LITMIR.BIZ

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Aleksandr Vyndomsky’s estate manager at Trigorskoe led to a revolt eventually put down, after an engagement which left forty dead or wounded, by a squadron of dragoons and a detachment of infantry under the command of the governor of Pskov. The seven ring-leaders were publicly knouted, branded, their nostrils slit, and were exiled to hard labour for life.

      Since the time of Catherine II various projects had been put forward for reforming the system, or emancipating the serfs, but with no result. The accession of the liberal-minded Alexander in 1801 gave hope to the abolitionists; but, following the Napoleonic wars, a period of reaction set in, marked, in external affairs, by Alexander’s creation of the Holy Alliance and internally by his appointment in 1815 of Count Arakcheev, a narrow-minded, brutal martinet, as deputy president of the Committee of Ministers: for the next ten years Arakcheev’s house on the corner of the Liteiny Prospect and Kirochnaya Street was the effective centre of government.

      Oppressor of all Russia,

      Persecutor of governors

      And tutor to the Council,

      To the tsar he is – a friend and brother.

      Full of malice, full of vengeance,

      Without wit, without feeling, without honour,

      Who is he? Loyal without flattery,

The penny soldier of a whore.^{* 31}

      Opinions differed on how the abolition of serfdom was to be brought about. In the view of the more conservative, it had to be preceded by constitutional reform. More radical opponents of the institution believed that constitutional reform would merely strengthen the hand of the landowners and worsen the condition of the serfs. Paradoxically, therefore, they saw the solution to lie in the exercise of autocratic power, through an arbitrary fiat of the emperor. It is this view which Pushkin, echoing the ideas of Nikolay Turgenev, expresses in the concluding stanza of ‘The Country’:

      Will I see, o friends! a people unoppressed

      And Servitude banished by the will of the tsar,

      And over the fatherland will there finally arise

      The sublime Dawn of enlightened Freedom?

      Towards the end of 1819 Alexander expressed the wish to see some of Pushkin’s work. The request was made to General Illarion Vasilchikov, commander of the Independent Guards Brigade, who handed it on to his aide-de-camp, Petr Chaadaev, possibly knowing that he and Pushkin were acquainted. Pushkin gave Chaadaev ‘The Country’; it was presented to Alexander, who, reading it with interest, is reported to have said to Vasilchikov: ‘Thank Pushkin for the noble sentiments which his verse inspires.’³²

      He would have been less gracious had he seen Pushkin’s more overtly political verse, much of which was directed at him: such as the playful satire ‘Fairy Tales’, in which the tsar promises to dismiss the director of police, put the censorship secretary in the madhouse, and ‘give to the people the rights of the people’ – all of which promises are, of course, fairy tales.³³ The scatological is also pressed into the service of lese-majesty: in ‘You and I’ Pushkin draws a series of comparisons between himself and the tsar, ending:

      Your plump posterior you

      Cleanse with calico;

      I do not pamper

      My sinful hole in this childish manner,

      But with one of Khvostov’s harsh odes,

Wipe it though I wince.^{* 34}

      Equally unacceptable are the witty, occasionally obscene, epigrams dedicated to prominent members of the government: Arakcheev, Golitsyn, and others such as Aleksandr Sturdza, a high official in the Ministry of Education, known for his extreme obscurantist views.

      Slave of a crowned soldier,

      You deserve the fame of Herostratus

Or the death of Kotzebue the Hun,^†

      And, incidentally, fuck you.³⁵

      Nikolay Turgenev took Pushkin to task on several occasions, scolding him for ‘his epigrams and other verses against the government’ and appealing to his conscience, saying it was ‘wrong to take a salary for doing nothing and to abuse the giver of it’.³⁶

      If late eighteenth-century opponents of serfdom had attacked it chiefly as a morally repugnant system, by now it was also seen as a brake on economic progress. But it was not wholly responsible for the post-war crisis which Russia experienced after 1815. In 1825 the Decembrist Kakhovsky wrote to Nicholas I from his cell in the Peter-Paul fortress: ‘We need not be afraid of foreign enemies, but we have domestic enemies which harass the country: the absence of laws, of justice, the decline of commerce, heavy taxation and widespread poverty.’³⁷ This sense among the younger generation of indignant dissatisfaction with the state of the nation was exacerbated – for those who had fought through Germany and France – by the vivid contrast between Russia and the West. But the absence in Russia of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly forced those who wished for reform to turn to secret political activity. Freemasonry – often connected, if as often unjustifiably, with secret revolutionary activity and for that reason suppressed by conservative governments – provided a means of association. In Russia the number of lodges grew rapidly after the war, and many of the future Decembrists were, or had been – like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – Masons.

On 9 February 1816 six young officers – Aleksandr Muravev and Nikita Muravev, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, Ivan Yakushkin, and the brothers Matvey and Sergey Muravev-Apostol, the eldest twenty-six, the youngest twenty-one – met in a room of the officers’ quarters of the Semenovsky Life Guards on Zagorodny Prospect. All had served abroad, and all – with the exception of Yakushkin – were Masons. They agreed to organize a secret political society to be called the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland: from this beginning came the Decembrist revolt of 1825. According to Aleksandr Muravev, the society’s primary aims were the emancipation of the serfs, the establishment of equality before the law and of public trial, the abolition of the state monopoly on alcohol, the abolition of military colonies,^* and the reduction of the term of military service. More members were soon enrolled, including the twenty-three-year-old Pavel Pestel, an officer in the Chevalier Guards. ‘Spent the morning with Pestel, a wise man in every sense of the word,’ Pushkin noted in his diary in April 1821. ‘We had a conversation on metaphysics, politics, morality, etc. He is one of the most original minds I know.’³⁸ Charismatic, erudite, with an iron will and a clear vision, Pestel became the moving spirit in the conspiracy. Under his influence a constitution was drawn up, entitled the Green Book, at the same time the Union of Salvation was dissolved and its members joined the new Union of Welfare. And in 1818 Pestel set up a southern branch of the society at Tulchin in the Ukraine.

      Much ink has been spilt in debating the question of the extent of Pushkin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, and of his involvement in it. The simplest answer seems the most correct. A number of the future Decembrists were his close friends, and he was acquainted with many others. He frequented houses in which they

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