The 1812 war and Russian nationalism
To understand the war's psychological impact, it is important to recall the drama and speed with which it unfolded. Napoleon invaded Russia in June. By September, he was in Moscow. And by Christmas, his Grande Armee had been annihilated, at the cost to Russia of hundreds of thousands of lives and immense economic losses; in Moscow, the devastation and carnage were such that the sheer stench was unbearable even from miles away.[136] Countless nobles found themselves on the run as they fled east or south from the war zone. For many, this brought eye-opening new thoughts and experiences.
Not surprisingly, many conceived a bitter hatred for the French, but Napoleon's alliance with other states also led many to blame Europeans in general. The young aristocrat Mariia A. Volkova was typical in her outrage at the French 'cannibals' and their allies for daring to call the Russian people 'barbarians': 'Let those fools call Russia a barbarous country, when their civilisation has led them to submit voluntarily to the vilest of tyrants. Thank God that we are barbarians, if Austria, Prussia, and France are considered civilised.'[137] Aside from the fear and loathing spawned by the invasion itself, these comments reflected the agreeable discovery that lower-class and provincial Russians, whom the educated elite had traditionally despised and feared but among whom many noble refugees and army officers perforce now found themselves, were in fact capable of patriotism, humanity and good sense, even though - or more likely, to a generation reared on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, because - they had been little exposed to European 'civilisation'.
Educated Russians' long-standing love-hate relationship with France had taken a turn for the worse in the decade preceding the war, when cultural Francophobia had become an all-purpose device for criticising the decadence of aristocratic mores, the liberal reform plans attributed to Alexander I's advisers (especially Mikhail M. Speranskii), and Russia's defeats in the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalistic writers and officials fostered a climate of opinion that regarded absolute monarchy, the old-regime social hierarchy, the Orthodox faith and cultural Russianness as the core of a national identity whose antithesis was post-revolutionary France.[138]
The only other country at which such venom was directed was Poland. Russia and Poland shared a complicated history, including a protracted struggle for hegemony in present-day Belarus and western Ukraine; Poland's intervention in Russia's Time of Troubles; Russia's part in the partitions of Poland and the extremely bloody suppression of its constitutionalist movement in 1794; and the 1812 war, when Russian eye-witnesses singled out Napoleon's Polish auxiliaries as having been especially brutal occupiers.[139]
In the hands of the nationalist writers associated with the influential Aleksandr S. Shishkov, as the historian Andrei Zorin argues, this painful past became raw material for a compelling mythopoesis of Russian national identity. Poland had all the attributes of both a national and an ideological enemy: it was an old religious rival; it was a traditional ally of France, and associated in Russian eyes with similar revolutionary attitudes; and the presence of many ethnic Poles in the Russian Empire created fears about a Polish 'fifth column'. After Napoleon's victories over Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1805-7 had crushed Russian national pride and led to the creation of the irredentist and pro-Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw, even while the Polish patriot Prince Adam Czartoryski figured prominently among Alexander I's liberal advisers and Russia reluctantly allied itself with France, 'Shishkovist' writers took to celebrating the Time of Troubles - which, fortuitously, had occurred exactly two centuries earlier - in poetry and on stage. In so doing, Zorin contends, they initiated a fundamental shift in Imperial Russia's sense of history. Two hundred years earlier, they argued, a divided Russia had been conquered by Polish aggressors with the complicity of domestic traitors, but in the end the nobility and the people had come together under the aegis of the Orthodox Church, restored Russian liberty and freely invited the House of Romanov to rule over them. This patriotic, anti-Western movement 'from below' in 1612-13 - and not, as had been proclaimed in the eighteenth century, Peter I's Westernising reforms 'from above' - was the true founding moment for the Russian nation, whose essence lay not in a European destiny achieved by a Westernised nobility and emperor, but in the unity of the Orthodox under a traditional Russian tsar, and in their selfless struggle against foreign (especially Polish) invaders and vigilance against domestic traitors.[140]
The regime was slow to endorse these views. Alexander I's entourage remained as multiethnic as ever after the war, and his conception of Russia's imperial destiny had no strong ethnic component. Internationally, he sought to stabilise the post-war order (and Russia's dominant place in it) by uniting the monarchs of Europe in a cosmopolitan, ecumenical 'Holy Alliance'; and in cases where his domestic policies were innovative and liberal - as when he issued constitutions to Finland and Poland or abolished serfdom in the Baltic Provinces - it was often in ways that privileged the empire's 'European' periphery relative to Russia proper. He disliked Moscow, the symbolic historic capital ofthe Great Russians, and while he enjoyed commemorating the campaigns of 1813-14 in Europe, he ignored sites and anniversaries associated with the 1812 war in Russia (when his own role had been considerably less heroic). However, Alexander's effort to impose a non-nationalist reading of the events of 1812-15 failed, and his post-war attempt to build a new European system and imperial culture on an ecumenical Christian basis crumbled within a few years under the weight of its own contradictions. Instead, the revival of elite interest in religion ultimately benefited Orthodoxy while Russian thinkers grew increasingly preoccupied with exploring the historical roots and ethno- cultural specificity of the Great Russian nation. At the same time, the alliance with Berlin and Vienna increasingly derived its resilience not from the Christian faith but a shared pragmatic interest in preventing a restoration of Polish independence and a recurrence ofthe sort of international anarchy associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon.
By the 1830s, the regime and its supporters had clearly embraced the nationalist conception of history. Alexander's post-war attempt to reconcile Russians and Poles collapsed amidst the 1830-1 Polish revolt and the subsequent suppression of Polish autonomy; in 1833, Nicholas I's minister of education, Sergei S. Uvarov, famously defined the essence of Russian identity as being 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality'; Mikhail I. Glinka's patriotic, anti-Polish opera A Life for the Tsar, set in the Time of Troubles, premiered in 1836; and in 1839, Aleksandr I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii published the official history of 1812, An Account ofthe War for the Fatherland in 1812, whose very title helped canonise the interpretation, and the name, of the conflict as a 'patriotic' war of the Russian nation. The notion of a centuries-old unity of altar, throne and Russian ethnos, adumbrated by writers after the defeats of 1805-7 and preached by regime and Church in 1812, had become official ideology by the 1830s and remained so until the end of the Romanovs.
136
'GriboedovskaiaMoskva vpis'makh M. A. Volkovoik V I. Lanskoi, 1812-1818 gg.',
138
See A. M. Martin,
139
For examples, see A. M. Martin, 'The Response of the Population of Moscow to the Napoleonic Occupation of 1812', in E. Lohr and M. Poe (eds.),