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the regime. Perhaps aided by the growth of the education system and the propaganda campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, these views also reached the general population, as is apparent from the notebook into which the provincial goldsmith Dmitrii S. Volkov in the 1820s copied readings that were particularly meaningful to him: a patriotic, anti-French diatribe by the nationalist Fedor V. Rostopchin, a primer on how to behave in church, a sermon by an Orthodox Greek preacher and a text cataloguing Russia’s monarchs from the legendary Riurik to Peter I.12 ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Autocracy’ and ‘Nationality’ were all represented.

The war and Russian political culture

Russians by 1800 had recently experienced two very different models of monarchy: Catherine II had presented herself as a consensus-builder who welcomed input from ‘society’ and favoured an embryonic form of electoral politics – exemplified by the Legislative Commission of 1767 and by her support for noble and municipal self-government – that pointed in the direction of political liberalism, while her son Paul I had favoured the opposite role of authoritarian, militaristic commander-in-chief. Alexander I was torn between these two options, but ultimately political liberalism suffered disastrous setbacks under his reign. Aside from the court politics of the time, this was due to the convergence of two forces whose growth was fatefully accelerated by the Napoleonic Wars. One was the nationalist conception of history that added a powerful layer of ideological armour to autocracy by depicting it as the indispensable corollary to Orthodoxy, Russianness and national unity. The other was the way in which the political culture was poisoned by the growing tendency to imagine politics as a succession of malicious conspiracies.

Because of the absence of a civil society and the vast power wielded by small, secretive groups of unaccountable individuals, conspiracy had long played an important role in Russian government. Conspiracies traditionally involved lower-class pretenders who claimed to be the ‘true tsar’, or else power struggles within the dynasty. However, the mischief by pretenders faded after the Pugachev revolt, and the last dynastic coup took place in 1801 when Paul I was assassinated and replaced with Alexander I. Instead, from the late 1780s onwards, conspiracy theories increasingly centred on ideologically or ethnically motivated opposition to the regime as such, especially by freemasons, liberals or socialists, and Poles or (later) Jews, often at the behest of Russophobic

12 OPI GIM, Fond 450, d. 835a.

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foreigners. Two factors accounted for this. First, the upheavals of the era – Paul’s capricious oppressiveness, Alexander’s stabs at liberal reform and, of course, the shock waves radiating from France – made clear how much more was now at stake in politics than in the past. Second, it came to be widely believed across Europe that the upheavals that began in 1789 and continued far into the nineteenth century were caused by a conspiracy to overthrow monarchy, religion and the existing order everywhere.13 This notion originated in the West, particularly France, and came to Russia largely through the influence of francophone conservatives such as abbe´ Augustin Barruel and Joseph de Maistre.

Fuelled by Russia’s military defeats in the wars against Napoleon and by the fact that Alexander I’s entourage – as opposed, for example, to Catherine II’s – contained a conspicuous numbers of foreigners with agendas driven by the interests of their homelands, the Russian version of this conspiracy theory imagined traitors to be present at the very top of the regime. It focused on social and ethnic outsiders: Alexander’s liberal adviser Mikhail Speranskii was attacked as a priest’s son out to undermine noble rights, while the Baltic German Mikhail Barclay de Tolly (the hapless commander of the Russian army during its retreat in 1812) and the liberal Pole Czartoryski were presumed to be disloyal to Russia. ‘In the Russian interpretation’, Zorin points out, ‘the antimasonic mythology fused almost immediately with time-honoured notions of a secret conspiracy against Russia that was being hatched beyond its borders.’14 The suspected wire-puller was Napoleon, whom – according to a verse making the rounds in 1813 – ‘the first Mikhail (that is, Speranskii) summoned, the second Mikhail (Barclay) received, and the third Mikhail (Prince Kutuzov) drove out’.15 To pacify public opinion, Alexander had to send Speranskii into ignominious exile and replace Barclay with the popular General Kutuzov, while Fedor Rostopchin, the governor-general of Moscow during the 1812 war, demonstratively deported foreign residents, purged freemasons from the bureaucracy and turned over the merchant’s son Vereshchagin, accused of serving the masonic conspiracy, to a lynch mob. According to Zorin, whose chapter on this subject bears the chillingly evocative title ‘The Enemy of the People’, Rostopchin’s real target had been Speranskii; only when that prize proved beyond his reach did he fall back on the wretched Vereshchagin as a

13Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 164–73; Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, pp. 204–5.

14Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, pp. 206–7.

15‘Griboedovskaia Moskva’, 625.

