Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness 0367134047, 9780367134044

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SOIL AND SOUL: THE SYMBOLIC WORLD OF RUSSIANNESS

Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness

ELENA HELLBERG-HIRN University o f Helsinki

First published 1998 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXl4 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Elena Hellberg-Hirn 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: ISBN 13: 978-0-367-13404-4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-367-13428-0 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-429-02626-3 (ebk)

Cover design: Sini Lappalainen

Contents Introduction

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Symbolic Communication The Symbolic World of Russianness - Symbol and Myth The Mythic Idea - Culture as Symbolic Communication - Self and Other - Sources and Methods

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Territorial Symbolism: The Double-Headed Eagle History in a Nutshell —St George —St Andrew - Split Eagle — Decoding the Eagle - Colour Symbolism - Territorial Marking —Territories and Titles —The Territorial Imperative — Expansion and Colonization - Return of the Eagle

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Symbols of the Centre The Wandering Centre - Moscow: Concentric Structures Petersburg: Centre and Periphery —Modernism and Polarization - The Prestige of the Centre —Rival Centres —Red Square - Periphery as Opposition

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The Tsar: Father to the People Saintly Princes —Tsar and God —The Monomakh Crown — The Pious Ruler - Hero and Father - The Era of Empresses Foreign Metaphor —Tsar and People —The Last Tsar

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Orthodox Christianity: The Collective Spirit The Legend of Choice - Pagan Heritage - Byzantine Connections - Unifying Power - The Third Rome - Western Influences - The Schism - Vehicles of Meaning - Icons: Windows to Heaven - The Trinity - Virgin of Vladimir - Holy Russia - Millennium - Christ the Saviour

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Mother Russia: Soil and Soul Beloved Motherland - Feminine Russia - Concentrated Matriarchy —Sacrifice —Hills of Heroes —Womanhood and Nationhood - Soil and Soul - The Face of Russia

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Ethnic Symbolism: Real Russianness? Folk Tradition - The Mythic and the Aesthetic - Folk Dress Heaven and Earth - National Food - Ritual Food - Food as Fantasy - Bread and Salt - Protected Space - Easter Eggs Kissing Customs - The History of Vodka - Drinking Habits Drinking Tea - Ethnicity and Nationality

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Russian Stereotypes National Character - Russkii Narod - Collective Body What’s in a Name? - We and Others - Purity of the Nation Language and Ethnicity - Russian Time and Space - Money and Wealth - Utopian Worlds

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Creation of the Nation: A Symbolic Discourse The Russian Idea - Creation of History - Protective Formula The Slavophile Utopia - The Russian Home - Narrating the Nation - The Narod in Collections - Museum and Empire The Intelligentsia - National Culture - Pushkin and Co. Whose Project? - The Eurasian Temptation

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Understanding Russianness Ambivalent Space - The Nesting Principle - Enigmatic Russia - Current Discourse - Cultural Archaeology - National Regeneration - Parts and Wholes - Understanding?

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Recommended Reading

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Selected Bibliography

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List of Illustrations

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Index

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

Knowing the other outside, it is possible to affirm identities inside. Knowing identities inside, it is possible to imagine the absences outside. R.BJ. Walker

In recent years, the issue of identity has come to occupy the centre of political, sociological, anthropological and cultural studies. To be sure, nationality is not the only identity-defining contemporary discourse, even if it is now one of the most dominant ones. But, whatever avenues are now being opened up in the exploration of contemporary identities, whether in the name of nations, humanities, classes, races, cultures, ethnicities, genders or social movements, they remain constrained by ontological, political and discursive options expressed most elegantly, and to the modem imagination most persuasively, in claims about the sovereignty of territorial states. (Walker 1991:445-46) This book is concerned with the various connections and restraints that exist between the changing historical reality of the Russian territorial state and the ideal world of national mythology. It comprizes a collection of essays devoted to national self-consciousness in Russia, the empire that vanished in 1917, together with its traditional symbolism. In the post-Soviet Russia of today, however, a rich symbolic flora representing an intermixing of codes of popular, ethnic and Imperial Russianness has emerged to fill the value vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet system. Soviet symbolism will not be dealt with in any great depth here, mainly because the Soviet empire was founded on the principles of proletarian internationalism and class solidarity as opposed to bourgeois nationalism. A continuity of symbolic expression will nevertheless be traced between the seemingly diverse patterns of Imperial and post-Revolutionary Russian social life: between Russian autocracy and the Soviet leader cult; between Orthodoxy and unquestioning faith in the only tme Communist ideology; and also between Russian official nationalism and Soviet collectivism and populism. 1

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The main aim of this book is to provide an orientation in the symbolic world of Russian self-identification, and thus to outline a comprehensible background to the current political discourse about the road to the future Russia. The reader will not find here a full account of Russian history, nor a consistent treatment of Russian culture over the thousand years of its development, although both the historical and the cultural aspects are pivotal to national self-consciousness as expressed in national symbolism. The ‘spectre of completeness’ is avoided, because I believe in the pleasures of discovery, in navigating through an archipelago of meaning, in the possibility that intellectual adventures on little islands may form a coherent pattern when viewed from above. Rather, my aim is to present the various symbols and stereotypes of Russianness as a mind-map of a vast mythological structure that branches out in many directions. Within this overall conceptual framework, always establishing a polarity of “We here, Others there”, Russian national identity is constantly being created and recreated by means of the continuous erasure of differences through the affirmation of the sameness of We. Its time is timelessness, the absolute essence of unchanging, eternal Russianness; its space is Holy Russia. An exploration of the structure and dimensions of the essentialist Russian myth of national identity is the focus of this book; and if this approach is able to stimulate reflection on the problems of national self-identification, my ambitions will be satisfied. The specialist will recognize many of my topics and references, but my way of viewing Russianness brings, I hope, some novelty into the scholarly discussion. For the sake of the general reader, however, I restrict the volume of notes and add a list of suggested further reading. I quote generously from sources both lay and learned, high and low, oral and literary, primary and secondary: for culture is a discourse made up of quotations, and Russian mythology is no exception, nor is its interpretation. But the meaning created by my writing this book is definitely my own. Interpretation in search of meaning, however, requires something more than a familiarity with the specific themes or concepts that contribute to the formation of national mythology. To grasp its meaning we need mental faculties comparable to those of a diagnostician, a certain intuitive capacity — and this has to be balanced by an insight into semiotic theories of symbols and symbolic communication. Such an enterprise cannot be, and does not pretend to be, strictly objective. The interpretation attempted here is grounded in my experience as a native Russian living abroad and on many years of teaching Russian language, tradition and culture in various Scandinavian universities. The position of being both insider and outsider may have its pitfalls, but among its advantages

Introduction

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I would count personal experience of Russianness as an inner understanding, complemented by the analytical approach used in my research in linguistics, cultural semiotics and Russian ethnography. The classical problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography is the reliability of the researcher: What is my own role in the construction of the reality I describe? In brief, I belong to the ‘thaw generation’ of university students in Leningrad. Being brought up in the confession-free Soviet mentality, my family almost totally wiped out during the war, I was severed from the old Russian traditional life. When, after obtaining a B.A. in foreign languages, I moved to Sweden, and later to Norway, I had the experience of having Scandinavian stereotypes of Russianness projected onto me. I was expected to live up to alien (and to my mind obsolete) images of Russian ethnicity so as to prove my professionalism as a teacher of Russian. Among other things, this meant cooking Russian food, singing Russian songs, being able to dance Russian folk dances, practising Russian Orthodox traditions... I had to learn all the ethnic stuff in order to confirm the Russian exoticism that was revealed to me in my cultural confrontation with Scandinavia. Gradually I began to realize that this somewhat contrived ethnic identity helped to connect me to imaginary national roots in my alienated situation, and that teaching Russian language and culture to foreigners does require this kind of emotional ethnographic support. And now, resisting the corrosive effects of time and foreign surroundings, which strongholds of my inherited and constantly revitalized Russianness still endure? First and foremost, my native Russian language as a superior vehicle of expression and understanding; connected to that is a love of Russian poetry, music, and collective singing; I might also add a non-Lutheran attitude to money and possessions, and a hospitality most often expressed in treating my guests to Russian dishes. And, last but not least, a lively interest in all things Russian. In my personal and professional concerns, I am used to considering Russianness both from the inside and from the outside; this double perspective, granted to me by my life history, hopefully lends stereoscopic depth to my views on Russian sameness, and/or otherness, for that matter. In other words, I am trying to understand and interpret practices of my own culture, practices which are by definition interpretations; following the line of thought proposed by Michel Foucault, such interpretative understanding can only be obtained by someone who shares the actor’s involvement, but distances herself from it. The resulting interpretation makes no claim to correspond either to the everyday meanings shared by the actors or, in any simple sense, to reveal the intrinsic meaning of these practices.

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In my choice of topics for individual chapters, I have tried to break down the complex field of national myth into manageable areas. Myths, symbols and national stereotypes, as well as symbolic communication in general, are dealt with in Chapter One. Symbols are understood here as concentrated, mostly visual, expressions of an idea or a notion. Symbolic systems referring to national mythology are loosely defined as terrains. In Chapter Two, the paramount Russian official symbol, the double­ headed eagle, is seen as representing the territorial dimension of the national myth. Here, the terrain of violence is made manifest both in the systematic violation of territorial borders, as well as in the power symbolism glorifying Russia’s Imperial expansion and her eternal victory over the dehumanized enemy. Chapter Three deals with the power of the State concentrated in the capital city. The horizontal territorial symbolism of centre and periphery is related to the vertical power structures of Russian society, as manifested by Russia’s two capital cities, Moscow and St Petersburg, each presenting its own rival version of modernity and tradition. In the symbolic terrain of the body, the two capitals are identified as the head and the heart of Russia. Chapter Four explores the higher end of the social hierarchy, as embodied in the image of the leader. Here, we find the myths of the good and/or saintly tsar, the family metaphor of tsar and people, and the signs of sanctity surrounding the father of the nation which sacralize the rituals of power. In Chapter Five, the vertical dimension of national mythology is examined in the divine terrain of the Orthodox Faith. The religious symbolism of communality, sobomost, has profoundly influenced the formation of the Russian national spirit, the “Soul of Holy Russia”. The symbolism of icons, crosses, rituals, church buildings, etc., is also related to the powerful feelings commonly aroused by these symbols, and to their role in producing and reproducing Russian national identity. In Chapter Six, the central symbol of the national myth, Mother Russia, is viewed as a culturally constructed female body/territory, to be protected by her sons. Father tsar and Mother Russia, demanding sacrifice from the people conceived of as a family, generate clusters of metaphors from the symbolic terrain of the body, which convey the ideas of common origin, belonging, and emotional affinity. Mother Russia is both Soil and Soul; the pagan Moist Mother Earth and the Holy Virgin Mary are blended into a sacred image of motherhood. Chapter Six explores Russia’s origin as connected to the Myth of the Motherland, Rodina. The creation of We is further reinforced by the ethnic symbolism of Russianness.

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Chapter Seven discusses a number of national symbols related to the body terrain (folk dress, food, customs), and to the stereotyped symbolic connections between a selected artefact and some alleged essential qualities pertaining to all pure ethnic Russians. Russianness as a cultural construct is further explored in Chapter Eight, examining national stereotypes of the Russian people ( ). Through the division into We and Others, insiders and outsiders, with genuine Russians on the inside and the different Others on the outside, an insular world model is created that ignores the heterogeneity of We, the Russians. The cultural construction of this homogeneous ethnic Russianness, the birth of the Russian Idea, took place in the atmosphere of political reaction during the reign of Nicholas I. Chapter Nine shows how a romantic nostalgia for the pure, uncomplicated life of the pre-industrial rural community took shape, and how the famous intellectual controversy arose between the Slavophiles who longed for such a return to the past, and the Westemizers who longed for a less oppressive regime. The major myth of Russian national identity was bom out of symbolic cultural discourse between East and West, out of attempts to confront the challenges of Russia’s mixed European and Asian heritage. Finally, understanding Russianness, as argued in Chapter Ten, means not so much finding the right answers to the proverbial enigma of Russia, as asking the right questions about the incongruities of We, the Russians. But most of all, it means seeing through the cultural construct of national mythology, and discovering within it a utopian retreat from an almost intolerable reality of violence, oppression, and struggle for political identity in a post-imperial state increasingly unable to contain the contemporary profusion of ethnic and cultural identities.

1 Symbolic Communication

There are two roads to knowledge — the longer, slower, more arduous road o f rational combination and the shorter path o f the imagination, traversed with the force and swiftness o f electricity. Aroused by direct contact with the ancient remains, the imagination grasps the truth at one stroke, without intermediary links. The knowledge acquired in this second way is infinitely more living and colourful than the products o f the understanding. J.J. Bachofen

The Symbolic World of Russianness The tsar and the samovar, the icon and the axe, the onion-shaped church dome, a troika speeding through an endless steppe — the list of stereotyped images that convey the idea of Russianness is long, but in the end it says more about the image-makers than about Russia and the Russians. Although Russianness may not be easy to define or reduce to a master invariant, national identity, nevertheless, continues to manifest itself in numerous ways, visual symbolism being the most conspicuous. The entire set of stereotypes, symbols and images representing Russian national values can be comprehended as a more or less consistent whole, a symbolic archive organized around two basic metaphors: body and territory, the primary sources of identification. The body/territory metaphors are neither arbitrary signs nor mere analogies, but rather important components of the structure of national identity, which can loosely be defined as a terrain. In abstract terms, a terrain is a medium for a relationship, common ground hardened by continuous use. A terrain is more fluid than a myth and less unidirectional than an ideology,

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yet it creates a field of symbols from which both myths and ideologies derive. It consists of a set of images whose use over a long period of time has imbued them with meaning. (Lemer 1991:409) Adam J. Lemer distinguishes between three types of terrain that are employed in the mythology of nation-building. The resilience of these images to the destructive effects of time is an indication of the importance of the social function they serve. “Images of God and the body of man intertwined with representations of violence are constantly present at moments of political formation. One can say that God, body and violence are terrains upon which national identity has been constructed.” {Ibid.) To the terrain of the body belong the national stereotypes that come from the Russian folk tradition (costume, food, etc.), i.e. from Russianness as the ethnic identity of the Russian-speaking people. For this ethnocentric symbolism, the metaphor of the body is essential. The spiritual terrain embraces Russian spiritual life as expressed by language, art, and Orthodox Christianity, i.e. Russia’s collective soul. Both terrains of ethnocentric symbolism confirm the idealized traits of the Great-Russian population of the vast multi-ethnic state, the Russian Empire. For the non-Russian and non-Orthodox population, the Empire provided another type of identification, a territorial one. The territory, with the centre (the capital) representing the original power that radiates over the entire country, is the main source of imperial symbolism. Even spiritual power is concentrated in the capital, so that the symbolism of Russian Soil and the Russian Soul coincide in the image of Moscow as the centre of Holy Russia. In the symbolic terrain of violence, the Russian nation is represented as everglorious and as overcoming all possible resistance. This is where history becomes a continuation of mythology, and performs the same function. Symbol and Myth “A superstructure of theory is always transitory, being constantly superseded by fresh theories which make nearer and nearer approaches to the truth without ever reaching it. On the shore of the great ocean of reality men are perpetually building theoretical castles of sand, which are perpetually being washed away by the rising tide of knowledge.” These words of J.G. Frazer serve as a warning against theorizing on such unfathomable creations of the mind and imagination as myth and symbol.1 However, following a definition coined by the Russian philosopher A.F. Losev, we will understand a symbol as being a concentrated visual expression

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of an idea or a notion, based on the structural isomorphism, or analogy, between the symbol and that notion (Losev 1991: 272-273). An emblem is a symbol generally accepted as a conventional sign, e.g. state symbols, such as the Russian national flag or the state’s coat of arms. What kind of correlation can be discovered linking the Russian national coat of arms with the country it represents? That question will be discussed in the next chapter. In our usual understanding, a symbol is a sign that stands for, that stands in place of, or that points to, something else beyond its own presence.2 Therefore the fuller import, or rather the ‘fullness’ of a symbol is not to be sought in some inherent or essential quality, but elsewhere and elsewhen. That elsewhere and elsewhen points in the direction of myth, where the fundamental relationship between the visible and invisible worlds is established. Since vision usually dominates in the hierarchy of the senses, it is not surprising that most non-verbal symbolic communication is mediated by visual symbols. J.J. Bachofen wrote a century ago: The symbol awakens intimations; speech can only explain. The symbol plucks all the strings of the human spirit at once; speech is compelled to take up a single thought at a time. The symbol strikes its roots in the most secret depths of the soul; language skims over the surface of the understanding like a soft breeze. The symbol aims inward; language outward. Only the symbol can combine the most disparate elements into a unitary impression. Language deals in successive particulars; it expresses bit by bit what must be brought home to the soul at a single glance if it is to affect us profoundly. Words make the infinite finite, symbols carry the spirit beyond the finite world of becoming into the realm of infinite being. (Bachofen 1967:49-50) The Mythic Idea This realm of infinite ideal being is the realm of myth. A myth can be simplistically defined as a sacred narrative explaining how the world and man came to be in their present form (Sacred Narrative 1984:1). The first thing that one realizes in trying to grasp the semantic implications of myth is that myth can cover an extremely wide field.3 Without resorting to enumeration of the different ways the term is used nowadays, it is clear that myth can encompass everything from a simpleminded, fictitious, even mendacious impression to an absolutely true, sacred

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account, the very reality of which far outweighs anything that ordinary everyday life can offer. The way in which the term myth is commonly used also reveals that the word is loaded with emotional overtones. (Honko 1984:41) Myths function as examples, as models. The mythical view of the world is experienced as being static: there are no changes, no developments. But, for the purpose of this description, what is most important, perhaps, is the structural parallel between cosmogonic myths and certain other stories of origin which the social group accepts as the ultimate source of its identity. In other words, the term cosmogonic in this sense comprizes all those stories that give an account of “how the land of Russia began”,4 how the goals that the nation strives to attain are determined and how her most sacred values are codified. Seen from this point of view, the life of Lenin, for instance, can be structured in a way that resembles ancient cosmogonic myths. “In principle it is possible to find exemplars and models for all human activity and all perceptible activity in the events of the great beginning.” (Ibid.:51) Theodor H. Gaster argues that myth — in this larger sense — may be defined as any presentation o f the actual in terms o f the ideal. It is an expression of the notion that all things can be seen from two viewpoints simultaneously: on the one hand, the temporal and immediate, and on the other, the eternal and transcendental. In this respect, the basic mythic idea — that is, the concept of an intrinsic parallelism between the real and the ideal — is in itself implicit in the very process of apprehending phenomena or of attributing significance to them (Sacred Narrative 1984:112-114). To quote Eric Dardel (ibid.:242): In societies where, with the advent of the Logos, nature has come out of her darkness, the myth has been driven back into the shadows. It has become suspect or it has gone underground. But even so it has not disappeared. It subsists, it subsists in the depths and continues to enliven many of the forms of our culture or to externalize many a movement of the soul. It inspires poet, novelist, and orator. It is at the bottom of certain collective sentiments which to us seem as “natural”, as “demonstrated” as possible: national feeling, class consciousness, the republican ideal, etc... It explains the impassioned tonality which makes certain “verities” vibrate inside us, which ought to remain serene and indifferent to contradictions. The myth is what we can never “see” in ourselves, the secret spring of our vision of the world, of our devotion, of our dearest notions. Whoever calls men to deeds of sacrifice, addresses himself, beyond all that is demonstrable and reasoned, to psychic

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dispositions and inner movements which can involve the individual and are of the same essence as those that take mythic form among archaic peoples. Culture as Symbolic Communication Among the many definitions of culture, I adopt the one offered by Clifford Geertz (1973:89) where he considers culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” This is basically a semiotic approach: the accent is placed on symbolic communication, on the process of transmitting social values; it focuses on symbols and on the behaviour that derives from symbolically expressed ways of thinking and feeling. In the words of Wendy Griswold: “Rather than standing for a single referent, symbols evoke a variety of meanings, some of which may be ambiguous. Symbols do not denote; they connote, suggest, imply. They evoke powerful emotions — think how many people have died for a flag — and can often both unite and disrupt social groups... To understand culture, we need to be able to unravel those tangled webs of meanings.” (Griswold 1994:19) According to Clifford Geertz, to look at the symbolic dimensions of social action “is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them” (Geertz 1973:30). He further argues that cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete; and, worse than that, the deeper it goes the less complete it is. “It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right.” (Ibid.: 29) In the discussion that follows, attention will be focused on some key symbols, stereotypes, and rituals as tools for the cultural management of identity. In short, it integrates different types of theories and concepts so as to allow the formulation of meaningful propositions. Not all parts of this symbolic continuum will be of equal interest to us here. Some symbols are more ‘symbolic’ than others. To recognize such key symbols, Sherry Ortner’s (1973) typology of symbols can be useful. She identifies as key symbols (1973:1339) those that attract a great deal of cultural interest, as, for example, when those who are native to the culture

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seem positively or negatively aroused by them; key symbols are more extensively elaborated, and are usually surrounded by restrictions against misuse. A national flag is a typical key symbol. At the ends of the symbolic continuum, Ortner distinguishes, on the one hand, sacred symbols which encourage an all-or-nothing allegiance to a diverse cluster of ideas and values, but which do not invite reflection on the relation between values (ibid.: 1338), and, on the other hand, elaborating symbols which order experience, provide orientation or strategies for action: these are root metaphors and key scenarios. Ortner calls both extremes of the symbolic continuum “key” symbols because they occupy a key position in the system of cultural meaning. (Ibid.: 1343) Key symbols are employed in various national rituals. Russian coronation rituals in their relation to the symbolic image of the tsar will be discussed in Chapter Four. Rituals are cultural texts, and just like cultures, they are not closed systems; they are interdependent, they interpenetrate. Thus the semiotic concept of intertextuality applies to the study of rituals and other culture texts. The term “cultural semiotics” originates in the Soviet semiotic school associated with the scholars of Moscow and Tartu (Yurii Lotman, Boris Uspenskii, Viacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov) who began to work together in the late 1960’s. By the 1970’s, the significance of semiotics for cultural research was recognized, and the semiotics of culture has since occupied a central role in cultural studies. Culture itself can be seen as one of the components of semiotics. It follows that semiotics cannot be reduced to the role of a mere analytic tool in its investigation of culture. “Above all, when semiotics strives toward synthesis, it interprets”, as it says in A Plea fo r Cultural Semiotics (Eschbach, Koch 1987:25). The concepts “sign”, “text”, and “world model” are central to the semiotic approach to culture as communication. The cultural information in a text has a complicated structure consisting of hierarchically ordered levels of signs. Nevertheless, cultural phenomena are so diverse that the explanatory power of the reductionistic terms — sign, text, world model — remains very general, and hence limited (ibid.:21). Some Western scholars have also used the concept of text (verbal or non-verbal) as a cultural unit (Geertz, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss), albeit not defined in the same way. Can all cultural domains be said to have, among their various functions, a semiotic dimension? The answer remains open. Insofar as it leads to the limits of its own territory, semiotics gives rise to interpretative activity, and this in a sense could be called a kind of deconstruction. Deconstruction may possibly be “an extreme vision of the anti-static approach so basic to a valid semiotics

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of culture which attempts to elucidate the interdependence and interpenetration of language-based, visual, auditory, and other sign systems”. (Eschbach, Koch 1987:15) Self and Other Ethnic affiliation may seem quite natural, a matter of blood and bone. But, as sociologists have pointed out, it is a cultural construct (Griswold 1994). Moreover, the cultural expression of ethnicity is less straightforward than might first appear. Ethnic groups have their subdivisions, often invisible to outsiders, and the question of whose culture gets promoted, and taken as the culture of the entire group, may be hotly contested. {Ibid.-.106) Cultural objects, such as ethnic symbols, rituals, national emblems, once created, are perpetuated and transmitted through their repeated expression, and through the socialization of new group members (for example, the young). In this process of symbolic interaction, identity is a key concept: one’s own identity or sense of self is produced through interaction with others, and requires confirmation from others. “Once again, we are in a realm of meanings here; the self tries to project a set of meanings onto those with whom it interacts, and in return tries to interpret the meanings constructed by partners in the interaction”. (Ibid.:55) The self needs the other to confirm a certain identity. For national consciousness of the collective Self, the presence of the Other is cmcial: the ‘identity work’ of nationalism is produced in a social discourse and in symbolic interaction with different Others. The dominant position of Russians in the multi-ethnic Russian empire has given rise to a hegemonic set of national symbols, meanings and behavioural forms, contrasting to or incorporating the symbols of various ethnic minorities and subcultures, which are often the opposite of the primary values of the majority.5 In the majority’s world model, the ethnic Other is placed outside. The root metaphor for the exaltation of Russian (or Slav) national and ethnic virtues in contrast to some Other Western, Eastern, foreign identity is the Russian homeland, represented by a Russian home. The home metaphor embraces the basic ethnic and national values transmitted and protected by generations, a native place open and hospitable to friends and closed to various unfriendly Others. We are dealing with national stereotypes, which is short for prejudice, i.e. oversimplified notions and patterns of decoding the different. “These routines, too, are familiar. They affirm the codes of nationalism and patriotism, the plays of sanctimony and projection, the implausibility of

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strangers in a world of friend and foe, and the impossibility of any real choice between tradition and modernity.” (Walker 1991:456) As Lakoff and Johnson argue in Metaphors We Live By (1980), our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. But metaphors and metaphorical concepts provide us with a partial, not total, understanding: in structuring some aspects of meaning, they hide or underplay other aspects. The blind acceptance of metaphor can hide degrading realities, because some things that are crucial for real understanding are almost never included. (Ibid..232) Symbols are metaphorical in nature; to engage in symbolic communication, to negotiate meaning with someone, requires a talent for the right metaphor. Via symbols, it is possible to give experience new meaning and to create new realities, to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences, or to highlight shared experiences while de-emphasizing others.6 Sources and Methods The primary and most extensively used sources for this study are written accounts by both Russian and foreign writers and researchers on topics related to Russian identity. This great reliance on secondary data is complemented by my own first-hand experience of the question. I intend not so much to contribute new facts to the discourse as to integrate the already existing enormous mass of data into a comprehensible whole. Additional sources from the contemporary Russian press have been used to confirm and update the connections between the pre-Revolutionary and the post-Soviet Russian identity. As to methods of interpretation, following the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1982), we have to distinguish between three strata of subject matter or meaning: I. Primary or natural subject matter, a) factual, b) expressional. II. Secondary or conventional subject matter, which constitutes the world of images, stories and allegories. TTT Intrinsic meaning or content, which constitutes the world of symbolical values. These three levels require different acts of interpretation: I. preiconographical description; n. iconographical analysis; in. iconological interpretation. The three methods of approach which appear here as three unrelated forms of research merge with each other into a single, organic, indivisible process. (Ibid.:39-41)

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The process of interpretation is similar to translation. In both cases it means translating from one code or language into an expression in a different language. According to Claude Levy-Strauss, ‘to mean’ means the ability of any kind of data to be translated into a different language, as he argues in Myth and Meaning (1978:9-12). In his view, science has only two ways of proceeding: it is either reductionist or structuralist. It is reductionist when it is able to show that very complex phenomena on one level can be reduced to simple phenomena on other levels. When we are confronted with phenomena too complex to be reduced to phenomena of a lower order, then we can only approach them by looking at their relationships, that is, by trying to understand what kind of original system they make up. My own standpoint is neither purely structuralist, nor reductionist. I subscribe to the postmodernist view of identity as a socio-cultural construct which can be deconstructed, reconstructed, or interpreted, but never defined and thus finally explained and exhausted. These preliminary remarks may serve as a conceptual map for the walk through the forest of Russian symbols that we are about to start. Cloaked in intuition, and armed with some of the useful tools provided by ethnography, semiotics, and cultural anthropology, I invite the reader to follow the slow progress of discovery, going from description, via analysis, towards an interpretation, through the symbolic terrains of Russianness. Our first challenge will be to confront the Russian identity via its territory. The borders of this terra incognita are guarded by the Russian national emblem, epitomizing the apt metaphor coined by Dmitrii Likhachev, the renowned contemporary Russian historian: “Rossiia — uznitsa prostranstva Russia is a prisoner of her own territory. Here, we must beware. The territory is alien and strange, mysterious and threatening, as R.B.J. Walker says, a realm in which we need to be brave in the face of adversity, or patient enough to tame those whose life is not only elsewhere, but which belongs to another time. Knowing the other outside, it is possible to affirm identities inside. Knowing identities inside, it is possible to imagine the absences outside.

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Notes 1. J.G. Frazer, “Preface”, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, London 1935, p. viii. 2. Symbols and symbolic meanings are variously treated and more or less extensively explained in symbol lexicons. These explanations, however, are inconsistent, and seldom refer to any specific symbol theory. One Russian lexicon that systematically applies a structural-semiotic approach to myth and symbol is Mify narodov mira I-II (1980-82). For theories of symbol, see: Eco (1976), Firth (1973), Lotman (1990), Skorupski (1976), Sperber (1984), Todorov (1982). According to Peircean theories of the sign, a symbol is a “framing law”: it is a potentiality, and the mode of its existence is to exist in the future (Ch. Pierce, quoted in Jakobson 1988:511). By symbolism is understood a cluster of visual and other symbols consistently connected to some root metaphor. 3. Various theoretical approaches to the study of myth are presented in Sacred Narrative (1984). Seze also Bachofen (1967), Eliade (1974), Kirk (1970). A list of modem theories of myth reveals the complexity of the subject: 1. Myth as a source of cognitive categories, as explanation for enigmatic phenomena. 2. Myth as a form of symbolic expression, on a par with such creative activities as poetry and music. 3. Myth as a projection of the subconscious. 4. Myth as a world view: in myth, man is faced with fundamental problems of society, culture and nature. 5. Myth as a charter of behaviour. Myths give support to accepted patterns of behaviour by placing present-day situations in a meaningful perspective with regard to the precedents of the past. 6. Myth as a legitimation of social institutions. 7. Myth as a marker of social relevance. 8. Myth as a mirror of culture, social structure, etc. 9. Myth as an outcome of a historical situation. Stress is laid on the reconstmction of those events which were most decisive in the formation of the myth. 10. Myth as religious communication. 11. Myth as a religious genre. 12. Myth as a medium for structure. (Sacred Narrative 1984:46-48) 4. The Russian Primary Chronicle (also known as The Tale o f Bygone Years or The Laurentian Chronicle). 5. For various ethnic theories see Sollors (1996). 6. Compare Alan Dundes, who argues that myths can and usually do contain both conscious and unconscious cultural materials. ‘T o the extent that conscious and unconscious motivation may vary or be contradictory, so likewise can myth differ from or contradict ethnographic data. There is no safe monolithic theory of myth, except for that of judicious eclecticism as championed by E.B. Tylor. Mythology must be studied in its cultural context in order to determine which individual mythological elements reflect and which refract the culture.” (Dundes 1984:290)

2 Territorial Symbolism: The Double-Headed Eagle

“Za Boga, Tsaria i Otechestvo ” For Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland! Device on Russian Imperial military banners

History in a Nutshell According to the Primary Chronicle compiled early in the 12th century, the history of what would later become Russia begins in the year 6360 (852), when Rus is mentioned for the first time, in connection with the campaign against the Byzantine capital Tsargrad, or Constantinople.1 The Rus of the Chronicle is not yet Russia: it would be six more centuries before the Russian national state emerged out of the small principalities around Moscow. Muscovy took over the name (The Land of Rus) and the cultural heritage from the Kievan Rus, devastated in the 1240s by the Mongol invasion. In the 13th century, the former Kievan Rus split into a number of disconnected principalities, which started to come together again by the end of the 14th century. The primary symbol of Russian statism (gosudarstvennost), the DoubleHeaded Eagle, entered the sphere of official Russianness in 1472, when the Great Prince of Muscovy Ivan III married Princess Zoe Paleologue (known in Russia as Sophia), a niece of the last Byzantine emperor. According to widespread opinion, Ivan HI adopted his wife’s family emblem, the double­ headed eagle, as a sign of Muscovy.2 This eagle appeared on his Great Seal around 1497, at the time when the recently consolidated Muscovy gained independence after the retreat of the Mongols in 1480, and when the imperial ambitions of its Great Prince (later the Tsar) led to the territorial expansion which continued for over four hundred years. The story of this expansion is symbolically represented in the iconography of the Double-Headed Eagle. It will not be possible here to give a detailed account of all the versions of

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the Imperial Eagle, beginning with the early Byzantine model, and ending with the recently supplemented Post-Soviet one. It is the latest Imperial version (established by Alexander DI in 1883), the main symbol of official Russia up to the end of the Empire in 1917, that will be the focus of our interest. We may observe, however, that the very first Eagle on the Great Seal of Ivan DI was an exact copy of his wife’s emblem: there are no symbolically charged details here, apart from the two decorative crowns above the twin heads of the Eagle. A century and a half later, the talons of the Eagle grasped the sceptre (skipetr) and the orb (derzhava), the regal signs of monarchy; these were added by the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail Feodorovich, in 1627. The original twin crowns, gradually becoming more elaborate in accordance with Western royal fashion, were replaced by the Imperial crown in 1721, when Peter I was proclaimed Emperor of Russia. With the two-headed Imperial Eagle, Russia presents itself as a world power dominating both East and West. The subject territories of the Empire are shown as being protected by the wings of the Eagle and by the Imperial crown. They, in turn, protect the centre, where close to the heart of the Eagle is the image of St George on the red shield of glory. St George The symbolic protector of Moscow and holy warrior, St George is riding a white or light-grey (silver) horse. Beneath him is the lance-pierced dragon, a loathsome beast, an image of the dehumanized enemy. In Russia, St George is called Georgii Pobedonosets, the Victorious Warrior, and in Russian folklore he is Yegorii Khrabryi, the Brave; Christian and Moslem legends present him as a warrior and a martyr linked with fertility cults and the dragon myth. In the Orthodox hagiography, George is described as a local military officer in an eastern province of Asia Minor, persecuted for his Christian faith and finally beheaded in 303. The Byzantine iconographic tradition presents George as praying while holding his decapitated head in his hands. The same motif appears on one of the icons in the Historical museum in Moscow, although on Russian icons St George is usually depicted as a dragon-fighting knight. The dragon (zmei) and the serpent (zmeia) commonly occur in Old Russian literature as images of the pagans, usually referring to the Mongol conquerors, or Tatars, as they were called in Russia. In 1497 the Rider joined the Eagle on the Great Seal of Ivan El: the Eagle decorated the front, the Rider the reverse. This coincidence gave birth to the Russian Coat of Arms. In 1897, its quadricentennial jubilee was celebrated

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with great pomp. It was the grandchild of Ivan HI, Ivan IV (the Terrible), who in the second half of the 16th century moved the Rider to the breast of the Eagle. For a long time the Rider was alternately turned to the right or to the left, probably to ward off the imaginary enemy coming either from the East or the West. Around 1856, his position was finally fixed, and since then he has remained turned to the left. Gradually, the Rider became completely merged with St George, who now became a paragon of military virtue, and the protector of the Russian Army. Two Russian military awards, the Order of the Holy Martyr and that of the Victorious Fighter instituted in 1769, and the Military Cross of Honour instituted in 1913, were dedicated to St George. (Mify narodov mira 1980:273-275) To the Kievan Rus, the cult of St George arrived via Byzantium in the 10th century. St George became the military patron saint of the princes. In the 16th century the dragon-fighting Rider ( ) appeared on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the Great Prince of Muscovy: there he is shown as a naked man riding an unsaddled horse and spearing a dragon. Foreigners visiting Russia identified the Rider with St George, while in Russia he was simply called a lancer. Russian money issued before 1534 shows a naked rider, or knight, with a lance. This money, called kopeinye dengi (lance money), later became kopeika, the kopek. (Soboleva, Artamonov 1993:10-27)

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St Andrew The central image of St George on the breast of the Imperial Eagle is surrounded by the chain of the Order of St Andrew, the first Russian order and the highest award of the Empire, instituted by Peter the Great at the very close of the 17th century. In heraldry, the chain is an attribute of central power, and a sign of unbreakable union. The badge of the Order, in the form of an X-shaped St Andrew’s cross, like other diagonal crosses, refers to Andrei Pervozvannyi, The First-Called Apostle. Also the diagonal part of the Russian eight-pointed Orthodox cross, which distinguishes it from all the other crosses in the Christian tradition, is dedicated to St Andrew. St Andrew is the holy protector of Russia, a reminder of her origins and of her Christian faith. In Christian mythology Andreas, one of the twelve apostles and the brother of Peter, was one of the first — or the first — that Jesus Christ called apostle, or follower. According to apocryphal legends, Andreas preached Christianity to the peoples of the Balkans and Scythia, and was crucified on an X-shaped cross in the Greek city of Patras. The prestige of the old centres of Christianity, primarily Rome, reflected their status as sites of the earliest Christian communities founded by the apostles. When Constantinople, not having such precedence, became the centre of the Orthodox world in opposition to Catholic Rome, the legend of Andreas was used as legitimation. After the fall of Byzantium in 1453, Russia was the only Orthodox great power, and the opportunity was there to connect the Scythians of the Andreas legend with the Slavonic peoples. The Primary Chronicle tells how Andrei from Korsun (Khersones) travelled to the sites of the future Kiev and Novgorod, blessed them, and was impressed by the local customs of sauna-bathing and the use of birch twigs. Kievan Rus saw in St Andrew the protector of the state. In Petrine Russia he became the patron of the Imperial Navy. Peter I introduced the use of the flag (white with a diagonal blue cross) of St Andrew for the Navy, and the Order of St Andrew. The order appeared on the Eagle in 1699. (Mify narodov mira 1980:80-81) Split Eagle There is an old tradition of combining polarized symbolism in the same composition, be it a split Eagle looking in opposite directions, or an Eagle and a Serpent (Dragon), both connected to the mythological World Tree: the Eagle on top, the Serpent at the roots. These polarized symbols express the

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ambivalence of being split and united; or, an all-embracing dualism and the resulting tension. Double-headed birds, split or doubled animals, and other double symmetric structures can be found in many archaic traditions as symbols of life and death, of the bipolarity and ultimate unity of the world. The double-headed eagle has been known in Asia Minor since 13th century BC. In Ancient Rome it was used as a standard in battle. The West-European monarchs were direct heirs of the Roman Emperors, and the double-headed eagle was introduced into the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century as a symbol of their power. According to the recent research, the double-headed eagle never functioned as a state symbol for Byzantium, as is often wrongly implied. Nor is it found on Byzantine state seals, or on the Byzantine coins of that period (Khoroshkevich 1993:22). The rulers of the Byzantine provincial territories of Morea, one of whom was the father of Ivan DPs wife Sofia, did, however, use the symbol of a golden double-headed eagle on a red background, and this could have prompted the appearance of the Russian Eagle. (Soboleva, Artamonov 1993:20-21) The decision to connect the Rider and the Eagle in 1497 may also be explained as an attempt to legitimate the transfer of power to Moscow. At least, such was the official explanation in the 15th century. St George being the patron saint of the founder of Moscow, Prince Yurii Dolgorukii, Moscow now acquired the same patron as Kiev, once protected by George the Victorious Warrior, and as the old Russian city of Vladimir, which inherited the same patronage. After the transfer of the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir to Moscow in 1395, the capital of the Princedom of Muscovy powerfully reinforced its position as the new centre of Holy Russia, protected both by the Virgin and by St George. Decoding the Eagle Glancing at the Eagle, the ambivalent message of this key symbol of Russia can be immediately grasped, although it is barely susceptible to verbal explication; herein lies the superiority of the symbol. The meaning of a key symbol is virtually inexhaustible: it has a complex visual structure, every part of which is a polyvalent symbol in its own right. An endless succession of new meanings, and of new variants of the old ones, can emerge in new contexts, and new competing or complementary interpretations are always imaginable. In other words, it is impossible to reach a final explanatory ‘bedrock’ level; only partial explanations are available. This one does not claim to be exhaustive, but hopefully it touches on the heart of the matter.

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The first Eagle, borrowed from the Paleologue family emblem, looks rather peaceful in comparison with the subsequent versions, whose eyes became more and more watchful, the twin beaks opened to show the playing tongue, hinting at a war cry, and the wings were spread and raised in an increasingly aggressive manner.

In 1577, eight emblems of the conquered territories, all oriented toward the central image, appeared on the wings of the Eagle. The majority of the territories, among them the recently subjugated Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), were represented on these emblems by various animals: a fox, stag, horse, dog, etc. These ideograms, imbued with biblical associations, contain hints of the religious dogmas and human qualities of the conquered peoples. The saintly images in the centre of the Eagle stood in opposition to the animals on its periphery: the animals represented the non-Orthodox

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barbarians inhabiting the territories around Moscow. In the emblems on the wings of the Eagle, their aggressive attitudes to the power of the Moscow monarch also found expression: the arrows and swords aiming at the wellguarded centre marked them as conquered but still unreliable former enemies. (Soboleva, Artamonov 1993: 26-28) Encoded in the structure of the Eagle, the territorial hierarchy becomes quite evident: in the innermost, dominant central position, at the heart of the Eagle, we find the symbol of Moscow protected by the Army; around it, the chain of St Andrew symbolizes the Russian periphery protected by the Navy; further away from the centre, the territorial symbols of the subjugated nations on the spread wings of the Eagle also protect the centre; above them the split crowns on the two heads of the Eagle are capped by the protecting Imperial crown, likewise split, but united by the central bond, and topped by the Christian cross. This structure of triple concentric circles, with the holy place of origin in the centre, emulates the mythological World Model. Obviously, what we have here is a magic formula of triple protection made manifest.3

A still more patent version of this concentric structure appears on the major version of the Eagle, adopted in 1882. Here, the number of protective circles is extended, and the emblems of the subordinated territories are placed on a separate wreath of oak branches outside the central Eagle. The Double-

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Headed Eagle is shown against a heraldic shield in the hands of the patrons of the heavenly host: the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, holding a sword and a cross, respectively. Behind this central shield is a canopy unfolding from the helmet of Alexandr Nevskii. Above it is yet another crown, and over that a banner duplicating the entire set of images: crown, canopy, archangels, shield, eagle and rider, all of it topped by the eight-pointed Orthodox cross. The main idea of the whole state emblem is expressed by the motto: S NAMI BOG (God Is With Us); this motto is repeated on the helmet of Alexandr Nevskii and on the banner. (Khoroshkevich 1993:5-6, Lebedev 1995:48-57) The iconography of the Eagle confirms Russia’s Christian heritage in many ways: in the Christian crosses topping the orb held in the talons of the Eagle, as well as in the three crowns above its twin heads; in the central image of a legendary Christian Saint piercing the dragon of paganism; and in the chain referring to the Christian Apostle St Andrew that protects the central image. Both saints are revered as the holy patrons of Russia, although they had nothing, or very little, to do with Russian history, apart from symbolically connecting Russia to her Christian roots. But the necessary components of Christian historical reality were thus introduced into Russian life, and gave Muscovy an historical presence in the Christian world: 16thcentury Muscovite ideology did not distinguish between the political and religious spheres. (Pliukhanova 1995:328)4 The geopolitical implications of the Imperial Eagle locate Russia as suspended between East and West, between Christened Europe and nonChristian Asia. But, above all, the Eagle manifests the union of disparate territories, forced together and governed by the principles of Orthodoxy and Autocracy. The message of the state symbol of Russia can roughly be boiled down to the following: central power, protected by worldly and heavenly authorities, domination and violence, on the one side, and fear of revenge from the subjugated peoples of the periphery, on the other. The Eagle does not explicitly present Russia as a Russian national state, but rather as a multi-national Empire, albeit with Russia in the dominant central position. For symbols of Russian nationality, we will have to look elsewhere. Colour Symbolism A number of mythological motifs concentrated in the iconography of the Imperial Eagle involve traditional colour symbolism. Since the eagle is an

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ancient symbol of the sun and heavenly power, of fire and immortality, its colours used to be white or gold. In 1709, these original colours were replaced by black, following the German heraldic tradition. This change is connected to the later adoption of black and gold (orange or yellow) as the official colours of the Russian Empire. (Soboleva, Artamonov 1993:127-128) On the black wings of the Eagle of the final Imperial model, fifteen emblems of the subordinate territories form a colourful belt round the centre. In the middle, the otherwise prominent shield of St George also dominates by being red. The Imperial Eagle is usually placed on a white (silver), red or yellow (golden) background. Taken together, these colours establish the traditional three-colour-scheme. The mythological symbolism refers to the three domains of the world: red, gold and yellow stand for the sun and the celestial upper world; white denotes the middle region, the domain of people (,belyi svet of the Russian folk tradition); and black or dark blue stands for the lower regions: the earth, the underworld, or the deep waters of the sea. The three colours of the basic scheme point to the totality of what is visible and invisible in the world. Projected onto the body of the Eagle, black means soil, the territory of the Empire. In many ancient traditions, the basic colours could also be used to denote the cardinal points: compare the old division of Russian territories in the 14th century into Black, Red and White Russia, of which only White Russia, or Belorussiia, is still a geographical denomination. (Etnicheskoe samosoznaniie... 1995:33, 38) As a territorial symbol, the Eagle alternates with, or complements, another territorial key symbol, the Russian flag bearing the national colours. The national flag is a traditional visual metaphor for the territory. In fact, there are now, as there were before 1917, two national flags in Russia, demonstrating a characteristic split: the official black-white-yellow flag, adopted in 1856; and the popular (narodnyi) white-blue-red one, adopted in 1883 (and since August 22, 1991, again the Russian national flag); this three-coloured flag was originally the flag of the Russian merchant fleet, instituted by Peter I in 16671668 (Soboleva, Artamonov 1993:110-111, 119-121). The white-blue-red flag has always enjoyed popularity, being close to the Russian folk tradition, where white, red and black used to be the basic ritual colours.5 The black-and-yellow (golden) colours stand for the official and military Imperial Russia, while the narodnyi flag represents its population. Thus, as befits her divided soul, in the two main symbols of her official identity, in the double-headed eagle and in the double set of national flags and colours, Russia reveals the vacillation at her heart, split territorially and culturally, and belonging to both East and West.

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Territorial Marking The Eagle and the national flags are territorial markers used to manifest the sphere of official Russianness: its centre and its periphery. We find them, together or apart, indoors and outdoors, demarcating national borders, official territories, institutions, seals, documents, money, stamps, military and civil uniforms, etc. Like the entrances to several Imperial residences, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg also proudly displayed a number of gilt eagles on its famous wrought-iron gratings, which were tom down in the iconoclastic war that was waged on the eagles after the Revolution of 1917.6 The double-headed eagle on top of the Spasskaia tower, the first used to decorate the towers of the Moscow Kremlin (before they were replaced by red stars in 1935)7 was erected in 1480, after the lifting of the Mongol Yoke, and reappeared in 1654. The first eagle was followed in 1688 by two more, on the Troitskaia and Borovitskaia towers. New eagles appeared on the towers of the Kremlin in step with the expansion of Russian territory. (Lebedev 1995:113-118) It goes without saying, that important aspects of the power hierarchy are expressed by these territorial symbols. It is the centre of the capital, where power over the country is concentrated, that is most lavishly decorated with the national symbols, especially when important national holidays, ceremonies, or foreign visits are celebrated. The last magnificent display of Imperial Eagles and national colours took place in Russia in 1913, during the tricentennial jubilee of the Romanov dynasty. Purely decorative use of the Eagle was, of course, quite frequent, too, but certainly not without connotations of loyalty to the regime and to the official manifestations of Russianness. It is not surprising either that the time and place of the founding of both Moscow and St Petersburg were marked by legends in which an eagle typically appears on the very spot where the future capital city was to be built. In the case of Moscow, an eagle came down from the sky during a boyar boar hunt: it was a bird of prey of strange shape, apparently having two heads; its claws and its two beaks reminiscent of a fork. On that spot the Kremlin was later erected. The bird of the legend (steeped in the Byzantinism of the time of Ivan m ) had chosen a good spot to appear. Indeed, it is almost in the exact geographical centre of European Russia. (Kelly 1983:45-46)

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Territories and Titles On the Great Seal of Ivan IV (who ruled Russia between 1533 and 1584), the central Eagle is surrounded by a chain of seals and emblems representing the territories of Tver, Pskov, Astrakhan, Bulgar, etc. After the first heraldic signs of the subjugated nations appeared on the Great Seal in 1577, their number constantly increased, following the expansion of the Empire eastwards, into Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus; and westwards, into the Ukraine, Poland and Finland. By the end of the 19th century, the Eagle became the fully developed Imperial symbol. On the Great Imperial Coat of Arms of 1882, fourteen emblems of the conquered and colonized territories surround the central image of the Eagle: these are the arms of the Kazan Tsardom, the Polish Tsardom, the Khersones-Tauris or Crimean Tsardom, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the united arms of Kiev, Vladimir and Novgorod, the united Georgian arms, the Siberian Tsardom, the Astrakhan Tsardom, the united North-East territories, the united Lithuanian-Belorussian arms, the united Great-Russian arms, the united South-West arms, the united Baltic arms, and the Turkistan arms; forty-four major territories altogether. Their names are mentioned in the full ceremonial title of the Russian Emperor. The expansion of Muscovy was followed by the extension of the ruler’s title. If Ivan HI spoke of Moscow along with nine other territories, Alexander HI proclaimed his power over the forty-four territories named in his title, accompanied by the thrice repeated etcetera, referring to the unspecified minor territories (Lebedev 1995:119-129). In other words, the sovereignty of the Russian monarch over the territories annexed by the Russian Empire was expressed not only by the main title Emperor of All Russia, but also by the additional titles of the Russian autocrat as Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., etc., etc. This statement of power, enhanced by the repetition of titles in official ceremonies, is not unlike the traditional magic of spells and incantations, where the multiple repetition and thorough enumeration of all the parts of the whole is supposed to procure the desired protection from the benevolent powers. The Territorial Imperative The natural surroundings in which Russian culture and civilization developed during the thousand years of Russia’s existence have definitely influenced the attitudes of the inhabitants to their living space: we can speak of the imprint of the territory on the Russian culture, creating the national stereotype of the

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so-called shirokaia natura, or shirokaia dusha the vast and limitless Russian Soul. If territory is destiny, as the geographical determinists maintain, Russia provides a good example of this. Territoriality is one of the basic human instincts, rooted in a need for security, for home, and homeland. “Territorial claims are or were, vested in the nation, the tribe, the family or the individual, and not infrequently in all these categories at once” (Malmberg 1980:101). The steppes of Southern Europe for centuries played the role of a vulnerable borderland susceptible to attack from the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of Asia. For Kievan Rus, maintaining the frontier was a matter of life and death. Already in the 13th century, the territorial policy of Russia for many centuries to come was shaped by her geopolitical situation. Almost simultaneously, she was enclosed on three sides by aggressive neighbours. The Germans and Swedes attacked the shores of the Baltic Sea as enemies of Pskov and Novgorod; Lithuania appeared on the stage of history as a principality hostile to Russians; at the same time, the Mongolian Golden Horde began to overrun north-eastern Russia. “The principal task was now self-defence, a struggle, not for freedom (this had been taken away by the Tatars), but for historical existence itself, for the integrity of the nation and its religion. The struggle continued for centuries. Because of it, the nation was compelled to adopt a purely military political organisation and wage war perpetually on three fronts.” (Platonov 1904:367) The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev (1874-1948) pointed to security needs as the main driving force in Russian politics (Berdiaev 1918:62). The Mongolian influence has also been mentioned as an important model for the conquest of and rule over large territories (Szamueli 1974). Under pressure from her militant neighbours, Russia frequently turned to expansionism in other directions, in order to sustain and consolidate herself. But constant territorial expansion created a country that lacked outer borders, having instead an ideal frontier space of unbounded, absolute freedom. Russia’s violent expansionism, which began in the 15th century, could be understood as a response to the prenatal trauma of defeat and humiliation under the Mongol Yoke. The inhabitants of Kievan Rus were forced off the fertile black soil on the southern reaches of the Dnieper, and had to adjust to a life of uncertainty and relative poverty in the north-eastern territories, where dense forests, marches, and the harsh climate made the formerly predominant wheat production less profitable. Besides, these territories were already occupied by hunting and fishing tribes who had to be conquered or driven off. These two types of living space, the southern steppe and the northern forest, created different attitudes to life: the steppe was open for freedom and

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movement, but also open for invasion; the forest was more secure, but more difficult to live and move around in. Both were endless and sparsely inhabited. The Russian love for space and speed, for the troika flying across the steppe, was surely bom in the Kievan period of its history. The Ukraineborn Gogol in a famous final passage of his Dead Souls (1842) compares Russia to a troika, a small carriage drawn by three fast horses abreast speeding over the endless plains: Russia o f mine, are you not also speeding like a troika which nothing can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and are not the bridges thundering when you cross them, everything left behind, while the spectators, struck with the portent, stop to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe­ inspiring progress o f yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies must be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with irongirded breasts, and hoofs which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission o f God? Whither are you speeding, Russia o f mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes — only the weird sound o f your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, fo r you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give way to you! Expansion and Colonization Bom in the narrow area at the crossroads of the waterways and trade routes around Moscow, the Princedom of Muscovy grew to become the political centre of the expanding Russia during the rule of Ivan HI. From a formerly defensive policy, Moscow now turned to attacking her western neighbours, and to colonizing the provinces on her eastern and southern periphery. The native Finno-Ugric tribes east of Moscow put up resistance, defending their territories. When they could no longer defend them, they retreated. The process of assimilation for those who stayed behind took many generations, while some of the native tribes totally disappeared in the process. The emptied territories were given to the men who served Muscovy, to the landlords and to monasteries. (Miliukov 1993:420-422) To the north of Moscow there lay the sparsely inhabited former Novgorod

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colonies, where the natives had traded furs with the Vikings, long before the Scandinavian Rus settled on the Dnieper and in Kiev in the 11th century. When Novgorod was conquered by Moscow in 1471, this early colonized area with its Finno-Ugric toponymy was already inhabited by Russians up to the Dvina river. Farther away lived the tribes of Komi, Perm and Votyak, whom Moscow tamed by converting them to Christianity, while the militant Ugra migrated to the Urals and beyond. The Christian missionary Stephan of Perm, on meeting resistance from the local shamans, simply burned the sites of pagan worship. He became the bishop of Perm in 1383. He also acted as an intermediary between Moscow and the pagan tribes of the northern Trans-Ural territories. A hundred years before the conquest of Siberia, the way to'the Urals already lay open. After the fall of Kazan in 1552, and the opening of the Northern Trade Route on the Dvina river in 1553, the focus of Moscow’s interest shifted from war to trading. The ‘emptied’ northern areas now also offered opportunities for enterprise, such as the salt mines on the Kama river, for which Anika Stroganov obtained special privilege from Moscow. Of course, the occupied territories were far from empty, and the local population forced from their native soil burned and looted the factory villages. In return, the Stroganovs received the right to build fortifications and to keep an army. The colonization of Siberia could now begin. (Ibid. : 483-487) The Russian historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841-1911) has described the history of Russia as “the history of a country that colonized itself’ (Kliuchevskii 1918:25). He did not, though, make any clear distinction between cultivation and settling on waste lands by peasants and fugitives, on the one hand, and planned military occupation of new territories, on the other. He depicted the Russian expansion as an organic process almost devoid of tension and violence, so that in his version of history the expansion of Russia is justified: being viewed as an answer to her needs, based on her specific geographical, political and economic situation. This view has been used to sustain the myth of peaceful coexistence between the conquerors and the conquered peoples, underpinning the claims of Russian nationalists to the territory of the Empire. With the conquest of Siberia, Russia entered a new era of expansionism. Before the military expedition by Yermak in 1581-84, Moscow had not yet considered the possibility of becoming an Empire. There was a gradual extension of the living space to the territories naturally connecting Russia with Siberia, where the taiga forests and the tundra areas provided the muchdesired furs. The Stroganovs supplied the money for the Yermak expedition,

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counting on the profits of success. The Cossacks of Yermak were not much different from bandits; their leader himself was sentenced for robbery before escaping to side with the Stroganovs. But after conquering Isker, the capital of the Siberian Khanate, in 1581, he was pardoned and rewarded by Moscow. Siberia now applied for Russian protection. (Ibid.: 491-494) Yermak died in 1584, his raids being one of many similar episodes in the long history of military conflict and insurrection by the Siberian population against the Russian occupation. Peaceful colonization was not possible as long as the natives were fighting for their independence. “The only positive goal of the government was to enrich the state treasury with sable, ermine, and squirrel furs”, as Pavel Miliukov puts it (Miliukov 1993:494). This colonization displayed all the traits of a military expedition. And as soon as the best fur resources were exhausted, the troops had to move further and further to the East. In the first quarter of the 17th century, the Russian population of Siberia amounted to approximately 15,000 people, half of them Cossacks. It was with such modest resources that the imperial period in Russian history was inaugurated. After 1622, the Russian population grew to 73,000, but it was still a minority. Over 70,000 Russians lived on a territory of 4,500,000 verst, on which the 288,000 natives moved around on reindeer, dog-carts, horses, and camels (ibid.: 496). Gradually, the initial violence of the Siberian colonization changed into more peaceful coexistence, following the growth of the Russian population and the Russification of the native Siberians.8 The expansion of the Empire continued in the 18th century. From 1700, the double-headed eagle decorated the banners and ammunition of the Russian Army and the recently created Navy. In the Great Nordic War that lasted over twenty years, Peter I won the Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland and Kurland, and repossessed the former Novgorod territories around the Gulf of Finland and the river Neva. There he built the city of Saint Petersburg, which became the new capital of the Russian Empire. His successors, especially Catherine H, extended the Empire, adding to it the annexed Crimea, and Lithuania and Poland. The Left-Bank Ukraine (known as Little Russia, Malorossiia) had already joined Russia in 1653, enjoying considerable autonomy as the Cossack Host until 1775. The Right-Bank Ukraine was acquired from Poland as the result of the Second Partition of that country in 1793. The greatest gains in territory occurred during the 19th century: most of eastern Poland in the partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795; Crimea and the Black sea littoral in 1774 and 1791; Georgia in 1801; Finland (as a separate Grand Duchy) in 1808/1809; Bessarabia in 1812; Azerbaidzhan in 1813;

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Mingrelia in 1857; and Abkhazia in 1864, were all annexed to Russia. Armenia asked for Russian protection in 1828. The Caucasus was finally conquered after almost a hundred years of struggle. By 1881, the whole of the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas belonged to the Empire. She also proceeded with the conquest of Central Asia: Turkestan was annexed in 1867, and Samarkand and Bukhara captured in 1868. In the 19th century, the Russian Empire reached its maximum size, even including the giant territory of Alaska, which was nevertheless sold to the United States in 1867 for the very modest price of 7.2 million dollars. The subsequent attempt to expand eastwards was, however, disastrous: the RussoJapanese war of 1904 ended with the defeat of the Russian Empire. As elsewhere in the history of imperialism, the sordid realities of war, annexation, repression, Russification, and exploitation, are downplayed or masked in Russian historiography.9 Not unexpectedly, in the iconography of the Imperial Eagle only the triumphant achievements are displayed: the Imperial crown in the uppermost hierarchical position symbolically dominates the conquered territories arranged in a circle around the victorious Moscow. By the turn of our century, the Russian Eagle spread its wings over the world’s largest multi-national and multi-confessional Empire, which covered a sixth of the land area of the globe. The Eagle is the key symbol of Russian territoriality based on the absolute power of her Imperial mlers, sending her armies to distant battlefields under the Eagle banner, to fight for the Russian faith, the Russian tsar, and the Russian fatherland. Return of the Eagle Dismantled after the Revolution of 1917, the Empire reassembled itself again as the Soviet Union in 1922, then including all but Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the last three being annexed in 1940. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a value vacuum in the imperial consciousness of the former Soviet Russians. The new Russian Eagle, updated in 1993, can now be interpreted not only as the traditional power symbol, but also as the symbol of a double nostalgia, a longing to return to the Old Empire, and to get away from it. The new Russian Federal Eagle, gold on a red background, is in keeping with the traditional heraldic colour scheme, accentuating the colour red and its equivalent gold (which connects it to the Soviet symbolism of red-and-gold stars and banners), but avoiding black, which is probably too compromised by the German and tsarist black eagles.

