PART ONE

A new era will begin for Russia. The emperor is dead . . . . A desolate page in the history of the Russian empire has been completed. A new page is being turned in by the hand of time. What events will the new ruling hand write in it; what hopes will it fulfill?

A. V. Nikitenko

Everyone tried to discover still new questions, everyone tried to resolve them; people wrote, read, and spoke about projects; everyone wished to correct, destroy, and change things, and all Russians, as if a single person, found themselves in an indescribable state of enthusiasm.

L. Tolstoy

AN EMPEROR'S FUNERAL

It was finally time to move the body. The funeral bells were tolling in the churches of St. Petersburg. For nine days the corpse of the dead Emperor, Nicholas I of Russia, had remained within the red walls of the Winter Palace. On some of these days the odor of his decomposing body had been almost unbearable. But it was now Sunday, February 27, 1855, and the winter sun was shining brilliantly.

As the procession began to move, the new Tsar and "Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias," Alexander II, walked behind the coffin of his father. In his Cossack overcoat he was tall and regal, and his blue-gray eyes stared straight ahead. He was thirty-six years old, and the heavy responsibility of ruling a country at war was now his.

His father had also come to power under difficult circumstances: a group of conspirators opposed to autocracy and serfdom--they were later called Decembrists--had tried to prevent him from coming to the throne. And so his reign had begun with bloodshed and the arrest of these revolutionaries, among whom were a number of aristocratic young army officers.

But the difficulties now facing Alexander II were, if not as dramatic, more complex. Despite inferior equipment, shortages of supplies, and diplomatic isolation, he somehow had to successfully conclude the present war in the Crimea. That, however, was just the first of his problems. For Nicholas I had bequeathed to him what one critic called, no doubt with some exaggeration, "a thirty-year tyranny of madness, brutality, and misfortunes of all sorts, the likes of which history has never seen."¹

The ruling ideology of the deceased Emperor was contained in three words: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. But Russian Orthodoxy, whatever its inherent value, was tainted by state control and itself in need of reform. Furthermore, it was the religion, if one subtracts the schismatic Old Believers as well as those of other faiths, of only about two-thirds of the empire's peoples. As for autocracy, it seemed more and more outdated in an increasingly complex age which demanded the cooperation of an educated citizenry. The principle of nationality was even more unrealistic. For how in an age of nationalism could an emphasis on the Russian nationality unite an empire where only about half of its people were Russian?

Besides a spent ideology, Alexander inherited a backward country. At least it seemed so to believers in one of the West's most cherished concepts: Progress. Compared to one of her chief enemies, Great Britain, the most industrialized nation in Europe, this backwardness was especially evident. Despite Russia's much greater size--easily over sixty times the size of the British Isles--it only had about one-tenth the railway track and produced an even smaller ratio of pig iron. While half of the English people were already living in urban areas and more than half the population could read and write, nine-tenths of Russia's population still lived in the countryside and four-fifths of the country's subjects were illiterate peasants, almost half of them enserfed to noble masters. Living in poverty in their small huts, their babies were almost twice as likely to die in infancy as an English child. And the backward nature of Russian agriculture, as well as its poor climate and growing conditions, necessitated the work of about three Russian peasants to produce as much as one Englishman could.

Dispirited by the thirty-year reign of the man whose body was now moving slowly towards its final destination, Russia's small educated class was conscious of the beginning of a new era. And they were anxious and unsure about what it would bring. Many yearned for an enlightened leader, for a Tsar whose ideas they could support. But was Alexander II such a man? And did he possess any such ideas, any banner, which they could rally around?

Although some in the streets of St. Petersburg on this sunny February day hoped that Alexander II could soon end the war, even if it meant compromise or defeat, others were encouraged by his assurances that Russia would not retreat before its enemies. The day Alexander came to the throne a large bell from the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in Moscow's white-walled Kremlin came crashing down and killed several people. An evil omen, some thought. But others recalled that a bell had fallen from the same tower on the day when the French had left Moscow in 1812 and begun their retreat. Was the present event then not a sign that Russia's foes in the Crimean War would also soon be on the defensive?

The funeral procession continued for two hours. Soldiers lined the route as the crowds looked on. The clanging of carriage wheels, the pealing of church bells, and the funeral music of the military bands filled the air. The procession wound its way toward the Nicholas Bridge, over the frozen Neva River to Vasily Island, and then finally over the Tuchkov Bridge to the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress, where many of Nicholas's enemies had been imprisoned. There a needle-like golden spire, extending high in the air from the island fortress cathedral and glittering in the sun, acted like an enticing magnet slowly pulling the mourners to itself from miles away.

After entering the fortress cathedral the coffin was placed on top of a catafalque covered in red velvet and sitting under a large silver brocade and ermine canopy. The rays of the sun and the lights of thousands of candles combined to illuminate the cathedral.

For another week the body lay in state as dignitaries and commoners filed past. It lay there with a crown on its head, painted up and perfumed, but still smelling of decay. Finally, on another beautiful winter day there was one last service. During it the dead Emperor's widow stood by his coffin. Then she kissed him one last time, and her children followed, making their last farewells. After the imperial mantle was taken from the coffin and carried to the altar, the new Emperor and his brothers carried the coffin on their shoulders to the tomb. As salvos of guns thundered, it was lowered into the ground. Handfuls of dirt were thrown upon the coffin, and the tomb was closed. The body of Nicholas I joined those of other Russian Emperors and Empresses in the fortress cathedral.

A LIEUTENANT IN THE CRIMEA

During the week that the dead Emperor's body lay in state in the cathedral, Sub-lieutenant Leo Tolstoy was stationed more than a thousand miles to the south. He was in the Crimea, near the besieged city of Sevastopol. (See the previous two links for both text and photos on the Crimean War and Sevastopol.) Here nature was already beginning to display its crocuses, snowdrops, and hyacinths; and larks, linnets, and brilliant goldfinches were twittering and singing their songs. On March 1, the lieutenant wrote in his diary: "The Emperor died on February 18, and now we are to take the oath to the new Emperor. Great changes await Russia. It is necessary to work and be manly to take part in these important moments of Russia's life."¹

No doubt he was exhorting himself as he often did. His mother had died when he was almost two and his father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, when he was almost nine. Kindly relatives completed the upbringing of the five Tolstoy children, but from an early age Leo exhorted and chastised himself as if he were his own parent. He was always setting goals for himself. When he was nineteen, for example, and about to leave Kazan University before obtaining a degree, he set out a two-year educational plan for himself. He would study the following: "the entire course of judicial science needed for the final exam at the university...practical medicine and part of its theory...French, Russian, German, English, Italian, and Latin...agriculture ...history, geography, and statistics ...mathematics...music and painting...the natural sciences."² In addition, he intended to write a dissertation, as well as compositions on all the subjects which he studied. Whenever he failed to live up to his self-imposed high standards, he berated himself in his diary, especially for his frequent lapses into lust and gambling. He had been in the south four years now, most of it in the Caucasus as part of a Russian military force trying to subjugate Islamic mountain tribes. In these years he also became a writer. His short novels Childhood and Boyhood appeared in the journal The Contemporary. (See this link for etext links to these and other Tolstoy works.) In these works the orphaned Tolstoy displayed for the first time his nostalgia for a mother he had hardly known and for the world of which she had been a part. The feeling of having been orphaned and the often accompanying feeling of not being loved enough were ones that often visited the young man. He did not make friends easily, and despite his noble birth, he generally felt uncomfortable in high society. Yet he longed for love and oneness with others. (See this link for text and photos in Paul Birukoff, Leo Tolstoy: Childhood and Early Manhood.)

Despite his promising start as a writer, he still was unsure about his future plans. In early March he wrote that he felt capable of devoting his life to a new religion, based on Christ, but purged of mysticism and dogmas, one that would not promise heavenly bliss, but happiness on earth. By the following month, however, he had more pressing thoughts on his mind.

He and his artillery battery had been moved back to Sevastopol. This time they were sent to the most forward bastion of the defense, only about a hundred yards from the French lines, and under constant and heavy bombardment. For the next month and a half, he alternated days at the bastion with off days back in the center of the city. In both places he found time to continue working on a sketch about Sevastopol at the end of the previous year. At the front he wrote in a bomb-proof dugout with the sounds of cannons booming in his ears. By the end of April, he sent the sketch off to The Contemporary.

Within a few months the educated public, including the new Emperor and his wife, were applauding this work of L.N., even though many did not yet know whose initials these were. In it they read of a cart with creaking wheels and heavy with corpses approaching a cemetery and of a government building converted to a hospital, where blood-splashed surgeons pitched amputated limbs into a corner. They also read about the earth shelter where the cannoneers lived and from which they shelled the enemy while incoming cannon and mortar shells whizzed and hissed near them and over dead and wounded bodies covered with mud and blood.

More than this unprecedented realistic description of the war, the Emperor probably appreciated Tolstoy's praise of the patriotism and courage of the soldiers and sailors who defended these fortifications. Even though Tolstoy privately believed that the common soldiers were treated like slaves, that many officers were involved in graft, and that supply and hygienic conditions were far from desirable, he did not mention these dissatisfactions in his sketch. Earlier that year he had planned to address some of these problems by writing a Plan for the Reform of the Army, but like many of his grandiose projects he soon forgot it.

