This week’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. Humans have been shaving for over 5,000 years. From flint tools to shark teeth, to the first copper razor, we always knew that a great shave comes down to sharp, durable blades. The ancient Greeks didn’t need flex balls and heated handles. Neither do you. That’s why Harry’s doesn’t add gimmicky features to their razors. They focus on the qualities that actually matter for a close, comfortable shave, and they never upcharge you for it. I have been using Harry’s for going on five years now, and I’ve always been happy with how smooth the shave has been, how reliable and long-lasting each blade is, it’s not like I have to chuck them out once a week. So join the 10 millions who have already tried Harry’s.

Claim your special offer by going to harrys.com/revolutions. That will get you a trial set that comes with everything you need for a close, comfortable shave, weighted ergonomic handle for an easy grip, five blade razor with a lubricating strip and trimmer blade for a close shave, rich lathering shave gel that will leave you smelling great, and a travel blade cover to keep your razor dry and easy on the go. Listeners of my show can redeem their trial set at harrys.com/revolutions, and please make sure to go to harrys.com/revolutions to redeem your offer, and let them know that I sent you. That will help you support the show.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.13: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality

Before we get started this week, I want to remind you, or maybe you just haven’t heard yet, but I will be at the Sound Education conference at Harvard, which runs from October the 9th to the 12th, so that takes place just about a month from now. If you produce an educational podcast or want to start an educational podcast or just like educational podcasts and you want to come hang out with us, it’s going to be a great deal of fun, with tons of sessions and talks and get togethers. I will be doing my talk, What is the Point of All This, as well as doing a joint session with the great Robin Pearson, who picked up the standard I dropped when I finished the history of Rome, and he kept going with the History of Byzantium. Registration is open and you can check it out at soundeducation.fm, and I will also put a link in the show notes and I, uh, hope to see you all there.

Now last time, we finally did our long overdue episode about the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825, a supremely abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs that went about as badly as an abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs could have gone.

This week, we will continue to cover events that dovetail with material we covered in series six on the July Revolution, and then move on through to events that would fit alongside series seven, on the revolutions of 1848, revolutions which of course convulsed so much of western and central Europe, but did not convulse Russia. Instead, Russia would emerge as something of the gendarme of Europe, helping the Austrian smash the last redoubts of Hungarian national independence in the summer of 1849.

So the failure of the Decemberists meant that the new emperor of Russia was now 29-year-old Nicholas the First. Although Nicholas was technically the younger brother of the now deceased Alexander, he was of a different generation — I mean, he was practically young enough to have been Alexander’s son. Nicholas was born in 1796 when their grandmother Catherine was about to keel over dead, and Alexander was already 19 years old. So unlike Alexander, who was raised in a broadly Enlightenment intellectual and cultural milieu, Nicholas came of age in a very different time, in a time marked not by philosophy and rational progress, but by war and the titanic struggle against Napoleon.

Nicholas was inducted into the army early, and was completely stamped by military life. His formative years were spent in the great patriotic wars against the French. He was not yet 16 years old when Napoleon invaded Russia, not yet 20, for the battle of Waterloo. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Nicholas prepared to settle into a permanent career in the army. And there was almost no thought given to the unlikely chance that he might be emperor himself one day. Tsar Alexander was still young, and after him would come Konstantin, and both would surely have sons, who would push Nicholas even further back in the line of succession.

Accounts differ about what exactly Nicholas knew about his older brother Konstantin’s plan to pre-abdicate the throne. By some accounts, Nicholas was completely blindsided in 1825; others say that he knew everything; others that he knew some of the story, but maybe not all of the story. But his actions in 1825 certainly hint at a young man who seemed very confused and caught off guard by the shocking news of Alexander’s death, and he certainly contributed mightily to the situation when he swore his oath to Konstantin, rather than saying, right, I now am the emperor. But, we covered all that last time.

So now it’s January 1826 and Nicholas, 29 years old, is secure on the throne. So what kind of emperor is he going to be? Well, he was hardly prepared for the job in experience or training, which isn’t his fault — no one had prepared him to rule. He had not prepared himself to rule. It seemed like such a remote possibility. So he followed the path he knew best, and he resolved to do his duty as a soldier. And not to exaggerate things, but that’s about as far as he got.

