Putin's Authoritarianism and the "Gloomy Seven Years"
Comprehension of the ongoing war in Ukraine for almost a year is taking place in many spaces. One of them is historical analogies, which allow us to better understand the nature, causes and mechanisms of the tragedy unfolding before our eyes.
Until February 24, 2022, observers and commentators most often compared the “late Putin regime” of the late 1910s and early 2020s with Brezhnev’s stagnation, implicitly hinting at the inevitability of future perestroika. Now, however, it turns out that this was terminological haste, and that “late” regime, with foreign agents and the suppression of the latest rallies for Navalny, was not yet the “late” Putin regime.
Until February 24, the “late Putin regime” was compared with the Brezhnev stagnation, but this was terminological haste
Sometimes parallels were drawn with the people's democracy regimes that existed simultaneously (GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland), which institutionally really looked more like Putin's Russia, with their decorative multi-party system and elements of a market economy. Less often – with late authoritarian regimes on the "outskirts" of Europe (Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, "black colonels" in Greece).
With the start of a full-scale offensive by Russian troops and the subsequent rapid changes in Russian domestic politics, popular analogies shifted back half a century – and comparisons were already with the Stalinist USSR and Nazi Germany.
Probably, nevertheless, the most accurate parallel is the Nikolaev era, including the Crimean War, in which England and France defeated Russia, and the years of tightening the screws that preceded it, the so-called “Gloomy Seven Years”. Putin has previously been compared to Nicholas the First, who, in Pushkin's words, had "a lot of ensign and a little of Peter the Great", but recently this analogy has become more and more obvious.
Putin is often compared to Nicholas I, who had "a lot of the ensign and a little of Peter the Great"
The “Gloomy Seven Years” narrative itself exists in a rather simplistic form (they usually mention a few particularly repressive years on the eve of the inevitable collapse of Nicholas Russia and the inevitable “Great Reforms” that followed), but history gives us new reasons to take a closer look at this period.
First, what is the "Gloomy Seven Years"? Chronologically, they describe the period of Russian history from 1848 to 1855, when dissent was especially strongly suppressed and civil liberties were limited.
Literary critic Pavel Annenkov described this time as follows:
“It’s hard to imagine how people lived then. People lived as if hiding. The police, official and simply amateur, reigned in the streets and everywhere, but appetites for robbery, bait, enriching oneself through the state and service developed to incredible. They were even encouraged. What happened then under the guise of good rules, flawless career progression, superior dignity! Three million stolen by Politkovsky from the disabled, one might say, under the noses of all the authorities, was still a trifle compared to what high-ranking men in general did.
During this period, Russian citizens were practically forbidden to travel abroad. Those who were already abroad were ordered to return under the threat of confiscation of property, in particular, estates that generated income.
Russian citizens were practically forbidden to travel abroad. Those who left were ordered to return
At the same time, the entry of foreigners into Russia was mirrored, in addition, the import of foreign books was actually banned.
Double censorship was introduced in the country: the so-called Buturlin Committee (named after the senator Dmitry Buturlin, who headed it) rechecked publications that had already been censored. The Committee even suggested that the liturgical text, the akathist to the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos, be edited to remove the “offensive” lines about “the invisible taming of cruel and bestial lords.” As they wrote in the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron fifty years later, Buturlin jokingly said that it would be nice for censorship to correct the Gospel.
About the same Buturlin, Nikolai Nekrasov later wrote in a poem about Belinsky:
Fanatic ardent Buturlin,
Who, not sparing the breast,
Furious, he repeated one thing:
"Close the universities,
And the evil will be stopped! .. "
Indeed, the question of closing the universities was raised seriously, but the tsar did not go for it. As a result, at all universities, except for Moscow, the number of places was limited – they made no more than three hundred. They also raised tuition fees, and increased supervision of students and professors.
In addition, the Minister of Education was replaced. The author of the concept of "Orthodoxy-autocracy-nationality" Sergei Uvarov was dismissed as too liberal, and he was replaced by Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, who demanded that henceforth all sciences be based "on religious truths in connection with theology." He banned the teaching of philosophy, political economy and foreign law.
Minister of Education Shirinsky-Shikhmatov banned the teaching of philosophy, political economy and foreign law
It got ridiculous. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov tried to ban the transcription of Greek names "according to Erasmus". So, for example, he demanded that Homer be called exclusively Omir (in the Greek manner). It is noteworthy that if before that both forms existed in the Russian literary language (for example, in Baratynsky: “But they are green in the fatherland of Omir // Hills, forests, banks of azure rivers”), then after that, as the data of the Corpus of the Russian Language show, such a form ceased to be used at all.
