NATASHA

gentry from which he was so proud to descend.

In contrast to these views was the democratic trend of Russian history advanced by the Decembrists and their followers. They stressed

* Dostoevsky shared this view. The Russians, he wrote in 1876, were 'a people devoted to sacrifice, seeking truth and knowing where truth can be found, as honest and pure in heart as one of their high ideals, the epic hero Ilia Muromets, whom they cherish as a saint' (F. Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, trans. K. Lantz, 2 vols. (London, 1993), vol. 1, p. 660).

the rebellious and freedom-loving spirit of the Russian people and idealized the medieval republics of Novgorod and Pskov, and the Cossack revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Pugachev's. They believed that the common people had always been the (hidden) moving force of history - a theory largely shaped by their observation of the peasant soldiers in the war of 1812. In response to Karamzin's famous motto 'The history of the nation belongs to the Tsar', the Decembrist historian Nikita Muraviev began his study with the fighting words: 'History belongs to the people.'¹⁶³

The origins of Russia was a major battlefield in this war between historians. Monarchists subscribed to the so- called Norman theory, originally devised by German historians in the eighteenth century, which maintained that the first ruling princes had arrived in Russia from Scandinavia (in the ninth century) by invitation from the warring Slavic tribes. The only real evidence for this argument was the Primary Chronicle - an eleventh- century account of the founding of the Kievan state in 862 - which had probably been written to justify what actually amounted to the Scandinavian conquest of Russia. The theory became increasingly untenable as nineteenth-century archaeologists drew attention to the advanced culture of the Slavic tribes in southern Russia. A picture emerged of a civilization stretching back to the ancient Scythians, the Goths, the Romans and the Greeks. Yet the Norman theory was a good foundation myth for the defenders of autocracy - supposing, as it did, that without a monarchy the Russians were incapable of governance. In Karamzin's words, before the establishment of princely rule, Russia had been nothing but an 'empty space' with 'wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and birds'.¹⁶⁴ Against that the democrats maintained that the Russian state had evolved spontaneously from the native customs of the Slavic tribes. According to this view, long before the Varangians arrived the Slavs had set up their own government, whose republican liberties were gradually destroyed by the imposition of princely rule. Versions of the argument were made by all those groups who believed in the natural predilection of the Slavic people for democracy: not just the Decembrists but left-wing Slavophiles, Polish historians (who used it to denounce the Tsarist system in Poland), and Populist historians in the Ukraine and (later on) in Russia, too.

Another battlefield was medieval Novgorod - the greatest monument to Russian liberty and, in the Decembrist view, historic proof of the people's right to rule themselves. Along with nearby Pskov, Novgorod was a flourishing civilization connected to the Hanseatic League of German trading towns prior to its conquest by Tsar Ivan III and its subjugation to Muscovy during the late fifteenth century. The Decembrists made a cult of the city republic. As a symbol of the people's long-lost freedoms, they saw its veche, or assembly, as a sacred legacy connecting Russia to the democratic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The teenage members of the 'holy artel' (1814-17) - among them several of the future Decembrists - opened all their meetings with the ceremonial ringing of the veche bell. In their manifestos the Decembrists used the terminology of medieval Novgorod, calling the future parliament the 'national veche'.¹⁶⁵ The myth of Novgorod took on a new meaning and subversive power after the suppression of their uprising. In 1830 Lermontov wrote a poem entitled Novgorod ('Brave sons of the Slavs, for what did you die?'), in which it was left deliberately unclear whether it was the fallen heroes of medieval Novgorod or the freedom fighters of 1825 whose loss was to be mourned. The same nostalgic note was struck by Dimtry Venevitanov in his pro-Decembrist poem Novgorod (1826):

Answer great city:

Where are your glorious days of liberty,

When your voice, the scourge of kings,

Rang true like the bells at your noisy assembly?

Say, where are those times?

They are so far away, oh, so far away!¹⁶⁶

The monarchist perception of medieval Novgorod formed a stark contrast. According to Karamzin, Moscow's conquest of the city was a necessary step towards the creation of a unitary state, and was recognized as such by its citizens. This submission was a sign of the Russian people's wisdom, in Karamzin's view: they recognized that freedom was worth nothing without order and security. The Novgoro-dians were thus the original consenting members in the leviathan of autocracy. They chose the protection of the Tsar in order to save

themselves from their own internal squabbles, which had played into the hands of the city's boyars, who became despotic and corrupt and who threatened to sell out to the neighbouring state of Lithuania. Karamzin's version was almost certainly closer to the historical truth than the Decembrists' vision of an egalitarian and harmonious republican democracy. Yet it too was a justifying myth. For Karamzin the lesson to be learned from his History was clear: that republics were more likely to become despotic than autocracies - and a lesson well worth underlining after the collapse of the French republic into the Napoleonic dictatorship.

The war of 1812 was itself a battlefield for these competing myths of Russian history. This was shown by its commemoration in the nineteenth century. For the Decembrists, 1812 was a people's war. It was the point at which the Russians came of age, the moment when they passed from childhood into adult citizens, and with their triumphant entry into Europe, they should have joined the family of European states. But for the defenders of the status quo, the war symbolized the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon. It was a time when the Tsarist state emerged as God's chosen agent in a new historical dispensation.

The regime's image of itself was set in stone with the Alexandrine Column, built, ironically, by the French architect Auguste de Montfer-rand on Palace Square in Petersburg, and opened on the twentieth anniversary of the battle of Borodino. The angel on the top of the column was given the Tsar Alexander's face.¹⁶⁷ Five years later, work began in Moscow on a larger monument to the divine mission of the Russian monarchy - the grandiose Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on a site overlooking the Kremlin walls. Half war museum and half church, it was intended to commemorate the miraculous salvation of Moscow in 1812. Constantin Ton's design echoed the architectural language of the ancient Russian Church, but enlarged its proportions to an imperial scale. This colossal cathedral was the tallest building in Moscow when it was completed, after fifty years, in 1883, and even today, reconstructed after Stalin had it blown up in 1931 (one death sentence that might be justified on artistic grounds), it still dominates the cityscape.

Throughout the nineteenth century these two images of 1812 - as

8. Monument to the millennium of Russia in the square in front of St Sophia's Cathedral, Novgorod

a national liberation or imperial salvation - continued to compete for the public meaning of the war. On the one side was Tolstoy's War and Peace, a truly national drama which tells its history from the viewpoint of the noble and the serf. On the other were the monuments in stone, the triumphant arches and gates of victory in the pompous 'Empire style' that trumpeted Russia's imperial might; or the sound of all those cannons in Tchaikovsky's Overture of 1812. Even in the early1860s,

when there were high hopes for national unity in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs, these two visions were at loggerheads. The fiftieth anniversary of 1812 coincided with the millennium of the Russian state in 1862. The millennium was due to be commemorated in the spring in (of all symbolic places) Novgorod. But the Emperor Alexander II ordered its postponement to 26 August - the anniversary of the battle of Borodino and the sacred date of his own coronation in 1856. By merging these three anniversaries, the Romanov dynasty was attempting to reinvent itself as a national institution, consecrated by the holy victory of 1812, and one as old as the Russian state itself. The granite monument unveiled in Novgorod was a symbol of this claim. Shaped like the bell of the Novgorod assembly, it was encircled by a band of bas-reliefs with the sculptures of those figures - saints and princes, generals and warriors, scientists and artists - who had shaped a thousand years of Russian history. The great bell was crowned by Mother Russia, bearing in one hand the Orthodox cross and in the other a shield emblazoned with