Taking Stock

The end of the year is a time for account taking and anticipation, a time for recollections of the passing year and hopes for the future. Winter is cold, snow, and darkness, but as the days gradually lengthen, dreams of spring take hold, prompting the thought that maybe, just maybe, the new year will fulfill long nurtured hopes.

Jews, who often suffered more than their fair share of hardships, relied on this sense of hope in the future. In the late eighteenth century, the Russian authorities were preparing to resettle all Jews living in villages to cities and shtetls. The partitions of Poland, by which the Russian Empire (along with Prussia and the Habsburgs) claimed ever greater swaths of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth as their own, had resulted in a large increase in Russia’s Jewish population, and the state could not come up with a consistent policy in regard to its new subjects. The powers that be tended to feel that Jews had no business living in villages and “plying the Russian people with drink.” Indeed, Jews, having no land of their own, had few ways to make a living. Keeping a tavern was one of them, and Jews therefore played a major part in the vodka trade. Basically, Jews were blamed for the fact that Russian villagers liked to get drunk, so expelling them from villages would solve the problem, while also increasing the urban population.

In December of 1804, Alexander I enacted an edict requiring all “village Jews” (of which there were approximately 60,000) to move to cities within two or three years (depending on the province in which they resided). This was utterly unrealistic. Jews were a part of the fabric of rural life, and in many places removing them would strike a blow to local economies and leave villages deprived of key skillsets. Furthermore, what would the resettled Jews do in the cities? Many high-ranking officials protested the edict, and on December 29, 1808, it was rescinded.

Yet the Jews knew from long experience not to get overly excited about this turn of events. Indeed, by 1812, as a Napoleonic invasion threatened, Jews were again targeted as somehow at fault and banished from all border areas. In subsequent years they continued to be ordered out of one or another province.

Of course, Jews were not the only imperial subjects buffeted by the shifting winds of desperation and hope. Many young Russians dreamed that the very near future would see the rising of

The star of joyous exaltation
And Russia will emerge from sleep
The ruins of brutal subjugation
Will evermore our imprint keep.

Russians rely at least as much on humor as hope to get by, and Pushkin’s noble verse inspired jokesters far in the future to come up with lines, loosely translated, such as

Oh comrade,
Like the star of exaltation
The price of booze will go up with inflation.

And just what were the hopes that inspired the Pushkin era, 200 years ago? Things seemed to be going swimmingly for Russia in 1818. The war with Napoleon had been won, and the tsar enjoyed tremendous authority, both at home and abroad. In November 1818, Alexander I played a leading role at the Holy Alliance’s congress at Aachen (known as the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle). The congress was dealing with a number of issues central to the fate of Europe: how best to manage the captivity of Napoleon on St. Helena, the withdrawal of occupying forces from France, rebelling Spanish colonies, and the rules for commercial shipping.

The Reverend Lewis Way, an Englishman who had gained an audience with Alexander the previous year, was invited by the Russian tsar to present the monarchs with a petition with proposals for improving the situation of Jews, especially in Russia. Alexander developed a particular rapport with Way and took his proposals to heart. However, the tsar was in no particular hurry to return to Russia. There, he would have to come up with reforms that went far beyond improving the lives of Jews.

Ever since his days as a young heir to the throne, Alexander had dreamed of implementing reforms and claimed that, once he became tsar, he would give Russia a constitution and perhaps even establish a republic. He and his wife would then live out their lives in a little house on the banks of the Rhine. In fact, when he first ascended the throne, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work drafting plans for reforms. “The beautiful beginning of the Alexander days,” Pushkin called this period. The problem was that the beautiful beginning was not followed by a marvelous continuation. Alexander became distracted by other matters, including fighting Napoleon and conquering the Caucasus.

