Liprandi published this memorandum, "A Brief Survey of Russian Schisms, Heresies, and Sects," in 1870 and dated it 1855, but intellectual circles in St. Petersburg had already read it in 1851 (Annenkov 1989: 510). The memo invented new realities on a giant scale. Huge numbers of people, some of them rich, some noble, and many entirely obscure, were described as a single political community, a republic within the monarchy, which was arranged on an unheard-of, revolutionary base and was fundamentally hostile to the empire. It was possible though, Liprandi believed, to take action, and if not destroy this underground community completely, then at least reduce its danger. Liprandi proposed to chose individual agents among both the sectarian and intellectual communities and, "having established personal relations with them, smartly induce mutual hostility between the communities." He also proposed to start "a focused, secret surveillance of the Schismatics, whose very existence is an important Evil" (Liprandi 1870b: 131).
Liprandi composed this memo while embedding one of his spies in the reading group lead by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whom Liprandi and his colleagues sent to Siberia in 1849 after a mock execution. Fyodor Dostoevsky was also a member of this group. Using his agent, Liprandi was trying to uncover the connection between these western-minded elitists from St. Petersburg and the folkish Schismatics. Simultaneously, he was trying to launch a new and larger affair, a trial of the Moscow Slavophiles, whom in his "Brief Survey" he listed as a sect, "the secular Schismatics." In fact, the Slavophiles did communicate with the Old-Believers; for example, they organized theological debates with them in the Kremlin.
Rumors that the sect of Skoptsy (Castrates) had bribed Liprandi destroyed his reputation, and in 1855 Pavel Melnikov, a provincial official who later became a writer most known for his novels about the Schism, replaced him in his position. Other religious experts in the ministry were Afanasii Shchapov, a former professor of history and a future Siberian exile (see Chapter 9), and the young journalist Nikolai Leskov, another future celebrity (Chapter 11). Leskov recorded the fierce debate between two parties, "the hesitant Melnikovians" and "the resolute Shchapovians," that was taking place in the 1860s. According to the former, every Schismatic was a debaucher, while, according to the latter, every Schismatic was "a little Fourier of a sort" (Stebnitsky 1863: 39). Divergent narratives by the two leading experts on the Schism, the conservative Melnikov and the radical Shchapov, competed for control over governmental policies. In the bureaucratic world of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, these visions complemented one another. Shchapov's idea of the political nature of the Schism only justified police measures against sectarians.
The New Alliance
In Gogol's Inspector-General, the central character is an impostor who pretends to be doing what officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs regularly did: an inspection of a distant province with all its ignorance, chaos, and corruption. Curiously, among the things that this character brags about is his friendship with Pushkin, which makes the provincial officials and their daughters tremble.
In 1843, Ivan Turgenev started his service in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His boss there was Vladimir Dal, and he worked on another project of agrarian reform. An extended memo, "Some Remarks about the Russian Economy and the Russian Peasant," was one of Turgenev's first written works (1963: 1/459-75). A rich landowner, he resigned in 1845 to publish his great masterpiece, A Sportsman's Sketches, in several parts, starting in 1847. Turgenev's Sketches had a larger impact on Russia's internal affairs than did dozens of ministerial memos. The mainstream Russian encyclopedia declared with a characteristic mixture of dependency and hubris: "[T]he role of A Sportsman's Sketches in the emancipation of serfs was equivalent to the role of Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the difference that Turgenev's book is, aesthetically, incomparably higher" (Vengerov 1902: 99). In 1852, Turgenev was arrested for his obituary of Gogol and, after a month in the police station, was exiled to his own comfortable estate. Later, he wrote his novels about Russian life while living in Western Europe.
