September and October

Pushkin had a lifelong interest in Peter the Great. The tsar appears in his works as a benevolent boss and prodigious worker in The Moor of Peter the Great, as a great warrior in Poltava, and as a sinister statue come to life in The Bronze Horseman. But to these works of historical fiction Pushkin aspired to add a non-fiction history of Peter. This project was never brought to fruition, and all that is left to posterity are some fairly extensive notes describing those of Peter’s deeds that the poet considered to be of particular importance.

Some of the episodes from Peter’s life that captured Pushkin’s imagination date back exactly 300 years – to September-October 1718.

Peter arrived in Petersburg (September 3) and laid the foundation of the first tapestry maker, in imitation of the French (on Liteiny).

At that time, Peter had begun working on the Ladoga Canal. On September 19, an ukaz was issued ordering that workers be gathered from all around, one from every 20 households, and one from every seven musketeer and pikeman households; construction began in April 1719 and was supposed to be finished in 1721.

He had another two canals in mind.

Here we see the Peter we know: the energetic innovator and builder. The tapestries that would be produced were of course intended to decorate the homes of Peter’s magnates, or perhaps of wealthy merchants – yet another step in the transformation of the way the Russian upper crust lived, making their homes more like those of their counterparts in the West. We can only imagine the surprise (and, in the case of the older generation, indignation) that must have been provoked by the images depicted on these tapestries, such as scenes from Greek myths, with naked nymphs rather than the dour religious content to which art had been confined in the past.

Peter needed the Ladoga Canal to develop trade with Europe. He had to connect the Volkov and Neva rivers to provide Russian merchants easier access to the Baltic Sea. As Pushkin certainly knew, much of the money spent on this challenging undertaking was stolen. Indeed, after a 1723 inspection, Peter ordered that General Skornyakov-Pisarev, who had been overseeing the effort, be stripped of his rank. His title of general was restored only after Peter’s death. The canal itself was not, in the end, completed in Peter’s lifetime, and it was soon discovered that its design was flawed. It proved to be too shallow, requiring the addition of locks and later the construction of an additional canal.

On the 28th, construction of a new naval ship was begun. Peter inspected the effort during October 2-17 outside Petersburg.

Peter confirmed his ukaz mandating a contribution from Danzig [in support of the war against Sweden] and ordered Repnin to stay in his winter quarters close to this city.

A Swedish shnava [sailing ship] with 14 canons was captured.

More of Peter’s typical activities: shipbuilding, the protracted war with Sweden on land and at sea. But the following sentence is somewhat puzzling:

There was a fire in St. Petersburg that was immediately put out. Peter stayed among the fire-fighting officers, as he was wont.

What are we to make of this? That the tsar was incapable of remaining on the sidelines when anything of consequence was happening? That he wanted to maintain direct control over everything that happened in his beloved city? Or is this merely evidence of his insatiable curiosity (fires are, after all, fascinating)? All of the above? And, perhaps, the fire prompted a line of thinking that led to the next ukaz Pushkin mentions:

On October 23 he published an ukaz ordering that buildings in Moscow be made of stone and about pavement, and that roofs be made of tile, and about ovens and so forth to prevent fires (with the imposition of fines and imprisonment).

This is also curious: until recently, the use of stone in construction was prohibited outside of St. Petersburg. All of a sudden, as we see, this prohibition was being lifted. But now buildings had to be covered in tile, as in Europe, rather than straw, and this, of course, had to do with more than fire prevention.

Pushkin’s notes end with a piece of information he certainly could not resist including:

It was ordered by ukaz that people must stand still and not talk in church.

Typical Peter! He built ships, fought with Swedes, established new manufacturers, and worked to make Russian homes more like European ones, while at the same time trying to get Russians to march in obedient lockstep or, the case of church, to stand still and keep quiet!

It should be noted that this ukaz was issued by a tsar who for many years called his and his friends’ carousing escapades, during which they sacrilegiously parodied church ritual, the “Most Joking and Most Drunken Synod.” An autocrat’s merrymaking is one thing and the behavior of his subjects quite another: their place is to stand still keep quiet!

Fifty years later, the autumn of 1768 found Catherine II (the future Great) on the Russian throne. By then, tapestries had long since become a standard adornment of noble homes, the Russian navy had grown, and the new section of the Ladoga Canal that had been added was improving navigability. Fires continued to plague St. Petersburg and Moscow. Russia was no longer at war with the Swedes, and Catherine did not yet know that in late September the Sultan had ordered the arrest of Russia’s ambassador, launching the Russian-Turkish War that ultimately brought her glory.

