This historic decision, in a stroke of a pen moving Russia from a feudal state to the new era, was one toward which Alexander (later often accused of indecisiveness) had moved stubbornly from his accession to the throne in 1855, sweeping aside doubts, arguments, and even direct resistance from both the right and the left. His severe father, Nicholas I, never did take such a bold step.
The people hailed the manifesto at first. (The authorities feared that the tsar’s ukase would lead to drunkenness and then disorder in the villages, but that did not happen.) In gratitude, they called Alexander the Tsar Liberator. He considered the day of emancipation the best of his life: “I have the sense that I fulfilled a great duty.”
Even the intellectual elite (a stratum traditionally given to skepticism) felt that an event of extraordinary significance had occurred. Alexander Nikitenko, a professor at St. Petersburg University, read that “precious” manifesto aloud to his wife and children in his study beneath a portrait of Alexander II, “which we regarded with profound reverence and gratitude”3 (as he recorded in his diary).
The great poet and editor of the leftist journal Contemporary Nikolai Nekrasov, in his poem “Freedom,” addressed an imagined peasant infant, “God is merciful! You will not know tears!” He called upon his fellow writers, “O Muse! Greet freedom with hope!” Even the implacable opponent of autocracy, the revolutionary émigré Herzen, doffed his metaphorical cap to Alexander II: “You have won, Galilean.”
But the honeymoon soon ended for the Tsar Liberator. It seemed that this reform and the important ones that followed (administrative, judicial, military) ultimately satisfied no one. The nobles worried about the erosion of their position as the leading political class. The peasants were unhappy with the small land allotments for which they had to pay high prices. The intelligentsia demanded a European-style constitution. The radicals among students, the so-called nihilists, dreamed of overthrowing autocracy altogether and establishing a “peasant” socialism in Russia.
Nikitenko wrote in horror in his diary, “To speak badly of the government and accuse it of all wrongdoing has become the fashion … Will the government have the strength to restrain this disorderly movement that threatens Russia with innumerable catastrophes? The main thing is a lack of national, patriotic feeling. Society is handicapped by the absence of lofty beliefs.”4
Karakozov’s attempt on Alexander II’s life was used by the authorities as an opportunity to instill “lofty beliefs” from above. As usual in such cases, cultural figures were quickly brought into play. Poetry in honor of the “savior of the emperor” Komissarov-Kostromskoy was hastily written by Prince Petr Vyazemsky, seventy-four, once Pushkin’s liberal friend and now a major official, and by Apollon Maikov, who had previously praised Nicholas I in his verse.
They were major poets, but not trendsetters. The ultrademocratic Nekrasov was one, and the authorities forced him—on pain of banning his progressive journal, Contemporary—to write an ode in honor of the “new Susanin.”
Son of the People! I sing of thee!
You will be glorified a lot!
You are great—like the weapon of God
Who directed your hand!
All three odes—by Vyazemsky, Maikov, and Nekrasov—were included in a deluxe presentation book, Osip Komissarov-Kostromskoy, Savior of the Emperor, published in Moscow and ornamented by a portrait of Komissarov and his wife. Some think that bad verse looks better on good paper, but it didn’t help here: even Nekrasov’s work looked pitiful.
Was that all the government could squeeze out of Russian culture for its large-scale propaganda campaign? (Further poetry dedicated to Komissarov, and there was a lot of it, was even worse.) They did not manage to create a “new Susanin.” That required authentic and not simulated “lofty beliefs” (both from the government and the cultural leaders), the absence of which was bemoaned by Professor Nikitenko. Glinka and Nicholas I had them: that is why their “cultural contract” brought about the great opera A Life for the Tsar, which still elicits “national, patriotic feeling” (as Nikitenko termed it). In Alexander II’s Russia, there was an apparent shortage of “lofty beliefs” and “patriotic feelings.”
The failure of this ambitious promonarchist cultural action in 1866 was symbolic of the ever-increasing alienation between the Romanovs and educated society. Autocracy was losing—slowly but inexorably—its former authority and its power over culture. The fear of the tsar’s wrath was gradually replaced with the fear of losing one’s audience. This was a historic transitional period.
The last great Russian monarchist writer was Fedor Dostoevsky. His road to apologist of the Romanovs was complicated and even dramatic. In 1847 the young Dostoevsky, already a famous writer, joined a socialist circle in St. Petersburg headed by Mikhail Petrashevsky. The police learned of the circle, and its members were arrested in 1849 on orders from Nicholas I. After an intensive investigation, supervised by Nicholas himself, the authorities sentenced twenty-one members of the Petrashevsky circle to hanging, including Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky later recalled, “We Petrashevskyites stood on the scaffold and heard out our sentence without the slightest repentance … almost every condemned man was certain that it would be carried out and we suffered through at last ten horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes awaiting death.” At the last moment, there was an announcement that Nicholas had commuted the death sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia.
In Siberia, “contact with the people, fraternal unity with them in common misery, the understanding that you had become just like them,” transfigured Dostoevsky. The writer had not been an atheist (“In our family we knew the New Testament from early childhood”), but in Siberia he became a Russian Orthodox fundamentalist and turned from socialist to monarchist.
When he became tsar in 1855, Alexander II’s first act was to pardon the political “state criminals”—the Decembrists and Petrashevskyites, and in late 1859 Dostoevsky was at last allowed to return to St. Petersburg, where he resumed his literary career, publishing the sensational House of the Dead, a reportage of his years in Siberia. This was his only work that Tolstoy valued unconditionally.
Dostoevsky remained grateful to Alexander II for his mercy, and Karakozov’s assassination attempt in 1866 stunned him. When he learned of it, Dostoevsky, forty-one at the time, a small, lumpy, and unkempt man, rushed to see the poet Maikov, also a monarchist, and shouted in a trembling voice, “They shot at the tsar!”
Prince Meshchersky, the St. Petersburg publisher of the semi-official publication The Citizen and fierce opponent of liberal reforms, hired Dostoevsky as editor in 1873 (Dostoevsky started his famous Diary of a Writer there), and he recalled that the writer’s “soul burned with fiery loyalty to the Russian Tsar … I had never seen or met such a total and focused conservative … The apostle of truth in everything, major and trifling, Dostoevsky was as strict as an ascetic and as fanatical as a neophyte in his conservatism.”5
When he heard of the attempt on the tsar’s life, Dostoevsky was writing his novel Crime and Punishment, which may be his most popular work. The story of the St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov, who killed an old pawnbroker with an ax to prove to himself that he was a superman and could be compared to Napoleon, already posed the quintessential “Dostoevskian” question: “Am I a quaking creature or do I have the right?” Karakozov’s act of terrorism (which Dostoevsky interpreted in that proto-Nietzschean key) gave the writer the idea to express what “filled my mind and heart” in his 1872 novel, The Devils. “I don’t care if it turns out to be a pamphlet, I will have my say.”