2. WAR, SLAVERY, AND SERVICE

The British poet Philip Larkin nicely pointed out the effect that family life has on children. In his poem “This Be the Verse” he concluded, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”[31] However true this may be—and likely it is self-evident to all adolescents—the ways in which parents warp their children take place within the limits and possibilities of society. Inevitably these are more important than the idiosyncrasies of individuals, for to a large degree they determine behavior and circumscribe choices. Parents and children react to the world they live in. They are formed by it, and their choices are not entirely free, while their virtues and faults both reflect the larger society and are defined by it. To Larkin’s imprecation we need to add that of Karl Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.”[32]

One of the circumstances that profoundly affected Russia and Priamukhino was war. In one of those minor coincidences that later generations make into profound ironies, Michael Bakunin was born on 30 May 1814, the day the Treaty of Paris was signed. The treaty was to put an end to the more than ten years of war that pitted France against Russia, Britain, Austria, Prussia, and a host of other nations. Two years earlier, Napoleon’s Grande Armee invaded Russia and smashed its way to Moscow, further than Hitler’s panzers would make it 130 years later. It would be an exaggeration to argue, as one historian does ruefully, that if not for 1812, there would have been no Bakunin, no Lenin, no Bolshevik revolution.[33] Yet the war and its aftermath would have a greater effect on Michael Bakunin than the mysteries of his id or his relationship with his parents and siblings.

That year of 1812 should have been a good one for Priamukhino. Alexander and Varvara’s first daughter, Liubov, was barely a year old, and a second was on the way. They had abandoned the formality and intrigue of court life in Tver and, like Voltaire’s Candide, they decided to tend their gardens, as Varvara planted flowerbeds and Alexander transplanted violets. If the estate was not wildly profitable, it was comfortable and stable. More and more Priamukhino became the idyll Alexander hoped to create, a sanctuary from the outside world where peace and harmony could flourish and inspire others.

The outside world, however, was not content to let it be, and the horrors of war that convulsed Europe would soon affect Priamukhino. When the French army crossed into Russia, Alexander, along with other local nobles, was called to the provincial capital to organize evacuation plans and the conscription of peasants. Conscription, however, put lords on the horns of dilemma. Sending off serfs to fight could result in bankruptcy, for who would remain to work the land? Yet who else could be sent to stop the invader? Equally dangerous, a stingy commitment to the war effort was a quick way to lose the favor of the court. After some haggling, the nobles voted to send one male serf out of every twenty-five to the wars. Alexander used the opportunity to dispose of some of his more troublesome peasants, and tried to induce the unproductive household servants to enlist along with them, hoping thus to fulfill his imperial duty while preserving his labor force.[34]

The invasion quickly dimmed Alexander Bakunin’s fondness for things French. It was one thing to admire French literature and cuisine, even to toy with the radical implications of French philosophers and revolutionaries and the cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But Napoleon represented none of these, and it was something else to face the French artillery, cavalry, and infantry.

For the revolution that had promised freedom and equality in 1789 had devoured its parents and its children by 1794. French moderates sought to crush the sweeping changes that radicals, workers, and peasants fought for, and they used Napoleon’s reputation as a war hero and his cannon in their political war. They planned a coup d’etat to oust the radicals from the government, scrap the constitution, and install themselves as an oligarchy, but when the coup was finally launched, the little Corsican general turned on his backers to catapult himself into power and become emperor. Much of his ensuing program reflected the aims of the moderates. Elections were curtailed and the power of the legislature was curbed; strikes and unions were violently suppressed; women were deprived of the property rights and civil liberties they had won; democracy was first stopped and then rolled back. The middle class was now safely protected from the demands of the people and the revolution was stopped.

Russia’s relationship with first revolutionary and then imperial France was as twisted and tortuous as events in France itself. Under Paul, Russia treated with France, then fought against her, then settled again. Tsar Alexander was no less torn. He made overtures to the British and strengthened his ties with France’s greatest foe; he also signed a treaty with France, for his primary foreign policy aim was to keep Russia out of war. When Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, his hope for peace in Europe seemed attained. Then war broke out between the two the following year. Worried by France’s advances in Italy and on the Adriatic coast, Russia cautiously sided with Britain; in 1805, Russia formally joined with Britain, Sweden, and Austria against Napoleon in the Third Coalition. Confident of victory, since the combined Austrian and Russian armies outnumbered the French forces, Alexander himself led his army against Napoleon at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805. In the most brilliant battle of his career, Napoleon defeated both armies, killing, wounding, or capturing nearly half of the troops arrayed against him and nearly capturing Alexander himself.

The catastrophic loss at Austerlitz forced Austria out of the war. When Napoleon went on to shatter the Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, Russia stood alone against the triumphant French army. Worse, encouraged by Russia’s defeats, the Ottoman Empire declared war in 1806 and forced Alexander to fight on two fronts. He eked out a costly draw at Eylau, then at Friedland lost the second of the best of three falls match. By June Alexander was forced to sign a peace treaty with France.