After his appointment to the ministry in 1848, the young lawyer, Ivan Aksakov, went to Bessarabia (Moldova) to study its remote though powerful community of Old-Believers. There in the steppes, he started writing a poem, The Wanderer, with a free, wandering peasant as the protagonist. Upon his return to St. Petersburg the following year, he was arrested in the context of the forthcoming investigation of the Slavophile circle, which his chief in the ministry, Liprandi, proclaimed to be a dangerous sect. Nicolas I personally ordered Aksakov's release (Sukhomlinov 1888). Aksakov was sent to the province of Yaroslavl as an inspector-general, a job that to a recent prisoner probably felt too close to Gogol's play. Known as a center of the Schism, Yaroslavl fascinated Aksakov. Combining both his tasks, of inspector of bureaucracy and researcher of the Schismatics, he wrote to his father that Russia would soon split into two halves: the Orthodox that takes bribes and the Schismatic that gives bribes (Aksakov 1994: 177). In one village on the Volga, Aksakov and his colleagues from the police discovered a sensationally new community, the Beguny (Runners). These people saw it as a sin to spend two nights in one place. They rejected money, property, and family. Understandably, Aksakov gave up his poem, The Wanderer, and wrote an extensive report on the "sectarian community" of wanderers. His report became the only source of information about the sect; nobody else could locate them, though many tried (see Chapter 9). Having heard about the poem, Perovsky requested its text and must have been puzzled by the coincidence. Though he found nothing dangerous there, he asked Aksakov to make a choice between creative writing and state service. Aksakov resigned and returned to his estate. He became a leading figure among moderate Russian nationalists, an editor and publisher.
Among these aristocrats, heirs of beautiful manors with hundreds of peasants attached, the boundary between the office and the prison was strangely unstable. Another writer with the blood of a Rurikide, Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin, was exiled for his writings in 1848 to the remote though still European province of Viatka. He served there in the governor's office and continued writing, until he was given a position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1855. Traveling for inspections, he collected impressions for an astonishingly broad and equally aggressive satire on many aspects of Russian officialdom. He later became Vice-Governor of Riazan province and the favorite writer of Lenin.
Though most of the classical Russian authors did not serve in offices, many of their male protagonists did. One of the explanations is that the officials and their families constituted a major part of the reading public. Seeking readers' responses, the seigniorial authors imagined scenes in harems, battlefields, madhouses, and other interesting places. But very often, they depicted scenes in the offices. Having turned from Romanticism to Realism, mid-nineteenth-century literature provided narrative models and the stylistic training that were required for paperwork in the imperial offices. The Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Aleksei Levshin, who came to the ministry after a long service in the colonial provinces of Orenburg and Odessa, wrote that during the preparation of the Emancipation of 1861, "literature provided a great service to Russia by espousing its variegated views and explications on the question [of serfdom], which had earlier remained a full mystery, a terra incognita" (Levshin 1994: 84). The influence went both ways, from the office to fiction and from fiction to the office. History, philology, and the erstwhile Tsarina of the humanities, ethnography, were construed as applied sciences that had their legitimate places in the tool-kit of the rulers. Applying this rhetoric to the practice of governing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs could pursue its agenda despite the virtual absence of social statistics and economic data. Nikolai Nadezhdin, then a professor of philosophy at Moscow University who would later become a top official of the ministry and the founding father of Russian ethnography, said early in 1831 that a new "Holy Alliance" was about to emerge, between the humanities and the practical life of the people. He derived this formula from the ruins of the Holy Alliance between the European powers, created by Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Nadezhdin's dream of the new Holy Alliance would lead Europe on the basis of uniquely Russian discoveries, made within the applied sciences in their studies of the Russian people (Nadezhdin 2000: 2/736-48). Working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1843, Nadezhdin took part in the production of an outstanding body of scholarship, in which he partially realized his dream of the new Holy Alliance. The Russian Geographical Society, with its vanguard section of ethnography, was created by Nadezhdin, Dal, and other associates of the ministry and was financed from its funds (Lincoln 1982; Knight 1998). Supported by Grand Duke Konstantin, the Minister of the Navy who was also the leader of the 1861 Emancipation reforms, the Russian Geographical Society focused on the investigation of the Russian heartland rather than the global world. The richest collection of Russian fairytales, the ground-breaking study of Russian sects, the best-known dictionary of the Russian language, and the pioneering studies of non-Russian subjects of the Empire were all realized in the ministerial circles. The participants of this movement knew of its colonialist nature as well as of the crucial connection between power and knowledge. As Vladimir Dal wrote in 1842: