Contemporary Views of the Coolie

The overseas Indian labourer entered the perception of the colonial planter and administrator in the early decades of the nineteenth century as it became clear, from increasing agitation in Britain, that slavery as a system was doomed. Intellectuals of the period, however, were convinced that European men were constitutionally incapable of dealing with labour in tropical climates. Earl Grey's comments typify the thinking of the period on this matter:

Late in February 1856, the city of Moscow gave a hero's welcome to some of the naval defenders of Sevastopol. By this time Russian diplomats were already in Paris working on the peace treaty that would end the war.Alexander had finally heeded the advice of his Foreign Minister and others and accepted the terms of his enemies. But not without bitterness, especially at the future prohibition of Russian naval forces in the Black Sea. His advisors, however, told him that Austria and perhaps even Prussia and Sweden might join the war against Russia. They emphasized the strength of the British navy and its ability to strike at Russia's coasts almost at will. They mentioned the difficulties of keeping so many troops (almost two and a half million, counting irregulars, militia and the navy) under arms in preparation for attacks from various directions, and they pointed out the tremendous financial strain of the war. They did not apparently stress the large number of Russian lives already lost in the war. In fact, an accurate count was not kept. But by the time peace finally arrived, about half a million had died, many from disease.

Welcoming the Sevastopol defenders was one way for Muscovites to assuage their wounded national pride. For more than a week they hosted and toasted these men: they greeted them with bread and salt, a traditional Russian welcome, and with hats thrown in the air and military marches; they invited them into their homes and cheered them as they rode through the snow-covered streets in troikas; and they held church services honoring the defenders' dead comrades.

In March 1856, a month after the Sevastopol sailors had left Moscow, the Tsar once again journeyed there by train. With the peace treaty having just been signed, those who concerned themselves with public affairs could now concentrate on other matters. And the old governor-general of Moscow had something other than war on his mind. Recently he had heard rumors that Alexander would announce the emancipation of the serfs during the upcoming coronation ceremonies. Although he himself might not believe such talk, some of his fellow nobles in Moscow were concerned. The governor-general asked the Emperor if he would reassure the nobles that their fears were groundless.

Even when primarily concerned with the war,Alexander had slowly begun to take steps to alleviate some of the more oppressive aspects of his father's rule. In addition to easing up on censorship, he lifted some of the restrictions on travel and on the number of students permitted into the universities. His manifesto announcing the peace also seemed to indicate reform. It spoke of a desire for strengthening Russia's internal well-being, for equal justice for all her people and for developing the urge toward enlightenment and useful activity.

But for many of the intellectuals of the day, the abolition of serfdom was the most pressing issue. From Alexander Herzen in his London sanctuary to more conservative thinkers like Constantine Aksakov and Pogodin in Moscow, there was general agreement among intellectuals that serfdom had to go.

While Professor Soloviev was writing about Peter the Great, Leo Tolstoy was at his estate working on a different type of historical work, War and Peace.

In the years since the emancipation of the serfs, Tolstoy had married and by the summer of 1866 had three children, Sergei, Tatyana and Ilya. His wife was Sonia Bers, the daughter of a government physician who worked in the Kremlin. Sonia's mother, Lyubov, was only a few years older than Tolstoy himself and as a young boy he apparently had once been infatuated with her. Sonia's father had met Lyubov in the early 1840s when he had interrupted a trip to Turgenev's in order to attend to her when she fell ill. Turgenev's mother had once been his mistress, and they apparently even had an illegitimate child.

In the early and mid-1860s the large Bers family, like the Solovievs, spent their summers in Pokrovskoe, and many a morning in the summer of 1862, Leo Tolstoy walked the eight miles from his rented apartment in Moscow to the Bers' dacha. One of his rivals for the affections of Sonia was a Moscow history professor, Nil Popov, who years later would marry the oldest of the Soloviev girls, Vera.

The young Sonia had rosy cheeks, dark hair and eyes, and was inclined to be serious and introspective. Tolstoy was sixteen years older than this teenager, still had his dark beard, and feared that he was too old and ugly.

On a Saturday less than two weeks after the attempted assassination, the stoopshouldered, goateed Nicholas Nekrasov approached the fat, bulldog-faced Count Michael Muraviev and asked if he could read him a poem. The scene was the exclusive English Club along the Neva, not far from the Winter Palace.

The previous five years had been difficult ones for Nekrasov. Due to differing ideologies and Nekrasov's contradictory personality, he had lost a number of old friends including Turgenev. Herzen was not the only one who came to think of him a hypocrite and swindler. How could he be a radical and sympathizer with the poor and at the same time ride in his carriage to the English Club and eat gourmet meals and gamble with the ministers and advisers of the Tsar? The fact that he was usually successful at cards and relieved such individuals as Alexander Abaza, a future Minister of Finance, of enormous sums of money did not seem to mitigate his guilt in the eyes of his critics.

Avdotya Panaeva was also no longer in his life. Perhaps she had hoped that after her husband's death in 1862,Nekrasov would marry her. Perhaps she grew tired of his sexual encounters with other women and his gambling. At any rate, she had moved out of the apartment they shared on the Liteiny Prospect. And two years after the death of her husband, she married someone else.

On that May day in 1880 that Dostoevsky left Staraya Russa for the Pushkin celebration in Moscow, the Empress Maria died, finally succumbing to tuberculosis. Her death had been the reason for the delay in beginning the Pushkin festivities. The nation had been in official mourning.

When his wife died, alone in her oxygen-supplied bedroom in the Winter Palace, Alexander was with Katia and their children at Tsarskoe Selo. Since September 1878, when she was born, there had been a new member of the family, the couple's infant daughter, named Katia after her mother. On hearing the news of Maria's death, the Tsar immediately took the short train ride into the city. Days of mourning and requiem services followed.

After the Empress's body had lain in the Winter Palace for a few days, it was transferred to the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was a gloomy Monday, rainy, windy, almost stormy in the morning when the procession wound its way over the Neva to the fortress. On horseback and in military uniform, Alexander rode behind the body of his wife. Foreign dignitaries, family and others followed behind. After a few days of lying in state, the body of the Empress was finally buried in the fortress cathedral.

One of the foreign princes at the funeral was the Empress's nephew, Alexander of Battenburg. The previous year, the Russians had helped to put him on the Bulgarian throne, but only as a limited constitutional monarch.

While Alexander II encouraged the nobles to discuss the emancipation of the serfs and Tolstoy and Turgenev signed a petition in favor of it, and while Dostoevsky, Bakunin and Muraviev were all still in Siberia and Peter Perovsky in China, the aristocratic socialist Alexander Herzen edited The Bell from his London home. Smuggled into Russia, it rivaled Nekrasov's The Contemporary in popularity and influence. Herzen himself became a first class celebrity, and for about half a decade his successive London homes became beacons attracting progressive Russians traveling in Europe.

But when he first arrived in the bustling, noisy metropolis of London in the late summer of 1852, he was a sad and disillusioned man of forty. Within the previous year death had taken his mother, two sons and his wife, still leaving him the father of three young children. In addition to his personal misfortunes, the failures of the European revolutions of 1848–9 had left him depressed about the social and political future of Europe. How events had changed since the Herzen family had set out with such high hopes for Paris in 1847! Only the recovery from Russia of his considerable fortune, aided by the Parisian banker James Rothschild, prevented his lot from being worse.

Herzen spent much time in his early years in London among the various émigrés and political exiles. Rejecting many of the values of English capitalist society, he participated in and tried to strengthen the radical subculture which surrounded him.

On a sunny but cool Wednesday in the middle of May 1874, Emperor Alexander II of Russia was in the English Channel on his yacht Derzhava, headed for Dover. Accompanying him was an entourage of more than a dozen aides and officials including his oldest son, the Tsarevich Alexander, by now himself the father of two boys. The Tsar's wife, Maria, was not with him. She seldom was any more, and the emotional ties which once bound husband and wife had long since come undone.

