The Smell of the Russian Spirit
The Smell of the Russian Spirit
On May 8th, the Russian usurper, Vladimir Putin, had signed a document: “Foundations of Government Politics of the Russian Federation in the Area of Historical Enlightenment”. True to form, it includes a definition of the terms. Paragraph 3: “Historical Enlightenment” – Would you like to take a guess what that means? Allow me, and I quote: “Historical Enlightenment: action, regulated by the Government, of spreading authentic and scientifically based knowledge in society, also for the purposes of countering the diminishment of the heroism of the People’s defense of the fatherland. ” Such is the torturous phraseology with which he is defining government actions spreading authentic knowledge. Strange combination, but anyway, Count Alexander von Benckendorff, the head of the Russian gendarmerie during the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich (known to history as “Nicholas the Stick”) had expressed the same idea using much more beautiful language. It’s a famous quote, let’s revisit it: “Russia’s past was marvelous, her present is more than magnificent, and what relates to her future – it’s superior to anything that could be depicted by the bravest of imaginations. ” It’s exactly from this point of view that Russian history should be observed and composed, and the language of Count von Benckendorff – that’s how government actions were meant to be described. Alas, today they write how they know.
In paragraph 5 they define that truth that the government, in all it’s care, needs to spread to the public. “Russia – great nation with a centuries-long history. Government-civilization that united Russian and many other peoples of Eurasia into a culturally historical community and made a massive contribution to global progress. Foundational to the self-consciousness of the Russian society are the traditional spiritual-moral values that formed and grew during Russia’s entire history, preservation and defense thereof being necessary conditions for the harmonious development of the country. ” This turn of phrase – “traditional spiritual-moral values” repeats in the text 6 times. 6 times – it seems that it’s close and dear to the heart of it’s creator. I think that I was the only person aside from the typist who had read the text carefully and in full, so I report: not a word was said about declassifying the archives, meaning that we are going to, with government help, advance historical enlightenment, but without declassifying the World War II materials, despite that war being a government-forming value these days. Not a word.
The document wraps up with a section on “Expected Outcomes”, where the lawmaker hopes that it will result in, of course, “preservation of traditional Russian spiritual-moral values, increasing the ability of the Russian society to resist destructive ideological effects. ” The end. The document is over, just a little comment – I think this is that very case where nothing needs to be explained, and if it needs to be explained, then all the more so that it shouldn’t be. However, I do think that the 6-times repeated “traditional Russian spritual-moral values” are a good topic of discussion, and it’ll be a long one, so I’m warning people who are doing useful and necessary things – consider whether or not you need to spend this much time.
Let’s start with our terms: what is Russia, how old is she, and where is she located. I think that Russia, the history of civilization therein, such that can be a subject of discussion from the context of spiritual and moral values, is a very young country that had, unfortunately, lived a very short life. Her story continued for exactly 155 years. It’s easy to remember – 155 years, from 1762 until 1917. Why 1917- it’s clear: that’s the Bolshevik coup that crushed the Russian Empire, and why 1762 – it’s the very year when after a string of half-Germans of strange lineage and occupation, finally, on the Russian throne, ascended Princess Sophie Augusta Frederica von Anhalt-Zerbst, 100% a German, to become a Russian Empress and reign for a long time (34 years long!), passing into history as Catherine II, or Catherine the Great. Her, and her children, grandchildren and great-grand-children, also 100% Germans, both from their mothers’ and their fathers’ sides, traditionally, with an unwavering regularity, married German (and sometimes Dutch) princesses – it was under their scepter that this domain was developed for 155 years.
If this approach comes off as objectionable to anyone, then please don’t spend too much time, with all due respect just name something that came before Catherine the Great. Anything? Any author? A pre-Catherine Russian author who predates Fonvizin (a German), or a poet who predates Derzhavin (who is from Catherine’s era), or any kind of scientist, and I will even concede Leonard Eyler (Ger. Leonhard Euler, from Switzerland). I’m willing to agree on the such famous Russian navigators as Johann von Krusenstern, Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen and Vitus Jonassen Bering. Literally anything to do with science, art, culture or education, and last comes to last, even with triumphs of Russian arms and the conquest of new territories? Yes, we view such things differently today, but still – not there – not in the eastern expanse that’s sparsely peopled by half-savages, but in the West: Right-Bank Ukraine, Crimea, Novorossiya, and the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan beyond the Caucasus, and the Baltics – that’s all during the reign of Catherine and that of her descendants.