 As I said, Nicholas was absolutely stamped by a military way of thinking. He was not much impressed with civilian politicians or ministers or bureaucrats. He did not trust his independent and possibly seditious nobility. He would run his government not through normal ministerial channels, but through a personal chancellery, composed almost entirely of high ranking military officers. And as the years went by, all future appointments at nearly every administrative bureau or department inside the normal ministerial channels went to a military officer, even if they weren’t qualified or knew anything about the department they were supposed to be running. Nicholas believed that military men were simply better able to make decisions quicker and more efficiently. He in fact tended to believe that the army was the perfect model for a well-run society. It emphasized service, duty, obedience, rational order, and a unified single purpose. These were virtues that Nicholas believed in, and at the top of any such society must be the commander in chief, the tsar, the emperor. His job was to be strong and decisive. Nicholas was not plagued by the intellectual vacillations of Alexander, which took him this way, and then that. And no description of Nicholas is complete without words like ‘iron will’ and ‘unbending resolve.’ He never doubted that his role as God’s chosen emperor was to be the stern and protective father of his children.

The other thing that marked Nicholas besides the military was the Decembrist Revolt that opened his reign — that had tried to prevent his reign. Even as the years and then decades passed, the memory of that revolt still haunted his imagination. Nicholas knew that there had to be more dissenters and seditious freethinkers lurking around out there. So to combat this ever-present menace to good order — and his life — in 1826, Nicholas created what was dubbed the Third Section of the chancellery. The Third Section was a political secret police, and the forerunner to the even more infamous Okhrana which, I promise you, we will be talking a lot more about. This special Third Section was answerable directly to the tsar, and run by the trusted Alexander von Benckendorff from 1826 until his death in 1844.

The job of the Third Section was to know whatever the regime needed to know in order to nip treason in the bud. And treason could come from anywhere: obviously secret political societies, like the Decemberists, but also heretical religious sects, students and professors at the universities, ambitious nobles, corrupt bureaucrats, all the way down to servants and staff and peasants.

The Third Section was never that big, starting with a small staff of just 16 permanent agents and about 300 gendarme officers at their disposal. But their psychological reach was immense. It was well known now that the walls had ears, informers were everywhere, that the person sitting next to you might be a spy. Loose talk around the proverbial water cooler might get back to agents of the dreaded Third Section, and the next thing you know, it’s a midnight arrest, and a one-way ticket to Siberia. Basically the creation of the Third Section in 1826 meant that the Russian Empire became infused with a vague omnipresent paranoia. But the reputation of the Third Section was always greater than its real size, or its record. In the mid 1830s, they had about 1600 individuals under regular surveillance, but mostly among the nobility and high level bureaucrats. They never had the resources to penetrate much deeper than that. So when the revolutionaries started coming out of the lower classes, the Third Section would prove to be mostly deaf and blind.

While the Third Section grappled with domestic enemies, Nicholas’s beloved army grappled with Russia’s foreign enemies, and right out of the gates, they faced about five years of continuous fighting down on the southern border. First, the Persians launched in attempt in 1826, to avenge their losses in the Caucasus, starting a war which lasted until 1828, and which resulted only in the Russians solidifying their position, and securing permanent hold on Georgia and Armenia.

Then there was the problem of the Ottoman Empire, and what is called in western histories of 19th century international diplomacy, the Eastern Question. But for the Russians, it was a southern question: basically, what to do with the increasingly dysfunctional and faltering Ottoman apparatus. Russia was under pressure from Christians and the Balkans and in Greece to help them throw off the Turkish yoke. But since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Russian policy had been to keep the Ottomans weak, but intact, and fighting a war with them might hasten their collapse. This would allow the British or the French to advance their own Mediterranean ambitions, which was a far worse proposition than dealing with the Ottomans. So under Alexander, the Russians had held off, for example, getting tangled up in the War of Greek Independence, but now things changed. Nicholas signed a protocol with the British where they pledged to mediate an end to the conflict and secure Greek autonomy. The Ottomans rejected this. So, in 1827, when a new Turkish fleet sailed for Greece, Russia’s navy joined with an allied fleet that successfully sent that Turkish fleet to the bottom of the sea. This act enraged the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1828, leading the Russians to march south through the Balkans and practically to the gates of Istanbul. But the point here again was to maintain a weak but intact Ottoman empire, not like conquer them and annex their domains. And so a treaty in 1833 helped maintain the basic status quo, though Greece now secured its independence, and Russia claimed additional territory around the Danube, and rights to a sort of protectorate around Moldavia and Wallachia.

Of greater personal concern to Nicholas through these years, though, was the return of revolution to France, because in July of 1830, that’s right, the barricades went up and the Bourbons came down. Again. A true believer in conservative royalist legitimacy, Nicholas was shocked to discover that Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans had consented to be the benefactor of rabble rising up and tossing out a rightful king. This was especially shocking because Nicholas and Louis Philippe had been personal friends. Nicholas had stayed with the Orléans family in Paris in 1815, and he took the ascension of now King Louis Philippe as a personal betrayal.