By early summer he completed another sketch about Sevastopol. By this time he was commanding a mountain battery, fourteen miles from the fighting in Sevastopol. The new sketch reflected some of his doubts about the war, and when the censors in the capital received it from the editors of The Contemporary there was trouble. Toward the end of it he had described a scene in which the Russians and French declared a short truce in order to gather their dead. While collecting the bodies, soldiers from both sides chatted with each other. Spontaneously, a Frenchman and a Russian exchanged cigarette holders, and a French officer asked a young Russian cavalry lieutenant to say hello to a Russian officer whom he knew. Tolstoy then wrote:

Yes, on the bastion and entrenchments white flags have been placed, the lowering valley is full of dead bodies, and the beautiful sun descends from the transparent sky to the undulating blue sea, which sparkles under the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at each other. And these people, who are Christians, confessing one great law of love and self-sacrifice, looking at what they have done, do not suddenly fall with repentance on their knees before Him who has given them life, who has placed in the soul of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and beautiful. They do not embrace like brothers with tears of joy and happiness. No! The white flags are lowered, and again whistle the instruments of death and suffering, again flows innocent blood, and groans and curses are heard.³

When the piece appeared in the September issue of The Contemporary this passage and others had been changed by the censors. Some deletions had been made and words inserted justifying the war for the Russians on the grounds of defense of their native land.

No doubt in his desire to build a society based upon secularized Christian principles and to live in one where men would not kill each other but live in harmony, Tolstoy manifested utopian aspirations. But such hopes were common for intellectuals who grew up in the stifling atmosphere of Nicholas I's reign. Many of them, blocked by a reactionary government from participating in any practical, meaningful service, retreated into a mental world where anything seemed possible.

This utopian tendency was further encouraged by the intellectuals' isolation from their less fortunate and less educated contemporaries. The great majority of intellectuals were still from the gentry class, which made up less than two percent of the population. And even within their own class, they stood out by virtue of their education and intellectual interests. Only about half of the men of gentry status had received more than a primary education. In all of the empire's six universities, there were not quite four thousand students, all male of course. Except for some institutes that educated young ladies to be "empty-headed dolls,"⁴ the government largely ignored female education.

Higher and even some secondary education usually implied an increased exposure to Western ideas. This only increased the gulf between those who were educated and the vast masses who were illiterate or who had had little education. Between the rural, illiterate, Orthodox peasant and the city educated noble, who had often become hostile or indifferent to Orthodoxy, there could be little in common. At times they even spoke a different language. Although Pushkin, the greatest of the Russian poets, picked up Russian from family serfs, he was formally taught as a young child to speak only French. The father of the radical Alexander Herzen hated to read a Russian book; and like Pushkin's father, his personal library was filled with French works. In the fashionable salons of the capital, even during the reign of the nationalistic Nicholas I, one heard French more commonly than Russian. For nobles serving at court it was more important to know the court language of French than it was to be fluent in Russian.⁵At the Smolny Institute, a sort of "finishing school" for young noble women, they spoke French except in Russian classes. In no other major European country were the educated so isolated from so many of their countrymen. At times an educated, westernized noble seemed as "foreign" in his own country as an Englishman in India or a Frenchman in Algeria.

During the quarter century of Alexander II's reign, the intellectual's isolation from the Russian masses and a passionate Russian desire to overcome it, to be part of some larger community, will appear and reappear. This phenomenon will take many forms. It will vary in intensity. It will sometimes be conscious and sometimes not. But it will always be there.

For the new Tsar this longing for community, as well as the utopianism of the intellectuals, presented both an opportunity and a major challenge. In the days ahead he would need the support of idealistic, but basically patriotic, men such as Tolstoy. He would need to temper their utopianism with doses of political realism and yet convince them that he shared some of their strongest-felt sentiments. It was yet unclear, however, whether Alexander had the will or skill to do so.

In early August, Tolstoy and his battery were at the battle of the Chernaya River, on the outskirts of Sevastopol. As the Russians crossed the river and started up the hillside in the morning sunlight, their lives ended in clusters as French and Sardinian shells exploded around them. Before the morning was over the Russians were forced to retreat, leaving thousands of their dead comrades behind. Tolstoy was depressed and angered by the slaughter and believed much of it was due to incompetent generals and staff. He vented his anger by composing, along with a few others, some satiric stanzas, which soon gained widespread popularity among Russian soldiers.

By late August, the year-long defense of Sevastopol was nearing its end. The Russian forces were short of powder, projectiles, and reinforcements; and the English and French bombardment increased. Tolstoy had volunteered for duty in the city and arrived at a fort on the north side of the bay just in time to see the French taking the Malakhov Hill Bastion on the other side. Once this key to the defense of the south and main part of the city fell, the Russians began to hasten down to the bay and to cross a floating bridge to the northern side. Before leaving the southern side they blew up their abandoned forts and ammunition and set the town afire. Lieutenant Tolstoy would later describe the scene in still another Sevastopol sketch. But he would not mention there that on the day after his arrival, seeing the French tricolor flying over the former Russian bastions and the town below in flames, he wept. It was August 28, his twenty-seventh birthday. (For more on Tolstoy during this war period, see the appropriate chapter in Birukoff.)

THE TSAR VISITS MOSCOW

Several days after the fall of Sevastopol Alexander II, his mother, wife, and four sons were on a train to Moscow. From there he would go south to encourage his troops. Soldiers and soldiering had always been important to him. Since childhood, he had loved military activities such as parades and war games, and he had become a full general while still in his mid twenties. In addition, it appeared that Alexander had decided to demonstrate that his rule reflected not just power but also the mutual love of tsar and people for each other. The Tsar's family had left the baby, Maria, back in Tsarskoe Selo, one of the Tsar's summer residences near St. Petersburg. It was early morning when they had departed, and now as they approached Moscow, a little over four hundred miles away, it was late evening. Although it was a long day's journey, it must have still seemed a great improvement over the carriage trip necessary before this line, Russia's first major one, had been completed just four years earlier.

The spring and summer had been difficult for the new Tsar. Although conscientious and provided with considerable experience by his father, Alexander II lacked a creative and agile mind. His thinking seemed almost as traditional as that of his reactionary father, and as uninspired. He also lacked vigor and real enthusiasm for his work. When he was young his tutors had discerned that he was easily discouraged by difficulties. As the dispatches from the Crimea got worse, his spirits fell. After the collapse of Sevastopol, he and his wife cried.

Still, there had been some happy times, especially during the spring and summer months spent at Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof, another summer residence close to the capital but located on the Gulf of Finland. Among large, luxurious palaces, magnificent grounds, trees, flowers, lakes, and fountains the family had spent some idyllic and peaceful moments. The marriage of Alexander and Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt had been based on love, not any special needs of state. In fact, at first there had been some parental opposition to it. But after fourteen years of marriage, the reserved young German princess had proved herself to be a serious, conscientious wife and Empress. And if some of Alexander's youthful ardor toward her had cooled and there had been some talk at court about him and a flirtatious lady-in-waiting to the Empress, still he often relied on Maria for advice and support.

While the Emperor's train approached Moscow, large crowds waited for him in the rain along the route from the station to his eventual destination at the Kremlin Grand Palace. The people of the city had followed the defense of Sevastopol closely and contributed bandages, money, and other needed supplies to the war effort. They had seen prices rise steeply during the war and, more importantly, sons, brothers, fathers, and friends sent to the front. The censored press told the people of the righteousness of their Orthodox cause in the war against the infidel Turk and his European allies. It spoke confidently of the ability of Sevastopol to withstand the siege. When it fell, the news came as a shock to many. Some of the common people groaned and crossed themselves as if to ward off any future unknown dangers. Others crowded for solace into the city's taverns. Yet the news was not unexpected in all homes. Years of government propaganda had created a certain skepticism, even among the uneducated, and some of the more intelligent and insightful had foreseen Russia's eventual collapse at Sevastopol. Although it was said that Moscow was more patriotic, more Russian, than the more cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, there were also those in this ancient capital who thought that the war was folly.

Toward Alexander, however, many Muscovites felt kindly. He had been born in their city, and this seemed to mean something to them. Those who blamed the government for failing to wage war more successfully could recall that Alexander had inherited the war and most of his ministers and generals from his father. Few were yet ready to judge him too harshly.

As the train pulled into Moscow, the rain let up and fireworks illuminated the sky. The sounds of bells and shouts of "hurrah" rang through the air. At the station imperial carriages appeared, and the monarchs' monograms, "A" and "M", were visible everywhere. Along the crowded route to the Kremlin, the Emperor and Empress stopped at one of the entrances to Red Square in order to enter the little Chapel of the Iberian Mother of God. There they knelt for a moment before the chapel's famous icon, believed by the faithful to work miracles.

