Time and Place: Russian Revolutions in the Long Nineteenth Century

Hillis, Faith. Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s–1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 360 pp. 37. 99. ISBN 978-0-1900-6633-8. Werth, Paul W. 1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 240 pp. 54. 00. ISBN 978-0-1988-2635-4. The Russian-British writer Owen Matthews begins his YouTube interview show, "Cursed Questions/Prokliatye voprosy, " by getting right into it. The first question for his mostly Russian guests is: "Who's war is this? Putin's War? Russia's? How did we get here? Do you bear any responsibility? " The answers vary, but everybody is used to "Who is to Blame? ", so there are few surprises. Later come questions that amount to the equally familiar "What is to be Done? " Many of Matthews's guests have been branded as "foreign agents" or worse, and everyone is against Putin and the war. If he were to interview the dictator and his proponents, however, one wonders how different the dynamic would be. The answers would be diametrically opposite, of course, but the Putinists would know just as well who to blame and what to do. 1 These two creative and engaging books explore the 1800s, when the "cursed questions" first arose, and their protagonists belong to the same camps—the exiled critics and vol'nodumtsy on the one hand, the imperial supporters on the other. Each group has its position on the questions, and their views are just as antithetical. The loyal subjects place their faith in God and tsar and tradition, with some allowance for useful updates to the latter, naturally, to keep up with the times. Their general position is: Stay the course. The critics, meanwhile, dream of taking over the ship, throwing the whole lot overboard, God included, and steering boldly for "the coasts of utopia. "2 Faith Hillis focuses on the anti-government contingent, specifically the émigrés and exiles whose various "colonies" in Zurich, Paris, London, and other European cities became "actually existing" utopias—Hillis calls them "concrete utopias"—where successive generations of radicals "live the revolution" and devise various plans for "human emancipation" (pp. 6–7). The story begins in the 1830s as Polish "patriots" and other mostly high-born passionés of "the new German philosophy" establish the first permanent Russian European communities and concludes almost a century later as the latest radical cohort, freshly returned from Europe, sets up shop in post-monarchical Petrograd to run the revolution (p. 14). (Hillis includes a brief epilogue that takes the story into the 1930s, but the thrust of the narrative stops with the end of the Civil War. ) The book opens with the arresting declaration that "the future of humanity once depended on a Geneva brasserie, " by which Hillis means the Landolt, where Vladimir Lenin, Chaim Weizman, and other disaffected Russian subjects gathered with their respective followers in the early 1900s to debate plans for human renewal (p. 1). From a humble Swiss café to a better world! Hillis is exaggerating, of course, but only slightly. The Russian Revolution with its world-transforming pretensions, while Russian in a basic sense, was arguably even more a revolution of the Russian emigration. Isaiah Berlin mused that if a brick had fallen on Lenin's head, everything might have turned out completely differently. 3 Hillis's main argument is that things might have been different if he and his café-going comrades hadn't spent so much time in the Russian colonies. The colonies are indeed nothing if not intense. Their residents are earnest about everything—truth, freedom, the future of humankind, not to mention sex, love, and God. Their disagreements (skloki) are just as passionate, and they also dress funny. Making his way through Zurich in 1872, the newly arrived law student Nikolai Kuliabko-Koretskii is dismayed to see young Russian-speaking women wearing short, un-lady-like skirts and men decked out in "grubby coats" and the sort of "tall, dirty boots" people usually put on "to hunt waterfowl. " The revolutionary look, however, is a clear sign that Nikolai has indeed reached his destination: "Europe's first Russian colony—an island of radical culture in the middle of a bourgeois city" (p. 13). The colonies are likewise diverse, with representatives of the various nationalities of the empire cooped up together in close quarters, speaking and, in some cases, publishing in their national languages, while sharing Russian as a revolutionary lingua franca. One of the delights of the book is Hillis's expert feel for the social complexity of the milieu, which amounts to a shifting jumble of nobles and plebs, young and old, singles and family types, dogmatists and pragmatists, men and women. In fact, women are central to the narrative, just as they are to the life of the colonies, even if the overall culture remains stubbornly patriarchal. Radical Russian women, like Sofiia Kovalevskaia, the first woman professor of mathematics in Europe, become "leading lights of continental feminism" (pp. 108–9) Oscar Wilde writes his first play about Vera Zasulich. Most importantly, perhaps, the colonies never sit still, their composition constantly changing as their residents grow up or move on or simply move from city to city. New arrivals from Russia also regularly come in, along with new ideas. Idealism thus gives way to materialism, Populism to Marxism, which itself then breaks like a pot into a variety of shards, all of which gets very personal, in part because the people in the pot know each other very well. Lenin's falling out with Iulii Martov in 1904, for example, leaves him depressed and preoccupied for months. "I looked at Vladimir Il'ich, " a friend recalled that summer as they stood gazing at a beautiful vista during a walk in the mountains. "He was … lost in thought. Then suddenly he blurted out: 'The Mensheviks are shitting on everything!'" (p. 172). Relations with the authorities are also fluid. At first, the reception is cordial, with an emphasis on the liberal value of asylum. The tsarist government is despotic; the exiles are victims. Of course, we should take them in. But as the century goes on and the Europeans come to