When events in France then threatened to spread east, first into Belgium, and then later that summer creeping into Poland, Nicholas’s emissaries told the other crown heads of Europe, we stand at the ready to assist you. But the new July monarchy supported the Belgians breaking away, and the Prussians and British didn’t want to make a huge issue out of it, and so they didn’t. We covered all of this in Episode 6.8B by the way. But then the 1830 movements hit the kingdom of Poland over the winter, which was that constitutional monarchy set up by the treaty of Vienna, and where Nicholas now rained out of the King of Poland. Now he had never liked the constitutional scheme, had been working steadily since he became King of Poland to erode the liberties and rights of his Polish subjects. This was increasingly intolerable, and so partly inspired by events in Paris, the Poles went into revolt in January, 1831. The tsar needed no permission or allies to act in his own domains, the Russian army stormed in, crushed the uprising, and more or less abolished the constitution, and converted those Polish lands into little more than a mere province of the Russian Empire.

But though he was a military autocrat with a fairly unimaginative belief in traditional legitimacy, nicholas was not totally insensible to the fact that he was living in a world very different from his medieval forebears, and educated Russians might need something more than obey your father if revolution was going to be avoided in the future. So Nicholas was open to listening to his enlightened and worldly minister of education, Sergey Uvarov. In 1833, Uvarov sent a circular memo to staff of the education ministry outlining the principles that should guide the further development of the state education system. And here, he introduced a triad that became official imperial ideology basically until 1917: orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. Or, what is called the policy of Official Nationality.

To take them in order, orthodoxy means the Orthodox Church, which had going all the way back to the princes of Moscow, been politically subservient to the monarchy, and mostly there to prop up the ruler, that was their political role. This new official policy of orthodoxy, though, was meant further to roll back a lot of the innovations that had been introduced into the church during the reigns of Peter and then Catherine. They wanted to take Orthodox Christianity back to its traditional roots, beliefs, and practices, untainted by western ideas.

The second part of the triad was the most important: autocracy. The emperor was the tsar, the father of his children. They obeyed him and he protected them. That was the relationship. This relationship was consecrated by God and could have no intermediary go-between like a constitution.

Then finally, there is nationality, which is a little bit trickier. This is not the same as the nationalism we’ve been talking about in other series in the show, this is about firmly rooting orthodoxy and autocracy in its Russian character, history, and traditions, rather than, say, whatever Catherine had been up to while she stayed up late reading Montesquieu. Official Nationality also tended to exalt an idealized Russian peasant as the simple, good, and loyal foundation of society. And in fact, part of the educational policy of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality was to not educate the peasants, in order to keep them pure and unspoiled by the atheistic and egotistical heresies coming out of the West.

This Official Nationality was not in itself a threat to the tsar, as nationalism was about to become a threat to the dynastic rulers in Germany and Italy and Hungary, because the tsar became the living embodiment of the nation. It was instead a kind of way to capture that nascent national spirit and redirect it, not down towards the people, but up towards the tsar. Official Nationality also recognized the special role of the Russians as the founder of the now multi-ethnic Russian Empire. So Russian language and culture and character would naturally dominate, even if ethnic minority groups would all enjoy equal civil rights — except for the two and a half million jews. Of course. It’s always except for the jews.

So orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality became the ruling ideology for the rest of the century. This also comes around as one tsar, one church, one language — faith, tsar, and fatherland — and it sought to place the tsar, the emperor, at the top and center of Russian life. And deviations from this could lead to a knock on the door from the Third Section.

But despite all this creeping conservative repression and the spread of orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality, fresh new ideas couldn’t be stamped out entirely. And while overt politics became increasingly off limits, if you had any kind of sense of self preservation, there were other outlets: for example, literature and philosophy. And this is the era when German philosophy, for example, really starts getting gobbled up by the students of Moscow. One group especially gathered around a young poet philosopher named Nikolai Stankevich in the early 1830s, and among other things, the Stankevich circle started studying and discussing Kant and Schiller, Ficte and Hegel. Now they were under Third Section surveillance practically the whole time, but they kept their activity strictly intellectual. Stankevich himself tragically died of tuberculosis in 1840 at the age of just 26, but the circle he founded had a long lasting impact. Young Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin were in that mix by the mid 1830s, but by then this small cadre of Russian intellectuals were already drifting into two competing camps: the westernizers, and the slavophiles.