For the next week the Tsar took part in prayer services, reviewed troops, met with his generals, and received delegations from the city. As Alexander looked about, he saw once again a very different city than the St. Petersburg from which he had just arrived. It was less symmetrical, less full of uniformed officials, and here one saw more Asiatic faces and attire. Despite its large size, it seemed more rural than St. Petersburg. Gardens and greenery were scattered in abundance around white walls and low-lying houses. One might also see a cow or two wandering along a broad street or on a narrow, twisting, dirt road. Green and red rooftops, blue and golden domes, multi-colored cupolas, and golden crosses sparkled everywhere in the sunshine as one looked down on them across from one of the hills of the city. And in the midst of it all, the ancient Kremlin! In Alexander's time not only were the brick crenelated Kremlin walls painted white, but so were many of the churches and other structures within, including the large new Great Kremlin Palace. From afar, along with the golden cupolas and crosses of the Kremlin's Ivan the Great Bell Tower and Assumption and Annunciation cathedrals, the white walls and exteriors helped to give the whole ensemble a magical appearance.

On the day after his arrival, Alexander went to several of the Kremlin churches to ask for God's help in Russia's hour of need. At the Cathedral of the Assumption (or Dormition), which Napoleon had once desecrated by using as a stable, the gray-bearded Metropolitan Filaret assured the Tsar of the justness of Russia's war effort and of the prayers of millions of Russians for its just cause. On that same day Alexander sent a letter to his Crimean commander, Prince Gorchakov, telling him not to despair, to trust in God, and to remember that two years after Napoleon had captured Moscow in 1812, Russian troops had been in Paris. Later in the week Metropolitan Filaret presented the Tsar with a banner depicting the Blessed Virgin appearing before St. Sergius. It had earlier accompanied Peter the Great and Alexander I on important campaigns, and the Tsar could now pass it on to Gorchakov.

For centuries, whether in war or in peace, the Tsars had relied upon the Orthodox clergy for support. They preached to the Russian people patriotism and submission, and Filaret, the most important clergyman of his time, was more than willing to continue the practice. In the words of Alexander Herzen, a man we shall soon meet, he "combined the mitre of a bishop with the shouldertabs of a gendarme."¹In addition, although he supported reform in some areas, he defended the flogging of peasants for offenses against their masters, and opposed emancipating Russia's serfs on the grounds that such "theoretical progress" would only stir the peasants' "false hopes and baser appetites."²Although there can be little doubt that the support of such clergymen was helpful in keeping the country's illiterate masses faithful to the Tsar and state authority, supporters like him also inadvertently helped to discredit both state and church in the minds of Russia's progressive thinkers.

A week after the Tsar's arrival in Moscow and on the twelfth birthday of his oldest son, Nicholas, Alexander left his family and headed south. First, however, there was one more service at the Cathedral of the Assumption, where Alexander's mother blessed him. The Tsar, Maria, and his mother were all misty eyed as he prepared to depart. Amidst the clamorous shouts of the crowds, he left by carriage for Nikolaev, a town Alexander now considered the key to Russia's southern defenses. It was over seven hundred miles away, and the lack of a railway to the south not only inconvenienced Alexander, but had created serious supply problems for the troops.

In Nikolaev the Tsar approvingly overlooked the improvement of the Nikolaev defenses by General Totleben, the engineer whose fortifications had made it possible for Sevastopol to hold out for almost a year. He also visited a military hospital, and a correspondent for a semiofficial newspaper wrote of the deep mutual affection of the Tsar and the wounded soldiers.

Before returning in early November back to Moscow, and then by train to the capital, the Tsar also visited both the headquarters of his army in the south at Bakhchisari and the northern side of Sevastopol. Like Tolstoy, he looked down across the bay on the ruins of the now-captured southern side of Sevastopol. He also visited the sick and wounded and thanked the defenders of the besieged city. Despite hearing tales of corruption and inefficiency, Alexander was in general encouraged by his trip to the south. He returned to the capital still hopeful that Russia could escape defeat.

A MOSCOW PROFESSOR

Late in February 1856, the city of Moscow gave a hero's welcome to some of the naval defenders of Sevastopol. By this time Russian diplomats were already in Paris working on the peace treaty that would end the war. Alexander had finally heeded the advice of his Foreign Minister and others and accepted the terms of his enemies. But not without bitterness, especially at the future prohibition of Russian naval forces in the Black Sea. His advisors, however, told him that Austria and perhaps even Prussia and Sweden might join the war against Russia. They emphasized the strength of the British navy and its ability to strike at Russia's coasts almost at will. They mentioned the difficulties of keeping so many troops (almost two and a half million, counting irregulars, militia, and the navy) under arms in preparation for attacks from various directions, and they pointed out the tremendous financial strain of the war. They did not apparently stress the large number of Russian lives already lost in the war. In fact, an accurate count was not kept. But by the time peace finally arrived, about a half million had died, many from disease.

Welcoming the Sevastopol defenders was one way for Muscovites to assuage their wounded national pride. For more than a week they hosted and toasted these men: they greeted them with bread and salt, a traditional Russian welcome, and with hats thrown in the air and military marches; they invited them into their homes and cheered them as they rode through the snow-covered streets in troikas; and they held church services honoring the defenders' dead comrades.

On one occasion, the Merchants' Club hosted the officers for a dinner. The halls were decorated and flowers were strewn along the staircase. Wealthy merchants, nobles, scholars, artists, and even some students were present, as toasts were drunk to the Emperor's health, and "God Save the Tsar" was sung. Among the speakers who addressed the heroes were three of Moscow's most prominent intellectuals. The most sober and moderate of them was Professor Sergei Soloviev of Moscow University, whose father was an Orthodox priest who had been teaching religion at the Moscow Commerce School for almost forty years. Although only thirty-five, the son had been teaching at the university for a decade, and in each of the last five years he had published a volume of his History of Russia from Ancient Times.

As speakers before him mentioned the heroic deeds of the men of Sevastopol, he perhaps remembered those of his own father-in-law, Vladimir Romanov. Naval Captain Romanov had been decorated for bravery under enemy fire during the final evacuation across the Sevastopol Bay.¹ In 1848, Soloviev had married Romanov's attractive dark-haired daughter, Poliksena, and since then she had given birth to six children, although two died in infancy.

With several of the speakers who spoke before him, Soloviev had considerable differences. First, there was the bearish and broad-lipped publicist and panslavist M.P. Pogodin. He was one of the few intellectuals who had been born into a serf family. In addition to his humble origins, he was known for his ardent Russian nationalism, tactlessness, and avariciousness. He was a former professor of Soloviev's and his predecessor in the chair of Russian history at the university. But he had resigned in anger in a dispute with administrators and colleagues and, contrary to his own expectations, was never asked to return. Bitter at being replaced by his former student, he had often found reasons to criticize Soloviev's work.

One of the major differences between the two men was also one of the most significant that divided Russian intellectuals in general. Soloviev shared the viewpoint of most thinkers that Russia was an integral part of European civilization, but Pogodin thought of Russia as a unique and superior civilization. As he characteristically overstated it: the Russian differed from the European in "temperament, character, blood, physiognomy, moral outlook, cast of thought, faith, ideals, dress, desires, pleasures, relationships, history--everything"!² Pogodin's relationship with Nicholas I and Alexander II was also noteworthy. Despite being a strong defender of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, Pogodin was more than a humble servant of state and church. On occasion he sent unsolicited advice to his ruler, and he could be quite critical, especially privately, of Tsarist activities of which he did not approve. Like almost all intellectuals, he believed the police-state measures taken by Nicholas I, especially after the European revolutions of 1848, were excessive. He also believed that the government had been guilty of serious foreign policy errors. He had long dreamed of a panslavic union stretching from the Pacific to the Adriatic. It would also include Constantinople and, most importantly, recognize Russian hegemony. But to achieve this goal he thought that Russia would have to realign its traditional diplomacy away from friendship with Prussia and Austria, the latter especially resentful of any Russian intentions regarding the Slavic peoples of the Balkans. The month before the banquet, Pogodin wrote to the Tsar and advised him to rally the Russian people for a struggle against its enemies. In the following words, he even dared to advise Alexander regarding his own behavior:

The Tsar lives in twenty rooms, let him occupy no more than five and have only five heated in the winter. He is served six dishes at table; let them give him three or four. The Tsaritsa will wear only a black dress...she will seem lovelier and sweeter to us. Three lumps of sugar are put into their children's tea; let them sip it through a single lump [as was the Russian custom]...and when they complain of its not being sweet, tell them it is because the French are in the Crimea and the English at Kronstadt."³

Another speaker who preceded Soloviev was the Slavophile Constantine Aksakov. He was a passionate man with a "leonine physiognomy,"⁴ known for his Moscowphilism, his dislike of the more westernized St. Petersburg, his glorification of the Russian peasant, and his ardent desire to see Russia's alienated intellectuals return to the native Russian traditions. He was such an enthusiast of older ways that in the 1840s he had walked around Moscow wearing "old Russian" attire and an old-fashioned beard. One of his ideological opponents joked that this only led to his being mistaken for a Persian. In 1849, however, part of his old fashioned look had to go. Because in the West beards were sometimes a symbol of revolutionary inclinations, the government of Nicholas I banned the "Russian beard," at least for members of the gentry class like Aksakov.