For the time being she was engaged in more peaceful activities. On October 23, wishing to set an example for her subjects, Catherine ordered that she be vaccinated against smallpox. At the time, Russia had little expertise in smallpox inoculation, and the people often looked on the doctors who administered inoculations as murderers.

For Catherine’s inoculation, a doctor was summoned from England. He inoculated her against smallpox using infectious material from a sick child, Alexander Markov, who was later granted nobility and given the surname Ospenny (from the Russian word for smallpox, ospa).

The empress was somewhat ill for a while, but soon recovered. In honor of the successful vaccination, a ballet was staged titled Defeated Prejudice that featured such characters as Minerva, Ruthenia (in other words, Russia), the Genius of Science, Superstition, and Ignorance.

Meanwhile, the Senate was largely occupied with petty matters, such as setting the boundaries between properties, but in late October mobilization was declared. Apparently, the news from Turkey had reached St. Petersburg. Whether or not people were obediently holding their tongues while in church is hard to say, but it seems safe to assume that they did not keep entirely silent, despite ukazes and the development of enlightenment.

Moving another 50 years closer to the present, two centuries ago, in September-October of 1818, Russia was not engaged in any wars, at least not any official, declared ones. Napoleon had been defeated, and that autumn the last occupying troops had vanquished France. Emperor Alexander I traveled to Paris to attend a meeting of the Holy Alliance.

In the Caucasus, General Alexei Yermolov was already implementing his ruthless policy of suppressing the mountain population, but nobody imagined the scale these military actions would reach. Young Pushkin did not yet know that he would one day try to write a History of Peter I. For the time being, he was working on Ruslan and Lyudmila and shocking St. Petersburg with his pranks.

That September, Russia’s senate was discussing the question of resettling the Germans of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, who had sided with Napoleon against Russia, in Georgia. With the struggles of 1812 still on their mind, they adopted a resolution to build memorials to Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly. The vitriol that had been directed at Barclay during the war (in response to his plan for the Russian Army’s retreat in the face of the French invasion) had apparently been forgotten.

One hundred years after Peter, the people’s behavior and wellbeing were still seen as demanding governmental intervention, but now the behavior worrying the senators was associated with the consumption of alcohol rather than talking in church. For some reason, quite a few resolutions on this subject were adopted during this two-month period.

First, there was “On Bringing the Drinking Establishments in 29 Provinces into Good Working Order” (apparently, they were too dilapidated). Next there was a resolution about improving the collection of liquor taxes, since revenues were not seen as high enough.

But there was also concern for the public health. It was then that the Votyaks, as today’s Udmurts were then known, were prohibited from brewing their national drink, “kumyshka,” or vodka distilled from mare’s milk, believing it to be harmful. To soften the blow, the Votyaks were granted permission to brew their own beer. Nobody asked the Votyaks how they felt about this.

During those same months a resolution was adopted “On Limiting the Weight of Courier Freight in the Kingdom of Poland.” The problem was that this expedited system was being overused, resulting in loads too large for the horses to handle. Why this was a problem specifically in Poland is unclear.

That fall, the senate was also combatting the counterfeiting of bank notes and the late payment of government contractors – clearly Peter’s dream that the Russian state would operate like a well-oiled machine had not come to pass.

But did the government show the slightest concern for the people who made up the vast majority of the population? Indeed it did! An ukaz was issued “On the Strictest Supervision by Provincial Authorities against Masters Forcing their Peasants to Work on Sundays and Holidays.” The peasants were thus supposed to have Sundays and holidays off from slavery. But since they could be forced to perform labor for their masters the rest of the week, they wound up working on their own plots on Sundays, rather than spending the day in prayer. Serfdom was still firmly in place.

The emperor did conduct an experiment: he freed the serfs in the Baltic lands, where the landowners were less interested in having a massive unpaid workforce. But for the most part, little had changed in the country, even if drinking establishments were in better repair.

And soon the tsar began to hear rumors that secret societies were being formed by members of the nobility who dreamed of introducing a constitution and abolishing serfdom.

Jumping ahead another 50 years, to the fall of 1868, the country was being ruled by Alexander I’s nephew, Alexander II. It was not a happy time for Russia. That year’s harvest had been poor, and some provinces were experiencing famine. A special committee was even set up to collect aid for the hungry.

We do not know how much correspondence was being carried by couriers from the Kingdom of Poland, but there can be no doubt that the bureaucracy was working at full steam after two uprisings in the kingdom, in 1830 and 1863. Poland was under constant suspicion and close surveillance.

Fires were still routine, and there should have been nothing surprising about the fact that, in St. Petersburg in 1862, during a scorching summer, many buildings had burned. Nevertheless, four years later, in 1868, people still believed that this had been the work of arsonists, most likely students.