The debates between the westernizers and the slavophiles, which would define this generation of Russian intellectual life, recapitulated in modern language the debates that have been going on since Peter the Great. Basically, should Russia’s future be defined by looking outward towards Europe, or inward towards itself? As their name suggests, the westernizers were the heirs of Peter and Catherine and the Decemberists. They continued to hammer the theme that Russia was backward, Russia was behind. They ridiculed the ignorant superstitions of the Orthodox Church. They chafed under the tyrannical paternalism of the emperor. Russia needed to fully embrace reason, science, liberal politics, and economic progress in order to keep pace with their neighbors in the west. The leading light of the westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s was a guy named Vissarion Belinsky, and he spread his message from his place as the preeminent Russian literary critic of the day. Going all in on Hegel, Belinsky believed that Hegel’s conclusion that existence was attempting to resolve towards a great idea, and that idea was freedom, and that freedom had already arrived in the west, Belinsky concluded that Russia must be on a similar track, they were just further back and they needed to catch up. Progress had to be made, it was almost a cosmic imperative.

Now, on the other side was a group who thought this whole westernizer obsession was an exercise in unnecessary self-loathing, and these guys were the slavophiles. Russia was not European. Russia should not try to be European. Sitting astride Europe in the West and Asia in the East, Russia was its own unique and great thing, and if they wanted progress — if such a thing was even desirable — they needed to build from their own history and traditions. And in this, at least, they fit in with Official Nationality. They had nothing but criticism for the west. Western Christianity was terrible, protestantism was greedy and egotistical, Catholicism was greedy and power hungry. Neither was concerned with true religion or the soul. As for these so-called progressive ideas that had come out of the west, look at what they had wrought: nothing but revolution, war, and chaos. One day, people start reading Voltaire and Diderot in Paris, and the next thing you know, Moscow is burning to the ground.

And what really chafed them was the sheer egotism of Europe, its obsessive narcissistic focus on the individual. The slavophiles believed that the greatness of Russian and Slavic culture was the emphasis on communal society, and they themselves emphasize this concept of Sobornost, a spiritual community of many people living together, jointly. That when people got together, they should not rush to identify what traits make them different from each other, but what traits they share in common: that was the basis of a real harmonious and healthy community, rather than the destructive conflict of all against all that, yes, may turn out a few more linen shirts, but does nothing for the spiritual wellbeing of a society. Many of the slavophiles were romantic conservatives, but they were not slavishly into despotism or anything, many of them wanted some kind of representative assembly. They just wanted it rooted in ancient Russian tradition, not like Montesquieu in the Houses of Parliament.

Now, I’m not going to render judgment on this debate, most sides make pretty good points, but if you look at the technological capacity of the Russian Empire during this period, one must conclude that something was happening in the west that was not happening in the east. This was a material fact, whatever one moral and philosophical conditions. The UK was well on its way towards an industrial society, fueled by coal and transported by railroad. So were in the Netherlands and Belgium in the Rhineland; France would soon follow. Something was happening that you could not just wave away and say, that’s not for us. And even Nicholas did not want to wave it all away. He commissioned the first 16 miles of railroad track connecting downtown St. Petersburg to the suburbs, and that was finished in 1837. Then, the emperor took a personal interest in building the rail line that would link St. Petersburg to Moscow, and he overcame conservative resistance to complete the project between 1842 and 1851. But in an empire that was literally millions of square miles, by the end of Nicholas ‘s reign, only hundreds of miles of railroad track existed. And we are now heading into that chapter of the world civ textbook where economic capacity is practically synonymous with number of miles of railroad track. In this, Russia objectively lacked behind.

In terms of manufacturing, there was some move towards using serf workers and managers to start some kind of industrial production, but this was all very small, and starting fitfully, and it was still inhibited by both a lack of investment capital and a workforce that was legally unable to leave their homes. The problem of serfdom was ever present. And Nicholas himself personally disliked serfdom, and he would have abolished it by fiat if he thought he could, but he was convinced that it would lead to one of the two types of rebellion that Russian history was so familiar with: the peasant revolt and the palace coup. If not managed right, emancipation could get out of hand and lead to a peasant uprising like Pugachev’s Rebellion or angry nobles would be pissed that they had just lost all their serfs, and they would engineer the overthrow of Nicholas; it had happened to his father, it had happened to his grandfather. And so he left the serfs in their bondage, and the Russian economy stagnated.

This brings up to within shouting distance of 1848. Like western and central Europe, Russia was not doing so hot in the mid 1840s, though the symptoms were not exactly the same. The Russians were dealing with a cholera outbreak and unseasonably dry weather that caused fires and bad harvests, but they were a geographic and economic step removed from the sharp economic downturn of the hungry forties. They were not so dependent on the potato to feed themselves and they were not so shaken by the problem of urban unemployment when the business recession hit. As for their literate and potentially revolutionary intellectual liberals, those guys were entirely nascent and not at all primed for a revolution.