The terms of the Treaty of Tilsit bound Russia to Napoleon’s Continental System, his attempt to blockade and bankrupt Britain. By banning its ships from continental ports, the emperor hoped to cut off Britain’s import of vital war supplies and its export of manufactured goods to Europe. Denied these much needed markets, English manufacturers would soon stop producing goods and would fire workers who were no longer needed. That in turn would lead to labor unrest and chaos and would divert attention and troops to the home front. Such a plan might seem far-fetched, especially to those who believe today’s working class and trade unions are the last bastions of a blue-collar, hardhat patriotism. But by 1812, Britain deployed more troops pursuing labor radicals and Luddites at home than the Duke of Wellington had to fight Napoleon in Spain.[35]

If the plan seemed sound to Napoleon, it was less useful to his sullen allies. The Continental System meant that, officially at least, Russia could no longer sell wheat, minerals, timber, and hemp—these last two crucial in the age of wooden ships and rope rigging—to Britain. Nor could it purchase British manufactured goods. But France did not step in to buy Russian products; trade with France actually declined. Russian industry, still in its infancy, was unable to supply the country with the manufactured goods it had formerly purchased from Britain. As a result, Russia’s imports and exports both fell drastically between 1808 and 1812. That meant that customs revenue, an important source of state income, plummeted and the rouble decreased in value by half. Britain was also the capital for finance, and Russian merchants found credit hard to secure. Even nobles found the system tiresome as the price of imported luxuries such as sugar and coffee shot up by over 500 percent.

As a result, the Continental System blockade leaked like a sieve as enterprising smugglers and neutral vessels happily took advantage of the creaking Russian economy, often with the tacit approval of local authorities and the tsar. This in turn angered Napoleon, who was already annoyed with Russia’s limited participation in the war against Austria. Even on the personal level, the two emperors were increasingly hostile as Napoleon jilted Alexander’s sister to marry Marie Louise of Austria. Finally, on 23 June 1812, five hundred thousand troops of Napoleon’s Grande Armee crossed the Niemen River into Russia.

They had every reason to be confident of victory. Napoleon had defeated virtually every continental army in a series of lightning wars, and of the major powers, only Britain and Russia remained outside his grasp. His plan was to reprise the previous campaigns: a war of mobility and rapid maneuvering leading to an early, decisive battle that would quickly convince the tsar to sue for peace. Such a strategy had made Napoleon the master of Western Europe.

But Napoleon’s blitzkriegs were largely forced upon him, for they were the only battles the French army could win. Surrounded by hostile states whose combined armies greatly outnumbered his own, Napoleon had to out-maneuver his opponents quickly. A war of long duration or attrition was impossible for the French to sustain, for they had neither sufficient troops nor adequate supplies. Feeding the army was largely a matter of letting troops forage the surrounding hostile countryside. That worked well enough in the short-term in areas where the land was rich and occupied by producing farmers. But it meant Napoleon had to win quickly and often to keep his opponents off balance, prevent them from coordinating their attacks, and keep the army fed. A fast, furious war was the only kind he could hope to win.

If Napoleon could win only a rapid war, the Russians could survive only by avoiding battle as long as possible. Russia’s military was divided into two widely separated armies, each outnumbered by Napoleon’s forces, each ready to be smashed in turn. The Russian general staff had no strategy other than to retreat and avoid catastrophe; indeed, it was less a strategy than the only means of survival. It worked, but only just.

As the Russian forces melted away to avoid his knockout punch, Napoleon was drawn farther and farther into Russia. His rapid advance looked like success, and concealed the growing problems. Hoping for a decisive battle at Smolensk, Napoleon pushed on. But the Russians continued their retreat, torching the city as they left, leaving the French army without food or shelter. Its soldiers, most of whom were not French, increasingly discovered that discretion was the better part of valor, and headed for home when they could.

Word of the retreat from Smolensk reached Priamukhino seven days later. Alexander began planning to move the family away to its holdings in Kazan. The next morning, however, Varvara went into labor and could not be evacuated. The family stayed at Priamukhino, though Liubov and her new sister, named after her mother, were soon sent away for safety. Alexander set about forming his serfs into a fighting force of irregulars. Similar bands of partisans harried and harassed the French invaders throughout Russia, cutting supply lines, creating confusion and panic, picking off stragglers, inflicting casualties while avoiding pitched battles, and demoralizing an increasingly dispirited army that could not find a foe to fight and yet could not protect itself.

Meanwhile, the regular Russian forces continued to withdraw and to force the enemy to overextend and overreach. In September, with the Grande Armee approaching Moscow, it was time to make a stand, if only to rally troops and populace alike who grew increasingly dispirited by the constant retreats and ceding of territory to the invader. General Michael Kutuzov engaged the French at Borodino, less than seventy-five miles from Moscow. He could not hope to win, but he turned Napoleon’s triumph into a Pyrrhic victory, best described not in military accounts but by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. Fifty thousand Russians died; about forty thousand of Napoleon’s soldiers were killed. The Russians withdrew again, and one week later, on 14 September 1812, the Grande Armee entered Moscow.

Still Alexander refused to treat with Napoleon. Instead, the city was set afire and Napoleon’s soldiers found themselves with the fruits of victory literally turning into the ashes of defeat. Unable to obtain food, harassed at every step, their triumph was no nearer than it had been at the banks of the Niemen. On 19 October, Napoleon began the long march back to France, hoping to flee both the Russian army and the Russian winter. Meanwhile, Kutuzov planned his counteroffensive.

The horrors of the French retreat from Russia are well-known. Kutuzov’s forces blocked the more fertile southern land and the tattered Grande Armee had to retreat over the earth it had already scoured and that the Russians had scorched. Of the six hundred thousand troops that had ultimately entered Russia, fewer than a hundred thousand straggled back across the Niemen. We might remember that a fighting force today is considered to be effectively unfit for action when its casualties reach 10 percent. By 14 December 1813 the Grande Armee had been pushed back across the Niemen, its orderly retreat collapsed into a rout.