By 1868 the serfs had been “free” nearly five years, although they were forced to make huge payments for their land. Trial by jury had been instituted, a major step forward. Furthermore, in the provinces and rural districts, a local elected body – the zemstvo – was playing its part in government.

In 1864 there had been an assassination attempt against Alexander, but back then no one imagined the wave of terrorist attacks the following decade would bring.

On the plus side, Russian literature was reaching its heyday. War and Peace was yet to be completed, but the first four parts came out in their second edition in 1868, and everyone was trying to get their hands on a copy of this novel that resided somewhere between the genres of history, philosophy, and romance.

At the time, Dostoyevsky was flitting between Switzerland and Italy with his young wife, despairing over the size of his debts and fearing his creditors – and writing, writing, writing. The Idiot was serialized throughout the year in Russian Herald, and the entire reading public was trying to guess how the love triangle between Prince Myshkin, Aglaya, and Nastasya Filipovna would be resolved.

Another 50 years later, Russia had changed beyond recognition. The tsarist regime was gone and the royal family was dead. Russia had withdrawn from World War I, but was now embroiled in a brutal civil war. The Volga, the Don, and Siberia were awash in blood. In response to an attempt on Lenin’s life, the Bolsheviks had launched the Red Terror and were using businessmen, priests, and other prominent members of society as hostages in the cities they controlled. At the slightest sign of unrest or the approach of the White Army, these hostages were shot.

The All-Russia Central Executive Committee issues a solemn warning to all servants of the Russian bourgeoisie and its allies, cautioning that all counterrevolutionaries will pay for every attempt to kill an agent of Soviet power or bearers of the ideas of socialist revolution... The workers and peasants will answer the White Terror of enemies of the worker and peasant government with a massive Red Terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.

The Whites responded in kind. On October 13, Admiral Kolchak, who had spent the preceding months abroad, entered Omsk. Several days later, the current government, which called itself the Directory, appointed him military and naval minster. One month later Kolchak overthrew the Directory and took up the role of dictator in the struggle against the Red Terror, indeed unleashing a no less ruthless White Terror.

What would Dostoyevsky have said had he lived to 1918? What would the pure-of-heart Prince Myshkin, who was incapable of harm, have thought of this? What would Empress Catherine have said? She herself had lived through Pugachyov’s violent uprising, but was convinced that, with time, all prejudices would go the way of the fear of smallpox vaccinations.

The revolution supposedly gave the peasants what they wanted: they now owned the land and were able to loot noble homes – wasn’t that true freedom? But their rejoicing was short-lived. By 1918 the Bolsheviks were beginning to incite the rural poor against hard-working and prosperous peasants, and ten years later this division would become one of the levers used in confiscating peasant property and forcing the rural population into collective farms.

As for the freedom to talk in church, that was no longer a problem. The churches were, for the time being, still open, but it was not an easy time for the clergy. In 1918 alone, twelve bishops and one metropolitan were shot. It is hard to know how many simple priests perished in Cheka custody, but the number is not small, and the campaign against the church and religion in general was just warming up.

Moving ahead another fifty years, to the fall of 1968, and the picture is only rosy if you compare it to the violence of 1918. A month had passed since Soviet troops put an end to the Prague Spring. On September 11, Soviet tanks left Prague, but a month later, on October 16, 1968, a treaty was signed between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia allowing Soviet troops to remain in the country “to provide security to the socialist commonwealth.”

The situation in the Soviet Union – and the entire world – had changed dramatically. The Cold War, which seemed to abate a bit under Khrushchev, made a comeback, with attendant ramifications within the country. The last of the flowers that had blossomed during Khrushchev’s Thaw quickly wilted. The ground-breaking journal Novy Mir, where the tenure of its editor-in-chief Alexander Tvardovsky would soon come to an end, was struggling to survive. The journal’s efforts to publish the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who was, interestingly, born in December 1918)  finally ended after Czechoslovakia. Clearly, the window of opportunity had passed. Furthermore, somehow the texts of The First Circle and Cancer Ward had found their way abroad, meaning there was no way their publication would be permitted in the Soviet Union.

In September 1968, the Soviet journalist Victor Louis, who was suspected of being the one who brought the novels to the West without the author’s permission, showed up in the village of Rozhdestvo, where Solzhenitsyn was living. The fact that Louis showed up at Solzhenitsyn’s door uninvited and hung around his dacha was the first signal: a press campaign against the writer was imminent. Several years later, that campaign would end in Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the country.

Much has changed in Russia over the course of 300 autumns, but one thing remains constant: Russians know it is better to stand still and keep quiet both in and out of church.