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The emblems of the conquered nations have gone, but the old signs of Imperial power, the orb and the sceptre, as well as the three crowns above the twin heads of the eagle, and the crosses on the crowns and on the orb, are left unchanged, on the grounds that they symbolize the power and unity of the Russian Federation, and the sovereignty of her parts (as the foremost experts on Russian heraldry, G. and T. Vilinbakhov, state in their latest book, in a passage on the symbolism of the Federal Eagle). It may be worth noting that the rider on the breast of the new eagle is now turned to the right, either anticipating an enemy from the East, or simply copying the old iconographic model of St George on Russian icons, which was probably imbued with the same association. The rider, not explicitly called St George, is interpreted by the Vilinbakhovs as the old symbol for defence of the Fatherland, and of the fight between Good and Evil (Vilinbakhov, Vilinbakhova 1995:152-153). “The return of the historical symbols illuminates the passage of Russia into the XXI century”, conclude the authors. (Ibid.: 36)

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It is quite evident that the symbols of the past provide a sense of security and continuity in the situation of social and political instability that Russia entered after the beginning of perestroika in 1985, and following the separation of the former Soviet republics from the fatherly embrace of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russian Federation, the multi-national and multi­ confessional heir of the Soviet Union, has adopted the slightly modified old Imperial Eagle as its symbol. Russian official identity is still bound to the territory of the state, as is manifest in the symbolism of the twice-inherited Eagle.

Notes 1. The old Russian calendar measured time from the Biblical creation of the world. This was changed by Peter I to the European (Julian) calendar in December 7208, which then became January 1700. 2. In most of the recent scholarly work on the topic of Russian national symbolism, this opinion is seen as oversimplified; in any case, more than twenty years separate the marriage of Ivan III from the adoption of the double-headed eagle as a state symbol of Russia. A detailed account of the different standpoints, as well as selected bibliographies of Russian research can be found in: Khoroshkevich (1993), Lebedev (1995), Soboleva and Artamonov (1993), Vilinbakhov and Vilinbakhova (1995). 3. The symbolism of the centre, concentric structures, and the magical numbers three, four and seven, is connected to the mythologem of the World Tree and to the mythological Model of the World. For a detailed account, see: Mify narodov mira I-II, or various symbol lexicons, e.g. J.C. Cooper (1982). 4. “The use of religious symbols for the self-determination of the Muscovite kingdom should not be considered equivalent to the latest demagogical means of exploiting religious feeling within a secularized political system.” (Pliukhanova 1995:328) 5. The colour symbolism in Russian folk tradition is discussed in: Filatova-Hellberg (1987). On the use of colour terms in different traditions, see: Berlin and Kay (1969); Ludat, H. (1953), ‘Farbenbezeichnungen in Volkemamen: Ein Beitrag zu asiatisch-osteuropaischen Kulturbeziehungen’, Saeculum, bd. 4; Sahlins, Marshall: ‘Colors and Cultures’, Semiotica 16:1, pp. 1-22; Solovjev, A. (1979), ‘Weiss, Schwarz und Rotreussen: Versuch einer Historisch-politischen Analyse’, Byzance et la formation de Vetat russe, Leningrad. 6. “The objects of iconoclastic assault were icons (pictorial and plastic images), indexes (names), symbols (indirect representations of abstract values), and buildings that were both symbols and ‘practical targets’”, writes Richard Stites (1989: 65). 7. The Red Star and the hammer and sickle, being symbols of Soviet power, and not solely of Russianness, are left outside this study. For the history of the Red Star, see Stites 1989:33. See also Soboleva, Artamonov (1933:194-201) on Soviet symbols. 8. The role of Siberia as the place of exile was also defined from the very beginning. In 1593, the involuntary witnesses to the murder of Tsarevich Dimitrii in Uglich, (together with the church bell that unduly announced the murder to the people of the city) became the first to be sent to Siberia. Exile as a form of punishment was instituted in 1649, and in a number of

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cases it was used as a form of mercy, instead of the death penalty. After being knouted and stigmatized by piercing the nose and the ears, the sentenced person could start his ‘service’ as an exile in Siberia. This relatively free form of existence was changed by Peter I to hard labour (katorga). Later the Empress Elisabeth, who abolished the death penalty, introduced life-long exile instead. (Miliukov 494-495) For a long time, most of the Russian population in Siberia consisted of fugitives and exiles. At the beginning of the 18th century, twice as many males as females were living there. The Russian population began to grow rapidly after the liberation of the peasants in 1861. By then, epidemics and vodka had almost led to the extinction of the native Siberian peoples. 9. A detailed, scholarly history of Russification in the Tsarist empire has yet to be written. For a general review, see: The Modem Encyclopedia o f Russian and Soviet History, ed. Joseph L. Wiechynski, Vol. 32 (1983). “In the final analysis, the Russian government lacked the human and financial resources as well as the iron will and determination required to alter significantly local social structures and patterns of behavior. Before the 1860s Russian officials rarely understood the importance of literacy, popular education, economic rationalization and social modernization as a basis for national unity,” (Edward C. Thaden, ibid.: 211). See also Hosking (1997:367-397).

3 Symbols of the Centre

Novgorod is our father, Kiev our mother, Moscow our heart, Petersburg our head. Russian proverb

Centre and periphery are not purely territorial concepts: the centre, with its position of power, as well as the various tensions between the centre and the periphery, have a profound impact on national patterns of cultural identification. The territorial hegemony of the centre reflects the social structure of domination. This structure is in turn encoded in the cultural hierarchies of high and low, in tradition and renewal, as well as in the established and continuously emerging cultural myths, and even in the myth of culture itself as a pure, central source of elevated, eternal values. The Wandering Centre If anyone still hankers after a statist formula of Russianness, here it is: Moscow the Heart, St Petersburg the Head, Kiev the Mother. In this proverb, the territorial formation of the Russian state is rendered with the help of the body metaphor. During her formative centuries, Russia’s political centre migrated several times, in response to pressures from the outside. According to the foundation tale, the first capital of Rus was Novgorod, which in the 9th century was an important commercial and trade centre on the route from the Baltic Sea to Byzantium, and controlled a vast territory inhabited by Baltic, Finnish and Slavic tribes. In 862, unable to stop their incessant strife, Novgorod’s leaders allegedly summoned Rurik, a legendary Varangian chieftain, in the following words (quoted by Nestor in the Primary Chronicle, thus referring to events that had happened several centuries before his birth): “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come, then, to rule as princes over us.” From 862 until his death in 879, Rurik ruled over the Novgorod Rus and controlled the important trading route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” (iz

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variag v greki). His successor, Oleg, in a military campaign directed southwards down the river route to Constantinople, attacked and conquered Kiev, and made it his capital in 882. There, the Rurikid dynasty reigned until Kiev was sacked and burned by the Mongols.1 Kiev was, of course, the paramount city in Rus. In the 11th century, Prince Yaroslav hoped to make it a Slav Constantinople, and it did, undoubtedly, become one of the showpieces of the Middle Ages. The emergence of Kiev Rus as an acknowledged European power was considerably facilitated by the adoption of Christianity, in its Byzantine form, by Prince Vladimir in 988. The migrations of the centre, caused by territorial shrinkages and expansions, reveal violent tensions and splits in the development of the Russian nation. Geopolitical factors also played a decisive role in the rise of Moscow from relative obscurity to being the centre of power. Under threat from the Mongols, and as the result of internecine feuding between the principalities on the territory of Kievan Rus, all virtually unconnected by any central power, the country turned eastwards, and the capital of Rus migrated again: first to the city of Vladimir in 1169, and then to Moscow, where the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan moved his residence in 1327. It was in this area under the aegis of the Mongols that the small principality of Moscow asserted its position as the nucleus of the future Russia, and the emerging Great Russian nation found its relatively secure centre.2 The Dnieper basin was replaced by the more remote regions of the Oka and Volga rivers as the dominant locale of Russian history. This was essentially a period of retreat into a region where the dominant natural feature was the forest.3 At first, Moscow was a small dot on the map, but it gradually spread until, two centuries later, its territory covered the whole of eastern Russia. In the bitter struggle between the two most powerful principalities, Tver and Moscow, the latter was victorious, and from the second half of the 14th century Moscow became the centre of the growing Russian state. Efforts to achieve centralization were intensified within the Grand Principality of Moscow itself, and took the form of civil war. By the end of the 15th and start of the 16th century, Moscow had brought the lands of north-eastern Rus together. During the 1550s, the territory of the Russian centralized state (as Russian historians tend to call the Russian monarchy) spanned some three million square kilometres, with a population of approximately seven to nine million people. The ethnic foundation of the state was the Great Russian (or Russian) nationality. Yesterday’s tributary of the Tatars, Russia was now transformed into a great eastern power.

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Following the violent expansion to the East during the following centuries, by the end of the 17th century, a new movement of the centre, out and away from Moscow, became imminent. In 1712, Peter I moved the capital of Russia to the Baltic Sea, to the newly founded city of Saint Petersburg, opening the country to the Western influences and extending its territory westward. St Petersburg remained the political centre and seat of the Russian Emperors for over two hundred years, until the historical pendulum swung again, and the capital returned to Moscow in 1918, thus connecting Russia to her allegedly truer national past. For seventy years to come, the country remained closed to the rest of the world, behind the Iron Curtain constructed by the Communist ideology which now replaced Orthodoxy as the only true faith. Russian identification with Moscow has always been strong; as in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, all the roads of Russian feeling still lead to Moscow. And it is in Moscow that the Russian national state, Rossiia, originated.4

Moscow: Concentric Structures The ideal model of a centralized state is embodied in the concentric structure of the national territory, with the city of Moscow in the centre of Russia, the Kremlin in the centre of Moscow, the Tsar and the Metropolitan in the centre of the Kremlin. This model corresponds to the concentric power structure symbolized by the Russian Double-Headed Eagle: the supreme authority abides in the centre, in the most protected position, closest to the Holy Origin. Moscow grew as a tree grows, in concentric circles: this is still traceable on the map of Moscow. The nucleus from which it started to grow, to become the centre of power in Russia, is the Kremlin. The very first mention of Moscow in the Chronicles dates back to 1147. At that time, it was a settlement on the river Moskva where the Prince of Suzdal Yurii Dolgorukii

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stayed on his way to Kiev. In 1156, Yurii surrounded it with a wooden palisade, thus turning it into a small fortress, the first Moscow Kremlin. This occupied the part of the hill where the Borovitskaia Kremlin tower stands now, its name reminding us of the forest (bor) which covered the hill. Later, several rings of fortifications were erected to protect the city, which was conveniently situated at the intersection of several waterways and tradingroutes from the southern Dnieper area and northern upper Volga, in the ethnographical centre of the territories colonized by the Great-Russian population in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 1263, Moscow became a separate princedom with Daniil, the son of Alexandr Nevskii, as its first ruler.5 The sudden rise to power of Moscow was a riddle for those who witnessed it. In the second half of the 15th century, Europe was surprised to find a huge empire on her eastern borders. But, before Moscow became the centre of political power, it was already established as the religious centre of Russia. The Uspenskii Cathedral, where many generations of Russian tsars were crowned and married, and the Archangel Cathedral, where the tsars were buried, made Moscow the heart of Holy Russia: grad serdechnyi, grad sredinnyi (the heart city, the central city), as the nationalist writer Feodor Glinka called it in his poem Moskva (1840). Medieval Moscow was a city protected by churches; sorok sorokov, forty times forty churches could be seen there, as a Russian saying puts it. Approaching Moscow in 1839, a famous traveller, the Marquis de Custine saw a multitude of spires gleaming above the dust of the road and above the uneven, sparsely inhabited, semi-cultivated plain. It was out o f the midst o f this solitude that / saw, as it were suddenly spring up, thousands o f pointed steeples, star-spangled belfries, airy turrets, strangely-shaped towers, palaces, and old convents. [...] Before the eye, spreads a landscape, wild and gloomy, but grand as the ocean; and to animate the dreary void, there rises a poetical city, whose architecture is without either a designating name or a known model. (Custine 1989:393-394) Custine, and many others before and after him, saw Europe and Asia as being united in Moscow, and especially in the Kremlin, Russia’s most important national monument. Rebuilt by Italian architects in 1485 for Ivan HI, for hundreds of years the Kremlin remained a forbidden area, where the Byzantine ceremonies of the Russian monarchs took place.6 On the holy island of the Kremlin, the tsars of Russia lived in palaces they

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seldom left, apart from their pilgrimages to monasteries, and other ritual occasions. From the Kremlin, they ruled as supreme monarchs: as a feudal lord, the Moscow Prince, later the Tsar, was master ( ) of the Russian land. But he was also the heir of Tatar Khans and Byzantine Emperors. In Russia, both Khans and Emperors were styled Tsars. This blending of various ideas and forms of government created a despotism rare though not unique in history. “I am free to bestow grace on my subjects and I am free to send them to the scaffold”, Ivan the Terrible used to say (Kohn 1955:266). He, Ivan IV, was bom in the Kremlin, he died there, and his spirit is still believed to haunt the place. But it is his grandfather, Ivan HI, who conceived and executed the plans for the Kremlin. The Kremlin’s Ivan Velikii belfry is named after Ivan ID, or Ivan the Great. It remained the highest building in Russia until Peter I built his PeterPaul Cathedral in St Petersburg, the belfry of which he deliberately wanted to be higher than Ivan’s belfry in Moscow.

It is, however, just outside the Kremlin walls that the most impressive of all Moscow buildings can be found: the Church of St Basil ( Vasiliia Blazhennogo), built by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his victory over Kazan. On being confronted with it, a modem traveller, Laurens van der Post, intuitively felt that here “in bricks and mortar was a complete statement of all that was invisible and searching in the Russian spirit.”

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I contemplated it daily as one might study some cypher fo r which the key was missing. My first reaction was to lose patience with the building and dismiss it as mad. [...] At first glance one can read a splendid distortion o f fact and a magnificent disdain for reality in the creation o f the church o f St Basil. It has no obvious symmetry, and its spires, domes and doorways are all o f different styles and shapes. All the various influences that had ever impinged on Russian life are present; Greek, Romanf Byzantine, Arab, Tartar and Gothic architecture is piled upon and around it. Even a hint o f Babylon, Assyria and Scythia intrudes among the walls. No two domes are alike in height, shape or decoration. Hard by them are Gothic spires and spits o f different heights piled on varying pagan foundations. Not a single spire is o f consistent shape throughout and no two conform to the same colour scheme. But in the middle of this wheeling, reeling system which combines all the prodigal trends and elements o f history stands one tall triumphant spire looking like a tower o f medieval Europe and ending in a round Russian turret o f gold drawn to point a single cross at the massive sky. Though this building possesses no immediate symmetry it implies with passion a profound and organic meaning. It has a firm , still centre round which all the colourful disorder spins. Considering the darkness, horror, and madness o f the moment in which this church was conceived it nevertheless conveyed to me some awareness o f the urgent necessity o f making whole the many and varied fragments o f the past, the boundless possibilities, conflicting trends, the paradoxes and tensions o f this immense land and its people. As I surveyed it the past, present, and the future too, were before me as in a symbol so vivid that it could awake the sleeper from his dream. (Van Der Post 1964:334-335) Petersburg: Centre and Periphery When Peter I moved the country’s political centre to the northwest, to the territory on the extreme periphery, the old territorial hierarchy of Russia, with Moscow as the paramount central seat of both secular power and spiritual authority, was shaken and split. Both as a person and as a monarch, Peter felt a compulsive longing for the sea and for the open spaces, away from the suffocating atmosphere of Moscow. He made his new capital Saint Petersburg into an embodiment of the new Russia, which was now opening up to

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European influence. If Petersburg was seen as being anti-Moscow, so indeed it was: Moscow and Petersburg came to stand as symbols for two different Russias, before and after Peter, whose reign marked a watershed in Russian history and culture.7 With the passage of time, an endlessly rich symbolism developed around the polarity of Petersburg and Moscow: between all the foreign and cosmopolitan forces that flowed through Russian life via Petersburg, and the accumulated indigenous and insular traditions of Moscow. Petersburg was seen as the Enlightenment, and Moscow anti-Enlightenment; Moscow was purity of blood and soil, Petersburg pollution and miscegenation; Moscow was sacred, Petersburg secular; Petersburg was Russia’s head, Moscow its heart. This dualism forms one of the central axes of modem Russian history and culture. As the cultural historian Marshall Berman puts it: What was different in St Petersburg was, first, its immensity of scale; second, the radical disparity, both environmentally and ideologically, between the capital and the rest of the country, a disparity that generated violent resistance and long-term polarization; finally, the extreme instability and volatility of a culture that sprang from the needs and fears of despotic rulers. (Berman 1982:179) The tensions and disharmony between the new centre of Russia in St Petersburg, and the rest of the country, now transformed into its periphery, were a reflection of the profound split between the necessary modernization initiated by Peter’s reforms and the conservative opposition to it in traditionbound Russia. “The building of St Petersburg is probably the most dramatic instance in world history of modernization conceived and imposed draconically from above” (ibid.:\16). After Peter, the country had to live with two capitals: the old one in the continental centre, and the new one on the periphery, in the almost empty territory open to the sea, and separated from the rest of Russia by forests, marshes, and vast roadless distances. The choice of St Petersburg as a new capital of Russia was “a brilliant mistake”, according to the 19th century Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin. Gripped by a single idea, Peter did not hesitate to mobilize a large part of the Russian population to build harbours and shipyards on the Baltic Sea; hundreds of thousands of workers slaved to build Petersburg, and perished there from the severe climate, epidemics, and exhaustion. But, for Peter and his apologists, the horrific human costs were not too high a price to pay for

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access to the maritime trade routes that continental Russia so badly needed. As was the case with Moscow, the appearance of a legendary eagle is also linked with the founding of St Petersburg. According to one of the legends, on the site of the future Peter-Paul fortress, Peter cut two young birches and stuck them into the ground to form a portal. At that very moment, an eagle came down from the sky and perched on one of the birches. Peter then entered the gates of his future new city. (Sindalovskii 1994:22) In fact, Peter was not present at all when the Peter-Paul fortress was founded on May 16, 1703. He spent the days between the 11th and 20th of May inspecting the shipyards of Lodeinoie Pole; the founding of the fortress was carried out by Alexander Menshikov (Mavrodin 1983:65). But legends have their own logic: the heavenly omen in the shape of an eagle signified a blessing brought from above to Peter’s city, his ‘paradise’, as he used to call it. And such a blessing was indeed necessary, in view of the poor odds of its being successful. In May 1703, however, there was not yet any definite idea, not to mention any plan of the future capital of Russia. Only a half a month earlier, on the 1st of May, the territory around the estuary of the Neva fell into Russian hands after a battle with the Swedish navy. Following the Stolbova Treaty of 1617, the Swedes had already established the fortress of Nyenskans, which in 1634 was granted the privilege of becoming the city of Nyen on the Neva. Peter built the Peter-Paul fortress closer to the sea, to secure this newly conquered territory. And, only after defeating the Swedish army at Poltava in 1709, did Peter feel that the foundations of St Petersburg had been laid.8 In his biography of Peter the Great, K. Waliszewski sums up critical opinions about his decision to turn the newly founded city into the capital of Russia: But, up to the time of the Battle of Poltava, Peter never thought of making St Petersburg his capital. It was enough for him to feel he had a fortress and a port. [...] The great victory, we are told, diminished the strategic importance of St Petersburg, and almost entirely extinguished its value as a port; while its erection into the capital city of the Empire was never anything but madness. [...] As a capital city, St Petersburg, we are told again, was ill-placed on the banks of the Neva, not only for the reasons given, but for others, geographical, ethnical and climatic, which exist even in the present day, and which makes its selection an outrage against common sense. (Waliszevski 1868:446)

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Initially, the new city was conceived as a sea port and a military camp, with very straight, broad streets, and large, empty spaces around the first buildings: the fortress with the Peter-Paul Cathedral, and the Admiralty, which was a shipyard and, for a while, also a fortress. But, if Moscow grew in an organic, irregular way, gradually expanding outward from the nuclear Kremlin, right from the beginning St Petersburg was planned as a rational city, dominated by the straight line, by order and regulation; it became the world’s most artificial, intentional, deliberate, ‘premeditated’ city (umyshlennyi gorod), as Feodor Dostoevskii called it. In the visual symbolism of St Petersburg, in the celebrated beauty of the Winter Palace, the embankments, the railings of the Summer Garden, the graphic quality of the city, the straight line, the border, is accentuated. The centre of the city, with its enormous open spaces, beside the broad and empty Neva, the grey and empty sky above it, evoked in many an observer a forlorn, unreal feeling; the magnificent palaces lining the embankments resembled theatre sets, phantoms about to dissolve into the bleak northern light. All of this was new and strange, and — worst of all in the minds of some Russians — the celebrated Palmyra of the North looked deliberately un-Russian.

More than a hundred years after Peter’s death, the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in his Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), an apology for Peter and his Petersburg, which is considered to be “the most brilliant single item in the entire glittering Petrine cult”.9 After Pushkin’s poem, the real Bronze Horseman, a monument to Peter I installed in Senate Square in 1782 by Catherine II (who, with great self-consciousness, wrote on its stone postament: PETRO PRIMO CATHARINA SECUNDA), became the main symbol of Petersburg, and of the new Russia violently modernized by her divine reformer. The equestrian statue of the Bronze Horseman by Etienne Falconet overlooks the Neva, at one of the city’s focal points. The Emperor is rearing his charger on the edge of a steep cliff, in front of an abyss. Under the

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feet of the horse, the trampled serpent raises its head. Was this an unintentional reminder of St George and the Dragon?10 Modernism and Polarization In his Bronze Horseman, quoting the words of Count Algarotti, an early visitor to St Petersburg, Pushkin calls the city “a window to Europe”, and in doing so implies the violence of this opening: a violence that will recoil against the city as the poem unfolds, creating madness in the city’s lower depths to complement the madness that dominates its commanding heights. And, in Marshall Berman’s words, Petersburg would continue to incarnate the paradox of public space without public life. (Berman 1982: 183,189) The appearance of St Petersburg on the map of Russia announced the age of modernism, and the emergence of a Russian secular culture of the Western European type. All the while, Moscow retained its former position as the sacred centre of Holy Russia: the Imperial coronation and wedding ceremonies continued to take place in the Kremlin’s Uspenskii Cathedral (although, beginning with Peter himself, the rulers of Russia were now buried in the Peter-Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, and not in the Kremlin, as before). In the eyes of the vast tradition-oriented majority, Peter was shaking the very foundations of Church and State. He forced the Russian boyars to cut their beards and to abandon the Byzantine dress of Muscovy for Westernstyle clothes; he ordered a large number of noblemen not only to move to the new capital, but to build palaces there, or they would forfeit their titles; he changed the calendar, he mocked church ceremonies, he surrounded himself with foreigners, he did not behave as a Russian Tsar was expected to behave; he was Antichrist personified. The sullen resistance to his reforms by a large segment of the people created a gulf between the upper and lower classes. For the former the cultural Westernization of Russia meant that Russian art, literature, music and thought would be directly influenced and shaped by Western models and values, and that Russia would join the family of European nations. The Russian intelligentsia created a distinctive Russian contribution to the common cultural heritage of the modem world. “Whatever their specifically Russian traits, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov are unthinkable without Peter’s work in Westernizing Russia” (Raeff 1963:xv). Or, in the words of the Russian cultural historian P.N. Miliukov:

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Peter had secularized the external manifestations of Russian life and in so doing he had laid the foundation for the secularization of the people’s mind: he introduced Russia to secular thought and modem science. One can say that in this respect he was the “father” of the Russian intellectuals. This alone separates him from Russia’s past and binds him closely to the Russia of to-day and to-morrow. (Quoted in Raeff 1963:95) Seldom mentioned, however, is the role the cultural shift from Moscow to Petersburg played in the emancipation of Russian women from the oppressive domestic rule of the Domostroi.11 In Muscovy, upper-class women were prevented from taking part in social life outside their home; a secluded chamber, terem, was the symbol of their isolation. In the new world of St Petersburg, women were not only encouraged to participate in social gatherings, but were even given opportunities to hold positions of power, which they did not hesitate to grasp. After Peter I, between 1725 and 1796, Russia was (with minor interruptions) ruled by four empresses, until the death of the Empress Catherine n, when her son, the Emperor Paul, reintroduced the patrimonial law of succession abolished by Peter. The rule of the Empresses — Catherine I (1725-1727), Anna (1730-1740), Elisabeth (1741-1761), and Catherine E (1762-1796) — was crucial for the process of Westernization initiated by Peter. In 1727, the capital of Russia moved to Moscow again, after the brief reign of Peter’s wife, Catherine I. Only the fatal lack of male Romanov heirs to the Russian throne prevented Russia from relapsing into Muscovy. But the female right of succession made possible by Peter and intended for Catherine I now enabled the appearance of female rulers, who continued to transform St Petersburg into a European metropolis. The cultural impact of this ‘petticoat rule’ (babskoe pravleniie, as it was derisorily called) has been largely neglected by Russian and Soviet historians, although the European tastes and habits of the empresses helped to enrich the new Russian court life with entertainments of a more refined type than the drinking orgies, processions and fireworks so beloved of Peter. As a matter of fact, Peter’s concerns were entirely utilitarian, and his taste rather crude: he liked military music and had a passion for dwarfs, but other forms of culture, such as the theatre introduced by his sister Natalia, bored him. The Empress Anna, a niece of Peter, who had spent seventeen years as the Grand Duchess of Kurland before coming to the Russian throne, intended to create the kind of European court life she was used to. In patriarchal Moscow

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this simply would not have been possible! So she resolutely moved the Imperial residence back to St Petersburg, and during her reign there laid the patterns of the secular life followed by her successors Elisabeth and Catherine II. It is worth noting that all the empresses who succeeded Peter were, like him, marginal personalities, strong enough and different enough to be able to break with the traditional life patterns of old Muscovy. First of all this new world rejoiced in the discovery of the human body. The cutting off of the beard destroyed man’s sense of community with the idealized likenesses of the icons. The introduction of secular portraiture, of heroic statuary, and of new, more suggestive styles of dress — all aided in the discovery of the human form. The beginnings of court ballet and of stylized imperial balls under Anna placed a premium on elegance of form and movement that had never been evident in Moscow. Gradually, the individual was being discovered as an earthly being with personal attributes, private interests, and responsibilities. (Billington 1966:188-189) The era of Enlightenment introduced in Russia in the reign of Empress Catherine II secured the foundations for the emergence of Russian national literature, art and science. The Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Sciences are among the enlightened creations of Catherine II, or Catherine the Great as she liked to be called. “Yet her impact on Russian history went far deeper than the superficial statecraft and foreign conquest for which she is justly renowned. More than any other single person prior to the Leninist Revolution, Catherine cut official culture loose from its religious roots, and changed both its physical setting and its philosophical preoccupations.” (Ibid. : 226-227) Catherine substituted the city for the monastery as the focus of Russian culture. She appointed a commission to plan a systematic rebuilding of Moscow and Petersburg. From an imitation Dutch naval base, St Petersburg was transformed into a stately granite capital. Simple, neo-classical shapes prevailed in the new urban architecture, in which the city centre was now dominated by political rather than religious buildings.

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The contrast between the two capitals fascinated Russia’s greatest writers, whose golden age was now beginning. From the 1800s onwards, the shifts in the relationship between Moscow and St Petersburg can be followed in the pages of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi. Comparing Moscow and Petersburg in the 1830s, Gogol argued that, whilst Russia was necessary to St Petersburg, Moscow was necessary to Russia; Petersburg was a German clerk, while Moscow was a truly Russian merchant wife. The comfortable patriarchal domesticity of Moscow was ridiculed in Griboiedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit). Dostoevskii’s Petersburg is gloomy, maddening, vicious. In his opinion, to the overwhelming majority of the Russian people, the significance of Petersburg was confined to the fact that the Tsar resides there. It was said that Petersburg would be a desert without the Court. Pushkin captured this rivalry: Moscow receded before Petersburg like a “dowager in purple, stooping before an empress newly crowned.” In Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, the juxtaposition of Moscow and St Petersburg is part of the plot, and it is the cold, heartless atmosphere of the high society of the northern capital, consumed by the fever of ambition, title and rank, that finally brings Anna to suicide. Along with Pushkin’s crazed Evgenii in Bronze Horseman and Dostoevskii’s Raskolnikov, Gogol’s Shinel (Overcoat) provides another mighty theme in Russian literature: the lowly hero, a symbol of the mute, underprivileged masses, upon whose bones the new capital city was erected. This “crawling, howling myriapod” of Andrei Bely’s Peterburg would have had only one ironic consolation for all their humiliations, to see power transferred back from ‘Western’ Petersburg to ‘Asiatic’ Moscow.

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Joseph Brodsky comments in “A Guide to a Renamed City” on the distinctly foreign and alienating atmosphere of his native city, called by its inhabitants simply ‘Peter’, and located on the edge of so familiar a world. Russia is a very continental country, and “the womb-warm, and traditional to the point of idiosyncrasy, claustrophobic world of Russia proper was shivering badly under the cold, searching Baltic wind” (Brodsky 1986:71-72). The founder of the city regarded each country where he had set foot — his own included — as but a continuation of space. In general, he was in love with space, and with the sea in particular. Another of Peter’s older inhabitants, although quite aware of the un-Russian character of this northern citadel, recollects: But one thing, in that cold, wide, sprung, elegantly poised St Petersburg, was Russian, and Russian to the core: the harness, the style o f driving. The accent was on speed. Horses snorting, reins held taut, the coachmen with their enormous cushioned and pleated bottoms built up — no less — to fill, indeed to form a single unit with, the box: the more ample the posterior, the more dashing the general turn-out. [...] Again, it comes back to me, the speed o f sleighs, a net fastened in front to catch the lumps o f snow flying from the horses’ hooves. [...] But how can I speak o f something, to me particular, that sounds like nothing in particular: a drive — one o f many to the Islands, where private carriages congregated on a Sunday afternoon in the late spring or early autumn (whereas driving up and down the full length o f the Palace Quay, roughly between the Winter Palace and the British Embassy, was more o f a winter pleasure). / still retain the feeling, as I alighted from my parents’ carriage and stood and looked out to the Finnish Bay glowing in the evening sunlight, the feeling o f bulging into the open space...12 The territorial and cultural rift between the centre and the periphery, between what was experienced as being originally Russian and definitely unRussian, was followed by a split in the Russian national self-consciousness. It resulted in the celebrated controversy between the Slavophiles and the Westemizers, which touched on the central dilemma of Russian identity.13 The three-century discourse between the two capitals of Russia is still going on. The renaming of Leningrad as St Petersburg in September 1991 is an attempt to cure the provincial trauma of Soviet Leningrad, transformed from being the centre into a peripheral city after the capital moved back to Moscow in 1918.

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The Prestige of the Centre The spatial distinction between centre and periphery reflects social segregation: it becomes an image of social inequality projected into space. As Pierre Bourdieu has observed in his writing on the sociology of politics, social realities enter into the physical world in a deformed and masked way: in a hierarchical society there is no space which does not express social distance; differences produced by social logic may seem quite natural. (Bourdieu 1990)14 Bourdieu further distinguishes between economical, cultural, social and symbolic capital (prestige). He sees social space as a power field in which positions are determined by different forms of capital. Thus, the city space becomes a projection of the multi-levelled power field onto the territory. In other words, living in the capital means acquiring symbolic capital; moreover, having a central address in the capital city involves reinforcing the value system, and in reality partaking in the power relations of hierarchy and subjugation reflected in the social segregation between centre and periphery. A central position in the country is connected to power: the institutions representing Central Power, such as the government, ministries, banks and other financial institutions, and even the cultural institutions with the highest prestige tend to have a central address in the oldest, most venerated parts of the capital city. One of the central quarters of Moscow, the Staryi Arbat, is endowed with great cultural prestige, since for many generations families associated with the intellectual professions tend to live there. The same can be said about Vasilievskii ostrov in Petersburg where the University, the Academy of Sciences, Pushkinskii dom, and a great number of other cultural institutions and museums are situated. Control of space also means control of time: a central address in the oldest and most prestigious parts of the capital city gives immediate access to national history, and thus to accumulated time. There, the cultural capital of the nation is more generously offered and more easily obtained, in national museums, national libraries, national theatres, at institutes of higher learning, and in other centrally located and most highly valued sources of education and entertainment. In her description of the Petersburgian population, N.V. Yukhneva (1984) shows that, from its very beginning, the centre of the city was inhabited by the social elite, which also included a great many foreigners (who up to the Revolution enjoyed higher social status than native Russians). In 1869 every third inhabitant of the capital city was of non-Russian origin, which undoubtedly accounts for the foreign character attributed to St Petersburg in

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many descriptions of the city. The aristocratic, administrative and cultural centre of the capital was thus socially and ethnically the opposite of the suburbs, where native Russians predominated. Moscow was, however, more homogeneously and ‘patriotically’ Russian. As J.G. Kohl observed in his description of Russia, Petersburg would never dare appoint a German to be Moscow’s Governor-General, only a Russian, “because Moscow would endure no other”. (Kohl 1842) At the heart of Moscow was the order of the merchant. Strongly Orthodox, bearded, inclined to wear kaftans and khalats and similar fancies of eastern origin, instead of the Petersburgian frock coats, the Moscow merchant would deck his portly better half in pearls, and entertain his men friends to gluttonous feasts accompanied by Gypsy songs at the Slavianskii Bazar. Some of them were risk-takers and capital creators, although foreigners led the way in the industrial development of Russia, which was primarily rooted in the arrival of railways after 1840. The ranks of industrialists were constantly renewed by eager candidates arising from the pool of meshchanstvo, the wealth-hungry, hard-working, hard-reading and often unscrupulous clerks, shopkeepers, and undercapitalized traders, more familiar from the pages of Ostrovskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoevskii than from Tolstoi.15 Rival Centres After the Revolution in 1917, Petersburg (now Petrograd) became the crucible of the cultural reconstruction of the former empire, while the power shifted to Moscow (Clark 1995). In the renamed city of Leningrad, the periphery, the industrial suburbs now started to play the dominant social and cultural role. The former Imperial centre with its palaces, embankments, and wide avenues became increasingly empty; the centre moved to the periphery. The literary critic Viktor Shklovskii remarked at the time: “Peter is creeping to its periphery and has become like a bagel-city (bublik) with a beautiful but dead center” (quoted in Clark 1995:265). Petersburg remained the main myth of Russian identity until the thirties, when the new Soviet mythology stabilized and a new cogent myth of Moscow emerged. When in 1913 the symbolist Andrei Bely playfully questioned the existence of Petersburg, following the literary tradition of referring to the city as a mirage, an illusion, he wrote: “If Petersburg is not the capital, there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist.” He did not realize, though, how serious his words were to become.

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As the value scales rocked, Moscow became the embodiment of progress, while Petersburg (Leningrad) now stood for all that was retrograde in the old Russia. On the other hand, after the Revolution, Leningrad became the symbolic site of humanistic culture, “of a quasi-religious value system that many believed should become the basis of a new social order” (Clark 1995:7). Each of the two capitals laid claims to rival interpretations of the national identity. During the 1930s, when the Soviet Union consolidated itself as a nation, it sought to establish a new, unique identity for the country. Moscow as the seat of Soviet power had to be recast and purified; its centre was remade and aggrandized, and Leningrad’s role as the centre of Russian intellectual life was increasingly undermined, when many of its scientific institutions, the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences among them, were moved to Moscow. For the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky, belonging to the Petersburg school of Russian poetry, illuminated by such names as Pushkin, Blok, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, the Petersburg of his recollections turns into a nostalgic dream of a lost civilization: And there was a city. The most beautiful city on the face o f the earth. With an immense gray river that hung over its distant bottom like the immense gray sky over that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully elaborated facades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint o f a giant mollusk called civilization. Which ceased to exist. (Brodsky 1986:32) But actually, as Katerina Clark argues (1995:300), in the old battle between Moscow and Petersburg, Petersburg had won. As Moscow was rebuilt, it was turned into a Petersburgian city: ‘straightening out’ crooked lanes (the iconic Moscow streets) was a standard gesture of modernization (under which the myth of Petersburg can be subsumed). Where fire, Tatars and invaders failed, Stalin and his metro-builders of the thirties and fifties succeeded. They swept away much of medieval Moscow, including the famous towers and chapel protecting the holy icon of the Iverskaia Mother of God at the entrance to Red Square (to be replaced by Lenin in his Mausoleum) and the massive presence of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had dominated Moscow’s skyline for over a century.

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Red Square The transfer of the capital to Moscow and the concentration of political power in the Kremlin have their own symbolic aspects. This is, of course, a transfer of power from the periphery to the spatial centre, but also a siting of power inside the Kremlin walls, into a core protected by a shell. In Moscow, rejection of modernity was expressed by the preservation of the Kremlin as a completely autonomous historical zone, one not subject to change or the passage of time. The Kremlin, of course, exerted a fascination on rulers because of its exceptional suitability to the symbolic manifestation of power. (Soviet Hieroglyphics 1995:97) Since the twenties, Red Square in Moscow has gradually been transformed into a public square-cum-cemetery, with the Lenin mausoleum as the main grave. This is a symbolic manifestation of the ancestor cult and also of the hero cult at the heart of the imperial mythology of Moscow. “It instantly creates the illusion of continuity, organizes a genealogy, and introduces into the consciousness the very concept of father-founder, so indispensable for the legitimization of any regime.” (Ibid.: 102) In the Soviet world model, the Mausoleum was not only the spiritual centre of Red Square and Moscow, but of the entire world. Like a pebble tossed into a lake, it was surrounded by mystical concentric ripples: the boulevards, the parkway, the Metro, the railway, the freeway, and Moscow's military radar all spread out in rings until they passed the equator and approached the final latitudes o f the globe. Just as the axis o f the earth passed through Jerusalem on ancient maps, it now passed through the Mausoleum in Moscow, uthe Heart o f our Homeland. ” (Monumental Propaganda 1994:51) Red Square is the location of statist centricity and the pinnacle of political and bureaucratic power in Russia. On national holidays, the political and military elite used to stand on the mausoleum of the embalmed Lenin. As a counterpart to this vertical, stable centricity, the marchers in the parades and demonstrations moved through the square and past the elite in lengthy formations, which themselves are elongated, but horizontal, statements of hierarchy. When, nowadays, an immediate, eye-catching reference to Russia is required for the TV, in the press or on a book cover, it is most likely that Red Square, and the two main buildings surrounding it, St Basil and the Kremlin, will be used as icons of Russianness.

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Periphery as Opposition The dynamics of the interplay between the symbolic roles of Moscow as the historical centre of Holy Russianness and of St Petersburg as the centre of modem secular culture obviously varied over the last three centuries. But one persistent component linked with the centrality of the two cities has always been present: namely, symbols referring to power hierarchies, be it the political, military, or spiritual (ideological) power of the ruler, or the cultural power of the enlightened, Westernized Russian elite, as most poignantly represented by Russian writers and poets. The formerly unquestioned priority in defining national culture has now been lost by the post-Soviet cultural elites of Moscow and Petersburg. Culture has always been created and recreated everywhere on Russian territory. It is the right to define it in terms of power, or in terms of pure cultural capital allegedly elevated above positions of power, that is now melting into air. Russia and her culture cannot be reduced to myths of Moscow and Petersburg; it is better presented as a pattern of regional variations. The old antagonism between the two capitals is an artificial confrontation produced by Russian Imperial and Soviet totalitarian power discourse. Naturally, it is the periphery that produces the strongest opposition to the centrality of any capital. The colonial power relations between centre and periphery are nowadays being strongly challenged by the former colonized nations. As to recent developments in the country in general, the awakening of the periphery and the peripheral national cultures’ claims to their own ethnic identity were the precursors of the dismantling of the Soviet Empire. The third period of Russian modernization from above, which began with the perestroika announced in 1985, can again, as in 1917, be described as a conflict of ‘Modernization against Empire’. Vertically, centrally oriented power relations are slowly giving way to other types of polycentric, regional and local organization of the social space. The centre stereotype is being re­ evaluated, in the political choice of priorities affecting Russia as a whole and her regions, between the values of the centre and the needs of the periphery.16 But the imperial pull on the Russian soul is still very strong. And the significance of the new-Slavophile message echoes in familiar cadences. The Russian Idea is again being repeated with the concomitant suspicion that closer intercourse with Europe might corrupt (and has already corrupted) Russian youth. Strong central power is seen as a remedy against the disorder of the katastroika as the transitional period is commonly called.

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Notes 1. The role of Varangians in founding the first Rus state has been hotly contested. In Soviet historiography, the so-called Norman theory was rejected, and the validity of the historical data supporting this former official doctrine of the Imperial Russia still remains controversial. 2. After the split caused by the Mongol invasion, the Old Russian language of Kievan Rus gave rise to three new branches of East-Slavonic, later to become three new languages: White Russian belorusskii, Little-Russian malorossiiskii (or Ukrainian), and Great-Russian velikorusskii. 3. The forests of central Russia abounded in bears. “Man’s rival in the pursuit of honey through the forest was the mighty bear, who acquired a special place in the folklore, heraldic symbolism, and decorative wood carvings of Great Russia. Legend has it that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship” (Billington 1967:20-21). See Slavianskaia mifologiia (1995:255-58) on Russian popular beliefs about the bear. 4. In Russian, the word Rossiia is traditionally used to designate the country and state inhabited by the Russian people. In political terms it was also used, along with the terms ‘Russian state’ and ‘Russian Empire’, to denote all the territory that belonged to the state and was inhabited by Russians and non-Russians alike. In Russian historical sources, from the end of the 15th century onwards, the word Rossiia (Russia) is occasionally used to refer to the country. But the country was more frequently called Rus, the Russian land, Russkaia zemlia, or the Muscovite state, Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, up to the end of the 17th century. From the middle of the 16th century, all the lands that comprised the centralized state were known as Russia or the Tsardom of Russia Rossiiskoe tsarstvo. Later, the word rossiiskii was used for all who were citizens of the state, while the word russkii (plural, russkiie) was applied only to those of Russian nationality. (The Modem Encyclopedia o f Russian and Soviet History:Russia, vol. 32,1983:26) 5. Alexandr Nevskii was a Novgorod Prince who took his name from the river Neva in commemoration of his victory over the Swedes in 1240. The names Neva, Moskva, Volga, along with a great number of other central and northern Russian place and river names, are linguistic relics of the Finno-Ugric inhabitants that preceded the colonization of these territories by the Slavs. On Northern Russian toponyms, see, e.g., Orlov (1907). 6. The Kremlin (from the Russian kreml, fortress), the oldest part of Moscow, was originally surrounded by wooden walls. In 1475, Ivan III, concerned with remodelling Moscow consistent with its new dignity as the successor to Constantinople, summoned from Italy five architects led by the famous Bologna master, Aristotle da Fioraventi. The latter was entrusted with the rebuilding of the Uspenskii Cathedral, originally built in the Kremlin in the 14th century. The Tsar’s residential and official quarters were also complemented by the construction of two stone buildings: Granovitaia Palata, the Palace of Facets, used for court ceremonies and the like, and Teremnoi Dvorets, the Terem Palace, for the royal family’s private residence. The walls of the Kremlin were straightened and furnished with towers and gates. 7. Russia’s split identity was made manifest in the violent efforts of Peter to convert oldfashioned Muscovy into a modem European state. For many years to come, the attitude to Petrine reforms divided the nation into two. For further reading, see Mavrodin (1948),

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

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Kliuchevsky (1958), Raeff (1963), Riasanovsky (1985). On the cultural history of St Petersburg, see, e.g.: Antsiferov (1991 [1922]); Kurbatov (1993 [1913]); Volkov (1996); Lotman’s and Toporov’s articles in Semiotika (Trudy po znakovym sistemam) 18,19 (1984, 1986). On the symbolism of Moscow and St Petersburg, see Monas (1983). On the day of the battle of Poltava, June 27, Peter wrote to his mistress and future Tsarina Catherine: “Hello, little mother, I declare to you that the all-merciful God has this day granted us an unprecedented victory over our enemies.” To the Admiral Apraxin he wrote: “Now with the help of God the final stone in the foundation of Petersburg has been laid.” (Mavrodin 1983:59) The famous passage as quoted in Riasanovsky (1985:92-93), in Oliver Elton’s translation: A century — and that city young, Gem o f the Northern world, amazing, From gloomy wood and swamp upsprung, Had risen, in pride and splendour blazing. Where once, by that low-lying shore, In waters never known before The Finnish fisherman, sole creature, And left forlorn by stepdame Nature, Cast rugged nets, — today, along Those shores, astir with life and motion, Vast shapely palaces in throng And towers are seen: from every ocean, From the worlds’ end, the ships come fast, To reach the loaded quays at last. The Neva is now clad in granite With many a bridge to overspan it; The islands lie beneath a screen O f gardens deep in dusky green. To that young capital is drooping The crest o f Moscow on the ground, A dowager in purple, stooping Before an empress newly crowned. The serpent traditionally represents the enemy, in this case the Swedes defeated by Peter. Originally the serpent was placed by Falconet on the hind legs of the charger to improve the balance of his equestrian statue of Peter. The serpent was later reinterpreted as a deliberate symbolic representation of Russia’s crushed adversaries. Domostroi (Law of the Home) is a collection of Russian medieval household rules promoting family life in accordance with monastic ideals. Memories of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, by William Gerhardie who lived in St Petersburg before the 1917 Revolution; quoted in Kelly (1981:292-94). This controversy, thinly disguised as a literary-historical debate, was a war of ideas about Russia’s either belonging to the family of European nations or being an incarnation of the national Russian Idea. The implications of this controversy for the creation of national mythology will be discussed in Chapter 9. Bourdieu 1990:112-122; compare Foucault (1984:239-256) on space and power politics. See also Foucault (1980: 77,149,151,156). “At the end of the century a miracle happened. These somewhat porcine-faced and stout burghers, descendants of Moscow’s medieval guildsmen, turned into true merchant princes,

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the patrons of Vrubel and Vasnetsov, of Chaliapin and Diaghilev, of Chekhov and Moscow Art Theatre.” (Kelly 1983:40-41) The collection of art that served as the foundation for the Tretiakov National Art Gallery in Moscow was donated to the city in 1892 by its owner, Pavel Tretiakov. The lives and deeds of Savva Morozov, Sergei Shchukin, Nikolai Riabushinskii, and other pre-Revolutionary patrons of Russian art are presented in Dumova, Moskovskiie metsenaty (1992). See also Buryshkin, Moskva kupecheskaia, New York 1954 (reprint Moscow 1990). 16. For example, A.S. Mylnikov (1995) argues that Russian culture is not monocentric, but polycentric; the antagonism between Moscow and St Petersburg is a manifestation of totalitarian power language. Mylnikov also shows in his article that Petersburg was not built in an empty space, as the myth will have it; there were pre-existing regional patterns and layers of local culture: Finnish, Russian (Novgorod), and Swedish ones.

4 The Tsar: Father to the People

“Bozhe Tsana khrani!” God Save Our Tsar! Old Russian National Anthem

What could be a better embodiment of absolute central power than the Muscovite sovereign monarch sitting on his golden throne, in magnificent Byzantine attire, crowned with a cap of Monomakh rimmed with black sable, and holding the gem-studded sceptre and orb, with all around kneeling and touching the floor with their foreheads in deepest humility and reverence? This picture has captured the popular imagination: it is the way the tsar of Russian fairy tale, historical folk-song and epic bylina appears. His image in folklore is that of an omnipotent, sometimes harsh and ferocious gosudar (master), and at the same time of a good and fair father, batiushka. Tsar was the political title of the Russian monarch from the 16th century up to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. The word derives from the Roman Caesar, and in early Russia was applied to the Emperor of Byzantium, and later to the Mongol Khans and other foreign sovereigns. Ivan HI and his successor, Vasilii m , used the title only intermittently. In 1548, Ivan IV of Moscow adopted the title at his coronation, and thereafter the term became the official political designation of the Russian monarch.1 Peter the Great was proclaimed Emperor of Russia in 1721, foUowing victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War; but Tsar remained the most important of all the other titles applied to the ruler of Russia. The Russian people usually referred to their ruler as Tsar, using the title Emperor only on formal occasions. The new title conferred on Peter by the Ruling Senate was unfamiliar and strange-sounding. It was the antithesis of the ‘body natural’ tsar, an antithesis indicated by the contrasting appellations Batiushka Tsar (little father tsar) and Gosudar Imperator (sovereign emperor), epithets which remained in use until 1917. The contrast is even sharper if we remember that, along with the imperial title, the Senate also gave Peter the title of Otets Otechestva (father of the country, pater patriae). This antithetical arrangement is particularly 57

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striking considering the fact that, logically and historically, the Batiushka tsar and Pater patriae express the same idea. (Chemiavsky 1969:83) The iconography of the tsars reveals the symbolic terrains of God, body and violence upon which images of Russian national identity are constructed. The use of religious imagery to buttress the authority of the monarch is most closely associated with the divine right of monarchs. Their power is compared to the power of God. This power is actually God’s by nature, and the monarch’s by grace. They are also compared to the fathers of families. And lastly, they are compared to the head of the microcosm: the body of Man. Each of these similes, deriving from the scriptures, had powerful resonances in early modem political vocabulary and iconography. The divine right of monarchs, the image of the sovereign as the head of the body, and that of the tsar as father of his people, represent attempts to legitimate absolute power by operating on the terrain of familiar images. Concepts of the terrain of the body have a long history, which is closely related to the terrain of God. In classical political thought, the soul was united with the body, which, in turn, mirrored the order of society as a whole. Order in the body was a reflection of order in the cosmos. In medieval political thought, body and soul were ideological battlegrounds for competing claims to authority. Religious authorities defended the primacy of soul over body, or the spiritual over the carnal side of the individual, and thus their own claims to spiritual leadership. Saintly Princes The early tradition of the Christian ruler imagined the Russian Great Prince as a perfect mimesis of Christ, saintly by nature as a man and saintly by action as a prince. According to Chemiavsky, the saintly princes can be very broadly divided into two groups. The first group is represented by St Vladimir and his grandmother St Olga, the very first Christian in Rus, who in Russian hagiography occupy a place equivalent to that of Constantine and Helen in early Christianity. The other group includes the two young sons of St Vladimir, Boris and Gleb, killed by their older brother; Prince Igor murdered in 1147; Andrei Bogoliubskii, Grand Prince of Suzdal and Vladimir, murdered in 1175; these are the most widely known names in the framework of the tradition whereby martyrdom for Russia meant elevation to sainthood. The element of sacrifice also dominated the story of the last passionsufferer, who was also the last of the saintly princes — Tsarevich Dimitrii,

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the young son of Ivan the Terrible, with whose murder in 1591 the Rurikid dynasty came to an end. This last offspring of the imperial line was venerated as a national saint, an intercessor for the whole Russian land. “What more fitting end to the dynasty of saintly princes could be found than the sacrificial death of its last and most innocent member?” (Chemiavsky 1969:17) In the history of the saintly princes, the age of Ivan IV the Terrible was an age of transition. The change from saintly prince to tsar meant the raising of his functions to a higher, apocalyptic level. The myth shifted from the saintly princes of Russia to the imperial rulers of Rome and Constantinople as the models and justification for the Muscovite Tsar. The medieval doctrine of Christ-centred monarchy, however, provided a field of symbols and historical precedent which later generations drew upon when the external environment was appropriate for their use.2 Tsar and God The new ideal of the emperor was described by Agapetus, the 6th-century Byzantine: “Though an emperor in body be like all other, yet in power of his office he is like God, Master of all men. For on earth, he has no peer.” Now the traditional image of the saint-prince and the new image of the glorious Tsar of the Third Rome influenced each other in the developing Russian myth of the ruler. (Ibid. :44-45) The concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, the natural inheritor, to the end of time, of Rome and Constantinople as the centre of Christendom, was proposed by the monk Filofei (Philotheos) of Pskov in his celebrated address to the Tsar in 1510: Know then, O pious Tsar, that all the Orthodox Christian realms have converged in thy single empire. Thou art the only Tsar o f the Christians in all the universe. [...] Observe and harken, O pious Tsar, that all Christian Empires have converged in thy single one, that two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and no fourth can ever be. Thy Christian Empire shall fall to no one. 3 According to the Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florenskii, to the Russian people autocracy was not a legal concept. It was a fact of divine will, it was God’s mercy and not a human condition; so that the tsar’s absolute power did not belong to any legal system. Rather, it was a matter of faith, disconnected from any secular pragmatic considerations.4

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The idea of a parallelism between the monarch and God was borrowed from Byzantium. But, as Boris Uspenskii argues in his article Tsar i Bog (Tsar and God, 1994:112), this idea does not presuppose the sacralization of the monarch. The concept of Moscow as the Third Rome made the Russian Great Prince an heir to the Byzantine Emperor, and at the same time placed him in a position that had no precedent in the Byzantine model. The concept of Moscow as the Third Rome had an eschatological character, and in this context the Russian monarch as the head of the last Orthodox tsardom was seen by some as being endowed with a messianic role.5 The “History of the Princes of Vladimir” (Skazaniie O Kniaziakh Vladimirskikh) written in the first quarter of the 16th century proposed a mythical genealogy of the Russian monarchs which traces their descent from the legendary Trojan founders of Rome. Ivan IV even denied being Russian, and prided himself in his origins stretching back to the first Roman Emperor Augustus (who was described as kesar in contrast to the Russian Christian tsar) through his brother, Prus, the ruler of Prussia. Time and again, mythical doctrines stressed the idea of continuity and thus the legitimacy of the Russian ruler and the Russian State. Chemiavsky writes (1969:42): What emerges before our eyes is not a line of saintly princes but of glorious basileis-tsars. The Russian princes were heirs of the two Romes not only spiritually or eschatologically, as they were for the monk Philotheos, but historically, virtually dynastically. Still the Orthodox rulers of the only Orthodox people, they received what was in effect a secular justification as well. [...] There is another element which the Skazaniie brings out: the rights of the Russian rulers are established not only through their imperial descent, but also by the right of conquest, for the “History” emphasizes the foreign origin of the Russian dynasty. In the words of Nietzsche, lofty origin is no more than a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth. Genealogy, however, seeks to re-establish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of domination.

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The M onomakh Crown The Russian monarchist legends were created by the church hierarchs themselves. They elevated the clergy, along with the tsar, as heirs to the Byzantine imperial mission of defending the faith. The Legend of Monomakh, also developed in Skazaniie, described a long tradition and the ‘ancient’ regalia of the Russian monarchs. These regalia comprised a pectoral cross containing a piece of the wood from the cross of the crucifixion; the barmy, a counterpart to the Byzantine emperors’ shoulder-pieces; the crown, or Monomakh’s cap, and a chain of the “gold of Araby.” According to the legend, Prince Vladimir Monomakh (1113-1125) received imperial regalia from the Emperor Constantine Monomakh, his grandfather, who actually died before his accession. (Wortman 1995:27-27)

Another legend ascribes the gift of the Monomakh crown to the Byzantine Emperor Alexis Comnin (Soboleva and Artamonov 1993:33). In reality, the crown, i.e. the Monomakh golden cap, decorated with pearls and precious stones and lined with sable, was of Asian, probably Tatar, origin, and made in the 14th century. Legends connected it to Byzantium as late as the 15th and 16th centuries. The sceptre was also allegedly sent to Prince Vladimir Monomakh together with the cap. The sceptre is mentioned in coronation records from

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the 16th century, along with the orb, or apple (derzhava, derzhavnoe yabloko), which Tsar Alexis ordered from Byzantium (Uspenskii 1994:124).6 The regalia of Monomakh were sacred items conferring the imperial succession on the princes of Moscow and later on tsars of Russia. The coronation ritual — called venchaniie na tsarstvo, i.e. marriage to the territory — was a ceremony of absolutism. The Metropolitan Macarius composed the first coronation ceremony of a Russian tsar in 1547 to consecrate and make known the imperial identity of the seventeen-year-old Ivan IV. The ceremony was an adaptation from late Byzantine rites of the 14th century (Wortman 1995:27). The weight of the regalia and of the golden, pearl-and-gemembroidered coronation attire amounted to five pouds, i.e. about 200 pounds.7 The coronation ceremonies which took place in the Uspenskii (Assumption, or, more exactly, Dormition) Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin surrounded the regalia with gestures of liturgical veneration. The tolling of the church bells, the darkness of the cathedral and aroma of incense, the saints looking down from the walls and the iconostasis all combined to produce an atmosphere of timeless mystery, as if the generations of princes and emperors had joined the living in the consecration of power. Ceremony turned the fiction of imperial succession into sacred truth. (Wortman 1995:28) The coronations symbolically represented the insoluble bond between the tsar and his country, analogous to a wedding ceremony. This familial spirit is caught in the words of a Russian proverb: “Without the Tsar the land is a widow; without the Tsar the people is an orphan”. This popular opinion might have been provoked by the dramatic events of the end of the 16th century: the chaotic interregnum of the Smutnoe vremia, the Time of Troubles, “the cataclysmic social and political breakdown following the demise of the dynasty that had ruled Moscow” (Wortman 1995:30). At last, in 1613, the widowed tsardom, with the converting of an assembly of all estates of the realm (Zemskii Sobor) which elected young Mikhail Romanov to the throne, sought to re-establish the patriarchal harmony of a Russia wedded to her Tsar. The Pious Ruler The process of partial Byzantinization of Russian court culture went hand in hand with its Europeanization. In the developing cult of the monarch, the

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Byzantine and the European trends are conflated. This tendency goes back to the pre-Petrine epoch, and it was reflected in the iconography of the Russian tsars. For the clearest image of the 17th-century tsar we must turn to the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645-1676), son of Mikhail Romanov and father of Peter the Great. Tsar Alexei was pious, Christ-loving, tishaishii (most gentle); but, although the tsar possessed the human qualities which define a saint, as the ruler, he was now identified with the state. Tsar Alexei dressed in the dalmatic, the ancient robe of the Byzantine emperors, and adopted the status of the Byzantine emperor. In the language of the earlier Russian tradition, this amounted to sacrilege. For the traditional Russian mind, both the Byzantine and the European trends can be seen as sacrilege, while for the reformist mind both could lead to a transformation of Russia through adoption of the universal cultural heritage. The myth of the pious ruler derived from the eschatology of Russian political theory. From its inception around 1500, the Third Rome, Moscow, was the focus of the economy of salvation. Upon the Orthodoxy and personal piety of the tsar depended the salvation of Russia as a state, and thereby the salvation of the whole world. It was this eschatological foundation for the myth of the ruler that was undercut by Peter the Great. (Chemiavsky 1969:71)

From Ivan IV to Peter I, the emergence of the modem secular state was accompanied by the growth of a political mythology that produced an image of an absolutist, autocratic god-emperor, self-contained and self-generated.

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Hero and Father In the iconography of the Russian tsar, the visual image of the Russian sovereign monarch divided into two. The earlier Byzantine style adopted by Ivan HI and elaborated by Ivan IV was abolished by Peter, who preferred the Western European warrior style. The road from the theocratic tsar to the sovereign emperor was travelled rather quickly by court circles, writers and official ideologies. The saints and the martyrs were replaced by victories, and at the head of it all stood the tsar, the new god on earth. The secular state, however, did not arise with Peter: he put into practice what under Ivan the Terrible was only theory (Chemiavsky 1969:93). Peter’s own conception of the state and his role within it would easily fit into the ideology of enlightened absolutism, in which the ruler was the first servant of the abstract, depersonalized State that all men served. Again and again, Peter expressed his ultimate purpose as the service of Russia, which was the enduring and the absolute, and which, as manifested by the Ruling Senate, crowned him for his labours with the triumphant title of Emperor. What this meant was the evolution of an abstract, impersonal image of the ruler. A new symbolic terrain was emerging. Used as a means of legitimating authority, this terrain mediated the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. It both affirmed the authority of the tsar and established the corresponding political identity of the individual. For example, when the tsar is proclaimed Parens patriae, the father of his country, by analogy, the individual understands his/her role as a member of that family. We could consider the issue of authority, the relationship between the mler and the ruled, as the vertical dimension of the terrain of the body. (Lemer 1991:411) This vertical dimension does not merely reinforce the location of the individual within the structure of society. More importantly, it makes an implicit or explicit statement about the proper role of that subject or citizen in society. This is a passive role: just as the head determines the movements of all other parts of the body, so the tsar is the only agent in society. And the popular awareness of the gulf between the tsar and the people is expressed by the Russian proverb: Do Boga vysoko, do tsaria daleJar, It is too high to God, too far to the tsar. After Peter’s death, he was characterized by posterity as the first emperor from whom everything in Russia derived. He left behind a daunting image of the emperor as warrior and hero. Moreover, he was declared a god on earth; not the image of God, but a god himself. In the famous poetic hyperbole of

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Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), a genius and universal scholar, “He was God, He was your God, Russia.” Peter showed that he could be the sovereign emperor without being a pious tsar. In fact, the Petrine myth included a cluster of images: There was Peter the Great the Enlightener, who introduced light into darkness, transforming nonbeing into being. There was Peter the Great the Educator, perhaps the very same personage only seen at closer range, who went himself to study in the West in order to teach his subjects, who sent them there to learn, who established schools in Russia. There was Peter the Great the Lawgiver, who issued progressive laws and regulations for the development and happiness of his country. There was always Peter the Great the Worker, who did everything himself and who laboured every minute of his life. That Peter the Great undertook the most ordinary tasks, repairing fishing nets or making shoes. By contrast, Peter the Great the Titan, a godlike avatar of the first emperor, constructed canals to change the river network in Russia and erected cities upon swamps. There was Peter the Great the dauntless Hero of Poltava, Peter the Great the Founder of the Russian Navy and, related but by no means identical, Peter the Great the Victorious Naval Commander. There were other Peters the Great besides. (Riasanovsky 1985:45-46) The new ruler myth was, however, rejected by the most traditionally oriented part of the Russian population. Starting with Peter I, being an emperor for the schismatic Old Believers meant not being a tsar; for masses of Old Believers, Peter and his successors remained changelings or Antichrists precisely because they were emperors and not pious Russian tsars. The difference between the image of the ruler held by the upper class, created and educated by Peter’s new Empire, and that held by the mass of serf peasantry would be the central rift in the Russian ruler myth. The Era of Empresses The gulf between mler and ruled widened and deepened during the age of empresses that followed the rule of Peter. Between 1725 and 1796, Russia was ruled by women, who came to the throne with the help of palace revolutions. The empresses were an outrage to the Orthodox Muscovite tradition: they were either foreigners (like Catherine I and Catherine II), or,

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although Russian, had spent a large part of their life abroad (as with Anna Ioannovna); or bom out of wedlock, unmarried and childless (as with Elizabeth); but, worst of all, they behaved like men, not like traditional women. “There was not really a dynasty one could identify, no sanctity one could feel, no piety one could admire. The Sovereign Emperor was such an abstraction that a German woman could fill the position.” (Chemiavsky 1969:91) This particular German woman, Catherine II, who ruled Russia between 1762 and 1796, made great efforts to emphasize her devotion to traditional Russianness. Before marrying the future Tsar Peter HI, she converted to Orthodoxy and changed her name from Sophia Frederica Augusta of SaxeAnhalt-Zerbst to Catherine ( KaterinaAlekseevna), which w homage to the foreign wife of Peter, the first Empress Catherine. But, unlike Catherine I, Catherine II learned Russian quickly and, contrary to her husband, was zealous about her devotions.8

The most famous Russian empress had originally, in contrast to all other modem Russian rulers, no connection with the reigning Romanov dynasty and, indeed, no connection at all with Russia. Her pietistic references to “Our Most Beloved Grandfather” meant, of course, the grandfather of her husband,

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Peter m , who was killed in the coup that brought her to power. Free of direct links to Peter the Great and his family, Catherine II was also free, in a much broader sense, of any relationship to Muscovy. In particular, she lacked totally the explosive hatred of the old order which was so prominent in the lives and work of the reformer himself and of his associates. The German ruler on the Russian throne even came to admire, in her search for worthy predecessors, the very Muscovite Tsar Alexis — and later St Vladimir of Kiev. (Riasanovsky 1985:34-35) The attitude of Empress Catherine to Peter the Great was complicated. In her search for predecessors who could make her position on the usurped Russian throne more legitimate, Catherine started from an ardent cult of Peter. “Whatever her shifts of emphasis, reservations and criticisms; whatever especially her private comments or at times her revealing silence for that matter, the overwhelming established public image of the reformer continued to dominate the Russian intellectual scene,” (ibid/. 35). Peter the Great was a formidable rival, and it is his glory that Catherine aimed to capitalize on in order to assign a still higher place in Russia’s history to the desperately ambitious empress. Modem Russian history was now divided into two stages, the Petrine and the Catherinian, the second building on the first but also rising above it. Catherine II liked to think of herself as a philosopher-empress, an ‘enlightened despot’ in the tradition of the 18th-century Enlightenment. She was, however, never willing to weaken the autocracy in the interests of personal liberty. If she deserves the title ‘the Great’ it is because of her achievements in foreign policy. But nothing could ever camouflage the fact that she had usurped the throne from a legitimate monarch by force and deceit. The Era of Empresses saw the final symbolic steps in the evolution of the autocratic ruler, “truly secular and truly absolute in the sense of owing nothing to anything outside himself and limited by nothing outside himself’ (Chemiavsky 1969:90). Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth, the Russian rulers crowned themselves in a ceremony performed in the Uspenskii Cathedral in Moscow. As Chemiavsky points out, the self-crowning, which began in 1742, reflected more accurately the new myth of the mler than did the traditional ceremonies during the first part of the century. The Sovereign Emperor was emperor sui generis, containing within him all the power and the source of all power, completely secular, or, what is the same thing, deified. (lbid.:9\)

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The new coronation scenarios presented Peter’s female successors as mothers of the nation, as emanations of Astraea, as goddesses descendant, inaugurating an era of universal justice and happiness. At the same time, they maintained the Petrine image of conqueror. Richard S. Whitman's penetrating analysis of scenarios of power, of myth and ceremony in Russian monarchy, reveals how the myth of renewal and the acclamation of concord between the empresses and the ruling elite combined with the leadership of the conqueror in their coronation rituals: The presentations of their assumption of power emphasized the heroic displays of violence producing the rupture with the previous reign, which stood for injustice and despotic self-interest. The show of force set them within the Petrine myth of monarch seizing his or her rule with ruthless violence in order to attain the utility of the realm. The demonstration of force was a symbolic requisite of enthronement, revealing the empress as the possessor of unbridled authority — one who had the power to act on behalf of the general good, without regard to the scruples of the previous ruler or cliques. Each seizure of power, therefore, was not concealed but publicly enshrined in public statements and displays as heroic act. Accession manifestos justified the coup, the empress appeared at the head of guards’ regiments, paintings glorified the show of force. (Wortman 1995:82) Since the glory of the monarch derived from the ability to display that glory to the people, an enormous amount of energy was dedicated to producing the spectacle of state. Artists, architects, poets, writers and musicians united in producing state entries, firework displays, water spectacles, ballets, masques and masquerades which celebrated the magnificence of state and its ruler. The great palaces of St Petersburg were built during this period to express grandeur through architecture. In the language of symbol and allegory, a dialogue was perpetually going on between the ruler and the ruled, and their respective positions defined and reinforced. Foreign Metaphor Eighteenth-century empresses continued the role of Catherine I and served as symbols of Western culture. In Petersburg, empresses adopted Western tastes

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and manners as signs of imperial rule. The Russian court was to become a semblance of the West; but it had to be a semblance, Russians acting as Europeans, performing the metaphor and behaving ‘like foreigners’. It was the very division between Russian origin and Western maimers that entitled the new nobility to rule. (Wortman 1995:86) Although foreigners were recmited into Russian service, their rule or domination of the court violated patriotic pride. The breach of this principle during the reign of Anna Ioannovna (1730-1740) animated the nobility with patriotic hatred against the German tyranny at the Russian court. Peter’s daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in 1740 as a ‘native’ (prirodnaia) empress, and elaborated the forms of Westernized presentation and celebration that Catherine II later used to glorify her own reign. The coronation rituals presented the empresses as heroines delivering and showering their bounty onto the people. The ‘iconography of happiness’ portrayed the empresses as the epitome of the virtues, and classical imagery strengthened the legitimacy of female monarchs whose rights to the throne were fragile. Moreover, by presenting themselves as foreigners, or as like foreigners, the empresses, following the example set by Peter the Great, affirmed the permanence and inevitability of their separation from the population they ruled. To be sure, this association of the ruler with foreign sources of power was the animating myth of the Russian monarchy from the 15th to the late 19th centuries. The myth made clear that royalty is the foreigner. In the words of Wortman: The devices of identification with foreign sources of power were varied — tales of foreign origin, analogies with or imitation of foreign rulers. Ceremonies of conquest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reaffirmed and reinforced the separation between the realms of the ruler and the ruled. In all cases, the source of sacrality was distant from Russia whether it was beyond the sea, whence the original Viking princes came, or located in the image of Byzantium, France or Germany. (Ibid.:5) For the Russian emperors that followed the era of empresses, the pattern of foreignness was already set. They all, unlike the Muscovite tsars, but imitating Peter the Great, had foreign wives who converted to Orthodoxy.9 French and German, alternately, but not Russian, was the language spoken in the court and in the palaces of the nobility belonging to the inner magic circle of power. The nobility also assumed foreign identities, adopted foreign

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styles, and boasted foreign lineages. In Russia the imperial myth took the form of an ongoing dramatization of the mler’s foreignness. In their scenarios of power, Russian emperors and empresses assumed varied guises — Roman emperor, Olympian god or Goddess, Prussian king, leader of Christendom, angelic presence, doting pater familias. They claimed membership of the company of European monarchs by borrowing Western designs and images of sovereignty. As Wortman further argues, The open, and often flamboyant displays of Byzantine or Western culture accentuated the inferior quality of the native population, who lived outside the heroic history of the ruling dynasty. The ceremonies of power — the coronation, the European advent, the court fete, and the parade — elevated the monarch in settings resembling distant realms: they were spectacular demonstrations of otherness, confirming the foreign and therefore exalted and sovereign character of the ruler and the elite. (Ibid.AOl) Tsar and People The reign of Nicholas I sought to change the foreign pattern, but without abandoning the Western traditions of absolutism rooted in the Petrine state. In Nicholas’s formulation, the Russian national spirit expressed itself only in the autocratic state and in the authoritarian inclinations indigenous to the Russian people: “the emperor was immanent in the nation, and the nation was immanent in the autocracy and the emperor”. Love for the monarch, rooted in the national psyche, became the grounds for the violent defence of the emperor’s power. “Feeling created the bond between tsar and people as it did between members of a family”. (Ibid.:275-278) The coronation ritual of Nicholas I enshrined innovation in the rituals and symbols of Russian monarchy. It was the first ‘national’ coronation to make the people an active agent of acclamation during the ceremonies: “The triple bow Nicholas made to the people from the Red Staircase on August 22, 1826, became, over the course of the century, a ceremony fixed in the tsarist repertoire, performed both at the coronation and during subsequent visits to Moscow. It came to be understood as an expression of the Russian national soul, displaying a bond between tsar and people.” (Ibid.:280) The coronation of Nicholas I was seen as an act of national unity, and the

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famous expression “the union of tsar and people” that later became the standard of official rhetoric was probably coined on that occasion. Dmitrii Bludov, state secretary to Nicholas I, watching the coronation ceremony, believed that Nicholas was worshipped by all Russians, but especially by the poor. Watching Nicholas prostrate himself before the Iverskaia Mother-ofGod, Bludov recalled the events of 1812, when Russia celebrated her victory over Napoleon. Red Square was lined with Infantry of the Guard, and before the Kremlin walls the band played God Save the Tsar — the first time this anthem, with its English melody, was played in Moscow.10 The strains of the music, mixing with the tolling of church bells, exalted him: it seemed that the words “God save the Tsar” resounded in all hearts. “It was as if I more than ever before believed in the blessedness of Providence and the future happiness of Russia.” 11 Such an ‘ecstasy of submission’ and similar feelings became general in the official discourse of the 19th century. The ideology of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality was developed during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), the apogee of the ruler myth in practice. The doctrine of official nationalism propagated the notion that it was the Westernized ruler and state, adored by common people, that constituted the distinguishing feature of Russia’s experience. While Nicholas encouraged national elements in the art, architecture, and music of his reign, he merely reformulated the old myth of conquest in contemporary terms. More German than Russian by blood and upbringing, he presented himself as the most native of Russians.12 Even the court ladies of St Petersburg began to dress in ‘patriotic attire’ (otechestvennyi nariad), a modified Russian national costume, covered in pearls and diamonds. This kind of dress had already been introduced by Catherine the Great, but in the reign of Nicholas I it was prescribed for the most formal occasions, and divergence from the official design was not allowed. During the same period, the centre of St Petersburg was rebuilt, re-creating Rome in Petersburg. The Triumphal Arch and the Alexandrine Column in Palace Square were erected; the classical facades of the official edifices were vast expanses; Rossi’s ensembles manifested discipline and uniformity. This grandiose Russian display of classical motifs suggested, in the opinion of the invariably acerbic Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in 1839, “the idea of being captive heroes in a hostile land.” (Custine 1989:88-89) The classical Roman theme evoked more emphatic statements in support of imperial patriotism of a Great Russian hue; in the enormous enlargement of the empire it was important to confirm Russia as the most imperial of nations,

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comprising more peoples than any other. The principal bond uniting the various nationalities of the empire was their personal devotion to the sovereign monarch and the adoption of the Westernized life style by the national Elites who were often made members of the Russian nobility. The ethnographic myth of nationalities who rejoiced in their devotion to a supreme, beneficent ruler went hand in hand with the myth of the mystical union of tsar and people. It has often been observed that myths, rather than approximating reality, tend to be in direct contradiction to it. And Russian reality was ‘unholy’ enough to have produced the ‘holiest’ myth of them all, the myth of the people. The Russian intelligentsia, driven by a desire for identity, a feeling of guilt towards the peasants, and the need for support against the overpowering myth of the ruler, began to appropriate and develop the myth of the people in more and more radical ways. This development took place during the period of general European Romantic nationalism, and each step in the exaltation of the people was assimilated into the ruler myth. The political myths that underlay the popular consciousness, as expressed in the symbolic terrains of body, God, and violence, re-emerged with ferocious force during the first quarter of the 20th century. The last Tsar, Nicholas II’s failure to reconcile autocracy with the liberal, democratic models of Western Europe ended in catastrophe for the old regime in Russia, and for the Tsar and his family, who were shot in 1918. The Revolution of 1917 meant the social, political, and economic (if not the physical) end of the old elite. And, for the intelligentsia, it also meant the disappearance of the familiar forms of the myths; the tsar was gone, and the ‘Russian People’, as they had been accustomed to think of them, no longer existed either: “Holy Russia”, “Russian God”, “Russian Soul”, and “Russian Tsar” were myths to justify a pretty intolerable reality, but, as myths, they were premised upon it. Also, as myths, they lived longer than the reality which they justified and reflected. As such, they died when the Russian people, whatever they were, passed from justification to change. (Chemiavsky 1969:227)

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The Last Tsar In 1913, the celebration of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty was the last great pageant of the Russian monarchy.13 During the three centuries of their rule, the monarchs were presented as altruistic, angelic, authoritarian, both mortal and divine, both Western and Russian, Christ-like, conquering, embodiments of national feeling, enlightened and benevolent, fathers to the people, heroes of erotic conquest, humble, legislators, loving and kind, military commanders, moral instructors, exemplars of moral perfection, mortal heroes, mothers, omniscient and omnipresent, pacifiers, philosophers, religious leaders, saviours, selfless, selfrestrained, models of simplicity, strong and forceful, warriors, and wise (Wortman 1995). The scenarios of power changed with time, but all of them were intended to impress both Russian and foreign opinion with the loftiness of the monarch’s power: “the sumptuous, highly ritualized presentations of Russian monarchy, produced at an enormous cost of resources and time, indicate that Russian mlers and their advisers considered the symbolic sphere of ceremonies and imagery intrinsic to their exercise of power” (ibid.:3). Wortman argues that such presentations, by acting on the imagination, tied servitors to the throne, and supported the persistence of absolute monarchy in Russia and the abiding loyalty of the nobility. The process of elevation lifted the sovereign into another sphere where he or she displayed the superior qualities of a being entitled to rule. The elite that surrounded the monarch also took on something of this sacral aura. (Ibid. A) Ten years earlier, in 1903, two centuries had passed since the founding of St Petersburg which marked the beginning of the Imperial period in Russian history. A magnificent costume ball was held at the Winter Palace to celebrate the birthday of Peter’s city; curiously enough, the costume theme chosen was based on the dress of the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the father of Peter the Great. No doubt, this was due to the aversion felt by Nicholas II for his august predecessor. The theme for the ball was a sign of the increasing fascination with the origins of Russian national culture, which stimulated an important movement of Russian revivalism during the first decade of the 20th century. The Empress Alexandra and the invited guests were dressed in the costumes of Old Muscovy, with their family jewels adapted by the famous goldsmith Faberge to match those of medieval costume. The ballerina Karsavina described the Tsaritsa as “an icon of rigid beauty”. The Tsar himself wore a red velvet brocade costume that had belonged to Tsar Alexei. (Ometev and Stuart 1990:116)

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Contemporary photographs of Nicholas usually show him dressed in military uniforms, ranging from a simple tunic, his favourite, to the full official attire of the commander-in-chief. From the reign of Paul I, military uniform became the accepted dress of Russian monarchs, replacing the mythical analogy as an expression of political transcendence: “Throughout the nineteenth century, Russian emperors would fuss over the details of their uniform and redesign them to fit their tastes and the fashion of each era. This passion, so troubling to sympathetic critics of the monarchy, ensured that the emperor’s uniform would continue to define prowess, power, and beauty for the Westernized elite.” (Wortman 1995:170) Completing a national census form in January 1897, Nicholas gave his rank as “first nobleman of Russia”, his occupation as “master of the Russian land,” and his side activity as “landowner”. As master of the Russian land, he implied that Russia was his to dispose of as he pleased. He thus persisted in an old tradition of the Muscovite tsars who regarded Russia as their property. The young emperor demonstrated his liking for the pre-Petrine past from the very beginning of his reign. The longed-for heir to the Romanov dynasty, Alexei, bom in 1904, was named after Tsar Alexis, whom Nicholas greatly admired. His marriage to Alexandra Feodorovna, alias Alice Victoria Helen Brigitte Louise Beatrice of Hesse, was a happy one, but, as earlier in Russian history, the Romanovs were not able to produce strong male offspring.14 The sumptuous and lavish celebrations marking the bicentenary of St Petersburg and the tercentenary of the Romanovs, the jubilees of the Battle of Poltava (1909) and the victory over Napoleon at Borodino (1912), as well as numerous high-society balls held in the early decades of the 20th century, could not obscure the general feeling that the foundations of autocracy were crumbling. The writers, poets, and artists of the Silver Age cried out in their apocalyptic visions that Russia was heading toward a catastrophe. The end of the century was seen as auguring the end of the world. The final act of the national tragedy began in Moscow and ended in St Petersburg. On the day of the coronation, May 14, 1896, Nicholas and Alexandra, both dressed in magnificent ermine robes, appeared on the Red Staircase of the Kremlin, and amid deafening hurrahs and to the sound of God Save the Tsar played by the court orchestra, entered the Uspenskii Cathedral. There, following a long service, the Emperor recited the Creed, after which he placed the large crown on his own head and a smaller one on Empress Alexandra Feodorovna; his full Imperial title was then read out, and the artillery salute and numerous congratulations began. While kneeling and saying the appropriate prayer, the Emperor was anointed with chrism (holy oil) and received communion. (Iroshnikov et al. 1992:28-29)

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An incident during the coronation was, however, taken by many, including Nicholas and Alexandra, as a bad omen. At the moment of taking the crown in the Cathedral, as he approached the sanctuary to receive the sacrament of chrismation, the jewelled chain supporting the Order of St Andrew the FirstCalled unexpectedly tore loose from his robe and fell at his feet. 122)

Three days later, the terrible catastrophe of Khodynka occurred, this too seen as presaging worse to come. The programme of popular celebrations included the distribution of meals and mugs to commemorate the occasion. The gifts on offer, together with the promise of spectacles and a circus programme (Partem et circenses!) brought masses of people to Khodynka Field, a training ground for troops of the Moscow garrison, which was dotted with deep ditches, gullies and trenches. No less than a half million people arrived. And, when a crowd pressed tightly together staggered in the direction of the buffets, people by the thousand fell into a ditch, others fell on top of them, and other people walked over them. According to the official statistics, 2,690 people were injured, 1,389 of whom died. The true number of those affected could scarcely be calculated.

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Faced with the choice of carrying on with the programme of festivities, or of cancelling them, Nicholas decided to continue as though there had never been any disaster. In the evening, the Emperor set off with his wife to the ball, expressing the opinion that, although the catastrophe had been a very great misfortune, it should not be allowed to cast a shadow over the coronation festival. And although royal donations were made to benefit those who had suffered, with the Emperor himself visiting the wards and attending the requiem service, his reputation was shaken. Nicholas II came to be known as “the Bloody”.15 The symbolic import of these coronation festivities which ended in disaster represents the entire reign of Nicholas II in concentrated form. He ascended the throne in a time of relative peace and was met with hope and sympathy by fairly large sections of the country’s population; he ended with a state to all intents and purposes brought to its knees, rejected himself by a patient and submissive people who only the day before had loved their tsar. (Iroshnikov et al. 1992:33) In terms of the ideal body, the relation between the crowned head and the corpus of the population is one of total control and subordination. And so it was presented in the official myth of the Russian monarchy, which was intended to remain unchanged forever, vo veki vekov. The myth of the anointed Tsar of All Russia, however, came to an end in the wake of the First World War and the February Revolution. When Nicholas II abdicated on March 2, 1917, he turned into a mortal Nikolai Romanov who could be shot a year later. With him disappeared the court culture of the Romanov dynasty, rich in symbols, regalia, and pageantry: “an elaborate visual ornament to the sacred and charismatic persona of the emperor-tsar.” (Stites 1989:80) But the cult of the autocrat survived. From the early 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet people — at least officially — expressed their unlimited devotion to the Father of the Nations (otets narodov), who ruled over them from the Kremlin. In the Soviet culture of the period, the ‘iconography of happiness’ can be traced to the myth of the superhuman, charismatic leader. Monarchist revivalists in contemporary Russia believe that her current problems can only be solved by the restoration of the Romanov dynasty. A recent pretender, Nicholas HI, has been blessed by the Russian Orthodox

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Church. The newspaper Literatumaia gazeta (12.2.97) reported a press conference with Nicholas Romanov HI in Moscow February 7, 1997. Notes 1. The Modem Encyclopedia o f Russian and Soviet History (1985), vol. 40, p. 31. Compare the comment of the Russian historian S.M. Soloviev (1820-1879), who wrote that Ivan IV “dared to adopt the terrible title of the Tsar which earlier denoted Tatar khans, the overlords before whom our princes trembled”. Soloviev, S.M. (1989, reprint), Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 5-6, p. 460. 2. See also Kantorowicz (1957), The King’s Two bodies. Ernst Kantorowicz shows that the Christian ruler as mediator between God and man shared with Christ the attribute of a dual nature. As Christ, whose image he is, the king is both god and man; he is man in his being and a god in his function. In Russia, the tension was between the divine nature of princely power and the saintly nature of the prince as man. 3. Quoted in Neville 1990:32. On the Doctrine of the Third Rome, see: Uspenskii 1984, Tsar i bog’; Chemiavsky 1969:114ff; Billington 1967:48ff, 93. 4. Florenskii, P.A. (1916), Okolo Khomyakova: (.Kriticheskiie zametki), Sergiev Posad, p. 26; quoted in Uspenskii 1994: 111. 5. The doctrine of “Moscow, the Third Rome” evolved into a highly complex national and religious philosophy, capable of various, and often differing interpretations. 6. On the regalia, see also Khoroshkevich (1993:69-80); Soboleva and Artamonov (1993:33); Howes (1967:97-103). Peter the Great was the last tsar crowned by the Monomakh cap. The first European-type crown was created for the coronation of his wife and successor, Catherine I, in 1724. The following emperors and empresses used the European-type crown, and the Monomakh cap became the symbol of pre-Petrine Russia. The royal regalia also included the sword of state, the shield of state, and the seal of state, all of which (as well as the state banner) were first used by Empress Elizabeth in the mid-18th century. The chain of the order of St Andrew the First-Called was also part of the Imperial regalia. (Iroshnikov et a l 1992:38-40) 7. Primechatelnye istorii i anekdoty o rossiiskikh gosudariakh (1994:11). On the details of the life at the medieval Moscow court, see Zabelin [1872], reprint 1990). 8. Catherine duly observed the rituals of the Orthodox Church, and displayed sober behaviour in public. This did not impede her, though, from living in private the promiscuous life that was common at the European courts of her time, and which she had seen practised by the unmarried and childless hedonist Empress Elizabeth. Although she shares with Elizabeth a reputation for being a voluptuary, much of the salacious gossip about her private life was the result of male prejudice. As John Alexander points out in his recent biography, “Amid the welter of state duties and court routine she sometimes felt achingly lonesome. A nymphomaniac she was not, but a normal person in an abnormal position.” Alexander (1989:226). 9. A curious detail noted by Uspenskii (1994:151,158) is that the patronimics of the converted empresses was often Feodorovna: both Nicholas I and Nicholas II, for example, married German princesses who adopted the orthodox name of Alexandra Feodorovna. Uspenskii connects this with the Romanov family’s Mother-of-God icon (Feodorovskaia Bogomater), and with the tsar’s palace church {Feodorovskii gosudarev sobor) in Tsarskoie Selo. A reverence for the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail Feodorovich, also seems to be a good guess.

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10. The historiography of the Russian National Anthem is rather poorly developed. For an attempt at a comprehensive presentation, see Soboleva and Artamonov (1993:146-193). In short, the first official anthem of Russia was “A Prayer of Russians,” Molitva russkikh, written by the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii (1783-1852) to the English melody “God Save the King”. In 1833 “God Save the Tsar”, Bozhe Tsaria khrani, became the new National Anthem, with music composed by A.F. Lvov (1798-1870). This official anthem survived till 1917. Along with it, a number of popular melodies, such as Mikhail Glinka’s “Glory to the Tsar”, Slavsia..., from his patriotic opera of 1836 Zhizn za Tsaria (A Life for the Tsar), later named Ivan Susanin, and the march Proshchaniie slavianki (Farewell of a Slav Maiden), can be considered informal Russian anthems. See: Russkaia starina, xxxi/102 (1900:145168). Since 1990 a melody by Glinka written in 1834 as an unfinished sketch for a national anthem has been adopted as the new National Anthem of the Russian Federation. 11. “Dva pisma gr. D.N.Bludova k supruge ego,” Russkii Arkhiv, no. 5 (1867), 1046-47; quoted in Wortman (1995:284). 12. While Peter the Great heeded only his own wishes when entering his second marriage to Martha Skavronska (later Catherine I), his successors paid much more attention to dynastic considerations; according to the prevailing standards, an heir could only marry a princess of the blood, and Germany offered a tremendous selection of royal brides. The Romanovs of later years were, from a genealogical point of view, probably 9/10 German rather than Russian. (Iroshnikov etal. 1992:123) 13. The reigns of the Romanov tsars began with Mikhail, 1613-1645, followed by Alexei, 16451676; Feodor III, 1676-1682; Ivan V and his half-brother Peter I, who ruled jointly 1682-96 (under regent Sophia, 1682-89); Peter I (ruled alone), 1696-1725; Catherine I, 1725-27; Peter II, 1727-1730; Anna Ioannovna, 1730-1740; Ivan VI, 1740-1741; Elizabeth, 17411761; Peter HI, 1761-1762; Catherine II, 1762-1796, Paul 1 ,1796-1801; Alexander I, 18011825; Nicholas I, 1825-1855; Alexander II, 1855-1881; Alexander III, 1881-1894; and ended with Nicholas II, 1894-1917. 14. This time the fault lay with Alexandra; her joy at the birth of a long-awaited heir (her fifth child) was marred by the discovery that he suffered from the incurable disease of haemophilia, which he had inherited through his mother from his great-grandmother, the British Queen Victoria. The system of primogeniture reintroduced by Paul I after the Era of Empresses excluded the four healthy daughters from the right to the Russian throne. The parents’ constant fear for the life of their son was not only a family tragedy but a major reason for the rise of Grigorii Rasputin whose presence was thought by the empress to be favourable for Tsarevich Alexei’s health, but who played such a fateful and destructive role in the last years of the empire. Grigorii Rasputin (1872-1916), healer and ‘man of God’, was a Siberian whose ‘psychic’ peasant insights brought him to the attention of the Imperial couple, who were in despair over the agonies suffered by the haemophiliac Tsarevich, which only Rasputin was able to alleviate. Supposedly a starets, a spiritual elder, he nevertheless lived a life of dissipation; but what counted was that he was generally believed to be the arbiter of the fate of Russia, and also, by many, to be a German agent and a lover of the German-bom Empress. His sensational murder fits well into the climate of mmour, slander and myth that paved the way for the onslaught on the monarchy prior to February 1917. (Ometev and Stuart 1990:123) 15. On ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1905 more than 140,000 workers, wearing their Sunday best, marched to the Winter Palace to ask the tsar to alleviate their plight. Their faith in their sovereign evaporated under a hail of bullets.

5 Orthodox Christianity: The Collective Spirit

“Udruchennyi noshei krestnoi Vsiu tebia, zemlia rodnaia, V rabskom vide Tsar Nebesnyi Iskhodil, blagoslovliaia.” There was one, my land, who knew thee: With a cross upon him pressing, Like a servant passing through thee, Heaven's King once gave his blessing. Feodor Tiutchev 1

The Legend of Choice A well-known legend referred to in the Primary Chronicle tells how Prince Vladimir’s emissaries in Constantinople visited the buildings where the Greeks worshipped their God, and were overwhelmed: [...] we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies o f other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty} Whether it is true or not, this legend points to an immediate sense of beauty, to a willingness to see spiritual truth in the aesthetic appeal of the Orthodox liturgy, rather than in the rational shape of its theology. The Russians who did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth were surely impressed, if not hypnotized, by the cadences of the Greek Orthodox chanting and by the rich smell of incense. Beauty was present not only in the

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church’s mosaics, frescos, and icons, but also in the ornate vestments worn for sermons and stately processions. And it was no accident, as Dmitrii Likhachev claims, that the main argument for the true faith was its beauty. “It was precisely the primacy of the artistic principle in church and state life that caused the first Russian Christian princes to so carefully construct their cities and place the churches centrally to them”. (Likhachev 1991:113) The intricacies of international politics which brought about the conversion to Christianity were, of course, more mundane. Suffice it to say that the emergence of Kievan Rus as an acknowledged European Power under the rule of Prince Vladimir (980-1015) was considerably facilitated by the adoption of Christianity, in its Byzantine form, in 988. But the events preceding the conversion of Rus clearly show the widespread influences to which the state was exposed. To Vladimir came Jews from the Khasar Kaganate, Moslems from a Bulgar state on the Volga, Catholics from Germany, and a Greek philosopher from Byzantium. The victory of the last of these was no doubt partly a consequence of Kiev’s commercial relationship with Constantinople. Also, the fact that Vladimir’s Rus was a multi-ethnic and multi­ confessional state maintained by his druzhina of warriors favoured an international religion: Christianity was adopted as soon as Vladimir had united Rus. In the words of Likhachev (1991:124): “The state simply could not live with fragmented belief systems.” These are the standard interpretations of the conversion. There was of course much more than politics, beauty, or economics that allowed Vladimir and his retinue to force the new religion on the regional 61ites. The flexibility of local religious traditions and Orthodoxy also facilitated the adaptation of Christianity. Vladimir’s agency is again a highly charged issue. (Poppe 1982) The effects of conversion were as profound as they were ambivalent. From now on, Russia’s historical identity was bound up with her faith, and with its claim that Orthodoxy had solved all the basic problems of belief and worship by means of the ‘right praising’, pravoslaviie, which is the Russian translation of the Greek orthodoxos. This historical conflation of the spiritual and ideological forces associated with Orthodoxy has been of great importance to the cultural and political development of the country. As we look at the history of Russian culture, James Billington suggests, it may be helpful to think of the forces rather than the forms that lie behind it. Three in particular: the natural environment, the Christian heritage, and Russia’s Western contacts, helped shape “the elusive world of ideas and ideals” which is that of the Russian spirit and soul. (Billington 1967:viii)

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Orthodox Christianity created the first distinctively Russian culture and provided the basic forms of artistic expression and the framework of belief for modem Russia. The Orthodox church also played a key role in infecting Russia with the essentially Byzantine idea that there is a special dignity and destiny for an Orthodox society and but one true answer to controversies arising within it. (.Ibid.:X) My reader should by now have realized that this chapter only skims the surface of the most significant cultural contributions made by Orthodoxy in Russia; those who wish to pursue the subject further should consult the recommended reading list. I am not concerned with the competing scholarly interpretations of historical data and documents, although I do supply some of the current (but often hotly contested) dates, facts and learned opinions about Russian Orthodoxy. History in the minds and works of historians tends to be rather different from history as reflected in the popular mind. My focus is on common ideas about Orthodoxy that are deeply embedded in the contemporary secular Russian consciousness: mine, for example.

Pagan Heritage During the first century of Russian Christianity, the new faith was not widespread, being restricted to the princes’ families, to their druzhina (warriors), to rich city dwellers, and probably also to the upper stratum of the local communities. In the 1080s, Metropolitan Ioann II noted that Christian

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marriage rites were only observed by princes and boyars, while the common people continued to follow the old pagan traditions. Pagan magicians, volkhvy, also set themselves and their faith in opposition to princely power and to the Church. The Christianization of society led to the ousting and destruction not only of the pagan cults but also of the original folk arts. The Church declared the traditional dances and rites to be the ‘Devil’s games’, and popular musical instruments, such as psalteries, pipes, horns, etc., were often destroyed. Nevertheless, many traditional beliefs and rites survived these persecutions, which resulted in the gradual merging of pagan and Christian beliefs: into the so-called dvoeveriie, double faith (Levin 1993). Orthodoxy became the state religion of Rus, but the pagan heritage proved so tenacious that the Church was compelled to include elements from former cults in its everyday practice, to reconcile itself with others, and to close its eyes to the rest. This was the only way for Christianity to become a generally accepted confession throughout Russia. This syncretism was to make itself felt for centuries to come. The old pagan world view would continue to permeate the culture of Russian feudal society, its art, and its literature. One example of this is The Lay of Igor’s Host, Slovo o polku Igoreve from the early 12th century.3 Paganism was not a unified, consistent belief system. There was a ‘higher’ mythology associated with the pagan gods which Vladimir, before his adoption of Christianity, set up in his own pantheon “outside the tower courtyard”, and whose wooden idols were thrown into the Dnieper after the baptism of Rus. But paganism also included a ‘lower’ mythology, which was a conglomeration of beliefs that regulated people’s relationships with nature, with the soil they tilled, and with each other. And, perhaps, the most important example of the preservation or even augmentation of peasant paganism is their cult of the earth, in which the generative powers of the soil were venerated.4 As elsewhere in Christened Europe, folklore and folk religion have preserved a poetic world of beliefs with links to paganism. In Russian folktales, skazki and in magic healing formulas we can still come across the old nature spirits: leshii who was the master of the forest, vodianoi and rusalki, water sprites, Baba Yaga, an ambivalent witch, and domovoi, a household guardian. All of them, along with personified elements of nature (fire, wind, frost), could be either good or bad, depending on the circumstances. Always benevolent, though, were the celestial couple, the sun and the moon, and their children, the stars.5

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Byzantine Connections Orthodoxy is a variety of Christianity that took shape in the Byzantine Empire during the 4th to 8th centuries and became a separate Christian denomination in the middle of the 11th century. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Rus was traditionally linked both with Constantinople (Tsargrad or the ‘tsar’s city’; evidently, there were tsars before the Russian tsars appeared as monarchs of Muscovy), as well as with the Slavs in Central Europe and in the Balkans, who also maintained close contacts with Byzantium. These ties largely determined the ecclesiastical orientation of Rus towards the Eastern Christian world.6 Byzantium, too, had a great interest in converting its northern neighbours to Christianity; it would not only reduce the pressure that they exerted on the Byzantine empire, but also create the basis for incorporating Rus within the sphere of Byzantine political influence. Two very significant borrowings from Byzantine ideology which were known to Kievan Rus, and somewhat adapted, should be mentioned here: namely, the notion of a ‘symphonia’ of church and state, and the notion of autocracy. (Meyendorff 1989:9-28) In the late 980s, the treaty according to which 6000 Russian troops were sent to the aid of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II stipulated that the “Tsar of Russians”, Vladimir, would marry Anna, sister of the Emperor Basil, and that his country would embrace Christianity. At his baptism, Vladimir received the Christian name of Vasilii, in honour of Emperor Basil’s patron, St Basil the Great.7 This changeover from one religious cult to another was accompanied by the destruction of the effigies of pagan gods worshipped previously, and now publicly desecrated by the prince’s servants, and by the erection of churches on the former sites of pagan cults and temples. Thus, St Basil’s Church in Kiev, dedicated to the St Basil the Great already mentioned, was erected on the same hill where the pagan idol of Perun had stood. Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev later admitted that the baptism in Kiev was performed under coercion: “No one resisted the prince’s order pleasing unto God, and every one was baptized — if not of their own free will then out of fear for the giver of orders, for his religion was connected with power.” {The Russian Orthodox Church 1988:26)8 With Christianity, there came an organized Church under a Metropolitan, usually a Greek, nominated from Constantinople. Simultaneously manuals of Church law and ritual were produced, along with volumes of sermons, the lives of the first saints and monks of Kievan Rus, and the first national chronicles. The visual impact of the new religion could be seen in the

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construction of churches in Byzantine style and in the form of frescoes, icons, mosaics, and ornamented manuscripts. The Ostromir Codex of 1056-7, the oldest-surviving Russian manuscript, is a richly illustrated and ornamented collection of readings from the gospels prescribed for church services and arranged according to the days of the week. There were, however, no complete versions of the Bible, let alone independent theological synthetic teachings, produced in early Russia. (Billington 1967:7) I make no claims here to be offering a systematic account of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church; rather I wish to bring out Orthodoxy’s vital role in the formation of Russian cultural identity. Above all, conversion to Christianity was important in bringing literacy to Rus, through the practice of using sacred texts translated into Old Church Slavonic: a language sufficiently close to the Old Russian vernacular to be immediately intelligible in Kiev. Use of the vernacular was critical in the successful dissemination of Orthodoxy. The liturgy also used a recognizable language. This allowed a clergy that was much closer to the people, and it had important consequences for the development of non-liturgical language and literature. The modem Cyrillic alphabet of thirty-two letters owes its name to St Cyril, who, with his brother St Methodius, were the first to translate biblical texts into a Slavonic dialect, in about 863, while on a mission to the Slavs of Moravia, then part of Bulgaria. As a matter of fact, Bulgaria probably supplied Slavic-speaking missionary clergy to the fledging Russian church.9 Christian art was also introduced into Russia at a relatively late date, when it was already fully developed. The art of Constantinople became that of Kievan Rus. In Kiev, great churches were built with amazing speed, and adorned with sumptuous mosaics and paintings, but Vladimir had once again to turn to Byzantium for the vestments and fittings needed to complete them. (Talbot-Rice 1993:11) Outstanding works of architecture, painting, jewellery, printing, literature and hymnography were produced for the new cult; their significance was not, however, limited to their practical ecclesiastical use, although their origin was primarily determined by it. Hymnography, for example, was more than the singing and composing of hymnal verse, but also the writing of church music and the use of the znamennyi chant and notation system. We might also mention the development of religious drama — not only the drama of the liturgy, but also of religious holidays (both the pageants of later times and their predecessors). Through translations of Byzantine and some West European books, Rus became familiar with the achievements of classical and medieval literature, historiography, philosophy and natural science. On the other hand, the ethos of Byzantine Russia would later differ

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profoundly from that of Western Christianity. Through its use of the Slavonic vernacular as a medium of communication, it was less able to share in the European culture of Greek and Latin. Secondly, it set greater store by piety than by knowledge, so that the Eastern Church had a pronounced anti­ intellectual attitude. Thirdly, it was in much more intimate contact with the State than the Churches of almost any country in Western Europe. When the Mongols came to make their own contribution to the development of the Muscovite state, one consequence would be a reinforcement of the collective at the expense of the individual. (Kochan 1962:17-18) Christianity brought with it the concepts evolved in ancient Rome and in Byzantium of the need for domination by and subordination to state power. Orthodoxy recognized the existence of slavery in Rus as lawful and inevitable. The clergy owned serfs; the monasteries, though, did not use serf labour. The Orthodox Church also strived to establish monogamy as the only form of marriage, the patriarchal permanent family as a divine institution (“Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder”), and placed a ban on intercourse and marriage between close relatives. Unifying Power In the initial period, i.e. the late 10th and the 11th century, except for a short period in the second half of the 11th century, the Kievan Metropolitanate united the entire territory of the ancient Russian state; in other words, it was the centre of a national Church, before the actual emergence of the Russian nation. Later, at the time of feudal fragmentation, the Russian Orthodox Church maintained its external unity, although in practice it did almost nothing to prevent internecine strife between the Russian principalities, itself sinking into the mire of controversies among the princes and boyars. And yet the cruel Mongol Yoke was not so harsh on the clergy as it was on the rest of the population. Part of the Golden Horde’s policy of subjugating Rus was to promote the Orthodox Church, whose privileges were preserved and confirmed. On the one hand, the Church regarded the foreign invasion as God’s punishment of the people for their sinful life, and this had to be accepted with humility. On the other hand, however, the clergy shared the patriotic feelings of the population and supported the struggle against the godless invaders. James H. Billington links the extraordinary development of icon-painting

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and veneration in 13th and 14th-century Russia with this period of weakened political authority. “The omnipresent holy pictures provided an image of higher authority that helped compensate for the diminished stature of temporal princes. In Russia, the icon often came to represent in effect the supreme communal authority before which one swore oaths, resolved disputes, and marched into battle.” (Billington 1967:31) Under the Mongol Yoke, Russian culture survived in the holy retreats of monasteries and churches. It was also a time of great missionary endeavour among the local people; St Stephen of Perm and St Cyril of Beloozero deserve mention here. Theological instruction was found in the lives of saints. Many a pious monk and starets, or spiritual adviser, compiled chronicles and copied old manuscripts for monastery libraries. The most important of the early monastic foundations was the ancient Kiev Cave Monastery, Pecherskaia Lavra, followed by the Trinity monastery (later Troitse-Sergieva Lavra). Monasteries also grew up near to the other cities of old Rus. The old monasteries and churches form what is now called The Golden Ring around Moscow. The impressive stone churches of The Golden Ring, erected during the 12th to 16th centuries in Rostov, Uglich, Yaroslavl, Suzdal, Vladimir, served as islands of Christian literacy and spirituality, as well as places of refuge from a secular world marked by ignorance, violence, and the struggle for power. Russian wooden church architecture, which is no less fascinating, has not survived the assaults of time, warfare, and frequent fires. One marvellous exception is the collection of old churches on the island of Kizhi in the Onega lake, now an open-air museum, where some of the early 18th century wooden churches and other buildings from Northern Russia are preserved.