realize that the tsars aren't the only ones with a radicalism problem, the asylees start to look less appealing. By the 1880s, "administrative expulsions" begin (p. 120). The Okhrana also joins the fight, printing anti-émigré and anti-Semitic tracts to sway European opinion, cultivating (and bribing) European security services, and subverting the colonies themselves. By the early twentieth century, Hillis reminds us, "every … group in the emigration had been thoroughly infiltrated by double agents" (p. 191). In time, of course, the radicals will prevail and mercilessly dispatch both the tsar and the Okhrana, but for a while at least, it's worth remembering that their chances did not look very good. Still, Hillis's book is less about the ultimate success of the revolutionaries than about who they had become by the time they succeeded, and her point is simply that they were where they were from. Close to three-quarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee and two-thirds of the first government of People's Commissars had lived in the colonies for at least a year prior to 1917, and many for far longer than that, all of which meant that they could not help but be shaped by "the heritage of emigration" (pp. 215, 225). The colonies' ethnic and social diversity and "rich tradition of utopian experimentation" taught the Bolsheviks to believe and argue fiercely, while also influencing their commitment to "the fundamental equality of men and women" and their own transformation into a true multinational party (pp. 221, 222). The exposure to Jewish socialism in the colonies was especially important. Though Bolshevik leaders tangled bitterly with Bundists, Labor Zionists, and other Jewish radicals during the exile years, they eventually coopted their ideas, which then helped foster a postrevolutionary Weltanschauung that was "simultaneously Jewish and Soviet" as well as "the rapid entry of Jews into the new cultural and political elite" (p. 223). In practical terms, life in the emigration also offered access to foreign benefactors and international networks, both of which came in handy during the struggle for power. At the same time, the colonies influenced a range of less inspiring habits: ideological rigidity, conspiratorial thinking, paranoia (though Hillis doesn't use the term), and, not least, the inclination to view politics as a blood sport. This applied perhaps most poignantly to the Bolsheviks' relations with their fellow radicals from the emigration household, whom they tended to see less as well-meaning roommates with a different point of view than as evil siblings bent on betraying the family. Hillis's vivid description of the painful shaming visited upon Martov at the Congress of Soviets in 1918 is a case in point (p. 219). Finally, years of exile helped to foster what Hillis calls a "Janus-faced relationship with the outside world, " particularly with Europe (p. 225). The Bolsheviks—the early Bolsheviks, that is—both believed in and desperately hoped for "European revolution, " but they were decidedly less excited about European revolutionaries, such as Karl Kautsky, for example, the reason being, at least in part, the difference in their milieus. Kautsky and his ilk grew up in "the bourgeois comforts of Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, " while Lenin and Company were products of "the impoverished and conflict-ridden Russian colonies" (p. 230). The European socialists, it followed, were naïve softies, while the Bolsheviks knew the truth. It takes a true bending of the mind to shift from this world of fierce existential churning to the "quiet revolution" of a dynamic and forward-moving empire, yet reading Paul Werth's work alongside Hillis's makes both even more intriguing. Her protagonists are anti-empire discontents looking for utopia; his are (mostly) pro-empire conformists intent on keeping up with the Joneses. Yet both books share a faith in the explanatory power of historic specificity. For Hillis, it's the distinct setting of the colony as a locus of social experimentation and radical culture-building over a century-long period that explains why the Russian Revolution turned out the way it did. Werth, for his part, investigates a wider range of settings and developments during a shorter and less disruptive period, though, just as for Hillis, it's the situatedness of the story that drives the argument. As for the argument itself, Werth's, like Hillis's, is at once simple and profound: The year 1837 might not look like much, but, in fact, it was a time of great transformation, or as Werth puts it, a "moment of conjuncture where diverse existing strands of historical development intersect and new ones emerge" (p. 2). In other words, it's a revolution. This one is "quiet" because nothing momentous happens in an obvious sense, but that doesn't mean change isn't unfolding. In Werth's case, the big change is an undeclared and more-obvious-in-retrospect Great Leap Forward into "modern Russia" and, along with it, a new "Russian nation. " Russia in 1836 is a huge, sprawling, diverse empire. In 1838 it's still all those things, but with a nation embodied within it. Obviously, this is a lot to pin on any single year, and Werth is quick to point out that he's really talking about the 1830s as a whole rather than 1837 alone, though the year is indeed full of developments. Glinka, "our musical Pushkin, " basks in the glow of A Life for the Tsar (p. 38). Pushkin, "our everything, " is killed in a duel (p. 23). Chaadaev writes his famous Apology. The heir to the throne takes an imperial tour. The Winter Palace burns down. And the government launches, in no particular order, a publishing program for provincial newspapers, Orthodox conversions in Poland, preparations for an assault on Khiva, a new railroad to connect St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, and a new ministry to oversee state peasants and properties. Werth's book is, in effect, a creative weaving of these otherwise disconnected strands into a tapestry of national-imperial meaning. The time, as he puts it, is one of "dynamism, innovation, and consequence" (p. 2). A new national music, a new literature and historical purpose, a more obviously national