When the shocking news of the February Revolution in Paris reached St. Petersburg, the tsar wasted no time. And if you remember from our episode on the Spectre of the French Revolution, Nicholas was among those for whom a new French Republic could only mean one thing: war in Europe. He immediately ordered full mobilization of the army and navy, and he now envisioned himself repeating the great deeds of his brother from 1812 to 1815, and he sent word to Vienna and Berlin and London, we must move quickly to surround and isolate revolutionary France. But then more shocking news came in: London was going to go along with the second Republic and they would provide no money for a new anti French coalition. Then more shocking news: Vienna was captured by barricade building radicals. In Berlin, the King of Prussia crawled away on his belly and promised a constitution. Budapest was falling into the hands of student nationalists. Nicholas couldn’t believe it. Instead of surrounding and isolating France with the powers of legitimate autocracy, Russia was the one now surrounded and isolated by revolutionary liberalism, they were now practically the last bastion of legitimate autocracy. The tsar then personally composed and circulated a manifesto, declaring Russia’s intention to fight all of this to the death.

Internally, there was much less immediate threat in St. Petersburg and Moscow that they would go the way of Vienna and Berlin and Paris, though the Third Section was working overtime. Censorship kept almost all news out of the west away from casual eyes, and those who did know what was happening were afraid of making any sudden moves. Certainly there was no organized group to prepare a revolution against the tsar, and so it did not happen. The closest thing the Third Section found to a revolutionary society was a literary group organized around Mikhail Petrashevsky. Most of these guys were younger and lower born than previous free thinkers and intellectual distance of the Stankevich circle. But they had been subversively reading the latest in political and economic thought, and when they discovered Charles Fourier, they were like, right, I guess what we’re called is: socialists.

Among them was a young writer of some promise named Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Third Section planted spies among the Petrashevsky group, and though there was some loose talk of fomenting some kind of rebellion, in the end, they were mostly busted for simply reading material that had been banned by the censors. In April, 1849, they were all rounded up and subjected to months of interrogation and then military trials. Forty men were eventually sentenced to death, but this death sentence was calculated trauma. After being taken to the place of execution and lined up as if they were going to be shot, the tsar delivered eight last minute stay of execution. The death sentences were planned, and the execution staged to traumatize the men and get them in the mood for a little love for the tsar to spring forth from their grateful hearts. Dostoevsky was among this forty, and he spent the next four years in exile.

Now out in western and central Europe, we know how the revolutions of 1848 progressed. With the springtime of the peoples giving way to a summer of feverish confusion, followed by the darkening autumn of reaction. And despite Nicholas’s bellicose hostility to the revolutions, Russia itself did not attempt to force it to will upon the other great powers. And it was suspected in some corners of the Kremlin that the Russian army was actually in no shape to force its will upon the other great powers. So Nicholas mostly watched from the sideline with approval as Prague and Berlin and Vienna and Milan slowly came back under the hands of their rightful rulers.

But if you remember from the very end of series seven, episodes 7.31 and 7.32, the kingdom of Hungary, what some were now calling the republic of Hungary, remained a revolutionary Inferno of nationalism and liberalism. And it was here that Russia could finally play a role. After the abdication of Emperor Ferdinand and the ascension of a new teenage Austrian emperor Franz Joseph in December of 1848, the new Austrian emperor secretly traveled to Warsaw for a personal meeting with Tsar Nicholas in May of 1849, where he frankly admitted in person what had been discussed in correspondence between the two powers: Austria could not reconquer Hungary alone. They needed Russian help.

Now Russia had already been sucked into the conflict on the eastern edges of Hungary but now they poured in by the hundreds of thousands, and that last pocket of revolutionary lava that had poured east from the initial eruption in Paris the year before finally hit a wall that was the Russian army. Within weeks, the job was finished and Tsar Nicholas could take satisfying credit for helping end of the great revolutionary menace. And so that menace had been held off, for at least one more day.

But Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and the future leaders of the First International are now out there. They were dealt a depressing setback, but they would never admit a final defeat. And next week, Russia will grapple with the aftermath of 1848. And even more importantly, the aftermath of the disastrous Crimean War, which exposed the technological backwardness of the so recently triumphant Russian army, there would be no holding back the modern world. It was coming, whether the leaders of the Russian Empire wanted it to or not, and they were going to have to deal with it.

And one issue, one massive issue that had been put off for so long, now finally had to be dealt with: the serfs were going to have to be freed.