Now that we’ve defined the timeframe, let’s consider the geography. The thing is, there were 3 Russias. This is exactly what makes it difficult to discuss, makes it easy to make mistakes, or to make knowingly false provocations. Taking numbers and facts from the lives of one of these Russias can support the construction of any parallels or conclusions. So, we have to look at the census of 1897 – the first and last census of the Russian Empire, and we place Russia #3 in the huge, massive territory to the East of the Urals that was practically unpopulated – that’s Siberia and the far East. Russia #2 was the Near East and Asian Russia, where we find 3 separate enclaves there that were comparable to the United States at the time, when America had a population of 90 million living across their own vast space, and made for an empty countryside. These 3 enclaves of American population density were swimming in a vast sea of even emptier land where the population varied from 1 to 5 people per square versta (a versta is roughly 1. 0668 km). Finally, Russia #1 is west of the Urals, the European part where the population density reached levels comparable to France or Austria-Hungary – meaning moderately populated European agrarian countries. I will exclude the Kingdom of Poland and the Baltics – that’s not Russia, wasn’t Russia and didn’t become Russia, and I’m left with Ukraine, the central fertile region, Saint Petersburg and a sliver of the North Caucasus inside a huge plain where a sparse population had spread with a density of about 20 people per square versta. Still, even in the first Russia there was a periphery where the population goes back down to the 1 to 5 per square versta density – basically a single household. Even between the two capitals – Moscow and Saint Petersburg, it was practically deserted – those are the swamps and forests around Novgorod and north Tverskaya county. Such were the 3 Russias.
To make use of a brilliant quote by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who said a year and a half before his death: “we have seized power in a country of half-savage, or completely savage people. ” Russia #3 was a desert populated by savage people. Russia #2 was the huge plain that was practically empty, with scattered villages between which you couldn’t always travel on foot. And there was Russia #1 where there was a European-scale civilization of 15 cities that, as was 100% correctly stated by Putin, was the one that made the colossal contribution to world culture, civilization, science, technology, etc. Counting the population of those 15 cities that we now know as parts of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, I couldn’t believe it – I thought that it should reach over 5 million, but no – taking all cities where the population was at least 100 thousand people, we get 4 million 220 thousand people, or 4% of the total Russian population (of course without including Poland or Finland). For these 4 percent there were grandiose palaces, wide boulevards, universities, theaters, there were the largest factories and research centers. This was where they made the first radio stations, where they made the most powerful vacuum tubes in the world, and diesel engines for submarines, and steam locomotives and steam ships, and at the turn of the century were beginning to make airplanes. This was Europe – a European country at a very high level of development. Not the highest, but plenty prestigious all the same. This sub-5 million country, the first Russia, was what made the contributions to the fund of global civilization.
Of the cities that made up the 1st Russia, last on the list is Samara – 90 thousand people according to the census of 1897. It was a city of 2 or 3 streets where buildings made of stone, one of which was literally called Dvoryanskaya (Noble street). There was the Zhigulevskoye beer brewery, founded by Austrian Alfred von Vacano. There was a splendid theater and a public library, both of which built by Governor Grotte (naturally, a German). And there was a huge cathedral in the center – one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in Europe. Beyond that lay streets with wood houses and wooden sidewalks, and beyond that there were no sidewalks, just gangs of strange men that for some reason bit passerby’s ears off. You’ll say that it’s provincial Samara, but in Moscow, the city of golden cupolas, 65% of buildings were single story and wood, and in the Imperial capital it was 59%.
Now, let’s attempt to somehow quantify the conditions and results of life in the 2nd – in the big Russia that spread out across the plains and was inhabited by, making use of the spot-on characterization by Vladimir Ulyanovich Lenin – by half-savage people. Before I begin, I must say why I am using such rude expressions. I’ll cite the same census made on the boundary between the 19th and 20th centuries: 21% literacy among men, and among women, 13%. That’s on average. We are interested in the European part of the Russian empire, meaning territory that you can call Russia, including what I’ve referred to as the Second Russia, and not the Third. In this European part, it was 67% of men and 86% of women who could not read. In the census, to measure literacy they posed the question like “Do you know how to read?”. Even taking it most charitably, we can take into account another column that excluded children under 9 from that question, since a child simply cannot master such an outlandish art as knowing how to read, and then we are left with just 70% illiteracy. That’s half-savage people. And why were they in such dire straights? Everybody knows that Lenin said that “in no other country have the working masses been so robbed, deprived of access to education, as in the Russian Empire. ” But you know, I’d argue this a little – in this Empire, for 20 years from 1894 to 1914 spending on education had increased 7-fold. Every year they opened 10,000 schools. By January 1st, 1912 there were 125,723 schools. Education in this country was free, and since 1908 – mandatory. Yes, this is the 4-year primary school program and it didn’t wait for the Bolsheviks or any October Revolution. Still, what were the outcomes? On January 18th, 1911 they did a universal school census where on that one day, census takers walked into every single one of the 125,000 schools and counted heads. They found 6. 2 million kids there, or 3. 85% of the total population. Since kids aged 8 through 12 were comprising 9% of the total population, this meant that only around 43% of the intended children were attending. There was a similar investigation in 1914, just with reduced scope, and it showed that in rural areas, only 28% of children aged 8 through 12 were in school. This begs the question – who was interfering with these people’s education? Was this the Czarist autocracy and it’s oppression?