As far as the Tsar was concerned his true wife was Catherine Dolgorukova, whom he still loved passionately eight years after first consummating his love with her that July night at Peterhof. After their rendezvous in Paris and return to Russia, their lives became more and more intertwined. Although he tried to remain discreet, his love for Katia was not easily hidden. He provided her with an apartment in the capital and arranged for nearby quarters for her when he was at Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Livadia in the Crimea, or Bad Ems in Germany. In 1870, she had become a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and therefore had an excuse often to be around the royal family. Her duties, however, did not oblige her to travel with Maria when she went off, as she often did, to take the cure in Europe. On such occasions Alexander could arrange their rendezvous a little more easily. In recent years Katia occasionally had even surreptitiously made her way into the Tsar's quarters at the Winter Palace.

The Russian word “istoriya” can mean either history or story; The Age of Alexander II attempts to be both and is written for anyone who enjoys readable history. While emphasizing the “story” in history, I have taken no liberties with the facts, and even minor details such as descriptions of the weather on a particular day are based on solid historical sources. This book's subject is the reign of Alexander II of Russia (1855–81) and some of the fascinating writers, thinkers and revolutionaries who made this the Golden Age of Russian literature and thought. It interweaves the personal and public lives of such individuals as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, but it also has a central thread woven throughout: Alexander II, his policies and the reactions they called forth from the book's other central characters, most of whom could be considered intellectuals.

This drama occurs in a psychological atmosphere as real but elusive as a St Petersburg fog. It is one of raised but then dashed hopes, of confusion, conflict and alienation, but also one of yearning for love and a sense of community. It is one of a lonely Dostoevsky in Siberian exile discovering the necessity of becoming one with the common people; of the radical Sophia Perovskaya rejecting the world of her influential father and going among the workers and peasants to both teach and radicalize them; of a Leo Tolstoy so miserable that he contemplates suicide until he also discovers new hope among the peasants.

While Alexander II was crowning himself in Moscow, far away in the in the Central Asian-Siberian border town of Semipalatinsk (present-day Seney) the non-commissioned officer Fedor Dostoevsky was languishing.

He was thirtyfour, about five feet six inches tall, with a pale freckled face and a receding hairline. He smoked a lot and had a throaty voice. He was the son of a Moscow doctor, whose mysterious death in 1839 left a permanent mark on the young Fedor.Hearing that his father had been killed by his own serfs, it is likely that the young man held himself partly responsible: he was then a student at the Military Engineering Academy in St Petersburg and repeatedly had requested money from his father, who was himself sliding towards impoverishment. Did not his requests contribute to his father's harsh demands on his serfs? Did they not indirectly help lead to the revenge thought to have been exacted by these peasants?

Six difficult years later came Nekrasov's discovery of Dostoevsky's literary talent, and soon afterwards the publication of his first novel, Poor Folk. Subsequent events, however, soon deflated the spirits of this shy, awkward, nervous young man. Some of Dostoevsky's newly made friends, such as the more aristocratic Turgenev, began to tease and torment him because the success of Poor Folk had caused him to seem unduly vain. In addition, his new works failed to generate the enthusiasm of his first. Then he became involved with the Petrashevsky Circle.

Some nine months after the Dostoevskys' departure from Geneva, a twenty-one-year-old Russian radical named Sergei Nechaev arrived in the city. He was of medium height and weight and possessed an abundance of nervous energy. To some his compressed lips and the look in his dark eyes hinted at the sinister nature of the man. Unlike Ogarev and Bakunin, both of whom he would soon meet, he was not from the noble class. His father worked as both a waiter and a painter of signs in and around Ivanovo, a small Russian textile town. Already hostile to the local nobility, he left his hometown in 1865 and went to Moscow. There he briefly worked as a copyist for the historian Pogodin before moving on to the capital, where he obtained a teaching position.