As today, first of all, the “crackdown” hit on those who “stick out” more than others and, according to the authorities, allow themselves more than others. If today these are not only writers whose books have been removed from libraries or wrapped in “foreign agent” covers, but also journalists, bloggers, actors, musicians who are accused in person or in absentia of “betraying the country”, “awarded” with the status of “foreign agent ” and so on, then at that time they were primarily writers. Therefore, the "gloomy seven years" can be most clearly and convexly illustrated by three historical and literary examples – Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Herzen.
Dostoevsky
The critic Annenkov, already mentioned above, called the “gloomy seven years” the “kingdom of darkness” precisely in the context of the most severe sentence against Dostoevsky.
Together with the members of the Petrashevsky circle , the young but already popular writer Dostoevsky, who, in general, was not even a member of the circle, but rather just occasionally went there, was arrested early in the morning on April 23, 1849 and placed in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months.
The case of the Petrashevites was based on the reports of the police agent Pyotr Antonelli, who was also a member of the circle. Based on his messages, Ivan Liprandi, on behalf of the Minister of the Interior, compiled a report, which eventually fell on the table to the king.
This document specifically stated:
“… From all this I learned the conviction that there was not so much a petty and separate conspiracy as a comprehensive plan for a general movement, upheaval and destruction.”
The verdict of 13 November 1849 was appropriate to this guilt, which was actually invented in Liprandi's report:
“The military court finds the defendant Dostoevsky guilty of the fact that, having received in March of this year from Moscow … a copy of the criminal letter of the writer Belinsky, he read this letter in meetings … Therefore, the military court sentenced him for failing to inform about the spread of a criminal about religion and the government of the letter of the writer Belinsky … deprive … of ranks and all rights of the state and subject to the death penalty by shooting.
At the same time, four days before the scheduled execution, Dostoevsky's death sentence was de facto canceled "because of its inconsistency with the guilt of the convict." At first, they planned to replace the execution with eight years of hard labor, but the tsar eventually personally replaced it with four years, followed by military service as a private.
Naturally, neither Dostoevsky nor the others were informed of this decision. They were convinced that they were going to be executed by "shooting", up to the announcement on the Semyonovsky parade ground.
Contemporaries were shocked by such a barbaric staging. One of the convicts, Nikolai Grigoriev, could not stand it and went crazy. Later, Dostoevsky himself described his feelings through the mouth of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. All this also had a strong influence on him, both physiologically (his seizures intensified) and ideologically (a conservative and religious transformation began to take place with him, similar to the finale of Crime and Punishment).
Turgenev
In 1869, Turgenev's "Works" were published, at that time already a living classic. He is a little over 50, on the literary Olympus he is being squeezed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, critics and the public did not very favorably accept his latest novel “Smoke”, considering it, to put it mildly, more polemical and journalistic than artistically great.
And Turgenev turns to the past. For his collected works, he writes literary memoirs – about Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Krylov and others.
It starts, of course, with Gogol. He tells how in 1851 he went to the terribly haggard Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, how six months later Gogol died, and Ivan Sergeevich himself went under arrest for a month for an obituary for Gogol, forbidden by censorship, and then exiled to the Oryol estate.
Turgenev says:
“But it's all for the best; being under arrest, and then in the countryside, brought me undoubted benefits: it brought me closer to such aspects of Russian life, which, in the ordinary course of things, would probably have escaped my attention.
Turgenev was already under close surveillance. Even his harmless "Hunter's Notes" were scrutinized by the censors. In particular, a report has been preserved, which expresses the opinion that Ivan Sergeevich deliberately “poeticized the serfs” and showed that they are also people, in order to thereby implicitly call for the abolition of serfdom.
Moreover, during the European revolutions of 1848, Turgenev, along with Belinsky, ended up in Paris. He witnessed the killing of hostages, crossfire, the construction and fall of barricades. He did not like all this, and for the rest of his life he endured a disgust for the revolution as an idea – he was rather a moderate liberal.
But during the Dark Seven Years, disgust was not enough to prove loyalty. On April 28, 1852, Turgenev was arrested and sentenced to a month in prison in the Admiralty part of the "moving out" (a pun even went around St. exile to the family Oryol estate under police supervision.
The reason for the arrest was a formal violation of censorship restrictions. More precisely, not even a violation, but some trick.
The fact is that after the death of Gogol, Turgenev wrote an obituary article and tried to publish it in Petersburg Vedomosti, but was refused by the censor. There was nothing seditious in the text. Historians argue: either the censor was embarrassed by the word “great” in relation to Gogol (they say, it’s up to the tsar to decide who our great is), or there was a general ban on mentioning Gogol in the press (after the death of Pushkin and Lermontov, censorship acted in a similar way).
