After the success of War and Peace Tolstoy turned again to pedagogy and several schemes for new novels. The outcome was Anna Karenina in 1875–1877. This was the story of the aristocratic Anna, her lover Vronskii and her bureaucrat husband, contrasted with Levin and his wife Kitty, again a portrait of Tolstoy, a happy family life contrasted with Anna’s disastrous affair. While he was writing the book, however, Tolstoy went through the final and deepest spiritual crisis of his life.
Tolstoy’s was a religious crisis. Haunted by death and the problem of the meaning of life, he turned to philosophy and religion, but could not make out which religion he should follow. He first turned to Orthodoxy, the religion in which he had been brought up, mainly on the grounds that it was the religion of the peasantry and he wanted to remain close to them and their wisdom. Orthodoxy, however, did not satisfy him. The liturgy left him cold, and he disliked the enthusiastic support of the church for the state and all its doings – warfare, oppression, and capital punishment – all already unacceptable in his mind.
Finally in 1879–80 he began to read the Bible intensively, particularly the Gospels, and came to the conclusion that the core of the teaching of Christ was non-resistance to evil. (“I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matt. 5:39) In Tolstoy’s mind, everything flowed from that principle. It meant that the state, in fighting crime or foreign enemies, was basically un-Christian, and that the only proper stance was radical pacifism and a sort of Christian anarchism. He developed these ideas in a series of long tracts, the Confession that recounted his inner development toward these views as well as accounts of what he saw as true Christianity. Needless to say, none of these works could be published in Russia though they circulated widely underground and attracted to him a small but devoted following.
Tolstoy did not abandon literature, in 1899 he published his last major novel, Resurrection, about a prostitute wrongly convicted of a murder and her spiritual rebirth (this book was banned in Russia) and he wrote Khadji Murat, a novella of the Caucasian Wars. Shorter works like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilich as well as innumerable articles on public issues gradually made him the most famous person in the country, and the most famous Russian in the world.
Tolstoy’s views and his stubborn defense of them created problems with the church and the state and with his family as well. His wife thought that he was neglecting their welfare, though by the 1890s the changing book market in Russia meant that he, like other authors, began to realize more substantial returns on his many works. The Revolution of 1905 was a hard time for him as well, since he was opposed to the autocracy but did not believe in the violence used against it, much less the violence of the state against strikers, revolutionaries, and peasant rebels. Finally in 1910, at the age of eighty-two, he decided to leave everything and lead the life of a religious recluse. His trip on an unheated third class carriage in winter proved too much for him. He died in the house of the railroad stationmaster in a small town only a few hundred miles south of Iasnaia Poliana.
By the time of Tolstoy’s death Russian literature and culture had passed into new phases, with which he had little sympathy. He was the last survivor of the greatest age of Russian literature, and perhaps of Russian culture in general. The arts as well as the sciences had put Russia on the map of world culture. For the first time the vast Russian empire was known for something other than size and military power.
14 Russia as an Empire
The Russian Empire’s foreign wars over the centuries laid the foundation for its expansion to include the whole of northern Eurasia. Of course by British standards, the results were not impressive. Most of the Russian Empire lay in Siberia, the largest part of which was seemingly impenetrable forest and tundra. Russia’s newest acquisitions in Central Asia were small in population and were poor – no equivalent to India or even Burma. The resultant state included extensive areas on its borders with non-Russian populations, effectively two empires, a traditional land empire in Europe and an attempted imitation of the British example in Central Asia. In both west and south internal and foreign politics were inextricably intertwined.
Nicholas I had understood that Russia’s empire had very limited possibilities for expansion. After 1828 its main effort went into subduing the Caucasian mountain peoples already within Russia rather than the conquest of new territory. In Central Asia the army also concentrated on strengthening the existing frontier and control of the Kazakhs of the steppe while making no serious attempt at expansion. Even in the Balkans, Nicholas had pursued a status quo policy, preferring to maintain Russian influence in a unitary Ottoman state rather than run the risks of partition schemes. Even this modest policy had been too much for Britain and France, but it reflected the tsar’s strategic prudence as well as his tactical blunders. The new situation after Crimea brought different possibilities.
The treaty of Paris not only ended the Crimean War but put an end to hopes of Russian influence on the Ottomans, leaving Russia with only the local nationalist movements in Serbia and Bulgaria as potential allies. Bands of insurgents with plans for democratic republics, the Balkan nationalists were unlikely allies for the Russian empire, and the international and military position of Russia, weakened by defeat and saddled with debts and an enormous deficit, rendered Russia’s European policy essentially passive. The need for stability on the European border also arose from the feeling that the Russian Empire’s boundary in the west was very difficult to defend, running an enormous length through territories poorly served by communications. The answer would be railroads, but they took a long time to build. Threatening noises from Britain and France during the Polish revolt in 1863–64 caused nightmares in St. Petersburg, but they came to nothing, in large part because of the firm Russian alliance with Prussia, now under its new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian alliance meant that the western boundary was largely secure, especially as Bismarck defeated Russia’s rivals, Austria and then Napoleon III, establishing in the process a powerful new state in the unified imperial Germany, for the time being Russia’s friend.
Preoccupation in Europe with Germany and Italy and the pacific policies of Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, secured peace in the 1860s. Russia could gradually reform itself and also begin to rebuild its army on more modern lines, but crisis in the Balkans soon created a new dilemma. The Serbian and Bulgarian revolutionaries had repeatedly attempted insurgencies inside Ottoman territories, calling on the Slavic and Orthodox peoples to rise against their Turkish masters. The response was increasingly savage reprisals, until in 1875 the Serbs of Bosnia revolted again and were able to hold their own for several months before the Ottomans crushed the revolt, in the process perpetrating the largest genocide in modern European history up to World War I. The next year the Bulgarians rose as well, and Turkish irregular units exterminated entire villages, causing even English public opinion to waver in its support of the Turks. Here was a chance for Russia to reassert itself and secure influence in the Balkans, and in 1877 Russia proposed to the Turks an autonomous status for the rebel areas. The Ottomans refused, and Russia declared war. The war that ensued was bloody but relatively short. The Turks had first-class fortresses, were well supplied with European weapons, and fought with their usual courage and determination. The Russian army, though larger, was still in the process of reformation and hampered by old-fashioned and unimaginative generals. After a series of bloody assaults on the Turkish forts, the Russians finally pushed their way over the mountains and arrived near Istanbul in 1878. They then made a treaty with the Turks that established Bulgaria as the main Slavic state in the Balkans, one that would presumably become a Russian client. This alarmed Britain and Austria, and the result was the treaty of Berlin, which created a much smaller Bulgaria with a German monarch. Austria was allowed to take Bosnia as a protectorate. This was Bismarck’s work, and it was a qualified defeat for Russia after all the sacrifices and heroism of the war.