For almost three years St Petersburg was his home. He witnessed the reaction symbolized by Muraviev's investigating commission and the appointment of several new men to key posts. One of these was the new Minister of Education, Dmitry Tolstoy, who in the year following his appointment issued new rules further restricting students' rights. Partly in reaction to these further restrictions, students, who had quieted down a bit during the middle of the decade, once again became more active in 1868 and 1869. The number of illegal circles and meetings increased significantly, and Nechaev, who enrolled as an auditing student at St Petersburg University, became active in the midst of them.

In May of 1862, Turgenev arrived in London for a short visit. In the previous six years he had visited England and Herzen almost yearly. Unlike Tolstoy and Bakunin, the liberal Turgenev admired the British political system and appreciated its spirit of compromise and tolerance; and he had encouraged the political moderation that his good friend Herzen attempted to display prior to the emancipation.

But moderation, political or otherwise, was not a virtue that came easily to Russian intellectuals. In the face of provocations by some of his more abrasive countrymen, even Turgenev found it difficult to practice. Upset over criticism of his work by Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, he had finally broken off relations with their chief editor, Nekrasov. In May of 1861, he had also quarreled so seriously with Tolstoy that the argument almost resulted in a duel.While at the poet Fet's estate one morning, Tolstoy criticized Turgenev for the way he was bringing up his daughter and, according to Turgenev, suggested that he would act differently if his daughter were legitimate. Turgenev later recalled threatening to slap Tolstoy's face if he continued insulting him. They soon parted, and a comedy of errors and delayed and misplaced correspondence followed. In these letters, Tolstoy was the first to insist on a duel. Turgenev was the more apologetic, but at one point he also stated he would demand satisfaction. Instead, they stopped seeing each other.

Two years after Chernyshevsky's visit, Tolstoy came to London and called on Herzen. Later that year a regenerated Bakunin arrived. Before leaving Russia once again, Tolstoy had begun teaching some of his serfs' children. Always the rebel and innovator, he disdained traditional educational methods. Memorization and threats went out the third-floor windows of the bedroom he converted into a classroom. He stressed instead freedom and the joy of learning. In the spring of 1860, he once again worked in the fields with his peasants and lay down in the woods with the peasant Aksinya. By now his original lust had developed into a more loving care for her. But, of course, she was not the type of woman he could marry.

Meanwhile, his oldest brother, Nicholas, was at Soden, a German spa, trying to alleviate his tuberculosis. His sister Maria, concerned about his health and perhaps also hoping to see Turgenev,who was also at Soden, decided to visit her sick brother, and Leo agreed to accompany her and her three children. Early in July they all left St Petersburg by steamship.

After arriving in Stettin and then moving on to Berlin, Leo decided to examine German educational methods. He did not arrive at Soden until the end of August. By then Nicholas's condition had worsened, and the weather in Soden had turned colder with frequent rain.Nicholas's doctors suggested wintering in a warmer climate.

On the next evening after her arrest, Sophia Perovskaya was led out of the three-storey gendarme building and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Four days earlier, after still another long procession across the wind-blown Neva, her victim, Alexander II, had been buried in the fortress's cathedral. A gendarme led Sophia into a vaulted, half-dark room,where a gendarme colonel sat behind a large table covered with a green cloth. There waiting to identify her was the heavyset bomb-thrower Rysakov, now clad in prison garb.

At the time of her daughter's arrest, Sophia's mother was in the Crimea at the little house where Sophia had recovered after her first prison term. Four days after Sophia's arrest, a gendarme captain arrived and took away her brother Vasily, and told her mother and brothers that Sophia had been arrested. That same evening Sophia's mother and oldest brother, Nicholas, left for St Petersburg.

Not long after arriving in the capital, Mrs Perovskaya went to the office of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Loris-Melikov. His preoccupation these days was with security, that of the new Tsar in particular. He and others were still fearful that the People's Will might try to strike again. The reform proposal which Alexander II had approved the day of his death was for the present in abeyance.