While this falls outside the topic of literacy, let’s acknowledge that highest education in the Russian Empire was the cheapest in the world, therefore most accessible for all classes, including the poorest. Naturally the impoverished got in for free, and for those who could pay, the yearly cost for a small provincial university was equal to a month’s wages for any normal, qualified factory worker. For a decent university in the capital, it was 3 month’s wages. For those from the USA or any other rich Western nations, you can appreciate these numbers.
This is one facet of life of savage and half-savage people, but there is another, arguably a more important one. It’s the one I always use and insist on using when measuring quality of life, or way of life in a society – and that’s infant mortality. It’s clear that it was horrendous, that’s how it’s always been during that era before vaccinations and antibiotics. The numbers, though: 250 per 1000 births, meaning that out of every 1000 that were born, 250 did not live to see their first birthday. This was 2 times higher than France and England, and 3 times higher than Sweden. But why, though? Why? Poverty and hunger? Please, what poverty, what hunger? In the 1860’s during the emancipation of the serfs, consumption of grains was at 320 kg per person per year in rural areas (not production, consumption – production was greater, this was after the lord’s share was remitted). And in 1913, the last czarist prewar year, it was 420 kg – so what hunger? An adult needs 200 kg of grains a year, and 48% of the population in this country were youth under 19. Furthermore, in England urbanization reached 78%, while in Russia, only 13% (European Russia – 14. 5%), and in Germany – 56%. This means that almost all Russian people lived in their own houses, even in urban areas (reminding that Moscow and Saint Petersburg were half-wooden), and a single story wooden house is not the same as a rental. Every family lived in their own house, while in England, 78% of the population, (former peasants thrown into cities to fuel the industrial revolution) lived in barracks. To tell you the truth, this is all written about by Karl Marx – nothing but the truth about the beginning of the 19th century. Terrible crowding: factory barracks, basements, closets, attics and mansards. Filth, humidity, overcrowding and the lack of fresh air – that’s how the English, German and French baby grew, and still for some reason died half as often (or 1/3 as often!) as a Russian baby who lived with fresh air, green grass, in his own courtyard, surrounded by forests where berries grew, and surrounded by rivers where fishes splashed about (and 320kg of grains per capita). Interesting! I think it’s the interesting spiritual-moral values that stand behind this. Simple traditions: “He’s dead – Trofim? Well forget him. God gave, God took away. Howled for 2 days, now back to the fields. ”
Another indicator of the quality of life in this 2nd Russia is cholera. I thought for a while, where could I find something? Something that I could measure and count? - Cholera! As you know it’s an infectious disease that attacks the intestines, and what’s interesting and noteworthy about it is the way that it spreads. Cholera isn’t spread by mosquitoes, like malaria and other tropical fevers; it doesn’t fly through the air, like a virus; it isn’t transmitted by breath, like the plague; it isn’t transmitted by touch, like leprosy, and isn’t even transmitted in the process of love, like syphilis. The only mechanism by which cholera spreads from one person to another is oral and fecal. To translate to normal language – from excrement to mouth – this way only. When people who are covered in this substance are eating with their bare hands, preparing meals, or drinking water from a dirty source into which an infected person had relieved themselves. Cholera is a certificate issued by the Quality Control department, and it reads: “SAVAGE”. For centuries (maybe even millennia), cholera was in India, (meaning big India, modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), and in the year 1830 it was introduced by ship to Europe, and a cholera epidemic covered the whole of it, with Russia having 10 times the deaths than the rest of Europe. This was that very cholera epidemic of 1830-1831 – the one that was accompanied by choleric mutinies, murders of doctors and burning down and destruction of hospitals. Europe, having encountered the disease, very quickly understood the needed to wash hands and boil water, resulting in the last flash of cholera being recorded in 1849, and that was it – done! It just ceased to exist in Europe. In the Russian Empire, though, one after another, cholera epidemics had flared up for the entire duration of the 19th century – it simply became a fact of life. There is even a Yiddish saying: “What’s the news about the cholera in Odessa?” What does this mean? - it’s equivalent to the more colloquial talking about the weather when people meet and something needs to be said, but there is nothing to talk about and it would be awkward to just stay silent, so you bring up something that’s always present and everyone knows about.