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A church or cathedral, sober, “provided a centre of beauty and a source of sanctification for the surrounding region. The word sobor, used to describe the gatherings in which the authority of God was invoked on all communal activities, also became the word for cathedral; and the life of each “gathering” was built around the liturgy: the ritual, communal re-enactment of Christ’s saving sacrifice.” (Billington 1970:7) The notion of sobomost, or Russian collective spirit, is derived from the Orthodox gatherings; the idea that the entire membership of the church, both lay and clerical, together preserve the faith is often called sobomost. For many neo-Slavophile writers it still denotes an innate striving towards communality, an underlying principle of Russian life, in which spiritual consensus replaces formal legalisms of all sorts. The Third Rome There is a certain irony in the fact that the Church actively cooperated in the creation of a strong Russian state by providing the ideological underpinnings for Muscovite autocracy, which was then able to dislodge the Church from its position of power. Ivan HI (1462-1505), a typical Russian ruler in many ways, showed his national temper with especial vigour in his robust defence of the Orthodox faith, the practice of which was closely identified with Muscovite and panRussian patriotism. It was during a surge of combined national and religious enthusiasm that Muscovy first embraced full independence. Before Ivan’s accession, Metropolitan Isidore of Russia, himself of Greek nationality, had gravely offended his flock by accepting the union of the Eastern and Western Churches as negotiated at the Ferrara/Florence Conference of 1438-39, for which offence he was arrested on his return to Moscow. Isidore and the Union were repudiated, and ten years later a new Metropolitan, the Russian Jonas, was elevated independently of the Patriarch of Constantinople — who had hitherto appointed the heads of the Russian Church. This date thus marks the emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church as an autocephalous organization: an episode so significant in the process of national self-assertion that its five hundredth anniversary was lavishly celebrated in officially atheist Soviet Russia in 1949. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Russians regarded this catastrophe as divine retribution visited on the Eastern Church for accepting (temporarily) a union with Rome. In 1461 the Russians removed “of Kiev” from their metropolitan’s title, which henceforward read “of Moscow and All

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Russia”. Now proudly conscious of its new status as the only independent Orthodox state, Muscovy began to see itself as the centre of Christendom, a doctrine promulgated by the monk Philotheus in his celebrated letter of 1510 to Grand Prince Vasilii HI. (Hingley 1991:36-37) The idea of the Third Rome has been traced back to the Bulgarian monk Cyprian, who became Metropolitan of Moscow in 1390. If the idea of the Third Rome did come from outside of Rus, this reveals quite a lot about its openness to outside ideas (even if only from the Orthodox world). There are many other examples of fruitful contacts and exchanges of ideas between Muscovy and its Western neighbours. Western Influences Gradually, in the wake of changes in foreign policy and the arrival of foreign technicians there was a slow seepage of foreign ideas into Muscovy. Greek Orthodoxy had hitherto dominated such little intellectual life as existed. The Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation passed Muscovy by completely. Apart from certain heresies, the Orthodox Church was able to enforce a more or less complete separation from developments in the West. Whereas to the West, Greece signified Hellenic antiquity, to Muscovy it signified Byzantium. Any incipient intellectual penetration was sternly repressed. This was carried to such lengths that Tsar Michael, in the first half of the seventeenth century, would have a golden jug and basin beside his throne in the audience room of the Kremlin. After receiving a Western ambassador, he would then wash away the stain of occidental pollution. (Kochan 1962:88) The domestic manual of Domostroi compiled in the 1500s is a clear example of Muscovite Orthodoxy, and of Muscovite attempts at insularity. It promoted monastic ideals in family life and the patriarchal organization of the household in minute detail, leaving nothing to the will of sinful woman. Speaking of isolated medieval Muscovy, we also have to bear in mind the territories not ruled by Muscovy, and their greater openness to Western ideas. Muscovy was in a constant state of expansion from as early as the 1300s to the late 1600s, so it is not easy to define it geographically, ethnically, or culturally. And many important influences filtered through to Moscow via Kiev. As was noted by Masaryk in the 19th century, European ideas

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necessarily had a revolutionary effect in Russia. The same was true in the 17th century. This first became apparent in the field of religion, following the conquest of the Ukraine. Politically, it was desirable to bring Muscovite and Ukrainian Orthodoxy into the closest possible harmony in order to facilitate the absorption of the conquered territories. Moreover, the Ukrainians, who came directly under the authority of the Constantinople Partiarchate, had remained closer to original Byzantine usages. There were thus considerable inducements to reform the Muscovite Orthodox liturgy and ritual, and to accept the offer of the Ukrainian clergy to help in this task. Did one cross oneself with two fingers or three? Did one recite a double or a triple Hallelujah? Such things as these provoked the most intense conflict. Nikon, the domineering and imperious Muscovite Patriarch, began to introduce reforms in 1653, and at once met with fierce opposition. This was not only religious, of course. The Orthodox Church, since its earliest days, had identified itself very intimately with the life of the people and State. The “white” parish clergy lived the life of their neighbours in the villages. The Church was undoubtedly at a low intellectual level, but — perhaps for that very reason — at one with its congregation, so that Nikon was in fact launching an offensive against the long-cherished popular associations of Moscow The Third Rome, the heir to Byzantium, the Christian bulwark against the Mongols — and against all the self-sufficiency of Muscovy. Again, to accept ideas from the West, as distinct from techniques, savoured somehow of treachery; for the West, from the days of Teutonic Knights onwards, had always confronted Muscovy as an aggressor. This was the reality that made sense of the fanatical opposition that faced Nikon. (Kochan 1962:88-89) This was a foretaste of the sort of opposition that Peter the Great’s Western-inspired reforms would provoke half a century later. By the 17th century, however, the wall of Muscovite isolation was already cracking. One of the signs of Western penetration into the heart of Russia was the so-called Nemetskaia Sloboda, that is, the German Settlement, outside Moscow, with a population of several thousand foreigners of mixed origin. To the Muscovite masses all foreigners were Germans, nemtsy, literally ‘mute’. Through their influential position in Muscovite society, the “Germans”, who were military men, merchants, teachers, artisans, doctors,

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apothecaries, paper manufacturers, iron-smelters, glass-workers, formed something of a European community, asserting a system of values that transcended mere practical usefulness. Western-style music would be organized to accompany the banquets of the Kremlin; the residences of the leading boyars would house European furniture, clocks, mirrors, pictures. The boyars and the Tsar would ride in carriages upholstered in velvet and fitted out with glass windows. One of the most remarkable innovations was the erection of a building in the village of Preobrazhenskoe for use as a theatre. The director was Johann Gregory, the pastor of a German Lutheran church in the Sloboda. The Tsar’s religious scruples were overcome by reference to the example of the Byzantine emperors. (Kochan 1962:90) Although Moscow already had a printing press, and some people such as the boyar Matveev owned a library in four of five foreign languages, the state of Muscovite intellectual life generally corresponded to the almost complete lack of provision for education. Moscow was wary of losing its national identity, and would succumb neither to the reactionary spirit of the Greeks nor to the unimpeded progress of the Germans. On the other hand, in the interests of its mission in the world, Moscow must reform itself through the introduction of Western culture and enlightenment: translate foreign works on agriculture and trade, develop a mercantilist trading policy, organize its artisans into guilds and its merchants into self-governing corporations, and so forth. (Ibid.:93-94) The Schism Nevertheless, on the whole, the 17th century was an outstandingly devout period during which the Church remained a powerful institution, with two leading prelates in particular acquiring extensive political powers. The first was the Patriarch Philaret (Feodor Romanov), who also happened to be the father of Mikhail, the first Romanov Tsar, and who became de facto ruler of Moscow from 1619 until his death in 1633, even assuming the title “great sovereign”, also held by his crowned son. Both Mikhail Romanov and Patriarch Philaret became national heroes for having saved Muscovy from outside (Polish) rule. This is another example of Orthodoxy’s contribution to the national heritage. Yet more dominant, not to mention more domineering, was the low-bom Patriarch Nikon, who also dubbed himself “great

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sovereign”, persistently humiliating and bullying the kindly Tsar Alexis in the middle years of the century. Patient though the Gentle Tsar was, such tantrums proved ineffectual in the long ran, with Nikon being deposed from office and banished to a distant monastery. (Hingley 1991:66) Though Nikon fell from power as an individual, the important ecclesiastical reforms sponsored by this patriarch remained in force. They included a revision of the Russian scriptural and liturgical texts by systematic comparison and collation with the Greek originals, from which they had diverged over the centuries. They also included such rulings as those determining the number of fingers which believers should hold together as they crossed themselves, and the precise spelling of the name Jesus. In so pious an age these matters assumed immense importance. Many of the faithful indignantly refused to accept Nikon’s tinkering with the cult of their fathers, thus inaugurating a schism, raskol, in the Church and earning themselves the name raskolniki, or starovery, Old Believers. Their most remarkable representative was Archbishop Awakum, author of an autobiography in the Russian vernacular which is an important literary landmark.

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The Old Believers were severely persecuted by the state, with Archbishop Awakum himself being burned at the stake. Other schismatics staged protest demonstrations of a special kind by immolating themselves en masse in wooden churches and bams. Restricted very largely to Great Russians (as opposed to Ukrainians and Belorussians), and among them mainly to peasants and lower-order townsfolk and merchants, the Old Belief movement was a manifestation of Russian traditionalism and hostility to foreign innovations. Almost a quarter of the Russian population was involved in the protest movement of Old Belief. The schism that split the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666-1667 alienated thousands of devout men and women. Two separate cultures developed in Russia: the one oriented backwards, rigidly defending the old roots and customs, and the other open to modifications but gradually becoming Westernized and rootless. The Old Believers practised their faith as outsiders for more than two centuries. Denied the sacraments of the Russian Orthodox Church, they in turn denied that its ‘new’ ways could lead them to salvation. Always at odds with the established Russian Orthodox Church and the tsar, the Old Believers created their own separate world within the Imperial Russian state. Eventually, however, the movement broke up into competing sects. The concept of starover, Old Believer, derives from the Russian staraia vera, literally Old Faith, because this group of traditionalists faithfully tried to stick to the most archaic elements of Slavonic Christianity. In contrast to the power game played by the Russian Orthodox Church in the two centres of the Empire, the Old Faith became the manifestation of Russian peripheral Christianity. Around the secret network of monasteries and skits, or hermit’s refuges, the starover families formed islets of traditional Russianness on the borders of the empire, where they were often the first Russian settlers. The encounter between Russian Old Believers and the indigenous peoples of Karelia, Northern Russia and Siberia is an extremely complex and little studied phenomenon.10 Until recently, very little has been known about the life of Old Believers and other groups of religious traditionalists. But despite persecutions continuing throughout the Imperial and Soviet periods, these schismatic religious movements are far from extinct, and interest in Old Believers and their ‘culture of community’ as representing ‘real national values’ has been steadily growing since the demise of the officially atheist Soviet state.11 The Schism may be interpreted in many ways, and many questions may be asked about the willingness on the part of the population to exchange one ritual for another. Was it a matter of ritual substitution, or one of expediency, since resisters to the reforms faced harsh sanctions? Perhaps the hold of

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Orthodoxy over the populous was so weak that such a change was significant to only a minority, the ones who were Old Believers? The Schism was, of course, not only a matter of conflicting personalities or religious reform. Complex political and social problems were also very much part of the reign of Tsar Alexis and the Schism. The social unrest of the time (dating back at least to the 1645 uprising in Moscow), which precipitated the most significant change in the legal code thus far (the 1649 Ulozheniie), political power struggles, and anti-foreign sentiments were all part of the Schism. The Schism was but one of many turning points in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Petrine reforms delivered another severe blow, after which the Church became bureacratized, professionalized, and then disestablished. A secular Westernized culture arrived in the wake of the Enlightenment, challenging the old Orthodox doctrines in explaining the world to people who were encountering modernization and modernity. The separation of church and state, and the atheist policy of the Soviet period were, however, unable completely to extinguish Orthodoxy as an institution, nor faith among the people. Orthodoxy also survived in the emigre communities outside Russia, suggesting some intricate connections between Orthodoxy and Russianness. Why did it survive? Is it so embedded in the collective consciousness of the nation that it cannot die? Another answer might be that the survival and revival of Orthodoxy today is an ominous development, because it favours tradition over modernity, the otherworldly over practical needs, insularity over openness, and so on. Vehicles of Meaning If religion can, on the whole, be seen as a system of symbolic communication between the human and the divine, then each particular religious symbol points both to the whole system and to a separate part of it, thus being charged with profound significance, which works simultaneously on many levels. Each detail represents the whole tremendous sacred truth; the heavenly kingdom is reflected in every part of the ritual as in a drop of holy water. The most important service in the Orthodox Church is the Divine Liturgy, the elaborate Mass, or communion service. It is celebrated at least every Sunday and on important holidays, with great pomp reminiscent of the Byzantine imperial court, from which is derived the style of the ornate vestments worn by the clergy during the service. The liturgy is always chanted, as all the services of the Orthodox Church, usually with elaborate

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choral accompaniment; instrumental music is forbidden.12 The congregation stands, there being no pews in Russian churches, although the services tend to be extremely long. People cross themselves, bow, genuflect and pray in front of the icons, kiss them and offer candles and incense before them. Icons decorate the often ceiling-high iconostasis, which separates the sanctuary, the altar area, from the body of the church, but icons are also displayed all around the church. They are also hung in Russian Orthodox homes, where they serve as the focal point for prayers. Discussing the difference between Eastern and Western Christianity, the Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii described a Russian Christian: His meal is eaten with prayers. Each action he begins and ends with a prayer. With a prayer he enters the house and with one he leaves it. The least peasant, entering the palace o f the Grand Prince [...] does not bow to the master before he bows in front o f the holy image which always stood in the place o f honour in every building, large or small. Thus the Russian associated every action o f his, whether important or not, with the highest conception o f his mind and with the deepest concentration o f his heart.13 Such idealized cliches of Russian piety were opposed by the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii, who wrote in his Letter to N.V. Gogol in 1847: “The basis of religiosity is pietism, reverence, and fear of God. But the Russian utters the name of God while scratching his backside. About icons he says: When necessary, pray to it; otherwise, use it to cover a pot. Look carefully and you will see that by nature it is a deeply atheistic people with a lot of superstitions, but no traces of religiosity.” This opinion is reminiscent of Alexander Herzen’s famous words about the Russian peasant, who is superstitious but indifferent to religion, which to him is an impenetrable secret. “In order to clear his consciousness he maintains all external rituals of religion. On Sunday he goes to the liturgy, so that for six days he no more thinks about church.” But what such quotations from disputes among the Russian intelligentsia reveal is hardly more than the outsider’s inability to view peasants except in terms of traditional stereotypes: either as pious, or as abysmally ignorant in matters of the faith. These stereotyped opinions refer more to the myths that outsiders had about the religious life of the Russian peasant population. (Chulos 1994:309) The present chapter, too, oversimplifies, omits or glosses over many important issues. This applies to levels of Orthodox piety, to the diversity of

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official and private religious beliefs and practices, as well as to the wealth of symbolism in religious pageantry, and in pilgrimages to holy shrines and relics. Only in passing, I mention such important aspects of Russian religious culture as the cult of saints, hagiography, or folk songs and ballads with pious content. Some of these forms of religious expression are experiencing a revival nowadays, but many are lost forever; descriptions of others can be found in pre-Revolutionary documents, e.g. in the archives of the Russian Orthodox Church (RIGA), or in Tenishev ethnographical materials (Byt velikorusskikh krestian-zemlepashtsev, reprint 1993). Icons: Windows to Heaven Among the visual symbols of the Orthodox faith, icons are the most sacred and powerful vehicles of symbolic meaning; the whole emotional world of traditional Russian piety is concentrated in them.14 According to Orthodox theology, icons are not to be worshipped in themselves, and this fact determined what subjects were portrayed and how they were represented in non-realistic two-dimensional images. Icons are meant to be channels of communication between the sacred and the profane. Icons were among the first of the religious objects which Prince Vladimir and his immediate followers imported from Byzantium. The earliest examples brought to light so far belong to the 11th century and, with but rare exceptions, are the work of Byzantine and not of Russian artists (Talbot-Rice 1993:11). The religious use of the icon followed the defeat of Byzantine iconoclasm in the 9th century. Using the rich tempera paints which had replaced the encaustic wax paints of the pre-iconoclastic era, Russian artists carried on and amplified the tendencies which were already noticeable in 11th and 12thcentury Byzantine painting: (1) to dematerialize the figures in icons, presenting each saint in a prescribed and stylized form; and, (2) to introduce new richness of detail, colouring, and controlled emotional intensity. The Russian artist stencilled his basic design from an earlier, Byzantine model onto a carefully prepared and seasoned panel, and then painted in colour and detail. He gradually substituted pine for the cypress and lime of Byzantine icons, and developed new methods for brightening and layering his colours. (Billington 1967:29-30)

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‘Icon’ is a Greek word meaning ‘image’ (in Russian, obraz), and, just as the Greek Orthodox Church thinks of itself as the reflection of the kingdom of heaven upon earth, so does it regard icons as images of the holy. Icons are indeed the sacred religious pictures of the Orthodox Church, and although in later times some were made of metal, the majority consisted of paintings on wood. The form originated in the tomb portraits of ancient Egypt. The Byzantines perfected the technique and evolved their iconography, transforming the old medium into something wholly Christian and entirely their own. The Russians took the art further, giving it a national complexion. (Talbot-Rice 1993:10)15 A 6th-century legend that the first icon was miraculously printed by Christ himself out of compassion for the leper king of Edessa became the basis for a host of Russian tales about icons ‘not created by hands’, nerukotvomaia. The triumphal carrying of this icon from Edessa to Constantinople on August 16, 944, became a feast day in Russia, and provided a model for the many icon­ bearing processions which became so important in Russian church ritual. (Billington 1967:29, n.55) To begin with, icons were primarily produced for use in churches and for carrying in processions, the latter being generally painted on both sides of the board. These early icons were fairly large in size, but with the introduction of the elaborate iconostasis — which was almost certainly a Russian innovation dating from the 14th century — they tended to become smaller. The place of an icon on an iconostasis was precisely defined, and the icons in the main or lowest row were always somewhat larger than the others. (Talbot-Rice 1993:10) In Byzantium and Kiev, illustrated cloths and icons had often been placed on the central or “royal” doors that connected the sanctuary with the nave of the church and on the screen separating the two. Holy pictures had been painted and carved on the beam above the screen. But it is only in Muscovy that one finds the systematic introduction of a continuous screen of icons extending high above the sanctuary screen, representing a kind of pictorial encyclopedia of Christian belief. From at least the end of the 14th century, when Rublev and two others designed the beautiful three-tiered iconostasis for the Archangel Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin — the earliest surviving iconostasis — these illustrated screens began to be a regular feature of Russian churches. (Billington 1967:33) The iconostasis provided a symbolic model of the separation between the

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absolute realm of the divine and the sinful congregation. It was also a reminder of God’s continuing involvement in human affairs, and a reassurance of God’s power in and over history which could be immediately comprehended even by those incapable of reading or reflection. Moreover, the icon screen represented the hierarchical order of Russian society. Each figure occupied a prescribed position in a prescribed way, but all were unified by their common distance from the God of the sanctuary. Amid this sea of pictures, thought tended to crystallize in images, rather than ideas; and the ‘political theory’ that developed in early Russia has been well described as a belief that “the Tsar is, as it were, the living icon of God, just as the whole Orthodox Empire is the icon of the heavenly world.” {Ibid.) Icons, and the frescoes painted directly onto the walls and ceilings of churches, served the common people as ‘books for the illiterate’. If Byzantium was pre-eminent in giving the world theology expressed in words, theology expressed in images was given pre-eminently by Russia, as Leonid Uspensky and Vladimir Lossky put it (1952:46). In Moscow, from the 15th century onwards, a demand arose for smaller icons, since these were better suited for use in the small private chapels which were being built in large numbers throughout the capital. The growing prosperity of the Muscovites also rendered the personal ownership of icons possible, and it then became usual to place an icon (with a gently flickering oil-lamp, lampadka, in front of it) in the far right-hand comer of each room as seen from the entrance, as well as at the head of each bed in the house. The custom of studding an especially beloved icon with jewels arose in the 14th century and was followed soon after by the introduction of metal frames, or metal casings, riza, either covering all but the faces and hands of the figures or only such details as their halos. (Talbot-Rice 1993:10) Early Russian icons depict events from the Old and New Testaments, primarily accounts of the earthly lives of Christ and the Holy Virgin Mary, the lives of saints, or figures from Christian history and legend. There is a general belief among Russian Orthodox people that icons can help a person in need and bring about cures. They are looked upon as a source of support and consolation; in daily prayers, the believer’s innermost thoughts are confided to icons; absolution from sins, blessing, and protection against evil is pleaded for in front of them. Some of the old icons are considered to have miraculous powers, chudotvomaia. Legends of the miraculous appearance of such icons take their place in Russian medieval chronicles alongside accounts of the most important events of the day.

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The Trinity Icons have been called speculations in paint. Dmitri Likhachev puts it emphatically: “What is our treatise of the beginning of the fifteenth century? The Trinity of Rublev.” (Likhachev 1991:125) Nowhere is Rublev’s artistic language more sublime than in this most famous masterpiece, Troitsa Vetkhozavetnaia, The Old Testament Trinity, with its ethereal curvatures and luminous patches of yellow and blue. The subject illustrates how Russian iconography continued to reflect the attitudes and doctrines of the church. Since the Trinity was a mystery beyond man’s power to visualize, it was represented in its symbolic or anticipatory form of the three angels’ appearance to Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament. Pavel Florenskii has argued in his treatise on the Trinity that the pathos of the icon originates from the sublime harmony, love, peace, and immaterial light radiating from it (Florenskii [1919] 1994:175). In Dmitrii Likhachev’s opinion, “The main idea of Rublev’s Trinity was the idea of unity, which was so important in the darkness of our separation.” (Likhachev 1991:131)

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It is no accident that the very concept of Russia appeared at the end of the 14th century. Andrei Rublev created the icon Trinity “in praise of Reverend Father Sergius” and “in order that looking at the Sacred Trinity may destroy fear of dissension in this world.” Sergius of Radonezh, later canonized, was a conduit for specific ideas and traditions: the unity of Rus was linked with the church. There was constant rivalry for the Great Princedom and for the title of the Great Prince, but the church was united. And therefore the main idea of Rublev’s Trinity was the idea of unity. (Ibid. :130-131) Andrei Rublev painted his icon in the first quarter of the 14th century, for the Trinity Church in the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra (a monastery founded by the hermit Sergius in 1340), where it was later replaced by a copy, the original icon being moved to the Tretiakov gallery. The prevailing ideologico-political explications of the meaning of the Trinity leave out the important question of how ordinary Russians interpreted it, and what place this icon motif had in their lives (Frierson 1993). To a modem Russian, the Trinity icon primarily represents artistic beauty: a contemplative, spiritual kind of beauty, which, in the words of Dostoevskii, “saves the world”. The Russian critic V. Lazarev has seen in the luminous colours of Andrei Rublev’s works interior links with the beauties of the surrounding northern forest: He takes the colours fo r his palette not from the traditional canons o f colour, but from Russian nature around him, the beauty o f which he acutely sensed. His marvellous deep blue is suggested by the blue o f the spring sky; his whites recall the birches so dear to a Russian; his green is close to the colour o f the unripe rye; his golden ochre summons up memories o f fallen autumn leaves; in his dark green colours there is something o f the twilight shadows o f the dense pine forest. He translates the colours o f Russian nature into the lofty language o f art. (Lazarev 1960:19) Virgin of Vladimir The history of the highly revered early-12th-century Vladimir Mother of God, or Our Lady of Kazan, “demonstrates the close collaboration between faith and fighting, art and armament, in medieval Russia” (Billington 1967:32). The transfer of this icon to the Uspenskii Cathedral inside the Moscow

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Kremlin in the late 14th century enabled it to become a symbol of national unity long before such unity became a political fact. Generation after generation prayed for her intercession in this cathedral dedicated to her entrance into heaven. Brought north by the warrior prince Andrei Bogoliubskii, the icon was transferred to Moscow in 1395, expressly for the purpose of inspiring the defenders of the city against an expected siege by Tamerlane in the late 14th century. The name “Kazan” for the icon derives from the popular belief that Ivan the Terrible’s later victory over the Tatars at Kazan was the result of its miraculous powers. Victory over the Poles during “The Time of Troubles” in the early 17th century was also attributed to it. Many believed that Mary had pleaded with Jesus to spare Russia further humiliation, and that he had promised to do so if Russia would repent and turn again to God. Four separate yearly processions in honour of the icon were established by 1520, moving within a few decades out of the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin across Red Square to St. Basil’s (also called “Kazan”) Cathedral. This icon was also often used to sanctify troops setting off to battle, and to “meet” other icons or dignitaries coming to Moscow. (Ibid.) The original icon of the Virgin of Vladimir is a Byzantine work, the Virgin Eleusa, also known as Our Lady of Tenderness (in Russian, Umileniie), dating from about 1130. The main distinctive feature of this particular iconography is that the Christ child has his face pressed against the cheek of the Virgin and one arm around her neck. According to legend, this icon was painted by St Luke the Evangelist and was kept in Jerusalem, Constantinople, and finally in Kiev, before Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii moved it to Vladimir. In addition to the cult that developed around this miracle-working icon, new poses of the Madonna began to appear in bewildering profusion. Most models were Byzantine; but there were uniquely Russian variations of this general type of “Our Lady of Tenderness”. Some four hundred separate styles of representing the Virgin have been counted in Russian icons.

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Holy Russia For both the Orthodox and schismatics the essence of what was holy in Russia was contained in its true faith. In the words of Chemiavsky, Russia was ‘Holy Russia’ because it was the land of salvation, as expressed in its icons, saints, people, and ruler. But the historical origin of the term indicates its concrete limits:

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“Holy Russia” was what remained, during the Time of Troubles; after Tsar and State and Church hierarchy were gone; it was the concentrated essence of Russia, visible when the form of Russia was destroyed. Hence, both on the transcendental and concrete levels “Holy Russia” was an absolute, immutable, because the land of salvation could not change except catastrophically, nor could the Russian essence change without losing itself. (Chemiavsky 1969:116) What we have here is the emergence of a popular myth: it symbolized a conception of immutability or a functional essence, which precluded all change and which would require opposition to any social and political changes. In this sense, it manifested that perpetual and universal mass inertia which it was the task of the state mechanism to overcome. The Old Believers, who rejected the emperor and the state, still remained in ‘Holy Russia’; ‘Holy Russia’ existed in the past to which one should return, and it also continued in their communities which fled the Russian state. (Ibid. A 16-117) Both the Orthodox and the Old Believers saw ‘Holy Russia’ as being embodied in a system of values which were their own; to all of these the Petrine secular state, in which the emperor in effect rejected the image of the saintly and pious ruler, was antithetical. Chemiavsky assumes, therefore, that the Old Believers, in their violent opposition, were expressing and putting into practice the beliefs of the masses, the myth of ‘Holy Russia’. (Ibid.: 118) This epithet symbolizes a new and different dimension to the concept of Russia. Despite the historical origin of this dimension in the 15th century, in contrast to the historical Muscovite tsardom, it symbolizes the non-historical, transcendental Russia. The identifying feature of this other Russia is the Orthodox Russian people. ‘Holy Russia,’ then, was a popular appellation expressing popular ideology. It was a territorial concept insofar as it embraced the land of salvation, with its icons, saints, and the Christian Russian people. The way in which the term was used in popular folk-songs and epics did not prescribe the political form of Russian society; that is, Russia could be ‘Holy Russia’ whether there was a tsar or not. That there was an inherent tension between the myth of the ruler and the myth of the people, although presented above in an extreme formulation, was shown by the extreme positions taken during the Petrine crisis. “In other words, to be of Rus was to be an Orthodox, a Christian, to indicate one’s status in eternity; to be of Rossiia was to be of the political state. What we seem to have here are two different Russias, each expressing a different myth.” (/«l) With the Union gone, Russia is still there, albeit with its boundaries

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altered. But, as every sentinel watching the Russian border knows, the national border is not a fiction, “because on the one side of the border people speak Russian and drink more, on the other side they drink less and talk differently” ; such is the simplest, most concise definition of Russianness delivered by the delirious anti-hero of the cult book of the 1970s, MoskvaPetushki by Venedikt Erofeev.26

How Russian then is this habit of heavy drinking? Is it ethnic, national, or is it geographically and socially determined? Obviously, drinking is not an exclusive privilege of the ethnic Russians, nor is heavy drinking limited to Russia alone. As a supposed national trait, however, it is part of the Russian behavioural stereotype promoted by the Russians themselves. The trouble with applying simple explanations to serious, complex social problems is that references to ethnic custom or intrinsic national disposition are not concerned with historical facts or with social practices rooted in historical reality, but provide ‘illusory explanations’ (Bourdieu 1977:19), concealing the real origins of Russian alcoholism.27 Drinking Tea The other national drink in Russia is tea, a non-dramatic, non-destructive twin to vodka. In parallel use for more than 300 years, tea and vodka constitute a

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competing couple: statistics show that when tea consumption in Russia grows, that of vodka declines, and vice versa. (Pokhlebkin 1995:22) Tea appeared in Moscow in 1638, at the time of the most horrendous alcohol drinking. A present containing 64 kg of tea was sent to Tsar Mikhail Romanov by a Mongol Khan. One-and-a-half centuries later tea, chai, imported from China, became the most popular everyday drink in Moscow. For a very long time, tea remained a city drink. Until the end of the 17th century, it was sold only in Moscow; even in the 18th century, Moscow remained the primary centre of tea sales and tea drinking. Tea came to St Petersburg from Moscow. As usual, the two Russian capitals differed in their tastes: Petersburg preferred coffee. Up to the 1850s, there was only one tea shop in the northern capital, while in Moscow in 1847 specialized tea shops numbered more than one hundred, and tea was served in three hundred tea houses (chainaia). Peasants selling their products in Moscow markets, horse drivers and merchants were the most ardent tea lovers and tea drinkers. (Ibid;36S) 28 The samovar, the Russian tea urn, came into common use in Russian households in the late 18th century. It is believed that the first samovar was brought to Russia from Holland by Peter the Great himself. Having arrived, it stayed, since the samovar was an economical way of getting hot water quickly. A centre for the production of Russian samovars developed in Tula, a city which also specialized in producing weapons. The samovar provided hot water for the tea; a very strong tea mixture was made in a small teapot that was kept warm on top of the samovar; some of this strong brew was then poured into a cup and diluted with hot water from the samovar. If you want your tea the Russian way, drink it in a thin glass in a metal glass holder (podstakannik), with a slice of lemon and sweets: jam, honey, biscuits, small pastries (pirozhki) or a cottage cheese cake (vatrushka). The samovar produced not only hot water, but also smoke from the charcoal fire burning in its central tube, so that in the summer people preferred to light the samovar outside the house. Tea by the samovar is an obvious symbol of the traditional Russian home. Just imagine Chekhov’s heroes gathered in the evening around the samovar on the veranda of a Russian summer house, or dacha, a guitar being strummed to accompany the long, longing conversations about unfulfilled dreams, about an imagined life in Moscow, and the pervasive skuka, the boredom of provincial existence... For the ‘superfluous’ heroes of Russian literature, beginning with Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, the simple pleasures of the samovar were a token of narrow-minded provincialism, and a symbol of suffocating home life. And so it remained until the recent nationalist resurgence of the fin-de-Soviet era

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when everything ‘traditional’, the samovar included, was redefined as part of the homely cosiness of life in the now idealized pre-Revolutionary Russian past. Other kitschified symbols of forgotten traditional Russianness, such as decorated Easter eggs, have also re-materialized during the last decade. Ethnicity and Nationality Mark Gottdiener (1995) has argued that the relation between symbolic and material culture has been ignored in postmodern cultural research. I subscribe to his variant of socio-semiotics, which explicitly relates symbolic processes to social context, to the “life of signs in society.” Socio-semiotic analysis that includes symbolic material articulation helps explain symbolic relations, inasmuch as meaning is not produced through the free play of signifiers alone; rather, signification is constrained by the forces of power in society. “Material culture is the condensation of past knowledge and ideologies that have materialized technique, modes of desire, and knowledge for social control.” (Gottdiener 1995:30-31) The overly simplistic proofs of tangible Russian ethnicity discussed above were chosen on the basis of their relation to the body, to its vital needs for food, protection, and contact. These objects and customs belonging to the long-lost peasant world are, however, constantly recreated in contemporary nationalist discourse as visible symbols of homogeneous, essential, normative Russianness. With their help, stereotyped connections are established between some particular ‘traditional’ piece of clothing, food or drink, and a supposedly intrinsic quality pertaining to all pure, ethnic Russians. In the symbolic terrain of the body, i.e. the natural, healthy and strong, essentially Russian body, the desired standards of morals and beauty are made manifest. As modem researchers (Foucault 1979, Bauman 1995, Gatens 1996, Gottdiener 1995) suggest, such a body is a cultural construction: the ‘natural’ body is regulated by social norms, it signifies a variety of social codes. Thus, nationalist discourse effects a tacit transfer of values from the idealized Russian body to the collective body of the nation, which is conceived outside time and space. Nationalist references to tradition tend to be essentialist and ahistorical, insofar as they are incomplete without their social contexts. But this constant recreation of ethnicity is hardly concerned with history, sociology or ethnography. It is concerned with feelings: “to understand ethnicity as a vital social force one has to consider subjective feelings related to group belonging more than to objective cultural criteria.” (Ethnic Identity 1995:12-13)

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According to the definition provided by George A. De Vos, an ethnic group is composed of people who include themselves in the group and who hold in common a set of traditions not shared by others with whom they are in contact. (Ibid.:l8) Ethnic identity tends to be coextensive with national or regional identity. It can be argued that for many people, Russian national identity and subjective cultural identity are indistinguishable, especially since ethnic identity and national territorial identity have been united historically. In the previous chapters of this book, I have tried to show that, symbolically and actually, territory is central to Russianness. Nevertheless, the ethnic and the national Russia do not coincide. In the centre of the country they overlap a great deal, forming the core of ‘real Russianness’, diverging more and more towards the national peripheries inhabited by different ethnic aborigines. If, as is argued here, the ethnic identity of Russians consists of their subjective, symbolic, or emblematic use of any aspect of Russian culture, ethnic features such as clothing or food can easily become national emblems, for they show others who one is by one’s origins and to what group and territory one’s loyalty belongs. In the contemporary world of complex societies, identity is increasingly expressed in ethnic terms. Discussing ethnic persistence, the need for a psychological approach to the emotional, even irrational underpinnings of ethnic identity has to be underlined: “As a subjective sense of belonging, ethnicity cannot be defined by behavioral criteria alone. Ethnicity is determined by what one feels about oneself, not by how one is observed to behave. Defining oneself on social terms is a basic answer to the human need to belong and to survive.” (Ethnic Identity, 1995:25) Now that the Soviet Union as a multi-ethnic imperial state is gone, a diminished but still multi-ethnic Russia is bedevilled by ethnic conflicts within its borders and in the surrounding, now-independent, territories. In the post-imperial Russian Federation, ethnicity or ethnic identity is as important as social class or class consciousness were in the Soviet state. A potentially conflicting form of social loyalty, ethnic identity is constantly being newly created and developed, with both positive and negative social consequences: either as a hostile projective dehumanization of another group, or as a selfrighteous ethnicity, gaining group prestige from a refabricated or embroidered ethnic heritage. “The collective fabrication of a mythical past may prove to be as socially efficacious as actual history.” {Ibid.:43) There are, of course, several alternative levels of belonging in modem Russian society, ranging from the tribal ethnic group to a broader identity with the nation-state, or the Federation. An individual can move from one

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such realm of identity to another without conflict, for these identities can be contained within the others, like a set of Matrioshka dolls. Ethnocentrisms and ethnic identity, however, are ultimately related to questions about the satisfaction afforded by social life. Belonging to a ‘superior’ group and deflecting one’s aggressive needs onto legitimately hated outsiders may help resolve problems with asserting individuality. An ethnic identity also provides savour, the taste of one’s past. Ethnicity, therefore, in its narrowest sense, is a feeling of continuity with a real or imagined past, a feeling that is maintained as an essential part of one’s self-definition. Ethnicity is also intimately related to the individual need for a collective, as a member of some group. “In its deepest psychological level, ethnicity is a sense of affiliative survival. If one’s group survives, one is assured of survival, even if not personally.” (Ibid.:25) Notes 1. An old-fashioned but thorough presentation of Russian folklore can be found in Sokolov, Russkii folklor (1938), the only one in English so far, Russian Folklore (1971). Kravtsov and Lazutin’s Russkoe ustnoe poeticheskoe tvorchestvo (1983) adopts a more modem approach, and cites extensive literature on sources and research in various genres of Russian folklore. For Russian folk beliefs, see Ivanits (1989). Important contributions to the semiotic study of the Russian and Slavic folk tradition are made by Ivanov and Toporov (1974), Uspenskii (1982,1994). 2. By folk in modem ethnography and folkloristics is meant any consistent set of people who develop a group tradition. See Bascom (1977). 3. ‘Costume as sign’ is a way of thinking proposed by Bogatyrev first in a small article in Slovo a Slovesnost 2 (1936:43-47), and later in his famous monograph on the functions of folk costume in Moravian Slovakia, Funkcje kroja na Moravskom Slovensku (1937); in English translation in Approaches to Semiotics 5 (1971), with an excellent presentation of Petr Bogatyrev and structural ethnography by Boris L. Ogibenin. 4. The symbolic power of the beard for the Russian peasant was underestimated by Tsar Peter, who forcibly introduced the shaving of the face for the nobility, and thus turned the majority of the traditional population against him. The Slavophiles re-introduced the Russian style of clothing, including beards, partly following European fashion of the period. 5. Covering the hair was obligatory for Russian peasant women. This custom, observed in many (if not all) traditional societies is connected to hair magic; as Sir James George Frazer explains, contagious magic is “the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails...” (1978:42-43). Female hair was seen as especially dangerous, mainly as a potential erotic attraction. For Russian folk beliefs connected to hair, see Baiburin and Toporkov (1990), Ivanits (1989.passim). 6. For general dress research, see Barthes (1983), Gottdiener (1995). Russian folk dress is analysed in Maslova (1984). Ethnographical dress collections are presented in Russkii narodnyi kostium (1984), Leningrad; Russkii narodnyi kostium (1989), Moskva. 7. For world models generally, see Mify narodov mira II (1982:161-164). 8. Mify narodov mira I-II (1980,1982); Eliade (1991); Hilton (1995).

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9. See Russkii narodnyi kostium (1984, 1989). 10. Foreigners visiting Muscovy commented, sometimes very unflatteringly, on the whiteblack-red face painting of the Russian women. See Inostrantsy o drevnei Moskve (1991:349,365,393). 11. This Russian custom, along with other culinary reminders of the Russian Imperial past, has survived in Finland. The Savoy restaurant in Helsinki prides itself on serving Mannerheim Schnapps (also called a ‘Mannerheim roof) in glasses filled to the very brim, as was the habit of Marshall Mannerheim, who had spent his youth at the Russian court as an officer of the prestigious Imperial Chevalier Guard. 12. Cooking is a part of female labour and female traditional culture connected to the home. On the male-female division in tradition, see: Women s Folklore, Women's Culture (1985). Generally on food: Mantanari (1994), The Culture o f Food; Toussaine-Samat (1987), History o f Food. On Russian ritual food, see Propp (1963). 13. Some foods are traditionally transformed into medicines. Decoctions or infusions of herbs grown locally are part of folk medicine. On Russian herbalism and folk medicine, see Ivanits (1989), Popov (1903). 14. On Russian proverbs about drinking, see Pushkarev (1994:115-118). 15. Gogol (1975:90-91). See even Lynn Visson, ‘Kasha vs. Cachet Blanc’, Russianness (1990:60-73). For a full discussion of Gogol and food see Natalia M. Kolb-Seletski, ‘Gast­ ronomy, Gogol, and his fiction’, The Slavic Review, 1970, vol. 29(1), 35-57. 16. A detailed presentation of traditional bread rituals can be found in Sumtsov (1885). See also Ivanov and Toporov (1967) on the symbolism of the ritual wedding loaf, korovai. 17. On bread and salt, see Smith and Christian (1984); Slavianskaia mifologiia (1995); Hellberg-Him (1990). 18. Torsten Malmberg points this out in his book on human territoriality: “The house is not only a structure but an institution with a complex set of purposes. Creating an environment best suited to the way of life of a people, it is thus a social unit of space. The demands of territoriality, basic to the house, most probably make life easier by making people more secure and better able to protect themselves. Certainly the outer walls of the house are of special importance, detaching and almost sanctifying part of the outer space. Gates and doors mark the division between the sacred and the profane world outside. Particularly the passing over the threshold is in most countries accompanied by rituals of different kinds. Its sanctity is probably related to a constant need of maintaining territory.” (Malmberg 1980:314) 19. See Rossiia. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar [St Petersburg 1898], reprint 1991, Leningrad: Lenizdat, pp. 99-105, 224-7. On health in pre-Revolutionary Russia, see also Solomon and Hutchinson (1990). Child mortality in Russia is discussed in Ransel (1988). 20. On the double status of objects, see Baiburin (1981). The custom of painting and decorating Easter eggs is not specifically Russian: it can be found almost everywhere in Europe, as described by Venetia Newall in her fascinating book An Egg at Easter (1971). Many variants of Easter egg dishes and egg games are also common to Slavonic cultures and to other European traditions. (76/d.:321-374) 21. Altogether, Faberge produced about 50 souvenir eggs for the Russian Imperial family. Most of them were sold to foreign collectors after the Revolution. See, e.g., Masterpieces from the House o f Faberge (1989). 22. Cf. Gimbutas (1984); Newall (1971). 23. See Baiburin and Toporkov (1990:44-69). 24. The proportions of the mixture of water and spirit in the Russian national drink was the result of experiments in vodka composition carried out in 1890s by the chemist Dmitrii

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27.

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Mendeleiev, the author of the periodical table of the elements. He found that the ideal alcohol content for vodka was 40 per cent by weight, which had never been precisely achieved in the earlier mixing by volume. In 1894, Mendeleiev’s formulation was adopted by the Russian government as the standard for the country’s national vodka. In 1902 a law was enacted under which only vodka with the ideal strength, that is, 40 per cent alcohol, could be termed true vodka: Moskovskaia vodka. Quoted in Christian (1990:5). On the history of drinking in Russia, see also Pokhlebkin (1991,1992,1995); Pryzhov (1868). A bible of alcoholic delirium, a poem in prose by Venedikt Erofeev (1991), MoskvaPetushki, Sankt-Peterburg:Soiuz; English translation: Moscow to the End o f the Line, New York:Taplinger Publ. Comp. (1980,1992). No less than 35 million alcoholics were reported by the researcher Irina Anokhina referring to the official statistics on alcoholism in Russia, at the international conference on drugs and alcoholism that started in St Petersburg on June 8,1996. Alcohol abuse, in her opinion, is to blame for the falling life expectancy in Russia: from 64,9 to 58 years between 1987 and to­ day. (Svenska Dagbladet 10.6.96, p.6) A curious detail concerning the Russian connection between tea and alcohol could be added here: the Russian temperance movement of the 19th century was linked to tea drinking. Tea­ houses were intended to replace alcohol and taverns. I am grateful to Chris Chulos for this comment.

8 Russian Stereotypes

Down with everything foreign! Long live the original Russianness. Let us be completely Russian. A.S. Khomiakov

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. Michel Foucault

Outside Russia, there is a sensationalized image of Russians as alien, passionate, mystical, or as unswerving devotees of some noble or ignoble case, in a romantic manner that conjures up images of stereotyped Otherness. A more sober opinion argues that Russians differ from other people in many ways, some trivial, some obvious, but some “deserving the kind of detailed attention which can penetrate encrustations of punditry, melodrama, and cant.” (Russianness 1990:7) The various intimations or stereotypes about Russians contain a number of over-simplifications, caught and pre-arranged in a net of expectations, and forming a kind of pattern of statistical probability. In discussing these stereotypes, we might distinguish between auto-stereotypes, i.e. images of Russian self-identification, and hetero-stereotypes, i.e. images of the Russians that non-Russians may have. In this chapter, the notion of a stereotyped, Typically Russian’ behaviour pattern, with its comforting illusions of identity, stability and solidity, will be subjected to closer examination.

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National Character It has been argued that simple explanations for Russianness such as language, genes, or territory, do not suffice. If location makes the Russians the way they are, then emigres should stop being Russian. They don’t. Outside Russia, however, they change. But Russians change even inside Russia, as recent developments clearly show. A situational and/or processual way of defining Russianness implies a less static identity than a simple list of properties pertaining to all Russians. It suggests that identity may persist despite changing properties. “Russianness can be such an ongoing experience, accumulating, but also disappearing, and leaving new states related to their predecessors only by the logic of succession.” (Russianness 1990:8-9) This kind of processual understanding does not deny the existence of national self-stereotypes or of the alleged Russian national character. The idea of national character has been defined as the totality of interests, traditions, and ideals that are so important for a nation that they tend to mould its image both in the mind of that nation and in the mind of others. But even if the existence of a national character is claimed by every nationalist ideology, there is no general agreement on the matter. The essentialist view of there being a specific character for each nation that can be traced through its history is opposed by those who hold that the nation considered as a continuous and personalized organism is in large measure a ‘physical dream’. The beliefs that people hold concerning their own character and that of other peoples contain a mixture of facts and false stereotypes, generalizations, and wishful thinking. But such stereotyped opinions are significant because they help produce national solidarity, and the very fact that they are widely believed gives them historical meaning. (Snyder 1990:235-236)1 What then is it that Russians of all times, subgroups and places are believed to have in common? In the first place, it is obviously the native Russian language, by means of which they inscribe themselves into an imagined Russian community persisting in adherence to certain cultural codes and myths. In the view adopted here, cultural meaning, codes of behaviour, and the national myths justifying them, arise in a historic and social reality and are then transmitted between generations. And it is the task of the cultural mythologist to reveal the process involved in such myth-making. We now find ourselves in the domain of cultural studies, in the anthropology of selves, which may be approached in the same way as the interpretation of dreams. And not only because “the anthropology of ourselves is still only a dream” (Cultural Studies and Communications 1996:334), but also because of the numerous links between cultural

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anthropology, ethnography and surrealism in issues of ethnicity. Recent research forcefully brings home that ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned. Insofar as ethnicity is a deeply rooted emotional component of identity, it is often transmitted less through learning than through processes analogous to dreaming. (Writing Culture 1986:195-196) Without attempting here to live up to Walter Benjamin’s surrealistinspired desire to produce a book made up entirely of quotations, I can at least mention that there are already such books devoted to the Russian national character: for example, Zhaba (1954), Russkiie mysliteli o Rossii i chelovechestve; or, Razmyshleniia o Rossii i russkikh (1994); and other similar compilations. Naturally, if Russianness is a cultural code uniting an ethno-linguistic community, this code must consist of cultural quotations. But for an interpreter of cultural myths, as for a dream-interpreter, the temptation to over-rationalize, imposing symmetries and discovering a balanced, orderly cosmos in the jungle of cited particularities, can be too strong to resist. As in dreams, the ostensible thinking in such quotations replaces logical connection with simultaneity in time. They also show a definite preference for combining opposites into a unity, and a tendency of the dream-work towards condensation. As in dream identification, a single blanket figure (the alleged national character) appears in all the relations and situations that apply either to the dreamer-interpreter or to the figures covered, and the most intense elements are also the most important. (Freud 1975:423-443) A more serious problem with quotations about stereotyped Russianness, however, is the same as we find with proverbs that are habitually used as a testimony to the national character: for any one of them it is possible to find a counterexample testifying to its opposite. This, in turn, simply supports the opinion already expressed in another quotation. An oft-cited passage by Nikolai Berdiaev (from ‘The Soul of Russia’ in The Russian Idea) states that the Russians are full of mutually contradictory properties. Among the paradoxes listed are: despotism, the hypertrophy of the state and, on the other hand, anarchism and licence; cruelty, a disposition to violence and, again, kindliness, humanity and gentleness; a belief in rites and ceremonies, but also a quest for truth; individualism, a heightened consciousness of personality, together with an impersonal collectivism; nationalism, exaltation of the self and universalism, the ideal of the universal man; an eschatological messianic spirit in religion, and a devotion that finds its expression in externals; a search for God and a militant Godlessness; humility and arrogance; slavery and revolt... (Russkaia ideia 1992:302) Again, we cannot help asking: does this really apply to all Russians, of all

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eras? And why only to Russians? Do not other ethnic groups possess contradictory properties, not to mention the individuals these ethnies are composed of? Berdiaev’s statement makes the myth of Russianness appear more sophisticated, but at the same time it helps create a wall between all Russians as extremely complicated, and the less-complicated (read: simpleminded) Others. Similar understatements of concealed superiority reverberate in Russian pride in the sensitivity of the Russian soul and in the unfathomable depth of Russian feelings, underpinned by Dostoevskian demonism and claims to a real, unfettered Christianity. Once again The Russian Idea: “In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia. For this reason the Russian people have found difficulty in achieving mastery over these vast expanses and in reducing them to orderly shape.” In this epic formula, every Russian is moulded into a romantic shape where the Soil and the Soul of Russia harmoniously merge into their nature; there is a parallelism between the physical and the spiritual strongly reminiscent of the magical maxim: As Above, So Below. National mythology, as Svetlana Boym observes in her book devoted to Russian ‘common places’, is composed of cultural cliches, of recurrent narratives that are perceived as natural in a given culture, but which in fact have been naturalized and their historical, political, or literary origins forgotten or disguised. ‘T o understand Russian mythologies it is not enough to trace their origins in intellectual history, state policy, or actual practice. It is necessary to remember that they function in the culture as magical incantations, memorized or paraphrased but rarely interpreted critically.” (Boym 1994:4) The concept of the Russian national character forms an important part of the national myth created in the 19th century by the Slavophiles (who would be more appropriately called the Russophiles). While the Russian Slavophiles such as Alexei Khomiakov and the brothers Kireevskii, and their followers Berdiaev and Losskii, along with contemporary neo-Slavophiles, put great efforts into the uncritical propagation of the superior qualities of the Russians, identified by Losskii (1957) as dukhovnost, spirituality; dohrota, kindness; darovitost, talent; svobodoliubie, love for freedom; etc., a critical reappraisal of the very concept of Russianness has been undertaken by, among others, Gorer (1949), Inkeles and Levinson (1954), Dicks (1952,1960), Black (1961), Thompson (1987), who suggest different, although converging, ideas in order to explain the — in their opinion — striking inconsistencies in Russian behavioural patterns. Thus, Geoffrey Gorer believes that the extremes of the Russian national

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character originated in the old custom of swaddling babies, which created a pattern of total constraint followed by total relaxation when the baby was unswaddled for feeding. In his opinion, the memory of the total constraint of early infancy manifests itself in the adult habit of total submission to authority, interspersed by destructive rage against all forms of constraint. Inkeles and Levinson suggest that the modes of behaviour of the ‘modal personality’ (which they propose as an alternative to ‘national character’) should be defined in Freudian terms such as aggression and orality, positing that these modes can be investigated in a systematic, albeit non-quantitative, fashion. In a study written independently of Gorer and Inkeles, H.V. Dicks defines the Russian modal personality as a configuration of traits shared over and above subgroup differences. He posits that in the case of Russians, the childhood authority figure tends to be strong, but inconsistent. This variation in pressure produces a personality with a tendency to fluctuate between extremes of behaviour, so that the ambivalence of the Russian personality is manifested by large swings of mood in relation to the self, to primary love objects, and to groups. “The Russian can vary between feeling that he is no good and that he is superior to all the rest of mankind.” (Dicks 1952:638) Ewa M. Thompson, in a remarkable book devoted to the Holy Fool in Russian culture, rejects these explanations as too simplistic; observing their striking unanimity in attributing to the Russian modal personality a tendency towards extremes of behaviour, Thompson proposes a different approach. Starting from the holy fool model, she generalizes the pattern of holy foolishness to cover Russian society as a whole. The holy fool, or yurodivyi, tended to accept abuse in silence, and then suddenly exploded. Grigorii Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible in Russian history, and Dostoevskian heroes in literature serve as examples of such a behaviour pattern. Rasputin was famous for his extreme humility and his brutal aggression. Ivan the Terrible destroyed the old Russian nobility, increased the burdens of the peasantry, and subjected thousands of Muscovites and Novgorodians to Mongol-style tortures. But he also on occasion donned monkish robes, headed for a monastery and spent entire weeks in seclusion. Ivan was seen as a secular holy fool, a Parfenii yurodivyi, as he liked to call himself. Even if it seems plausible that Ivan the Terrible helped consolidate acceptance of the yurodivyi model of behaviour within the Muscovite power structure, and by extension, in other strata of society, as Thompson argues, — still, to describe the Christian-shamanic dialectic of holy foolishness as the blanket code for the Russian intelligentsia whose ideals are “traversed

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through and through by the holy fool code” is to stretch the argument a bit too far. Nevertheless, in her final remark, Thompson draws a conclusion with which intuitively I cannot but agree: The search for spiritual wisdom, readiness to surrender and to learn, the attachment to tradition and the purity of goals which are implicit in Russian culture are accompanied by a refusal to learn things that are inconvenient to know, by a lack of sense of social cohesiveness and tradition, by a general acquiescence to the idea that the individual is helpless before the state, and by readiness to mock yesterday’s heroes. (Thompson 1987:199) The Russian semioticians Yurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii have connected the duality of the Russian culture and the Russian love of extremes with the construction of the Orthodox universe, where Heaven and Hell were radically opposed but not mediated by the third element of Purgatory present in Catholicism.2 Whether all or any of these explanations are valid is difficult to judge, but they do agree in accepting the paradoxical traits in Russian behaviour patterns. Perhaps, the ambivalent nature of the Russian cultural code most clearly manifests itself in a readiness to admire, which easily turns into a readiness to suspect and hate those who are ne nashi (foreign, literally ‘not ours’). We — i.e. Russians as opposed to various social, ethnic and national Others — is the basic category that delimits, and thus creates, Russian identity. This involves coinciding with the narod, an amorphous group of Russians who define themselves solely by self-inscription into that group. Russkii Narod An amalgam of cultural commonplaces is conjured up when people daydream about their country, its identity, and about their own identity as defined by belonging to that country. Such views are largely made up of myths about past history, reduced to their lowest common denominator and complemented by individual experiences. These are ‘matters of common knowledge’ that are sufficiently uniform to constitute a rudimentary national identity; parts of it may be gradually covered over, shaped or eliminated as new shared knowledge and experience are absorbed by the narod. Narod, people or folk, is a diffuse portmanteau word which can denote either an ethnic group (russkii narod), or a territorial group (naseleniie), or

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any collective body (massa, narodnye massy), even a mob (tolpa), an irrational elemental power (narodnaia stikhiia) and, finally, a nation (natsiia) or a nation-state. Narod is usually distinguished socially as the lower classes, the working people (trudovoi narod, trudiashchiesia), or the uneducated (prostoi narod); but always as a non-individualized group opposed to the leaders or to the social elite. In other words, narod are those social Others ruled and led by the rulers and leaders. This implies double standards for the narod and for the higher social groups, be it the gentry, the middle class, the intelligentsia, or the bureaucratic nomenclatura. In the rhetoric of the Soviet period, the term sovetskii narod, the Soviet people, denoted the whole population of the country, which was composed of allegedly homogeneous Homo Sovieticuses, unshakeably loyal and devoted to the leader and to the Communist Party which was ‘one with its people’. This myth of homogeneity survives in the current populist and nationalist discourse boosted by the ubiquitous adjectives accompanying the word narod: velikii (great), moguchii (mighty), trudoliubivyi (industrious), miroliubivyi (peace-loving), mnogostradalnyi (long-suffering)... This last one, mnogostradalnyi, refers to the doleful history of sorrow and sacrifice, tears and terror, beginning with the national trauma of the Mongol invasion, when Russia played the ungrateful role of a shield protecting Christian Europe from the barbarian hordes. In popular Russian feeling, Europe is thus indebted to Russia, a debt which has never been repaid or even acknowledged by appropriate gratitude. Similarly, in the Second World War, the Soviet Union helped to liberate the world from Nazi Germany. By the implied logic of suffering, the Russian people feel entitled to some kind of compensation for the exigencies of geography.3 In our examination of Russianness, its ambivalent relation to Europe has to be set in the historically established and perpetuated contexts of isolation, xenophobia, and defensiveness. Dostoevskii, for example, frequently mentions in his notebooks and in his characters’ discussions Russia’s humiliating inferiority to the West, as contrasted to its moral superiority. In Diary o f a Writer, Dostoevskii argues that the Russian peasant, coarse, foolish and devious though he may appear, is ultimately closer to the moral ideal of truth. The Russian peasant is wiser and more moral than his Western counterpart, even though outwardly he may not appear so.4 Remarkably enough, the same kind of inferiority/superiority complex can be discovered in the most popular hero of Russian fairy tale, Ivan-durak, the Fool who overcomes everything in the end. He is usually presented as a lazy, dirty good-for-nothing peasant who wastes his time in daydreams in the warm niche above the clay oven, until his lucky day arrives and all his wishes come

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true: he marries a tsarevna and gets half the tsardom to rule over. He moves to the palace right on his oven, which can magically transport him anywhere. Maximum comfort and benefit are achieved with minimum expenditure of energy when his dream of eternal bliss ironically and unexpectedly comes true. To use Freudian dream-interpreting terminology, in this wish-fulfilling fairy tale the unconscious secret of Russian popular (narodnyi) utopianism finds grotesquely condensed expression. The idea of ‘going to the people’, khozhdeniie v narod, or moving to small towns and villages in search of genuine contact with peasants, appeared among the Russian narodniki in the 1870s. Their populist vision of an ideal future was ridiculed by the more radical intellectuals as a sentimental utopia: Peasants will have in their personal possession so many cattle and poultry that they won’t be able to count them. Everyone will have all the meat he could possibly eat, sweet wine to consume every morning, noon and night... Everyone will work only as much as he desires, eat as much as he desires, and take a nap on the stove whenever he desires. A most extraordinary way o f life! 5 Still, it is a similar utopian mode of thinking, now projected back onto the past, that marks the stereotypes nostalgically promoted in contemporary Russian nationalist discourse, with its idealization of long-vanished patterns of collective life in the pre-industrial peasant commune, obshchina. In this discourse, it is not only the mythical Russia That We Lost (the title of a recent neo-monarchist film by Stanislav Govorukhin), but also nostalgia for the ‘Common Place’ that is particularly pronounced, especially during a time of crisis, a crisis of the existing forms of community and communication. Nationalist nostalgia puts the emphasis on a return to that mythical place on the island of Utopia where the ‘greater patria’ has to be rebuilt, according to its ‘original authentic design’. (Boym 1994:284-285) Svetlana Boym argues that the utopian nostalgia reveals the totalitarian nature of nostalgia itself — the longing for a total reconstruction of a past that is gone, providing people with an imaginary sense of community, a mythical map of rewritten history; it relies on faith, not on faithfulness. At the same time, this approach obscures the political and economic struggles that occur behind the national banners. “The seduction of nationalism is the seduction of homecoming and total acceptance: one doesn’t even have to join the party; one simply belongs.” (Ibid:2&7) Belonging is what really matters in group mentality: ‘we’ are those who belong to a closed, exclusive, ‘our’ world, as opposed to ‘them’ who do not.