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substitute scapegoat whose killing by the ‘people’ would symbolically restore the unity of the nation.16

After 1814, Alexander I and his entourage were convinced that the continuing troubles in Europe and subversion in Russia were co-ordinated by a nefarious ‘comite´ directeur’ based in Western Europe, while Alexander’s conservative critics regarded his own beloved Russian Bible Society as part of an Anglo-masonic plot against Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, ironically, no one took action against the real conspiracy that almost overthrew Alexander’s successor in December 1825. Spooked by the Decembrist revolt and the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the regime of Nicholas I offered an even more inviting field for conspiracy theories; thus, it seems that the disgraced ex-official Mikhail Leont’evich Magnitskii, in a secret 1831 memorandum, was the first to claim that Jews and freemasons were collaborating in a grand anti-Russian plot.17 By the 1860s, stereotypes of this sort were sufficiently entrenched to convince the satirist Mikhail E. Saltykov-Shchedrin that his hilarious ‘history’ of the town of Glupov – a ludicrous compilation of the cliches´ of eighteenth-century Russian society and politics set in the microcosm of an imaginary provincial backwater – required a few absurd ‘Polish intrigues’ to be complete.18

How deep into the population these fears reached is difficult to tell. However, the common Muscovites who lynched Vereshchagin apparently accepted Rostopchin’s notion of a masonic plot; as for the longer-term impact, Vladimir Dal’s authoritative dictionary of the late nineteenth century defines the popular colloquialism farmazon (freemason) as ‘pejor. freethinker and atheist’, and in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical novel, a Glupov craftsman declares with a kind of na¨ıve cynicism that as a ‘false priest’ in the ‘sect of farmazony’, he is of course an atheist and adulterer. Maxim Gorky writes that his merchant grandfather around 1870 called an artisan whose craft he found disturbingly mysterious a ‘worker in black magic’ and a ‘freemason’,19 and at least as late as 1938 – when, in the film adaptation of Gorky’s book, the grandfather unselfconsciously uses farmazon as the rough equivalent of ‘troublemaker’ – Soviet audiences could evidently be expected to know the word’s connotations.

16Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, pp. 234–7.

17A. Iu. Minakov, ‘M. L. Magnitskii: K voprosu o biografii i mirovozzrenii predtechi russkikh pravoslavnykh konservatorov XIX veka’, in Konservatizm v Rossii i mire: proshloe

inastoiashchee. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vyp. 1 (Voronezh: Izd. Voronezhskogo gos. universiteta, 2001), pp. 83–4.

18M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriia odnogo goroda: Skazki (Moscow: Olimp, Izd. AST, 2002),

pp.44, 47, 49.

19M. Gorky, My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966),

p.116; Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriia, p. 37.

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1812 and the problem of social stability

Concern about treason in high places reflected a deep-seated awareness of the brittleness of Russia’s social order, which had faced no assault comparable to 1812 since the Time of Troubles. The army’s failure to stop Napoleon’s advance came as a shock and contributed to the proliferation of conspiracy theories, while upper-class Russians feared that the masses would now run riot or even, egged on by Napoleon, rise up in revolt. Forty years earlier, state authority had crumbled before the illiterate Cossack Pugachev’s lightly armed rabble, whom the peasantry in some places had joined en masse. What, then, to expect from the most powerful army in European history, led by a brilliant general who advocated revolutionary ideas?

While the army was reeling, the stress on the administration was immense. As Janet Hartley has shown,

although provincial government [in the war zone] continued to function throughout the period of invasion it proved impossible to carry out to the full all the demands made of it in respect of provision of supplies and the care of the sick and wounded. Furthermore, the administration was unable to prevent disorder from breaking out and ultimately could not protect the inhabitants from the ravages of war.20

In Moscow, government authority was maintained through the summer thanks to a clever if distasteful combination of demagogy and repression that culminated in the lynching of Vereshchagin, but collapsed once the army had withdrawn. Hordes of peasants then joined the Grande Armee´ in picking the abandoned city clean, while terrified Muscovites fleeing the city faced the prospect of crossing a possibly hostile and anarchic countryside. Cossacks looted some villages and burned others astride the invasion route, while the police (at least in Moscow) apparently enriched themselves on a grand scale while ‘restoring order’ after the French had left. Russian society appeared to be coming apart at the seams.

Yet, mysteriously, the empire held. Napoleon did not try to incite a popular revolt,21 and the systematic pillaging and coarse anticlericalism practised by his multinational army deeply alienated the population, creating a lasting resentment against the ‘twenty nations’ (a phrase popularised by the

20J. M. Hartley, ‘Russia in 1812, Part II: The Russian Administration of Kaluga Gubernija’, JfGO 38, 3 (1990): 416, and ‘Russia and Napoleon: State, Society and the Nation’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State-Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1 800–1 81 5 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 187–8.

21See J. M. Hartley, ‘Russia in 1812, Part I: The French Presence in the Gubernii of Smolensk and Mogilev’, JfGO 38, 2 (1990): 182.

