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 ofthe 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 naive cynicism that as a 'false priest' in the 'sect offarmazony', 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.
16 Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, pp. 234-7.
17 A. Iu. Minakov, 'M. L. Magnitskii: K voprosu o biografii i mirovozzrenii predtechi russkikh pravoslavnykh konservatorov XIX veka', in Konservatizm v Rossii i mire: proshloe i nastoiashchee. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vyp. 1 (Voronezh: Izd. Voronezhskogo gos. universiteta, 2001), pp. 83-4.
18 M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriiaodnogogoroda: Skazki (Moscow: Olimp, Izd. AST, 2002), pp. 44, 47, 49.
19 M. Gorky, My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 116; Saltykov-Shchedrin, Istoriia, p. 37.
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.[145]
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,[146] 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
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'.[147] 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, fire- prone 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.'[148] 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.
Yet she was among the lucky ones, for all members of her family had at least survived, as had (apparently) their house.[149] 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.[150]
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.'[151]
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 simple- hearted 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 religiosity with which they resisted aggressors who claimed to represent a superior civilisation.[152]
145
J. M. Hartley, 'Russia in 1812, Part II: The Russian Administration of Kaluga
146
See J. M. Hartley, 'Russia in 1812, Part I: The French Presence in the
147
T. Shanin,
150
E. 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.),
151
M. Broers,
152
Pavlova, 'Moi vospominaniia', 228; M. A. Dodelev, 'Rossiiai voina ispanskogo narodaza nezavisimost' (1808-1814 gg.)',