In 1895 this was no joke – at the end of the 19th century, trains were running the rails, railroads crossed the whole country, the electric light bulb was shining, and Popov was making first radio broadcasts with his first in the world radio transmitter and receiver – in that very moment, a Cholera epidemic blankets the whole of Russia. 801,000 people got sick, 381,00 died, meaning 4 out of every 10. You also have to understand that without a doubt these number are low – who in the world would admit to it and register with the government? That’s a terrible thing – the neighbors would come over and burn your house down, so actual numbers were much greater. Take a look at the phenomenal amount of those that perished – what exactly is Cholera and how do you cure it? A man who contracts cholera dies from dehydration, and that’s all there is. The cause of death is the same as for someone who gets shipwrecked on a raft at sea or for a caravan in the desert that couldn’t find a well. When the cholera vibrio reaches the small intestine, they attach to the intestinal wall and start producing toxins that give the infected person constant watery diarrhea until they dry up and die from dehydration. No more, no less. All that’s needed to prevent death is water and salt. Today they have protocols that prescribe a specific set of needed salts to be delivered intravenously, but in principle you can save someone with a copious amount of salted water. That’s how the Zemstvo doctors saved people back then. The huge number of cholera deaths, meaning people who couldn’t even get water and salt, speaks of a nonexistent level of sanitation, medical knowledge, total lack of doctors and field medics and monstrous and total savagery.
Still, doctors already existed and Zemstvo already existed, so we are left with a lot of remembrances. There’s even memoirs of foreigners, if you can imagine that Americans, those very Americans that have been saving Russia for a long long time came here in 1892 and 1895 as well. They left behind memories: we are working, trying to pump out a child – around us are completely anti-sanitary conditions. Around us are other children that are crawling in some sort of soiled rags and we perfectly understand that by the time we finish with this one, the rest would get infected as well. Zemstvo doctors from Vladimirovskaya province had gathered in a congress. Understand that Vladimirovskaya is in the very center of the country – it’s the original Russia; there is no place more authentic – it’s the Golden Ring. The doctors noted that “there exist entire counties where they consume exclusively stagnant meltwater from ponds”. Simply put – people drink water from big puddles. Not even from wells. Of course nobody even thinks of boiling it. “Where the wells are the sources of water, the former are kept in a most unattractive condition. Peasant courtyards commonly have an appearance of typical dump for all manner of sewage. The listed phenomena are the significant factors behind the spread of epidemics, and the elimination thereof is a matter of prime necessity. ” - at the end of the 19th century in the center of the country it is imperative to teach the people to not drink from puddles.
Well, this is the countryside and the peasants, but what about the Empire’s capital – in Saint Petersburg? Have you ever thought of – for me it was only recently that I’ve thought of it – when did they get running water in Saint Petersburg? I report: in the middle of the 19th century, when a certain Count arrived in the city and built the first water supply system. Rome had running water for a long time, but Saint Petersburg only in the middle of the 19th century. The Count’s name was Essen Steinbach Fermor and it’s not difficult to guess where he came from. He set up to provide running water along 3 streets: Znamenskaya, Italyanskaya and Sergeyevskaya, set up a water pump and went bankrupt. He thought somebody would connect, but nobody did. Why would you need running water? That costs money! The city was already serviced by water-carriers which distributed water from dirty barrels, and that’s how they lived. Only in 1863 – the time of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, the Czar-Liberator, did Saint Petersburg get running water, but only on the mainland part. Vasilyevskliy island and other such places on the other side had to wait another decade.