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It can be discussed whether traditional peasant identity is, or was, parochial more than national, but there is no doubt that territorial and familial ties formed the foundation for the peasant obshchina. Unfortunately, the old, traditional community representing the Russkii Narod is no more. It ceased to exist when, together with its traditional culture, it drowned in the violent maelstrom of Russia’s modernization. But it was to this imaginary Narod that the Russian intelligentsia offered its ideals of progress, enlightenment, humanity and Western civilization. In the words of Ivan Turgenev, the role of the educated classes in Russia was to teach civilization to the Narod. Alas: this capitalized Narod, as historical experience has revealed, was rather deaf to the intellectual allure of abstract human values; it is in its direct contacts with the Narod that the intelligentsia felt most foreign in its own country. The ‘progressive Russian society’ as represented by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the late Imperial period decided that the Narod has to be overcome, for its own good, of course; thus Russia began to save herself from herself. The Russian intellectuals that so adored the Narod did not really know the people. In 1878, they hotly debated in the Russian press whether or not the butchers of the Moscow market street Okhotnyi Riad, who cruelly beat the participants in the student demonstration on April 3, really belonged to the Narod', after the Revolution, in exile, some of them excused themselves for what happened in Russia by putting the blame on the people, the wrong Narod. (Iz pod glyb 1992:174) In the opinion of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, as expressed in his early article “Obrazovanshchina?’ (1974), the narod disappeared in two overlapping processes: the first a worldwide one that Solzhenitsyn calls ‘massovization’; the other specifically Russian, ‘Sovietization’. This second process was especially ruthless. The icons were thrown out of peasant huts, the old patriarchal order was destroyed, the most industrious (trudookhotlivye) peasant families were sent away to die in Siberia, the land was taken away from the people... “And the intelligentsia did not scream of horror; the most progressive ones even helped to drive the peasants out of their homes. It was then that it came to its end, our intelligentsia, in 1930.” (Solzhenitsyn 1992:212) Collective Body National self-stereotypes presenting patterns of collective identity refer not only to properties attributed to all Russians, but also to imagined looks, behaviour, emotional responses, customs, values, ideals and phobias of the

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collective body. Recently, Viktor Aksiuchits, the neo-Slavophile leader of the Russian Christian-Democratic Movement, in his article ‘In Search of the National Idea’ (Nezavisimaia gazeta, 23.07.96), has promoted the old idea of the collective organism in the same tone of supematurally-inspired certainty as was used by the Russian Slavophiles a century earlier: The Narod is not a random, chaotic set of individuals (sluchainoe khaoticheskoe mnozhestvo), but a collective organism (sobomyi organizm), the subject of historical action. To be reborn as the narod, the Russian people must perceive their Russianness (russkost’) as their ontological status, which can be neglected but cannot be abolished, because our being bom here and now is providential, giving each of us a historical responsibility. Also in Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential interpretation, this immortal collective body of the narod is viewed as eternally overcoming the transient but replaceable individual, who is being constantly lost but reborn and reduplicated in the process of tribal reproduction. The triumph of the narod in Bakhtin’s literary theory is alarmingly consonant with the rhetoric of official Soviet populism or Russian nationalism, where the cliches of narodnost were frequently used to mask the rootlessness of the nomadized masses of former peasants, who had moved to the cities with the onset of first Imperial Russian and then Soviet modernization.6 But, as Mikhail Ryklin points out in his Terrorologiki (1992), we still know rather little about the life of the masses that are called the narod. Ryklin considers the collective body of the narod as reflected in its violent and obscene ‘mother-fucking’ talk {mat), where the epic canon of the lower body (bylinnyi pot) is used to codify all possible and impossible relations in terms of sexual possession and male genital power. In his opinion, the sexually oriented discourse of the masses promotes ‘terrorologics’, grafted onto the collective body as a new religion nourishing a social life based on violence. ‘Terrorologics have all the traits of a negative utopia.” (Ryklin 1992:204,214) The complicated relationship between sex and society is a subject oddly overlooked or avoided by most researchers into Russia, yet it is surely no less salient a facet of Russian behaviour than ‘familism’ (making the family a central value) or religion. In fact, the ignorance of sex in Russian society was (and is) connected as much to Orthodox ethics as to the long-standing official puritanism and hypocrisy. As Igor Kon and James Riordan believe (1993:2), the suppression of anything that deviates from straightforward marital sex was not only due to a more restrictive Orthodox view on the human body, as

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any comparison of Russian icons and Renaissance art reveals, but also to the repressive attitudes of the radical intellectuals of the 19th century, who tried to subjugate individual, particularly sensual values to their utopian ideals of the communist society, and to channel their energies for the sake of the nation. After a brief liberal post-Revolutionary period, the repressive politics of sexual discipline, as the basis of moral discipline, were adopted by the increasingly conservative Soviet society of the 1930s. The sexual revolution occurring in Russia today is set against a background of crisis, and has induced a state of shock and moral panic in many people. Consider the 1990 letter from a woman in the provinces to a Moscow youth paper Moskovskii komsomolets, which published a mild, educational article on childbirth: We knew nothing about ‘sex' or ‘erotica’ before, but we still produced healthy children. We knew how to do it without lessons from you. We had real love, a sense o f duty, love fo r our mothers, our country, patriotism, and so on. What sort o f children are you bringing up now? Look what your democracy brings! What we need is Stalin or a merciless God!1 The same longing for the stable authoritarian values of the peasant commune underpins the current Russian neo-nationalist and revivalist discourse, in which the traditional family and the supreme moral and social qualities of the collective body and its togetherness (sobomost) are strongly accentuated. Such persistent Russian togetherness, which fits very well with the Soviet ideal of collectivity, is expressed in collective actions at work and leisure: in harvest, worship, ritual processions, collective eating and drinking, ring-dances accompanied by singing and music (khorovod), as well as in other manifestations of a collective mentality common to pre-industrial societies. In the life of a traditional extended peasant household (bolshaia semia, or dvor) ruled by the patriarchal order, there was little room left for individuality. Digressions from the traditional patterns were few and were not encouraged by the community. And it is also worth bearing in mind that the egalitarian spirit of the mir applied only to the males who were heads of the family, all others were virtually excluded. The commune itself was a family organism, originating in an expanded patriarchal family, based on collective property, and led by an elder, the commune’s fictive father (starosta) who had to be obeyed unconditionally. Family was, indeed, the central value of the peasant commune. In his myth-making essays, the Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii praised the traditions of

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the Russian family, arguing that in Old Russia, the life of a peasant (muzhik) was characterized by self-sacrifice and a denial of self. Integrity o f the family is his only goal and the springboard fo r all his actions. All pay goes to the head o f the family, in full and without any question. Members o f the family never learn about the total income which the family, in the person o f its head, has received; nor are they interested in learning about it. Their material lot is not improved by means o f this income, no matter whether it happens to be large or small in a particular year. They keep working with the same self-abandon. (Kireevskii 1911:1-212) The current revivalist defence of the traditional family is an idealized defence of a romanticized traditional life-style, a specific world view, and a social incarnation of religious truth, all interpreted by educated elites. As recent research on late Imperial peasant culture tries to show, the Slavophile reverence for family and work as the main values of the traditional agricultural commune also held true for the post-emancipation preRevolutionary Russian village (Bemstam 1988; Gromyko 1986, 1989; Safianova 1989; Russkiie: semeinyi i obshchestvennyi byt, 1989). That ‘cultural lag’ was reinforced by violent modernization from above; it is a rejection of the Soviet way of modernization that now places the traditional family in the focus of nationalist discourse. And indeed, the values, customs and stereotypes of pre-Revolutionary Russia could survive the Soviet period only in the protective circle of the family.8 To be sure, the issue of family lies at the heart of modernity; the traditional family is a God-centred authority structure and a primary locus of child socialization. The development of the modem family is seen by the revivalists as a decline in traditional national values: God is removed as the direct agent of the human and natural world; education and sanitation take the place of personal regeneration and the Holy Spirit; libertinism and fluctuating identities are perceived as freedom. As Peter Beyer (1994:3) argues, at the level of symbolic issues, ethno-cultural defence is a way of competing for power. In terms of meaning, the traditional protective family pattern oriented towards religious values addresses the core problems of human life — failure, insecurity, disappointment. Confronting instability, people are prone to look backwards and inwards. The current rapid restructuring of the Russian society will no doubt result in a longing for security and stability when too many changes occur over too short a period of time. But on a deeper, more important level, speed is less at issue than the direction of change and who

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controls the change. In broad terms, the problem is one of power, not just loss of meaning. After all, as Joseph Brodsky casually remarked, the difference between an empire and a family is a difference in volume, not in structure. (Brodsky 1996:273) Unfortunately, not much empirical sociological and ethnographical research has been carried out so far on these matters in Russia; investigations of public opinion and studies of rural or urban mentalities were not encouraged in the pre-perestroika Soviet Union, so that current Russian value systems, self-stereotypes and hetero-stereotypes, rural and urban personalities, their ethics, and strategies of adaptation to new situations and new kinds of encounters in a fast changing society are still a matter of more or less qualified guesswork. Among the few available publications: Etnicheskiie stereotipy muzhskogo i zhenskogo povedeniia (1991), Russkiie (1992) and Peterburzhtsy (1995), the latter two provide us with some clues; Etnicheskiie stereotipy... deals with stereotyped male and female behaviour in different cultures, concentrates on general problems of sex symbolism and is oriented toward the past, and not specifically toward Russian gender stereotypes and ethnicity, so it still leaves us in the dark. According to the material referred to in Russkiie (1992:380-396), it is the cultural elite, deiateli kultury, who appear to be most concerned with the problems of ethnicity and Russian national identity. And their common significant trait is that they belong to the Russian periphery which is more active in this respect than the central cities. The writers who were actively engaged in the discourse about the regeneration of Russia in the 80s lived in the provinces, and their revivalist and patriotic ideas were interlaced with references to local problems associated with national resources and the impending ecological crisis. Their defence of national values has a strong ‘imperial’ flavour. The protectors of the conservative ‘real Russianness’ are also united in their negative attitude to the so-called massovaia kultura. Youth rock-culture is declared by the neo-patriots to be the main enemy of the Russkii Narod, because it replaces the historical memory of the people with the ‘Geschaftmacher-kultur’ now spreading all over the world. (Ibid.:382) A recent sociological investigation of the mass mentality in Petersburg, on the other hand, revealed a different value orientation; but Petersburg has always diverged from other Russian cities, not to mention the Russian provinces. In Petersburg, ethnic and nationalist values were listed last in a hierarchical table, where human dignity and peace occupied the top positions (Peterburzhtsy 1995:84). In a comment from the authors, these primary values were identified as being the most needed but the least promoted by the general course of political development in Russia (ibid.:86).

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Interviews with teachers conducted in St Petersburg by Russian sociologists in collaboration with Timo Piirainen and Anna Korhonen show that national self-stereotypes are very stable. Among the traits pertaining to Russians, shirokaia natura, kindness, hospitality were most frequently mentioned (Korhonen, forthcoming; Piirainen 1997). Easter celebrations and love of birch trees and the steam bath (bania) are also perceived by some of the respondents as belonging to traditional Russianness.9 Obviously, there are rural and urban, male and female ways of being Russian, and Russianness does not look quite the same in the centre as it does on the periphery. But the whole issue of Russian self-stereotypes requires more research, which I hope will be forthcoming. A note of promise is contained in the title of a recent sociological report from Moscow: Obraz myslei i obraz zhizni (The Way of Thinking and the Way of Life), published in 1996 in a very limited number of copies; so that even if it has not reached my desk, it does indicate that work is going on in this field. What’s in a Name? The patriarchal cultural code is reflected in many everyday Russian customs, such as ways of addressing each other by patronymic, i.e. with reference to the elder male generation, or by implying kinship between all parts of the collective body of the Russian narod, as being bom of and sharing in the same rodina. Such references to the basic family structure, as expressed by ‘the language of kindred relations’ described by Andrei Sinyavsky, persists in the style of address used in the living colloquial Russian of our day: The Russian people and language still retain traces of the old, patriarchal family, which included the entire people and, by extension, everyone on earth. On the street a simple man will often address an older man he doesn’t know as otets (father) or papasha (daddy); a contemporary as brat (brother), bratets, or bratok (variations of ‘brother’); a young man as synok (little son) or vnuchek (little grandson); and a much older man as dedushka (little grandfather) or, more familiarly, ded. In addressing a woman he doesn’t know, he might say: mat’ (mother) or mamasha (mommy); sestritsa (sister) or sestrionka (little sister); dochka (little daughter); babushka (granny) or, more crudely, babka. (Sinyavsky 1990:215-16) This familial code, with its peculiar blend of the Father and Mother

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complex, has been recognized in relations between Mother Russia and her symbolic sons (Hubbs 1988; Barker 1986), between generations (Bemstam 1988; Gromyko 1986,1989; Shchepanskaia 1991), or in Russian attitudes to sex and sexuality (Sexuality and the Body... 1993; Kon and Riordan 1993). What it helps to promote is a double-bound collective identity of ‘We, the Russians’ perceived as a huge, endlessly extended family, united if not by blood then by common familial codes. After October 1917, Russian would become the language of internationalism. But the Russian Republic was proclaimed the first among equals, as the increasingly Russified and peasantized culture of the Soviet bureaucrats took shape during the 1930s. The revolutionary dreams of the Russian internationalist avant-garde mutated into Soviet patriotism and the paternalistic leader cult. If the social overseers of the earlier period — the priest, the landlord, the tsar — were popularly addressed as batiushka, father, so Stalin, in the solemn fake-folkloristic style of the Soviet period, was called otets narodov, the father of the nations. As Sinyavsky has noted, this symbolic familial aspect inherent in the language is a relic of Old Russia that was not only adopted but extended in the Soviet period. In a curious linguistic paradox, the official idiom of Soviet address grazhdanin (citizen) and tovarishch (comrade) which were supposed to unite people, actually divided them, and colloquial language attempted to fill the void of alienation by side-stepping the rules and replacing the official code with family-related words that were richer in warmth and intimacy. In his own milieu, a man can say to his friends bratsy (brothers); or, like soldiers, rebiata or ichloptsy (boys); or muzhiki (even with sophisticated intellectuals). But no one any longer says ‘comrades’ or ‘citizens’ in private: these words are too dead for the living language. Evidently, they died before the system did. Curious hybrids survive, though, in times of transition. Gospoda-tovarishchi, comrades-gentlemen, can nowadays be heard in Russia as an ironic echo from the early post-Revolutionary period. Among other familial modes of address, calling each other by patronymics deliberately underscores the generational and hierarchical divide. The great leaders of the Soviet state were styled Vladimir Iliich, or sometimes simply Diich, and Iosif Vissarionovich, not just Lenin and Stalin. All Russian grown­ ups are customarily addressed by their full name, e.g. Elena Georgievna, while the young (or socially inferior) are called only by their first name, often in the diminutive: Lena, Lenochka, Lenka. But this Russian custom has also served, and still serves, as an oppressive stigmatizing mechanism of ethnic differentiation. A name is a primary identifying factor, and also an ethno-cultural quotation. For many generations

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of minorities whose ethnic names were not suited to the formation of patronymics, the necessity either to completely Russify their names or to create awkward hybrids was experienced as ethnic discrimination. The Soviet internal passport system did not allow for an absent response on the third line of the standard Russian name complex consisting of surname, first name and patronymic (familiia, imia, otchestvo). A.P. Cohen (1994:71-76) sees naming as a process which establishes society’s rights over the individual. The use of ancestors’ names stresses continuity and the primacy of affiliation to a descent group. As a social instrument, the name can be coercive; it may express the subordination of an individual or of a class of persons. We and Others In the multi-confessional, multi-ethnic Russian state, ethnic and confessional boundaries have been kept so as to separate Us, the Russians, from Them, various Others, who belong to the same empire but are different. Artificial protective walls of ethnicity (natsionalnost) had to replace the natural barriers absent from the vast expanses of Russian territories. The overlapping categories of territorial Others (inorodtsy) and religious Others (inovertsy) applied to Catholics, Protestants, Moslems, Jews, Gypsies, Buddhists, and a host of different religious minorities in the Siberian and Asian provinces. They had to accept the civilizing role of the Imperial (or Soviet) Russians, who sought, sometimes successfully, to convert them to Orthodoxy, and later to Communism. Historically, this pattern follows the Russian expansion and domination associated with the creation of the empire. Russianness became manifest and was affirmed in contacts with these Others. The Tatars and the Poles, against whom medieval Russia had to defend herself, have played both roles, first dominating and later being dominated by the Russians, but in each period defining Russianness by what it is not. The recurring assumption was that one’s own custom is right because it is one’s own, and that true Russianness resists all that is alien. Russian peasants themselves had formulated the vision of a closed world that cut itself off from the West through a preference for its own traditions. The idea of defensiveness, the sense that stubborn integrity is “the hedgehog’s only protection against an encirclement of omnivorous foxes”, may appeal to those who search for a thematic centre of Russian culture (Russianness 1990:8-10); but the same can also be said of ethnic minorities who obstinately held onto their own customs despite Russian domination.

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For a traditional Russian, the classical stereotypes of the Other were the German and the Jew. Russia’s conflicts and battles with the Germans began in the 12th century, culminating in the two World Wars of our century. But from being, together with the Swedes, Russia’s enemy in the Baltic region, after Peter the Great’s reforms, the Germans turned into one of the main sources of Westernizing influences on Russian politics, administration, military life, science, technology, education, philosophy and music. Small wonder then, that for the Russian peasant population the ubiquitous Germans condensed into a general image of the outsider, nemets, a word which was applied to all foreigners. Nor is it surprising that St Petersburg, the city felt to be foreign by most of the Russian population, was nick-named nemets by the sarcastic Gogol, in contrast to the true Russianness of Moscow. The Jew, on the other hand, still constitutes the most persistent stereotype of alterity, being all the more treacherous to the chauvinist mind because most Russian Jews are insiders, who not only speak Russian, but also live among Russians and share the cultural codes of Russianness, perhaps with the exception of heavy drinking. In Imperial Russia, the Jews, segregated into special areas behind the symbolic walls of the Pale of Settlement and legally (though not always in practice) forbidden to live permanently in other regions, occupied the position of the specific Other, the demonstratively and fundamentally different ethnic and religious Other; an anomaly considering the multi-ethnic and multi­ confessional character of the empire. Russian folklore, as K.A. Bogdanov has shown, along with some literature, presents the Jew as an utterly despicable merchant, strange in his looks and customs, who sold vodka to the Russian muzhik but would not drink it himself. (Bogdanov 1995:70-76) Folklore stories underscore the greediness and dirtiness of the Jews, making a mythological connection between money, blood and excrement. Jews were believed to be vampires (krovopiitsy), misers, traitors and Christkillers. While the populist writer Nikolai Leskov could admit that Jewish life was unknown to him, even such renowned classic figures of Russian literature as Dostoevskii and Gogol betrayed strong anti-Semitic feelings in their writings. When illiterate Russia learned to read in the 1880s, as Jeffrey Brooks (1985) reminds us, popular xenophobic sentiments penetrated into the cheap mass-produced lubok literature. The pogroms, inspired by the Russian reactionary nationalist Black Hundred movement of the 1900s, forced a great many Jews to emigrate. Among those who remained, many took part in the 1917 revolutions and later occupied prominent positions in postRevolutionary Soviet cultural and political life. Nowadays, the entire

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Bolshevik Revolution and its fatal consequences are blamed by neo­ nationalists on the Jews.10 But before perestroika, assimilated Soviet Jews usually did not know much about their ethnic language, culture or religion. Probably only their surnames and the obligatory ethnicity mark (natsionalnost) in their internal passport bore witness to their specific ethnic background. Quite often, however, they remained controversial social Others and dissidents (,inakomysliashchiie). The names Mandelstam, Pasternak, Liubimov and Brodsky are also illustrious in this connection. Negative stereotypes about the ethnic Other perceived as being an enemy tend to resurface in situations of stress and insecurity {Russkiie 1992:423). In the 1990s, since the Russian Federation launched its territorial terror war on Chechnia, Caucasians have almost replaced Jews as the suspect and unreliable Others. In current Russian jokes about Jews, Armenians, Georgians, or Chukchi of the Russian Far East, their peculiar accents when speaking Russian are always exaggerated to serve as a symbol of their Otherness. Such a negatively perceived ethnicity of the Others helps to enhance feelings of superiority in the protective circle of the family or close friends, kompaniia, where such jokes are habitually told.11 But this is, again, not specifically Russian behaviour. All ethnic communities tell stories about ridiculous Others. Generally speaking, ethnic stereotypes could be pronounced illusory if we expected to find them composed of precisely the same set of traits wherever they are found in the world. Rather, we expect to find a ‘family resemblance’ a la Wittgenstein among varying packages of traits that comprize the cultures that we study and the conceptions we form of them. Of such ‘things’ are cultures made. (Ethnic Identity 1995:51) Besides, there are no ethnically pure nations anywhere, since a nation is constructed for political reasons, although ethnicity can be one of the prime motors of nationalism. As for Russia, many different ethnic groups contributed to the historical formation of the Russian nation: the Slavic, Finno-Ugric and Turkic tribes merged in the process of territorial expansion which began in Kievan Rus (that in itself was already a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional tribal union). Purity of the Nation The reader still expecting to find a list of identifying Russian traits and qualities is bound to be disappointed: it will not be provided here, simply

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because I do not believe any human trait or quality pertains to all Russians, and to Russians alone, independent of time and place. Even such primordial means of identification as language and territory do not suffice to constitute a Russian. Extra-territorial and displaced Russians remain Russian both by their own definition and by that of others; on the other hand, linguistic and cultural background does not seem automatically to provide a generally acknowledged Russian identity. This brings us to the problem of language and ethnicity: evidently, they do not totally coincide. If ethnic identity is mainly linguistic, then everybody who can speak Russian is a Russian. But in current nationalist discourse, an important distinction is made between ‘real Russians’ and Russian-speaking Others. As many examples from Russian Imperial and Soviet nationalist praxis demonstrate, persons bom and living all their lives, for instance, in Moscow, counting the Russian language as their mother tongue, and unable to communicate in any other language, are not considered ‘pure’ or ‘real’ Russians if at least one of their parents (or grandparents for that matter) belonged to another ethnic group. For instance, Bulat Okudzhava, a poet, prose-writer, and ballad-singer, the bard of the Moscow Arbat, who expressed himself artistically in Russian, is undeniably a part of Russian culture, in spite of the fact that he came from a mixed Armenian-Georgian marriage. The link between nationalism and racism in the purist search for real Russianness is most ironically underscored by Alexander Pushkin. His supreme position as the great Russian national poet and the pride of Russian culture is in many a nationalist’s view marred by his racial impurity; his African grandfather Hannibal (whose fascinating story is described by Pushkin in his unfinished novel A rap Petra Velikogo) was bom in Abyssinia around 1696, became a page at Peter the Great’s court, was Christened in 1707 with Peter himself as godfather, and sent to Europe for a military education, ending his days as a General. This African connection is well known; but a modem racist joke tells us that Pushkin’s real name was Pushkind and that he was a Jew.12 In contemporary Russian folklore, Pushkin is a hero deflated, appearing in dirty jokes and anecdotes, quite the opposite of the glossy official image promoted by his literary cult. But nevertheless, it was Pushkin who was among the first to show an interest in the Russian narod and its folklore, and who himself collected folk songs and tales. His encounters with the people were not, however, totally devoid of complications. When he collected folk songs and stories about the Cossack rebel Pugachev, the village mir decided he was the Devil himself; peasants described him as small and swarthy, with curly black hair and claws

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instead of fingernails; besides, he gave them gold coins! (Peterburgskiie vstrechi Pushkina 1987:390). But the narodnyi Pushkin’s literary versions of fairy tales told by his nanny Arina Rodionovna, Skazki Pushkina, is standard reading for Russian children who usually know their Pushkin by heart. Language and Ethnicity Also learned by heart by generations of schoolchildren is the writer Ivan Turgenev’s famous appraisal of his native language: velikii, moguchii, pravdivyi i svobodnyi russkii yazyk (the great, mighty, true and free Russian language). Turgenev concludes his hymn with the words: one cannot believe that such a language has not been given to a great people (nelzia verit, chtoby takoi yazyk ne byl dan velikomu narodu). True, nothing is more Russian than the Russian language. Well, one might still ask an innocent question: whose language? Turgenev naturally meant his own socio-dialect, one of the many dialects in his own contemporary Russia, but the one possessing the greatest social and cultural prestige. In the long historical development of the Russian language, the linguistic aspects were enmeshed in a net of complicated and changing relations between centre and periphery, Slavic and foreign, literate and vernacular, educated and unschooled. The language, like the people, has never been homogeneous. B.A. Uspenskii (1994) has argued that the development of the Russian language cannot be properly understood outside the context of Russian culture. He sees the history of the Russian literary language in general as a specific realm of cultural history. After the adoption of Christianity and during the Old Russian period, Church Slavonic, the cult language and first literary language, was the opposite of the vernacular: they coexisted but their functions were strictly divided. At various stages in the historical development, there were significant changes in the linguistic and social content of these two complementary languages, Church Slavonic and Old Russian. But even so, the cultural opposition expressed by this diglossia was clearly perceived by the linguistic community. Gradually, from its beginnings as the language of the Orthodox cult, Church Slavonic developed into the language of culture. It played a role similar to that of Latin in medieval Western Europe. The Russian language as such emerged during the Muscovite period, when the earlier diglossia began to converge and the two separate languages blended into one language, which was based on the Moscow dialect and oriented toward the vernacular. The birth of the national language coincided

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with the birth of national consciousness and the creation of a centralized Russian state that gradually turned into an empire. The Russian language became the language of power and Russification. And what we now call the classical Russian literary language appeared only in the second part of the 18th century, along with Russian secular literature, in the creation of which the fundamental role of Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Pushkin, but also Western influences, cannot be underestimated. In 1783, the Russian Academy (Rossiiskaia Akademiia) was established by Catherine II; its aim was to develop the Russian language and linguistics; among its other publications, it issued the first Russian lexicon, and Russian and Slavonic grammars. The President of the Russian Academy was Countess E.R. Dashkova, who was also President of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk): a dual status so far unprecedented, and not only in Russia. The emergent Russian literary language presented an organic unity of what were originally Church Slavonic and colloquial Russian elements, which still exist side by side as correlated word pairs, and thus provide the Russian language with rich expressive resources. But the birth of the literary language also coincided with the birth of Russian nationalism. Needless to say, left outside this process were the other local and social dialects; the very language that the illiterate people of Russia really spoke. The language of the centre — Moscow, and later Petersburg — dominated the peripheries not only in the normative way, but also because the printed word was linked with power. The literary language also functioned as a class boundary. This was doubly true, since in reality, the Russian dvorianstvo gentry and the upper classes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for whom and by whom the literary language was created, again lived in a state of diglossia, this time the French-Russian one. Their culture was literate, Westernized, polyglot, individualistic, while the people’s culture was monolingual, dominated by oral tradition, conservative, group-oriented, and protected against the cultural innovations of their masters by mutual mistrust. It was the appearance of cheap mass-produced popular literature by the end of the 19th century that partly bridged the gap between the literate Russian elite and the up-to-then illiterate Russian narod. The appearance of ‘printlanguage’ created the possibility of imagining a new kind of limited, but sovereign community, as Anthony D. Smith has argued in National Identity (1991:361). Language is often cited as a major factor in the maintenance of a separate ethnic identity, and language undoubtedly constitutes the single most characteristic feature of ethnic identity. But, in the view of Russian scholars Vygotskii, Luria, Voloshinov and Bakhtin, language is first and foremost a

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communicational, conversational, dialogical means of responding to Others. Ethnicity is frequently related more to the symbolism of a separate language than to its actual use by all members of a group. As we all know, group identity can even be maintained by minor differences in linguistic patterns.13 To sum up: if the ethnic identity of a group consists of its subjective, symbolic, or emblematic use of any aspect of culture, or of a perceived separate origin and continuity in order to differentiate themselves from other groups; if modes of ethnic persistence depend on the capacity to maintain art forms distinctive to a group rather than that to an individual (Ethnic identity 1995:23) — then, to my mind, for any serious study of the specifically Russian self-stereotypes and hetero-stereotypes, the importance of oral tradition and popular culture far outweighs that of Russian literature and professional urban culture. And this is why I choose my examples from the oral tradition rather than from the literary classic figures, which are usually credited with the honour of creating the Russian culture.14 In any case, aleatory facts of birth develop into Russian ethnicity only after a long process of identity formation; but it is by means of learning the mother tongue, almost with the mother’s milk, through nursery rhymes and children’s lore, that the specific cultural codes, myths, ethnic and national stereotypes become interiorized in the child. In understanding, non­ understanding or misunderstanding Russianness, the knowledge of Russian oral culture is therefore crucial. It goes without saying that this knowledge sets the horizon of expectation within which any interpretation, any cultural archaeology, finds its meaning. Never a simple thing, Russianness is a multi-level historical creation, a panoply of codes, a mosaic of cultural quotations held together by the glue of imperial osmosis. All ethnic identities are made up of the same stuff as dreams, but their power lies in their capacity to exert or resist domination. Especially in the context of looming insecurity, not only the native language and national territory, but also the shared emotions of togetherness, most vividly expressed in collective storytelling or in song and music, can be experienced as protective shells. Without them one dies, like a mollusc, in the sea of troubles. But even in this respect, the Russians are no different from the Others. Russian Time and Space Perhaps a better way of describing the way Russians differ from Others, e.g. from contemporary West Europeans, is to approach the issue via the

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overarching cultural-specific codes related to the fundamental concepts of human existence: time and space. The concept of time is connected to working activity. In the predominantly agrarian pre-Revolutionary Russia, peasants lived according to the cyclical model of time of traditional pre-modem society. The irregular tempo of peasant work, with periods of working hard from dawn to sunset during the summer, and then hibernating during the winter, was not laziness but a different attitude to time. In Europe, industrialization took a century to accustom people to regular work by the clock. Russia was slow in this respect. Post-Revolutionary peasants would go to the city at sunrise and sleep in the waiting room of the station until the train came, which was often in the afternoon. When these peasants became workers, they would still sleep in the factory yards, unless commanded to work, or fired, even shot. The cyclical time of the peasant tradition, identical with the rhythms and sequences of nature, shuns the logic of modem linear time connected with industrial production. Among other things, this is reflected in the way people relate to each other and value the joy of being together: they tend not to relate strategically or invest in friendship, but stay together simply because they can give something to each other now, and not because they can win in some calculated social game.15 This immediately lived time is life’s own movement, it cannot be separated from experience and from the locality where this activity takes place. This is the time of family life, of personal caring that cannot be planned, of children’s play, of storytelling, the time of rituals, the time of successive generations. When the harvest work was done and the food gathered in, the peasant family felt secure: the abundance of food was a guarantee for the future. And the long winter evenings were then fit for dreaming, drinking and singing together. This carefree peasant attitude to time among the first generation of Russian workers was confronted by the new demands posed by modernization and industrialization, which began in Russia with the turn of the century, and intensified in the late 1920s. Time as discipline, clock time, working time was connected with money: every moment can — and must — be used effectively. Time became an instrument of power and control. In the late 1920s and 1930s Russian workers were immersed in state propaganda promoting first Taylorist control of time, and later the Stakhanovite ideology of ‘shockwork’ (udamiki) and extreme productivity, which was to replace the former spontaneity of peasant collective work. The five-year plan increased the accident rate and damaged workers’ health by matching untrained labour with complicated machinery and impossible output

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quotas. The instinctive response from the unskilled workers in this manmachine confrontation was the tactics of inaction, accompanied by secret drinking on the factory floor, which qualified as sabotage and was severely punished. The ‘ruralization’ of Soviet cities in the 1930s deeply affected Soviet civilization. Cities became imbued with peasant values, and “for the first time a Russian political culture was peasantized”. (Stites 1989:245) The idea that time is money, as the Taylorist slogan said, was a foreign one which did not easily take root in Russian soil. Of course, a casual and lax attitude to time cannot be considered an exclusively Russian trait: it is typical of many, if not all, pre-industrial societies; but, when combined with the ambivalent Orthodox ethics concerning money and wealth, it becomes somewhat more specific. Money and Wealth The Russian attitude to money is perhaps more controversial than that of Protestant West Europeans, partly due to the belated modernization of Russia paired with the Orthodox rejection of earthly values. Money as a sign of modem bourgeois society was originally associated with the city, and thus it became a symbol of a life and culture which were felt to be foreign by the majority of pre-Revolutionary Russians bound by the codes of traditional peasant culture. The pre-modem thinking about money, as revealed in dreams and fears attested to in Russian folklore, according to K.A. Bogdanov’s Dengi v folklore, reveals its irrationality almost as a national trait. This can be seen as the result of the social separation of peasant and money, and the segregation of the peasant mir from the rest of Russian society up to the 20th century. (Bogdanov 1995:11,69) Outside the city money was rare; in the natural household of the village, a peasant family could almost do without it, with the exception of peasants selling their goods at the city market, where they also usually spent what they earned on presents, entertainment and drink. The darling of Russian folk tales, Ivan-durak, typically spends his money in an irrational way: at the market he buys a cat; then he gets three barrels of gold for the cat, but he gives the money away to the poor; and finally an angel appears to fulfil his wishes... (Afanasiev 1958:11:62) Dealing rationally with money seems to be quite foreign to the hero of Russian folklore. Here, money is mainly the object of dreams and fears; it

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abounds in the city, especially at the fabulous court of the tsar, which is bathed in gold; otherwise it is owned by the devil, by the immortal sorcerer Kashchei, as well as by merchants, soldiers, robbers, and other folklore personalities marginal to the world of the peasant, who thus expressed his negative attitude to everybody not engaged in honest labour on the land. Even if merchants were professionally associated with money, in the folk imagination their money usually came from supernatural sources. The rich merchant Sadko in a Novgorod bylina is lucky, but his luck is contained in the magical music he plays on the gusli and in his singing. With its help he escapes from the malevolent Sea Tsar, and the fish he catches turns into money. (Byliny 1958:1:348) Quite often a merchant and a robber are the same person. Both used to hide their treasures in the earth. To find such a treasure, klad, magical knowledge of herbs and formulas is required. The imaginary fern flower that blooms only at midnight on Midsummer’s Night is able to reveal the treasures hidden in the earth. But, as Gogol’s story also tells us, in order to grasp this flower one has to sell one’s soul to the devil.16 In Russian folklore, the devil, the robber, and the soldier are united by their adventurous character and their greedy search for money. Due to his almost life-long army service, the soldier was a person foreign both to the village and to the city. He came from nowhere, he had no land, no family, he did not work, but he got paid: all the central values of the peasant community were alien to him. In folk tradition, money is seen as wonder-working, and only a miracle can bring forth money. Etymologically, the Russian word bogatstvo (wealth and money) is related to bog, god: the rich person is thus chosen by some magical or divine force and separated from all others. In Russia this was seen as incurring an obligation to show generosity in giving alms and presents. The Kievan Prince Vladimir of the bylinas used to demonstrate his power and social importance by a generous feast (pir), where his druzhina ate and drank to their hearts’ content, and were granted precious stones, golden rings and other presents by the Prince as payment for their services. The same kind of feudal generosity was habitually shown by the Russian tsars and tsaritsas, who lavished on their friends, favourites and courtiers exorbitantly rich gifts of diamond-studded snuff boxes decorated with their own portraits, spectacular gems and rings, jewelled Easter eggs, and such-like presents, not to mention the land, estates, and titles that followed. Fabulous feasts and balls were also part of conspicuous, status-enhancing upper-class generosity.17 From the collective feasts and collective drinking rituals (skladchina) still supporting the tradition of Russian sharing with generosity, it is a short step to

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unproblematic borrowing. A saver, not to mention a miser, like Gogol’s famous Pliushkin, is a despicable figure, while a spendthrift is not, due to his/her shirokaia natura. It is still felt to be somewhat indecent to have a lot of money, but it is no shame to borrow. If you do not care to tuck away a sum in case of emergency, na chernyi den, you can always ask your friends to help you. Ne imei sto rublei, a imei sto druzei, as the Russian proverb teaches: it is better to have a hundred friends than a hundred roubles. Such pre-modem, basically peasant attitudes to money and possessions survived the abruptly curtailed initial stage of Russian Imperial capitalism, and later the NEP (New Economic Policy, 1924), only to be reinforced by the false egalitarianism of communist ideology.18 In the atheist propaganda of the Soviet period, the Orthodox Church and the wealth it had amassed, the gold and gems on the icons and church utensils testified to the hypocrisy of Christian dogmas that preached to the poor the ideal of non-possession (bessrebrennichestvo). The greedy Orthodox village priest (pop) was the stereotyped butt of Soviet anti-religious propaganda posters, supported by folklore jokes, fables and tales. For the Christian and the atheist Soviet Russian alike, having money implied a moral dilemma, and was imbued with shame and guilt, as it was considered impossible to store up riches through honest work. In the popular mind, all money-possessors were ethnic and religious Others: either Jews, Caucasians, or Germans. And typically Russian heroes of folklore and literature are portrayed as either totally indifferent to money or, when they become rich by chance, as spending it immediately on their friends, or giving it all away to charity. A special connection in the Russian national code between money and drinking also deserves attention. Both belong to the same ambivalent paradigm of bliss and hell. Both permit transgression of the boundaries of everyday reality, both are imbued with sin and guilt. In a typical joke, when two Russians find a box of vodka bottles, they drink the liquor, then sell the empty bottles and buy more vodka: this is called ‘Russian business’. In such Russian attitudes, the egalitarianism of Christianity and Communism clearly clashes with the inevitability of social segregation as expressed by having or not having money; this paradox is again best captured by a joke, this time from Radio Yerevan. Imitating a fake question-and-answer radio programme, the joke goes as follows: - Will people have money under Communism? - Some people will. In the present day, the ambivalent experience of social inequality, formerly

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suppressed by the outwardly egalitarian Soviet society, is resurfacing with full force; this is indignantly felt, and openly expressed as hostility by many lesssuccessful Russians in the presence of foreigners or the Russian New Rich and their conspicuous consumption. In the collective national memory, free enterprise leads to unjust wealth for some and miserable poverty for the rest. After 70 years of anti-capitalist propaganda, capitalism stands for exploitation and class antagonism. So, instead of attempting to achieve the, for them, unattainable market paradise, the impoverished elder generation of Russians prefers to go on believing in the moneyless communist paradise promised by the now officially dishonoured but politically vigorous dream of the Soviet utopia. Utopian Worlds The Russian tendency to use the country’s extensive space, especially its frontier territories, as a voluntary refuge or as an escape into freedom, but also into forced exile, has already been touched upon. But there are other aspects of the Russian territorial imperative, such as the centrifugal expansion of private enterprise, state-sponsored travel for resource exploration, or the grandiose geographical expeditions into the wilderness of Siberia, to the Far North and Far East, to Central Asia and beyond... The liminal spaces of the frontiers and borders known to colonizers and explorers, to refugees and convicts, for whom the notion of home and homeland was a different one, show that the notion of space is useful in mapping Russian identity not only in the static metaphors of the centre, periphery, locus, boundary, and the like. The symbolism of travel not only gives spatial focus to the issue of Russianness, and connects Russian territoriality with the symbolism of the moving body inscribed in space; but it also replaces the cotton-wool wrapped security model of the sedate peasant identity with a dynamic version of moving hybrid identities that are not essentialist: “the ethnic absolutism of ‘root’ metaphors, fixed in place, is replaced by mobile ‘route’ metaphors which can lay down a challenge to the fixed identities of ‘cultural insiderism’.” (Mapping the Subject 1995:10) Although Russia has always had bad roads, they were thoroughly traversed by pilgrims and wanderers, convicts and fugitives, beggars and holy fools, monks and merchants, soldiers and seasonal workers. This formed a fluid continuum of movement and encounter, a social mixture of a more democratic sort than in the less mobile parts of society. This preRevolutionary foot-loose Russia, as described by S.V. Maksimov in his

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Brodiachaia Rus (1877), was later replaced by Soviet propaganda brigades (agitprop), by geologists, virgin landers, railroad and dam builders, and by the so called limitchiki, nomadized workers moving from one construction site to another. For most of them, singing songs about Russian rivers and forests, coachmen’s road songs about the troika and the steppe, rhyming pole, volia, razdoliie and privoliie (open land and three synonyms for freedom) was to praise natural, free movement as opposed to the restrictions of the sedate life; it was to capture a sense of existence as a provisional and open-ended movement. The travel metaphor seems quite appropriate: to put it simply, it is about traversing the difference between the familiar and the strange. The meaning of the word zemlia (earth), both as open, free space and as native soil, and a reflection of Russian topophilia, i.e. attachment to the homeland and its territory, is symbolized by an old custom: when moving away from their village, Russian peasants and wanderers used to take along a handful of their native soil, sometimes from their forefathers’ graves. Usually this ensouled soil was carried in a ladanka, a little amulet-bag worn around the neck beside the cross. Many Russians who fled abroad after the Revolution kept some of the soil of their homeland for the rest of their lives, so as to be buried together with it. (Uspenskii 1994:1:257) Such private, mobile topophilia can be counterposed to imperial expansionism on the one hand, and to the stifling enclosure in the Russian centres of power, on the other. And it is also connected with the issue of purity and danger. In the old Russian Orthodox world model, all space was divided into pure and impure. The space of the homeland conceived as Holy Russia was held sacred, and even the thought of travelling to the impure lands of the infidels was sinful. Before Peter, a journey abroad was totally unthinkable for an Orthodox tsar. Foreign countries were then perceived as zamorskiie, beyond the seas, even when they could be reached by crossing the continental boundaries of Europe; by definition, foreign countries belonged to ‘the other world’, comparable to the netherworld, and the distance was more mythological than territorial. A similar pattern could be observed in the Soviet Union surrounded by the mythological Iron Curtain. To penetrate it, and come out in zagranitsa, abroad, symbolically amounted to a journey into Paradise or Hell, depending on the expectations of the Soviet traveller. But, for the majority, the right of free travel abroad was denied, and the West was just another utopia, a Never-Never land of dreams, or a dystopia of capitalist vice and violence. Even before the great Soviet communist project, attempts were made in Russia to create utopia on earth, here and now. Richard Stites (1989) has

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brilliantly analysed the role of the deep currents of utopianism in Russian culture and the ties between the popular utopia, administrative utopia, socialist utopia and the Russian Revolution. In his view, for statesmen of the administrative utopian persuasion, Russia seemed difficult to govern and defend, threatened from without, too big, too poor and too weak. Isolated psychologically from the common people, because of Peter the Great’s cultural revolution that Westernized an elite and retained a deeply rooted manorial and patrimonial system, they developed a compulsion to organize, shape and train (not educate) the rural population according to a military model, and to regiment life in general. Peasant utopianism, on the other hand, was fed by fear of the state, by an anxiety about change that periodically led peasants to escape from the unreal Russia to a more ‘real’ one through flight, rebellion, or sectarianism, to a quest for order — their own order. As for the intelligentsia of the radical socialist persuasion, social daydreaming was their vocation. The maximalist cast of their thought, which was informed to an extraordinary degree by passion and feeling, led them to the only ‘ideology’ that fitted their ‘utopia’ — socialism, a way of life that toppled autocracy and class oppression, taught equality and justice, and repudiated capitalism — the evil menace that lurked around the comer of the future. (Stites 1989:5) Each of these utopian modes sought welfare and justice, but by different means. For peasants it was volia, untrammelled freedom combined with village order or religious life. In peasant utopias the soil, zemlia, usually belonged to everybody, and produced endlessly rich harvests of crops and fruits. This utopian land was, however, difficult to reach. There was a legendary ‘just land’ of Belovodie where spiritual life reigned supreme, all went barefoot and shared the fruits of the land, and which was devoid of oppressive rales, crime and war. A similar Arcadia of popular and religious fantasy was Kitezh, the town beneath the lake. But Vyg in Northern Russia was a real community of Old Believers, which lasted from the 1690s to the 1850s and has been called ‘a theocratic utopia.’ It was anti-Western, antimilitarist, and anti-expansionist. It was also hierarchical and regimented; males held all the positions of authority. “At various moments in its history — although it engaged in regular economic life and commerce with the outside world and enjoyed the protection of the state — the Vyg community outlawed money, passports, and even sidewalks.” (Ibid.: 16) In hand-painted religious pictures made by Old Believers, a magical soulbird with a crowned woman’s head, Sirin, perched in the Paradise tree hung with fruits and grapes; in a heavenly voice, she sang of the boundless joy of Paradise...

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As elsewhere, Russian utopias express a longing after a Paradise Lost. Like Sirin, utopias sing the songs of bliss. Utopia, literally a land of nowhere, is significantly often envisioned as an island cut off from the rest of the world, following different rules of life, even a different cycle of natural seasons: eternal summer prevails there. Its time is the Golden Past or the Golden Future, never the dreary present. The trouble with utopias, however, is basically the same as with stereotypes: they shrink, flatten, make stable, predictable, and thus stop and deform the unruly and ever-changing flow of life. Ironically enough, the same disclaimer can be applied to the process of analytical interpretation, as exemplified by the book you are now reading. This is how, in the introductory pages to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick describes writing activity which feels like pushing and shoving things to fit them into some perimeter of a specified shape:

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All those things are lying out there, and they must be fit in. You push and shove the material into the rigid area getting it into the boundary on one side, and it bulges out on another. You run around and press in the protruding bulge, producing yet another in another place. So you push and shove and clip off comers from the things so they’ll fit and you press in until finally almost everything sits unstably more or less in there; what doesn’t gets heaved fa r away so that it won’t be noticed. (Nozick 1995:xiii) This can provoke important but somewhat frightening questions: What does having everything within a perimeter do for us? Why do we want it that way? What does it shield us from? My own answer to these questions would be: an awareness of the impending disorder is no excuse for reducing complicated matters to simplicity by an over-ordered interpretation. And this is not my way of taking back what I say in this chapter, or in this book. Rather, I propose to offer it to you with all its uncertainties: not as the final word, but as an invitation to reflect on the polymorphous, evasive nature of national dreams, myths and utopias. And even if the Russian community may be an imagined one, the emotions stirred by belonging inside its magical circle are real and strong. It is the love for one’s native soil, even for the “smoke of the fatherland,” dym otechestva, that seems to unite Russians from near and far in space and time.

Notes 1. For studies of the Russian national character, see Gorer & Rickman (1962); Miller (1960); Russkiie. Etno-sotsiologicheskiie ocherki (1992). The issue of stereotypes is discussed in Gemdt (1988), Rapport (1996). 2. Lotman and Uspenskii (1994:219-253). This binary structuralist model is, however, criticized nowadays. See, e.g., Boym (1994:298-299). Current discussion about the Russian semiotic school can be found in Novoe Literatumoe Obozreniie 3/1993, 8/1994,15/1995. 3. There is this sort of body of opinion in every country, as Graham Frazer and George Lancelle argue (1994:xvii); politicians, who share it, inevitably formulate their programmes taking it into consideration. Their success or failure largely depends on how well they manage to incorporate it and build upon it. The populist Vladimir Zhirinovskii, for example, counts on approval from his listeners when he says: “We have suffered enough. We should make other people suffer.” 4. Dostoevskii, Dnevnikpisatelia (1989:365-366). 5. P.N. Tkachev, Sochineniia, vol. 1, p. 22: quoted in A.S. Weeks (1968), The First Bolshevik, New York-London, p. 52.