But what should be done about autocracy, about serfdom? Several months before the Congress in Aachen, the tsar had ordered his friend Nikolai Novosiltsev to draft a constitution, and it was just about ready. So, was he just supposed to introduce it? Doing so was Alexander’s long cherished dream, but actually fulfilling that dream was another matter. He could well remember how his father, Paul I, had been killed by irate nobles (not without Alexander’s tacit consent, incidentally), and that his grandfather, Peter III, had been murdered by courtiers. What if the Russian nobility was so resistant to reform that the same fate should befall him? The constitution sat on the back burner.

Meanwhile, some members of the nobility were impatient for reform. By the fall of 1818, a secret society, the Union of Welfare (Союз Благоденствия), was almost a year old and was eager to help the tsar introduce change. Their emblem was the bee, whose collective and assiduous efforts gathering nectar yielded sweet honey. Perhaps by helping individual people and righting individual wrongs they would manage to advance the moment when the sovereign would finally improve the welfare of the entire country? But the members of this and other secret societies could see that the tsar had little use for their help, since he himself was doing nothing. These progressive young nobles grew increasingly tired of waiting.

Just a few years later, in November 1825, the country learned of Alexander’s death. The tsar himself had grown weary, depressed, and disappointed in life.

In December, the former members of the Union of Welfare, who had long since begun to prepare a revolt, went out onto Senate Square in St. Petersburg in the hope of delivering their country a joyous new life. They were met with cannon fire.

Hopes were yet again dashed. Alexander’s brother, Nicholas I, who shared none of his brother’s liberal tendencies, lost no time in applying a firm hand.

Nicholas’s reign was not a particularly hopeful time. Or rather, the only ones able to nurture hope for the prosperity and wellbeing of Russia were those who believed that Russia could only flourish under a strong autocrat. Life for anyone skeptical on that count was dreary.

Five of the Decembrists who staged the 1825 revolt were hanged and dozens ended their lives in forced labor or in Siberian exile, but those who lived to see their freedom restored in the late 1850s under Alexander II probably did experience a resurgence of hope – a hope that was now far from groundless. Where his uncle and father had quailed, this young tsar was making ready to abolish serfdom. The Secret Committee charged with paving the way toward liberation soon began to operate in the open. and the tsar pressured the provincial nobility to form committees to offer their own plans for reform.

Within the Main Committee, which compiled and developed the proposals submitted by the nobility, a general named Yakov Rostovtsev was playing an increasingly important role. In his youth, Rostovtsev had been a member of the secret society that carried out the Decembrist revolt, but on the eve of the uprising he had revealed the plot to the tsar. Some believed that he did this to promote his career, while others thought he merely favored a peaceful path to change. Whatever the case, while Rostovtsev’s friends were sent to Siberia, he enjoyed a splendid career in the capital, becoming known for his conservative views. So, why was he now so passionately throwing his energies into plans to emancipate the serfs?

Perhaps he felt a need to assuage his conscience? There were rumors that his dying son had begged Rostovtsev to atone for his sin, and that now he was fulfilling this deathbed promise. Be that as it may, Rostovtsev became a major force for reform. And in December 1858 the tsar approved the program he proposed. Under Rostovtsev’s proposal, the peasants could only be emancipated with land – they could not simply be given freedom and sent off to make their way in the world, which might have suited many members of the nobility. Rostovtsev invested so much effort into the cause of liberating the serfs that he became seriously ill and died without living to see his reforms implemented.

Emancipation finally came in 1861, and it marked the dawn of a new era. In its wake came judicial and military reforms, reforms in how cities and villages were governed, and an abolishment of censorship. Society blossomed, with independent courts, local self-government, new magazines and newspapers, and an end to the hated commandeering of peasant troops for virtually life-long service. Finally, the hoped-for future had arrived!

The country was undergoing a rebirth, renewing old hopes that Mother Russia would emerge as leader of all Orthodox countries and free the Balkans from the Ottoman yoke, maybe even retake Constantinople and place a cross back atop Hagia Sophia. Twenty years later, in 1878, even this hope began to look realistic, as Russia thrashed Turkey and took the upper hand in the Balkans. Russia was in fine shape both at home and abroad.