Great, now we have running water, but the actual water – where do you think that comes from? Interesting question – in 1908 a cholera epidemic begins in Saint Petersburg (9000 infected, 3820 dead). It’s 1908 – there are airplanes flying in the sky, the first Russian movie has already been filmed, and there’s a cholera epidemic in the Empire’s capital. The ministers gather, under Stolypin, on 17th of February, 1909. They note: “Among large European cities, Saint Petersburg ranks among the top in disease. Among the mortalities, a third are due to infectious diseases, some among them, especially typhoid, practically never cease. Such exceptionally poor sanitary conditions in the aforementioned City are explained by a number of reasons, but among them the chief ones are the lack of a sewer system in the Capital and bad quality of drinking water. Inlets of the City’s water supply system are on the Neva and her tributaries within the city limits. Upstream from the inlets are thickly populated areas and whole number of factories, bath houses and hospitals that freely drain their waste into the very same Neva. This is how the sewage that accumulates in Saint Petersburg, basically, doesn’t get removed, but makes a sort of a never ending cycle from the homes to the Neva and from the Neva, through the water supply system, into the apartments of the residents. ” Such is life for the residents, but aside from the residents there’s also the highest aristocracy, there’s Czar the Father, he has his mother, the Widowed Empress Maria Fyodorovna. In 1910, her doctor reports: “All tableware, that is washed with water from the faucets of the municipal water supply system, is covered in bacteria from all manner of diseases, especially typhoid. And in the kitchen, ice is used that comes from the storehouse near the Tavricheskiy Palace which is situated near the infectious disease ward of the Palace hospital. From there they make 2 deliveries of ice a day which, just by looking at it, is dirty. ”
The ministers argued endlessly, kicked off the most brutal struggle between themselves, the rest of the government and the local government of Saint Petersburg over who should or should not finance what. After 3 years of scandals they created a massive all-government commission and to head it they put that very Alexander Guchkov, the biggest politician in the country: founder and leader of the Octobrist party, Chairman of the Third Duma, and when in the Provisional Government he was at the same time the Minister of War and the Minister of the Navy. So, this Guchkov puts together a committee which produces a report: “The soil of Saint Petersburg, at the current time, is literally soaked in all manner of miasmas. Gutter pipes feed into the drainage pipes buried underground. These gutters were made for atmospheric precipitation, but in practice, all homeowners drain into them their sewage. When workers dig up the streets, the stench has been known to cause fainting. ”
At this point, my respectable audience will revolt, which I understand – of course traditional spiritual values have nothing to do with water and sewer, and spirituality is not about the smells, and there’s no need to vulgarize. We are talking about the high matters, the highest, as tall as the mountains, as Dostoevskiy put it – “the universal empathy of the Russian soul”, about Christian humility, loving your neighbor and other such things. Which, according to the opinion of many, stench and lack of a sewer system do not impede in the slightest. Well, if we are to speak honestly, with no offense: one of the facets of traditional spiritual-moral values is the Christian, Orthodox juxtaposition of the body and the spirit. The thesis about how mortifying the body and taming the flesh, deadening the flesh is one of the ways of, if not the prerequisite to, spiritual cleansing. And if for centuries in a Russian village there was a single person who could read, or maybe they were lucky enough to have a priest that could read, which wasn’t always the case, then they would have had one book, blackened from it’s advanced age: “Zhitiya Svyatih” (“The Lives of the Saints”). It’s from this book Russian people learned how the Saints never bathed in their life, many of them were stylites, who were the Holy Ascetics that lived under the open sky atop of high pillars. Literally could have stood atop a large rock, for years. If they stood that means they were alive, and if they were alive that means the processes of life were happening, and the product of this life was up to their knees. And emitting the appropriate smell did not impede them being permeated by the Christian faith, and when they prayed to God, their prayers took the most direct route to the throne of the Almighty. Mental images like these were imprinted onto the minds for centuries, so they too became part of the spiritual values of the people who grew up under government-mandated Orthodoxy.
Enough of the extremes. Let’s talk about something more clear, although unfortunately more dark, however yielding to qualitative, quantitative and temporal analysis. Let’s turn to the globally recognized sage of Russian spirituality – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Fyodor Mikhaylovish had authored a book called “Notes from the House of the Dead”. He did not write it by chance – after he and the rest of the members of the Petrashevsky circle were not executed and were sentenced to hard labor, if I’m not mistaken, for 6 years, he wrote a book that stands first in a long row where also stand the Gulag Archipelago and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. In this book he writes: “The right of corporal punishment, granted to one man over another, is one of the plagues of society, one of the most powerful means of annihilating in it any germination of, and any attempt at, civility, and full grounds for its inevitable and unavoidable corruption. A society that indifferently observes such a phenomenon is itself infected to the core. Whomever had experienced this power even once – this limitless dominance over the body and soul of another, over another human being who is like himself, who is created equal, who is a brother to him by Christ’s law, whomever had experienced the power to debase with the highest humiliation another creature that bears God’s own image, they unwillingly become powerless over their own feelings, man and citizen die inside of them forever, and the return to human dignity, repentance and rebirth become almost impossible. ” As you see, with true Christian humility, Fyodor Mikhailovich laments not only the suffering and humiliation of the one being tormented, but also over the unavoidable moral decay and moral destruction of the one who torments.