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6. Mikhail Bakhtin’s references to the collective body are to be found in his book on Rabelais, Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia; in English: Rabelais and His World (1984), Bloomington:Indiana University Press. 7. ‘Ili Stalin, ili Bog’, MoskovsJai komsomolets, 6 October, 1990, p. 2. That abusive letter is quoted more extensively in Sex and Russian Society (1993:3). The editors, Igor Kon and James Riordan, conclude that, as a consequence of long neglect and repression, there is in contemporary Russia an extreme ignorance of sex, due to the lack of sex education in school and at home, the lack of contraceptive culture and the high abortion rate, a sharp rise in sexual violence and child abuse, inadequate measures to combat AIDS, the tragic status of sexual minorities, etc. (Jbid:A-9) 8. For current research on the peasant family, see: Gromyko (1986, 1989); Frierson (1992); Levin (1989); Mitterauer (1990); Ransel (1988); Farnsworth and Lynne (1992). In Kaser (1995), interesting parallels can be found between the traditional Russian and the Balkan Slav families. 9. Birch symbolism, as well as the steam-bath tradition, are, of course, not exclusively Russian: examples can easily be found in all the Nordic and Baltic Countries. The Finns, however, claim the sauna steam bath (identical with the Russian bania) as their own original invention. On the bania, see Vahros (1966). Slavic and Russian birch traditions are described in Slavianskaia mifologiia (1955:44-47). 10. See, for example, Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobiia’, Vest li u Rossii budushchee? (1991:446463). 11. On Russian ethnic jokes and the jokelore of Radio Yerevan, see Hellberg (1985,1990). 12. The sources on Hannibal are very controversial; Pushkin was, of course, more interested in promoting somewhat embellished versions. An outline of Hannibal’s life can be found in Him (1963:48-55). 13. By way of example: Yurii Lotman, in Besedy o russkoi kulture (1994), reports an 18thcentury Russian nobleman who had a different mode of address for different people in accordance with just how many ‘souls’ they owned. This book describes the culture of the Russian gentry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in great detail. This was a system of ranks and statuses that were to be demonstrated and recognized. 14. Most works on Russian culture deal exclusively with high culture, particularly literature. But, as Richard Stites (1992) justly argues, popular culture provides the necessary background for understanding both the high culture and the life of ordinary people. For a related discussion, see Stavrou (1983). 15. For discussions of time, see Fabian (1983), Johansen (1984), Stites (1989, chapter 7). 16. Gogol, Noch na Ivana Kupalu. This story belongs to the first collection of Gogol’s stories, Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki, largely based on Ukrainian folk beliefs and abounding in folkloristic details. 17. Descriptions of balls and fanciful dinners in pre-Revolutionary Russia can be found in Pyliaev, Staroe zhitie (1897) and Staryi Peterburg (1889). Especially remarkable is the last great ball arranged by Potemkin for Catherine II in April 1791 where 3000 costumed guests took part (1889:306-314). Also see: Lotman, Pogosian (1996). 18. Russian Old Believers, of course, had a different view of money (and of drinking and work ethics, too). Surprisingly many of the rich Moscow merchants were Old Believers. On postSoviet attitudes to money and wealth in contemporary Russia, see Ruble (1995). See also Remaking Russia (1995:33-35, 281).

9 Creation of the Nation: A Symbolic Discourse

Five images o f Russia emerge from different periods o f Russian history. There is Kievan Rus, Russia under the Tatar yoke, Muscovite, Petrine, and Soviet Russia. And a completely new Russia might still follow. Russia’s development has always been catastrophic. The Moscow period was by fa r the worst, o f the most stifling Asiatic kind, and due to some strange misunderstanding it became most idealised by the freedom-loving Slavophiles. Nikolai Berdiaev

“Narod bezmolvstvuet.” The people is silent. Pushkin’s final remark in Boris Godunov

The Russian Idea Things that have history are never natural, they are all man-made. So now it’s time to take a look at the very Russkaia Ideia and its connections to the birth of Russian nationalism and to the process of national self-identification. Although nationalism has been around for, at the very least, two centuries, it is hard to think of any social phenomenon which remains so puzzling and about which there is less analytical consensus. No widely accepted definition exists. Its global diffusion is read through the malignant metaphor of metastasis, as well as under the benevolent signs of identity and emancipation. Today, it is possible to ask a new kind of question — “how

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masculine is it?” — without there being any obvious best answer, as Benedict Anderson says in Mapping the Nation (1996:1). The creation of Russianness and the birth of the Russian Idea is linked by various historians to the political and cultural discourse initiated in the 1840s by a controversy between the slavofily and the zapadniki, which reverberated through the rest of the 19th century. The central issue of Slavophile ideology was Russia’s relationship to Western Europe. As formulated in 1839 by Ivan Kireevskii, Russia’s exclusion from the Roman heritage was the essential feature distinguishing her from the West. In the pre-Slavophile stage of his intellectual development, Kireevskii had regarded this circumstance as regrettable, but as a Slavophile he came to see it as a blessing. (Walicki 1979:93-94) The core of the controversy was the attitude to the Petrine reforms and to the resulting cultural schism which separated the Russian Westernized elite from its own narod. But the problem of Russian self-identification was deeply rooted in the crisis of an authoritarianism unable to change under the pressures of modernity.1 National identity as a historical phenomenon is a constitutive feature of modernity (Hobsbawm 1990). Nations are imaginary constructs: according to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) theory of imagined community, people can feel a sense of national belonging without ever interacting with more than a tiny fraction of the other subjects and citizens; thus commonality with many strangers must be imagined. Anderson has traced how modem nations were constructed by a symbolic process which created the impression that they had actually existed for much longer than really was the case, aided by ‘the invention of tradition.’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) The Russian sovereign power of the tsar was founded upon a dynasty and on Imperial hegemony rather than on a national state in the modem sense of the word. Moreover, as was pointed out earlier, the Russian language alone did not define nationality. At certain periods in history, the ruling classes communicated in French, whereas ordinary, monolingual people spoke languages of lowly and regional status. The formation of the modem nation state in Europe was linked to the rise of capitalism and to the role of the printed media in facilitating trade and in producing an imagined community. Newspapers could simulate in dispersed peoples spread across a national territory (who spoke and learned to read the same language) a sense of events happening simultaneously. (McGuigan 1996:117) In Russia, all these European processes came late. But a strong sense of national humiliation over the occupation and burning of Moscow by

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Napoleon in the war of 1812, followed by the surge of proud patriotism when the French troops had to retreat, and were pursued by the triumphant Russian army all the way to Paris, played a most significant role in creating a sense of community that embraced all Russians. Patriotism was a necessary symbolic dimension made concrete in monuments to a Russia forged and safeguarded by war. Nor was the religious aspect absent, either: Napoleon was believed by the Russian people to be Antichrist himself. The victory over his army in what was then called Otechestvennaia voina, the Patriotic War, produced an avalanche of elated emotions blended with xenophobic, mostly anti-French sentiments; historical imagination began to loom large, and the heroic Russian past as well as the national heritage in general exerted tremendous ideological sway. Creation of History The honour of ‘creating’ the Russian past belongs to the first Russian historiographer, Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826), who was also a writer and one of the first Russian intellectuals, the founder of the famous Russkiie Besedy (Russian conversations) in Tsarskoe Selo, where Pushkin, Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Turgenev, Viazemskii shared his company; the Russian intelligentsiia was in fact an outcome of these celebrated conversations. The publication in 1818 of the first volumes of Karamzin’s history of the Russian state, Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, was an unprecedented event. Pushkin wrote at the time: Everybody, even women o f high society, rushed to read the history o f their fatherland, so fa r unknown to them. This was a revelation. The Old Russia was discovered by Karamzin as was America by Columbus. For a while nobody talked o f anything else. (Pushkin 1981:IX:48) Karamzin’s History is a rare example of a historical work that was read both as an exciting historical romance and as a scholarly opus. Karamzin’s view of history was monarchist and imperialist; his historical arguments support the need for a strong central power in Russia. “He rehabilitated for the intellectuals of St Petersburg many of the old Muscovite beliefs about history: the belief that everything depended on the tsar, that Providence was on the side of Russia if it remained faithful to tradition, that foreign innovation was the source of Russia’s difficulties.” (Billington 1970:263)2

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A widely travelled aristocrat and a champion of Westernization, Karamzin was deeply shocked by the French Revolution, which meant the end for the Old Europe; like others who then became politically conservative, he viewed autocracy as the only power able to ensure the evolutionary development of Russian society in accordance with enlightened rules. But for Karamzin, the difference between samoderzhaviie (autocracy) and samovlastiie (tyranny) — whether practised by the ruler, by the oligarchy, or by the people — was the crucial one. The ninth volume of the History devoted to Ivan the Terrible depicted the horrors of authoritarian tyranny, which was something new and very radical for the Russia of his day. A biting epigram ascribed to the young Pushkin proclaimed, however, that Karamzin in his Istoriia simply and elegantly proves the necessity of tyranny and the pleasures of the whip, prelesti knuta. There is no national culture without mythology, and Karamzin’s books helped to create Russian national mythology; out of the catastrophes, blood and terror of Russian history he moulded a heroic epos, with the help of which Russia could overcome her inferiority complex. While the dramatic victory over Napoleon, so important for Russian self-confidence, was made possible by the strategic mind of Generalissimus Mikhail Kutuzov, so Karamzin was compared to Kutuzov by the contemporary poet Viazemskii, who wrote: “Karamzin saved Russia from oblivion and proved that we have a fatherland, as many of us learned in 1812.” (Venok Karamzinu 1992) Generations of Russian historians, writers and literati who shaped Russian culture for almost a century, were brought up with Karamzin’s History. For decades, histories of Russia were paraphrases of Karamzin. Feodor Dostoevskii admitted that he grew up with Karamzin, whose books were popular as home reading for children in educated Russian families. A host of historical reminiscences in 19th century Russian art and architecture, poetry and painting, fiction and fashion were inspired by Karamzin’s History. Pushkin owes much to his influence; he borrowed many of his plots and characters from Karamzin, among them Boris Godunov (1825); the drama was dedicated to Karamzin with warm words of gratitude.3 Protective Formula It is well known that the Napoleonic wars sparked romantic exaltation and national fervour. But not until the generation of Decembrists in the 1820s do we meet with a more realistic understanding of the complexity and significance of West European conditions and a more sober appraisal of the

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discrepancy between Western enlightenment and Russian reality. In Origins o f the Russian Intelligentsia, Marc Raeff argues that two major themes dominated the 19th century in Russia: Westernization (or modernization) and revolutionary ferment. These two developments had been brought about by two small leadership groups, the nobility and the intelligentsia. Like westernization and revolutionary agitation, the nobility and the intelligentsia were related genetically, for the former was the seedbed of the latter. In the case of both trends, moreover, the state played a paramount role: actively participating in the process of westernization, consistently repressive in its reaction to progressive aspirations. (Raeff 1966:3) Western civilization was adopted by a large segment of the Russian nobility during the course of the 18th century; its outward manifestations even filtered down to estates in remote provinces. But, at the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian nobility, dvoriane, the upper crust of the empire, amounted to hardly more than one per cent of the population. And, because of their foreign educational and intellectual experiences, that aristocratic elite were sadly lacking in factual knowledge of their country and people. An ideological vacuum followed the abortive revolt of December 1825 (sometimes called the first Russian revolution), when hopes of liberal reform and a constitutional monarchy were crushed, and the Decembrists were brutally executed or exiled to Siberia. Their failure created an irrevocable gulf between the elite and the state. The elite had not yet overcome its isolation from the people, and now its ties to the state were weakened too. Left alone and adrift, some of its members turned their energies to finding new roots: Lacking solid roots in their family, their religion, or their people, the new generation of the elite sought meaning for their life in thought and action aimed at transforming the men and society surrounding them, and at creating another — better, modem, ‘Western’, or ‘Slavic’ — cultural, economic, and political environment. The intelligentsia was coming into being. {Ibid.\\10) The reactionary rule of Nicholas I followed ‘the brilliant beginnings’ of Alexander I, which held out the promise of a fulfilment of liberal hopes; and the frustrated Russian elite now estranged from the state, found a sense of personal closeness to, even worship of, the people. The government leaders

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tried to counterbalance the threatening emergence of European-style nationalism by attempts to “annex nationalism as official, even imperial, culture and ideology and to protect themselves from the effects of the massmobilising, popular movements.” (Millennium 1991:361) The triple formula for the new official ideology was first used by Nicholas I in his coronation manifesto: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality, the three fundamental virtues of Russia, were presented as the triune anchor of salvation, able to resist destructive Western influences.4 The immutable and mythic qualities of the official triad rested on the primordial values of the monolithic narod, which guaranteed the holiness of Russian Orthodoxy and monarchy. But this mythic narod was not yet a nation. One quality, smireniie (humility) was most vigorously emphasized by the official ideology, especially during the period when beliefs in the eternal existence of both monarchy and Orthodoxy were being increasingly shaken. Many Russian intellectuals felt strongly that the Western heritage only deepened their isolation from the state and the people. The task of the newly bom Russian nationalism consisted, therefore, in creating a bond between the elite and the people. A longing for stability and continuity in the face of a fundamental societal split, coupled with a romantic adulation of an idealized Russian past, inspired the new anti-Enlightenment sentiment of the most outstanding Slavophiles: Ivan Kireevskii (1806-56), Aleksei Khomiakov (1804-60), and Konstantin Aksakov (1817-60). These were a group of ideologists belonging to the conservative nobility, whose outlook was formed in the late 1830s in opposition to the ‘Westernism’ most notably represented by Petr Chaadaev. ‘Slavophilism’ here denoted not so much a feeling of solidarity with brother Slavs as a cultivation of the native and primarily Slavic elements in the social life and culture of ancient Russia. (Walicki 1979:92) Chaadaev (1794-1856) in his first Philosophical letter (the only one published during his lifetime, in 1836) attacked the current concepts of Russian history. Herzen described this letter as “a shot that rang out in a dark night.” Chaadaev was declared insane by order of the Tsar. When his friend M.V. Orlov attempted to obtain a pardon for Chaadaev with the chief of Gendarmes, General Count Benkendorff, the plea was rejected, and Benkendorff explained the official position with the memorable laconic statement: “Russia’s past has been admirable. Her present is more than magnificent. As to her future, it is beyond the power of the most daring imagination to portray; that, my friend, is the point of view from which Russian history should be conceived and written.” {Rossiia glazami russkogo 1991:6)

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In his next essay, Apology o f a Madman (written in 1837 in French, like all his essays and letters, and first published in Russian in 1906), Chaadaev wrote: The history o f a people is more than a succession o f facts, it is a series o f connected ideas. That precisely is the history we do not have. We have to learn to get along without it, and not to vilify the persons who first noticed our lack. From time to time, in their various searches, our fanatical Slavophiles exhume objects o f general interest fo r our museums and our libraries; but I believe it is permissible to doubt that these Slavophiles will ever be able to extract something from our historic soil which can fill the void o f our souls or condense the vagueness o f our spirit. (.Russkaia ideia 1992:41) Chaadaev was also the first to stress the crucial importance of space for Russian history and culture; in the last lines of the Apology he mentions that the most essential element of Russia’s political grandeur and the real reason for her mental impotence is the fact of her geography: geograficheskii fakt. (Ibid.: 48) The Slavophile Utopia The Slavophiles were, however, less concerned with geography than with history, or rather with historical time. They wanted to stop history by creating a protective myth, to reverse the movement of events into an imagined past, which would also contain the present and the future: a truly medieval conception of time in which the past prefigured the future through divine Providence. Slavophilism combined elements of transcendentalist idealism and romantic primitivism. The Russians had one true Church, the mystical body of Christ, which made Russians the chosen people who could create the ideal Christian society: free, simple, classless, and patriarchal. The Slavophile version of the past was not heroic like Karamzin’s but totally harmonious and idyllic. In ancient, pre-Petrine Russia, the Slavophiles believed that they had found an entirely different form of social evolution. Orthodox Christianity — a form of Christianity that had not been infected by Pagan rationalism or the secular ambitions of Catholicism — had

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contributed a principle unknown to the West, that of sobomost or ‘conciliarism’ (Khomiakov). This was a form of true fellowship, a ‘free unity’ of believers that precluded both self-willed individualism and its restraint by coercion. The relationship between the common people and the ruler it had ‘called’ to power (a reference to the ‘calling of the Varangians’) was based on mutual trust. (Walicki 1979:95-96) The freedom-loving Slavophiles definitely idealized Muscovy, in Berdiaev’s mind the most stifling period of Russian history; but their ideal of ‘ancient Russian freedom’ had nothing in common with ‘republican liberty’. This fact emerges most clearly in the historical writings of Konstantin Aksakov. Republican liberty, he argued, was political freedom, which presupposed the people’s active participation in political affairs; ancient Russian freedom, on the other hand, meant freedom from politics — the right to live according to unwritten laws of faith and tradition, and the right to full self-realization in a moral sphere on which the state would not impinge. The people could be sure of complete freedom to live and think as they pleased, while the monarch had complete freedom of action in the political sphere. This relationship depended entirely on moral convictions rather than on legal guarantees, and it was this that, according to Aksakov, constituted Russia’s superiority to Western Europe. But while demanding freedom in the non­ political sphere, Aksakov wanted every individual to submit totally to his mir — a submission, moreover, that was to be “according to conscience” and not only “according to law”. (Ibid.:96-7) Using Ferdinand Tonnies (1887) typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, one can agree with Walicki that the Slavophiles saw the Russian nation as being divided into the folk, or community, and society, an aggregate of individuals separated from the people and living a conventional and artificially Westernized life. Their criticism of the West was essentially a critique of capitalist civilization from a romantic conservative point of view. It was less a defence of the present than a romantic nostalgia for a lost ideal, but it was a utopianism because it was a vision of a social ideal, sharply contrasted to existing realities. This vision was based on the concrete experience of that segment of the hereditary nobility whose life followed a firmly traditional social pattern.

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The Russian Home From a contemporary point of view, it is exciting to trace the utopian and mythological aspects of the Slavophile movement in their search for the Russian roots to the German Romanticism of Schelling and Herder. For the Slavophile romantics, the true soul of a nation was manifested in her history, customs and language. ( Slavinoflstvoisovremennost 1994:80) Look carefully, wrote Chaadaev in Apology, and you will see that each important fact in Russian history is a fact that was forced on us; almost every new idea is an imported idea... Although there is no doubt that the Russian thinkers were well acquainted with the works of German philosophers, there were also fundamental affinities between Germany and Russia: both faced the need to modernize at a time when capitalism was already growing in other European countries and had begun to reveal its negative features, which gave them a broader perspective and made it easier to “idealize the patriarchal traditions and archaic social structures that in their countries had shown an obstinate vitality.” (Walicki 1979:107) The Slavophiles, longing to unite Russia’s soil and soul, discovered Russianness first and foremost in the Orthodox faith, which defined the Russian people as the only true Christians. By people, as Walicki (1979:98) comments, the Slavophiles meant all sections of society that remained faithful to the old traditions.

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The Petrine reforms, according to the Slavophiles, cut the links between Russia’s upper strata and the common people. A leitmotiv of Slavophile ideology is the consequent cleavage in Russian life, the antithesis between the people (narod) and society (obshchestvo) — the enlightened elite that had adopted Western ways. The people cultivated stable customs, whereas society bowed to the caprice of fashion; the people had preserved the patriarchal family, whereas society was witnessing the breakup of family ties; the people had remained faithful to ancient Russian traditions, whereas society was an artificial product of the Petrine reforms. Westernized Russians had become “colonizers in their own country” (Khomiakov). Through being tom away from their popular roots, they had lost their sense of historical attachment and had become what Chaadaev had accused them of being: men without a fatherland, strangers in their own country, homeless wanderers. The return of the enlightened sections of society to the fold of Orthodoxy and the ‘native principles’ preserved in the present village commune seemed, from this vantage point, to offer the only hope of a cure for Russia. (Walicki 1979:98-99) One of the most persistent symbols in the Slavophile discourse aimed against the homeless zapadniki, who were seen as neither Russians nor Europeans, was the symbol of the Home. In the true spirit of Romanticism, a patriarchal old-fashioned provincial home and the country estate with its soulful natural style of being were seen as the opposite of the comfortable but chilly European or Russian Westernized urban variety. This juxtaposition can be found in Russian literature beginning with Pushkin and Gogol; but it is most typically revealing in Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), where the hero’s blissful childhood in Oblomovka is contrasted to the rational home of Stolz, significantly a Russian German. The two incompatible ways of life: the native, patriarchal, pochvennyi (down-to-earth) Russian one, and the foreign one, imitating European civilization, collided in the life of Oblomov, as they did in many other Russian lives. The old patriarchal home is filled to the brim with relatives, servants, icons, legends and traditions. It is usually provincial, far from both capitals, about the vices of which wild rumours are repeated in dinner conversations. Home is seen as the only protection from evil, a family nest, a place of the heart’s content. This peaceful haven is unthinkable outside the village setting; in the Russian context of Oblomovka, it is a manor house surrounded by peasant huts and fields.

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In such provincial Nests of Gentlefolk, to borrow the title of a novel by Turgeniev, Dvorianskoe gnezdo, aristocratic and patriarchal Russia coexisted. “Wealth and estate occupancy distinguished the grandee summering in the country from a true provincial, but grandees who retired to their provincial estates tended to adopt patriarchal values.” (Roosevelt 1995:158) For the Slavophiles, the home meant first and foremost a rural family united by common faith and customs. In Alexei Khomiakov’s writings, no important difference is perceived between a patriarchal family and a peasant commune: in both, mutual love and simplicity in organic union with the native soil offer a shelter for everybody, orphans and the homeless included. (Khomiakov 1900:111:101) It was through the metaphor of the protective home that the Slavophiles regarded the Russian past, present and future. The past was their Golden Age, their Paradise Lost. They cast a chain of central protective symbols (nesthome-family-heart-soul) around the collective body of Russian society, which they imagined as a huge patriarchal family with Father Tsar at the very top. The root of such persistent idealization of the archaic and the rural, totally ignoring the real existence of urban culture and the profound social changes in their contemporary Russia, could be seen, as Shchukin argues (1994), in their childhood. The leading Slavophiles grew up in the country, in manorial estates with their indolent conservatism and convenient stability, in households supported and surrounded by serfs and servants. They belonged to the old patriarchal gentry: either as the descendants of boyars or pre-Petrine aristocracy (as with Khomiakov, Kireevskii, Samarin), or as ‘service gentry’ (dvoriane) turned patriarchal in the faraway provinces (as with the Aksakov brothers). Their homes were nests of old-fashioned Russianness where French was forbidden; later when they moved to Moscow they brought their family traditions with them. The modem processes of industrialization and secularization did not touch these provincial patriarchal homes. And when confronted with modernity, they recoiled in horror: their world model was under deadly threat. (Shchukin 1994:44-45) But for the Slavophiles as for their followers, pochvenniki, the soil-bound populist writers who opposed both Moscow and Petersburg (but who in the long run preferred to live in Moscow), the much-praised traditional Russian life with its primordial purity of heart, like a vanishing dream, became more and more illusory. Nevertheless, their nostalgic opposition resulted in a myth of Russianness polarized into the images of the two main cities. The old capital became the incarnation of Russia, the new capital the phantom city of illusions. (Lotman 1990:191-202; Monas 1983; Shulgin 1991)

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The truly Russian squire Oblomov, dreaming on his sofa in Petersburg of the comfortable, totally protected life in Oblomovka, is a parody of the Slavophile utopia. He belongs to the category of ‘superfluous man’ (lishnii chelovek), like many other heroes of classical Russian literature. In 1859 the leading literary critic of the radical Sovremennik, Nikolai Dobroliubov, published an essay on ‘oblomovism’ in which he wrote that even among the best-educated people in Russia, all the things they talk and dream about are really alien to them, superficial; “in the depth of their hearts they cherish only one dream, one ideal — undisturbed repose, quietism, oblomovshchina." (Dobroliubov 1956:204) In the meantime, quite a different life was emerging in Russia, especially after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861; and it did not help much to go around dressed in ‘traditional Russian costume’, as the Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov did: he was simply stared at and taken for a foreigner. (Slavianofilstvo i sovremennost 1994:231) The Old Russian decorative style (which owed much to the Byzantine tradition) was, however, so adored by the trend-setting Slavophiles that it was widely imitated, and not only by their ideological followers; towards the end of the 19th century, it became a major fashion in Russia. At that time, the interior and exterior adornments of some merchants’ houses in Moscow were more reminiscent of an imagined medieval Muscovy than of the European urban style of the fin-de-siecle period. For a long time, such fake Russian Style came to epitomize the ‘real Russia’, both for insiders and outsiders. To sum up with Walicki (1979:114), “the classical Slavophilism of the 1840s was a romantic conservative utopianism, and a reactionary one insofar as it was based on backward-looking ideals. Yet despite expressing a conservative system of values, it went beyond the immediate and selfish class interests of the gentry.” 5 Narrating the Nation This brings us to the past as discourse, in the sense that it relates history to conflicting interests and power. If history is a complex field of forces, then there are different ways of organizing the past, and any direction is always a direction for someone, and always contested (Jenkins 1991, Hastrup 1992). Seen from this angle, the nation as a community narrated in a particular printed language becomes a kind of modem ‘text’, and nationalism a form of political ‘discourse’. But, as Anthony D. Smith remarks, there is a related methodological problem.

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It is possible to exaggerate the role of specifically literary products in the process of creating and narrating the nation. There is in fact a long tradition of such over-emphasis, traceable to Herder and his followers. Herder himself cautioned against it, citing the importance of other forms of cultural expression: folk ballads, ethnic dances, music, folklore. To this list, one might add the powerful imagery of the visual arts: not just of paintings and sculptures, but of furnishing, ceramics, metalwork and, above all, architecture. What more powerful image of the resurgent, but continuous nation than the neo-Gothic buildings favoured by nationalist revivals, [...] or those of the Neo-Slavic movement in fin-de-siecle Russia? (Smith 1991b:361) We can wonder, along with Smith, what these revivalists thought they were doing: Were they creating, or recreating a lost (submerged, neglected, forgotten) nation? In reviving a medieval style which they believed to be ‘authentic’, were they creating something that was not only contained within self-imposed limits, but also within communally given ones? In that sense, they were also contributing to the ‘reconstruction’ of the nation out of pre­ existing ties and traditions. “In general, the proliferation of what we may term the ‘ethnic’ model of the nation stems from both the influence and ideals of nationalist ideologies and from activation of the larger segments of population to fulfil those ideals.” (Ibid.:362) Russia became a more modem and more fluid society in the last half century of the old regime, and the attitudes of those who experienced and contributed to this modernity changed accordingly. Railways, emancipation, urbanization, local self-government, theatres, schools and industrial growth brought new opportunities for many people bom into the lower classes. From 1861 to 1917, a popular culture based on common literacy arose in Russia. In When Russia Learned to Read (1985) Jeffrey Brooks has thoroughly explored the thinking of ordinary people embodied in popular literary culture, which offers many clues to the character of Russian culture as a whole. Even if we know a lot about the rich, creative world of educated Russia, little is known about the imagination and intellect of the rest of Russian society, as he rightly argues. (Brooks 1985:xiii) When the lower classes learned to read, they turned from their oral heritage to the printed word; and to serve their needs new types of commercial publications, popular fiction, collectively called lubochnaia literatura (from lubok, popular prints), appeared. “These ephemeral texts had little lasting literary value, but they meant something to the people who

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purchased them, and they remain a revealing artifact of their imaginative lives.” (Ibid.:xW) Since the tsarist authorities never made primary education compulsory, and probably lacked the power to do so effectively, the decision of ordinary people to become literate reflected their grasp of its potential usefulness. But what was extraordinary about Russian popular commercial literature was its peasant character: it was written for peasants and former peasants by people who were close to their world and concerns, and it provided these often firstgeneration readers with information and ideas that they could readily absorb as they sought to make sense of the changing world around them. (Ibid.:353) As a result, peasant values and the formulaic qualities of the oral tradition and folklore seeped into the printed production, alongside new kinds of stories (of individual success, adventure, crime and punishment, popular history, etc.). These new types of narrative contributed to the development of modem values similar to those found elsewhere in the industrialized world. Although the existence of tsarist censorship may seem to be an additional barrier between the readers’ demands and the printed word, Brooks’ study of popular publishing in Russia shows the unusually close ties between the printing industry and its lower-class audience. He points out, however, that the direction of the officially sponsored and commercial efforts diverged most sharply in one area: the acceptance of the promises of the market economy. For commercial writers the allure of individual mobility and success — escape from a squalid lower-class life into bourgeois comfort — was one of the most effective themes for satisfying customers. To the sponsors of non-commercial materials (such as schoolbooks, official, church and intelligentsia-sponsored publications) this was a dangerous chimera that misled the lower classes or threatened the stability or appropriate development of society. What clearly distinguished Russia from the West was a strongly felt, clearly formulated, and widely held antipathy to the functioning of the market economy. This was perhaps a transitional response to the dislocations and stress of rapid development by the more articulate members of society. In the cultural sphere it was expressed by scorn for the market as a mechanism for dissemination of the printed word, objection to cultural diversity and elitism exemplified by the appearance of both popular culture and literary modernism, and distaste for the values of individualism and material ambition displayed in commercial popular literature. (Ibid.:355)

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The new popular culture also met hostility further down the social scale, in large and rapidly expanding middle strata of upwardly mobile people of lowly origins; some among them, chiefly the primary schoolteachers, but also priests, civil servants, and technicians in industry, agriculture, and local government, as well as all those who identified themselves as ‘the intelligentsia from the people’, had very definite views about what a culture based on common literacy should contain. Brooks further argues that the repudiation of popular literature and the market values it represented by educated and semi-educated people stemmed from a wider hostility toward the market system, with its attendant inequality and strife. Those who found the literature of the lubok and the commercial periodicals most pernicious saw them as obstacles on the path to a brighter future for all Russians. For the educated and for the semi-educated in general, and for those engaged in popular education in particular, the notion of a common heritage in which all could share was an important alternative to the popular culture. {Ibid.356) The elitist scorn for the popular taste that denied the common people the right to choose what they wanted to read was a way of restricting the information available to them, and of adding new barriers to the inequalities of education and social status. Those who spoke with automatic authority on behalf of ‘the people’ belonged to an intelligentsia engaged in a privileged discourse by virtue of the cultural capital conferred on them by literacy, status, power, social centrality, and male Russianness. Almost unbelievably, ‘the people’ themselves, the still largely illiterate peasant narod, the majority of the pre-Revolutionary Russian population, were excluded from this discourse. Even apart from ‘the people’, there were various other excluded Others: the ethnic and religious minorities (inovertsy, inorodtsy) who constituted up to half of the Russian Empire; females, another half of the nation; and lower social groups devoid of power, and thus doomed to marginality in culture and politics. These Others were either not heard at all, or engaged in marginal discourses which went on in subcultures or on the periphery of the cultural space. The Narod in Collections The Narod was the social Other for the generation of Russian narodniki, the populist intelligentsia of the 1870s, who were the classic ethno-linguistic nationalists; this rather small group of literary intellectuals saw its social

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function as mobilizing of the uneducated masses using populist visions of the desired society through a printed language which made it possible to imagine a new kind of limited, but sovereign community. Both the literary and the revolutionary narodniki were well aware of the powerful emotional dimensions of nationalism, as well as of the material and political factors which facilitate the growth of nations. They were radical socialists, but also culturists, engaged in bringing Education and Culture to the Narod, working in the interplay between language, tradition and print capitalism. Equating the native with nature and nation in the romantic spirit of the Slavophiles, the populists were also engaged in the invention of the Folk. The collecting of folklore and traditions intensified in the second half of the 19th century. For the populists, ‘going to the people’ meant not only bringing the light of literacy and medical care to the village, but also discovering and describing the Folk. Their accounts of folk life, whether they were professional ethnographers or amateur collectors, are written from the position of the outsider who ‘speaks for’, or translates the reality of others: others defined as being unable to speak for themselves, primitive, pre-literate, remote in some special, past or passing, times, and represented as if they were not involved in the present which encompasses the ethnographers along with the peoples they study. The ethnographer’s encounter with the people is rarely described. We are usually given a general picture. Presumably many observations, taken from many vantage points, are conflated into a single, constructed product, which becomes a sort of ideal, a Platonic performance. The narod was a cultural fiction based on systematic, and contestable, exclusions. These might involve silencing incongruent voices, or neglecting large parts of the described reality, particularly women. Ethnographic truths about the narod are thus inherently partial — biased and incomplete. (Cf. Writing culture 1986:6-7,10) This symbolic discourse about the folk was held not with the people participating in their own lives, but above their heads; they were described through their objects, and thus objectified. Indeed, the first generation of ethnographers, folklorists, and amateur populists mostly collected objects and texts, seldom or never registering or mentioning who, when, where, why, which ritual or secular context used or produced these collector’s items. Initially private, such highly incomplete collections of traditional culture became the hard core of a ‘real Russianness’ kept in archives and museums, and later used for public education and research. The narod was being codified in its objects and texts. Publications of Russian folklore (primarily folk tales and bylinas) became general reading matter and a popular source of artistic expression, especially during the second half of the 19th century.

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These fetishistic, censored images of the narod inspired by the Romantic dreams of the past and imbued with “primordialist assumptions that those long-run forms lay essentially unchanged beneath the surface flux of history” (James 1996:18), were intended to preserve the illusion of folk life which was rapidly dissolving. Museum and Empire The difficulty with such collections and representations is that they seem to be unaware of their own bias; they are tacitly assumed to present the whole truth, not a partial view of one truth. Museum collections are not innocent mirrors or portraits of culture, because ‘Culture’ does not hold still for a portrait to be made. Attempts to make a culture, or cultures, hold still always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of temporal focus, the construction of a particular self-other relationship, and the imposition or negotiation (perhaps, negation?) of a power relationship. (Cf. Clifford in Writing Culture 1986:10) Russian ethno-linguistic nationalism joined imperialism in the exhibition in public museums created to be seats of learning and repositories of the wisdom and beauty of the national heritage, but indirectly portraying the power structure of the empire. In the late 19th century, museums that had previously relied upon private benefactors and philosophical societies, and which operated on a voluntary basis, became a focus of state policy concerned with the national heritage. The private collections were transferred to new publicly founded museums: The Russian Museum, with its enormous ethnographical collections (1898), in St Petersburg; the Tretiakov Gallery (1892-1902) in Moscow. Museums not only represent the nation and history: they are historical institutions in themselves, a product of the Enlightenment and of modernity. They present a linear, theological conception of history, ordered systems of classification, a view of the civilizing mission of the centre with regard to the backwardness of the peripheries, the imposition of Imperial power justified by the primitivism of the subjected and colonized peoples... “Artefacts collected from the colonies provided collections for the ethnographic museums where Otherness was conveyed through ethnocentric and, indeed, racist discourses.” (McGuigan 1996:131) In Russia, following Europe, a key stimulus for the formation of museums and the associated disciplines, was imperialism. In museums, cliched versions of the ‘ethnographic myth’ of the Empire signified the past and what it

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included and excluded: the narrative images and discourses deployed are controversial, to say the least. The very first Russian public museum, Kunstkamera founded by Peter I in 1719, was initially his private collection of curiosities brought from abroad and from different parts of the empire. The strange exoticism of the collected items was intended to underscore the normality and rationality of the viewer. Peter wanted visitors ‘to look and learn’. It is no accident that a cultural description of the Other visually prefigured as a museum object presupposes an outside standpoint — looking at, objectifying, or, somewhat closer, ‘reading’ a given reality.6 To quote Benedict Anderson (1996:178), “museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political.” In Russia, as elsewhere, nationalist cultural discourse indulged in ethnocentric self-description and self-deception; imperial violence was conveniently hidden behind the picturesque exoticism of the exhibited Others.7 This was a pattern of comforting auto-communication in the face of the threat of disobedience and social disorder. During the 19th century, Russia was almost constantly at war, against Europe and/or against Asia. The Russian Eagle spread its wings over Poland, Finland, the Caucasus and Central Asia. But, although imperial expansion coincided in time with the years of growing radicalization among the Russian intelligentsia, it was ignored by Slavophile, radical democrat, and populist discourse. “The paradox of the Russian radicals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s placidly accepting the Empire’s continuing expansion has never been explored, yet it deserves a separate study.” (Thompson 1987:205, n.10) The Intelligentsia Although the central role of the Russian intelligentsia in the formation of national self-confidence is generally recognized, little has been done explicitly to account for the ambiguous position of intellectuals and the conditions which made it possible for them to constitute a ‘community among strangers’, while their traditionalism, nationalism, individualism and cosmopolitanism formed a single, complex amalgam. In other words: the problem is to explain how the pre-eminent purveyors of nationalist ideologies, who stressed the importance of cultural boundaries, emerged out of a universalizing, cosmopolitan way of thinking. The intellectuals were in the forefront of the imagining and enacting of the

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Russian nation; in the forefront of both oppositional revolutionary movements and the official nationalism of the old, and new, Russian empires. Their pivotal yet deeply contradictory role as the main reproducers of national forms of culture, as a medium through which the ideas of nationalism were refracted into Russian society (providing points of reference and assembling archives of national culture, and, on the other hand, as ‘free personalities’ who were very open to the call of cosmopolitanism) is a reflection of an extremely complex process. But in the first instance, Russian nationalism was propelled by a “disenfranchised intelligentsia, affirming the folk culture as it supplants it.” (Gellner 1983:62) When we consider the familiar ideological descriptions of the national past — the invention of tradition, or the instrumentality of national nostalgia — we realize that they are being caught in an act of restless hesitation that articulates the contemporaneity of the past: “part disavowal, part elliptical idealization, part fetishism, part splitting, part antagonism, part ambivalence,” as Homi Bhabha, in ‘Anxious Nations, Nervous States’ (1994), puts it.8 It is sufficient to remind ourselves how deeply split Russia was, adding new tensions to the old ones as the 19th century went on: the geographical and economic split between the European centre and the Asian provinces grew more profound as new territories were conquered; tensions built up between the past-oriented conservatives and the future-oriented radicals, who gradually turned to nihilism in the 1860s and to political terrorism in the 1870s and 1880s; there were social rifts between the upper classes and the lower classes, with their different cultural patterns, which were also confronted by the new middle class that emerged in the wake of urbanization, railways, and industrial growth; the old barriers to communication were re­ formed and extended by print, photography and later cinema. In the meantime, the Russian intelligentsia was almost totally preoccupied with the ‘accursed’ questions: Who is to blame? (Kto vinovat?)', What’s to be done? (Chto delat?)\ What is Russia’s mission in the world, what is The Russian Idea? These were the sentiments of the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev who in Russkaia ideia (1888) outlined a way of conquering national egoism by uniting in universal brotherhood on the basis of the Universal Church (Vselenskaia tserkov). For Soloviev, the idea of a nation is not what it thinks of itself but what God thinks of it in eternity. Divine wisdom, Sophia, with its roots in pantheistic European mysticism, was the final goal of Soloviev’s Sophiology, a utopian concept of the ‘all-unity’ of man. Thus, for him, the universal mission of Russia is just one aspect of Christianity. “The image of the Divine Trinity — this is the Russian Idea, and it can be achieved only in

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unity with other people; that would prove that the idea is real.” (Rossiia glazami russkogo 1991:339) That messianic Russian Idea looms like a giant supertext over Russian culture, pointing to the special way prepared for Russia in world history. For the Russian intelligentsia, the search for that way was also the search for a symbolic soil in which to be rooted. The Russian way implied holiness, sin, guilt, and repentance. Perhaps, no other public admission of collective guilt can match the Russian intelligentsia’s self-flagellation in the notorious Vekhi, where that age-old guilt was publicly acknowledged.9 Vekhi (Landmarks) is a collection of essays published in Moscow in 1909, at a time when reaction had triumphed over the lofty idealism and social disorder of 1905-07; a period that was described by the editor Mikhail Gershenzon as a “nation-wide test of those values that our social thinkers have regarded for more than half a century as most highly sacred.” In his opinion, because the intelligentsia’s ideology was inherently wrong it had become incapable of leading to the intelligentsia’s self-set goal: the people’s liberation. Petr Struve, a prominent scholar and journalist, charged the Russian intelligentsia with being “dreamy, impractical and frivolous in politics”. Its radicalism amounted to “credulity without a creed, struggle without creativity, fanaticism without enthusiasm, intolerance without humility”. An essay by the philosopher Semion Frank was concerned with the intelligentsia’s ethics of nihilism. In effect, a handful of secular monks, “alien to and contemptuous of the world, declare war on the world in order to forcibly do it a great favour and gratify its earthly, material needs.” (Vekhi 1991:193) Sergei Bulgakov, who eventually became known as an eminent Orthodox theologian, warned against repeating both Slavophiles’ and Westerners’ mistakes; he saw the ‘religious nature’ of the Russian intelligentsia in its spiritual and messianic mission, notwithstanding its formal rejection of doctrinal Christianity. Borrowing his image from Dostoevskii’s Besy (The Possessed), he wrote: “A legion of demons has entered into Russia’s enormous body and is choking it with convulsions, torturing it and crippling it. Russia can be cured, and freed from this legion, only through religious action (podvig), invisible but powerful”. (Ibid.:68) Bulgakov argued that the Russian intelligentsia was doomed to oscillate between the extremes of popular idolatry and spiritual elitism. He traced the idealization of the Narod to Herzen and later to Russian populism and socialism, where all the lofty qualities and the communal spirit of the narod were ascribed to one of its parts, first the peasants and then the proletariat; on

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the other hand, the intelligentsia could not help feeling superior to a people so immature, so unenlightened and so in need of a redemptive nanny who cared about its upbringing. (Ibid.:59-60) My retelling of all this is not a shorthand for a socio-historico-cultural study of the mythogenesis of Russian nationalism; another volume Will have to be written on that. My aim is more modest: to point to the intelligentsia’s contribution in providing and sustaining the discourse about Russianness, in imagining the nation. For the Nation, as Benedict Anderson writes in Imagined Communities (1996:7), is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism. National Culture It is true that for the Russian intelligentsia the national idea became secondary to a cultural identity based on the ideals of the radical and liberal critics of the 19th century. The concept of the nation, although very much alive in late 19th-century Russia, was associated in the minds of many educated people — and especially the intelligentsia — with a retrograde political order counter to their own political ideals. Loyalty to the tsar and identification with the Orthodox Church, the traditional emblems of Russian nationality, had become unacceptable to many Westernized Russians as a basis for citizenship. The notion of cultural rather than political or religious identity was particularly attractive to the upwardly mobile people of common origins, the so called raznochintsy. They saw culture’s role as providing connections across the social rifts; the perceived cultural cleft produced a dream of cultural unity. The term ‘culture’ was understood in the sense of shared values, but these values were primarily expressed through the Russian literary tradition, “which consisted of a pantheon of respected writers and critics and

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of the judgement that the true function of belles lettres was to illuminate social reality and transform readers.” (Brooks 1985:317-319) In the 19th century, Russian literature emerged as an institution closely allied with ‘culture’ and ‘art’. Literature and art were, in effect, circumscribed zones in which non-utilitarian, ‘higher’ values were maintained. High culture is usually perceived outside or above the political field of force, in this way accumulating cultural capital along with maintaining the central position in the social discourse. Cultural nostalgia for the world of ideal values reverberates in the current practice of calling the Pushkin period of the 1820s and ’30s ‘The Golden Age of Russian Poetry’, and the whole of the 19th century ‘The Golden Age of Russian Culture’, followed by ‘The Silver Age’ of the pre-Revolutionary culture, all seen from the chill perspective of the degradation in ‘The Iron Age’ of the 20th century. In the context of national myth, however, it is important to consider the role of the relatively well-established middle-class of merchants largely seen by the intelligentsia as embodiments of philistine values {meshchanstvo, poshlost). The 19th-century Russian merchant was widely seen as a conceited boor interested only in money, and frequently depicted as devoid of any sense of personal calling or public responsibility, both ignorant and scornful of learning. This view was undeniably unfair, because towards the end of the 19th century some of the leading merchant and industrial families attained a high level of cultivation. (Dumova 1992) As Richard Pipes reminds us (1995:217-18), this was a middle-class highly concerned with national ‘high culture’. Its non-commercial energies were directed primarily towards cultural patronage, in which towards the end of the 19th century businessmen replaced the impoverished landed class. “The widow of a self-made railway magnate discreetly subsidized Tchaikovsky; another railway builder, Savva Mamontov, founded the first opera company in Russia, and helped support Mussorgskii and RimskiiKorsakov. Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theatre was financed with merchant money. The best collection of the Russian school of painting was assembled by the Moscow merchant Tretiakov. It was the descendants of two serf entrepreneurs, Morozov and Shchukin, who put together Russia’s outstanding collection of French Impressionist and post-impressionist art.” (Ibid.) Even a brief account of the creative imagination involved in the emergence of Russian national culture is bound to leave readers breathless. A host of impressive names — including Repin and Surikov in painting; Glinka, Musorgskii, Rakhmaninov, Chaikovskii in music; Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi in literature, to name only a few of the giants —

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conforms to the proud opinion of most Russians that the best expressions of the national genius were produced by the Russian artists of the 19th century; in the opinion of other, more sceptical observers, these names are symbols of cliched commonplaces, the ABC of Russian nationalism. Since little more than name-dropping is possible here (the history of Russian literature, painting, music, theatre being extensively treated elsewhere), let me just comment on the iconicity of the artistic discourse in Russian realistic art of this period that was so preoccupied with national soil and soul. When they opposed the elitism of the Russian Academy of Arts in the 1860s, the democratically oriented Itinerants, or Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) sought to create a visual image of Russia and the Russians, and chose as their credo the nationalist-sounding slogan: Only Russian themes, only Russian models! In an age not yet seduced by visual aids, they painted Russia as they saw or imagined her, in landscapes, provincial towns, home interiors, peasant faces; they exhibited the prosaic side of life, and even the ugly face of Russia. In particular, Ilia Repin’s painting Burlaki (1873), depicting a team of bargehaulers on the banks of the Volga, became the icon of the Russian populist intelligentsia of the 1860s. The Itinerants ‘went to the people’ with their paintings, taking their exhibitions from place to place. Their art was realistic, easily understandable, socially engaged and engaging. It was perceived by viewers and art critics alike as a mirror of reality, as a revelation of a longed-for Truth about Russia. Obscured by this naive equation of life and art was the simple fact that these pictures were imagined, created by the painters in accordance with the artistic conventions and restraints of the time. They were representations, symbols and icons, engaged in populist discourse about Russia. The illusory nature of this virtual reality is especially revealing in the portraits of Russian intellectuals of the late 19th century; Kramskoi and Repin left a number of psychologically sensitive pictures representing Russian writers, painters and composers; their portraits of Dostoevskii, Musorgskii and Tolstoi are still considered masterpieces. Eventually, the narrow standards of the realistic style in art, and especially in portraiture, were more or less devalued by the spread of photography. But the enchantment of iconicity, of one-to-one correspondence between symbol and ‘reality’ endured for a long time in the demands of the less sophisticated public for ‘understandable’ art. (Not by accident, the same tendency to illusionary ‘realism’ prevailed in Soviet art of the 1930s onwards. Opposing the ‘bourgeois decadence’ of the Silver Age and the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, Soviet ‘socialist realism,’ proclaimed the only truly democratic art,

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adopted the realistic canons of the Russian classics of the 19th century as its artistic ideal, but without its critical edge.) A drift towards historical themes occurred by the middle of the 19th century simultaneously in painting and in music, arts which provided immediate means of communication with the polyglot audiences of the expanding empire. Historical themes taken from painting and literature echoed in Russian music, most audibly in national operas: in Glinka’s Ivan Susanin, Borodin’s Prince Igor, Musorgskii’s Boris Godunov. And national feeling could soar at opera performances; in April 1866, after the attempted assassination of Alexander II, Glinka’s patriotic opera A Life fo r the Tsar (later Ivan Susanin), in which a peasant saved the life of the first Romanov tsar which was being threatened by the occupying Poles, was performed in St Petersburg. The then budding composer Petr Chaikovskii was there; he remembered: As soon as the Poles appeared on the stage, shouts began: ‘Down with the Poles!’ The choristers were confused and stopped singing, and the audience demanded the anthem, which was sung about twenty times. At the end the Sovereign’s portrait was brought out, and the ensuing madness cannot be described.10 In popular opinion, the Russian soul (dusha) is best expressed by music, either by folk songs or by artistic composition using folk melodies; thus understood, ‘closeness to the people’ was the hallmark of Russian national music of the 19th century, especially of the so-called Moguchaia kuchka, The Mighty Coterie, a group of composers who sought a new popular style of music, and whose rebellion against established musical conventions almost exactly parallels the iconicity favoured by the Wanderers in art. The most distinguished of The Mighty Coterie, Modest Musorgskii, wrote to Repin using vocabulary reminiscent of a painter’s vision: “It is the people I want to depict; sleeping or waking, eating or drinking, I have them constantly in my mind’s eye.” (Billington 1970:406-407) Intellectual belief in the redemptive power of culture was nevertheless most directly oriented towards the printed word, and more towards literary prose than poetry. In Russian literature, the populists saw not only a source of national pride, but also a means of salvation. “Educated Russians of different political persuasions shared a common belief that a ‘proper’ literature was a necessary beacon to guide the Russian peasant along an as yet dimly perceived path out of generations of serfdom and backwardness.” (Brooks 1985:317).