Or was it? Back home, educated young Russians were growing increasingly hostile toward the authorities and saw the tsar as having abandoned reform. He had liberated the serfs, but they had been given too little land and remained dependent on landowners. He had given the people new courts, but had arrested Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the idol of the young intelligentsia, and sentenced him to a degrading “civil” (mock) execution before sending him into exile. Alexander had granted great freedom to universities, but then began having students expelled if they became too politically active.

Hundreds of young men and women were creating revolutionary discussion groups and attempting to provoke a peasant uprising. As they were arrested, a continuous stream of replacements came to fill their ranks. Meanwhile, Russia’s military achievements began to crumble. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the great powers deprived Russia of many of the advantages it had gained in its war with Turkey. Russia’s international relations became increasingly fraught.

The following year, the most radical wing of the revolutionary movement decided that Alexander had to die, since, as they saw it, he had retreated from political reform. Thus began the tragic pursuit of the tsar by terrorists, ending in his murder in March 1881. His replacement, Alexander III, decided that reforms were a bad idea, since they encouraged revolutionaries. Hopes for a constitution collapsed – there would be no parliament, no bright future. The tsar’s assassins were hung, his reforms were rolled back, and the government became increasingly brutal and began to emphasize Orthodox Christianity, believing that only non-believers opposed the tsar. Life became calmer, but it was also harder to breathe.

DECADES PASSED, and ordinary Russians continued to alternate between hope and despair, while revolutionaries turned to the more gradualist “theory of small deeds” or went into emigration. The rest were arrested or exiled. Jews, meanwhile, were expelled from major cities. The accusation was no longer that they plied the Russian people with drink, but that they infected them with anti-government ideas and were leading the younger generation astray.

On November 1, 1894, Alexander III died and young Nicholas II took the throne, introducing another period of hope. Even the tragedy at Khodynka Field, where hundreds were trampled to death while celebrating Nicholas’s coronation, did little to dampen optimism. The incident was seen as a simple misfortune, rather than a sinister portent of horrors to come.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 took the lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, and 1905 began with Bloody Sunday, the start of Russia’s first revolution, one that yielded the State Duma. Prime Minister Stolypin began agrarian reform to give land to the peasantry, so as to lure them away from supporting revolutionaries. He claimed that if he could just have twenty years of peace he could turn Russia into a prosperous country.

Stolypin urged the tsar to give Jews greater rights, in order to make revolution less appealing to them, but the tsar refused. Instead, anti-Jewish pogroms swept through parts of Russia, leading many to emigrate to the United States. When Stolypin was shot by a terrorist, his assassin claimed under interrogation that he held Stolypin responsible for the pogroms. Crucial reforms stalled.

Still, there were gradual improvements in the country. The development of industry accelerated, censorship weakened, and people were granted increasing rights. Brilliant poetry was written, stunning paintings were painted, and in December 1908 the biologist Ilya Mechnikov was awarded a Nobel Prize. True, he had been living in Paris for many years by then (he could not endure the policies governing Russian universities), but still – his was a Russian achievement.

Life continued improving and people started to enjoy a thing called “leisure.” In December 1908, for example, a company founded two years earlier by Alexander Khanzhonkov, a Cossack officer, to “sell cinematographic film, magic lanterns, dissolving views, and other various machines and equipment for producing these items” released its first production. This filma (today the Russians call a movie a film), Drama in a Gypsy Camp Near Moscow, featured a soul-searing plot:

A handsome young Gypsy by the name of Aleko (just like the hero of Pushkin’s verse poem The Gypsies) is in love with the beautiful young Aza. The camp is already celebrating the couple’s wedding when another Gypsy who loves Aza entices Aleko, who has a weakness for gambling, into a card game. Aleko, of course, loses all his money and any Gypsy’s prize possession – his horse. Left with nothing else to wager and a burning desire to keep playing, he agrees to add his wife to the bargain. Despite Aza’s pleading to simply stop playing, he persists, and, of course, loses his bride. His fellow Gypsies indignantly drive Aleko out of the camp. He returns under cover of darkness to convince Aza to flee with him, but she refuses. Aleko then stabs her with a dagger and throws himself off a cliff into a river.