I’ve decided, having hidden behind Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s unquestionable authority in the field of Russian spirituality, to take a look at the disgusting phenomenon that destroys any attempt at civility and leads society to it’s inevitable and unavoidable corruption. Of course we won’t talk about what happened way back then: we will not be remembering the times of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, and that’s for the very reason that the same monstrous, elaborate, unconscionable atrocities were practiced by everybody else as well. Europe, Asia, America – wherever, and we will not be discussing this because our site it not an aid to novice sadists. We are going to talk about the new era – the era of Enlightenment that had “extinguished the fires of ignorance”, like Vassarion Grigoryevich Belinskiy wrote, and a new life began. It began there – in Europe, and by the end of the 18th century the more advance countries, like France, had banned corporal punishment for all, or nearly all, and in the first half of the 19th century that happened in the rest of the civilized world as well. What about us? What was happening among our dear birch trees? Perhaps you will be surprised, of maybe not be surprised at all, that before April 21st, 1785, a Russian noble was flogged and tormented in all manner of ways. It was completely normal and sometimes Russian Czars did it themselves, and sometimes they delegated it to professional executioners. And only on April 21st 1785, Catherine the Great (of course – who else?) issued the nobles’ Letter of Complaint where it was finally said: “corporal punishment should not touch the body of a noble”, meaning that a minuscule part of the population of the country was legally freed from corporal punishment. After a couple years, this privilege was extended to merchants of the First and Second Guilds – to another statistically minuscule little bit of the country. The rest continued to be flogged, with limits. Enlightened Catherine, and I call her that would the slightest bit of irony – yes, indeed, for her era and for this country where they brought the Anhalt-Zerbst princess, she was very enlightened indeed, she published the Landowner’s Code of 1765 where she limited master’s rights by allowing them to order their serfs to be flogged by a birch rod, no more than, wait for it – 5,000 times. This number – 5,000 doesn’t make sense. I can only propose that perhaps the Sovereign was confused about how numbers are expressed in a totally foreign to her Russian language. Returning to Fyodor Mikhailovich and his “Notes from the House of the Dead”, it’s all spelled out, and he would know what he was writing about: it happened right in front of him for many years. He fell ill and he was laying in the infirmary, when they would drag in those who were half-dead from the torments, so he knew how it all worked. Fyodor Mikhailovich writes: “Lashes with the birch rod, if given in large quantity, are the harshest punishment we have in use. 500, even 400 lashes could beat a man to death, and above 500 – it almost guarantees it. 1000 lashes cannot be withstood by a man of even the strongest build, if they are given in one go. ” If the Sovereign was not mistaken and she meant what she had written, then a master was given the right to kill his own serf, and to do so with exceptional cruelty.
When the grandson of Catherine the Great – Alexander, had ascended the throne, in his ascension manifesto he informed that he will rule in the custom of his grandmother, and indeed he began what Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin had called – “days of Alexander – a great start”. Alexander very much wanted to become an Emperor of a normal country, that other European rulers would not see as a savage chieftain. In 1802 he forbade torture once again, forbade corporal punishment for the nobility and even, having thought for 15 years since since ascension, had created a special committee that would evaluate forbidding corporal punishment for all. He appointed Count Tarmasov to lead it, who had said this at the opening: “Sovereign Emperor, I am directing your attention to the corporal punishments up to this day, by the means of the whip and ripping of the nostrils, to find that this punishment is inseparable from inhuman cruelty that knows no precedent in any European government. ” - this is me saying hello to those who will now begin to say that they were doing it that way in Europe – “That this cruelty, having been entrusted to the arbitrariness of the executioner, not only does not satisfy the needs of justice, that during the verdict necessitates that it were to be exactly proportional to the crime, but by and large is the opposite thereof. ” Everyone who was present understood exactly what Count Tarmasov was talking about, but our respectable audience that is far from sadistic amusements, an explanation is needed. What you need to know is that in Russia, when they put on a public execution by the knout, the instrument wasn’t a nagaika – it was a huge 3 meter long 3-piece construction with which an experienced executioner could rip skin and meat to the bone, and on the 10th hit could have beaten the life out of a strongly built man. It was a monstrous device that turned from an instrument of punishment to an instrument of sadistic execution. That’s one side. From another side, the number of lashes were up to the discretion of the executioner, they got to decide whether to beat a man to death or to merely mark someone. “Merely” – ha! They carried you out in either case. The question was resolved, as you could guess, by the means of a bribe. It turned out that because a seasoned criminal has more ability to pay and get off easy, the punishment ended up working in the opposite of the court’s decision.