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The way forward was shown by Nikolai Chemyshevskii’s novel Chto delat? (What’s to be done?), the Bible of the revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia of the 1860s. Here, the new type of relations between men and women are presented. The heroine, Vera Pavlovna, is guided in her development by a mysterious apparition of radiant beauty (a relative of Soloviev’s Sophia?) who appears to her in dreams. The fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna is particularly famous for its utopian vision of a future Russia as presented to her by the ‘radiant beauty’: men and women live in harmony and equality in crystal palaces amid ripening fields and orchards, their time divided between work, entertainment, free love, and shared caring for their children. This was just another version of the Paradise myth, but its main novel element was female equality and complete emancipation; and the eternal feminine principle showed the way to salvation from age-old patriarchal principles and the tyranny of familism. Underlying the Russian intelligentsia’s utopian dreams, and the basic cause of populist agony, was “the unresolved (and largely unacknowledged) conflict that existed within the intelligentsia between its relentless determination to see things as they really are and its passionate desire to have them better. It was the old conflict between harsh facts and high ideals — lifted, however, to a new level of intensity by the conviction that facts and ideals were but two aspects of one Truth.” (Billington 1970:404) The central (and occasionally acknowledged) truth of the populist era was the intelligentsia’s indebtedness to the Petrine Westernizing reforms and to the subsequent influences of the Enlightenment and Modernity; in defending either an imaginary and idealized past, or an imaginary and idealized future, they had already been shaped by modernizing forces from the West. The heroic struggle to defend the old patterns of life and culture in the symbolic discourse between the Westerners and the Slavophiles produced a powerful national myth; Russian self-reflection and self-confidence were embodied in national art and literature. This was the magical mirror in which Mother Russia would recognize herself, if not as the fairest nation in the world, then as the one with the greatest soul. And indeed, the best source for learning about Russianness, next to living among Russians, is fiction. There it is, all described in a beautiful language, captured in fascinating stories. But we should always bear in mind that even classical, realistic literary prose, not to mention poetry, is generated in a double process of imagination: first by the writer, then by the reader. Imagination is the very stuff of myths. Small wonder that the first Russian National Poet and Writer, the central image of the intellectually conceived national myth uniting an imagined community of Russians, becomes larger

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than life: he is genuinely Russian, no matter how secular and Westernized. And he himself is a cultural myth. Pushkin and Co. The dominant rhetorical representations of Russian culture (traditionally viewed as the supreme arena of male artistic activity), in Helena Goscilo’s idiom “continues to rely on its hardiest metatrope: the metonym that is Alexandr Sergeevich Pushkin.” To be sure, as she points out, Russians who may agree about nothing else are united in proclaiming Pushkin their ‘all,’ their Genius, their divinity, the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of Russia, and Art incarnate. And the wave of memorials, monuments, museums, ‘Pushkin places,’ postcards, and reissues of his works has swelled to tidal proportions... While one divinity after another has toppled in the last decade, Pushkin as cultural metonym has withstood all the vicissitudes of glasnost, to emerge intact. “For Russians, not idolizing Pushkin is tantamount to betraying Russia, abrogating all human values, or involuntarily revealing crass imperviousness to aesthetics” (Goscilo 1995:80-83). We might add a secret admiration by those living in a less glamorous age for the gilded life of refined pleasures, balls and salons of the aristocratic French-speaking Russian nobility, an elite within an elite, to which Pushkin belonged and which he so brilliantly described. Pushkin (1799-1837) is generally credited with founding the Russian literary language. Pushkinologiia is the most distinguished branch of Russian literary research, resounding with such brilliant names as Tynianov, Tomashevskii, Lotman. Pushkinskii dom is Pushkin’s archive in Petersburg and a highly prestigious research institution. In the last decade alone, dozens of scholarly publications on Pushkin have been issued in Russia, some of them meticulously collecting minute details about the poet and his lifetime, the period called Pushkinskaia epokha, the Pushkin Age. The poet was, of course, not immune to the prejudices of the age, as his uncritical admirers wish to present him. “Beware of the Pushkinists” are the words with which Vladimir Mayakovskii addressed the Pushkin monument in his poem Yubileinoe (1924)." Currently, some rather disrespectful female voices can be heard asking: Why Pushkin? Helena Goscilo’s answer is threefold: first of all, it satisfies Russia’s peculiar penchant for ideological legitimation through ‘high’ art — and no artist in Russia is ‘higher’ than Pushkin; secondly, the specific demands of cult formation are eminently met by Pushkin’s relatively brief biography; and thirdly, Pushkin’s reluctance to foreclose a text or an issue

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gives him an ambiguous image, inviting multiple, even mutually exclusive, extrapolations. In a passage entitled ‘All Things to All Men: Troping Pushkin,’ Goscilo writes: The process of the poet’s canonization, launched by the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, was consolidated in the ensuing 100-odd years by official campaigns orchestrated to capitalize economically and politically on Pushkin’s name and its totem powers... The state ensured that the poet became and remained our Pushkin — a national treasure, not only the fountainhead and acme of Russian art, but the slippery signifier invoked to legitimate whatever ideology dominates at a given moment. Hence the liberal press hoped to use the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 as an argument for constitutional reform, while conservative nationalists, notably Dostoevskii, “used the occasion to stimulate nationalist pride by eulogizing the writer’s universality and messianism.” {Ibid.) In a different mood, Svetlana Boym observes that little busts of Pushkin, Chaikovskii, and other great Russian Geniuses that have persistently decorated private and public places from the late 19th century to the present, represent the popular prestige of high culture; and Pushkin is one of the first to confront seriously the problem of the commonplace and the cliche. He introduced many expressions into Russian which became ‘expressions of national wisdom’ and the commonplaces of more-or-less educated Russians. (Boym 1994:154,175-80) Obviously fascinated by the Pushkin myth, and being herself associated with the Pushkinskii dom (alias the Institute of Russian Literature), the Russian researcher Maria Virolainen, in a more reverent style, presents an analysis of Pushkin as a cultural hero in a secularized society. In her interpretation, Pushkin is a Victim Hero and a Winner Hero; a poet who managed to re-establish the lost unity of the painfully split Russian culture, paving the way for a new sobomost. After Pushkin’s untimely death in 1837, the central idea of classical Russian literature, i.e. the writer as a messianic producer of cultural myth, was grandly formulated by Gogol. It is with Pushkin, then, that the poet began to play the role in the Russian cultural hierarchy which had once belonged to the prophet, and later to the priest. (Virolainen 1994:47)

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But what of the other two giants of Russian literature, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi? They are equally controversial, while being less mythologized. The two are often compared: both were under the spell of Slavophile, and later Populist messianic thinking; both were moralists preoccupied with deep religious concerns. But, while Dostoevskii literally adored Pushkin, calling him the Universal Man ( vsechlok,) Tolstoi rejected everything artifici art included, and was averse to praising other writers. But both viewed the major new trends in the Russian world with fear and antagonism, although the epic, pastoral world of Tolstoi, the high aristocrat and rationalist ‘seer of the flesh’ is in many ways the very antithesis of the dramatic, urban world of Dostoevskii, that low aristocrat and often irrational ‘seer of the spirit’. Life was a serious matter for Tolstoy because it was the arena in which man’s quest for moral perfection and universal happiness had to be realized. Unlike Dostoevsky, for whom evil and death were part of the greater drama of suffering and redemption, they were for Tolstoy unaccountable intrusions into his world of Promethean perfectibility. (Billington 1970: 443)

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The last years of Tolstoi’s life were spent in defining ‘the meaning of goodness.’ For Dostoevskii, goodness was embodied in Christ and in the Mother of God. Dostoevskii’s words Krasota spaset mir (the world will be redeemed by beauty) are often cited in modem interpretations claiming an aesthetic approach to life. But is it the beautiful female body that Dostoevskii had in mind? Or the spiritual beauty of the sacrificial Russian soul? As James Billington commented: “Above all stands the idea that increasingly obsessed the literary imagination of the late imperial period: the belief that a woman, some strange and mysterious feminine force, could alone show the anguished intellectuals the way to salvation.” {Ibid. :557) But this was far from any feminist stance. Whose Project? To question the male cultural myth at all is to focus on the gender aspect of nationalism; while Russian texts on the nation have consistently ignored gender, there is a straggle to define what constitutes the ‘national project,’ and in this women are, typically, heard less than men. Russian preRevolutionary feminists were preoccupied with the question of emancipation, female labour and equal rights. Imperial politics remained outside their scope, as is still the case in post-Soviet Russian feminism. The Russian national myth was and is couched entirely in terms of male imperial monologue.12 As Sylvia Walby has argued in ‘Woman and Nation’ (1996), gender cannot be analysed outside of ethnic, national and race relations; but neither can these latter phenomena be analysed without gender. Women have engaged at the level of the nation less than men have. The relationship between women and nationalism is crucially mediated by militarism, since men and women often, but not always, have a different relationship to war. This may mean that women are simultaneously both less militaristic and less nationalistic, because militarism is often seen as an integral facet of a national project. Nationalist discourse in Russia grew out of men’s rather than women’s experiences: “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope” (Mapping the Nation 1996:241). This display of Masculinity was and is especially relevant in relation to the East. In Russian literature and art of the classical period, numerous images of women in colonized territories were constructed and purveyed in a manner which simultaneously eroticized and exoticized them, while justifying

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imperial domination in the name of ‘civilization.’ The same, of course, holds true in a wider cultural and historical perspective: “European ‘Orientalism’ nurtured an appreciative fascination with these cultures while justifying European rale in the name of ‘civilization’. The image of tantalizingly veiled Moslem woman was a cornerstone of this Orientalist ideology and of the imperial structure it supported.” Not only was masculinity an imperial issue, so also was femininity: “Like sanitation and Christianity, feminine respectability was meant to convince both the colonizing and the colonized peoples that foreign conquest was right and necessary.” (Ibid.) All this was part of an imperial complex in which Russia, caught between East and West, is still entangled. Notwithstanding the constant explicit problematization of her relations with the West, post-Soviet Eurasia has to grapple with its own shadow, a shadow cast by tacit yet no less problematic relations with the East. The Eurasian Temptation The Russian national myth reveals an ambivalent pattern of superiorityinferiority in the self-image of Russia: while often feeling inferior to the West, Russia could always feel superior to the East. Every Self is a reflection of its Others, and the Russian Empire had its own Others in the conquered Asian provinces. They were ‘pockets of inferiority’ (Goody 1996:1) for the ethnocentric Russian power, especially military power; but Russian superiority was then given a permanent guise. The stress in devaluation of the East was on knowledge, or reason, power and trade. “In other words a historically specific advantage was generalised into a long-standing, indeed permanent, almost a biological superiority.” (Ibid.:2) Russia had its own peripheries in the eastern provinces, but she herself was on the periphery or semi-periphery of the West. The patterns of successive Westernization, Enlightenment, Modernization and Industrialization of Russia were perceived in relation to their origin and centre, i.e. the West. As Jack Goody has remarked, the framework of such ideas about East and West has been the bread and butter of sociologists, historians, demographers, economists, and, from a somewhat different angle, anthropologists; they have attempted to draw lines that not only overemphasized and exaggerated the historical differences between the two parts of the Eurasian landmass, but also overlooked the common heritage of the major societies of that region. (Goody 1996:5) In Russian social and philosophical thinking, the intermediary position of

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Russia straddling Europe and Asia was the geopolitical stuff that constantly fed the Russian Idea, and gave meaning to its empty beginnings and ends. In the first variant of the Russian Idea, Moscow as the Third Rome was simultaneously oriented toward West-Rome and East-Rome; this providential religious vision was later adopted by the Imperial ideology of St Petersburg, the Fourth Rome. In the 1830s the Russian Idea was reanimated by the Slavophiles, and later, after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56, further developed by Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Danilevskii. While Soloviev insisted on the universal character of the Russian cultural mission, Danilevskii argued in Rossiia i Evropa (1869) that the Russian cultural heritage was unique and self-contained. Following the Slavophiles, Danilevskii believed in the promise of the Russian peasant commune; thus he provided a link between the Slavophiles and the populist pochvenniki. His book was also a source of inspiration for the Eurasian movement among the emigre Russians of the 1920s. Sooner or later, a battle with Europe is inevitable, prophesied Danilevskii, and “the banner on which will be written ‘Orthodoxy, Slavdom, and the Peasant Allotment’— that is, the moral, political, and economic ideal of the peoples of the Slavic cultural-historical type — that banner cannot become but the symbol of victory”. (Danilevskii 1869:XVI:89) Danilevskii envisaged history as a great manlike organism, not past, inert, and dumb, but contemporary, alive, purposeful, even articulate: a very Russian view, in the opinion of Robert MacMaster. “Danilevsky’s intellectuality and his attitude toward modernity were progressive, scientistic, democratic, rationalistic. He wanted modernity reshaped without much simplification or purification. He wanted to proceed not regress to an idealized and vastly improved past.” (MacMaster 1967:300) Danilevskii’s Russia and Europe helped to define the course of Russian thought. Konstantin Leontiev used his theory of cultural historical types in his philosophy of history. Deeply concerned with Russia and Europe, Russian thinkers, however, all but forgot about Asia. Dostoevskii, keen to underscore the civilizing role of the Russian ‘God-bearing’ people (narod-bogonosets), has observed that Asian Russia, Siberia included, was seen by most Russians as a kind of mute appendage to European Russia; no one showed any real interest in it. “But a Russian is not only a European, he is also an Asiatic. Moreover: our hopes may belong more to Asia than to Europe. Moreover: in our future destiny it is perhaps Asia that would offer us the final solution! ’, he wrote. (Dostoevskii 1984:27:33) Defying both Slavophile ‘Russia for the Russians’ with its pagan

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nationalism, and Soloviev’s Orthodox missionary ‘Russia for the World’, a new concept of the Russian Idea was proposed by Nikolai Berdiaev in Sudba Rossii, The Fate of Russia (1918). There he views Russia’s Janus face, Europe-cum-Asia: a very specific geopolitical space with its own ethnic, social and cultural tasks, if not missions. These thoughts were further developed by the so-called Evraziitsy (Eurasianists), who watched developments in the Soviet Union from abroad, and understood that the Revolution put a definite end to Old Russia. Combining the Russian Idea with Bolshevik messianism, they explicated the new paradigm of Eurasia in a number of books and articles issued between 1921 and 1937. The new Russian Idea was underpinned by the old myth. Russia’s mission was now based on her special situation (mestorazvitiie) between Europe and Asia; her polyethnic cultural world was seen as a selfsufficient, organic, ‘symphonic personality’; her religious ideals were Orthodox; her national, Eurasian state was to be an ideocratic state.13 The Eurasianists can also be subsumed into the Romantic nationalist position, since they too were engaged in the perpetual discourse about the essence of Russianness. The intellectual Romantic nationalists, reared as they were in a European tradition, acknowledged that in the eyes of simple, non-Europeanized Russians, they belonged with the European outgroup. Yet this state of affairs threatened to falsify their view of Russia as an organic nation by introducing a lack of cohesion between head and body. Rather than trying to fill this white spot with new meaning, they chose to leave it unexplored. But this also entailed that the Russian people itself was largely left unexamined, making its appearance in Romantic nationalist texts only as an ill-defined blur. (Neumann 1996:115) Even contemporary post-Soviet intellectual discourse is centred on the national myth, in discussions of Russia as the West, Russia as the East, Russia as Eurasia bridging East and West, and Russia as an enigmatic Sphinx. And the Russian narod still remains an ill-defined blur.

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Notes 1. Important contributions to the study of Russian Slavophilism are Riasanovsky (1952); Christoff (1961,1972); Gleason (1972); Grant (1976); Walicki (1975, 1979); for recent research in Russian, see Tsimbaev (1986); Slavianofilstvo i sovremennost (1994). The term ‘Slavophilism’ was originally used as a gibe to underline a certain narrow tribal particularism that was felt to be typical of the opponents of Russian Westernism. The term ‘Westernism’ (zapadnichestvo) had similar origins; it was first coined by the Slavophiles to draw attention to their opponents’ alleged national apostasy. Both terms, however, could be interpreted positively and were finally accepted by the ideologists of each side as something in the nature of a challenge. (Walicki 1979:92) 2. The secret of Karamzin’s unique success was that the History was written in an easily understandable language. The 12 volumes of this historical account were accompanied by 12 more volumes of notes (6548 notes altogether) based on his archival research, and to this day an important historical source, since many of the documents to which Karamzin referred were later lost in the fire of 1812, when Moscow was occupied by Napoleon. The unfinished twelfth volume brought the history of Russia up to 1611. 3. Boris Godunov became world famous as Musorgskii’s opera (1874) based on the drama by Pushkin, with the bass Feodor Shaliapin singing the title role.

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4. On the origin of this formula, see Tsimbaev (1986). N.V. Riasanovsky discusses this issue in Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855, Berkeley (1959). The origin of the official formula of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality is usually linked with the name of Count S. Uvarov, the Russian Minister of Education in the 1830s. See also Hosking (1997). 5. I am in complete agreement with A.D. Smith who argues (1991b:362) that analysis of the meanings imparted by, or found in, the literary products of nationalism cannot substitute for causal explanations of the rise, content, form, timing, intensity and scope of a given nation and nationalism. But my task consists of revealing how the nation has been narrated by its devotees. 6. Such ‘visualisin’ is nowadays rejected; e.g., James Clifford writes: “Once cultures are no longer prefigured visually — as objects, theaters, texts — it becomes possible to think of a cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances. In a discursive rather than a visual paradigm, the dominant metaphors for ethnography shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech (and gesture).” (Writing Culture 1986:12) 7. The participation of museums in creating the national image has been discussed by Anderson (1983), Clifford (1994), Ehn (1986), Meyer (1974) and Said (1993). Recent international research underlines the importance of museums in shaping knowledge and identity, and in mediating political messages: see Museum, Media, Message (1995); Objects and Others (1985); Museums and the Appropriation o f Culture (1994); Learning from Things (1996). 8. Quoted in James (1996:18). 9. Reprints of Vekhi published since 1991 show that the dispute about the role of intelligentsia was — and remains — in the classic Russian tradition. Nowadays, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn represents the tenuous but unbroken thread between the original Landmarks and the postSoviet period. For a recent view on Russian nationalism and the role of the intelligentsia, see Hosking (1997). 10. P. Chaikovskii, Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii, Moskva 1959, vol. 5, 105; quoted in Volkov (1996:91). On art and culture in 19th century Russia, see Stavrou (1983). 11. Venok PushJdnu (1987:147). See Peterburgskiie vstrechi Pushkina (1987), or Chereiskii (1975), where 2500 people with whom Pushkin came into contact during his short life are piously registered. More imaginative are Ospovat and Timenchik (1987), Tertz (1975) and Goscilo (1995). Boym (1994:179) writes about the uncanonical Pushkin. 12. On Russian feminism, see Atkinson et al. (1997); Edmondson (1984); Engel (1983); Clements (1979); Jordan et a l (1985); Stites (1978); Tishkin (1984); Women in Russia. A New Era in Russian Feminism (1994); and Feminizm i rossiiskaia kultura (1995). Recent contributions to Russian women’s studies include Russia. Women. Culture (1996), Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies (1993), Women and Gender in Russian History (1996). Murav (1995) and Walby (1996) provide a fuller account of gender and nationalism. But if women’s experiences have been significantly excluded from accounts of the nation, the recognition of this absence now highlights the fact that men’s experience (as gendered subjects, not cultural types) is itself largely unstudied. 13. Eurasianism has recently been discussed in Rossiia mezhdu Evropoi i Aziei. Evraziiskii soblazn (1993). See also Mir Rossii—Evraziia (1995) and Gumilev (1992,1993).

10 Understanding Russianness

“Rossiia — Sfinks...” Alexandr Blok

Russia! — it is an age-long discourse, an endless controversy. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody is right, in a way. Alexei Remizov

Writing this book has been a journey into the interior, from the outside into the inside, from the soil into the soul of Russia. I entertain no illusions of having solved, exhausted, or even fully outlined the elusive problems posed by my topic. The pattern resulting from this interpretative venture is that of an open-ended collage in which, from one point to the next, and in changing contexts and perspectives, certain figures and motifs recur. In that respect, my presentation is congruent, or isomorphous, with the subject itself. Ambivalent Space One of the recurring themes has been the motif of space, prominent in the dual symbolism of bounded containment and unbounded expansion. In this bounded-unbounded view of herself, Russia seems to express the experience of being a hostage to her own immenseness. The endless, open landscape with the troika, and the protectively sealed space of the decorated Easter egg — the two contrasting symbols of Russia — convey the paradox of Russia’s vast territory. While the troika denotes the centrifugal movement of escape and freedom, but also insecurity, the egg symbolizes the centripetal contraction of space into a seamlessly closed and safe refuge, perhaps a prison, surrounded by protective walls that separate Self from Other. The ambivalence of this simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic experience matches the national self-stereotypes of Russia like two sides of the same coin.

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The traditional Russian symbolism of the bird and the horse, both originally belonging in free space but later tamed and domesticated, is imbued with the dual longing for freedom and protection. Recall the totemic roofridge horse-and-duck (konek) which used to protect Russian peasant houses from above: this provides a symbolic key to the world of Russian territorial (and other) ambivalences.1In the famous passage from Dead Souls quoted on page 28, where Gogol describes the troika flying over the steppe like a bird, ptitsa-troika, Russia herself is compared to that flying troika. Where are you going, Russia? asks Gogol: Rus, kuda zhe neseshsia ty? Dai otvet. Ne daet otveta. There is no answer. Turning the horse-cum-bird into a ptitsa-troika, Gogol has provided an image of reckless speed, of Russia’s violent urge to expand. By contrast, a recurring topic of Russian national symbolism is constraint: the setting up and keeping up of real and symbolic walls, fences, the control of entrances and openings, fiercely defending the national borders — but also violently breaking through them, whether it be the military conquest of Siberia and Central Asia, or wildly romantic dreams of World Revolution, which were replaced in the 1970s by dreams of the peaceful conquest of outer space (pokoreniie kosmosa). So there it is, the peculiarly Russian juxtaposition: a great preoccupation with space-and-time boundaries, such as protective fences, a welcoming blessing with an icon, the bread-and-salt, the triple kissing rituals at parting and meeting, the custom of sitting on the suitcase before setting out on a journey, the almost obligatory celebrations of birthdays and anniversaries, the love of jubilees; and an accompanying powerful need to escape the limitations of time and space by dreaming or drinking, by using the language of sex and violence, or by breaking other taboos of social behaviour, in an intoxication by total freedom, volia... Michel Foucault has pointed out that a whole history remains to be written of space as a historico-political problem, and of spaces as well, “from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat” (Foucault 1980:149). Space used to be either dismissed as belonging to ‘nature’ — that is, the given, the basic conditions, ‘physical geography’ or, in other words, a sort of prehistoric stratum; or else it was conceived as the abode or field of expansion of peoples, of a culture, a language or a state (ibid.). In the perspective explored here, space emerges as a central identifying concept in the national mindscape generating a cluster of basically ambivalent symbols. These symbols seem to embrace the vital values of the Russian community: freedom of expansion and protection from intrusion. Or, to put it in a different way, an endlessly aggrandized Self securely separated from the Other.

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The Nesting Principle This insulating security pattern is reproduced most distinctly in the ethnic symbolism of space; we see it in the protective concerns of Russian peasant houses topped by a konek and surrounded by a fence, in the concentricity of the peasant village with the church at its heart, in the khorovod ring dance, or in ritual objects such as wedding bread (korovai) and Easter eggs, as well as in traditional folk dress with its protective decorations. In all these cases, the ancient apotropaic magic ultimately harks back to the concentric world model which symbolically denotes the mythological origin of the world in the divine act of creation. As was mentioned earlier, this same centring principle also underpins the national emblem of the double-headed eagle, as well as the walled security of the Moscow Kremlin with its towers and cathedrals. The interdependence of vast horizontal expanses and the vertical hierarchies of central power are inherent to Russia’s territorial dilemma. The more space there is, the more difficult it is to control, the greater the need for yezhovye rukavitsy, the harsh, ‘hedgehog-skin gauntlets’ of an absolute ruler. Once we penetrate the layers of cultural meaning encoded by ethnic histories and traditions into Russian national symbols, unpacking the containers of matriarchy of the Matrioshka doll, or peeping into the hidden surprises of the self-aggrandizingly overdecorated Imperial Easter egg, Russia reluctantly discloses her identity as vulnerable, isolatory, thoroughly protecting the encapsulated interior. Ironically enough, this secretly nested vulnerability cannot help but reveal itself behind the tough facade of Russianness externally imposed by the national myth. By drawing together the many strings, strands and levels of symbolic expression, I have tried to discern something like a pattern of Russian national self-identification. What has revealed itself in this process of decoding the national text is still very complicated, but perhaps more ordered: it is a huge conceptual structure unfolding in time and space, of the kind we can think about but not speak of other than in symbols. Writing this, a passage from Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology o f Mind entitled ‘How Much Do You Know?’ comes to my mind; a father is talking with his young daughter: D: Then really do we only have one big thought which has lots of branches — lots and lots and lots of branches? F: Yes. I think so. I don’t know. Anyhow I think that is a clearer way of saying it. I mean it’s clearer than talking about bits of knowledge and trying to count them. (Bateson 1978:26)

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This endlessly ramifying structure: is it the proverbial razvesistaia kliukva, the ‘spreading cranberry tree’, a cliche of exaggerated exoticism? Or is it the mythological world-tree of the Russian traditional world model? That huge tree that spans the national space and time, deeply rooted in the Russian soil, with soul-birds making nests in its branches and laying magical red and golden eggs; the world-tree whose twigs, leaves, buds, flowers and fruits decorate innumerable Russian traditional artefacts, as most vividly exemplified by the red-golden patterns on wooden Khokhloma ware. If this mythological tree structure represents the symbolic world of Russianness, then we can imagine in its branches nests of key-symbols epitomizing some important national values. The virtual world of Russianness is coiled there, in metaphoric and metonymic chains which form a cultural code not unlike the genetic code, latent, but unfolding when the necessary conditions are fulfilled. Such a nesting principle is reminiscent of a motif in the Russian fairy tale about the Three Tsardoms: the main protagonist, Ivan naturally, obtains three eggs, each containing a realm which can be rolled out or folded back into the egg, and carried conveniently in the hero’s pocket. Each symbol is a condensed myth. And remarkably many of Russia’s keysymbols (e.g., the Easter egg, the national eagle, the Matrioshka doll) have a nesting, unfolding structure.2

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If anything, the Matrioshka doll represents centricity, hierarchy, protection and boundaries. Its structured hierarchy of boundaries conceals and confirms the primacy of the protected centre. It is also made to play with the contraction and expansion of space, with parts and wholes, unity and diversity, albeit understood as repetition. The involuted space of the Matrioshka’s body contains the same generating principle as the fabulous egg with its involuted kingdom; in an oversimplified form, it points to holy origins and to a higher existential truth. By the same token, it also symbolizes the very symbolizing process in its regressive search for simplicity understood as truth. No matter that the superficial meaning of this doll is a trivial cliche of Russianness; the cultural text encoded in the symbol can still evolve in the mind of the beholder. And, the further from pragmatics, the higher the semiotic status of an object used to be. The Imperial Easter eggs are another good example of this. Enigmatic Russia In Winston Churchill’s memorable sentence about the triply enigmatic Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” which has greatly contributed to the cliche of Russian inscrutability, the magical formula of triple protection acts as a thick veil: it conceals reality in a triply impenetrable layer of fog, underscoring the total incompatibility of the Self with the mysterious Other. Ultimately, uttered by an outsider, this formula is a refusal to understand, a gesture of separation, and is imbued with a covert animosity. But if from the outside Russia may seem too different, too inconsistent, too complicated, then, in contrast, the popular self-image of Russia tends to be over-simplified: insiders usually stress her homogeneity (vse kak odin, the all-alike-stereotype of Russian monolithic communality), or her immutability (u nas vsegda tak, the it’s-always-been-like-that-stereotype, i.e.: it is impossible to change anything radically in Russia). Now that a new, radically changed Russia stands in the place of the Soviet empire, is this emerging Russia, somewhat inchoate and mercurial as it is, just as much a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” as ever? (Mikheyev 1996:2) The many faces that Russia reveals through her symbols are contextual, situational, temporal: changing. But the symbolic text itself, that endlessly ramifying national myth, displays a preponderance of symbols that are split, dual, contradictory, hybrid. Rossiia — Sfinks: Russia is a Sphinx. She cannot be rationally comprehended: Umom Rossii ne poniat’... These words, written by the

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Russian poets Blok and Tiutchev, are the trite commonplaces of non­ comprehension uttered by insiders; quoting them also tends to provide closure, a full stop to any discussion of Russia. Indeed, the Sphinx is a hybrid creature, a lion and a woman, human and animal. Exoticism and Mystery unite in the Sphinx: she is the mysterious Oriental Other, and utterly enigmatic.3 In Russian traditional symbolism, Sirin, the paradise bird of the apocryphal texts, a bird with a woman’s head, is also a mysterious and significantly hybrid creature. Sirin is a Russian cousin of the sirens in Greek mythology who were bird-women. With their sweet voices the sirens tempted Ulysses and his co-travellers to approach the dangerous cliffs of their island. Sirin of the Russian tradition sings with an angelic voice about the pleasures of the afterlife; this is the voice of paradise or utopia, the allure of a bliss unattainable on earth. Her exotic name points to her eastern, Syrian origin. Exoticism as a commonplace of utopia or rejection? There is a refuge of security nested within all commonplaces; and, in the long run, this is what Russian identity is about, most of all: the secure choice of the same, being like everybody else, reducing the variety of individuals to easily understandable and safe similarity, and concealing the heterogeneity of We behind the cliches of homogeneity. Symbols are also commonplaces, and the national myth as a common denominator for Russian communality cannot be other than a collection of commonplaces. This is true even when the topic of the symbolic discourse is Russia’s exoticism, or her special fate and mission. But there’s the rub. Because the process of cultural construction of the Russian Self was, and is, reciprocal: under the critical gaze of the Other being incessantly incorporated into the Self, that very Self has been trying to protect its own purity from contamination by the Other; but, by the same token, the Self is constantly transformed into a hybrid creature, or rather into a host of hybrid creatures, reminiscent either of the ‘asphyxiating’ Sphinx, or of the alluring paradise bird, Sirin. Russia’s exoticism may indeed be perceived from different vantage points: as an exotic kind of West, if viewed by the various non-Russians on the periphery of the empire, and as an exotic kind of East to onlookers from the West. Is it then surprising that Russians insist on their essential, uncontaminated Russianness in order to reject the temptation of selfidentification with dangerously similar Others? The myth of Real Russianness segregates their superior centrality from the various peripheral Others who regard them (not always lovingly) from the inferior outsider position projected upon them. But, if Russianness is thoroughly mixed up with Otherness, culturally and ethnically at least, then why bother about

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segregation? There are no cultural islands: for one cannot occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world from which to look at others. “Human ways of life increasingly influence, dominate, parody, translate, and subvert one another. Cultural analysis is always enmeshed in global movements of difference and power.” ( W Culture 198 C urrent Discourse Writing from a marginal position outside the fields of political power (but on behalf of the power of knowledge), and looking at the national symbolic discourse conducted from a central position of real or imagined superiority, helps one realize how power and space are related in the national myth invented for and by the imagined community of Russians.

In that national discourse, the real political and military power exerted over the territory from the dominating centre of the Russian Empire is effectively downplayed, or hidden. Nevertheless, power and dominance are linked with the parallel theme of violence: ethnic violence as directed against

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non-Russian inhabitants of the territory; social violence as practised against those with different opinions on issues of religion or ideology; and, last but not least, violence against the territory itself, against Mother Earth violated in the course of a modernization process envisaged as a conquest of nature (pokoreniie prirody) — resulting in poisoning of the soil and ecological disasters. The protective circles of historically conquered territories and spheres of political and economic influence created by Russia over many centuries are now disintegrating. The Russian Federation, still gathered around Moscow, has diminished; the former Soviet republics on the periphery of the former Union have now achieved independence; the belt of East-European socialist countries intended to protect Russia from Western invasions are now eager to enter a NATO that will protect them from Russia...

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During the Soviet period, the slogans of internalization and the merging of national ethnic cultures into one Soviet culture masked the aim of Russian cultural policy (which identified itself with the Soviet regime) to dominate other republics by means of their gradual Russification; with the result that, when communist power ended, the former republics opted out of the pattern of Russian domination, proclaiming their political freedom and national independence. Mother Russia overshadowing and engulfing the neighbouring nations and ethnies, the Great Mother Matrioshka who had gathered them all under her skirts, has now disgorged them into a disobedient array of minor nations determined to go their own way. When Russian nationalism fails to convince, the state turns to violence or the threat of violence to prevent fission, as the recent war in Chechnia has demonstrated. “The monopoly on the use of legitimate violence is, together with the monopoly of taxation, one of the most important characteristics of the modem state; however, violence is usually seen as a last resort. Much more common are ideological strategies aiming to integrate populations culturally.” (Hylland Eriksen 1992:55-56) Current Russian discourse is deeply concerned about the state, derzhava, a power field of established superiority that legitimates violence. It is imbued with a nostalgia for a Soviet or Imperial past when that superiority was hard to challenge. This nostalgia is for a time when a coherent politics of ‘place’ could be imagined as a real possibility for the future. Today, nostalgic realism and idealism co-exist within the compass of the state. While the state encounters powerful centrifugal forces in the acceleration of global economic transactions, disease transmission, communications, travel and in the emergence of global dangers to the environment and human survival, it retains a tight grip over public definitions of democratic accountability, danger and security. The democratic, territorial state, in constructing these barriers to those currents, produces itself as a potential carrier of virulent nationalism. (Connolly 1991:463) Another group of recurrent topics, also connected to issues of political power, has centred on the growing tensions between the national centre and the periphery. There are old and new tensions created by disparities in modernization (the rural periphery and the urban centres, uneven distribution of power and communications, significant variations in ethnicity (Russian centre — non-Russian peripheries), and in population density. Russia grows in provinces, as Nikolai Karamzin wrote two centuries ago, and nowadays

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this is truer than ever. While the power game is played in Moscow, it is probably what happens on the periphery that will decide the future course of Russia’s development. The peripheral population is also an ethnic Other, and the last few years have witnessed a re-emergence of ethnic nationalisms on Russia’s borders. Given the unsatisfied aspirations of ethnic communities in many parts of the former Union, it is unlikely that the present wave of nationalisms will be the final one.4 In the Soviet Union, the Russians by and large understood Soviet identity as a Russian one, even if the influential neo-Slavophile tendency, of which Solzhenitsyn was the best-known exponent, denied this. In many ways, the Soviet Union was indeed a Russian state, as George Schopflin argues in ‘Nationhood, Communism and State Legitimation’: Although after Stalin’s death, the superior status of ‘Elder Brother’ was no longer as explicit as before, Khrushchev’s project for the long-term merger of all cultures was understood as a form of Russification by nonRussians and probably gave a certain satisfaction to Russians, who felt that, at the end of the day, the Soviet state was theirs, however much they resented some or many of the ways in which it impacted on them. In this sense, communism and the Soviet state did help to sustain a Russian identity and conversely the Russian identity helped to underpin the Soviet Union. For the non-Russians, on the other hand, the Soviet state was alien, its power over them was resented and when the communist ideology that sustained it collapsed, they opted out. (Schopflin 1995:89-90)5

Cultural Archaeology Recently, the role of nationalism in the reconstruction of nations has been examined by Anthony D. Smith (1995) who holds the view that the nation has been discussed from either a modernist or a post-modernist vantage point, which he compares to geology vs. gastronomy; in the ‘gastronomic’ theory, nations are composed of discrete elements and their cultures contain a variety of ingredients with different flavours and provenances. There is also a stress on the imagined quality of the national community and the Active nature of unifying myths. In this view, the nation is a piece of social engineering. Among the various ways used to forge an imagined community, Smith mentions the standardization of history through a canonical textbook as a

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particularly important one. The creation of a canonical literature represents another popular strategy. Pushkin, Tolstoi and Lermontov, the icons of the new imagined community, created in their reading publics a communion of devotees and provided the national image with a textual fabric. Music can also serve this collective purpose. “And here lies the point: these artefacts have created an image of the nation for compatriots and outsiders alike, and in doing so have forged the nation itself. Signifier and signified have been fused. Image and reality have become identical; ultimately, the nation has no existence outside its imagery and its representations.” (Ibid. :6) This essentially ‘post-modernist’ re-reading turns the nation into a ‘narrative’ to be recited, a ‘discourse’ to be interpreted and a ‘text’ to be deconstructed. The meanings of the nation are grasped through the images it casts, the symbols it uses and the fictions it evokes, in the novels, plays, poems, operas, ballads, pamphlets and newspapers which a literate reading public eagerly devours. It is in these symbolic and artistic creations that we may discern the lineaments of the nation. “Are we then to conclude that ‘post-modernist’ approaches to the nation are no more than the theory of nationalist practices? There seems to be no other conclusion, and it suggests that the recent radical rethinking of the problem of nationalism has abandoned the attempt to understand it causally and has substituted a series of descriptive metaphors.” (Ibid.:9) In the modernist ‘geological’ account, in contrast, the nation is a historic deposit: a stratified structure of social, political and cultural experiences and traditions laid down by successive generations of an identifiable community. According to this perennialist view, nations have always existed in one form or another. It postulates an unchanging essence of the nation beneath the different forms. For this standpoint, the ethnic past explains the national present. This is in stark contrast to recent anthropological approaches that emphasize how the present — its concerns, interests and needs — shapes and filters out the ethnic past. Modernists reify the nation, while failing to grasp the elusive, shifting character of all communities, including the nation. A geological metaphor fails to convey the active dynamism, the transformative power, which is characteristic of what we call ‘nation­ building’. It has no room for popular participation, for interaction with other nations, for projects of reconstruction or for the influence of different ideologies and myths. It represents a closed, static image of the nation, one far removed from the powerful currents of modem national will and aspiration. (Ibid.: 13)

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According to Smith, the images and traditions that go into the making of nations are not the artificial creations of intelligentsias, cultural chefs or engineers, but the product of complex interplay between these creators, their social conditions and the ethnic heritages of their chosen populations. One cannot but agree. Practising a kind of cultural archaeology, nationalist are recycling old topics, the old symbols, in their discovery and interpretation of the past so as to mobilize the present. The active role of nationalism and nationalists, is then threefold: rediscovery, reinterpretation and regeneration of the community. Rediscovery is a quest for authentic communal ‘ethno-history’, the recording of memories, the collection of indigenous myths and traditions: this is the role of the nationalist historian, philologist, anthropologist and archaeologist, the starting point of cultural nationalism. In Russia this role has been played most significantly by the Pamyat (Memory) movement of the 1980s-90s. Reinterpretation is more complicated. “Forming part of a simple unfolding drama of national salvation, that past must be selected and interpreted in a specifically national light. But the present too is selectively appropriated and interpreted, in accordance with the ideology of national authenticity.” (Smith 1995:16) The view of nationalist activity as a form of archaeology is rather more limited than that envisaged by both modernists and post-modernists. According to Smith, this is particularly evident in the nationalist practice of collective regeneration. Regeneration involves a summons to the people, mobilising the members of the community, tapping their collective emotions, inspiring them with moral fervour, activating their energies for national goals, so as to reform and renew the community. Here the nationalist-archaeologist is revealed as a missionary romantic, drawing political conclusions from the cultural work of rediscovery and reinterpretation: ‘if this is how we were, and that is how we must understand things, then this is what we now must do.’ {Ibid) National Regeneration The power of the past has never been stronger in Russia than now. We are reminded again and again that when nations have existed for a long and

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glorious time, they cannot break with their past, whatever they do; they are influenced by it at the very moment they work to destroy it. The Russian Revolution, for all its claims to the contrary, did not abolish the past: at most, it suspended it; or at least some of it. Russian national regeneration which began in the 1960s was a response to the ideological confusion following the death of Stalin in 1953 and the denunciation of his cult in 1956. After the brief ottepel (thaw) of the open and optimistic Khrushchev period, the Soviet state showed its imperial claws in 1968, invading Czechoslovakia in order to crush the hopes of ‘communism with a human face’ using faceless tanks. “But this was just the inertia of history running amok like a hen with its head chopped off.” (Vail and Genis 1996:310-313) That revelation was too much for the Soviet intelligentsia. When the communist future failed, they began to elaborate on the past. Looking for a new foundation, they turned to the people, to the Orthodox faith, and to Russia’s national heritage. This search for lost roots began with culture, with a rediscovery of pre-Petrine Russia, the Old Believers, the Slavophile teachings and the Russian Idea. The communist utopia thus came full circle and returned to its source. And the Russian Idea resurfaced accompanied by the symbols of traditional Russianness. As formulated by Berdiaev, “the Russian Idea is eschatological, it is looking toward the end: thus Russian maximalism. But in the Russian consciousness that Idea tends to imply universal salvation.” (Berdiaev 1971:253) A special path for Russia was once again connected to the Orthodox heritage of suffering and Christian humility, as vividly and poetically manifested in the film Andrei Rublev by Tarkovskii (1964). “People must be reminded that they are Russians: one blood, one soil,” as Tarkovskii put it in his film. And Dmitrii Likhachev defined real Russianness as humility (smireniie) in his book on Old Russian literature, which was awarded the National Prize (Likhachev 1967). Not by chance, the Soviet mentality of the 1960s, and the turn of mind of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1860s follow a parallel development; suffice it to mention the role of the ‘heavy’ literature journals, Nekrasov’s Sovremermik and Tvardovskii’s Novyi mir, in forming the attitudes of the reading public; the growth of populism during the 1870s and the appearance of the pochvenniki, soil-bound writers like Uspenskii, Leskov and Maksimov, corresponds to the emergence in the 1970s of ‘rural prose’ (derevenshchiki: Shukshin, Rasputin, Belov, Soloukhin). The Orthodox revival also gained momentum by the 1980s, culminating in the celebrations of the Millennium of Baptism in 1988. At last it was possible to openly and publicly admit

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belonging to the Russian Orthodox church. The programme of national revival based on Truth, Faith and Morality had already been formulated by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.6 Andrei Amalrik wondered whether the Union would last until 1984 (Amalrik 1978). He described Russians as the people without morals or religion who believed in their national right to intimidate other nations, and who were themselves intimidated by the power of their regime (ibid.:49-50). But the painter Dya Glazunov was already soaring to the heights of national fame with his idealized images of Russian heroes and saints, and blue-eyed beauties in sarafan-cum-kokoshnik outfits. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn and his followers were trying to prove that Russians were the real victims of the Soviet empire.7 The disillusioned Russian intelligentsia decorated their homes with icons and bast shoes collected during vacation trips to dying northern villages; they devoured Dostoevskii, now published again after being considered a reactionary nationalist during the preceding Soviet years; they secretly got baptized; they read and copied samizdat and tamizdat; they bought records of Zhanna Bichevskaia’s arrangements of old Russian songs and ballads; and oral culture flowered in the shadow of the heavy censorship and dissident trials of the stagnation-marked pre-perestroika period. The collectivity of the svoi, a company of friends, protected the spiritual supremacy of the Russian soul in an atmosphere of political jokes from Radio Yerevan, rumours, tapes of Galich, Vysotskii and Okudzhava, and stories told in communal kitchens, washed down by tea and vodka. The emerging Russian nationalism was simultaneously creating the past and the present, reinterpreting and discovering Russianness and freeing it of the encrustations of Soviet mythology: remembering and forgetting at the same time. The more split, false and decadent the present Soviet Russia seemed, the more magnetic the attraction of what was memorable in the past, which acted as a spur to growth beneath the official surface. A.D. Smith (1995:19) points out that in this continually renewed, two-way relationship between ethnic past and nationalist present, in the constitution of a particular ethno-history and its symbolism, in the relationship over time between certain key components that recur in that community’s history, lies the secret of the nation’s explosive energy and of the awful power that it exerts over its members. For example, the dominance of the state in Russia, the relative weakness of Russian civil society and Russian liberalism, and the consequent alternation between periods of strong, cruel leadership and factional

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anarchy, set limits to all subsequent developments in Russia. These patterns are also expressed in peculiarly Russian institutions, language and symbolism: in concepts of tsar, zemlya, narod and the like, in the role of the Kremlin, in the diffusion of bureaucracy, in conceptions of space and territory, chosennesss and mission. (Smith 1995:17) Nationalist discourse promotes an ethnocentric view of the Russian state as culturally and linguistically homogeneous, bound by solidarity, the protector of the collective way of life and the territorial homeland. For the nationalists, only such a state has deep roots in the minds and hearts of its citizens, is morally and emotionally ‘their’ state. Russia has once again to overcome its split identity and become a spiritual whole.8 As current research on Russia shows, the Russian Idea in its statist, missionary aspects remains central to the moral and ideological underpinnings of contemporary Russian society. Tim McDaniel in The Agony o f the Russian Idea (1996) explains the repeated social breakdowns of Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia by its poor capacity for building on the failures of the past. The Russian Idea combines incompatible components: statism and modernity with antimodem communality. The same fundamental dilemmas faced the tsarist regime, the Communist leaders, and the Westernizing reformers of the post-Soviet Russia. They all failed because of the lack of correspondence between their words and deeds. But Lotman and Uspenskii’s catastrophic binary ‘either/or’ model (1985:32) does not seem to apply to the post-Soviet situation. Rather, now it is ‘neither/nor’. Boris Yeltsin’s words (quoted in Argumenty ifakty 1992,42) epitomize the puzzling indecision of the current period: “The main thing I want to say to all those who are crying out everywhere that Russia is moving toward capitalism: we are not leading Russia toward capitalism. This is simply impossible. Russia is a unique country. There will be neither socialism, nor capitalism.” Attempts to understand what is happening in Russia and where the country is heading leave the impression that at present no answer is available. A recent sociological report (Temkina and Grigoriev 1997) describes the current perception of the condition of the Russian society as ‘special’ (osoboe): special democracy, hybrid economy, special culture. Several divergent transformational models are now discussed as being equally possible for Russia, among them authoritarianism, statism, modernization, the Latin American variant, Eurasianism, and cultural transformation.

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Only one post-modernist approach (Ionin 1996) is opposed to the overwhelmingly modernist or traditionalist underpinnings of current intellectual discourse. Ionin argues that the transitional period in which Russia now finds herself makes all formerly stable norms and conditions fluid, so that citizens have to learn a new flexibility in order to survive. Vladimir Pastukhov (1994), on the other hand, sees the present period as a source of cultural transformation: in his opinion, the crisis will bring about a cultural revitalization of Russia, as similar periods of Russian history testify. The latest failure, adding a further threat to the sense of both the past and the future, has created a crisis of national identity. The future has disappeared in the harsh new world of Russian capitalism. The post-Soviet reformers could not present a vision of Russia’s future that provided a bridge to the past. “From the Russian idea they might have taken modified ideals of equality, belief, community, and the responsibility of government for social welfare.” (McDaniel 1996:186)9 Whether the increasingly reiterated references to an enigmatic Russia signify a refusal to understand, or whether they denote the frustrations of inadequate or faulty understanding, they obviously point to the hazards of grasping the heterogeneous, overwhelming, unpredictable, ambivalent strands in the ongoing paradox of Russia. Parts and Wholes Behold the image of a huge mental edifice that looms larger than life over the collective Russian mentality — or is it the collective mentality in itself? The myth of Russianness, as it is mirrored or recreated in millions of individual minds, can only be grasped symbolically, partially, imperfectly. Each of us is a mirror, a tiny shard that is able to reflect the whole, although not all at once, and not in minute detail. The number and position of the ramifications, as well as their relative significance, change in time. There are multiple decodings and encodings going on, an endless process of self-communication, a continuous discourse on matters of the identification of the Self and the Other, in which each of us acts as an observer and an interpreter. And perhaps Russianness is just a mirror; you find what you look for, as always in rich traditions. The face of Russia revealed in this magic mirror is your own face: beautiful, ugly, plain, loving, careless, aggressive, vulgar, holy, self-assured or self-denigrating, mighty or powerless... Looking for the Other, you find the Self. The riddle of the Sphinx was about Oedipus, and the answer was contained in the question. The Sphinx is the incorporate Other.

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But can the national myth in all its diversity, branching out and endlessly mutating in space and time, while reproducing itself as basically the same — can this enormous collective dream be reduced to a set of key symbols? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because every single symbol or stereotype of Russianness is part of an organized structure, every element of which can metaphorically (by means of similarity) or metonymically (by the association of proximity) represent the whole. And no, because the whole is always more and different than any of its parts. Perhaps this great myth of Russianness is not so much a tree structure as a forest of symbols; then national symbolism can be compared to a map of cognitive tracks, and symbols help us find our way through the bushy vegetation of entangled references-representations-interpretations, faction and fiction about Russian history and culture. But a map is not the territory. The issue is complex enough to be unamenable to simple explanations. In fact, the more one penetrates into the subject of national mythology, the more complicated it appears. And there is no comfortingly simple solution in sight, no formula for understanding Russianness. Imposing a false unity upon the enormous diversity of national and ethnic phenomena would be the intellectual equivalent of the cultural imperialism that Russia herself has practised for a long time, in her hegemonic monologue addressed both to insiders and outsiders. Besides, in the process of cultural discourse, the national myth is not only created but also recreated, interpreted and reinterpreted, mediated, supported, opposed and fought against, demystified in one context and succumbed to in another... Further, there is no longer a stable vantage point from which to map the Russian mentality and ways of life, to discover the archipelago of islands of identity. As is poignantly expressed in post-modem cultural anthropology: “We ground things, now, on a moving earth.” (Clifford 1986:22) Understanding? Understanding Russianness may mean less finding the right answers than asking the right questions about the incongruencies of W e, the Russians.’ Understanding what, or whom, when and where? Culture is in constant flux, and the national myth is repeatedly being reformulated. Myths do not die, they mutate. Like any myth, the Russian Idea is not totally decomposable into simple basic ingredients; nor is it totally explicable, because its real power lies in being polyvalent, multi-layered, diffuse, and thus usable in changing contexts and directions. It is emotional, not rational. Poetic, not prosaic.

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By bringing together a number of frequently cited, cliched, yet highly impressive quotations from renowned Russian poets of the last century, let us try to grasp the emotional impact of Russia expressed in the suggestive lines: I love my native land', but mine's a strange love, truly, And baffles reason. Neither glory bought With blood, nor, I record it duly, A calm to proud faith wed, nor exploits brought To life in tales and myths and out the dim past taken Within my heart a glad response awaken. And yet 1 love, not knowing why they please, Her rolling steppes, at once so chill and soundless, Her wind-swept, rustling groves and forests boundless, Her streams, by vernal floods made nigh as broad as seas... Reclining in a cart and fo r a warm bed sighing, I love to bump along a country road at night And meet with drowsy eye, the shadowed dark defying, O f cheerless villages the lonely, trembling lights. Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841): Rodina, My Native Land (1841); tr. by Irina Zheleznova

Nature meagre and ungracious, Hamlets poor and grey and dreary, Russian land, a land o f patience, O f a humble perseverance! Never will the haughty alien, Scomful-eyed, perceive the secret, Shadowed light that shines unfailing Through your nakedness and meekness. You it was, my land, that Mary's Saintly son, disguised as bondsman, Walked, His cross unwearied bearing... You it was that blessed He loudly. Feodor Tiutchev (1803-1873): Eti bednye selenia (1855); tr. by Irina Zheleznova

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Native land, fair land o f mine! Horses in freedom run, The eagles shriek in the wide sky, The wolf howls in the plain. Hail to thee, motherland, all hail! Hail to thy shaggy woods, The whistling o f thy nightingales, The wind, the steppe, the clouds! Alexei K. Tolstoi (1817-1875): Krai ty moi, rodimyi krai! (1856); tr. by Avril Pyman

Sob loud, wild element rushing In pillars o f thunder fire! O Russia, Russia, Russia, To die in your flames I desire!

Shall not shame’s arid deserts, The inexhaustible seas o f tears Be warmed by a silent presence When the risen Christ appears?

I beg you be reckless, consuming me In your wild elemental blaze, O Russia, Russia, Russia — Messiah o f the coming days! Andrei Bely (1880-1934): Rodine, To My Homeland (1917); tr. by Peter Tempest

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***

O Russia, half-starved beggarly Russia, Your humble cabins, mean and grey, Your songs, wild as the wind and wayward, Are like first tears o f love to me! / cannot give to you my pity, And / must duly bear my cross... Bestow your fierce and savage beauty On any wizard o f your choice! Alexandr Blok (1880-1921): Rossiia, Russia (1908); tr. by Alex Miller ***

O Ancient World, before your culture dies, Whilst failing life within you breathes and sinks, Pause and be wise, as Oedipus was wise, And solve the age-old riddle o f the Sphinx. That Sphinx is Russia. Grieving and exulting, And weeping black and bloody tears enough, She stares at you, adoring and insulting, With love that turns to hate, and hate — to love.

We love raw flesh, its colour and its stench. We love to taste it in our hungry maws. Are we to blame then, if your ribs should crunch, Fragile between our massive, gentle paws? Alexandr Blok: Skify, The Scythians (1918); tr. by Alex M iller10

Understanding Russianness

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From these poetic confessions there emerges a collective vision of an immense and rather unfriendly space, where a lonely traveller’s soul is lulled by winds and songs; in that loneliness, accompanied by screeching eagles and howling wolves, he longs for the light of a distant peasant hut offering a night’s refuge; and he places his hopes for the beloved but not very loveable homeland in the redeeming Christ. The main key symbols of the national myth are all given. Also given is the ambivalent love-hate provoked by that monstrous Russian Sphinx. And now we are back where we started, with Tuitchev and his enigmatic Russia which cannot be understood rationally, Umom Rossii ne poniat’... If Russia is not really rational — how is it then to be understood? By faith and love unreasonable, love in spite of it all, as any great love is (or should be), at least for the romantic minds of the Russian poets. The national myth, that symbolic world of Russianness, a super-text consisting of innumerable fragments of cultural discourse, has the power to awaken an emergent fantasy of a possible world, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect. It is, in a word, poetry — not in its textual form, but in its

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return to the original context and function of poetry, which evokes memories of the ethos of the community. (Cf. Writing Culture 1986:125-126) A rational approach deconstructing and demystifying the myth is, in fact, quite beside the point. The point is that the national myth is rooted in an emotional need; it is the same need that urges us to care for the graves of our parents, or to bring flowers to the monuments of national writers and composers: namely, the need to connect one’s personal life to the collective body-and-soul of our forefathers and compatriots with whom we share space and time, the territory of our habitation and the history of our kin or our nation. What really matters is the emotional content of that connection to soil and soul: be it the fascination of the native landscape, the thrill of discovering lost fragments of local history, the peal of church bells, the taste of rye bread and the flavour of samovar tea, the allure of a balalaika tune, of collective song and dance on a festival day, or the enchantment of Russian poetry recited in one’s native language... As in love: the shared pleasures of immediate understanding. And like love, the national myth is composed of collective stereotypes which are enlivened by personal feelings. That is to say: Russianness is created as an individual experience by means of personal communication with Russian cultural stereotypes encoded in language and literature, portrayed in pictures, exhibited in museums. It is a life-long process of learning, implying choice and self-inclusion into the values and behavioural codes of the ethnolinguistic group historically defining itself as the Russians. An insider’s knowledge of Russian language and culture is thus essential, since it provides the necessary horizon of expectations. The national myth created by cultural discourse contains many voices; it is a polyphony of variously encoded messages converging on commonplaces of Russianness. On closer examination, the symbolism that Russia communicated about herself in the historical process of national self­ definition reveals a manipulated image of an insular world created by and for the Russians, while all the different Others are kept out. In this symbolic discourse, the endless diversity of human expression in the Russian national space and time is reduced to a handful of perennial stereotypes, and the oppressive authoritarian patterns which still generate tumultuous territorial, ethnic, religious, social, economic and gender conflicts, are effectively hidden. A highly emotional, reassuring tale for the troubled soul, the Russian myth has emerged and re-emerged during periods of social insecurity and national humiliation: the deep traumas of occupation under the Mongol Yoke, by the Poles during The Time of Troubles, and by Napoleon in 1812; the defeats in

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the Crimean War of 1856, in the 1905 war with Japan; and the collapse of the empire at either end of our century. Much more research is needed to provide the details of the connection between the price of national security, the mythology of power, and the national mission promoted by the Russian Idea as it seeks to reconcile the people with the empire (see Hosking 1997). The process of Russian self-definition and self-communication as Rus and/or Rossiia can be traced through more than a thousand years of Russian history. Undoubtedly, Russianness is a historical category; but its study does not belong entirely to the field of historical research. Rather, it requires a cross-disciplinary approach. A combination of historical, political and geopolitical, sociological, linguistic, gender-oriented, cultural and semiotic studies, centred around this topic, might help to render the allegedly enigmatic russkaia dusha (Russian soul) somewhat less mysterious. Understanding Russianness means rejecting both the mystical veils of Russian inscrutability and simplistic political explanations, and instead paying due attention to the complexity, heterogeneity and mutability of this giant mythical structure, of the symbolic world of national identification created by generations of Russians in order to mirror and protect the imagined Self. This structure contains components which must be distinguished: the emotional and the political, where the emotional, ethnocentric arguments are used to legitimate political power and military violence directed against Others in order to protect the Self. And, last but not least: Russianness is created not only by what is encoded in the national supertext, but also by what is hidden or left out. By the same token, this applies to my own presentation as well. Out of the multitude of rejected, forgotten or, to me, unknown fragments of fact and fiction, another picture of Russianness might emerge, a different collage, or bricolage, one that is perhaps more comprehensive and comprehensible. But, paraphrasing Bateson (1978:84), we may conclude by believing that, as a matter of fact, substantial contributions to knowledge can be made using very blunt, crooked concepts. Bateson has, also suggested that, besides simply not hindering the progress of science, scientists can speed things up, and there are two ways in which this might be done. Researchers can be trained to look among the older sciences for wild analogies to their own material, so that their vague hunches about their own problems will land them among strict formulations. Another method is to train them to tie knots in their handkerchiefs whenever they leave some matter unformulated — to be willing to leave the matter so for years, but still leave a warning sign in the very terminology they use, such that these terms will forever stand, not as fences hiding the unknown from future investigators, but rather as signposts

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which read: “UNEXPLORED BEYOND THIS POINT.” (Ibid.:Sl) In the end, Russkaia Ideia looms, like Russia herself, neobiatnaia: mindboggling and unembraceable. Since it is literally impossible to embrace the unembraceable, even if one possessed the multi-dextrous capacities of an Oriental divinity, the unattainable wholeness always appears swathed in a dreamy veil of desire. And yet: if imagination is too feeble to embrace the whole, the ubiquitous symbols pointing to this great national myth, pars pro toto, are always out there: to be grasped, and perhaps embraced, by a real or imaginary traveller intent on discovering the soil and the soul of Russia. As you journey on, bear in mind the advice of Andrei Bitov in ‘Realia of Paradise’ (1994:31): Please don’t have any doubts about reality. We can insure that the terrain will be good ... as if you’ve already seen it already...