Despite being almost forty, his idealistic convictions and his devotion to his father, the novelist Sergei Aksakov, made him seem younger. Like Soloviev, Aksakov had also once been a pupil of Pogodin's, and the latter was a longtime friend of the Aksakov family. Soloviev and Aksakov had also once been close enough for the latter to become the godfather of Soloviev's first daughter, but more recently Aksakov had become quite critical of Soloviev's historical views and in the next few years would increasingly attack them in reviews of Soloviev's multi-volume history.

The personal relations of Soloviev with Pogodin and Aksakov and the advice which Pogodin showered upon the Tsars both point to an important characteristic of the times. The prominent people in Russian society--the Tsar and his family, members of the court, leading government ministers, and the significant intellectuals--were relatively few, and a great many of them were related, personally acquainted, or at least had access to each other.

Concerning Aksakov's ideas, Soloviev thought that due to his nostalgia, anti-Westernism, and anti-progressivism, he was guilty of falsifying history. The professor also believed that Aksakov was more of a dilettante than a serious scholar and that he overemphasized the historical role of the Russian people. Both Soloviev and Pogodin stressed more the importance of Russia's rulers and government.

Like Pogodin, Aksakov also had sent a letter to the new Tsar. It deplored evils such as government corruption, romanticized the era prior to Peter the Great, and blamed Peter for being a despot and beginning the westernization of Russia's nobility. It also tried to convince Alexander II of the necessity of ending despotism, although not autocracy. For although Aksakov considered Russia fortunate to have a government that enabled its people to concentrate on their spiritual life and not be involved in any inherently corrupting political body such as a parliament, he nevertheless believed that a Tsar should allow and seriously consider freely expressed opinions. He even suggested that as the need arose the government might wish to convene representatives of different classes for advice.

Whatever the merits of this memorandum of Aksakov's, it is questionable whether the Tsar ever read it. And if he did, it had little effect. Despite wishing to encourage a limited amount of "openness" (glasnost), especially within government circles, Alexander was opposed to unshackling public opinion to the extent suggested by Aksakov.⁵

Despite Soloviev's differences with Pogodin and Aksakov, he probably did not disagree with much the two men said at the Merchants' Club. Although their extravagant nationalistic excesses might bother him, he shared their praise of the heroes of Sevastopol.

When his turn finally came to say a few words the solidly built, already balding Soloviev greeted the officers with words that he said were dear to their ancestors. He welcomed them as "sufferers for the Russian land, who had gloriously stood on guard for the native land."⁶Those who were familiar with his work knew that he believed that Russia was continuing in the tradition of Greece, Rome, and the Christian medieval world in its fights against barbarian Asia. They were aware that he justified Russia's past wars against the non-Christian Mongols, Turks, and other Asiatic powers because he believed that Russia was furthering the cause of European Christian civilization.

When the Crimean War broke out one of the causes had been Russia's insistence on her rights to intercede in behalf of Orthodox Christians within the Muslim Turkish Empire. Nicholas I had written at the time: "Waging war neither for worldly advantages nor for conquests, but for a solely Christian purpose, must I be left alone to fight under the banner of the Holy Cross and to see the others, who call themselves Christians, all unite around the Crescent to combat Christendom?"⁷Soloviev's feelings about the justness of the war were not essentially different.

Years later, however, Soloviev made it clear that Nicholas I was not one of his favorite Emperors, and he placed much of the blame for Russia's failures in the war on Nicholas. Despite Soloviev's patriotic feelings, he had even been a bit reluctant to see Russia win the war. For a victory might strengthen Nicholas's despotism, while a defeat might bring the progressive kind of changes that Soloviev believed Russia needed. With the accession of Alexander to the throne, Soloviev had thought there was still hope for victory. As he later explained it, a forceful, bold, knowledgeable ruler could have tapped the patriotism of the Russian people, while diplomatically splitting her enemies. Long after Alexander had given up the belief, Soloviev still thought that the fall of Sevastopol, like that of Moscow in 1812, could have been followed by a new beginning, one that would have forced the allies to eventually sign a peace treaty more to Russia's liking. But in the eyes of Soloviev, Alexander was too weak to accomplish the task.

The views of Pogodin, Aksakov, and Soloviev, all three critical of the despotism of Nicholas I, but also all strong patriots and defenders of Russian autocracy and Orthodoxy, were illustrative of a serious problem facing Alexander II. All three of these men were confident that they knew better than the Tsar how the government should be run. The reign of Alexander's father had especially encouraged, inadvertently of course, this type of feeling. Although radical leftist criticism, emanating especially from St. Petersburg intellectuals, would eventually attract more attention, the faultfinding of Muscovite supporters of autocratic government should not be overlooked.

Even at court in St. Petersburg there were a few who agreed with some of the criticisms and reservations about the government's actions which were expressed or harbored by these three Moscow thinkers. One such person was Anna Tyutcheva, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress. She was the daughter of the poet and panslavist Fedor Tyutchev, and ten years after the Moscow banquet for the heroes of Sevastopol she would marry Constantine Aksakov's younger brother Ivan.

When she first heard rumors of the possibility of Russia's accepting unfavorable peace terms put forth by Austria, she became alarmed. On January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany and a day on which the Tsar took part in the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters along the Neva, she wrote in her diary that if the Tsar offended the honor of Russia by agreeing to an unfavorable peace, she would not be able any longer to love him. Two days later she told the Empress that the Ministers of War and Finance were ignoramuses and should be replaced. And three days after that she recorded her belief that unfortunately Alexander was not the strong and energetic man that Russia needed in such trying times.

On January 16th, a young adjutant of the Tsar read to her and others a new letter written by Constantine Aksakov which expressed many of her sympathies about the undesirability of accepting unfavorable peace terms. She borrowed the letter and read it to the Empress, but it failed to have the desired effect.

Following Soloviev's words of welcome to the Sevastopol defenders, the millionaire merchant Vasily Kokorev, who had planned many of the activities of these February festivities, also made a speech. Not to be outdone by the historians, he also compared the Sevastopol heroes with those of earlier times.

Before the honored guests departed the Merchants' Club for a costume ball at the governor's house that February evening, they moved to a neighboring room. There hung a full-length picture, decorated with flowers, of the Emperor. With drinking glasses in hand and with loud voices they once again sang "God Save the Tsar." Pogodin then toasted the Tsar, and the guests in good Russian style threw their glasses to the ground, shattering them into thousands of pieces. The bearish Pogodin, as usual given to excesses, expressed the hope that all the Tsar's enemies might be dealt with in a similar fashion. Then once again the guests sang "God Save the Tsar" and departed.

TOLSTOY IN THE CAPITAL

Three months earlier, on November 19, 1855, Lieutenant Tolstoy had arrived in St. Petersburg by train. He remained there for most of the next six months. While Moscow's thinkers focused primarily on the war, St. Petersburg's intellectuals seemed more concerned with political reform.

Although the Neva remained frozen throughout most of Tolstoy's stay, the spirit of the capital and Russia itself seemed to be experiencing a thaw after the frozen immobility of Nicholas's final years. Signs of renewed life were sprouting up everywhere. New journals were begun. Previously forbidden works were now printed. And as Tolstoy later wrote: "Everyone tried to discover still new questions, everyone tried to resolve them; people wrote, read, and spoke about projects; everyone wished to correct, destroy, and change things, and all Russians, as if a single person, found themselves in an indescribable state of enthusiasm."¹

Tolstoy came to the capital to meet the leading literary men of his day. One of the most prominent was Ivan Turgenev, the author of A Sportsman's Sketches, a work applauded for its humane depiction of the Russian peasants. Turgenev had just recently completed a draft of a novel, based in part on the life of a friend, Michael Bakunin, a radical currently in prison. Almost immediately after arriving at the train station, Tolstoy headed for the large first floor apartment of Turgenev. It was just off the Nevsky Prospect near the Anichkov Palace, where the widow of Nicholas I now resided. Turgenev had earlier written to Tolstoy and praised his work; he now invited him to stay with him.

For over a month Tolstoy remained as Turgenev's guest. Although still in the military, Tolstoy's duties were minimal. He soon shocked the more sedate, fastidious Turgenev by his carousing in this city of canals, columned palaces, and pastel-colored buildings of green, yellow, blue, and red. Turgenev was only ten years older than Tolstoy, but his hair, mutton-chop whiskers, and mustache were already noticeably graying. (See this link for an 1856 photograph of some contributors to The Contemporary including Tolstoy in uniform standing behind Turgenev.) At first Turgenev tried to restrain the younger writer from his excessive gambling, drinking, and cavorting with gypsy women. But he soon gave up and resigned himself to preventing Tolstoy from being disturbed as he slept in the drawing room until the late morning or early afternoon.

Tolstoy was not alone in this custom, for St. Petersburg during the winter season was not a place where the nobility rose early unless obliged to by their work. Evenings often kept them out late. There were theaters and concerts, operas and ballets, parties, banquets, and balls. At the dances the bejeweled women, bare-shouldered in their full-length gowns, waltzed with officers and officials resplendent in uniforms with sashes and medals indicating their accomplishments. (See this link for a photo and description of a late-nineteenth-century Tsar's ball.)