At Priamukhino, the Bakunins rejoiced at the news of the retreat and again tended their gardens, this time in a spirit of celebration rather than contemplation. They planted a grove of linden trees to honor Kutuzov, whom Alexander had met at Tver in 1812, and in the spring put in lilacs and poplars “to remind us of this horrible epoch.”[36]

As Napoleon retreated, erstwhile allies broke with him, new coalitions arrayed against him, and the French empire was rolled back on itself. On 31 March 1814, Alexander I, now hailed as the savior of Europe, led his triumphant troops into Paris. Two months later, the Treaty of Paris was signed, signaling the end of war, at least until Napoleon escaped from exile. In far-off Priamukhino, where news of the treaty would not arrive for some time, there was another reason to rejoice: Michael Bakunin, son of Alexander and Varvara, named after his legendary grandfather, was born.

The Bakunins were delighted to have a third child, and in the aftermath of the war, Michael’s birth—the first male child, so important in those days—seemed especially cause for celebration. But if Priamukhino and the Bakunin family had avoided the ravages of the war, they would not be spared the repression of the peace.

At the beginning of his reign, Alexander I appeared to be a rational, progressive, humane improvement over his father. As a young man, he had remarked that Russia needed significant political reform, and he assured his subjects that he wished to follow the model of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, rather than his half-mad father, who had been persuaded to do the right thing only by having the oxygen supply to his brain choked off. Certainly the new tsar’s early actions were cause for optimism for enlightened nobles such as Alexander Bakunin. The restrictions on foreign travel were relaxed and the censorship of books and journals slackened. There was even reason to hope cautiously that the autocratic rule of the tsar might be eased as Alexander I hinted at the possibility of a Russian constitution and something like the limited parliamentary democracy of France, the United States, and England that represented their bourgeoisie and aristocracy so well.

The sincerity of Alexander I’s desire to loosen the strictures of autocratic rule and his ability to institute reforms in the face of the intransigence of the nobility, the bureaucracy, the military, and the peasantry are still debated by historians, but war with France put an end to any progressive ideas he might have had. Some reforms were undertaken during the peace of 1807, but when war with France broke out again in 1812, all the plans were shelved. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris, many hoped that the tsar would turn again to questions of reform, especially to the two pressing matters: greater access to a more open government and serfdom. In the event, Alexander I continued to float ideas, but never tried to implement them. If he was not the reactionary that his predecessor and successor to the throne were, neither was he the visionary the empire had hoped for.

Yet reform was desperately needed. Even in victory, the conflict with France had revealed Russia’s relative weakness on the European front. While an optimist might conclude that the war showed Russia could defeat the mightiest army on earth, a pessimist could reasonably argue that Napoleon had made it to Moscow and had been defeated by the weather as much as by the Russian military. In the future, headlong retreat might not prove an effective strategy; at the very least, it was embarrassing. Furthermore, if the war with France had taught anything, it was that space was Russia’s greatest defense. That meant expansion of the empire, and that increased the need for a larger and more efficient army. Pushing the boundaries of the empire outward for protection, however, brought conflict and competition with other powerful states. As Russia expanded in different directions, it alarmed Austria, Prussia, Persia, and Turkey. Any expansion alarmed Britain, which interpreted every move as a threat to the balance of power on the continent or as a threat to the jewel in the crown: India. The same expansion necessary for defense constantly risked war.

Expansion also meant policing an ever-increasing territory. When the victors finally divvied up the spoils of war, the good news was Russia received the largest share of Poland. The bad news was Russia received the largest share of Poland, a country constantly on the edge of revolt. So too were the other nations subordinated by the Russian empire. Thus the costs of empire expanded along with its territory. Modern armies cost money, and that could come only from the nobles, who in turn extracted it from their peasants. As taxes were raised to pay for defense, the nobility became increasingly alienated from the tsar and the peasantry became increasingly alienated from the nobility. The opposition of the peasants to taxes and conscription meant the army had to be strengthened to meet this internal threat. It was a vicious spiral: the security of the state depended on expansion, but expansion threatened the empire from without and within. Russia was difficult to defend, hard to rule, and nearly impossible to develop.

No one was more aware of the failures of the regime than the nobility. Like Alexander Bakunin, nobles discussed over and over what was to be done. Inspired by the early gestures of Alexander I himself, they understood that a constitutional monarchy would empower them. Thus they talked about the rule of law, made in public by representatives of the people. Their definition of “the people” often varied. Did the empire’s peasants count? Others outside the nobility? Non-Russians? Jews? Rarely. So too did their solutions vary. Would petitions to the tsar be considered or would they simply lead to mass arrests? After 1812, the latter seemed more likely. How then would change come about? A coup d’etat? The officers’ corps had put Alexander on the throne and presumably could remove him. But should it? Revolution? By whom? Could the officers and nobles link up with peasants? Should they? What did peasants want? Who knew? Who cared?

But talk of coups and revolution, however hypothetical or theoretical, was dangerous. Even barroom speculation on constitutions and limiting the power of the tsar was an invitation to prison. The recourse of many was to form secret societies to discuss reform. In particular, army officers from the nobility, well traveled in the course of chasing Napoleon back to Paris, educated, and dedicated to reform of some sort, began to organize. Bright, articulate, thoughtful, hungry for access to power and change, they drew up plans for constitutions, parliaments, even republics. By 1816 they created a clandestine organization; by 1821 it was large enough to be split into two groups, the Northern Society and the Southern Society. The Southern Society, headed by Colonel Paul Pestel, was more radical, calling for a republic on the American or French model and for the abolition of serfdom. The Northern Society was more moderate, arguing for a constitutional monarchy on the British model. It too called for the abolition of serfdom, but unlike the Southern Society expected peasants either to rent land or to work it as wage laborers.