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Notes 1. The custom of protecting the domestic territory with traditional totemic symbols of origin such as a water bird (duck) is common to all the peoples of the Arctic region, Siberia and Northern Russia. In Russian folk tradition, the bird generally denotes the sphere of the sublime, granting heavenly protection and uniting Earth and Heaven. The bird and the horse, key symbols of space and territoriality, are also associated with the mythological world tree, as revealed by many archaic peasant rituals of the rusalka-typc. In Russia, the bird and the horse are related to the ancestor cult, and both are traditionally associated with the mythologem of the centre. Besides, the domesticated bird (duck, hen) is traditionally a female symbol, doubtless due to the nesting instinct. In contrast, the horse is associated with the male sphere of outdoor activities, speed, power and sexual potency. See Mijy narodov mira (1980,1982); Cooper (1982). 2. It might even be the case that the voluminous fur hats so beloved by Russian men and women are expressions of the same protective instinct; they are reminiscent of inverted nests, and their use is not dictated by climate alone. The climatic conditions are quite similar, for instance, in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and St Petersburg, but the use of fur hats is different. While the Scandinavians prefer to go bare-headed or to wear light, sporty caps, and wait to done their fur hats (if they own one) until the frost goes far below zero, Russian visitors to these Northern cities can be spotted in the winter by their heavy ushanka hats, with the characteristic adjustable ear-flaps, or elaborate fur hats for the ladies, who usually keep them on even inside. 3. On the history of the Sphinx comparison, associated with the oedipal love of her sons for Mother Russia, see Ronen (1996). 4. Ethnic revival is a complex and elusive area, involving economics, history, law, politics, sociology, international studies, philosophy and social psychology: the ramifications of the field require a multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach. Relations between nationalism and class, the state, gender, race, ethno-history and religion is another area for future research. Among recent books, see Brubaker (1996), Brunner (1996), Hosking (1997), James (1996), Mapping the Nation (1996), Nash (1989), Parekh (1995). For Nash, ethnic relations are best viewed as a cauldron, but also as a refuge, one that often preserves and enhances the power and ties of ethnicity. 5. According to Schopflin (1995:89), the Soviet Union satisfied Russian ambitions for worldpower status; it also insisted that Russian be the universal language of the state, in the armed forces for example, while Russian was accorded extra-republican privileges as the language of education throughout the Union. Only Russians enjoyed the right to be educated in their mother tongue outside their own republic, the RSFSR, apart from the marginal exception of Armenian schools in Georgia. On the general issue of Russian-language education, see Karklins (1986). On language and ethnicity, see also: Fishman et al. (1985), Giles (1977), Hylland Eriksen (1992), Ethnic Groups in International Relations (1991), Language and Ethnic Relations (1979). 6. See: Solzhenitsyn, A., ‘Pismo k vozhdiam Sovetskogo Soiuza’, a Samizdat text from 1973; ‘Zhit ne po lzhi’, Sochineniia, Vermont 1981:9:168. An idyllic reconstruction of Russian peasant life was presented in Lad (Harmony), by Vasilii Belov in 1982. 7. The topic of the Russians as victims of the Soviet regime is also discussed in Kozlov (1995). For the demographic threat of the disobedient periphery, see Carrere d’Encausse (1982). 8. Contemporary Russian nationalist writing: Kozlov (1995), Lebed (1995), Mukhin (1993), Shafarevich (1991), Troitskii (1994a,b; 1995), Zhirinovskii (1995), Ziuganov (1996); see

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also Gachev (1991), Gumilev (1992, 1993), anthologies Intelligentsiia. Vlast. Narod (1993), Rossiia glazami russkogo (1991), and current reprints of the Russian nationalist philosophic works of the 19th century. 9. For recent research on Russia, see: Beetham (1991), Brubaker (1996), Brunner (1996), Dixon (1997), Hosking (1997), Krasnov (1991), McDaniel (1996), Mikheyev (1996), Neumann (1996), Pastukhov (1994), Piirainen (1994, 1997), Ragsdale (1996), Yergin and Gustafson (1994). See also collections of articles: Etnichnost (1995), Inogo ne dano (1988), Inoe (1995), Post-Soviet Puzzles (1995), Vlast i oppozitsiia (1995). 10. All quotations are from: Three Centuries o f Russian Poetry (1980), Moscow:Progress.

Recommended Reading This short list draws attention to some basic works which might prove useful for further orientation in the world of Russianness. RUSSIAN HISTORY Acton, E. (1986), Russia, London and N ew York:Longman Hosking, G. (1997), Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, London:Harper C ollins Publishers

Pipes, R. (1995), Russia Under the Old Regime, London.Penguin B ook s Riasanovsky, N.V. (1 993), A History of Russia, Oxford U niversity Press Szamueli, T. (1974), The Russian Tradition, London:M cGraw-Hill

V.O. Kliuchevskii o russkoi istorii (1993),

M oskvarProsveshcheniie

RUSSIAN CULTURE Billington, J.H. (1970), The Icon and the Axe. An Interpretive History of Russian

Culture, N ew

YorkrVintage

Lotman, Yu.M. (1994), Besedy o russkoi kulture. Byt i traditsii russkogo

dvorianstva (XVIII-nachalo XIX veka), Sankt-Peterburg:Iskusstvo

SPB

Miliukov, P.N. (1993), Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury, M oskva:Kultura

Russian Culture at the Crossroads. Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness (1996), ed. Dmitri N . Shalin, Boulder, Colorado:W estview Press

Stites, R. (1989), Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in

the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press Volkov, S. (1996), St Petersburg. A Cultural History, London:Sinclair-Stevenson

RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY Ellis, J. (1986), The Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, B loom ington, Indiana

Florovskii, G. (1937), Puti russkogo bogosloviia, Paris:YM CA-Press; reprint 1988 Freeze, G. (1977), The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, Harvard U niversity Press

Russkoe podvizhnichestvo (1996), M oskva:Nauka Toporov, V.N. (1995), Sviatost i sviatye v russkoi dukhovnoi kulture, M oskva.G nozis

Uspensky, L., Lossky, V. (1952), The Meaning of Icons, Boston; reprint (1983), Crestwood, N Y :St Vladim ir’s Seminary Press

257

Selected Bibliography Afanasiev, A.N. (1958), Narodnye russkiie skazki I-III, M oskva Alexander, J.T. (1989), Catherine the Great. Life and Legend, N ew York:Oxford University Press

Amalrik, A. (1978), Prosushchestvuet li Sovetskii Soiuz do 1984 godal, Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press

Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and

Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso; reprints

1991, 1996

Antsiferov, N .P . (1991), “Nepostizhimyi gorod...” [1922], Leningrad:Lenizdat; reprint

Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1983),

ed. Theofanis G eorge Stavrou,

Bloom ington:Indiana University Press

Atkinson, D., Dallin, A., and Warshofsky Lapidus, G ., eds (1 977), Women in

Russia, Stanford University Press Bachelard, G . (1964), The Poetics of Space, Boston:B eacon Press Bachofen, J.J. (1967), Myth, Religion, and Mother Right. Selected Writings, B ollingen Series LXXXTV, Princeton University Press

Baehr, S.L. (1991), The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, Stanford U niversity Press

Baiburin, A.K. (1981), ‘Sem ioticheskii status veshchei i m ifologiia’, Materialnaia

kultura i mifologiia, Sbomik MAE X X X II, Leningrad Ritual v traditsionnoi kulture, Sankt-Peterburg:Nauka Baiburin, A.K., Toporkov, A.L. (1990), U istokov etiketa, Leningrad:Nauka Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington:Indiana U niversity Press ------------- (1986), Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia, Antiquariat Barker, A.M. (1985), The Mother Syndrome in the Russian Folk Imagination, ------------- (1993),

Slavica Publishers, Inc.

Barthes, R. (1983), The Fashion System, N ew York:Hill and W ang Bascom, W.R., ed. (1 977), Frontiers of Folklore, Boulder, C O :W estview Bateson, G . (1978), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, N ew York:Ballantine B ook s Bauman, Z. (1995), Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality, Blackw elkO xford U K

& Cambridge U S A

Beardsworth, A., Keil, T. (1997), Sociology on the Menu. An Invitation to the

Study of Food and Society, London

& N ew York:Routledge

Beetham, D. (1991), The Legitimation of Power. Issues in Political Theory, London:M acmillan

Belov, V. (1982), Lad, M oskva Berdiaev, N . (1918), Sudba Rossii, M oskva:Izdaniie G.A. Lemana i S.I. Sakharova ------------- (1930), ‘O kharaktere russkoi religioznoi m ysli X IX vek a’, Sovremennye zapiski, V ol. 11, no. 4 2 ------------- (1971), Russkaia ideia, Paris:YM CA-press

258

Selected Bibliography

259

Berdiaev, N . (1990), Dusha Rossii [1915], Leningrad; reprint --------------(1990), Filosofiia neravenstva [1918], M oskva:IM A-Press; reprint Berdyaev, N . (1962), The Russian Idea, Boston Berlin, B., Kay, B. (1 969), Basic Color Terms, Berkeley:University o f California Press

Berman, M. (1982), All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity, N ew York:Sim on and Shuster

Bernard, J. (1971), Women and the Public Interest, C hicago:Aldine Bemstam, T.A. (1988), Molodezh v obriadovoi zhizni russkoi obshchiny XIX -

nachala XX v., LeningradrNauka Beyer, P. (1994), Religion and Globalization, Sage Publications Bhabha, H. (1994), ‘A nxious Nations, N ervous States’, Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan C opjec, London: V erso

BiUington, J.H. (1967), The Icon and the Axe. An Interpretive History of Russian

Culture, N ew

York:Alfred.A.Knopf; (1970), Vintage; reprint

Bitov, A. (1994), ‘Realia o f Paradise’, Monumental Propaganda, 23-31 Black, C .E ., ed. (1960), The Transformations of Russian Society: Aspects of Social

Change Since 1861, Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press Bogatyrev, P.G. (1971), The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia, A pproaches to Sem iotics 5, M outon

Bogdanov, K.A. (1995), Dengi vfolklore, Sankt-Peterburg:Bell Boguslavskaia, I. (1968), Russkoe narodnoe iskusstvo, Leningrad:Sovetskii khudozhnik

Bonnell, V. (1991), ‘The Representation o f W om en in Early S oviet Political A rt’, The

Russian Review, V ol.

50, N o. 3 ,2 6 7 -2 8 9

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Oinas, F.J. (1978), ‘The Political U ses and Them es o f Folklore in the S oviet U n ion ’, Folklore, Nationalism, and Politics, 77-96 --------------(1984),

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Russkiie stolitsy Moskva i Peterburg. Khrestomatiia po geografii Rossii (1 993), M oskvarM iros

Russkoe podvizhnichestvo (1996), M oskvarNauka R y b a k o v , B .A . (1994), Yazychestvo drevnikh slavian, M oskva:Nauka R yk lin , M . (1992), Terrorologiki, Tartu-M oskva:Ad M arginem Sacred Narrative. Readings in the Theory of Myth (1984),

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Semiotika (Trudy po znakovym sistemam), 18: Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kultury. Peterburg (1984), Tartu ------------- 1 9 : Semiotika prostranstva iprostranstvo semiotiki (1 9 8 6 ), Tartu Sex and Russian Society (1993), eds Igor Kon and James Riordan, London:Pluto Press

Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (1993),

eds Jane T. C ostlow , Stephanie Sandler and Judith V ow les, Stanford University Press S h a fa rev ich , L (1991), Yest li u Rossii budushchee?, M oskva:Sovetskii pisatel

S h ch ep a n sk a ia , T .B . (1991), ‘Zhenshchina, gruppa, sim vol (na materialakh m olodezhnoi subkultury’, Etnicheskiie stereotipy muzhskogo i zhenskogo

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Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press ------------ (1992), Russian Popular Culture. Entertainment and Society since 1900, ------------- (1989),

Cambridge U niversity Press S u m tsov, N .F . (1885), Khleb v obriadakh ipesniakh, Kharkov ------------- (1996), Simvolika slavianskikh obriadov. Izbrannye trudy, M oskva:Nauka S zam u eli, T. (1974),

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T a lb o t-R ice, T. (1993), Icons. Art and Devotion, Londom Bracken B ook s T em k in a, A ., G rigoriev , V . (1997), ‘RuBland als Transformationsgesellschaft: K onzepte und D iskussionen’, Sozialwissenschaft in Rufiland (Deutsch2, 10-57, Red. Ingrid Oswald et al, Berlin:Berliner

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273

Progulki s Pushkinym, London:Overseas Publication Interchange

Ltd

The Golden Ring (1988), Leningrad:Aurora Art Publishers The Lubok. Russian Folk Pictures, 17th to 19th century (1984),

Leningrad:Aurora

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The Roots of Nationalism (1980),

ed. Rosalind M itchison, Edinburgh: John D onald

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The Russian Intelligentsia (1961),

ed. Richard Pipes, N ew York:Colum bia University

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The Russian Orthodox Church, 10th to 20th centuries (1988), M oskva:Progress Publishers

The Russian Primary Chronicle

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M oskva

Tsennostnye orientatsii i sotsialnoe povedeniie v izmeniaiushchikhsia usloviiakh. Regionalnye aspekty (1995), Samara T sim b aev, N .I. (1986), Slavianofilstvo. Iz istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi politicheskoi mysli XIX veka, M oskva:M G U T u m ark in , N . (1994), The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, N ew Y ork:Basic B ook s T u rn er, B .S . (1996), The Body and Society. Explorations in Social Theory, London:Sage Publications U sp en sk ii, B .A . (1982),

FUologicheskiie razyskaniia v oblasti slavianskikh

drevnostei, M oskva:M G U --------------(1994a), Izbrannye trudy I-II, M oskva:G nosis --------------(1994b), ‘Tsar i b o g ’, Izbrannye trudy I, 110-218 ------------- (1994c), Kratkii ocherk istorii russkogo literatumogo yazyka (XI-XIX vv.), M oskva:G nozis

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Vpoiskakh svoego pud: Rossiia mezhdu Evropoi iAziei (1 997), M oskva:L ogos Vahros, I. (1966), Zur Geschichte und Folklore der Grossrussischen Sauna, Helsinki: FF Comm unications 197

Vail, P., Genis, A. (1 996), 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, M oskvarNLO Van Der Post, L. (1964), Journey into Russia, Penguin B ook s Ltd, Harmondsworth, M iddlesex, England

Vekhi (1991) [1909], Sverdlovsk; reprint Venok Karamzinu (1992), M oskva:Academ ia Vilinbakhov, G ., Vilinbakhova, T. (1995), Sviatoi Georgii Pobedonosets. Obraz Sviatogo Georgiia Pobedonostsa v Rossii, Sankt-Peterburg:Iskusstvo-SPB Virolainen, M . (1994), ‘Kultumyi geroi novogo vremeni. (Pushkinskii m if v kontekste sekularizovannoi kultury)’, Russian Studies I, 34-59, Sankt-Peterburg:Pushkinskii fond Mast i oppozitsiia (1995), M oskva:Rosspen Volkov, S. (1996), St Petersburg. A Cultural History, London:Sinclair-Stevenson

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Walker, R.B.J. (1991), ‘State Sovereignty and the Articulation o f Political Space/T im e’, Millennium, 4 4 5 -4 6 2

Warner, E. (1985), Heroes, Monsters and Other Worlds from Russian Mythology, Eurobook: Peter L ow e

Weidle, V. (1961), Russia: Absent and Present, N ew York Williams, R. (1976), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, N ew York:Oxford University Press

Wilson, W.A. (1976), Folklore and Nationalism in Modem Finland, Indiana U niversity Press

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Y a m p o lsk y , M . (1995), ‘N otes on Iconoclasm and T im e’, Soviet Hieroglyphics, 93-

112 Yazyk i etnicheskii mentalitet (1995), Petrozavodsk Y erg in , D ., G u sta fso n , T . (1994), Russia 2010 and What it Means for the World, London:Nicholas B realey Publishing

Etnicheskii sostav i etnosotsialnaia struktura naseleniia Peterburga. Vtoraiapolovina XIX - nachalo XX veka, Leningrad:Nauka

Y u k h n ev a , N .V . (1984),

Z a b elin , I.E . (1990), Domashnii bytrusskikh tsarei v XVI i XVIIstoletiiakh [1872], M oskvaiK niga; reprint Z ab ylin , M . (1990), Russkii narod. Ego obychai, predaniia, sueveriia i poesiia [1880], M oskva: Kniga Printshop; reprint Z h a b a , S .P . (1954), Russkiie mysliteli o Rossii i chelovechestve, Paris: Y M C A -Press Z h irin ovsk ii, V . (1995), Poslednii vagon na sever, M oskva:Foliant Z iu g a n o v , G .A . (1996), Rossiia — rodina moia. Ideologiia gosudarstvennogo

patriotizma, Moskva:Informpechat

List of Illustrations (Courtesy o f the Slavonic Library, H elsinki University)

1. W ooden barrel-shaped lacquer box, Khokhlom a style, 1 9 5 7 .......................................vi (I. Boguslavskaia, Russkoe narodnoe iskusstvo , Leningrad 1968) 2. W ood en salt b asin s......................................................................................................................5 (Narodnyia russkiia dereviannyia izdeliia , Count A. A. Bobrinskii’s collection, M oskva 1913) 3. St G eorge ( Chudo Georgiia o zm iie ), icon, 16th century............................................. 18 (The Hermitage, St Petersburg) 4. Coat o f Arms o f the Russian Empire, established in 1 8 8 3 .......................................... 21 5. M ajor Imperial Eagle, established in 1 8 8 2 ....................................................................... 22 6. N ew Coat o f Arms o f the Russian Federation, established in 1 9 9 3 ..........................32 7. W ar loan poster, 1 9 1 4 ............................................................................................................. 34 8. V iew o f m edieval M o sco w Kremlin with the Ivan Velikii b elfry .............................. 37 N ote the double-headed eagle on top the Spasskaia (Redeem er) tower protecting the main entrance to the Kremlin area. (Adam O learius’ illustration from his travels in Russia, 17th century. D etail) 9. Church o f St B asil ( Khram Vasiliia B lazhennogo , or Pokrovskii so b o r) ...............39 M oscow , built 1555-61, usually named after the ‘holy fo o l’ (yurodivyi) V asilii, who used to pray there. 10. Senate Square in St Petersburg, with The Bronze H orsem an.................................... 43 (W oodcut by A .P. Ostroum ova-Lebedeva, 1912) 11. V iew over the N e v a ................................................................................................................ 47 (W oodcut by A .P. O stroum ova-Lebedeva, 1920) 12. T he Bronze H orsem an............................................................................................................56 (Lithograph by K.P. Beggrov, 1830s) 13. The M onom akh C a p .................................................................................................................61 14. Tsar A lexei and his son Tsar Peter 1 ................................................................................... 63 15. Empress Catherine I I ................................................................................................................66 16. Tsar N icholas II crowning Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna in M o sco w 1 8 9 6 ...... 75 17. St V ladim ir................................................................................................................................... 81 (Seal com m em orating the M illennium o f Orthodoxy in Russia, 1988) 18. W ooden churches o f K iz h i..................................................................................................... 86

276

List o f Illustrations

277

19. Attributes and sym bols used by Old B elievers and official Orthodox Church..... 91 Crossing o n eself with two fingers represented the dual (human and divine) nature o f Christ; it was the sign o f Old B elief. After the reform o f 1666, three fingers were to be used as a sign o f the H oly Trinity. (A nonym ous painter, late 18th - early 19th century) 20. The Old Testament Trinity (The Three Archangels Appearing to Abraham ) ...... 98 (Icon by Andrei Rublev, painted for the iconostasis in Trinity Cathedral at Trinity-St Sergius Laura; early 15th century) 21. The Virgin o f Vladimir ........................................................................................................ 101 (Byzantine icon, early 12th century) 22. Christ the Saviour Church under construction, M ay 1 9 9 6 ........................................ 107 (Private collection) 23. Onion-shaped church cupolas o f the M o sco w K rem lin............................................ 110 24. Embroidered tow el, end o f 19th century, V ologd a district...................................... 115 (I. B oguslavskaia, Russkoe narodnoe iskusstvo, Leningrad 1968) 25. 26. M other R ussia..................................................................................................................120 (Left: W ar poster by I.M. Toidze, Motherland Calling You!, 1941. Right: M other R ussia crowning the War M em orial on Mamaev Kurgan. Sculptor E. Vuchetich, 1967) 27. Porcelain Easter eg g with the im age o f St O lg a ...........................................................123 (B ased on the fresco by Viktor N esterov in the Cathedral o f St Vladimir in Kiev. Imperial Porcelain Factory, 1900s.) 28. Merchant's Wife at Tea .......................................................................................................130 (O il painting by Boris Kustodiev, 1918. The Russian M useum , St Petersburg) 29. A pearl-decorated kokoshnik, N izhnii N ovgorod, 18th cen tu ry............................. 135 (I. B oguslavskaia, Russkoe narodnoe iskusstvo, Leningrad 1968) 30. Festive sarafan-cum-kokoshnik folk dresses from V ologd a district......................141 (Left: unmarried girl; right: married woman. Drawing by Ivan Bilibin, 1905) 31. Konek on a peasant hut. Sidorovshchina village, Arkhangelsk p ro v in ce............ 150 (Count Bobrinskii’s collection, 1913) 32. Traditionally decorated Easter eggs from Kursk d istrict.......................................... 153 (S.K . Kulzhinskii, Opisaniie kollektsii narodnykh pisanok, M oskva 1899) 33. A drinking vessel, skopkar, from N ovgorod p rovin ce............................................... 155 (Count Bobrinskii’s collection, 1913) 34. A vodka-drinking se ssio n ................................................................................................... 158 (Draw ing by Alexandr Florenskii, 1990. Courtesy o f the author)

278

Soil and Soul

35. Bread-and-salt...........................................................................................................................164 36. Sirin , the Bird o f P arad ise.................................................................................................... 194 (A nonym ous author, first half o f 19th century) 37. A peasant h o m e .......................................................................................................................205 (Lubok, late 19th century) 38. ‘Literary’ matrioshka presenting a hierarchy o f Russian w riters............................2 24 Arranged by size: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoi, G ogol, Turgeniev, D ostoevskii, N ekrasov, Chekhov, Gorkii... 39. M ap o f the Euro-Soviet E m p ire....................................................................................... 2 29 (Eurasian review in Elem enty , a Russian right-wing nationalist m agazine, N o. 1, 1992) The map on the cover shows the im agined Euro-Soviet Empire extending from Dublin to Vladivostok, with M oscow as the Third Rom e. 40. A set o f Matrioshka d o lls .....................................................................................................2 34 41. The Bogatyrs .............................................................................................................................237 (O il painting by Viktor V asnetsov, 1898. The Tretiakov Gallery, M oscow ) The painting show s three Russian epic heroes: Ilya M uromets (centre), Dobrynia N ikitich (left), and A liosh a P opovich (right) on the look-out for the enem y. 42. Surrounded by N A TO ! ........................................................................................................ 238 ( Argum enty i Fakty , N o. 6, February 1997, collage by Andrei D orofeiev) T he three bogatyrs defending R ussia’s borders are Viktor Chernomyrdin, B oris Y eltsin, and Anatolii Chubais. 43. P redatory Wolves Attacking Travellers ......................................................................... 251 (Lubok: lithographic transfer from an engraved copper plate, 1867. The subject is borrowed from an earlier lithograph o f the 1830s) 44. A dam a nd Eve at the Tree o f Know ledge .......................................................................2 54 (Lubok, V yg-L eksa school, 1820s-1830s. T he Historical M useum , M oscow ) 45. W indow in a peasant hut, V ologd a p ro v in ce................................................................2 5 6 (Count Bobrinskii’s collection, 1913) 46. M illennium o f Russia M em orial ....................................................................................... 275 T he national monument in N ovgorod (1862, sculptor M . M ikeshin). In the background, the dom es o f the N ovgorod cathedral o f St Sophia (1045-50). 47. Imperial Easter E g g .............................................................................................................. 289 Gift from Tsar N ich olas II to his w ife Alexandra Feodorovna, 1914. Platinum, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds and pearls. D esign A lm a Pihl, Faberge, St Petersburg.

Index Only the names of the persons, places, buildings and artefacts that I consider most relevant to the general theme of this book are included in the Index.

basic colours, 24, 143 See red, white, black, blue bast shoes, 140, 244 batiushka, 5 7 ,1 2 4 ,1 7 9 bear, 54 beard, 4 4 ,1 4 0 ,1 6 2 Belinskii, 94 Bely, 50, 250 Berdiaev, 2 7 ,1 0 4 , 111, 113, 167-168, 197, 228, 243 berioza. See birch birch, 19,42, 99, 114, 129, 156, 178, 196 bird, 2 5 ,1 3 9 ,1 5 1 ,1 9 3 , 232, 236, 255 black, 24, 27, 31, 5 7 ,1 2 6 , 143-144,152, 163,183, 250. See basic colours bliny, 145. See food Blok, 51, 128, 231, 236, 250 blue, 19, 24, 98-99, 133,143, 244. See basic colours body, 4-7, 24, 35, 46, 57-59, 64, 72, 94, 103, 114-115, 117-119, 126, 129, 140, 145, 148-151, 171, 174-175, 178, 191, 195-196, 203, 207, 216, 225, 2 2 8 ,2 3 5 ,2 5 2 collective body, 173 ideal body, 7 6 ,1 6 0 bogatyr, 123, 129, 237, 278. See hero bogatyrka, 122-123 Bogoroditsa, 116,117. See Holy Virgin M ary, M other o f God Boris and Gleb, 58. See saintly princes Borodin, 220 Borodino, 74

adoption of Christianity, 36, 80, 82, 184 aesthetic concern, 139 Akhmatova, 51,1 3 5 Aksakov, 202, 204, 207 Alexander 1 ,78 Alexander n , 78, 220 Alexander m , 78 Alexandr Nevskii, 23, 38, 54. See saintly princes Alexei Mikhailovich, 6 3 ,7 3 Amazon. See bogatyrka ancestor cult, 52, 255 Andrei Pervozvannyi, 19 anthem, 71, 7 7 ,1 1 1 ,2 2 0 art, 7, 84, 125,218 folk art, 114,142-143 national art, 221 Russian art, 4 4 ,5 6 , 82,128-131, 200, 219, 223,225, 230 Asia, 5 ,1 7 , 20, 23, 26-27, 31, 3 8 ,4 7 , 61, 180, 191,197, 214-215, 226-228, 232. See East autocracy, 23, 71, 202, 230 auto-stereotypes. See stereotypes A w akum , 91, 92 ,1 3 3

baba, 117, 120, Baba Yaga, 82, babushka, 145

126 113

Bakhtin, 174,185, 196

balalaika, 252 bania, 19,178. See steam

bath banner, 16, 23, 30, 3 1 ,7 7 ,1 7 2 , 227 barmy, 61

279

280

Soil and Soul

boundaries, 124, 150, 157,180,190, 192, 214, 232, 235 boyar, 25, 44, 82, 85, 90, 129,142, 154156, 207 Bozhe Tsaria khrani, 105. See anthem bread, 54,114,138, 144,146,148-150, 163, 226, 232-233, 252 bread-and-salt, 138,144,149,164,232 hospitality, 138. See folk tradition, rituals, customs Brodsky, 47, 51,177,182 Bronze Horseman, 43-44,56,47,276 Bulgakov, 104, 216 bylin a , 57,122-123, 127,189, 212 Byzantine dress, 44 Byzantine tradition, 154,208 capital city, 7,20,25, 30, 35-36 See Kiev, Moscow, Petersburg Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, 51, 106-107,277 Catherine H, 30,43,45-46, 66-67,69, 78, 185,196 Catherine the Great. See Catherine H centre, 1,4,7,17,19-22, 24-25, 28, 33, 35-38,40-41,43-44,46,48-53, 59, 71,85, 87-88,114,117,121,135, 142, 159,161, 178, 180, 184-185, 191, 213, 215, 226, 235, 237, 239, 255 centre stereotype, 53 Chaadaev, 202-203, 205-206 Chaikovskii, 105,128, 218, 220, 223, 230 Chekhov, 44, 56,147 Chernyshevskii, 221 ch u dotvom aia, 97. See icon church bells, 62, 71, 252 church buildings, 40,86,110,275, 277278 Church of St Basil, 39-40,276 circle, 31,69,140,142,176,182,195, 243. See visual symbols clothes, 44,140,150,157 coat of arms, 8 code, 14,93,126,140,167,169-170, 178-179,190, 234 collectivism, 1,167

colonization, 29,30, 54,122,126 colonized territories, 26, 225 colour red, 143. See basic colours, red commonplaces, 170 concentric structure, 22, 37 conversion of Rus, 80. See adoption of Christianity coronation, 11,44, 57, 61-62,67,69-70, 74, 76-77,202 Cossacks, 30,129,134 cross, 19, 22-23, 28,40, 61, 79, 89, 94, 107,142,150,192, 249-250, 253 crown, 17, 22-23,31, 61, 74, 77 cultural cliches, 168 cultural code, 167 cultural nationalism, 242 cultural quotations, 167 cultural semiotics, 3,11 culture, 10-12,35,44 Byzantine culture, 70, 80, 83-85,93 court culture, 45-46,62,68 female culture, 130-131 high culture, 196,233 national culture, 73, 218 pagan culture, 81-82 post-Soviet culture, 125,128 Russian culture, 2-3,26,41,44-46, 56,122 Soviet culture, 76,121-125 Western culture, 68,70,90 customs, 5,19,92,108,152,154,156, 160,173,176,178,180-181, 205207 Danilevskii, 227 Dashkova, 185 decorated Easter eggs, 152 derzhava , 17,62. See statism diglossia , 109,184 Dmitrii Donskoi, 105,120,122 D om ostroi, 45,55 Dostoevsku, 43-44,47,50,99,103,134, 171,181,195, 200,219,223-225, 227,244 double-headed eagle, 4,16, 20, 24-25, 30, 33, 233 dragon, 17,18, 23

Index dreams, 151,159,166,167,179,186, 188,189,192,195,213, 221,232 drinking, 155,158 dukhovnost, 168. See national character dusha, 27, 220. See soul dvoeveriie, 82 dvoriane, 201, 207. See nobility eagle, 4,16-17,19- 26,30-33, 37,42, 214, 233-234. See coat of arms, national symbols East, 5,12,17-18,23-24, 30,32,37, 128,148,191, 225-228, 236 Blaster. See Orthodox Easter egg, 151-153,163, 231, 233-235,211 , 289 emperor, 17, 26,44,45, 57, 60-61, 64, 66-67,74-75, 83. See tsar empire, 19, 23, 30, 31, 65,92 empresses, 45-46,65, 68-69,70, 77,148 enemy, 4,17-18, 32, 55,177,181-182 enigma, 5,15, 228, 235-236, 246, 251, 253 ethnic minorities, 12 ethnic revival, 255 ethnicity, 160-161,162,184 ethnocentrism, 162 ethnographic myth, 72 ethnography, 3,14, 136,140,160,162, 167, 230 Eurasia, 226, 228 Europe, 23, 27, 38,40,44, 53, 72, 8283, 85,107,109,163,171,184,192, 198, 200, 204, 213-214, 227-228 Evraziitsy, 228 exoticism, 236 expansionism, 27,29,192 fairytale, 171, 234 fakelore, 137. See folklore familial code, 178 familism, 174, 221 family, 4,27, 55,64,70, 85, 88,107, 109,112,116-117,125-126,144146,149-151,155-157,163,174176,178-179,182,187-189,196, 201, 206, 207

281

Father tsar, 4. See tsar fatherland, 32,112. See motherland felt boots, 140 female, 4,45, 67, 69,111, 113-116, 118119, 123,126, 130-134, 221, 225226 female headdress, 143,151 female peasant dress, 143,144 feminine. See female flag. See national flag folk, 3, 5,7, 24, 33, 57, 82, 95, 102, 113114,117,127,129,131,134-135, 137-138,140-142, 144,149, 150, 153, 162-163,170, 183,188-189, 196, 204, 209, 212-213, 215, 220, 233, 255 folk costume, 3,140-141, 277 folk dance, 3,137 folk life, 138,213 folk tradition, 138, 139,140,142, 162 folklore, 17, 54, 57, 82, 113, 123, 136, 137,140,162,181, 183,188, 189, 190, 209, 210, 212 food, 3,5,7,131,138,144-152,157, 160-161,163,187 ethic food, 144 ritual food, 145-146,152 foreigners, 3,44,49, 50,66, 69, 89,112, 181,191 forest, 14,27, 36, 38, 54, 82,99,129, 247 freedom, 27,28,126,127,128,168, 176,191,192,193,197, 204, 231, 232,239, 249 fur hats, 140, 255 gender, 225, 230 gerb, 74,77. See coat of arms

Germans, 24, 32,47, 50, 66, 67, 69, 71, 77, 78, 89, 90, 109,126, 147, 181, 205, 206 Glinka, 38,78,133, 218, 220 G od Save th e Tsar, 74,77. See anthem goddess, 68,113-116,120,122,134,143 Gogol, 44,47,163,181,196, 218 golden, 20,24,47,57,61,62, 88,99, 113,133,152, 189,234

282

Soil and Soul

gostepriimstvo, 144. See bread-and-salt, hospitality gosudar. See tsar

gosudarstvennost. See statism Great Goddess. See goddess Great Russian, 36, 71,129,133, 135 group identity, 119,186. See identity,

sobornost Gypsies, 50,180 head, 17, 41, 44, 60, 68, 74, 97,106, 109, 113-115, 139, 142, 154,156, 176, 193, 236, 243. See body headdress. See folk costume heart, 4,17, 22, 35, 41, 52, 89, 94, 131132. See body Heimat, 119. See homeland hen, 143,152. See bird hero, 64-65,119,121-223 hero cult, 52 Herzen, 94 hetero-stereotypes, 165. See stereotypes Holy Fool, 169 Holy Russia, 4,7, 20, 38,44, 53, 72, 101-103,108,133, 192. See Orthodoxy Holy Virgin Mary, 97. See Mother of God home, 8,12, 27,45,111-112,119,131, 133, 135,140, 144-145, 148-150, 151,155,157,159,163,167,191, 196, 200, 205-207, 219, 278 homeland, 12, 27,112, 128,129,133, 145, 191-192, 245, 251 horse, 17, 18, 21,44, 114, 150-151,159, 232, 255 hospitality, 3,144,156,178 house, 90, 94, 97, 114-115, 140, 144, 147-148, 150-151, 159, 163, 206 icon, 6, 20, 51, 73, 77, 85, 95-100,105, 108, 110, 114, 133, 149,219, 232 iconicity, 219 iconoclasm, 95 iconography, 16, 58, 69,120 iconostasis, 62,94,96

identification, 2, 6, 7,35, 37, 69, 112, 144, 165, 167, 183, 197, 198, 217, 233, 236, 246, 253 identity, 1-6 ethnic identity, 7, 53,138, 161-162, 183, 186 national identity, 2-7, 51, 58,90, 161,170,177,246 Russian identity, 13-14,48, 50,107, 170, 183, 191,236,240 idols, 82,113, 121 imagined community, 198, 222, 237, 240 Imperial Easter egg, 233, 278, 289 imperial mission, 61 imperial symbolism, 7 inferiority, 171, 200, 226 inorodtsy, 180, 211 inovertsy, 103,180, 211 intelligentsia, 44, 72, 94, 128-129, 131132,134, 169, 171, 173,193, 201, 210-212, 214-219, 221, 230, 243-244 Intercession, 116. See protection Ivan HI, 16, 17, 25-26, 28, 33, 38-39, 54, 57,64, 87 Ivan IV, 18, 26, 39, 57, 59, 60, 62-64, 77, 132 Ivan-duraky 171, 188 Jews, 181,183

kaftan,50 Karamzin, 41,199, 200, 229, 239 key symbols, 10, 247, 251, 255 kasha, 148. See food khalat, 50 khlebosolstvo. See bread-and-salt Khodynka, 75 Khomiakov, 165,168, 202, 204, 206207 khorovod, 175. See folk dance, ring dances Khram Khrista SpasiteHa. See Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

Khram Vasiliia Blazhennogo. See Church of St Basil

kichka, 141. See headdress

Index Kiev, 19, 20, 26, 29, 35-36, 38, 67, 80, 83-84, 86-88,96, 100,104,109-110, 113, 116,123, 127, 132-133,142, 145, 155 Kiev Cave Laura. See Lavra Kievan Rus, 16, 18-19, 27, 36, 54, 8384, 129, 182,197 Kireevskii, 94,109, 168,175-176,198, 202, 207 Kizhi, 86,276 kokoshnik, 135,141,142, 244, 277. See headdress konek, 150,151, 232, 233, 277 kopeika, 18 Kramskoi, 219 krasnyi ugol, 149 kulebiaka. See food kulich, 152. See Easter, food Kutikovo pole, 120,122 Kutuzov, 200 ladanka, 192 lampadka, 97 landscape, 38,126,128-129,132,135, 231,252 language, 2, 3,7-8,12,14, 54, 56, 63, 68-69, 84, 98-99,105,109, 111, 119, 139, 155,166,178-179,182,183186,198, 205, 208, 212, 221-222, 229, 232, 245,252, 255. See diglossia, national language lapti. See bast shoes Lavra, 99,110. See monastery Lebed, 123,256 legend, 19, 25, 61,79,96, 97,100, 108, 123 Lenin, 9,51,52,106,112,179 Leontiev, 227 Lermontov, 248 leshii, 82 Levitan, 129 Likhachev, 14, 80,98,108-109,127, 128, 243 tishnii chelovek, 208 literature, 17,44,46-47, 82, 84,107, 116,125,127-128,131-132,139, 159,162,169,181,185-186,190, 196, 206, 208, 210-211, 218-221,

283

223-225, 241, 243, 252. See national literature liturgy, 79, 84, 87, 89,93-94,107,109, 153 Losskii, 168 lubochnaia literalura, 209 lubok, 122,135,151,181, 209, 211, 278 magic, 22, 26,69, 82,105,116,143-145, 151-152,162, 233, 246 male, 45,74,77,111,113,115,117, 122-123,130-134,138, 140-142, 145,163,174,177-178, 211, 222, 225, 255 Mamaev Kurgan, 71,120, 277. See war memorial Mandelstam, 51,182 masculine, 113,119, 125,132, 198. See male marginality, 211 market, 188,191,210 Maslenitsa, 145 mass mentality, 177 mat, 116,174 Mat9Syra Zemlia. See Mother Earth matriarchy, 116 Matrioshka, 117,118,162, 224, 233, 234, 235, 239, 278 Mausoleum, 51, 52 Mednyi vsadnik, 43. See Bronze Horseman merchant, 55-56,189, 218 meshchanstvo, 50, 218 Mikhail Romanov, 62,90,159 Millennium Memorial, 135, 275, 278 Millennium of Orthodoxy, 81,104,106 mir, 175,183,188, 204,225, 243. See peasant community mission, 28,61, 84,90, 213, 215-216, 227-228, 236, 245, 253 modernization, 34,41, 51, 53,93,124, 173-174,176,187-188, 201, 238239, 246 Moguchaia kuchka, 220 monarch, 20, 39, 58, 60-61,69,70,73, 83 monarchist legends, 61

284

Soil and Soul

monarchy, 17, 36, 59, 68-70,72-74,76, 78, 112, 121,201-202 monastery, 46, 86, 91, 99,103-104, 169 money, 3,18, 25, 29, 106, 135,148, 181, 187-189, 190, 193,196, 218 Mongol Yoke, 85-86,252 Mongols, 16-17, 36, 86,169. See Tatars Monomakh’s cap, 61 Moscow, 4,7,11,16, 17, 20, 22, 25-26, 28, 29, 31, 35-57, 59, 60, 62-63, 67, 70-71, 74-77, 86-90,93,96-97,99100, 103-104, 106, 108, 110, 116, 120, 132, 135,142, 152,155,157, 159, 164, 173, 175, 178, 181, 183185, 196-198, 207-208, 213, 216, 218, 227, 229, 233, 238, 240, 256 Moscow Kremlin, 25, 38, 62,96,100, 233 mother, 35, 55,78, 111, 114-116,118119, 120-122,125,132-134, 174, 178,183,186, 255 Mother Earth, 4,120,121 Mother of God, 51, 99,116,120,121, 225. See Holy Virgin Mary, Bogoroditsa Mother Russia, 4, 111, 121-122, 125, 129,130-133,135, 142,149,179, 221, 239, 255 motherhood, 4,113,117,126 motherland,4, 111, 112,118-119, 124, 128, 131-133,145, 249 multi-confessional, 31, 33, 80,180,181, 182 multi-national, 23, 31, 33 Muscovy, 16,18, 20, 23, 26, 28,44-46, 54, 67,73, 83, 87-90,96,152,163, 204, 208 museums, 49,132,141, 203, 212-213, 222, 230, 252 music, 45,133. See national music Musorgskii, 218-219, 220 muzhik, 176,179. See peasant myth, 2,4-9,15. See national myth myth of the people, 72,102 name, 54,66,77,94,109,112-114,133, 155,178,180,183 Napoleon, 199-200, 253

narod, 5,105,117,137-138,170-174, 178, 183, 185, 198, 202, 206, 211212, 217, 227-228, 245. See folk narodniki, 211. See populists nation, 4,7, 27, 36,49, 54, 68, 70, 85, 111, 112, 117, 119, 124, 126, 138, 160-161, 166,171,175,182, 198, 202, 204-205, 208-209, 211-217, 225, 240, 241, 252 national character, 166,168, 264 national coat of arms, 8 national colours, 25. See national symbols national costume, 71 national culture, 217-222 national flag, 8,11, 24-25 national food. See bread, bliny, kasha, kulebiaka national language, 184 national literature, 219 national music, 219-220 national operas, 220 national myth, 1*2,4-5, 55, 123,168, 200, 218, 221-222, 225-226, 228, 232-233, 235-237, 247, 251-252, 254 national regeneration, 243 national self-consciousness, 1, 2,48 national spirit, 4,70 national symbols, 5,12, 233. See national flag, anthem, coat of arms national tradition, 144. See folk tradition, nationalism national traits, 144,158, 188. See stereotypes nationalism, 1,12,71-72,119,126,136, 167,172, 174,182-183, 185,197, 202, 208, 212-215, 217, 219, 225, 228, 230, 239-242, 244-255, 290 nationalist discourse, 119,124,138, 160,171-172,176, 183 nationality, 1,23, 36, 54,71, 87,103, 136,142, 144,160,198, 202, 217, 230 Nekrasov, 132,135, 277 nemtsy. See Germans nerukotvomaia, 96. See icon nesting principle, 233,255 Nestor, 35

Index Nicholas 1,5,70-71,77-78,142, 201202, 230 Nicholas H, 72-73, 75-78, 276, 278 Nikon, 89,90, 91 nobility, 69,72-73,162,169,201-202, 204,222 norms and values, 138. See values nostalgia, 5,31,127,135,172, 204, 215, 218, 239 Novgorod, 19, 26-30,35,54, 56,116, 133,189, 275, 278 numbers, 33,97,143,157 Oblomov, 147 obraz, 178. See icon obshchina, 138,156,172-173. See peasant community, mir Old Believers, 65,91-93,102,109,142, 193,196, 243 Oleg. See Prince Oleg onion domes, 6,110,275 Optina Pustyn, 104. See monastery oral tradition, 137,185,186, 210. See folklore orb, 62. See regalia origins, 19,60,73, 111, 113,126,129, 132,134,138,158,161,168, 211, 217, 229, 235 Orthodox cross, 19, 23,107 Orthodox Blaster, 152 Orthodoxy, 1,23, 37,63,66,69,71, 8085, 88-89,93,104,107-108,125, 180, 202, 206, 227, 230 Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality, 71 otechestvo. See fatherland otets narodov, 76,179 Otets Otechestva. See Father tsar Other, 12, 92, 146, 149, 160,181-182, 211, 214, 231-232, 235, 236, 240, 246-247 oven, 150,171 pagan gods, 83. See idols Palace of Soviets, 106 Pamyat, 242 paradise, 191, 236 Paradise Lost, 128,194, 207

285

paskha, 152. See Easter past as discourse, 208 patria, 108,119. See homeland patriarchal cultural code, 178 patriotism, 12, 71, 87,112,119, 126, 175,179,199 patronymic, 178, 180. See name peasant, 29, 34,72,92,94,103,108, 138,172-174,180,183,187-188, 192-193, 210 pious peasant, 108 peasant community, 138,189. See obshchina, mir peasant embroideries, 114 people. See folk, narod Peredvizhniki. See Wanderers perestroika, 33, 53,104,135,177, 182, 244 periphery, 25, 28,40,49-50,53, 178, 239 Peter 1 ,17,19, 24, 30, 33-34, 37, 39-40, 42-43,45, 57, 63, 65-67, 69, 73, 7778,135,159,214 Peter the Great. See Peter I Petersburg, 4, 25, 30, 35, 37, 39-51, 53, 55-56,68, 71, 73-74,110, 125, 132, 135,152,159,163-164,177,181, 185,199, 207-208, 213, 220, 222, 227, 255, 290 pir, 189 pirog, 148. See food pisanka, 151. See decorated Easter eggs platok, 142. See headdress pochva. See soil pochvennUd, 207 podvizhniki, 108 Pokrov. See Intercession Poles, 90,180, 220,253 poneva, 141. See folk costume popular culture, 186 populists, 212, 220 post-modernism, 240-242, 245 power, 7, 26 central power, 19, 23, 36,53,57, 199, 233 military power, 226, 237 power structures, 4,111 power symbolism, 17

286

Soil and Soul

spiritual power, 7 See derzhava, scenarios of power, violence pravoslavtie, 80. See Orthodoxy Primary Chronicle, 15,16,19, 35,79, 109,123 Prince Oleg, 36 Prince Vladimir, 11, 20, 26, 36, 58, 6061, 67, 79, 80, 82-84, 86, 95, 97, 99100, 104, 108-109, 113, 116, 122, 128,133,155,179,189,195, 215, 222, 227, 246 printed media, 198 protection, 22, 26, 30, 31, 97, 112, 139, 140, 143, 150, 160, 180, 193, 206, 232, 235, 255 proverb, 131, 133,137,163,167, 190 purity, 41,170,182,192, 207, 236 Pushkin, 43-44,47, 51,134,183,185, 196, 199-200, 206, 218, 222-224, 229-230, 241

ruler, 38, 53, 57-60,62-65, 67-72, 77, 87,90, 101-102, 109, 111, 124, 200, 204, 233 ruler myth, 65,72 Rurik, 35 Rurikid dynasty, 36 Rus, 16, 18-19, 27, 29, 35-36, 54, 58, 80, 82-86, 88-99,102,104,108-109, 113, 129, 132-133,182,192, 197, 253 rusalki, 82,113 Russian Federal Eagle, 31 Russian Idea, 5,55,198, 216, 227-228, 243, 245, 248, 253 Russianness, 1-7,14,16, 25, 35, 52, 53, 66, 92-93,133,136, 138,142, 149, 158, 160-161, 166-168,171, 174, 178, 180-181,183,186,191, 198, 205, 207, 211, 217, 221, 228, 231, 233-236, 243-247, 251-253 Russification, 30, 31, 34,185, 239, 240

racism, 183 Raskol. See Schism raskolniki. See Old Believers Rasputin, Grigorii, 78 Rasputin, Valentin, 125,135, 223 red, 17, 20, 24-25, 31, 73, 143-144,146, 148,151-153,163, 234. See basic colours red egg, 152 Red Square, 51-52,71,100 Red Stars, 25, 31, 33 regalia, 61-62, 76,77 Repin, 129, 218-219, 220 Rider, 17,18, 20 ring-dances, 175 ritual kissing, 153 ritual towels, 114 rituals, 4,10-12,68-70,77,94,107, 113,121,125-126,135,154,163, 187,189, 232, 255 riza, 97 rodina, 4,112,126, 248. See motherland, fatherland Romanov dynasty, 74,78 Rublev, 96,98-99,105, 243

sacred, 4, 8-9,11,41,44, 62, 76, 84, 93, 95-96,105, 109, 114, 116, 121,163, 192, 216 sacrifice, 4,9, 58, 87, 118-119, 121-122, 171,176 saintly princes, 58 saints, 23, 62, 64, 83, 86, 95,97,101102,105, 108, 122, 244 samovar, 6,130,159, 252 sarafan, 141. See female peasant dress scenarios of power, 68, 70, 73 sceptre, 62. See regalia Schism, 91. See Old Believers, Orthodoxy Self, 12,104, 226, 231-232, 235-236, 246-247, 253 sex and society, 174 shirokaia natura, 27,178,190 Shishkin, 129 Siberia, 26,29-30,33-34,92,129,180, 191,201,232,255 Silver Age, 74,104,219 Sirin, 193,194, 236, 278 skazki. See fairy tales skipetr. See regalia skladchina, 189

Index slavofity, 198. See Slavophiles Slavophiles, 5,48,53,87,94,103-104, 162,168,174-176,197-198,202-208, 216,221,224,227,229,240,243 Slovo o polku Igoreve, 82, 108 smutnoe vremia. See Time of Troubles sobor, 39, 77, 87 sobomost, 4, 87, 175, 204, 223 soil, 4, 7, 82, 111, 117, 126, 130, 168, 192. See earth, homeland Soloviev, 77,104,128, 215, 227 Solovki, 104. See monastery Solzhenitsyn, 134-135,173, 230, 240, 244, 255 soul, 4,7, 27, 72,105, 111, 126,167, 168 soul-bird. See Sirin Soviet symbolism, 1,31 space, 2, 26, 27, 29,44,48,49, 53, 55, 56, 108, 121,126,127,128,135, 137,147,150,156, 160,163,187, 191, 192, 195, 203,211,228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 245, 247, 251, 252, 255. See territory Spasskaia tower, 25, 37, 276 Sphinx, 228,235, 236, 246,250, 251, 255 spiritual leaders, 104,108,129 St Andrew, 19, 22, 23, 75, 77 St George, 17-20, 24, 32,44, 276 St Olga, 58 St Petersburg. See Petersburg St Sergius Laura, 105. See monastery, Lavra St Sophia in Novgorod, 116, 275,278 St Vladimir, 58, 81, 276. See Prince Vladimir Stalin, 51,112,124,175,179,196, 243 starovery. See Old Believers star. See red stars startsy. See spiritual leaders state symbols, 8 statism, 17, 62 steam bath, 19, 178,196 Stenka Razin, 132 steppe, 6,27-28,120,122,192,232,248

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stereotypes, 2-7,10,12,94,165-166, 172-173, 176-178, 181-182, 186, 194-195, 231,252 stove. See oven sun symbols, 114 superiority, 171, 226 super-text, 251 Surikov, 129 Suvorov, 122 symbol, 4, 7, 8,11,15-16,17, 20, 22-24, 26, 31-33,40,43,45,47, 68, 77,93, 100,108,114,117,134,140-142, 149,152,159, 182,188, 206, 219, 227, 234-235, 247, 255. See key symbols symbolic archive, 6 symbolic capital, 49 Tarkovskii, 243 Tatars, 17,39,180 Tchaikovsky. See Chaikovskii tea, 158, 159,164 terem, 45 terrain, 4,5,6,7,58, 64,121,150,160, 254 territorial markers, 25 territorial symbolism, 4,121,129. See space, territory territoriality, 27,150 territory, 4, 6, 7,11,14, 24, 25-26, 2930, 33, 35-36,37,40-42,49, 53-54, 62 the Kremlin, 25, 37-39,44, 52, 54, 71, 74,76, 88,90,100,106, 245 The Lay of Igor’s Host, 82, 108 Third Rome, 59-60, 63, 77, 87-89, 227 time and space, 186 Time of Troubles, 62,100,102,252 titles, 26,44, 57,189 Tiutchev, 236, 248-249,251 Tolstoi, 44,224 topophilia, 192 toska, 127. See nostalgia tradition, 102,117,141-142, 152-159. See customs, folk tradition, national tradition, oral tradition traditional colour symbolism, 23 traditional family, 144,175-176

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Soil and Soul

traditional societies, 139 travel metaphor, 192 Tretiakov, 218 Trinity, 86, 98-99,104, 116, 216 troika, 28, 231-232 Troitsa, 98, 277. See Trinity tsar, 16, 26, 37, 39,44,47, 57, 59, 60, 62-63,66-67,70-74,76-77,79, 83, 88,90,93,97,102,122,133,142, 148, 152,159, 162,189, 202, 207,

Vladimir. See Prince Vladimir Vladimir Mother of God, 101, 277. See Virgin of Vladimir, Mother of God, icon vodianoi, 82 vodka, 34,144-147,149,153-158,163, 181,190,244 Volga, 36, 38, 54, 80,120-121,129,132, 219 volia. See freedom

220

tsar-batiushka. See Father tsar Tsarevich Dimitrii, 59. See saintly princes tsaritsa, 73, 75 Umileniie, 100. See Vladimir Mother of God, icon ushanka, 255. See fur hats Uspenskii Cathedral, 38,44, 54, 62, 67, 74,99,116 utopia, 106,172,174,191-193, 208, 236, 243 valenki. See felt boots values, 6,9-13, 33, 35,44, 53,90,102, 119, 124, 126, 128, 138, 145, 160, 173, 175-177,188-189, 202, 207208, 210-211, 216, 218, 222, 232, 234, 252 Vekhi, 216, 230 venchaniie na tsarstvo. See coronation violence, 4,5,7,23, 29-30,44, 58, 68, 72, 86,113,121, 125, 167,174, 192, 196, 214, 232, 237, 239, 253 Virgin of Vladimir, 101, 277 visual symbols, 8,95

Wanderers, 129, 219, 220 war memorial, 121 We, 2,4, 5,179,180, 236 West, 5,17-18,23-24,65,69,88-89, 148,171,180,192,198, 204, 210, 221, 226-228, 236 Westernization, 44-45, 200-201, 226 Westernizers, 202, 206 white, 17,19, 24, 89,143-144, 148, 152, 163, 228. See basic colours wholeness, 254 world tree, 255 Yaroslav, 36,109 yellow, 24. See golden, national colours Yeltsin, 245 Yermak, 29,30 Yezdets, 18. See rider Yurii Dolgorukii, 20,38 yurodivyi, 169. See Holy Fool zakuski, 149. See food zapadniki, 198. See Westernizers zemtia, 54,79,130,192,193. See soil Zhirinovskii, 195

Acknowledgements This book is part of a larger project on Russian Nationalism financed by the Finnish Academy. My thanks go first to my colleagues in Helsinki and St Petersburg, with whom I discussed many important issues. Chris Chulos, Timo Piirainen, Anna Rotkirch and Richard Stites have read the manuscript in various stages of its preparation; their comments were extremely valuable. I am also very grateful for Michael Gamer’s editorial help. And, last but not least, I wish to thank the Slavonic Library of Helsinki University for their generous permission to use pictures from their collections to illustrate the book.

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