Having discussed all that, the committee members have immersed themselves in multi-year discussions and in the end didn’t decide anything. 1825 came and Alexander either died, or according to a legend had faked his own death and retreated into mysticism. His brother, Nicholas Pavlovich ascends the throne, entering into history as “Nicholas the Stick” and, imagine this – in 1829, having gotten nothing from his subjects, created a secret edict so that the number of lashes by the knout were to be defined exactly, and was no greater than 50. After that, he gathered a new committee that also discussed for years and years, and in the end concluded that they too needed to reject the murderous knout, and to perform corporal punishment with a greater number of lashes by the pleti – a lighter 3-tail whip, instead. Only the Minister of Justice had dug in his heels and categorically refused, going against the will of the Sovereign: no, no and no – the knout and only by the knout. It ended by forming a new committee in 1845, which also amounted to nothing. At this point, Nicholas’ patience snapped and he had unilaterally proclaimed the substitution of the knout with the increased number of lashes of the pleti, which made it into law and was by all measures extremely humane. And also for the soldiers sentenced to running the gauntlet, the number of hits by the spitzruten long rod was limited to 800, compared to the thousands that came before. But because not only cruelty, but also humanity of the Russian law is destroyed by it’s lack of enforcement, it’s very questionable just how much this decree had been applied to real life. I think that everyone remembers from their school days the poem by Nekrasov: “Yesterday at six, I stopped by Hay Square; They whipped a woman with the knout, a young peasant, there. ” - written in 1848. Maybe the word “knout” appears for rhyme, but maybe the Czar’s order didn’t quite reach everyone yet.
As for what was happening in and around the army, for that there’s a wealth of memoirs. Ilya Repin – that very Ilya Repin, the great Russian painter, grew up in a military settlement in modern day Kharkovskaya region, and this is how he recalls his childhood there: “Executions were performed endlessly and boys happily ran to look at them. They knew all the terms and the steps of the punishment. Boys crawled in close to the line of soldiers to get a good look at how human meat bounced from the spitzrutens and fell to the ground, how shoulder blades and ribs were undressed from their muscles, revealing bright bones. ” - you understand that as a future painter he was very observant man. “The victim, hands tied to a rifle, was held up by others, so that that they can receive the full number of hits ordered by their superiors”.
Another recollection by Peter Kropotkin, the father of Russian anarchism and among other things – an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, and I quote: “The soldier’s service in those times was terrible – beatings, rods, sticks were pouring down daily. Cruelty exceeded all that could be imagined. Even in cadet corps, where the children of the nobility were educated, they sometimes gave as much as a thousand rods in the presence of the whole corps – for a cigarette. A doctor stood next to the tormented boy and stopped the punishment only when the pulse almost ceased. The bloody victim was carried away to the hospital. Of course they did even worse with common soldiers. If anyone appeared in front of a military tribunal, the sentence was always the same – run the gauntlet. Junior officers made sure that soldiers used their full strength. , After one or two thousand hits, the victim, spitting blood, was carried away to the hospital where they were treated, so that the punishment could be completed as soon as the soldier recovers a little. It he died under the stick, the sentence was carried out to conclusion on the corpse tied to a wagon. ”
The story, nee – the philosophical essay – “Nicholas the Stick” by Lev Nikolayevich (1887), I hope is known to everyone, so we will end our sadistic readings here and move on to the next Great Reformer, which I say without any quotes – Alexander II, the Liberator. The author of truly great reforms which gave Russia the vector by which it was rapidly entering the family of civilized European countries, but halted in 1917. Having ascended to the throne, Alexander II looks towards corporal punishment once again and forms another committee under Prince Orlov. Another note is written: “Here they beat anyone who lets themselves be beaten. This upholds roughness of morals and strongly interferes with the development of a human personality. It’s time to end barbaric punishments that shame the name of a Russian. ” - the committee had created their report and sent it to all departments. They got back 15 positive responses – meaning yes – we must stop corporal punishment, and 3 negative, meaning no – we must continue, beat and beat again. One of those three was Metropolitan Philaret, making it yet another time that the Russian Orthodox Church spoke out in favor of beatings. Nonetheless in April 1863, on his birthday, Alexander II signs the highest decree where he bans almost all forms of corporal punishment. It’s 1863 – trains are running on railroads, hot air balloons fly across the skies, the era of electricity is beginning and in Russia, they forbid corporal punishment for women, regardless their age or social strata. Nekrasov did not live to see this. For men, they allowed pleti, but only for criminals, penal laborers and exhiles, and the quantity was limited to just 100 hits. Also, vagabonds get 20. It looked like this law was put into practice, as the trail of these kind of memoirs ends. Corporal punishment did remain in the Army and the Fleet – those were outlawed in 1904. Finally, in the 20th century, formally and legally…. However, in Denikin’s memoirs, he does note that lashes with the rod were greatly harming the spirit of the Russian Army – and the time period described there was significantly later than 1904.