How to make such changes? The officers had no clue. But when Alexander I died suddenly, far from the capital in 1825, probably from typhoid or malaria, it seemed as though fate had provided an ideal opportunity. Alexander I had no sons, so the next in line was his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. Constantine, however, refused to take the throne; instead, a third brother, Nicholas, agreed to rule. The confusion emboldened the Northern Society and it decided to act. On 26 December, as guards units were to swear loyalty to Nicholas, the rebel officers hastily mobilized as best they could and soon about three thousand of them formed up in the Senate square of the capital. Once there, however, it was clear they had no idea how to proceed. As officers and nobles, they had little support among the peasants and other groups. Others agreed with their ideals but did not believe in revolution or violence to accomplish them and had no notion of what was going on. Isolated, naive, without effective leadership or plans, the rebels occupied the square and waited.

They were quickly surrounded by troops and officers who remained loyal to the tsar, or at least to their orders. Nicholas desperately wanted to avoid bloodshed on his first day in office, and the two sides faced each other uneasily for several hours. Finally, Nicholas ordered the artillery units drawn up around the square to load their cannons with canister, that is, metal balls or shot in a metal container, designed to spread out like a high powered shotgun blast and inflict maximum damage on human flesh. Twice Nicholas gave the order to fire, and twice he rescinded it. Finally, he gave the third order and the cannon belched smoke and fire and shot into the rebels massed together on the square. Some tried to rally on the frozen Neva River, but the artillery, now loaded with cannonballs, smashed through the ice and plunged many into the water. The rest fled as best they could.

The repercussions of their failure were swift and harsh. Hundreds of the Decembrists, as the rebels became known, were rounded up and interrogated, many by Nicholas himself. A court convicted them without a trial and ordered over one hundred officers exiled to Siberia. More were stripped of their rank and sent to the Caucasus; noncommissioned soldiers were caned, some to death. Five of the leaders were hanged, but such was the inefficiency of the regime even that grisly job was bungled. Three of the nooses slipped, and the victims had to be hanged twice. One broke his leg in the fall, and as he was hoisted up to be hanged again, he summed up the tragedy of his country perfectly. “Poor Russia!” he exclaimed. “Here we don’t even know how to hang a man properly.”[37]

The failed revolt and the bloody repercussions stunned Russia. Pushkin, who had known two of the hanged men, penned a bitter poem, “To the Emperor Nicholas I”:

He was made emperor and right then
Displayed his flair and drive:
Sent to Siberia a hundred-twenty men
And strung up five. [38]

Nicholas I was not content with that. He created a secret police, the notorious Third Section, headed by the grim Count Alexander Benckendorff, who soon set up an extensive network of informers and surveillance, with a special detachment for opening mail. Benckendorff was aided by Admiral Alexander Shishkov, who as the minister of public instruction insisted that the proper way to instruct the public was to censor reading material. Publishers could be held liable for books that had previously been cleared by the censors if the authorities suddenly changed their minds about what was permissible. Ambiguous passages were to be interpreted in the way most damaging way to the regime and treated accordingly. Predating William Safire by more than one hundred years, political conservatism was accompanied by linguistic purity as censors insisted on excruciatingly correct grammar and syntax. Finally, the censor could make “minor” changes without informing the author. So widesweeping were the laws that one censor observed that “even the Lord’s Prayer could be interpreted as a Jacobin speech.”[39]

The rule of law was adjudicated firmly for subjects but largely ignored when it came to the tsar. Where Alexander I had considered constitutions and written legal codes, Nicholas believed that “the best theory of law is a well-intentioned morality, but it ought to exist in one’s head, independent of abstractions, and have as its base religion.” A lofty thought, perhaps, but of course in an autocratic state, it meant that law was arbitrary and fickle. Given his belief that no “system could be better than that by which Kings were delegated by Providence to govern the masses,” reformers had little enough to hope for. Even travel abroad was restricted, for the tsar feared that “young people return from there with a special spirit of criticism which, perhaps with good reason, makes them find the institutions of their own country inadequate.”[40]

If Nicholas was not a complete reactionary, he was close enough for most purposes. The chilly wind of his reaction blew across the empire, even to Priamukhino. The Bakunin family had special reason to be careful under the new regime. Alexander Bakunin was no radical, but he had traveled throughout Europe and had entertained moderate ideas that, in the shadow of the hanged Decembrists, could be misinterpreted. The Decembrists were closer to home than that, however. One of Varvara’s childhood friends was a member of the secret society; so was one of Alexander’s nephews. Most damning of all, Varvara’s second cousin, Sergei Muraviev, was the unfortunate Decembrist who had his leg broken on the scaffold. Rumors dogged Alexander. It was known he had entertained friends and relatives who were connected to the Decembrists; how involved was he personally? In a fragment of his memoirs, Michael Bakunin wrote that his father was a member of the Society of the North and had been asked to become its president several times.[41] Given his age, his politics, and his retreat to the country, the story is unlikely. But perhaps Alexander enjoyed listening to the talk of the younger rebels, encouraging them here, restraining them there, warning them of their folly, enjoying the frisson of revolutionary talk in the comfort of Priamukhino. In any case, security now demanded that the Bakunin family sever its ties with the rebels. The education of his children, always chief among Alexander’s concerns, now took a less liberal turn. His sons would be loyal subjects, while for his daughters the future would bring not emancipation, for as he put it in a poem,

Life at home,
For woman, as a peaceful angel,
Keeps the hearth safe under her wings ...
[And] unites into a harmonious choir
Many unanimous voices

Even more ominously, the Bakunins approached Admiral Shishkov for advice on educating their children, and while no record of the conversation has been kept, it is safe to assume he was no Dr. Spock.[42]

Michael himself noticed a radical change after the events of 26 December. “At first,” he wrote, “our education was very liberal. But after the disastrous events of the December conspiracy, my father, frightened by the defeat of liberalism, changed his plan. Now he made it a point to make us into loyal subjects of the tsar.”[43] It appeared to him as though his father had drawn down an “invisible barrier” and had become afraid of his efforts to educate his family.[44]