dynasty, a nationally minded reclaiming of estranged members of the faith (the Uniates), a tightening connection between the territories and peoples of the empire—all of this is in the works, and just about everyone seems happy about it, or at least ready to go along. The leader of the Uniates' "reunion" with Orthodoxy is a Uniate prelate (p. 148). The state peasants who insist they'd rather be exiled to Siberia than plant the ministry's potatoes eventually come around. Even "madman" Chadaaev is confident that Russia is in a "happy" position and bullish about the country's prospects: "I have a deep conviction that we Russians are called … to answer the most important questions that occupy humanity" (p. 53). (Chadaaev was not a colony resident, but he sounds like one here. ) As Werth takes us through these various developments, we travel the empire: Palace Square, Poland, the Kazakh steppes, the potato fields of the Middle Volga and Northern Urals. The tsarevich, the future Alexander II, zigzags for seven months across twelve thousand miles between the endpoints of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Orenburg, and Tobol'sk, during which he endures "loathsome roads, " "a frightful multitude of flies, " fermented mare's milk (kumys) served up by welcoming nomads, excited "hoorays" from countless townspeople, and balls in every provincial capital. He also collects some sixteen thousand petitions, most of them requests for "material aid" (pp. 66–69). If one of the pleasures of reading Hillis's work is her expert feel for the Russian colonies of Europe, here it's Werth's deep appreciation of the enormity and variety of the empire itself. Describing "the birth of the provincial gazette, " he notes that in the mid-nineteenth century St. Petersburg and Moscow accounted for just 2 percent of the state population, and that "open country" began "within view of the Kremlin walls. " He adds: "In no small measure, then, the provinces were Russia" (p. 86). To Werth's credit, Russia's great pivot to "the modern age, " which we might expect to occur in the capital, instead, in his telling, unfolds a little bit everywhere (p. 2). In spirit if not in name, this is a true all-empire book. As for whether the turning point happens when and how Werth says it does, my answer would be: yes and no. He is surely right that the 1830s represent a "distinct threshold" (p. 201). You step over the decade, give or take a few years, and, yes, you have entered a new time, with a new national feel. But the we're-just-as-good-as-the-Europeans-only-more-special ressentiment that makes up so much of this national turn gets going in the 1700s, as do a few of the other developments Werth singles out as breakthroughs of the 1830s—for example, the country's "full participation in the European imperialism that will leave such a deep imprint" on the nineteenth century (p. 140). Werth argues that we see this "European imperialism" especially clearly in Perovskii's Khiva campaign of 1839–40, but one could argue that it appears just as much in New Russia under Catherine the Great, or in Ermolov's campaigns in the Caucasus in the 1820s. This is the cost of bold thesis. Reducing great changes to a single year, even a "pivotal" turning point like 1917, let alone a "quiet" one like 1837, can never really work because change isn't tidy. It neither stops nor starts in one go. Even as certain things change, others stay the same. One might ask: Are events—the death of a poet, the laying of the first railway track, a palace fire—even the right place to go looking for indications of meaningful historical change? Without going as far as Braudel in writing them off as "the ephemera of history" that flash like fireflies and then disappear, one can still wonder whether events, even a string of them that seem to share something in common, are indeed the repositories of the change they appear to contain. 4 In his introduction, Werth writes that he could have included other events from 1837 that spoke to the same sort of change but didn't because he thought the ones he picked worked best for his purposes. But what if he had added some of those and subtracted some of these? Would the broader picture have been different? What about events that don't speak to the kind of change he was seeking to explain? Would their inclusion have changed the argument, not just about timing but even about what exactly was "modern" about "modern Russia"? Werth jokes in his last line that we will be relieved to know he is not going to be writing a book on 1838. But what if he did? In his old age, Tolstoy remembered how just a single touch of Briullov's brush could change an entire painting. 5 If Werth were to alter his brush a little, would his tableau of "modern Russia" stay the same? What to make of the fraying of the post-1945 international order? Maybe the breakdown of the Three Emperors' League can help us understand. Why all the unease today about globalization? Read the Slavophiles. Why the terrorists, school shooters, and opiate epidemics, and why the rage of so many who feel left behind by a changing world? Dust off your Dostoevsky and your Gorky. The nineteenth century may be passé as the origin story of a triumphant modernity, but in our age of anxiety, it feels more present than ever. 6 Hear, hear! These two rich books are the same reminder. Gracefully written, full of insight and engrossing detail, they return us to the nineteenth-century questions that never seem to go away, the "cursed" ones like Who is to Blame? and What is to be Done? , but even more, the quiet ones, like: What can the past tell us about the way we live and the deeper problem of historical change if we listen closely and pay careful attention to the special circumstances of time and place? Willard Sunderland is Henry R. Winkler Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (2018) and co-editor (with Ekaterina Boltunova) of Regiony rossiiskoi imperii: Identichnost', reprezentatsiia, (na) znachenie (2021). He currently is writing a travelogue and history of U. S. Ambassador to Russia John Quincy Adams's 1809 voyage from Boston to St. Petersburg, which he researched in part by sailing his own vessel, the Clio, from Boston to Finland, in 2023.