So what do we have? What is my conclusion? It’s simple: Russia, that existed for 155 years from Catherine the Great to 1917, especially that first part, that small part made of 5 million people, is one of the brightest, luckiest, super fortunate examples of a successful catch-up development. History of this Russia of 155 years had presaged the history of South Korea, Taiwan and Argentina – of countries from some forgotten corner of the world that nonetheless could receive civilization as an import. From the perspective of the import of civilization, the history of Russia does not differ from that of Taiwan or South Korea. In our case it was the Germans who brought German administration, German scientists and seafarers, architects and engineers and this 5-million Russia could understand it, adapt it, develop it with a speed that was astonishing for the time. That country that in the beginning of the 19th century spoke French at home and German at work, by the end of the 19th century was one of the leaders in science and technology and produced unrivaled literary, musical, theatrical and artistic creations. With an astonishing speed this country was catching up to Europe, and we might ask ourselves just how long could such a rate had been maintained? A leopard runs faster than a wolf, but can’t run kilometer after kilometer like a wolf can. A cart can’t outrun the horse, so I wonder what would have happened. And then what happened – happened. It’s not without reason that I’ve been telling you so long about corporal punishment and the century long struggle to forbid it. Amazingly, it took just several months after the October coup and the country drowned in a war of all-against-all. All the cruelties from all the darkest times have been reborn. All these achievements of a century and a half were flushed down the non-existing sewer and after 10 or 15 years after Bolsheviks came to power, Russia was returned to the times of Ivan the Terrible, judging by social and economic development. “And we are free to pardon our slaves. And to execute them, we are also free” – as Ivan wrote to Kurbsky. And by “slaves” he didn’t mean commoners – those counted for nothing. He meant his boyars and nobles, which he executed, and pardoned, and executed again entirely how he saw fit. And that’s exactly what 1937 was: with a mock trial and interrogation under torture, in the best traditions of Malyuta Skuratov, Czar Stalin executed his boyars as he saw fit. And what was done to the commoners is well documented in numerous memoirs. In the villages, where the majority lived, they reinstated corvee labor and the country collapsed and disappeared. The 1980’s saw an attempt to pull the country back up, but that resulted in what we have now. This is where I could put a period, but since you’ve been with me for so long already, allow me to read this one more thing. I think this fragment is known to the educated public as it’s been quoted many many times, and I must say that until February 2022, I thought that this was merely a journalistic exaggeration, in the style of Turgenev’s “For a catchphrase, I won’t spare neither my father nor my friends”. I mean of course Marquis de Custine, when he visited Russia in 1839. His father was lost to the guillotine during the Terror, and after observing Russia for 3 months very carefully, he wrote a book. The book was immediately forbidden, never printed, then in 1930’s it was published with huge edits, and only after perestroika it was published in the original, and everyone began to quote it, and so will I: “In the heart of the Russian people ferments an ambition for conquest which could only possibly spring in the hearts of the oppressed, and could only find nourishment in the miseries of a whole nation. Through humiliating submission at home, this nation preemptively atones for it’s dream of tyrannical power over other nations. Expectation of glory and riches distract it from the disgrace to which it submits. The slave upon his knees dreams of the conquest of the world, hoping to purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty. Russia sees in Europe a prey which our quarrels will sooner or later yield to her. She foments anarchy among us in the hope of profiting by the corruption she helped create. They say in Petersburg: ‘Europe is following the same path as Poland – weakening herself with vain liberalism, while we continue to be powerful precisely because we are not free. Let us be patient under the yoke – we will take out our shame on others. ’”