St. Petersburg was not only the home of many officers and government officials, it was also the most modern, fashionable, and Western of Russian cities. Its architecture, like many of its nobles, reflected European influence. Baroque and neoclassical facades struck the eye on both sides of the Neva and along many of the city's canals. Even some of its main churches, such as the Kazan Cathedral, on the Nevsky Prospect, and St. Isaac's Cathedral, which still was not quite completed after three and a half decades, looked more like they belonged in Rome than in Russia. While Italian Opera flourished, thanks to generous government support and its own popular appeal, native Russian opera languished. The prima donnas who captured the imagination of young men sang in Italian, not Russian. One such woman, Pauline Viardot, so mesmerized Ivan Turgenev that now, twelve years after first meeting her, he still idolized her as he did no other woman.

Despite its modern Western appeal, the city Tolstoy now found himself in was still nevertheless a mid-nineteenth century Russian city. There were still vacant lots scattered about. Smoking was not permitted on the street. Almost all the city traffic was on foot or in horse-drawn sleighs or carriages. Omnibuses, also pulled by horses, existed but were little used. If no snow was on the ground, the fast-moving carriages might jolt one continually as one traveled over cobblestone or dirt roads. During the long hours of winter darkness, which could last from mid-afternoon to mid-morning, the street lights did not give off much light. Only a few gas lamps yet existed. Although it was the most industrialized of Russian cities, no more than one in twenty inhabitants worked in factories. About a third of the city's population were officially considered peasants, even though they worked in factories, shops, on the docks, in restaurants or bath houses, drove horse cabs, carted wood or ice, or peddled sweets, fruit, or toys from the trays they carried as they walked along the streets. Even though residents dumped all types of waste into the city's canals and rivers they also used them for drinking water. In addition, unclean water often flooded basements in the low-lying capital. It was no wonder that in the 1850s deaths in St. Petersburg outnumbered births. (For photos and text on St. Petersburg in the 1890s follow this link.)

In addition to Turgenev, from whose apartment he eventually moved when he found quarters of his own, Tolstoy met other important writers and spent many evenings with them. One of the most famous was Nicholas Nekrasov, a poet and the principal editor of The Contemporary. Tolstoy often visited Nekrasov's apartment on Little Stable Street, not far from the Tsar's Imperial Stables.

Nekrasov was a man of contradictions, almost a split personality. Like Tolstoy and Turgenev, he was from the landowning class. But unlike them, he had suffered poverty and hunger when as a youth of sixteen he had defied his father's wish that he enter a St. Petersburg cadet corps and instead had begun preparing himself for entrance into St. Petersburg University. Years of extreme poverty had followed, and he was never to obtain a university degree. For a while he had to rely on using the overcoat of his much larger roommate when he wanted to go out into the biting St. Petersburg winter. He lived at other times with prostitutes and working girls. Although these difficult years had passed, Nekrasov maintained a strong sympathy for the poor and unfortunate. He had helped to discover and publish Dostoevsky's first major effort, Poor Folk, and many of his own poems reflected his identification with the sufferings of Russia's common people. Like Constantine Aksakov, but for different reasons, he worshiped at the altar of the Russian people (narod). But he also had the reputation of being a man much more concerned with making money than was the average poet or even editor. Some even considered him an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer. And his fondness for good food, drink, and gambling, all of which he enjoyed at the exclusive English Club, contributed further to his janus image.

In recent years, although still only in his early thirties, Nekrasov had not been in good health. He was apparently suffering from syphilis and feared he might die. Never an imposing figure, the dark-haired, mustached Nekrasov was even less so now. (See this link for photo of Nekrasov, in the middle of the picture, and other contributors to his journal.) His shoulders drooped and he walked slowly. At times he could not raise his high, squeaky voice above a whisper. His throat was constantly sore, and while Tolstoy was in the capital Nekrasov seldom left his apartment.

It was at Nekrasov's place that Tolstoy several times angered his new friends by his intemperate behavior. On one occasion he accused Turgenev of empty chattering and of lacking real convictions. The exasperated Turgenev, who normally had a rather high voice, whispered "I can stand no more! I have bronchitis."²His large, soft body began striding back and forth through the three room apartment. The shorter but more muscular Tolstoy lay on a morocco sofa and responded that bronchitis was an imaginary illness. While not true, it was not entirely inappropriate, for Turgenev was a bit of a hypochondriac. He also seemed excessively concerned with growing old. Nostalgia for youth and a sad resignation in the face of life had appeared with increasing frequency in some of his recent stories.

On another occasion at Nekrasov's, after being cautioned ahead of time to avoid the subject, Tolstoy attacked the French female novelist and advocate of women's rights, George Sand. He said that if her heroines actually existed, they should be tied to the hangman's cart and dragged through the streets of St. Petersburg. Sand was a personal friend of Turgenev's and very close to his beloved Pauline Viardot, who some thought had been the model for Sand's famous heroine Consuelo.

Tolstoy's statement also no doubt offended Avdotya Panaeva, the wife of Nekrasov's fellow editor on The Contemporary, but Nekrasov's mistress. She often acted as the hostess at Nekrasov's gatherings. She was a great admirer of Sand and a writer herself who in her works dealt with injustices suffered by women. She also had collaborated with Nekrasov on several novels. She was small and attractive with dark hair and eyes and a velvety voice. Many writers praised her beauty. A decade earlier the young Dostoevsky had become infatuated with her. Nekrasov easily became jealous of her and the couple often quarreled. The past year or so had been especially difficult for them because of Nekrasov's illness and the death of an infant son.

Toward such liaisons as that of Nekrasov and Panaeva, Tolstoy was hardly more sympathetic than he was with some of the behavior of Sand's heroines. Sex with gypsies or peasant girls while still a bachelor was one thing, but to the early orphaned Tolstoy, marriage and family life were sacred and eternal. And they would remain so for him in an age in which traditional ideas regarding women and the family would come under increasing attack.

While Tolstoy was in the capital a split was developing among the contributors to The Contemporary. It was precipitated by a radical young man of Tolstoy's age, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, who thought that literature should be subservient to man's social and political needs. Turgenev and several of his friends found this role too restrictive. Soon after leaving St. Petersburg, Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov and also criticized Chernyshevsky, referring to him as a "gentleman who smells of lice" with an "unpleasant, reedy little voice uttering stupid, unpleasant things."³

Although Tolstoy's description was hardly objective, Chernyshevsky was not an imposing looking figure. His terrible nearsightedness necessitated glasses; and his delicate face, wavy hair, and timid appearance had earned him the nickname "the pretty maid" when he was a seminary student in the Volga river town of Saratov. Nekrasov, however, increasingly would back Chernyshevsky and his young collaborator Dobrolyubov, both of whom were of more common origins than most older intellectuals. Turgenev labeled the pair the snake and the rattlesnake, and one senses in the attitudes of some of their noblemen critics, including Tolstoy and Turgenev, a touch of unconscious class snobbishness.

The differences which were now beginning to surface among the contributors to The Contemporary would become increasingly important. Just as Pogodin and Aksakov represented two forms of anti-Westernism, so Chernyshevsky and some of his critics such as Turgenev would come to represent two forms of Westernism, one radical and one liberal.

It would take, however, several years for some of Chernyshevsky's radical ideas to fully emerge. In 1856, he was still attempting, like a number of other thinkers, to be conciliatory. One of the most important conciliators of the day was Constantine Kavelin, whom Tolstoy met shortly before leaving the capital. He was a historian of law and a government official, who had earlier taught with Professor Soloviev at Moscow University. Early in 1855, he and one of his former students, Boris Chicherin, had begun a collaborative effort in behalf of Russian liberalism. The two of them wrote a number of works which circulated in manuscript and which early the following year they sent to the émigré radical journalist Alexander Herzen in London for printing. In one of them Chicherin wrote: "Liberalism! This is the slogan of every educated and sober-minded person in Russia. This is the banner which can unite about it people of all spheres, all estates, all inclinations. This is the word which can mold a powerful public opinion, if only we can shake off from ourselves self-destructive laziness and indifference to the common cause." Liberalism, he believed, was also the medicine Russia needed in order to cure its social ills and assume its proper place in the world. In this one word, he concluded, lies "all the future of Russia."⁴ Chicherin identified liberalism with freedom--for example, freedom for the serfs, for religion, for the press, and for teachers and professors. It also meant to him due process of law and the publicity and openness (publichnost and glasnost) of government and legal activities.

But the past of Russian liberalism seemed to portend that it had about as much chance for a fruitful future as would an orange tree in Siberia. Whereas in the West liberalism was supported by a strong middle class wishing to limit governmental powers, in Russia the middle class was small and not always desirous of limiting the power of the monarch. Men such as Kavelin and Chicherin, as well as Professor Soloviev, who shared some of their important ideas, wanted a reforming monarch, but had no desire to weaken his authority. In fact, all three men wanted him to strongly pursue progressive policies while standing above class interests. Thus Kavelin could write, as he did in 1855, about the "complete necessity of retaining the unlimited power of the sovereign, basing it on the widest possible local freedom."⁵The inherent unlikeliness of any lasting marriage between autocracy and freedom, indeed the improbability of anything more than even a brief flirtation, does not seem to have occurred to Kavelin or his fellow moderates.