As significant an influence on Priamukhino as war and revolution was the economic base of the empire. How goods are produced, exchanged, and consumed, and how the labor of many becomes the profit of a few is crucial to understanding a society. Serfdom, like slavery in the U.S., underwrote the regime. All economic systems have rules that enable certain kinds of behavior and inhibit others. A capitalist business, for example, is always forced to innovate, for if it does not, other firms will. They will be able to produce their competing goods more cheaply and thus increase their sales at the expense of the firm that does not innovate. At the same time, all this innovation is tightly constrained, for its chief objective is not to make a better product or a more useful product or a longer-lasting product. The chief objective of capitalist innovation is to reduce labor costs, either by replacing people with machines or by making people work harder to produce more or by replacing high-paid skilled labor with lower-paid unskilled labor. Products may be better, though that does not happen as often as advertising implies. But simply making the product better for consumers does not give a company enough of a competitive edge. The real competition is in lowering costs, and since it is difficult to lower the costs of raw materials, for these are sold by other capitalists who also seek to make a profit, the company must go after the wages of its workers. Similarly, efficiency may be defined in many ways, but the only one that really counts for the employer is the one that increases profit rather than, say, giving employees shorter hours with more pay. This is the dynamic that makes capitalism so much more productive than other economic systems. At the same time, it means that unemployment and poverty are not, therefore, mistakes or unfortunate happenstances in capitalist societies. They are the logical consequences of the system itself as capitalists follow the rules for success. So too did serfdom have its own economic rules and logic, and these put strict limits on what was possible.

The needs of war and reform that so occupied the tsar, his officers, and the nobility, foundered on serfdom. The Napoleonic wars dramatically proved even to the most hidebound boyar that the modern world required modern weapons for a nation to survive. Yet the real problem was not technology. That could be developed or purchased abroad. The real problem was how to pay for the technology and the productive capacity that made it possible to compete with the most efficient economies. Modernization was not primarily about technology. It was about creating an economy that could sustain it and use it effectively. Certainly Russia lacked the armaments factories, transportation networks, and textile mills of Britain and France, but more fundamentally, it lacked the economic base to build them and the political superstructure to encourage and sustain them. In short, what Russia needed to compete with the most productive economies was capitalism and a corresponding political system that would enable capitalists to put all the powers of the state, from taxation to tariffs, from borrowing capacity to determining spending priorities, and from military defense to policing the population, at their disposal. This was the advantage France, Britain, and increasingly Prussia, had over Russia.

What was this capitalism then? Modern economists often cloud the issue. Their role, after all, is to defend capitalism, and that means denying its essential, exploitative nature. Capitalism is not the same as trade and markets. Markets have, after all, existed in virtually every society, and few of these can be historically described as capitalist. Nor is capitalism primarily about competition, for this too predates capitalism. It is not primarily about technology or invention, though these certainly accompany it. They are, however, effects, not causes. Nor is capitalism necessarily about manufacturing and heavy industry: Agriculture was the first sector to become capitalist in England and France.

The primary element of capitalism is wage labor. It is this that makes capitalism what it is. To create capitalism, it is not enough to have capital and capitalists. It is necessary to have workers, that is, a landless population that must go to work for the capitalist. In Russia, it meant turning peasants into wage laborers. Such a task, however, meant nothing less than destroying the very economic system that was the basis of Russian society. Therein lay the real challenge of reform: how to force the economy to evolve from one based on the exploitation of serfs to one based on the exploitation of workers without destroying the aristocracy, the tsar, and the social fabric along the way. For peasant-based economies could not compete effectively with capitalist ones based on wage labor. As a method for funneling wealth from peasants to lords, serfdom was effective enough for hundreds of years. When placed in competition with the new capitalist economies, however, it lagged behind.

Serfdom worked very differently than capitalism: the rules were different and so the conflicts and problems were very different. Profit in a capitalist system is easily explained. The employer owns and controls the coffee shop or factory where production takes place and determines who will be hired and fired and how things will be produced; that’s what it means to be a “boss.” Workers produce goods or services for their employer. Everything that they produce on the job belongs to the capitalist: workers have no more right to the coffee or cars they produce than someone off the street. Their employer, protected by law and by the apparatus of the state, owns all they produce. The employer then sells the goods that have been produced and gives the workers a portion of the value they have created. Capitalists and workers fight over the precise amounts of this portion, but the capitalist system is based on the notion that the capitalist owns everything that is produced and controls how everything is produced.

Under serfdom, exploitation was even more obvious and direct. Peasants produced an amount of goods and a percentage was handed over, either voluntarily or at the point of a sword, to the nobles and the church. Certainly some wealth trickled back down, in the form of churches and mills and so on, but the system existed to let nobles and clergy and state enrich themselves from the labor of the peasant. Intricate rationales were developed to “prove” the necessity and virtue of the arrangement, and peasants could sometimes exert countervailing pressure if the rate of exploitation was too high, but the basic fact of the system was the funneling of wealth from the mass of people at the bottom to an elite at the top.

Other classes did exist, including a middle class composed of artisans, professionals, and merchants, and there was a great deal of variation and even overlapping within each of the classes. But the relationship between lords and peasants was the important one, for peasants made up the largest segment of the population and produced most of the wealth, while the nobles, including the tsar, received most of that wealth.

