From St. Petersburg to Moscow

1790: Alexander Radishchev reports

alexander nikolayevich Radishchev was born and came of age at a time when, strange as it may seem from a modern perspective, educated society fully supported its rulers and wanted nothing better than to serve them heart and soul.

The appellation applied to the era of Catherine the Great, “the Golden Age of the Russian Nobility,” is remarkably accurate. The nobility rightly felt itself to be the foundation on which the throne rested, with all the rights and obligations this implied. While a half century earlier Peter the Great had felt that his subjects’ sole obligation was to fight for him, serve him, and pay taxes to him, after his reign the nobility gradually acquired greater and greater freedom.

First, they were permitted to retire (Peter had presumed that everyone was obligated to serve him until their dying breath). Then schools appeared for the children of the nobility, from which they emerged with the rank of officers, thus eliminating the need for them to serve as soldiers, as they were forced to do under the “tsar-reformer.” Next came the practice of signing infants up for service so that, as they grew up, they could also grow in rank. The nobleman increasingly felt himself to be master of his own fate.

This sense was reinforced in 1762 when, a few months before Catherine ascended to the throne, the famous Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility was issued, freeing the nobility from its obligation to serve the crown and allowing them to live wherever they pleased, be it in one of Russia’s two capitals, abroad, or on their country estates. Furthermore, it was no longer permitted to subject the nobility to corporal punishment. Gone were the days when Peter could beat his ministers with a staff or when the head of Empress Elizabeth’s Secret Chancellery (secret police) could seat a suspect nobleman on a special chair that would drop into an underground chamber, where the immobilized victim would be lashed with a whip.

In Radishchev’s day, a nobleman was someone with a keen sense of his own worth, of his special position, endowed with the right to select his own representatives, even if only on the provincial level, someone who knew that he could only be judged by his peers. And this gave him a sense of his importance to the government.

Although the nobility had the right to not serve the state, any nobleman who took advantage of this right at too early an age – and not because he was in poor health or wanting to start a family, but simply because he did not wish to serve – was regarded with shock and suspicion. How could one not wish to serve the beloved empress? How could one not harbor dreams of going to war, helping to push the boundaries of the empire outward and at the same time covering one’s chest with well-deserved medals? How could one not long to advance through the ranks of government service?

Virtually any member of the noble estate could proudly proclaim, “this is my government.” It protects me, endows me with rights, and I therefore conscientiously and voluntarily serve it.

Alas, there was another side to this rosy picture. The nobility’s rights and freedoms were inextricably bound with their power over the peasants. In Peter’s day it might have seemed that landowners could not have wielded any more power than they already did. However, subsequent decades showed this was not the case. The more freedom from the state the nobility acquired, the greater freedom they enjoyed as masters of their own estates. These people, so proud of the fact that they could only be judged by those elected from among their peers, acted as judge and jury of their own peasants and could send them into exile or even forced labor in Siberia.

Landowners swore an oath of allegiance to the crown on behalf of their peasants. This might not seem a terribly important detail, but it speaks volumes about the peasants’ place in society. Landowners increasingly sold peasants without their land, selling just a few individuals (instead of an entire village) to a new owner, thereby tearing people from their native land without a second thought for the fact that relatives and loved ones were being separated from one another.

And here is what is amazing. All these educated, self-confident noblemen, filled with such enlightened thoughts and sentiments, completely failed to see any contradiction in the order of things. The liberty and calm that they enjoyed seemed in no way incompatible with the peasants’ slavery. The fact that the government protected some and oppressed others seemed completely natural and justified to them, or at least to the vast majority of them.

The Pugachev Rebellion (1774-1775), with its wild excesses and horrible brutality, did not awaken landowners to the idea that oppression should be relaxed. Quite the contrary, to them the peasants were savages who could not be given freedom. They had to be kept in check. If enlightened philosophers and writers did find someone to blame, it was those evil, cruel landowners who did not take sufficient care of their peasants. There was nothing wrong with the system itself.

But then something interesting started to happen. The freedom that had been given to some at the expense of others began to gradually change people’s consciousness. Some started to think that it was shameful to own human beings, as if they were chattel. Why this occurred to some people but not others we may never know.

What was it that the pious Nikolai Radishchev did differently in raising his son Alexander to render him incapable of accepting the state of affairs that everyone else had grown accustomed to from childhood? What books did this civil servant, philosopher, and poet read before he retired and devoted his life to literature and contemplation? What was it that he discussed with his Freemason friends, what kind of improvements to humanity was he dreaming about when he sat down at his desk and penned the words, “I look around me and my soul is wounded by the suffering of mankind”? It was after this that he described a Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow that he supposedly made, during which, in each village, he saw human sorrow and degradation, lives destroyed by slavery, families torn asunder, behavior incompatible with human nature.

In essence, Alexander Radishchev was a creation of that same golden era, of those same noble freedoms that were granted by the government over the previous decades. For a long time, historians and literary scholars considered Radishchev a revolutionary and turned him into an unbending foe of the regime. And indeed, the empress herself, upon reading his book, exclaimed, “Here we have a rebel worse than Pugachev.” But if we read Radishchev’s book carefully, we see that he was counting on a wise monarch who would prove capable of not only punishing cruel landowners, but changing the entire system.

Radishchev was writing about the same things that the empress herself had been dreaming of for many years. Catherine had been planning to free the serfs. Well educated and raised on the ideas of the Enlightenment, the empress understood the immorality of slavery only too well, and also the harm it was doing to the country. But the idea of opposing the nobility was daunting – what if they were to depose her the way she had deposed her own husband? Catherine dragged her feet and assuaged her conscience with half measures – punishing the sadistic Saltychikha (the sobriquet for Darya Saltykova, a noblewoman notorious for torturing and killing her serfs), permitting peasants to start their own businesses (perhaps a third estate would gradually take shape?), and of course by focusing attention on education.

If she could only create new sorts of Russians through education, imbue them with new ideas, a love of goodness and justice, then maybe they would appreciate the reforms she was planning but kept delaying. New institutions of learning were appearing, wonderful books were being translated and published, journals were being founded that promoted enlightened thought.

Indeed it was Catherine herself, when Radishchev spent part of his youth at her court as a page, who did more to educate him than his own father or the teachers at the university gymnasium and the professors of Leipzig University. Intentionally or not, she instilled in him new thinking and a love of liberty. In him, she had created someone who would have been prepared to support her reforms, who was counting on her. Alas, it was too late.

In 1790, when Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow came out, Catherine was no longer the woman she had been in her youth. France was in the throes of revolution (begun the year before) and she was asking herself who was responsible. Was it her beloved Voltaire, Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophers – the very ones whose ideas she had instilled in young Radishchev? Fears like these are why, instead of the monarch’s approval, Alexander Radishchev earned a path to prison, to trial, and to a death sentence (commuted by the empress to ten years exile in Siberia). He returned home a broken man, for whom a reprimand by the authorities and an empty threat of another term of exile was enough to lead him to take his own life during the liberal reign of Alexander I.