Nevertheless, in early 1856 there was considerable support among educated people for the type of changes advocated by Kavelin and Chicherin. In the capital the enthusiastic Kavelin was a whirlwind of activity. He was well thought of by the two most progressive members of the Imperial family, the Tsar's aunt Grand Duchess Elena and his brother Constantine, and he was also friendly with a number of progressive bureaucrats. Furthermore, realizing that the times called for a unified public opinion, he tried to patch over past personal and intellectual differences and to create a consensus for moderate reform. In the material which he and Chicherin sent to Herzen, with whom Kavelin had once been close friends, the two liberals tried to persuade him to moderate his criticism of the Tsar and renounce what they considered his socialistic propaganda. Kavelin had recently also made overtures to one of his former teachers, the conservative nationalist Pogodin.

One of the subjects Kavelin had been most concerned with was the possibility of ending serfdom, and he had recently written a long "memorandum" suggesting how it could be successfully accomplished. Meanwhile, Tolstoy had been troubled by a guilty conscience because of his own ownership of serfs. Thus, he sought out Kavelin, who also contributed to The Contemporary, for enlightenment on how he might best improve their lot. After spending the evening of April 23 with Kavelin, Tolstoy recorded in his diary that the serf question was becoming clearer, that Kavelin possessed "a charming mind and nature,"⁶ and that he (Tolstoy) was now hopeful that he could return to his serfs with a written proposal.

Although Tolstoy shared some of Kavelin's enthusiasm for reform, he did not share his reconciling temperament. While Kavelin tried to appease and reconcile various groups, Tolstoy continued sporadically to antagonize or find fault with one after another. He believed that many of the liberal contributors to The Contemporary, i.e., most of those opposing Chernyshevsky, lacked moral depth. They in turn realized that, despite some liberal inclinations, Tolstoy was somehow essentially different from most of them. When one of the contributors wrote in a letter to Nekrasov that Tolstoy's sympathy with liberalism was insufficient, Tolstoy challenged him to a duel. Fortunately, Tolstoy's would-be opponent ignored the challenge.

During the first few weeks of May, Tolstoy's dissatisfaction targeted the Slavophiles and Pogodin. Earlier that year, he had visited Moscow and met with Constantine Aksakov and his father. Now in St. Petersburg he met Constantine's younger brother Ivan and Ivan Kireevsky, another prominent Slavophile. In his diary, Tolstoy criticized their ideas for being too narrow and one-sided. Five days later after reading an article of Pogodin's about the honoring of the Sevastopol defenders in Moscow, he wrote: "I with pleasure would slap Pogodin's face. Contemptible flattery, seasoned with Slavophilism."⁷

Ironically, despite his critical disposition, he wrote in his diary for 12 May that the key to happiness in life was to dispense love in all directions. And a few months later when he wrote to Nekrasov criticizing Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy pointed to what he considered the radical's angry and bitter literary criticism. Tolstoy thought that it reflected an absence of love and therefore could do only harm.

Already by the middle of April, with the first signs of spring in the air, Tolstoy was anxious to leave the capital and return to his lovely Yasnaya Polyana property. But first the military had to approve the leave which he had recently requested. Finally on May 16, he received a long furlough, eleven months, from further military duties. The next day he boarded the train for Moscow en route to his estate. (For more text and photos dealing with Tolstoy in St. Petersburg at this time, see this link to Birukoff.)

THE TSAR, THE SERFS, AND THE CORONATION

In March 1856, a month after the Sevastopol sailors had left Moscow, the Tsar once again journeyed there by train. With the peace treaty having just been signed, those that concerned themselves with public affairs could now concentrate on other matters. And the old governor-general of Moscow had something other than war on his mind. Recently he had heard rumors that Alexander would announce the emancipation of the serfs during the upcoming coronation ceremonies. Although he himself might not believe such talk, some of his fellow nobles in Moscow were concerned. The governor-general asked the Emperor if he would reassure the nobles that their fears were groundless.

Even when primarily concerned with the war, Alexander had slowly begun to take steps to alleviate some of the more oppressive aspects of his father's rule. In addition to easing up on censorship, he lifted some of the restrictions on travel and on the number of students permitted into the universities. His manifesto announcing the peace also seemed to indicate reform. It spoke of a desire for strengthening Russia's internal well-being, for equal justice for all her people, and for developing the urge toward enlightenment and useful activity.

But for many of the intellectuals of the day, the abolition of serfdom was the most pressing issue. From Alexander Herzen in his London sanctuary to more conservative thinkers like Constantine Aksakov and Pogodin in Moscow, there was general agreement among intellectuals that serfdom had to go. Many considered it a sign of backwardness and some a scandal that close to a half of Russia's large peasant class and about two-fifths of its total population was comprised of serf families. Although the serfs usually lived in their own households and worked on strips of land whose produce they kept or sold, or even worked in the city if their owners approved, they all owed work or made payments on a regular basis to their lords. They could still be beaten, sent to Siberia or to the army for twenty-five years, or be compelled to marry by their masters. The nobles could still with impunity take sexual advantage of their female serfs. Regardless of how frequently or infrequently such abuses occurred, their mere possibility and the absence of legal safeguards for serfs seemed intolerable to such men as Herzen and Chernyshevsky.

To the governor-general of Moscow and to some of the area's less enlightened nobles, however, serfdom was not intolerable. For centuries the serfs had supported the nobility. (See this link for the home of one of the Sheremetevs; in the early nineteenth century the richest member of this clan owned about 300,000 male and female serfs and almost 2 million acres.) Many serfowners could not imagine running their estates without serfs. Some "masters" also were convinced that serfdom was necessary, at least in their lifetime, for the good of Russia. Were not their serfs too ignorant, immature, and indolent to operate on their own?

Despite some of the Emperor's other early steps in the direction of reform, the governor-general had some reason to hope that Alexander would not tamper with serfdom. Rulers from the time of Catherine the Great, almost a century before, had recognized some of the evils of the system, but had not dared to abolish it. Serfowners were the backbone of the military and civilian leadership. The Tsar was dependent on them for carrying out his policies. Some thought that he could not afford to alienate this small but influential class. Moreover, as Tsarevich, Alexander had gained the reputation of being a supporter of the rights of the landowners.

Alexander's visit to Moscow was a short one, with the usual religious services, military ceremonies, and governmental meetings. Since it was the Lenten season, however, the governor-general was not able to give a ball. The day after the Tsar arrived he received the representatives of the nobility of the Moscow province. While he spoke to them of serfdom, he was not very reassuring. Although he did not allow his speech to be printed nor its contents mentioned in the press, it nevertheless created a sensation. An underground text of it soon rapidly circulated. The Tsar told the nobles that while he did not intend to abolish serfdom immediately, eventually it must occur. He added that it would be better if it came from above rather than from below, an allusion to possible serf uprisings. Finally, he invited the nobles to give some consideration as to how serfdom might be ended.

After returning to the capital Alexander instructed his Minister of Interior to begin preparing a plan for the gradual liberation of the serfs. He also told him to speak informally about the subject to representatives of the nobility of various provinces when they convened at the upcoming coronation in Moscow. The Tsar hoped to obtain the cooperation of the landowners rather than forcing the emancipation of the serfs upon them.

During the war there had been scattered peasant disturbances, and some in the military believed that Russia's poor showing in the war was partly the result of serfdom. In the same month that Alexander spoke to the Moscow nobles, Dmitry Milyutin, a young general and friend of the liberal Constantine Kavelin, composed a memorandum on army reform. In it he pointed to the necessity of creating a large trained reserve and reducing the size of the traditionally large standing army. But for a variety of reasons these steps were only feasible if serfdom was abolished. To the Tsar such military considerations were important. So also was the financial consideration that a smaller standing army would be more affordable. The Crimean War had strained the country's economy to a dangerous degree, and Alexander wished to reduce inflation and the threat of serious peacetime budget deficits. The peasant disturbances, public opinion, the aid of enlightened bureaucrats such as Milyutin's brother Nicholas (who served as deputy Minister of Interior), concern with its image at home and abroad, and Russia's industrial backwardness and sluggish economy also helped propel him toward emancipating the serfs.

Thus, in the first year of his reign, Alexander indicated that he could be more pragmatic and flexible than his father had been. What he wanted for his country was what most rulers wanted: strength and stability. He began to perceive that if Russia was to regain the status and power it lost during the recent war (an important consideration to Russia's ruling elite as well as to Alexander), it would have to reform and modernize. The trick was to do so while maintaining stability and without infringing upon his own autocratic powers. For he sincerely believed that in Russia's backward state only the Tsar could stand above narrower interests of class and ideology and rule in behalf of all.