A small number of Russian peasants were self-sufficient and independent, scratching out a subsistence living on their own land. The vast majority, however, lived on and farmed land owned by someone else. About 40 percent were state peasants who handed over their produce directly to the tsar. The majority, nearly 60 percent, were serfs, that is, humans owned privately by nobles such as the Bakunins. They were bound by law to a particular lord and plot of land; so too were their descendants. Some worked the fields, while others might work as shoemakers, blacksmiths, or domestic servants. Peasants paid rent to the owners, usually in barshchina, that is, direct labor for the owner, or in obrok, payments in kind from the produce of the farms.[45]

Owners had practically unlimited control over the lives of their serfs. Even a benevolent man such as Alexander Bakunin was, as Michael observed, “master of about two thousand slaves, male and female, with the right to sell them and beat them, to send them to Siberia or into the army, and above all, to exploit them without mercy, or, simply put, to plunder them and live off of their forced labor.”[46]

However, this power over their lives and labor did not generally extend to authority over how the peasants worked. Peasants did not own the land, but they occupied it and farmed it with little interference. Rarely did the lord directly supervise the work in the fields; this was usually left to the peasants themselves, organized into the mir, or commune. This gave them a great deal of control over how work was done and how much was done. Absentee landlords were often happy, or forced, to leave the peasants to decide what was to be done and how. Decisions about which family would work which fields, or how the commune would meet its obligations to the lord were made not on the basis of what would be most profitable but what would be most fair for all. The mir took into account the individual circumstances that affected each household as work was assigned. Larger families, for example, might be given larger plots; families laid low by illness might have some of their work taken up by others. Most often, it meant regularly redistributing the land to ensure that no one was permanently stuck with poor fields or received an unfair advantage. Because they controlled and worked the land, peasants believed that it was theirs in a very real sense, even though formal ownership was acknowledged to reside with the lord. As a result, lords often viewed the peasant commune itself as an impediment to “modernization.”[47]

Since surpluses were handed over to the lord, there was little incentive to produce more or to produce more efficiently; only a fool would knock himself out to benefit the Man. Nor were peasants inclined to adopt innovative farming techniques eagerly advocated by lords who hoped to increase productivity. While peasants were often chastised for their ignorance, stubbornness, clinging to hidebound traditions, and a general reluctance to “modernize,” their refusal to change was a completely rational response. Untried techniques were risky; the lord, who did not know the land, might be inspired by the latest fad or book on agriculture, but had little practical knowledge. If the new, unproved farming methods failed, it would be the peasants, not the lord, who would starve. However inefficient the old techniques might be, their worth was obvious, for they had maintained the peasant family for generations. The same could not be said for the new notions of the lord.

Thus innovations by the lord were viewed with the same suspicion that time management and new managerial techniques are viewed with by workers today. Inevitably these aim to make employees work harder, longer, and faster, while the benefits of increased efficiency and productivity flow upward to management and shareholders. The most barbaric and humiliating techniques, ranging from the Wal-Mart cheer to the speed-up, are always introduced with smarmy promises that everyone will benefit from taking them up. Peasants, no less than workers today, were justifiably suspicious of the bright ideas and the enthusiastic exhortations of those who stood to gain from intensifying work without ever having to perform any of it.

Because peasants controlled how work was done, it was difficult for lords to squeeze more rent or work out of them. As a result, it was difficult to accumulate the surpluses needed to revamp production. Nor could payments in kind be used to invest in new equipment for farming or small industry: foreign manufacturers and suppliers demanded payment in cash, not chickens, however plentiful. Capitalism requires capital, and that generally meant selling something on the world market. Realistically, for Russia that meant selling grain, especially wheat. But again, production was difficult to control and boost. Peasants could not simply be directed to stop producing for their own subsistence to grow wheat instead, for without their own gardens, they would starve. If some lords cared little about this, most could see that killing off their serfs would soon result in their own starvation. Diverting peasant labor to cash crops then required first an agricultural revolution, either in technology or in technique or in turning serfs into farm wage laborers or all three, to produce more food with less labor, thus freeing serfs to work on the market crops. And that of course ran straight into the peasants’ well-justified distrust of “modern” ideas that were too often divorced from reality and were obvious attempts to extract more labor.

Therefore, attempts to “westernize,” “modernize,” or “industrialize”—more accurately, to impose capitalist relations on the Russian peasantry—often foundered. A lord could strive to intensify the labor practices, and many tried. Using what one author has termed “repressive modernization,” some forced peasants to adopt new methods. One of the foremost advocates of innovation and progress as practiced in England and Germany found especially creative ways to encourage his serfs to change their habits. Chief among his inducements were throwing them bound hand and foot into hot water and smearing them with blistering hot tar and feathers.[48] However useful such techniques might have been in the short term, there were practical limits to them. Physical coercion tended to make peasants work only hard enough to avoid punishment and to inspire them to find other ways to resist. Peasants could be very good at playing dumb. New tools might “accidentally” be left outside and ruined; “clumsy” and costly “mistakes” might be made. At the very least, increased supervision and control over the peasants was expensive and time-consuming, with no guarantee that these costs would actually be made up through increased production. Peasants believed they had the right to protest rates of exploitation that exceeded their sense of the moral economy, and they exercised that right even in the face of harsh punishment.