But Turgenev really wanted to publish this text. And he sent it to Moskovskie Vedomosti, where the censorship let him through (the departments simply did not coordinate their work).
Interestingly, for the sake of Turgenev, they even introduced a temporary ban on visiting those arrested in the Admiralteyskaya part. Too many people were sent every day to express their support for him.
Herzen
In 1849, at the request of Nicholas I, all the property of Alexander Herzen and his mother in Russia was arrested. Arrested informally, the decision of the court will be only in December 1850.
The reason was very simple. Herzen actively participated in the European revolutions – and refused to return to Russia. Declared an "eternal exile" (this is the wording of the court's verdict), Herzen nevertheless found himself in this situation. He wrote about it this way:
“I got acquainted with Rothschild and offered him to exchange two tickets of the Moscow safe treasury for me [on the security of the estate]. Things then, of course, did not go, the course was bad; his conditions were unfavorable, but I immediately agreed.
Herzen managed to get some of the money. On them, on the advice of the same James Rothschild, he "bought himself American papers, several French ones and a small house on Amsterdam Street, occupied by the Le Havre Hotel."
But there were problems with the cashing of the rest of the papers. When the banker's agents approached the Russian government to receive the money from these tickets in turn, they were refused on the grounds that the property had been seized. About the conversation that took place after that between Herzen and Rothschild, we know from the works of Herzen himself:
“For me,” I told him, “it is not surprising that Nikolai, as a punishment for me, wants to steal my mother’s money or to catch me with it; but I could not imagine that your name had so little weight in Russia. The tickets are yours, not my mother's; subscribing to them, she handed them over to the bearer, but since you signed for them, this bearer is you, and they impudently answer you: your money, but the master did not order to pay.
Herzen worked on the banker in this way for several days. He even described Russian politics with the phrase "Cossack communism."
As a result, Rothschild decided to put pressure on St. Petersburg, because his reputation was affected, and at that time he was providing loans to the Russian government. Having achieved an audience with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, Count Nesselrode, the banker actually forced the government of Nicholas to pay a relatively small amount in order to receive much more serious sums, and Herzen received his money, which later opened the same free printing house where The Bell was printed. You can even say that the king financed the "Bell".
"The darkness is stronger before the dawn"
It is curious that the “gloomy seven years” is a specific term that exists almost exclusively in Russian historiography. In English-language literature, for example, dark seven years or grim seven years are mentioned extremely rarely – and only as a retelling of the fact that this term is used by Russian historians.
In Western historiography, the entire thirty-year reign of Nicholas I is traditionally described as a single authoritarian continuum, as a period of frost and repression.
Probably, the domestic complicated distinction (singling out the most authoritarian stage of the already authoritarian rule) here rather comes from the desire to isolate “shades of gray”, on the one hand, and on the other hand, relies on a living historical and literary tradition.
“Whoever did not live in Russia in 1856 does not know what life is,” wrote the young Leo Tolstoy, paraphrasing a French phrase about 1793. And he, of course, expressed the general mood. Despite the very painful defeat in the Crimean War, the whole country rejoiced and waited for change.
Despite a very painful defeat in the Crimean War, the whole country rejoiced and waited for change.
It is in this contrast with the subsequent death of Nicholas I, the defeat in the war, the expectation of reforms and the "Great Reforms" themselves that the "gloomy seven years" are noticed.
Because of this, a retrospective narrative developed that this dark period was programmed to not be very long. This idea was most characteristically expressed by the literary critic of the early 20th century Ivanov-Razumnik:
“… The pressure immediately and suddenly intensified so much that, obviously, it could not last too long; in the hopeless darkness, the approach of light was felt, but in order to wait for it, one had to go through seven black, difficult years.
There is a logical error here. Because it happened, it didn't follow that it had to happen. The death of Nicholas I, in a sense, accidental (he dressed lightly and caught a cold at the parade), was not at all something expected. He reigned for thirty years, but he was only 56. Even with the then development of medicine, he could well remain on the throne for another 15–20 years, and no one and nothing could seriously prevent this. And then the “gloomy seven years” would turn into a gloomy twenty-seven years. Dostoevsky would have remained in Kazakhstan, Turgenev in the Oryol estate, and the peasants would have remained serfs.
Stories with the general frame “the darkness is stronger before dawn” are especially well told in retrospect – like Turgenev in his memoirs. From the moment of darkness itself it is very difficult, if not impossible, to grope how much is left. Hardly the same Turgenev, when he was under arrest for a month, and even more so Dostoevsky in hard labor, seriously believed that everything would change in just a couple of years.