Although Alexander thought that Russia must now concentrate on internal development and avoid costly foreign entanglements, he nevertheless had to take diplomatic steps to aid such a policy. A few weeks after his return from Moscow, he installed a new Foreign Minister. He was vain, talkative Alexander Gorchakov, a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy. In domestic matters he supported reform, although always within proper bounds. He would prove to be a strong supporter of Alexander's emancipation efforts. Regarding foreign affairs, he was known for his anti-Austrian and pro-French sentiments. With his appointment the Tsar signaled a drastic change in Russian foreign policy. Turning his back on an Austria that his father had allied with, but which Alexander believed had betrayed Russia during the recent war, the Tsar now began moving Russia closer to France. In January 1857, after receiving a friendly letter from France's Napoleon III, Alexander would write to his brother Grand Duke Constantine: "I see union with France as a guarantee of future peace in Europe."¹ Alexander was no great admirer of Napoleon III, but he realized that the French ruler's ambitions conflicted with those of Austria. He hoped to take advantage of any estrangement between these two powers to regain, without undue risk, Russia's military rights in the Black Sea.

Moving closer to France, however, did not necessitate moving away from Russia's other pre-war friend, Prussia. Thus, in May 1856, Alexander traveled to Berlin and Sans Souci to visit the Prussian monarch, Frederick William IV. He was met there by his mother, who was the sister of the Prussian monarch. The Tsar thanked Frederick William for not joining Russia's enemies during the war. Four days of cordial talks, parades, and pleasantries followed.

On his way to Prussia the Emperor had spent six days in Russian Poland. Alexander had already shown signs of easing his father's harsh handling of the Poles, but while in Warsaw he warned Polish leaders not to dream of Polish autonomy. On the way back from Berlin, Alexander spent some time in Russia's Baltic provinces. As in Poland, he displayed there a firm resolve to hold together Russia's multiethnic empire.

He also wished to increase his hold on newly conquered border areas and to continue expanding the Russian empire. General Muraviev was tightening his control over former Chinese territories in Siberia. In the Caucasus Russian troops after two decades were still battling the legendary Shamil and his Islamic mountain forces. Many of the Tsar's advisors predicted the necessity of at least another decade of fighting before a Russian victory could be gained over Shamil. However, in the summer of 1856, Alexander placed a friend of his youth, Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, in charge of operations in the Caucasus. Within three years Baryatinsky would capture Shamil and break the resistance movement in the Eastern Caucasus.

As in his first year as Tsar, Alexander and his wife resided the greater part of that second summer in Tsarskoe Selo and then Peterhof. The planning for an August coronation was proceeding, and the family spent some happy moments together. One such time began with a trip on the Emperor's yacht from Peterhof to Gapsal, along the Estonian coast. The four sons were already at this seaside resort when their father and mother decided to pay them a surprise visit. The gulf waters were calm and the July weather beautiful. Although her constitution was not the strongest and she had not been feeling well before her departure, the Empress suddenly began to feel better. After a night at sea the yacht approached Gapsal, and the royal couple spotted their four sons out in a boat. A happy reunion followed, with parents, children, and dogs all delighted to see one another. After some days together and receptions and festivities, the Empress kissed her boys on the forehead and blessed them. Then the parents said good-bye and once again boarded their yacht. That evening there was a beautiful sunset. As they sat on the deck the Empress told Anna Tyutcheva, that lady-in-waiting who had been so upset at Alexander's decision to end the war, that she loved the sea because to her it was a symbol of eternity. Their conversation then turned to St. Augustine and his mother. Such religious topics were close to the heart of this pious, non-worldly Empress.

Another lady-in-waiting, the tall, slender, dark-haired, and flirtatious Alexandra Dolgorukaya, also accompanied the couple on the trip. There were still rumors about her and the Tsar, and the Empress would become increasingly upset about such talk--Grand Duke Constantine's diary entry of November 22, 1859, indicated that three years later serious grounds for rumors still existed.²Nevertheless, a little more than nine months after these nights on the gulf waters, Empress Maria would give birth to another boy.

At the end of August, after more than a week's preliminary festivities, the coronation finally took place in Moscow's Kremlin. The ancient city was painted and cleaned in preparation. And one observer noted, perhaps with some exaggeration, that almost as much was being spent on coronation festivities and preparations as on the costly Crimean War, and that this was being done partly to impress foreigners. People from throughout the empire streamed into the white-walled city, jamming the roads leading to it. The great variety of the empire's nationalities and costumes caught the eye. The weather was magnificent. On the day before the actual coronation, the Emperor's subjects joined foreign observers and diplomats along the city's roads and upon specially built platforms in order to watch the entrance of the royal procession into the city from a palace on the outskirts. Cossacks and elite cavalry units sitting upright on their horses, brilliantly decorated and colored uniforms, golden coaches and jeweled royalty, all captured the eye. The bells atop the hundreds of churches, the clatter of hoofs and carriage wheels, the music of the bands, and the noise of the crowds created a cacophony of sounds. As a silver and glass carriage, harnessed to eight gray horses, slowly passed by, people fell to their knees. Inside, alone and erect, sat Emperor Alexander II.

Among the diplomats in Moscow for the coronation was England's Lord Granville. His report to Queen Victoria spoke of the tremendous expense of the coronation festivities, but more importantly he briefly assessed the new monarch and the condition of Russia. Like Professor Soloviev and Anna Tyutcheva, Granville believed that the new Emperor did not possess a strong character, nor did he seem to have the ability to choose able ministers. And due to the oppressive nature of the reign of Nicholas I, Granville thought that the easing of restrictions which was then occurring presented some danger for the new regime. On the future horizon, he believed, Socialism could pose a serious threat.

But on the morning of the coronation the sun shone brilliantly, and most Muscovites and visiting Russians from outside the city were in a joyous mood. Cheers, bells, cannons, and the Russian national hymn greeted the Emperor as he descended the famous Red Staircase of the Great Palace and moved toward the Assumption Cathedral. Under a royal canopy, Alexander walked erectly next to his wife whose eyes only approached the level of his shoulders. He was in uniform, and it was not difficult to see why many considered him a handsome man. He was a bit pale that day, but his sideburns curved around to meet his finely trimmed mustache and helped to give his face a regal appearance. The eyes of the Empress were downcast and she seemed withdrawn into her own inner world. Once inside the Assumption Cathedral, amidst its beautiful frescoes and icons, the ceremony continued for five hours. The Emperor's crowning of himself and his wife, as well as other aspects of the ceremony, symbolized the power of the Autocrat of the Russian Empire and the fact that he was responsible to no man, only to God. (See this link for the report of a Prussian general on the coronation.)

On the days following the ceremony the pageantry and celebrations continued. Fountains flowed with wine. Soldiers served food to the people and coronation souvenirs were distributed. At night fireworks illuminated the sky, and the Kremlin towers could be seen reflected in the Moscow river below. Dinners, receptions, and balls, where crinolined ladies danced mazurkas, polonaises, quadrilles, and waltzes with their uniformed partners, followed one after another.

In general the coronation ceremonies seem to have been a smashing success. The Crimean war was a thing of the past. The coronation symbolized a new beginning, and in that spirit Alexander granted numerous amnesties to prisoners and exiles. He also ended some past injustices--for example, the practice of drafting selected young Jewish boys, who were subsequently pressured to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. But despite the euphoria of the day, there was one small incident which bothered the Empress, and that occurred during the coronation ceremony. At some point after the Emperor had placed the crown on her head, it had fallen off. She told Anna Tyutcheva: "It is a sign I will not wear it long."³

A SOLDIER IN EXILE

While Alexander II was crowning himself in Moscow, far away in the in the Central Asian-Siberian border town of Semipalatinsk (present-day Seney) non-commissioned officer Fedor Dostoevsky was languishing. He was thirty-four, about 5'6" tall, with a pale freckled face and a receding hairline. He smoked much and had a throaty voice.

He was the son of a Moscow doctor, whose mysterious death in 1839 left a permanent mark on the young Fedor. Hearing that his father had been killed by his own serfs, it is likely that the young man held himself partly responsible: he was then a student at the Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg and repeatedly had requested money from his father, who was himself sliding towards impoverishment. Did not his requests contribute to his father's harsh demands on his serfs? Did they not indirectly help lead to the revenge thought to have been exacted by these peasants?¹

Six difficult years later came Nekrasov's discovery of Dostoevsky's literary talent, and soon afterwards the publication of his first novel, Poor Folk. Subsequent events, however, soon deflated the spirits of this shy, awkward, nervous young man. (See this link for several photos of Dostoevsky, including ones in 1847 and 1860.) Some of Dostoevsky's newly made friends, such as the more aristocratic Turgenev, began to tease and torment him because the success of Poor Folk had caused him to seem unduly vain. In addition, his new works failed to generate the enthusiasm of his first. Then he became involved with the Petrashevsky Circle. And his instincts for social justice, his hatred of serfdom (probably intensified by the circumstances of his father's death), and his utopian dreams for a golden age, all led him into trouble. Early one spring morning in 1849, Dostoevsky was awakened by a lieutenant colonel of the secret police and a local police official and led to a waiting carriage. He spent the next eight months surrounded by the damp, cold, and moldy walls of his cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

A few days before Christmas he was taken to Semenovsky Square. There, amidst fresh snow and the newly risen sun, he and others who had once been part of the Petrashevsky group heard their death sentences read out in a hasty and indistinct voice. "Retired Engineer-Lieutenant Fedor Dostoevsky, twenty-seven, for participation in criminal plans, for circulating a private letter that contained infamous expressions about the Russian Orthodox Church and Supreme Authority, and for an attempt to disseminate writing against the government by means of a hand printing press--to be put to death by the firing squad."²Moments of agony followed as the first group of three were led forward, and he stood there in the second group. The troops assigned to this gruesome task loaded their muskets and took aim. But then came the deliberate last minute arrival of the Tsar's reprieve, and instead of death, Siberia, where several wives of those Decembrists exiled a quarter century earlier met him in transit and gave him a copy of the Gospels. Following four years of prison in Omsk, in that "House of the Dead" as he would later describe it, he was assigned to the 7th Siberian Battalion of the Line in Semipalatinsk, a city about 600 miles southeast and up the Irtysh River from Omsk. (See this link for a photo of a Semipalatinsk bazaar.)