Their ultimate form of resistance was the specter of open revolt. Peasants vastly outnumbered lords and made up over 85 percent of the population. They were also concentrated. Most American slaveowners owned fewer than twenty slaves. In comparision, a Russian noble who owned twenty male souls was considered a small holder. Many Russian nobles had one thousand or more serfs; in 1860, only one American owned one thousand slaves. There was more than sheer numbers to worry about. Peasants had risen up in the past. Thousands joined the Don Cossack Stenka Razin in 1670–1671 to seize land and massacre lords and nobles. In the end, two hundred thousand peasants formed a rebel army that roamed the countryside, burning manors and crops and massacring lords and nobles. Eventually defeated and beheaded, Razin and his promise of freedom lived on in peasant folklore. Within living memory was the revolt led by Yemelian Pugachev between 1773 and 1775. Again peasants organized an army, sacked towns, and put the countryside to the torch along the Ural and Volga rivers, even threatening Moscow itself at one point. They announced the abolition of serfdom and the expropriation of land for peasants, and called for peasants to execute nobles and government officials. Defeated because of the movement’s lack of cohesion and discipline, the Pugachevshchina still stood as a powerful reminder of the limits of noble rule. Even a relatively benevolent noble such as Alexander Bakunin worried that his serfs would use Napoleon’s invasion of Russia as an opportunity to rise up, and the tsar was forced to divert many of his troops to forestall a peasant revolt. Only when Napoleon refused to free peasants and seized their crops and animals did they discover their patriotism and form the backbone of the partisan resistance and the army itself.

No, the trick was to make peasants work harder by turning them into wage workers. As Karl Marx put it, the secret was to find a way for “great masses of men [to be] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labor market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.”[49] The key to Britain’s success was not in technology or innovation or scrimping and saving to raise capital. It was in forcing peasants off the land they possessed to work for wages for those few who owned the land. That allowed owners to direct production as they saw fit, using the methods and processes they decreed. It allowed them to force workers to produce not for their own subsistence but for the market. It allowed them to divert workers from the land to other forms of production, such as textiles, and it allowed for the efficient accumulation of capital for investment.

This process had begun in England in the fifteenth century as the notorious enclosures converted common property into the private property of the lords, who could then evict peasants and replace them with sheep whose wool was more profitable. By the time of the industrial revolution, roughly the 1780s, there was no English peasantry to speak of. Instead of peasants, England had free laborers—free, that is, in two senses. First, they were not slaves or serfs; they were no longer attached to the soil or to a particular lord, or bound by the rules of guilds that established limits to their labor. In this positive sense, they were now free agents. But more important, they were also “free” from the land, their traditional means of supporting themselves. Now they had to sell their labor to someone else if they were to survive. That someone else was the owner of the land or factory, and ownership meant he would determine how work would be done and at what rate. Furthermore, all the production of capitalist farms and factories belonged to the owner to do with as he pleased. All he owed his workers was a wage that represented only a fraction of the wealth the workers had produced.

Thus Russian nobles read Adam Smith carefully for suggestions and clues. But creating capitalism required sweeping changes that were not easily made. Nowhere had it evolved simply and easily. Peasants were expropriated, native people massacred, and populations enslaved to create capitalism. In Russia, it amounted to asking lords and serfs to abolish themselves, or more accurately, their way of life, with no real alternative in hand. Voluntary attempts most often failed. When Alexander I changed the laws to allow nobles to free serfs and provide them with land, few took him up on the offer. Whatever they thought about serfdom, and many nobles, including Alexander I, sincerely believed it was immoral, the law was roughly the equivalent of the U.S. president signing a bill to allow General Motors to transform itself into a worker-owned collective if it wants to. Even those nobles who were especially keen to abolish serfdom had no effective way to do it and maintain their way of life during the period of transition. One sincere but misguided reformer announced his bold new plan to his peasants: they would be set free and could rent half of his land for their own use while working the other half for wages. Not surprisingly, the peasants respectfully requested that things be left as they were.[50]

It was in this light that Alexander Bakunin wrote an “Agreement between Landlord and Peasant” that outlined his own vision of how a more harmonious—and profitable—relationship between the classes might work. It is striking in its naivete. Under this ideal arrangement, peasant families were to be given about forty acres of land for their own, with hereditary title. This sounded like incredible bounty at a time when the average “soul” was lucky to have eight acres to till for his own needs. It was not, however, a gift, and it was intended to reinforce rather than weaken noble privilege, for the lord would receive one-third of all that was produced on this land—a harsher toll than under serfdom. In theory, peasants would work harder and more productively on their own land, thus creating more wealth for the lord, and the land would be exempt from redistribution by the commune. Indeed, one of the purposes of such a policy was to destroy the peasants’ attachment to the commune and replace it with an attachment to Russia, and presumably, the new property relationship. Bakunin believed that as independent tenant farmers, the former serfs would have a stake in Russia, for “without hereditary tenure there is no property, without property—no citizenship, and if a farmer is not a citizen, then he is a prisoner, and what then is the Fatherland?” That the basic exploitation of the peasant would continue seemed to have escaped Alexander in his attempt to create loyal, more profitable “citizens.” His dream, one shared by many nobles of his day and many capitalists of ours, was to create happy, hardworking, peaceful people who joyfully and freely worked hard to create prosperity for their masters and employers. It was a plan to reduce conflict between the classes, to create, as Alexander Bakunin put it, a society where “all private wills should agree,” without, however, removing the root cause of conflict: the exploitation of the peasant.[51]

Political questions no less than economic questions rested on serfdom. When nobles spoke of liberty, often they meant their liberty from the traditions, customs, and laws that protected serfs from the harshest exploitation. What lords wanted was the right to do as they wished with the land, regardless of the wishes of peasants. Some hoped to obtain all the property for themselves, to control as well as own; others thought it preferable to have peasants own their own plots, believing they would be more productive if working their own land while still allowing the lords to skim from the top. Both cases required legal changes, and that meant changes in the political order so the nobility might press its case more effectively. A state where lords made up the parliament or constituent assembly or duma was more likely to do what they wanted than a tsar who had to listen to competing interests, including his own.