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Orthodox hierarchy and repeated in many memoirs) that composed it. What Teodor Shanin has written of 1905 also applies to the year 1812: it was a ‘moment of truth’ that offered Russians ‘a dramatic corrective to their understanding of the society in which they lived’.22 Russia suffered an unexpected series of shocking setbacks, but even in the direst of circumstances, the army and administration held. Napoleon’s huge army with its pan-European composition and revolutionary ideology – the quintessence of the West’s aggressive rationalism – invaded Russia, abused its people and violated its shrines, but ultimately imploded under the pressure of its own indiscipline and overreaching. Vast numbers even of ‘Europeanised’ Russians, on the other hand, became implicated in a form of all-out warfare that they came to regard as distinctly Russian: abandoning or even burning their homes and possessions – as he had earlier with his Francophobic propaganda and anti-masonic campaign, Rostopchin again set an example by demonstratively burning both his own estate and (most likely) Moscow itself – peasants, urban people and nobles fought or fled rather than live under enemy occupation. They watched in awe as the primordial forces of Russian life – vengeful peasants and Cossacks, fireprone cities, and the empire’s vast spaces and unforgiving climate – ground up the presumptuous Grande Armee´. All in all, it was a tremendous display of elemental ‘Russianness’ that confirmed, in the educated classes, a deep and increasingly proud sense of national uniqueness.

Patriotic pride notwithstanding, however, most found these experiences more terrifying than exhilarating, at least at the time when they occurred. As the noblewoman Karolina K. Pavlova later recalled, ‘the news of the fire of Moscow struck us like lightning. It was fine for Pushkin to exclaim with poetic rapture, a dozen years later: “Burn, great Moscow!” But the general feeling while it was burning, as far as I know, was not enthusiastic at all.’23 Nearer the other end of the social scale, the Moscow printer’s widow Afim’ia P. Stepanova had this to say about 1812:

Owing to my modest means and because my children and I were sick, I stayed in my house, but during the invasion by the enemy army all my possessions and my daughter’s trousseau . . . they took all of it before my eyes, carried it away and smashed it, and while threatening to kill me as well as my children they beat and tormented [me], causing me and my whole family to fall ill for six months.

22T. Shanin, Russia, 1905 –07 : Revolution as a Moment of Truth, vol. II: The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. xv.

23K. Pavlova, ‘Moi vospominaniia’, Russkii Arkhiv, 4, 10 (1875): 224.

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Yet she was among the lucky ones, for all members of her family had at least survived, as had (apparently) their house.24 The scale of the misery, and the expectation at least among the urban population that the state would provide redress, is illustrated by the fact that in Moscow alone, over 18,000 households – a substantial majority of all Muscovites who were not serfs – filed such petitions for assistance.25

Michael Broers argues that in the lands of Napoleon’s ‘inner empire’ – e.g. the Rhineland or northern Italy – where his rule had been comparatively long-lived and stable, ‘the Napoleonic system left a powerful institutional heritage’, and after 1815 ‘[the] restored governments were expected to meet French standards’ on pain of losing the support of influential constituencies. By contrast, in the restless ‘outer empire’ of Spain, southern Italy and elsewhere, ‘Napoleonic rule was traumatic and destabilizing. It was ephemeral, in that it left few institutional traces, yet profound in the aversion to the Napoleonic state it implanted at so many levels of society.’26

While Russia was never formally a part of the Napoleonic empire, its experience comes closest to that of the outer empire. Like the peoples of that region, common Russians’ encounter with Napoleon’s regime endowed them with little understanding of, let alone sympathy for, the revolutionary Enlightenment principles he supposedly represented. Instead, many viewed his invasion of Russia through a pre-modern religious and ideological lens that could inspire great kindness but also terrible cruelty. For example, a poor midwife in Orel reportedly took five prisoners of war from the Grande Armee´ into her home. After exhausting her own savings, she even went begging to feed the men. But when, at last, ‘her’ prisoners were removed by the authorities, ‘this simplehearted woman smashed all the crockery from which they had eaten and drunk at her home, because she believed these people – whom she had cared for so attentively and aided so selflessly – to be unclean heathens’. Educated Russians proudly seized on such episodes as evidence that their common people resembled the indomitable Spaniards in the emotional, combative patriotism and

24Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy, Fond 20, op. 2, d. 2215, l. 12.

25E. G. Boldina, ‘O deiatel’nosti Komissii dlia rassmotreniia proshenii obyvatelei Moskovskoi stolitsy i gubernii, poterpevshikh razorenie ot nashestviia nepriiatel’skogo’, in E. G. Boldina, A. S. Kiselev and L. N. Seliverstova (eds.), Moskva v 1 81 2 godu. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 1 80-letiiu Otechestvennoi voiny 1 81 2 goda (Moscow: Izd. ob’edineniia ‘Mosgorarkhiv’, 1997), p. 47.

26M. Broers, Europe Under Napoleon, 1 7 99–1 81 5 (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), pp. 266–7.

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