Ron St.Amant

10/17/06

HIS325

Dr. Alison Smith

The Russian Road: Occident or Orient, and Critiques of the Aristocracy

Russia in the eighteenth century existed in an ideological bubble.  Its past was written and re-written to conform to the needs of the autocracy.  As the autocracy strained to retain its grip on the people, an idealized Russian history clashed with the reality of daily existence.  Peter Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinskii were members of the intelligentsia and critics of the autocracy.  They sought to open the eyes of their fellow Russians to the reality of eighteenth century Russian life.  They saw a corrupt State that had twisted the past, and killed the legacy of reform, using nationalism to quell the peasantry.

         The turn of the eighteenth century brought sweeping change to Russia under the rule of Peter the Great.  Pre-Petrine Russia was a violent era filled with a harsh autocracy that Peter hoped to eradicate.  Inspired by Western Europe countries, Peter founded the city of St. Petersburg as a window to the West in the hope that Europe’s influence and intellectual power would transform Russia into an even greater world power.  Yet the reforms he desired amounted to little meaningful change.  The autocracy continued, indeed grew more powerful during and after Peter’s reign. 

            The Russian population had always been stirred to passion by the invocation of Russian pride and spirit.  Such spirit, embodied in life (and death) by Peter the Great, promoted an idealistic view of Russia as a powerful and progressive country, one steeped in a tradition of reform.  The nationalism this spirit called forth served Peter and subsequent leaders in binding the people together and harnessing their labour to build the infrastructure of an expanding empire.  Peter had begun “a new era” and it was to him that Russia owed its “greatness…glory, and all the goods” it owned.[1]  Peter’s legacy of reform eroded, however, as the autocracy fomented  “chaos of national prejudices” and “narrow paths of local ideas” that left “a rusty rut of native customs”.  To recapture the glory of Peter’s Russia, an “energetic effort of the national conscience” was needed.[2]  As Peter annexed territories, the spirit and idealistic perception grew.  Yet in its wake, the stark reality of struggling peasant life was left for the intelligentsia to expose. Chaadaev and Belinskii were western-leaning in their intellectual view and thus, at least in Chaadaev’s reckoning, made a connection to the legacy of Peter the Great and the disaster they viewed it had become.

                        Part of the blame fell to the Russian people themselves.  Chaadaev stressed an historic failing of the populous to initiate change. It was as if Russia was filled with uninterested, or weak people who needed strong leaders to guide them if any reform were to take hold. Rather than rise up and create change from within,  it was invariably left to “princes [who] almost always took [them] by the hand, almost always took the country in tow, and the country never had a hand in it.”[3]  Since the people had no hand in their direction, Russia needed the intelligentsia as “leaders, defenders, and saviors” against the autocracy that had created the “dire spectacle” that was the reality of a failing State.[4]  Part of the cure was a return to the window to the west.

            The West was home “to all the great and beautiful ideas which are prevalent among men.”[5]  Salvation for Russia lay “in the successes of civilization, enlightenment and humanity” that were valued so highly, and espoused vociferously, in Western Europe.[6]  Whether real or imagined, the dynamic between East and West- the Orient and the Occident- was powerful in the Russian worldview.  To which part of the world did Russia belong?  Geographically it straddled the East and West, historically it owed its vaunted past to the Orient, yet Peter had turned to the Occident.  The conundrum haunted writers such and Chaadaev and Belinskii who saw the autocracy as “no longer want[ing] the Occident” and instead wanting “to destroy the work of Peter the Great and again follow the desert road”.[7] 

            If the autocracy wished to turn its back on the West, its ambition was made easier by the political events in Europe in the eighteenth century.  The Napoleonic wars galvanized Russian contempt for the West, in large part embodied by the French who were making war on the continent, yet the same France that carried to torch of Enlightenment.  To Chaadaev, the autocracy had seized on a “smug [and] lazy patriotism, which manages to make everything beautiful” in an effort to defeat the French military.[8]  While rousing a strong national pride in wartime could be a necessary endeavour, in peacetime, to the intelligentsia such descriptions were illusory.

            In reality an atmosphere of “divine autocracy” that had seemed ideal was “at close quarters…not so attractive [nor] safe” in the security of the post-war.[9]  The autocracy created a system that failed “common sense and justice, and their strictest possible observance” and “vast corporations of official thieves and robbers of various descriptions” ruled a poverty-stricken serfdom.[10]  The people themselves were incapable of breaking the system due to “an absence of spontaneity in [the] social development” of Russia.[11]  Thus the necessity of critics such as Chaadaev and Belinski to show that “the age of blind loves [had] passed.”[12]

            Through the darkness of diseased autocracy, Chaadaev, Belinskii, and other writers shown a bright light on the reality of Russia’s problems. The autocracy had hijacked the past and held hostage the future.  The system had grown ever more corrupt.  The peasant population were virtual slaves and the enlightenment of Western Europe was dying in the vast Russian countryside.[13]  With a broken system, and a false reality, the intelligentsia saw the need for an awakening within the Russian people.  “One owes one’s country the truth” was how Chaadaev saw his role as an intelligenty.[14] Though they faced harsh treatment, censorship, imprisonment, and other punishments for their views, the intelligentsia persisted in their prodding of the autocracy, and the peasantry.  Their critiques, and the rising corruption within the autocracy, would ultimately push the system to the breaking point as the nineteenth century dawned.  In the breach, however, they threw themselves, their talents, and their words, serving as a reminder of a real past and a promised future, one that would bring with it all the guarantees of civilization and humanity that Peter’s window to the west had promised.  They would, they demanded, to serve as the gatekeepers of the truth of Russian life.  Their love was not blind, nor free of harshness, but to them it was Russia’s only chance at salvation.

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Bibliography

Belinskii, Vissarion.  “Letter to Gogol” available at website http://artsci.shu.edu/reesp/documents/Belinskii.htm

Chaadaev, Peter.  “Apology of a Madman” in selected course readings.

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