Milton Ehre, Princeton University Press, 1973. German Politics under Soviet Occupation by Henry Krisch, Columbia University Press, 1974. Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s, Henry W. Morton and Rudolph L. Tokes, eds., Free Press, 1974. Liberals in the Russian Revolution by William G. Rosenberg, Princeton University Press, 1974. Famine in Russia, 1891–1892 by Richard G. Robbins, Jr., Columbia University Press, 1974. In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction by Vera Dunham, Cambridge University Press, 1976. The Road to Bloody Sunday by Walter Sablinsky, Princeton University Press, 1976; paperback, Princeton University Press, 1986.

The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin by William Mills Todd III, Princeton University Press, 1976. Russian Realist Art, The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition by Elizabeth Valkenier, Ardis Publishers, 1977. The Soviet Agrarian Debate by Susan Solomon, Westview Press, 1978. Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Indiana University Press, 1978; paperback Midland Books, 1984. Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy: Specialists in Policy-Making by Peter Solomon, Columbia University Press, 1978. Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia by Kendall E. Bailes, Princeton University Press, 1978. The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914, Leopold H. Haimson, ed., Indiana University Press, 1979. Political Participation in the USSR by Theodore H. Friedgut, Princeton University Press, 1979; paperback, Princeton University Press, 1982. Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cambridge University Press, 1979. The Soviet Marriage Market: Mate Selection in Russia and the USSR by Wesley Andrew Fisher, Praeger Publishers, 1980. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and Russian Jews, 1862–1917 by Jonathan Frankel, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader by Robin Feuer Miller, Harvard University Press, 1981. Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution by Diane Koenker, Princeton University Press, 1981; paperback, Princeton University Press, 1986. Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia by Patricia K. Grimsted, Princeton University Press, 1981. Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 by Ezra Mendelsohn, Yale University Press, 1982. Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Behavior by Hannes Adomeit, George Allen and Unwin Publishers, 1982. Russia at the Crossroads: The 26th Congress of the CPSU, Seweryn Bailer and Thane Gustafson, eds., George Allen and Unwin Publishers, 1982. The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government by Roberta Thompson Manning, Princeton University Press, 1983; paperback, Princeton University Press, 1986. Sergei Aksakov and Russian Pastoral by Andrew A. Durkin, Rutgers University Press, 1983. Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union by Bruce Parrott, MIT Press, 1983. The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind by Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Praeger Publishers, 1983. Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii by Sarah Pratt, Stanford University Press, 1984. Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 by John P. LeDonne, Princeton University Press, 1984. Insidious Intent: A Structural Analysis of Fedor Sologub’s Petty Demon by Diana Greene, Slavica Publishers, 1986. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger by Richard Gustafson, Princeton University Press, 1986.

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