Escaping into a darkened theater and, with bated breath, watching the tragic fates of Aleko and Aza unfold, Russians had no idea that they would not get their 20 years of peace. A mere six years remained before world war would shatter their fragile existence. Even the tsarist regime, which seemed absolutely unshakable, would fall, offering a new set of hopes for the future.

But then came a new force, one that most people had never heard of: the Bolsheviks.

Many years later, Mikhail Bulgakov penned the novel The White Guard, which begins in December of 1918.

It was a mighty and horrific year, the 1918th since the birth of Christ, but the second since the revolution. Its summer was rich in sunshine and its winter rich in snow, and two stars stood particularly high in the sky: the shepherd’s star, evening Venus, and red and tremulous Mars.

This new life offers no place for the Turbins – a family of wonderful, cheerful, tender, intelligent members of the nobility. They will be swept away by the new era. A little boy who knows nothing of the revolution has a wondrous dream at the very end of the book:

The dream he had was simple and joyous, like the solar sphere. It was as if Petka was walking through a large green meadow, and a glistening diamond ball that was bigger than Petka was lying in this meadow. In grownup dreams, when they find themselves needing to run away, they stick to the ground, they agonize and cast about, trying to tear their legs from the mire. But children are footloose and nimble. Petka ran up to the diamond ball and, breathless from happy laughter, grabbed it. The ball splashed Petka with sparkles. That was Petka’s dream. It so pleased him that he broke into happy laughter in the night. A cricket chirped cheerfully at him from behind the stove. Petka began to dream other lighthearted and joyous dreams, and the cricket kept singing and singing its song in some crack in the wall in the corner behind the bucket, enlivening the family’s slumbering, murmuring night.

 

AND SO IT will continue. Millions of people will see out the old year every December, reflecting on what was bad and difficult, and hoping for something better in the new year. And their hopes will be realized and then dashed and then again realized. But will they really be dashed every time?

Long ago, in late November (or early December New Style) of 1866, Fyodor Tyutchev would write:

Russia can’t by mind be known,
All common measures will deceive.
She has a nature all her own,
In Russia, one must just believe.

Умом Россию не понять
Аршином общим не измерить
У ней особенная стать
В Россию можно только верить.

A little more than a century later, the poet Igor Guberman, who lived through arrest, exile, and emigration, took an exasperated stab at Tyuchev-inspired humor, titling a poem: “Isn’t It Yet F***ing Time We Fathomed Russia with the Mind?” It would also be great to fathom when our hopes will finally be realized.

It seems apt to return to the words concluding The White Guard, which takes place exactly one hundred years ago, in December 1918:

The last night blossomed. During its second half, its entire weighty blueness, the curtain with which God shrouds the earth, became covered in stars. It looked as if, at the immeasurable height beyond this blue canopy, vespers were being sung at the holy gates. The altar candles were lit, and their light shone through the curtain forming crosses, clusters, and squares. Above the Dnieper, Vladimir’s midnight cross rose out of the sinful and blood-soaked and snowy earth into the black and gloomy heights. From a distance it seemed as if the horizontal part of the cross had disappeared, merging into the vertical part, creating the illusion of a sharp, menacing sword. But there is no cause for fright. All this will pass. Suffering torment, gore, famine, and pestilence. The sword will vanish, but the stars will still be there when not a trace of our bodies and doings remain on the earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. So why are we so reluctant to cast our gaze on them? Why?