It was a barren town of less than 10,000 inhabitants, even if one counted some 3,000 Tatars, Kirghiz, and other people of the steppe who lived on the western side of the Irtysh River. Its main section consisted of a long line of log houses and a few brick government and military structures, which were separated by a wide unpaved road from melon gardens along the eastern side of the Irtysh. Past the river and the Tatar village on the other side lay the treeless Kirghiz steppe. It stretched to the southwest for more than a thousand miles. Semipalatinsk was a military base from which troops could be dispatched to help keep the newly conquered, but still rebellious, Kirghiz in line. It was also a center for camel-caravaned and pack-horsed traders who departed and arrived from Chinese towns and also from cities like Bukhara and Tashkent, far to the southwest and not yet under Russian control. Sheep, horses, cattle, and animal skins from the steppe also entered and left the town. It contained one Orthodox church, one district school, one hospital, seven mosques, and many exotic shops. But there were no bookstores and no street lights. Mail came only once a week. Cards, gossip, and drinking helped the townspeople to pass their spare hours.

After first arriving in early 1854, Dostoevsky lived in the barracks with most of the other soldiers, but soon he was renting a low-ceilinged, one-room cottage in a dreary part of town. He also acquired a new friend. This was a twenty-two-year-old newly appointed public prosecutor from St. Petersburg, Baron Alexander Wrangel. He was familiar with Dostoevsky's writings and had been present five years earlier on the square where the writer thought he was to be executed. Wrangel was an intelligent, sympathetic young man who soon did all he could to help Dostoevsky. He brought the writer into the homes of Semipalatinsk's small Russian "elite," and during the extraordinarily hot summer of 1855, the men resided together at the dacha, or summer home, of a rich merchant. When Wrangel returned to St. Petersburg in February of the following year, he interceded with officials in an attempt to improve the career of his good friend.

Dostoevsky himself had tried to better his own fate by displaying his patriotism in three poems he had written since arriving in Semipalatinsk. The first, "On the European Events in 1854," criticized Russia's enemies and stated that "God is with us." The second, which he dedicated to the widow of the Tsar who had sent him to Siberia, spoke of her just deceased husband as one "who illuminated us like the sun." The third, in honor of Alexander's coronation, spoke of the new Tsar as the "source of all mercy."³ The poems were meant primarily for the eyes of high officials in the capital, and at least the second and third seem to have helped Dostoevsky improve his chances for an eventual pardon.

The poems were not as hypocritical as they might seem. Dostoevsky's Western-influenced utopian convictions had undergone a profound change since his arrest. At first in the prison at Omsk, the lonely writer observing the barbaric conduct of the common criminals had felt more isolated and cut off than ever. But he could not long stand this agony of isolation. Two experiences helped him to overcome it. The first was his participation one Easter week with these common prisoners at Orthodox Church services, and the second, occurring that same week, was a sudden long-forgotten recollection of the loving help one of his father's serfs had given him when he was nine years old. (Many years later Dostoevsky described this recollection in the short piece "Peasant Marey.") These two phenomena seem to have triggered in him an intense religious reawakening.

His vague religious beliefs, which had become amalgamated with his utopianism, were now replaced by a belief in the concrete Orthodox religion of the common man: the religion of Christ, of sin and suffering, of resurrection and redemption. And from this belief followed another: the only path for Russian intellectuals to follow was one that united them with the common people and their religious beliefs.

Yet, despite these beliefs, which he would adhere to for the remainder of his life, he did not completely abandon his earlier utopianism, but rather unconsciously merged it with his reawakened Orthodoxy. His youthful dream of creating a golden age would later be reborn in his hope that the Kingdom of God could be realized on earth. In general, his new faith was more optimistic and less fatalistic than that of the masses. He also remained much more concerned than most Church leaders about obtaining social justice and happiness for the masses on this earth, and not just in heaven. For these reasons, he never completely lost his sympathy for young people who dreamed of creating a more humane society.

Dostoevsky also shared the hopes of most educated society that Alexander II would be a great improvement over his father, that he would be a true reformer. After Wrangel wrote to him about the popularity of the new Tsar, Dostoevsky replied that the news greatly pleased him and that what was needed now was greater faith, unity, and love.

Shortly after Wrangel left Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky sent him a letter to be given to the hero of Sevastopol and now aide-de-camp to the Tsar, General Totleben. The general's brother, Adolf, had been a classmate and friend of Dostoevsky's when they had studied engineering together in St. Petersburg. In the letter the ex-convict requested the general to ask the Tsar to release him from military service, allow him to leave Semipalatinsk, and permit him to once again publish his works. Totleben agreed to help. But the Tsar allowed only the promotion of Dostoevsky to the officer rank of ensign. Permission for him to publish was to be granted only after continued surveillance had established his political reliability.

Although Dostoevsky and many other writers hoped for much good from the new Emperor, he never would reciprocate their confidence. When still a Tsarevich, he had criticized intellectuals who thought they were "more intelligent than everyone else" and who believed "that they should be able to do as they want."⁴For such false pride he had blamed foreign influences and some of Russia's professors. Later, a few years after becoming Tsar, he wrote to a friend: "I swear that I have never been greatly enamored of literary men in general, and in particular I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that they are a class of individuals with the most dangerous biases and hidden motives."⁵

The welcome news of Dostoevsky's promotion did not come until the fall of 1856. At the time of the August coronation, however, the exiled writer was a very unhappy man. Besides not being able to publish anything, he was in debt and his health was not good. He also missed his good friend Wrangel. Worst of all, he was in love with a woman five hundred miles away who, he feared, loved a younger rival who had the advantage of living in the same town with her.

The passion of his life at this time was Maria Isaeva. She was in her late twenties, of medium height, somewhat sickly, frail and thin, but capricious, high-strung, and strong willed. When Dostoevsky met her soon after arriving in Semipalatinsk she was married to a drunkard, who had lost his government position. She also had a seven-year-old son. Eventually an intimate relationship developed between the unhappy woman and the lonely writer who had been deprived of love for so long.

But then her husband found a new job in the distant town of Kuznetsk. When his wife left with him, Dostoevsky wept and became morbid. Nor did the death of her husband some months later greatly improve the writer's chances, for he was in no position to propose marriage. She herself was impoverished and unclear in her own mind as to her feelings about Dostoevsky or what she should do in the future. On a secret and unlawful trip to Kuznetsk several months before the coronation, the writer had met not only with Maria, but also with his young rival of twenty-four. He was a schoolteacher who, Dostoevsky had thought, had "seen nothing and knows nothing."⁶

Dostoevsky returned to Semipalatinsk in a state of nervous exhaustion. Several months passed, as did letters between Maria and Dostoevsky. She could not make up her mind, and Dostoevsky's health noticeably suffered from her indecision. Acquaintances found him on the verge of collapse.

Finally, after his promotion came, his odds with Maria shot up along with his salary and status. After another trip to Kuznetsk, he wrote to Wrangel in December that he hoped to be married before Lent of the following year.

Two months later, in February 1857, Dostoevsky and Maria were married at the Church of the Holy Guide in Kuznetsk. Only a few people were present including his rival, the young school teacher. On the way back to Semipalatinsk, the newlyweds stopped off in the town of Barnaul, where they visited a friend of the writer's, a well known geographer and expeditionist, Peter Semenov. While there Dostoevsky fell to the floor, moaning and convulsing in spasms. His new bride was terrified. The doctor who was summoned diagnosed epilepsy. Maria had not realized that her new husband was an epileptic, and despite previous nervous attacks, he claimed that he had not known it either. He said that previous doctors had assured him that such attacks were not "true epilepsy" and that they might cease under more tranquil conditions.

After resting and recovering the couple moved on to Semipalatinsk and into four rented rooms in a square wooden house. They remained in the town for a little over two years; her son was sent to a cadet school in Omsk. Dostoevsky found time to write and renewed some of his literary contacts. A friend wrote that Nekrasov and Panaev would send money to help him until he could write something for them. He also read all that he could. He regarded Turgenev's works very highly and thought his A Nest of the Landed Gentry, which appeared in The Contemporary in early 1859, "