The nobility also sought political change so state resources could be allocated differently. Capitalist industry requires a huge investment in infrastructure, and private enterprise always insists that the state tax the rest of the population so business may be spared the expense. But with 50 percent of its annual budget going to the military, Russia did not have sufficient resources to hand out largesse to capitalists and nobles eager to become capitalists. Given the strains of empire, this was impossible as long as the tsar spoke for himself and not for business. Even if the tsar wanted to make such changes, he could not simply impose his will on nobles and peasants. Many nobles were content with the system and saw no need for change, while the tsar could not afford to alienate one group at the expense of another; he had only to reflect on the murder of his own father to recall the danger of acting without support.

Round and round it went. Every way Russia turned, it was blocked and hampered. Everyone was for reform, but no two parties could agree on what exactly that meant. What peasants meant by abolishing serfdom was quite different from what lords meant, and any change risked upsetting a very wobbly applecart. With no consensus on how to proceed, even the tsar was hamstrung. If he tried to institute change from above, say by creating a modern bureaucracy that would ease Russia into abolishing serfdom, he would alienate the lords who relied on patronage and favor rather than merit. If he left reform to the nobles, it would be a patchwork affair that would weaken the central power and risk the collapse of the empire. Leaving the serfs to the tender mercies of the lords risked another Pugachevshchina; after all, even the most generous “soul” would stand for only so many tarrings on the way to modernity.

Priamukhino too faced such dilemmas. Alexander Bakunin understood that political and philosophical ideals paled beside economic realities. What use, after all, were “needles when there was nothing to sew?” he asked rhetorically.[52] Yet he was keen to offer prescriptions for Russia: the legal system needed to be revised and cleaned of corruption; in particular, it had to secure the right to property. The rights and responsibilities of tsar, nobles, and peasants should be carefully outlined, and tyranny banished. In practice, however, Alexander Bakunin was no more able to reform Priamukhino than Alexander I was able to reform Russia. The conundrum of reform proved too much for both, and both soon abandoned it. If Bakunin first tried to reconcile his ideals with reality by changing reality, he ended up by changing his ideals to conform with reality. There was no easy way out of serfdom for lord or peasant. Serfdom then had to be reinvented, at least on the intellectual plane, and Bakunin proved up to the task. In another poetic venture, he defended serfdom as the natural order:

I don’t know why our know-it-alls
Call them slaves—
By feasible daily labor
They pay their regular rents
And having their own plot in exchange,
Fields, meadows, livestock, a house,
They are just the same as their masters,
The masters of their own daily lives. [53]

His son Michael made a more trenchant observation. In his memoirs he wrote, “My father was fully conscious of this immorality [of serfdom], but, being a practical man, he never spoke to us of it, and we were ignorant of it for a very long time.” The evil of serfdom could not be so easily escaped through ignorance, however, and ran through Russia and Priamukhino like a syphilis spirochete, working its damage largely unnoticed for years while its victims treated only the most glaring manifestations with palliatives as they ignored the fundamental disease. As a result, Michael wrote, “my moral education was warped by the fact that my entire material, intellectual, and moral existence was based on the crying injustice, the absolute immorality, of the enslavement of our peasants who furnished our leisure.”[54] Michael was writing about Priamukhino, but his observation applied equally to all of Russia.

There were more immediate effects as well. The peculiar institutions of the Russian empire meant there were few options for the men and women of Michael’s generation. Given an excellent education at home, there was little opportunity to use it productively. For young men of Michael’s age, there were really only three choices: managing the estate, entering the civil service of the tsar, or joining the military. His father decided Michael would enter the military, and at fourteen he was packed off to artillery officer school in St. Petersburg. He went willingly, to please his father and because there were few options. The decision would have large ramifications for Michael, his family, and Europe.

[31] Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse,” in High Windows, London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

[32] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” in David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, page 329.

[33] Curtis Cates, The War of the Two Emperors: The Duel Between Napoleon and Alexander: Russia, 1812, New York: Random House, 1985, page xviii.

[34] Randolph, pages 155–6.

[35] The myth that blue-collar workers were the fiercest supporters of American involvement in Vietnam still persists. John Strausbaugh, for example, repeats the mistake in his otherwise delightful book, Rock ’Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia, London: Verso, 2001. In his chapter, “Up Against the Wall, Mother Hubbard!” he argues that the American new left of the sixties foundered on the shores of “patriotism and deep personal commitment many working-class Americans felt toward winning the war” (page 82). In fact, as James W. Loewen has pointed out, opposition to the war was always strongest among the working class. See Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: The New Press, 1995, pages 297–303.

[36] Randolph, page 158.

[37] Elaine Epstein, Pushkin, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998, pages 139–40; W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, London: Allen Lane, 1978, page 82.

[38] Walter Arndt, Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972, page 27.

[39] Lincoln, Nicholas I, page 236; the censor is cited in Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, page 142.

[40] Lincoln, Nicholas I, pages 58–70; quotes cited here.

[41] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire de ma vie,” 1871.

[42] Cited in Randolph, page 195; for Shishkov, see Randolph, page 172.

[43] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire de ma vie,” 1871.

[44] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his father, January 1836.

[45] David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made, London: Longman, 1999, pages 21 and 77; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, pages 366 and 3; Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, pages 420–1.

[46] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire de ma vie,” 1871.

[47] Kolchin, Unfree Labor, chapter 4.

[48] Esther Kingston-Mann, “In the Light and Shadow of the West: The Impact of Western Economics in Pre-emancipation Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33, no. 1 (January 1991), pages 86–105.

[49] Karl Marx, Capital, volume I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983, page 669; the general argument is laid out in Part VIII, “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, chapter 2.

[50] Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917, London: Fontana, 1998, pages 175–6.

[51] See Randolph, pages 100–13.

[52] Alexander Bakunin, cited in Randolph, page 101.

[53] Cited in Randolph, page 188.

[54] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire de ma vie,” 1871.