Russians also enslave one another. Chaadaev, himself an owner of serfs, is racked with guilt. He has ideals of freedom, but he cannot live up to them, consequently his self-esteem is lowered: “Weighed down by this fatal guilt, what soul is so fine that it will not wither under this unbearable burden? What man is so strong that, always at odds with himself, always thinking one way and acting another, he does not in the end find himself repulsive?”72 Given this attitude, it is not surprising that Chaadaev was subject to fits of depression.
The First Philosophical Letter, recalled Aleksandr Herzen, was “a shot that rang out in the dark night.”73 It provoked an uproar when it was published in Russia in 1836. The tsar got wind of the scandal and the journal in which Chaadaev’s work had appeared was closed down. Chaadaev himself was placed under house arrest and—more than a century before psychiatric abuse was reinvented in the Soviet Union—Chaadaev was officially declared insane by the tsarist authorities. For over a year he endured daily examinations by a physician.
An essay ironically titled The Apology of a Madman (1837) was one result of this very frustrating situation. In it Chaadaev, among other things, takes back some of the criticism he had directed at Russian Christianity. The Russian Orthodox Church is now praised for its humility rather than castigated for its servility.74 The Russians as a whole (not just serfs or the clergy) are characterized as submissive, but this feature now has a positive aura:
Fashioned, moulded, created by our rulers and our climate, we have become a great nation only by dint of submission [force de soumission]. Scan our chronicles from beginning to end: on each page you will find the profound effect of authority, the ceaseless action of the soil, and hardly ever that of the public will. However, it is also true that, in abdicating its power in favor of its masters, in yielding to its native physical climate, the Russian nation gave evidence of profound wisdom.75
Just what this “wisdom” was Chaadaev does not make clear in 1837. But in his later years he changes his mind again and criticizes the Russian slave mentality: “Everything in Russia bears the stamp of slavery [le cachet de la servitude]—customs, aspirations, enlightenment, even freedom itself, if such can even exist in this environment.”76 In 1854, during the Crimean War, he says:
Russia is a whole separate world, submissive to the will, caprice, fantasy of a single man, whether his name be Peter or Ivan, no matter—in all instances the common element is the embodiment of arbitrariness. Contrary to all the laws of the human community, Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all the neighbouring peoples. For this reason it would be in the interest not only of other peoples, but also in that of her own that she be compelled to take a new path.77
It is clear from his changes of opinion that Chaadaev must have harbored contradictory feelings about the submissiveness of Russians. A close reading of his works demonstrates that he experienced an intense ambivalence toward the idea of submissiveness generally. His psyche harbored both masochistic and antimasochistic impulses.78
Native Russians like Radishchev and Chaadaev were not the only ones to comment on the subject of Russian slavishness. Foreign visitors could not miss it either. A good example is the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), who was in Russia from 1824 to 1829. The “Digression” of his Forefathers’ Eve, Part III (1832) offers, among other things, a satire of Russian servility. Mickiewicz tells an anecdote about a peasant servant found frozen to death on the field of Mars in Petersburg. It seems the peasant had been ordered by his master, a callous young army officer, to sit still and guard a fur coat. The officer had not come back for his coat, and the servant, rather than disobeying orders by donning the warm coat, literally froze on the spot. The narrator comments:
As David Brodsky observes: “The anecdote shows the peasant’s complicity in his own exploitation by a frivolous ruling elite.”80
Another foreign visitor to Russia, Astolphe de Custine (1790—1857) had much to say on the subject of Russian slavishness. Custine was a French marquis who, having met Mickiewicz beforehand,81 spent a summer traveling in Russia. His book, La Russie en 1839, was a great success in France and was very controversial in Russia, where it was read by many despite the ban on it there.82
Custine visited various Russian cities, including Petersburg (then the capital), Moscow, Iaroslavl, and the great trading center of Nizhnii Novgorod. He also stayed in the lice-infested roadside inns of many small villages. No matter where he traveled in “the empire of the tsar” the overwhelming impression he received was one of gloom and misery: “the life of the Russian people is more gloomy [triste] than that of any other of the European nations; and when I say the people [le peuple], I speak not only of the peasants attached to the soil, but of the whole empire.”83 Indeed, according to Custine, Russia is a society in which “no happiness is possible.”84
The primary source of this unhappiness is the slavish attitude of Russians toward authority of any kind. This applies to all Russians, not just serfs (compare Olearius’s previous declaration, “They are all serfs and slaves,”85 or Chaadaev’s assertion that there is no visible difference between a serf and a free person in Russia,86 or Masaryk’s later statement that “both slaves and lords have servile souls”).87
Russian nobles, for example, are not like the cultivated, independent aristocrats of France and Germany, but are ambitious, fear-ridden individuals who are always trying to appease the tsar and other higher authorities. Thus the courtiers surrounding the Hereditary Grand Duke impress Custine with their hypocritical behavior: “What has chiefly struck me in my first view of Russian courtiers is the extraordinary submissiveness with which, as grandees, they perform their devoirs. They seem, in fact, to be only a higher order of slaves; but the moment the Prince has retired, a free, unrestrained, and decided manner is re-assumed, which contrasts unpleasantly with that complete abnegation of self, affected only the moment before;”88 “there are slaves everywhere,” says Custine, “but to find a nation of courtly slaves it is necessary to visit Russia.”89
Custine was an aristocrat whose father and grandfather were guillotined by French revolutionaries, so it is not surprising that he hoped to find evidence in Russia to support the idea of autocratic rule. But Russia changed his mind: “I went to Russia to seek for arguments against representative government, I return a partisan of constitutions.”90 Having now experienced a “nation of slaves”91 Custine can declare that “a peasant in the environs of Paris is freer than a Russian lord.”92
The idea of Russia as a “nation of slaves” seems to have been in the air by the late 1830s. Around the time the first edition of Custine’s book appeared, the poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) wrote a poem, now famous, about Russian authoritarianism: