<>1796:1801; Death
of Catherine II followed by brief (5-year) and most curious reign of Paul I
*--Paul took strenuous measures to reverse much of his mother's legacy.
Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov were pardoned. Radishchev returned to
state service, but never ventured again anything as bold as
his optimistic writings in the time of
Catherine II. Fearing a repeat of his earlier prosecution, he committed
suicide in 1802. Novikov lived on to 1818, but never returned to
his earlier active professional life
\\
*--Florinsky,1(24)
<>1796de12:Emperor Paul decreed serfs in
southern Russia
(Ukraine) could not move freely from village to village [VSB,2:473-4]
<>1797mr24:Russian decree reduced peasant serf work-week [DIR2:126-7
| DIR3:141-2]
*--Edict forbad Sunday Labor by serfs [VSB,2:474 | KRR:294-5]
*--Newspaper ads offered serfs for sale [DIR2:127 |
DIR3:142]
*--Serfdom had reached its nadir point and seemed now to slacken its grip on the throat of
Russian peasants. Piecemeal measures mounted over the next half century toward
emancipation in 1861
*--1797au07:Russia moved to restrict expansion of government owned and
administered property in the provinces, followed by move to allot state lands to certain
state serfs. More piecemeal reform [VSB,2:474-6]
*--Some of the same tendency toward emancipation can be seen in the evolution of European
slavery. In 1794, the revolutionary French National Convention abolished slavery in all
French territories, though Napoleon was soon (1802) to repeal that law
*--In the 30 years between 1784-1814, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey,
Argentina, and Columbia all adopted laws providing for the gradual emancipation of
slaves.
About unfree labor, a global reform attitude intensified
\\
*--Hoch, Stephen L.
Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in
Tambov
*--Kolchin, Peter.
Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
*--Blum:326-44 (on Russian agriculture in the century before serf emancipation)
<>1797ap05:Uchrezhdeniia ob imperatorskoi familii
[Institutions of the Imperial Family] Emperor Paul and Empress Maria issued decree on succession to the
Imperial Throne [VSB,2:473 |
DIR3:137-9]
*--Exclusive and heritable udel prerogatives of the royal family were thus certified 700 years
after the institutionalization of an early, broader, more feudal definition of udel
[ID]
*--Noteworthy statistic
= by 1857 the number of udel serfs (serfs "owned" by the royal family) = 838,000
<>1798:Indonesia, a group of islands stretching over
2000 miles west to east, cluttering the sea routes between the Indian and Pacific oceans,
came under Dutch (Nederland; the Netherlands) governmental administration when the
Dutch East India Company was
liquidated and its assets "nationalized" by the Dutch government. This
Company and the British East India Company were the two most
powerful and classical mercantilist
enterprises, combining governmental and insider-private interests in a huge
state-managed corporation
*--The Dutch East India Company (1602-1798) managed to defeat the ambitions of the
British East India Company in Indonesia, "limiting" the great English
international imperialist corporation to the Indian subcontinent. But by the
1780s the Company had rotted away at its core as a result of corruption and
unchecked exploitation of the region
*--The Dutch crown took direct
imperial control over, and began to colonize Indonesia, what would for over a century and a half be
called the Netherlands East Indies, centered in Indonesia. Here at the birth
of European liberal reformism, and in one of the nations that so much prospered
through international free-market commerce, imperialism came increasingly to
seem both contradictory and unavoidable
*--The Russian state moved in the same direction and at about the same time as the Dutch with respect to
government
control of overseas corporate enterprise
*--The British East India Company held a monarchical charter which
guaranteed it a monopoly on trade in the East Indies. By 1740, the Company had
control of only three centers of trade in India: Bombay,
Calcutta and Madras, but the great imperialist and industrial age was just then
about to dawn. The Company proclaimed itself the ruler of Bengal in 1765. The
company not only benefited from trade revenue, it was authorized also to impose
steep land taxes on all regions it conquered. Bengal territories were reduced to
famine and economic collapse as the Company extracted greatest possible wealth
from the region. In 1770, famine resulted in the death of about 1/3 of the
Bengal population, but the area still produced opium for
yet another income-producing project = the Company's international trade with
other regions (most notably in China). The British Company was a rival of
the Dutch Company when it came to one of the biggest items of early 19th-century
overseas commerce = opium
*--The English monarchy replaced the Company's "entrepreneurial" directors with
officially appointed state administrators in a "Board of Control" not long after
the tragic Bengal famine. The Company thus became a hybrid "free-market" and
"bureaucratic" institution, satisfying the interests of a small number of
insider "privateers" and the British crown in the earliest years of the great
era of steam powered industrialization. By 1815, the East
India Company had managed to
seize the greater part of India. Its "private" corporate army had grown to
150,000 and was regularly supplemented with detachments of the regular British
army and navy.. This was the situation until the Company was abolished
[ID]
*--British rule in India, among other things, represented
an imperialistic form of "primitive accumulation of capital", the first stage of
economic modernization in the industrial era. English behavior in India and
China in these decades might be compared with a similar era
of "primitive accumulation of capital" in Russian history,
Stalinist industrial modernization
*--Modern European ("Western"?) imperialist internationalism or globalism began to show its outlines clearly,
even at the dawn of the great industrial age
[ID], domestic "free-market" economics
[ID] and liberal reformism
<>1798:Etorofu
Island, off the eastern shore of Hokkaido at the southern end of the Kuril Islands
| Russians landed, planted Orthodox cross, claim stakes
with Russian inscriptions, and other indications of possession
*--Shortly thereafter, samurai Kondo Morishige(1757:1815) explored these territories,
tore down the Russian
crosses and other claim stakes, put up Japanese posts saying Dai-Nippon-Etoru
[Etoru is a part of Greater Japan]. Returned to Tokyo [Edo] an urged Ezo
[Hokkaido] be put under bugyo reign, direct Bakufu rule. This happened slowly
over the next two decades
*1800:Hokkaido and southern Kuril Islands | Japanese surveyor
Mamiya Rinzo (1775:1844) at work. In this year Matsumae
authority established over whole of Hokkaido Island, after 3 great Ainu
rebellions (1643, 1669 & 1789) against the Japanese
\\
*--KEJ,2:238
*--PH&G:305-6
<>1799:Hokkaido | Takataya Kahei (1769:1827) volunteered as aid
to Kondo Juzo, Tokyo's agent there, to explore and survey Etorofu Island and check on
Russians
*--Takataya sought to establish for himself a monopoly
on regional trade in the north. He was from a poor family but had by now become
a wealthy merchant who had founded his own shipping firm, transporting clothing, tobacco,
and salt to northeastern Japan. Soon he set up his own headquarters in Hakodate
*--Compare Takataya's relationship to Japanese National Seclusion policy with
Shelikhov and Rezanov's
relationship to Russian mercantilism
\\
*--KEJ, 7:319
<>1799my08:Siberia | Irkutsk was the first
headquarters of the Russian-America
Company
*--Earlier action in Irkutsk connected with merchants Myl'nikov; Golikov and
Shelikhov. The Company was founded to build on
Shelikhov's grand ambitions, now
with a royal monopoly to promote entrepreneurial exploitation of Alaska
resources
*1799de15:Emperor Paul granted special privileges to the Company for a period of
twenty years [DIR3:326-8]
*--Within a year Russian-America Co. headquarters moved
from Irkutsk back to Saint Petersburg. Company gathered under distant state
control all private trade ventures in Siberia and Alaska. Russian
overseas corporate mercantilism
took a lot of the steam out of frontier expansion
*--Serious rivals arose against Russian presence in the northern Pacific Rim.
First, England (in the person of Captain Vancouver and eventually the Hudson's
Bay Company) and then USA (in the person of John Jacob Astor
and his American Fur Company, and other commercial companies often called "Bostonians") began
to bring pressure on the Russian-America Co. USA financed Tlingit [Koloshi]
indigenous hostility to Russia, supplying native insurgents with arms and
ammunition against Russia in Alaska. England, Russia and the fledgling USA now
entered into rivalry, via different forms of vast corporate enterprise, for
exploitation of the natural resources of the western North American territories
and the Pacific shores. Spanish imperial ambitions waned
*--Russia now solidly in the north Pacific, even if it provoked some hostility
with other expansionist nations.
Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov had been Shelikhovs main contact with the imperial Russian
state in Catherine's time. In Irkutsk, Rezanov fell in love with
Shelikhovs daughter-in-law and they were soon wed. Before long, the fate
of the Russian-America Company would be in his hands
*--Documents covering period until sale of Alaska to USA in 1867 [DC&V,3]
\\
*--Saul,1:42-8
*--P. A. Tikhmenev,
A History of the Russian-American Company
*--Howard Irvin Kushner,
American-Russian rivalry in the Pacific
Northwest, 1790-1867
*--Lensen,Eastward:65-70
*--Clarence Manning,
Russian Influence
on Early America:27-38
*--SIE,12:207
<>1799:Russian/Ukrainian statesman Prince Bezborodko memo on reform [Raeff2:70-74]
<>1799no09 (NS; 18 Brumaire according to French
Revolutionary calendar): Revolutionary France now ruled by
Napoleon as First Consul. He soon declared self
Emperor and
reigned for fifteen years, until 1814, and again briefly in 1815. Historians
still argue, was Napoleon the child of the Revolution or the nemesis of it?
*--The French overseas mercantilist empire had so far failed [EG].
Napoleon was prepared to look closer to home, to take Europe
as his "colony", and more. His ambitions stretched across the Mediterranean Sea
to Egypt, though France did not have the strength to hold
Egypt on its own
*1800je04(NS):[NW Italy] Battle of Marengo pitted 60,000 French and Austrian
troops against one another. Compare that with =
*1812je:Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 French and
other allied troops, breaking earlier truce with Russian Emperor Alexander I [ID]
*--Napoleon came a cropper on the east-European steppes and was driven back to
France and defeat, but on the way back =
*1813oc16:oc19(NS): [Germany] Battle of Leipzig, or "The Battle of the Nations"
involved 500,000 troops from a coalition of Russia, Austria,
and Prussia against France
*--The militarist/revolutionist acts of Napoleon represent a big epoch in European history [W], and more
locally in Russian historical development. The Napoleonic era encouraged Russian
frontier and imperial expansion to shift from the New World
to its southern frontiers with the Ottoman Empire
*--Yet there was another side of Napoleon, one in which he gave some appearance of being, indeed, the "child
of the Revolution". As the European revolutionary era opened, the notion of La carrière ouverte aux talents
[careers open to talent (rather than privilege)] served to undermine the grip of
old European notions of title by inheritance and privilege by birth or
establishmentarian assignment [See Pellicani below]
\\
*--David A. Bell,
The First Total
War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It | The
argument here is that modern "total war" had its origins in French
Revolutionary politics [example] and in
the Napoleonic style of warfare (see the statistics on growth in the numbers of
troops accounted above). Oddly, the Revolutionary passion for absolute
peace and liberty created an exterminationist logic, in domestic as well as
international politics. The presumption was that political or military conflict
had to be interpreted as a massive clash between absolute principles. Napoleon's 1799 coup d'état was a logical culmination of
a gradual militarization of Revolutionary politics. Napoleon's Grande Armée
was a great democratic mobilization of the whole nation. Military virtue was
becoming the very embodiment of civic virtue. Critics accuse Bell of
exaggerating the ruthless militarism of the Revolution. They ask how Bell might
explain the curious century of relative peace in Europe that followed the
Napoleonic era, 1814-1914, the century that preceded the first mechanized total wars
[ID] [2007no23:TLS:13].
The Napoleonic era [beginning in 1797] might not have equaled the qualities
of "total war" demonstrated by WW1, but it did hint at the 20th century to come
*--Luciano Pellicani (The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity:84)
discovered that the notion of “careers open to talent” dates from the beginning
of history and over the long haul has been a prominent presumption in global human culture. The
Western Roman Empire
(Rome) and its successor states in "The West" were something of an exception to this rule. Twelfth-century historian Giovanni Cinnamo
was surprised to discover that birth gave privileged status in the Latin
kingdoms of western Europe [EG], while the socially more open
Eastern Empire (Byzantium)
tended more often to reward merit. Among the many medieval states that were successors to
the destroyed
Western Roman Empire, feudal privilege and exemption by birth predominated. From the classical through the medieval periods, the social/economic
presumption of status by birth distinguished “The West” from eastern Europe. It was
always a serious obstacle to modernization or
any sort of adaptation to social/economic change. After the French Revolution,
that all began to change in "The West"
*--The notion of careers open to talent was not original
with the Enlightenment, but it was expressed with special force beginning then
(for example, Thomas Paine
[ID]). The notion spread far and wide in the French Revolutionary
epoch
and was carried on by Napoleon and his army. But by the early 1800s, a
powerful and largely successful assault on the notion of privilege by birth was under way
[EG]. From this point forward, a shockwave ran through
19th-century establishmentarian
Europe. Eventually, the assault on privilege and status by birth became the social/economic cornerstone of modernization there
*--By the 21st century, counter-attacks against the idea of careers open to talent
(often given the derisive label
“meritocracy”) became more frequent [EG].
The critique of "meritocracy" has often been little more than a thinly disguised assault on the
concept of “careers open to talent”, an assault on one of the pillars of European modernization
over the past two centuries
<>1800:Scotland,
New Lanark | Robert Owen (1771-1858) came from Manchester,
England, to purchase local cotton mills. Owen had worked his way up from laborer
to owner of Manchester cotton mills. He was now a wealthy, self-made industrial
entrepreneur on his way toward founding modern European social democratic
movement, or socialism. He was determined to
establish a practical functioning cooperative community of working people. He
reorganized his New Lanark enterprise into a model industrial town in which
public services were delivered on a cooperative basis -- housing, public
sanitation, schools, retail outlets (stores). The fame of New Lanark spread.
Often with Owen's support, experimental agricultural/industrial communities were
founded
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions
of labor in the new factory environment [ID] but
they were also inspired in part by Owen
*1825:USA, Indiana, New Harmony utopian community established
with direct participation of Robert Owen [pix]
*--Owen created National Equitable Labour Exchange and encouraged organization
of wage-labor unions and advised unions to unite with cooperative associations.
He fell afoul of English authorities who suppressed wage-labor organizations
\\
*1994ap01:TLS:29, Ian Harris review of Selected Works of Robert Owen [TXT]
<>1801ja18:Caucasus Mountains southern slopes | Georgia [Gruziia] made a protectorate as
Russian frontier and imperialist expansion reached ever
more boldly southward, without hindering expansion to the east
\\
*--D.M. Lang,. A Modern History of Georgia. London:1962
<>1801:1825;
Russian Emperor Alexander I
reigned for a quarter of a century
*--Twenty-four-year-old Alexander came to the throne as a result of a palace
coup d'état. He was not unaware of this conspiracy which led to the murder of his father, Emperor Paul.
At Alexander's coronation, the Austrian Minister described in his report how the
new young Emperor marched in the procession "preceded by the
murderers of his grandfather [ID], surrounded by the assassins of his father and
followed by his own future killers" [that last was a prediction unrealized]
*--Alexander's early letters expressed concern about conditions under his
father's rule [VSB,2:477]
*--Polish statesman in Russian service, Adam Czartoryski memoirs about this troubled
situation [VSB,2:478-81 | DIR2:128-39
| [DIR3:153-64] See his
Memoirs
[more excerpts: WRH3:224f]
\\
*--Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I: Paternalistic Reformer (NYC:1970)
*--Marian Kukiel, Czartoryski and European unity, 1770-1861 (1955)
[DK435.5.C83k8]
<>1801ap02:Alexander I manifesto abolished
Secret Chancery [rudimentary secret police created even before Catherine's
reign] and transferred its authority to the Senate [VSB,2:481-2]
<>1801je05:Alexander I rescript directed a Commission to draft a new reformed
code of laws [VSB,2:482-3]
<>1801se27:Alexander I abolished torture in criminal trials as reform spirit
mounted [VSB,2:483]
<>1801de12:Alexander I decreed all free persons can purchase and own land, not
just aristocrats [VSB,2:483]
*--These first months show how Alexander I hit the ground running with his
plans for reform
<>1802jy:USA Delaware | Brandywine powder works
constructed by French émigré Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours and his son. The
Du Ponts helped consolidate the Hamiltonian vision
[ID] of a strong US economy independent of other national economies but
closely coordinated with US national goals and supported by governmental acts
*--Pierre had made a name for himself as a leading political-economic theorists
of the new era (the "Physiocrats", close cousins to the
English-language "classical economists"
[ID]). The Du Ponts had fled the French Revolution
as it became too radical for them. Pierre returned briefly in the more congenial
militaristic
Napoleonic times, but returned to USA before his death
*--The company thrived on military-industrial contracting during the War of 1812
*1822:Bank of America selected Pierre's son, Eleuthere Du Pont, as its head
<>1802se:Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin (-1826),
"The Book Trade and the Love of Reading in Russia" and other essays [Raeff3:107-16
| KRR:412-14 | DIR3:165-74]
<>1802se08:Russian statute established Ministries and laid
out ambitious plan for Senate [VSB,2:483-5 | KRR:256]
*--In these months Alexander I created, and was much influenced by, the Unofficial Committee
made up of Adam Czartoryski, Pavel Stroganov, Viktor Kochubey, and
Nikolai Novosil'tsev. These believed in reform, but
they meant "reform from above". They were not sympathetic to "grass roots"
movements, particularly among the aristocratic elites who sought something like
social participation in legislation, perhaps through an augmented Senate.
Alexander's greatest reforming statesman, Mikhail Speranskii,
made the last effort to elevate the Senate,
created by Peter I, into an authentic position of governmental authority.
However, statist reformers prevailed in Alexander's councils
*--The old "colleges" of Peter I were juggled and renamed as eight "ministries"
= Foreign Affairs, War, Navy, Finance, Interior, Justice, Commerce (soon
abolished), and (altogether new) Education
*--Over the next few years five new universities were founded = Vilnius
(Polish-language), Dorpat (German), Khar'kov, Kazan and, finally (1819), Saint-Petersburg
University
*--The Unofficial Committee submitted
several position papers, e.g., "Essay on the System to Be Followed in Restructuring
the Administration of the Empire", "On the State of Our Constitution", and
"General Plan for Work with the Emperor on Reform" [Raeff2:86-91]
*--In the first year of Alexander's reign, Adam Czartoryski composed a "Project for a
Most Graciously Granted Charter to the People of Russia" [Raeff2:76-84]
*1802:The vigorous reformer Mikhail Speranskii
submitted a memorandum to Emperor Alexander I in which he targeted imperial
institutions and social classes for sharp criticism. Speranskii was himself born
into the social class [soslovie] "clergy", worked his way out of that
natal category and rose to a high position as close adviser to the crown. His
memorandum criticized old and "useless" governmental institutions, but also the
much compromised Russian social/service hierarchies
[ID] =
"let us ask what is the nobility itself, when its
person, property, honor, indeed everything, depends not on the law but on a
single autocratic will.... I should like someone to point out the difference
between the dependence of the peasants on the landlords and the dependence of
the nobles on the sovereign. I should like someone to discover whether in fact
the sovereign does not have the same right over the landlords as the landlords
have over the peasants. Thus, instead of all the splendid divisions of a free
Russian people into the very free classes [sosloviia
(ID)] of nobility,
merchants, and the rest, I find in Russia two classes: The slaves of the
sovereign and the slaves of the landowners. The first are called free only in
relation to the second, but there are no truly free persons in Russia, except
beggars and philosophers." Speranskii went on to say that this situation made
subordination and harsh exploitation of the peasant a necessity for serf owners,
and reliance on absolutist state control over serf owners a necessity for
peasants. The mechanisms of the system naturally reinforced one another and
compounded their harmful effects
*--Yet Speranskii himself worked to limit the privileges of the aristocracy
(skipping ranks) as they sought to advance on the Table of Ranks
*--Much reform followed, but reform plans were grander than reform accomplishments
\\
*--Raeff, Marc. Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839. The
Hague:1957. DK201.R3
<>1803:1808; Martha and Catherine Wilmot give
womens view on travel and
everyday life in Russia, in their
Russian Journals
[Excerpts =
WRH3:232f]
*--Anna Evdokimovna Labzina,
Days of a Russian noblewoman :
The memories of Anna Labzina,
1758-1821 [Excerpts = KRR:370-6]
*--More everyday life in the memoirs of F. F. Vigel' [VSB,2:510-13]
<>1803ja26:Alexander I issued preliminary directive on reform of public education
[VSB,2:485-6]
<>1803fe20:Russian law created a new social estate, Free Agriculturists, and
seemed to promise easing of serfdom, as well as
other social reform [VSB,2:486-7
| DIR2:140-1]
<>1803ap30:USA doubled in size as result of
"Louisiana Purchase" [W]
from France
*--France had been stumbling in the New World for a half century, since
the Seven Years War [ID], and now
Napoleon needed cash to finance his grand army of
European conquest
*--"Lewis and Clark Expedition" -- formally "The Corps of Discovery" --
was dispatched to explore this territory, which can be described briefly as that
territory from the left bank of the Mississippi River to the Rockies, including
the watersheds of all the tributaries to the Mississippi flowing from the west [W#1] [W#2]
NB! that the Ohio River basin to the east was already within USA jurisdiction,
and the Rio Grande and Colorado river basins were still firmly held within Spanish
colonial territory
*--Corps of Discovery continued westward beyond the presumed limits of the
Louisiana Purchase, over the Rockies, down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the
Pacific Ocean. This might be taken as the beginning of the "Oregon question"
since that vast north-western Pacific slope of the great continental divide
along the Rockies with its various indigenous inhabitants (current day Oregon,
Washington, Idaho and southern British Columbia) were not firmly under the
authority of any one sovereign European state. A five-way shuffle for advantage
was now under way between Native American, Russian, Spanish (then Mexican),
English and USA interests. Another taxonomy of forces at work would show the
sovereign empires (as listed above), several great overseas corporations
(e.g., Russian-America Co., Hudson's Bay Co., the North West Co.), hitherto independent tribes, and ambitious individuals and groups
maneuvering for advantage
*--Oregon Territory was defined as all the territory west of the Rockies, north
of Spanish New World colonial possessions (California, Nevada, Utah) and south
of Russian America (what is today a coastal panhandle of the state of Alaska,
but stretching ambiguously much further south in the days of the
Russian America Co.). Increasingly throughout the region the English mercantilist Hudson's Bay
Company was putting down roots, operating often in seeming independence of any
governmental control. Soon there would be a new company in
Oregon Territory
*--USA citizens, "pioneers", moved in great numbers from east to west in the
first half of the 19th century. Notice the western N.American urban enclaves of
US settlers in Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Portland, San Francisco, Monterey and
Los Angeles [MAP]
<>1804:1806; Russian Emperor Alexander I correspondence with Thomas Jefferson
[TXT letter #1]
\\
*--Saul,1:38-42
<>1804:Russian thinker Ivan Pnin, "Essay on Enlightenment...." [Raeff3:126-58].
The Enlightenment guttered still against the rising
darkness
<>1804oc07:Nagasaki | Rezanov
arrived on the ship Nadezhda, captained by Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern
[Krusenstern, Adam Johann von] In the previous year, 1803,
Alexander I dispatched as official envoy Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764:1807)
who sailed from Kronstadt in Gulf of Finland, via Cape Horn of Africa, to
Kamchatka in northeastern Siberia. Rezanov planned to take up the permit given
years before to Laksman to visit Japan,
misinterpreting that permit to allow trade w/Japan. Rezanov was
son-in-law of Russian-America Co. founder
Shelikhov [PH&G:783] and a majority
stockholder in RAC. He believed Japan would become the supplier to Russian outposts on
Kurils, Aleutian Islands and in Alaska
*--Rezanov returned Japanese castaways and gave gifts. Japan put them all under close guard
*1805:Sea of Japan and south. Kruzenshtern explored under Russian flag
*1805ap04:Nagasaki. Only now was Rezanov
granted meeting w/shogun envoy, who refused gifts and ignored requests for trade. This
despite R's careful observation of Japanese etiquette, removing shoes, sitting on tatami
mats. Rezanov was personally affronted [KEJ,6:307]
*1806:Kronstadt (island protecting inlet to Saint
Petersburg) to Kamchatka-Kurils | Captain Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin
sailed aboard
the frigate Diana on an around-the-world expedition, a peaceful
expedition complicated by the difficulties associated with Rezanov's corporate
politics [BBL/Fraerman.
Ivashchenko]
*1806:1807; Hokkaido waters, Kurils (Etorofu), and Sakhalin
(Karafuto) | On Rezanov's orders, two captains who served the Russian-America Co., Nikolai
Aleksandrovich Khvostov and Gavriil Ivanovich Davydov, repeatedly raided Japanese
settlements and shipping, drove off Japanese settlers [KEJ,6:341.
PH&G:774, 783] and looted, leaving letter on their own corporate authority saying they would
return unless Japan came to terms with Russia. Purpose was to force Japan to
abandon national seclusion [KEJ,3:45, 6:307]
This is an early example of "gun-boat diplomacy" exercised by an
overseas corporation and taken up more successfully by
USA a half century later
*--Japanese officials
stiffened defenses and wrote a defiant reply [SHJ,3:203-4]
*--Mamiya fought
Russians and was wounded
*1806ap:Rezanov seemed a "loose cannon" as he acted like a sovereign in the
northern Pacific Rim. He left Japan, now on another grand mission to the San
Francisco Presidio, the seat of Spanish
administrative authority in Alta California. He won the heart and hand of 16-year-old daughter
of the Spanish commandant, Concepcíon
(Conchita) Argüello. He seemed to think "nuptial diplomacy" might unite the
ambitions of Russia (or maybe he thought he represented only his own
Russian-America Company) and Spain in the Pacific
*1807:Siberia, Krasnoyarsk | Rezanov died while on his way to Europe seeking
Papal permission for a Russian Orthodox widower to marry the young Catholic. Rezanov kept diary and other descriptions
of his trip, now in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His
exciting eight-year career on the Pacific Rim frontier ended. His Spanish
fiancée became first nun in California
*1807:Hirata, a great Shinto scholar (1776:1843) [PH&G:159], wrote Chishima
shiranami [White Waves of the Kurils] as a guide on how to restrain barbarians
(for example, Rezanov) and a manual
of modern coastal defense [Sansom,WWJ:244]
*1808:1809; Sakhalin (Karafuto) explored by Mamiya w/ Matsuda Denjuro. On his own initiative Mamiya followed the west coast of Siberia to
discover Tatar Strait, then up Amur River 100 miles or so to Deren (Te-jen), a Manchurian
post established for the collection of tribute, a further sign that active
international economic relations were maintained despite various mercantilist or
statist efforts to control them
*--Mamiya published Kita Ezo zusetsu
[an illustrated account of northern Ezo (i.e., Sakhalin)] and Todatsu kiko [Travels
in Tatary] which contained significant geographic and ethnographic information
*--Russian/Japanese relations seemed promising over previous
decades, when largely limited to "private" commercial ties. Now
commerce was in the hands of statist overseas corporate monopoly-holders, and two strutting
states seemed ready to square off against one another
*--Events to the west again complicated Russian imperialist expansion
\\
*--Japanese ruling Bakufu felt they
"had no need of foreign goods, to permit trade relations would merely deprive her of
useful commodities and risk the entry of foreign religious doctrine" [Sansom,WWJ:244]
Serious confusion and error within the Bakufu explained in SHJ,3:202-3. Shinto
scholar/statesmen were beginning to see the need for radical modernization,
rather than seclusion. Russia played a role in the coming of the
"Meiji Restoration"
*--Russian poet Andrei Voznesenskii has written an interesting historical fiction about
the remarkable career of Rezanov, Story under Full Sail
*--Chevigny, Lost Empire
*--Voenskii"Russkoe"
*--SIE,11:988
*--BrE,51:475
*--PH&G:776
<>1804de09:Alexander I decree reaffirmed Jewish "Pale of Settlement" created by
Catherine II after the annexation of Polish territories and now added other measures, some
reformist, some not [VSB,2:487-8]
<>1805de02:Austrian town Austerlitz the site of a great
Napoleonic military victory over Russia and Austria
*--Coalition of England, Russia and
Austria having
little success against Napoleon
<>1806:England imposed "Continental Blockade" on
Napoleon's Europe and, step by step, all Napoleon's allies. Wars were becoming
"global" because national economies were becoming global
<>1806:Holy Roman Empire (after
a 1000 years of stuttered existence) destroyed by Napoleon. His next big
target would be yet further east in Europe = the Russian Empire
*--The Holy Roman Empire was later thought of as the
first German “Reich” [imperial regime], as in the name of the German-speaking nation-state translated as “Austria” = Osterreich or Eastern Reich,
indicating the eastern European edge of the great empire. But what of the
vigorous, developing power of northern German folk?
*--Two paths to modernity followed for the German-speaking peoples of Europe,
Prussian in the north of "middle-Europe" and Austrian in the southeast
=
(1) In the north the German-speaking territories, most notably Prussia, drifted yet further from the dominance of
Vienna. The Protestant Reformation [ID] and the Thirty-Years War
[ID] had already destroyed any
possibility of unity among the German-speaking peoples of middle-Europe. The
Lutheran north and the Catholic south were spiritually at great distance from
one another. Prussia began its fretted development toward “nationhood”, many
years later than
the geo-political units known as France and England
(2) In the south, Austria desperately clung to its notions of grandeur while its actual power eroded.
Between 1867 and 1918, it glowed brightly for one last time as the
Austro-Hungarian Empire [ID], then expired at the end of WW1
\\
*--Heinrich August Winkler,
Germany: The Long Road West. Volume 1, 1789-1933 and volume 2, 1933-1990| Notice
that Winkler presumes that “The Westernization” of Germany is a vital topic. He argues that the old pre-1806
dream of the holy “Reich” [imperial regime] continued to inspire the northern German-speaking peoples. The myth of the Reich
postponed German nationhood in the north and squelched evolution of democracy there. Furthermore, Lutheranism
promoted authoritarian and “caesoro-papist” tendencies in government. In the era of the Revolution of
1848 [ID] the central contradiction of European liberalism
[ID] expressed itself with special sharpness in
Prussia = national unity and liberty could not be combined. Two decades later, Bismarck solved this contradiction
by creating a “Second Reich”, a parliamentary, authoritarian, statist and militaristic
German nation-state "Deutschland"
*--At the end of WW1, “democracy” was first tried under circumstances of humiliating defeat and economic collapse
[ID]. The Nazi movement inherited this legacy when, in 1933, it created
the “Third Reich” [ID] based on broad popular
(if not technically democratic) assent. WW2 destroyed the myth of the Reich, and Germany was divided between
contending partners, USA at the head of “The West” and the USSR at the head of world-ambitious proletarian
internationalism [ID]. Then in the
1990s, the divided Germanies were united, not as Reich but as a recognizable
democratic state [ID]. In other words, national unity and liberty were now combined. The great modern European
contradiction was finally resolved in the German Federal Republic
*--As of 1806, all that was far in the future.
Prussia still had a perilous half century ahead of itself as a German-speaking
monarchy, guided by the interests of a landowning aristocratic elite (Junkers)
who in many cases in the eastern regions depended, as from days of yore, on the
bound labor of Slavic villagers (Poles). In the German-speaking world, the
chances for traditional conservative or new liberal
political outcome were slim
<>1807je25:Russian Emperor Alexander I and French Emperor
Napoleon signed alliance at Tilsit [VSB,2:488-90 | DIR2:142-52
| DIR3:175-83]
*--The two emperors played at the possibility of creating anew the great Roman
Empire in West and East. Yet Alexander succeeded in protecting the integrity of
the Prussian monarchy and its homelands. Alexander told Prussian king Friedrich
Wilhelm III, "Be patient. We will get it all back. He will break his neck."
*--The demands of the great
Napoleonic wars now shaped Russian imperialist and frontier expansion
*--As so often in time of war, anytime and anywhere, Emperor Alexander felt it necessary to re-create the
national secret police administration he had largely disbanded
six years earlier
*1807oc09(NS):Prussia emancipated its
serfs, but the remains of the old German-speaking
Teutonic and Livonian knights within the Russian Empire at the eastern border of
Prussia -- the now Russianized "Baltic Barons" -- clung tightly to their
authority over serf labor in the villages
<>1808:+; French political theorist
Charles Fourier (1772-1837) published Théorie des
quatre mouvements. This and later works made Fourier one of the most
influential radical thinkers of his epoch. He
was of the bourgeois class (like the English visionary Robert Owen
[ID]), and his family did well, but he dreamt of a
future far more egalitarian than that produced by the French Revolution. He
believed in the liberating but also unifying power of natural human passions. He
felt, as did Rousseau, that modern
society was to be blamed for most of humanity's woes. He felt that "civilization"
hindered the realization of "harmony"
*--Seeking to free humans for a fully
emotional and passionate life, he conceived of a highly rational economic unit
called the "phalanx". He supplied a very precise number = 1620 people working together
equaled one phalanx. He thought of the phalanx as something like the basic cellular unit of his ideal
self-sufficient social-economic system. The community that formed the phalanx
was called a phalanstery
*--Fourier ran ads in newspapers inviting wealthy financiers
to bankroll his transformational organization. No bankers responded, but many
followers later made efforts to create such utopian communities, many of them in
USA (e.g., Brooks Farm)
*--Fourier and Saint-Simon were very different
figures, but together they were thought of as founders of what a later
generation (mainly opponents) called "utopian socialism"
<>1808:1832; Weimar Germany | Writer and
cultural impresario Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publish his most famous work,
Faust
[PWT2:115-17]
*1798:1717; Johann Sebastian Bach had been court organist in Weimar, the capital city of the German Duchy Saxe-Weimar.
The city had become
the cultural capital of an emerging north German civilization and a European literary mecca during the time of Goethe's residence there (1775:1832)
<>1808:USA and Russia initiated formal diplomatic relations
*--In that same year, German-born but now USA citizen and NYC resident John
Jacob Astor (1763-1848) formed American Fur Company, including a Great Lakes
subsidiary and a Pacific Fur Company with its provincial headquarters in the
Oregon Territory city named after him, Astoria
*1808ap09:Russian-America
Co. directors complained about incursions of "Bostonians" into seas and
territories claimed by Russia [DIR3:328-32]
*--By the 1820s, Astor's companies exercised a virtual monopoly on the fur
trade in USA territories. At his death he was the wealthiest individual in the
USA. This "capitalist" corporation was an active rival to the old mercantilist
overseas
corporations in North America and the Pacific region. While not a mercantilist
enterprise, the Astor companies worked to exclude "foreign" companies and
develop the middle and western regions of North America under USA dominance. The
company was active in the development of Mississippi riverboat transportation.
As an early example of a "trust" corporation, it also worked to crush all
competition, whether "foreign" or not
\\
*--Saul,1:27-55 & 64-69
<>1809mr23:Finland fully absorbed into Imperial Russia
[VSB,2:490]
*--Finland was granted its own constitution, suggesting that the Emperor might
be open to the thought of constitutional reform in Russia itself
*--Frontier and imperialist
expansion was now mainly shaped by Napoleonic contingencies
<>1809oc:Russian minister Mikhail
Speranskii issued his bold project [Raeff2:93-109
| VSB,2:490-3 | DIR2:153-7
| DIR3:184-90]
*--Over the next
year, the State Council [Gosudarstvennyi sovet] was established and the ministries reorganized [VSB,2:493-4
| KRR:256-7]
The State Council was appointed from among old and experienced statesmen, and
its role was to consult with the Emperor, at his pleasure
*--This was the greatest period of Alexandrine reform
<>1810:USA CA Fort Ross founded by 95 Russian colonists who were expected to help
supply the Russian Pacific-rim enterprises of the Russian-America Company
*1812:Russian-America Co. signed an agreement with Spanish officials to lease
territory around Bodega Bay, not far north of San Francisco Bay
*--USA-Russian economic relations intensified in the heat of the Napoleon wars [Saul,1:25-27,
111-32] US vessels carried 20% of all exports out of Saint-Petersburg
<>1811:Nikolai M. Karamzin
published Memoir on
Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis
[Excerpts: RRC2,2#23 | VSB,2:495-7]
*--Russian TXT
*--Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790: An Account of a Young Russian Gentleman's
Tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and England
\\
*--J. L. Black,
Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the 19th Century
(1975)
<>1811:1815;
Netherlands
East Indies (Indonesia) occupied by English, one of many examples of how
Napoleonic
wars were not unlike the "world wars" of the 20th century
<>1811jy11:Japan,
Kunashiri Island | Vasilii Golovnin landed to make amends for 1807:raids
[Golovnin memoirs excerpted in Lensen,Eastward:61-5]
*--Japanese lured, then captured Lieutenant
Commander Golovnin and crew who were surveying Kurils. G had put a man ashore
further out to sea, on Etorofu Island, and had
gone ashore himself to join conversations with Japanese officers who gathered there. Then Golovnin
anchored for night off Kunashiri near "strongly garrisoned fortress". Went
ashore again w/some men, was surrounded, bound, rough handled and packed off to Hakodate
for two years [SHJ, 3:204] Tradition says this was in retaliation for
Khvostov attacks on Japanese territories. Golovnin
later published his memoirs of his time in Japan, quickly published and
republished in English to satisfy deepening European curiosity about the
fabulous Asian Island civilization =
Narrative of My
Captivity...
*1812:Kuril Islands | In retaliation for Golovnin kidnap, Lieut.
Commander Petr Ivanovich Rikord seized the powerful frontier merchant Takataya
and took him to Kamchatka
*1813:Takataya persuaded Russians to let him return
to Japan. Okhotsk commandant gave written
assurance that Khvostov raids were without the authorization or knowledge of tsarist
authorities. [Beasley,MHJ:40 said written assurance from Irkutsk provincial
governor]
*--Yet Golovnin managed to repair Japanese-Russian
relations
\\
*--KEJ,3:45
<>1812jy06:Russian Emperor Alexander I issued
proclamation of war with French Emperor Napoleon [DIR2:158-9
| DIR3:191-2
| WRH3:249-56]
*--MAP = Napoleon's central
European empire on eve of war with Russia
<>1812au26:Russians defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino. Russian
retreat left Moscow open for French occupation [Eye:278-80]
*1812se04:Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov reported to Alexander I about retreat
from Borodino in the face of the French invasion [VSB,2:497-8
| DIR3:192-3]
Napoleon occupied Moscow which burned for over two weeks. Napoleon awaited for
Alexander I to capitulate, but he did not
*--Borodino Battle museum
*--Borodino "virtual
battlefield"
*--MAP = Napoleon's
Russian attack and retreat
*1812no03:Alexander I issued a manifesto on the retreat of Napoleon from Russia [VSB,2:498-9]
*1813ja01:Moscow scene [DIR2:160 |
DIR3:194]
*1813de25:Alexander's orders to the advancing Russian armies: "Your courage
and valor have brought you from the Oka River to the Rhine" [VSB,2:499]
*1813:1814; Russian-led military campaign drove the French out of middle Europe
and pursued Napoleon into the heart of France
*--Phillippe-Paul Ségur, Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign [earlier
edition of this personal account]
*--General Armand de Caulaincourt,
With Napoleon in
Russia
*--The pertinent section of the great French writer Stendhal's
published
diary account of his experience on the Russian campaign
*1836:Nadezhda Durovas memoirs described how, during the
Napoleonic wars,
she, a woman, masqueraded as a man so that she could join the cavalry [KRR:376-9]
*--Statistics on Russian losses in these wars [DIR3:194]
*--Russian imperial expansion had now taken a dramatic
step westward, but only very briefly
\\
*--Saul,1:55-91
*--Kutuzov vs. Napoleon at Borodino featured in
St.Petersburg Hermitage Museum
[W]
*--Jane Hartley article on invasion
[TXT]
*--J. David Markham essay on novelist Stendhal in the Napoleonic army that
invaded Russia. FIND "Russia" and read to end here =
[W]
*--E. V. Tarle, Napoleon's Invasion of Russia in 1812
*--Michael Adams, Napoleon
and Russia offers a good military history of the campaign that drove
Napoleon out Russia and all the way to Paris (though readers should be wary of Adams' weak grasp of the
larger historical issues)
*--Jon Latimer,
1812: War with America
is especially good on the international context of the north American episode
<>1813se:Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada during the War of 1812. Tecumseh [W], a brilliant
Shawnee Indian chief, orator, and warrior at the Battle of Tippecanoe, shown above being
fatally shot by Colonel Johnson

Death of Tecumseh
[Rotunda Frieze of the US Capitol, Washington DC]
<>1813:Japan | Golovnin released with help of Takataya. Much
mutual information exchanged in this tense but salutary confrontation [KEJ,6:341]. Takataya regained monopoly in
Hokkaido trade which he had managed for nearly 15 years [KEJ,7:319, 3:45] Golovnin
cooperated with Japanese interrogators, but exaggerated Russian strength, contributing to
Japanese fears of Russian threat
*--Mamiya, already an accomplished explorer over the previous
decade and a half, exchanged surveying and
astronomical navigation findings with Golovnin [KEJ, 5:88]
*--Adachi Sannai(1769:1845) conversed with Golovnin about math
*--Baba Sajuro
(1787:1822) revised Russian-Japanese dictionary w/G's help
*--"Golovnin had gained the esteem
and affection of his captors, and when he left there was a festive farewell gathering in
which Russians and Japanese took part in great harmony. The Japanese crowded round their
one-time prisoners with gifts and kind words, and some were on the verge of tears at
partying. As the Diana was towed out, the Japanese and Russians exchanged
thunderous cheers. Such behavior was typical of the intercourse between Japanese and
Russians, which combined fear and attraction. Golovnin's was the last important attempt to
establish good relations with the Japanese in the Kurils. This intercourse, like a love
affair with its quarrels and embraces, played an important part in revealing to the
Japanese their own weakness and in opening a breach in the policy of seclusion."
[SHJ,3:204]
*1816:Saint Petersburg | Golovnin published memoirs of his adventure in Japan.
"Remarkably objective and sympathetic, Golovnin praised the high level of
Japanese education, the concern of the Japanese government for its subjects, the
sensibility, astuteness, honesty, hospitality, and cleanliness of the Japanese people. He
portrayed the Japanese as fiery patriots, conscious not only of the harm that foreign
actions had brought in years past, but confident of their own superiority. He felt that
the Japanese lagged behind Europe in many respects, but he noted that their capabilities
were tremendous and predicted that they would catch up with the Europeans and become
potential rivals in the future." [KEJ,3:45]
Golovnin did much to encourage positive relations, BUT =
*--By 1821, Ezo [Hokkaido] came under direct reign of Japanese shogun for the first time, as
a counter to Russian pressures there and as a restraint on the evolution of
independent relations between Japanese and Russian
frontier agents and adventurers
<>1813:Azerbaijan,
Daghestan and Georgian territories taken from
Iran (Persia) and absorbed into the Russian Empire
according to the stipulations of the Treaty of Gulistan [MAP]
*--Baku, an important Azery port city on the western shores of the land-locked Caspian Sea,
later a world-significant oil depot, came under Russian authority [W]
<>1814mr30 (NS):Paris | Russia led allied forces
into the French capital. Emperor Alexander astride his white stallion signified his key role in the liberation of Europe from Napoleon
*--Which of the two Napoleons did Alexander liberate Europe from: "The child of the
French Revolution" or "the nemesis of the French Revolution"?
*--And another question arose about whether the previous decade of war was
simply about the French Revolution and Napoleon or perhaps about a whole lot
more here in the early years of the 19th century =
*1814au24(NS):English burned Washington DC as the
Napoleonic wars expanded onto the global stage even after Napoleon was defeated. In the New World, that
expansion was called the "War of 1812". Note that both Moscow [above]
and WDC burned in this era
*--The "European Revolution" slackened only briefly as statesmen in the various
nations who claimed victory over Napoleon prepared to meet in Vienna with the
conservative and sometimes reactionary goal to restore the old pre-Napoleonic Europe and, wherever possible, to restore the pre-revolutionary old regime ("ancient regime") =
<>1814no01:1815je09 (NS); Austria | The
Congress of Vienna met for over six months in an attempt to set Europe straight after the disruptions caused by
French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic imperialism within Europe itself. All European powers of any
considerable size were invited to participate, including "defeated" France.
Mercurial French statesman Talleyrand, ex-priest, ex-revolutionary, ex-official
under Napoleon, and in all regards a powerful representative of the French
nation, was allowed a serious role in this Congress. [Contrast this
generous-minded moment in European diplomacy with a moment of equal profound impact on the fate of Europe
one century later, the far less generous-minded Paris Peace Conference]
*1815mr01:je18(NS); Even as the great Congress met, Napoleon escaped captivity on the island Elba and gathered a
small armed force in a futile three-month effort to retake France. Allied troops
commanded by Prussian and English officers apprehended Napoleon this second time at
Waterloo
*--Back in Vienna, Austrian minister
Prince Clemens von Metternich played the key role.
His conservative actions and views (perhaps better to say reactionary actions
and views [ID]) made him the most
powerful European continental spokesmen of post-French Revolutionary "far-right"
conservatism
*--Irishman and British parliamentary
figure
Edmund Burke was the chief
representative of English conservatism in this epoch. Edmund Burke's
views can be contrasted every bit as much as they can be compared with the ideas
of the continental conservative Metternich
*--Among other things, the Congress of Vienna sought to ease European imperialist competition in
Europe itself. On the whole the Congress approached its tasks with a very
practical and sober-minded set of expectations. However =
*--Russian Emperor Alexander I inspired a universalistic or pan-European Christian
reconciliation. His lofty pietistic pan-Europeanism seemed quaint in an era of emerging nationalistic divisiveness
*--For Alexander, visionary global schemes
gradually replaced domestic reform back in Russia. Alexander had fallen
to some degree under the political influence of the reactionary
French émigré Joseph de Maistre. However visionary and however global
Alexander's scheming,
actual Russian frontier and imperial expansion
slackened in the last decade of his reign
\\
*--Florovsky,5:162-238 surveys Russian spiritual life in
the Alexandrine era of the "Bible Society"
<>1814:1825de14; Russian activists, many of
them ex-officers in Alexander's armies that occupied Paris, took inspiration
from the role of "liberator" that Russia had just played and, on the other side
of the ledger, grew increasingly alarmed as Alexander I and his government lost
its reforming zeal. They dreamt of European-style liberalization
or even revolutionary change in Russia and set about mobilizing themselves and
others within a surprising network of voluntary action societies that culminated
eleven years later in an ill-fated insurrection against Emperor Nicholas I at
the moment he prepared to ascend the throne [DIR3:207-29]
*--This long decade of diverse and complex activism has been conventionally packaged in the
all-too-simple phrase "Decembrist movement". The calendrical phrase is abrupt, singular and misleading but mainly artificial.
The phrase was never used prior to December, 1825. That coincidental month in which the final futile act took
place has been fastened onto a long-term, complex, original and dramatic epoch in the history of
modern Russian political culture
*1813:1814; Almost all leading figures participated in the campaign through the
western provinces of war-ravaged Russia and into western Europe, all the way to
Paris. Life in occupied
Paris was a "school in politics" [SIE]. Schooling touched on more than politics,
it also taught a good deal about the public culture of an emerging general
European civil society
*1816:1819; Mikhail Lunin (1787-1845), lived in Paris, grew
close to Saint-Simon and left a powerful impression on him. Lunin
was a person of unusual integrity and reckless daring, traits that appealed to
Saint-Simon. Lunin was a dashing and wealthy gentry landowner who served as an
officer in the Russian army of liberation and was preparing to devote his life
to public service. Soon Lunin
drew close to other "Decembrists"
*1814:Two original organizations formed = The Order of Russian Knights [Orden
russkikh rytsarei] [NDD,1:132-9] and Sacred Workshop [Sviashchennaia artel’]
[NDD,1:124-30]. The Workshop existed until 1817
*1816:1817; Union of Salvation [Soiuz spaseniia] or Society of True and
Faithful Sons of the Fatherland [Obshchestvo istinnykh i vernykh synov
otechestva] lasted one year and had thirty members, including =
Aleksandr Murav'ev, a Lieut.colonel in the Imperial General Staff was the
founder
S. Trubetskoi
I.D. Yakushkin
Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol
Matvei Murav’ev-Apostol
Nikita Murav'ev
Pavel Pestel' and others soon became active
*--Eventually four substantial societies -- Union of Salvation, Union of Welfare, Northern Society
and Southern Society -- represented the beginnings of organized political
opposition (as opposed to great uprisings or smaller conspiracies or isolated
dissent) [SIO:11]
*--Let's bow to convention and designate these years as "the
Decembrist Movement"
<>1815:Nikolai Karamzin, History of the
Russian State (12 vols.) began to appear [Raeff3:117-24]
*--Karamzin had been a dominant figure in Russian cultural life
for more than a decade, but his influence was being
superseded by a more radical
form of progressive patriotism as represented by "Decembrists", a love of Russia that insisted on moving
"forward" rather than venerating the past
\\
*--Wagar on Karamzin [TXT]
<>1815ja:1817my08; Hawaii, Kauai Island, Waimea
River | Russian Fort Elizabeth established
*--Hawaiian King Kamehameha refused cooperation with Russian America Co. and demanded it leave; which it
did
*1817au05:Russian-America Co. administrator reported to
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karl Nesselrode about the Hawaiian Islands [DIR3:332-4]
*--Russian expansion to the east, into the Pacific Basin and the New World, which began over two centuries earlier,
was winding down as new difficulties and complexities arose to the south, in
Central Asia =
*--A century-long epoch opened often
called "The Eastern Question" or, more broadly and more playfully, "The
Great Game", a
largely English-Russian competitive struggle for imperialist expansion, first
in Central Asia and eventually on a global scale
<>1815se14(26):Paris |
Austrian Emperor Francis,
Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, and Russian Emperor Alexander I signed agreement creating
the "Holy Alliance" [VSB,2:499-500 | DIR2:161-2
| ORW:66-7]
*--Inspired mainly by Emperor Alexander's Bible-centered piety, the three
monarchies committed themselves -- "sincerely" or with mendacity of forethought
-- to guide their "nations" in harmony with time-honored Christian principles.
They felt the need to augment the very hard-headed or practical-minded or
solidly diplomatic Vienna settlements [ID] with
spiritual verities, to add "values" to politics. The Quadruple Alliance
(England, Russia, Austria and
Prussia -- later erstwhile enemy France was
admitted) seemed to these righteous monarchs too purely political, too
Machiavellian [ID], and thus lacking
in moral substance
*--Not wanting to seem sacrilegious, all the great princes of Europe eventually
signed on, except for three = English King George IV (spared the embarrassment
by laws barring the king from any significant political acts), the Pope in Rome
(whose religious obligation was to shun secular acts of this sort), and the
Turkish Sultan (he simply was not a Christian -- no room was provided for an
Islamic presence within the alliance here called "holy")
*--The "Holy Alliance" became an instrument in the hands of reactionary Prince
Metternich of Austria and stirred revulsion, even direct
opposition, within the British Foreign Office. The US Monroe Doctrine
[ID] was in part inspired as a check against the
aggressive reactionary policies supposedly justified by Christian virtues
*1820:Austrian minister
Metternich, "Confession of Faith"
[TXT]. Over
the next two years he offered views on Russia and the Greek revolt against
Turkey [VSB,2:508-10]
<>1815no15:Poland received constitution from Russia (i.e.,
those territories of old Poland taken by Russia in
the three partitions) [VSB,2:500-2
|
DIR2:164-73 | DIR3:196-9 | ORW:70-1]
*--Poland was thus the scene an early experiment in "devolution" of political
power, in which political authority over domestic affairs moved downward from
the imperialist metropol to the regional periphery
*--Russia sought to ease imperialist tensions in the westward direction, to
avoid the dangers of direct European imperialist competition in Europe itself
*--As he did this, Alexander I again inspired hopes among many of his subjects
that a constitution might
be possible in Russia itself. But it is hard to escape the impression that
Alexander's fifteen years of zealous reform were largely at
an end
*--Arakcheev replaced Speranskii as the symbol of Alexander I's political
programs =
<>1816:1821; Russian military leader and loyalist
General Aleksei Arakcheev administered "military settlements" [voennye poseleniia] in the Russian countryside.
Created in 1810 as a way of integrating the military with productive work,
particularly agricultural, these settlements also made peasant life like
barracks life, agriculture like a military mission. Settlements grew to about 400,000 members in
1825 and constituted 1/4 of the Russian army [VSB,2:503-4]
*--There is a sense in which these measures can be seen as a part of a larger
effort to extend state tutelage over society. Village agricultural life was not
recognized in the Petrine Table of Ranks, but military ranks were. Military settlements opened the
possibility that peasant plowmen could be organized in rational rank and
file (just like peasant "soldaty")
*--These settlements also served to extend the reach of state authority into
distant rural districts where the authority of gentry landowners needed to be checked and balanced. Thus the
settlements can be
viewed as a statist move to undermine that
independent gentry authority implied in
Catherine II's Charter 30 years earlier
*--So far as peasant disorder in the French Revolution inspired dread in every
European monarchical heart, the settlements can also be thought of as early
examples of change introduced as a restraint on change, or "change vs. change"
*--Military settlements represent an end of
an epoch of
"progressive" reform and the beginning of
an epoch of "reactionary" reform
*--The settlements were not abolished
until 1857 at the
beginning of the "Era of Great
Reforms"
*--"Decembrist" I.D. Yakushkin identified
"military settlements" as one source of
social opposition to autocracy [VSB,2:522]
\\
*--Jenkins, Michael.
Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire
<>1816:English Parliament formed a committee to look into the national
scandal of child labor and related social abuses caused by rapid
industrialization. An era of English reform opened
*1815:Eyewitness accounts of working conditions in English factories [Eye:295-8
|
PWT2:142-50]
*--Scene from the English mines illustrated need for reforms [pix]
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions
of wage-labor in the new factory environment. Robert
Owen [ID] inspired some part of this progressive
movement, though results produced by a less reform-oriented Parliament
disappointed some English liberals
<>1817:England | James Mill published
The History of
British India which gained him a permanent appointment with the India
House, the managerial headquarters of the East India
Company. Mill held that position until the company and its authority in
India were abolished and replaced by direct English imperialist rule
[ID]
*--Much influenced by the Utilitiarian social critic Jeremy Bentham
[ID] and the philosopher David Hume,
Mill went on to write many influential studies
[ID] in philosophy, government and political economy. He contributed to the
growing influence of a public movement of "liberal
economic theorists" or "philosophical radicals". They were advocates of "progressive" reform in England, better to rid the
land of medieval obstacles to industrialization and promote economic, social and
institutional changes better to accommodate modernization
*--James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, extended the
"classical economic" legacy into even more radical scholarly and political positions.
Significant variations among "political-economic"
theorists"
\\
*--Joseph Hamburger,
James Mill and the
Art of Revolution
*---------------------,
Intellectuals in
Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophical Radicals
*--Richard Reeves,
John Stuart Mill:
Victorian Firebrand
<>1817:1832; Alaska
| Colonial Russian America:
Kyrill T. Khlebnikov's Reports
*--These were the years of increasing hardship for the Russian colonies and the
Russian-America Company
<>1817:1819; USA FL | Seminole wars
*--Major documents relating to USA foreign affairs prior to 1898, including many
treaties signed between USA and Native Americans peoples [W]
<>1818:1872; Pacific deeps now crossed by USA whalers
sailing out of New Bedford CN and Nantucket MA, around the southern tip of the
South American continent, and out into the great South Sea. This was the third
and grandest phase of the global US whaling industry, lasting 54 years
*1823oc07:Nantucket newspaper, The Inquirer, reported = “there are
employed in the Southern Whale Fishery from the port of Nantucket alone nearly
twice as many ships as are engaged in that fishery from all the ports of France
and England, and that most of the whaling ships belonging to both these
countries are commanded by persons from Nantucket and New Bedford”
[Stackpole:382]
*--Early in this half-century phase, the Pacific Rim came under USA influence in
a new way, and this some decades before over-land frontier expansion reached
westward beyond the Ohio Valley. The efforts of William Rotch, Sr., the vision
of John Ledyard, the far-western extension of the Lewis and Clark expedition,
and the enterprise of Astor’s American Fur Co. leapt over the vast North
American interior. US “Manifest Destiny” was guaranteed by the
east-coast/west-coast sea embrace of the North American mainland, and the
whalers played a central role
*--Melville wrote in ch. 111 of Moby Dick: “To any
meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be
the sea of his adoption. It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian
Ocean and the Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the
new-built California towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men,
and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than
Abraham, while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying,
endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious,
divine Pacific zones the whole world’s bulk about, makes all coasts one bay to
it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.”
*1823:ships in the hunt=203
*1835:ships in the hunt=421
*1846:ships in the hunt=736
*1847:USA sent out individual whaling ventures from 34
ports. New Bedford sent out three times as many ships as the second busiest
whaling port, Nantucket. By now San Francisco CA was engaged in the
international whaling industry and was soon the principle importing point for
whale products
*1840:USA | Socially conscious lawyer and pundit Richard Henry Dana published
Two Years Before the
Mast. This fictional but realistic account, based on personal experience,
exposed maltreatment of sailors and promoted labor reform in the whale fisheries
*1840s:US whalers pushed through the Kuril Island chain
which suspends like a necklace south from the Kamchatka Peninsula. They entered
the icy northern waters of the Sea of Okhotsk [G]. They also fished the Bering Sea
and passed through the Bering Strait, past the Diomede islands and Russian
Alaska to the east, into the Arctic Sea, hunting northern Siberian coastal
waters. In these years, US whalers frequently dropped anchor in Russian ports
and met with Siberian Russian commanders and officials on friendly terms. The
Russians never thought in these years to enter the
whaling business in any
serious way
*--Whaling was a USA frontier experience fundamentally unknown to Eurasia
<>1818:English
writer Mary Shelley published
Frankenstein. The fantasy can be
taken as the original work of “science fiction”. The growth in the numbers of cheap penny-press publishers,
magazines and other forms of popular entertainment created just the right market for these
“fables of a technological age” [a phrase from Brian Aldiss’ introduction to his anthology,
A Science
Fiction Ominbus]
*1826:Shelley further contributed to the genre, and helped launch the
pop-arts era, when she published
The Last Man, which portrayed the suffering of the only surviving representative of human
kind after a global pandemic
\\
*2008fe01:TLS:19 | Dinah Birch emphasized the dominant tone of solitude in science fiction, as in all
varieties of Romantic literature [ID]. “Loneliness shadows science faction.” It allows “subtle ways of
exploring cultural anxiety and desire”
<>1818mr15:Warsaw meeting of the Polish Sejm heard
Russian Emperor Alexander I suggest that the whole Russian Empire might soon be
ruled by constitutional law, perhaps on the model of the constitution he had
granted Poland three years earlier
*1818:1820; Russian political thinker and state
servitor, earlier a member of the Unofficial Committee, Nikolai Novosil'tsev,
composed a constitutional Charter of the Russian Empire. He suggested true
federalist relationships between the Russian metropol and the imperial peripheries [Raeff2:111-20
| VSB,2:504-6]
*--Mikhail Lunin remembered that the newly mobilized but narrow and elite
"public" close to "Decembrists" circles welcomed Alexander's speech as a
"political pledge" to the nation. They presumed Alexander I intended to encourage them; perhaps he was "blessing"
them and their aims. "The Society gathered and intensified its forces to ensure that this
promise should be independent of the temporary will of an individual, and taught the nation to
understand and appreciate the benefits of liberty and merit them" [FBF:14]
*1818:1821; Russian voluntary society, Union of Welfare [or Union of Prosperity =
Soiuz blagodenstviia] (Decembrists) formed with about 200 members when
the Union of
Salvation disbanded. Pavel Pestel wrote that the central directorate [Korenaia
uprava] unanimously voted to work for a Russian republic in harmony with
general European political trends, several degrees more "radical" than Alexander's
promise
or Novosil'tsev's constitutional project (above)
*--Union of Welfare bylaws [Raeff3:117-24] Rules and
constitution [Raeff1:69-99]
*1818:Society of United Slavs [Obshchestvo soedinennykh slavian] formed independently and went
through many changes. Petr Borisov was an active member [Raeff1:157-61].
A very moralistic society, it required on "Oath" of all its members [MFR:282-3] Life on the SW borders of the Russian
Empire showed members how they were all harmed by needless divisions among "Slavic
brothers" (religious, linguistic, ethnic, etc.) [Georges Luciani, La société des Slaves Unis 1823-1825 (Bordeaux:1963)]
*1818:1826; Free Society of Amateurs of Russian Letters [Vol'noe obx liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti]
*1819:Free Society to Found Schools of Mutual Instruction [Vol'noe
obshchestvo uchrezhdeniia uchilishch vzaimnogo obucheniia]
*1820:A spontaneous military mutiny, involving the elite
Semevsky Regiment [Semevskii polk], convinced certain Decembrists that
the military was ripe for revolt. They positioned themselves within the
military establishment in order to avoid the horrors of destructive and
uncoordinated
disorder among the people, and to assure their own rightful and prominent place in the event of an
uprising
*--"Decembrists" were gaining momentum and seemed
at first in some harmony with larger state-sponsored trends. But with time the
societies became more oppositional
<>1819:French "public intellectual" Claude
Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825),"First Extract from the 'Organizer'"
*--Saint-Simon was the original "socialist" theorist. He fought with French forces
against England during the USA colonial wars. Back in France he surrendered his noble
title ("derogated" his title) and supported the French Revolution. Through
various speculations he amassed a fortune, but contributed it all to the support of
scientific and scholarly research. Until his death he lived in extreme poverty, supported
only by his servant
*--He developed a view of the future which placed great responsibilities
on what he called "savants", trained specialists, an intellectual and
technocratic elite from all realms of business, productive, scientific, artistic and
professional life. These would be the leaders of the peaceful and productive industrial future, supplanting the
old destructive and war-like feudal elites -- priests, warriors, kings and seigneurs
-- and abolishing the medieval legacy of privilege or position by birth, rather
than merit and contributions to modernizing society. Saint-Simon's socialism
shared much with the liberalism of the industrializing, modernizing,
rationalistic bourgeoisie, but went a stop beyond standard European liberalism
*--Saint-Simon's legacy became entangled with that of Charles Fourier
[ID]. Together they exerted considerable influence as European
politics evolved so energetically in the years after the French Revolution
*--Saint-Simon's life and legacy fit the experience of the emerging elite Russian civil
society especially closely, for example, Mikhail Lunin,
Alexander Herzen [EG] and the Petrashevtsy [EG]
*--Auguste Comte served as assistant to Saint-Simon in his later years
*--By the 1830s, the followers of Saint-Simon had evolved into something like a
cult, adopting habits and outlook that could be called "religious", though one
might argue that was the last thing he would have wanted to be his legacy
<>1819:German Carlsbad Decrees, inspired by
a
Metternich-style conservative/reactionary outlook, sought to censor all
expressions of liberal and nationalistic dissent and to crush all voluntary (spontaneous)
social organizations, particularly university student organizations [the Burschenschaften] [SPE2:472-3]
*--German liberal Ernst Moritz Arndt described how the Napoleonic wars in
northern Germany set loose a powerful nationalistic and liberal political
movement [PWT2:124-5;
more on this era, 125-7]
<>1820:USA New York State political boss and future
President Martin Van Buren (1837-41) created "the Albany Regency", something new
in politics: a political party machine sustained by
the "spoils system" and control over nominations and, thus, selection of
officeholders in an otherwise democratic electoral system. This sort of "political
machine" has been called a "cadre party" within which large numbers of relatively passive adherents are guided by a
minority of professional party activists
<>1821:Central America | Wide-spread revolt against Spanish imperial power and colonial authority
*--Separate states formed out of the old colonial departments: Guatemala, Honduras,
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica. These tried a "Republic of United States of
Central America" or "Central American Union" but fragmented as the decades
wore on
*1823:Mexico achieved independence from Spain, after more than a
decade of revolutionary struggle against European imperialist dominion, but soon began to
disintegrate under internal and external pressure
<>1821:Ezo [Hokkaido] now no longer under direct shogun rule
<>1821:French reactionary political
philosopher and advisor to
Russian Emperor
Alexander I, Joseph de Maistre wrote The Pope
*1810:de Maistre wrote "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political
Constitutions"
[W]
*1822:de Maistre wrote "On the Spanish Inquisition"
[W]
<>1821:Moscow meetings of the Union of Welfare [Soiuz
blagodenstviia] spawned two
new and more politically oriented societies =
(1) Southern Society [Yuzhnoe obshchestvo] formed in Ukrainian regions where the
Second Army was quartered. Pavel Pestel' organized the society on
the basis of ideas
he formulated in a document that later came to be known as "Russkaia pravda"
[TXT]
(2) Northern Society [Severnoe obshchestvo] formed in Petersburg
Nikita Murav'ev was the founder [G/BBL]
Nikolai Turgenev
Mikhail Lunin
Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoi
Evgenii Obolenskii
*--The society grew significantly. It favored constitutional rule, but
felt that only a Constituent Assembly had the authority to formulate a
constitution. Nikita Murav'ev offered his "Konstitutsiia" as one that might
serve as a model [TXT]
*--The following Northern Society members strengthened its republican tendencies =
Kondratii Ryleev
Obolenskii
Nikolai Bestuzhev (baron)
Aleksandr Bestuzhev
Mikhail Bestuzhev
*1822au01:Russian Decree prohibited Masonic lodges and all secret societies
(the definition of which was "societies not formally approved by the tsarist
state"). The decree was provoked, in part, by the growing intensity of the
"Decembrist movement" [VSB,2:508]
*1823:Moscow | Despite decree, the Society of Wisdom-Lovers flourished with V. F.
Odoevskii at its head and future Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevskii and
radical "westernizer" Petr Chaadaev as members
\\
*--Wagar on Odoevskii [TXT]<>1822:Russia
introduced elaborate protectionist and tariff regulations that remained in force
for nearly a quarter of a century
*--German economist Friedrich List praised this act [TXT],
but market economists generally criticized it
<>1822:1831; German philosopher of eventual world
influence George W. F. Hegel [W#1]
[W#2],
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
*1821:Philosophy of Right
[TXT#1]
[TXT#2]
<>1822jy22:Speranskii, now
maneuvered from the center of power, crafted a Statute for the administrative organization
of Siberia, to make it more systematically a part of Russia and to promote entrepreneurial
freedom, thus reforming old mercantilist practices [VSB,2:506-8]
*--His policies included regulations governing how Siberia natives were to be
treated [DIR3:230-4]
\\
*--Raeff4:65-7
<>1823:1832; Russia suffered cholera epidemics
\\
*--McGrew, R. E. Russia and the Cholera, 1823-1832. Madison WI:1965
<>1823au16:Alexander I issued secret order concerning succession to the throne [VSB,2:510]
<>1823de02:USA President Monroe sent to Congress a message
which declared opposition to any new European colonies in the Americas (the western
hemisphere) and warned against any further interference in the affairs of the hemisphere.
The message (composed mainly by John Quincy Adams) came to be called the Monroe Doctrine
[TXT]
*--This "Doctrine" aimed in part to check Russian imperialist ambitions along NE
shores of the Pacific down to California.
[MAP] Some of the background to this is
shown in the following =
*1818, Oregon Territory was taken under "joint occupancy" by treaty
agreement between England and USA
*1821, Russia decreed that its New World territories stretched southward to
the 51st parallel (at the northern tip of Vancouver Island). The New World
Pacific Coast was in a state of flux. The fall of Spanish rule and the
establishment of new but weak Mexican rule in the northern
reaches of the old Spanish imperialist domains, "El Norte", opened a new set of
possibilities. The Monroe Doctrine was designed to help limit those
possibilities
*--There was in this connection an imaginary threat from the Holy Alliance which seemed ready to support New World Spanish
imperialism, eroding each day. USA was flexing its young muscle for the edification of the
Old World European imperialists. It turned a cold shoulder to England, refusing to issue
the document as a joint USA/English resolution
*--By 1825, Russia, USA and England were able to agree that 54 degrees, 40
minutes latitude would mark the southern border of Russian power (and thus the
northern border of Oregon Territory)
*--As the century wore on, the Doctrine came explicitly to imply a "corollary"
right of the USA to intervene in hemispheric affairs in reaction to the fear of
possible European
intervention -- or, as first in the case of Mexico, to correct perceived self-mismanagement on the part of western
hemispheric neighbors -- or simply to further US national interests
*--Opponents of growing US power were quick to say that the Monroe
Doctrine had in a sense reversed itself by the time
of Teddy Roosevelt. It now seemed, especially in Latin America, to justify and protect
USA imperialism rather than hemispheric independence
\\
*--Saul,1:92-110, 126-34
*--Russell Bartley, Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American
Independence, 1808-1828
<>1824:USA PA Beaver Co., Ambridge, north of
Pittsburgh in the upper Ohio R. valley | The
Harmonists, religious refugees from Germany, finally settled
*--George Rapp
(1757-1847), a young weaver, was their leader, so the group was also
known as Rappists. In 1804, the Harmonists originally migrated to
America from Iptingen (near Stuttgart) in southwest Germany. They came seeking
religious and economic freedom. Nearly 800 farmers and craftsmen followed Rapp,
first to Butler County, Pennsylvania, and then to Posey County, Indiana. They
stayed 10 years in each state, building and naming their towns Harmony. The
towns were designed by Frederick Rapp (1775-1834), the adopted son of
the Founder. The son would have to be adopted because the commune was a celibate
society. Still, the Harmonists were one of America's most successful Christian
communal groups. And Oekonomie was its third and final home in USA
*--The "utopian" and pacifist community built
Old Economy [Oekonomie] Village on their 3,000 acres in Ambridge. Excellent carpenters and
craftsmen, they built beautiful shops, homes, and a house of worship. They
cultivated well-planned herb, vegetable and flower gardens, and managed grape
vines [pix]. The Society
gained worldwide recognition for its religious devotion and economic prosperity
[W]
*--Despite the Society's economic success, time and certain events brought its
decline. In 1832, one third of the members left Economy under the leadership of
Count de Leon, a self-proclaimed prophet. [How often are prophets not
self-proclaimed?] And, in 1847, Father Rapp died.
By the end of the century only a few Harmonists remained. In 1905 the Society
was dissolved
<>1824:Penza described in official report [BL&T:23f]
<>1824:"Decembrist" Southern Society joined with
United Slavs. It now planned for a huge Slavic federation, including Russian, Poles,
Czechs, Moravians, Transylvanians, Serbs, Moldavians, Walachians, Dalmatians,
Croats. Hungarians were considered Slavs for this purpose
*--Ambitions of post-Napoleonic political thinking was as obvious here as at the
Congress of Vienna, except these “Decembrists” were planning "from the bottom
up" rather than from on high in the manner of the Vienna diplomats. The United
Slavs were in favor of mass
revolution directed against domestic economic and political oppressors and
national revolution against foreign or imperialist oppressors. [NB! Pavel Pestel’s
Russian nationalistic reluctance to consider
federalist independence for peripheral regions of the Russian Empire, for example, in the
Caucasus and Central Asia.]
*1824:Saint Petersburg | Something like a unity congress of these various
societies gathered. Northern Society met in HQ of the
Russian-America Co. The congress received the
full version of Pavel Pestel's Russia Truth [Russkaia prava] which projected a
future, more decisive
meeting of various related societies in 1826. Then
differences would be worked out and a general constitution agreed upon.
Circumstances, as we will see, prevented this great convocation of Decembrist
societies
\\
*--SIE,12:209 says Decembrists were closely associated with "incipient Russian
bourgeoisie" who wanted to shift the Russian America Co. to capitalist methods and
therefore were sympathetic to the Decembrists "antifeudal" outlook
<>1825:USA NY | Erie Canal completed connecting Hudson
R. with Lake Erie. The Canal ran west from above Albany, through Lake Oneida,
past Rochester, and into the waterway above Niagara Falls, between Lake Erie and
Lake Ontario. Its significance was that Atlantic seagoing transport now extended
deeply into the N. American continent via the Great Lakes
*--The Erie Canal project was financed
entirely by NY State tax revenues, then sustained in part by tolls. The people paid, and business thrived
*--The Canal guaranteed that NYC would become the principle US financial center,
the American "metropol", but it also contributed
to the rise of the great inland metropolis Chicago. The growth of regional
metropols represented a variation on the traditional European relationship between
the domestic metropol and its
peripheries. In the US tradition of federated union, several US metropols grew
in economic power in 19th and into the middle of the 20th century. After the US
Civil War and especially after WW2 a process of metropolitan centralization
gained headway
<>1825no:Siberia | Alexander I died unexpectedly, even
mysteriously. Popular legend had it that he lost interest in being Emperor and
chose instead to become a simple itinerant monk, Fedor Kuzmich, begging and
blessing the folk in villages throughout the Russian eastern frontier
[pix]
*--The previously established line of succession had already, in 1822, excluded brother
Konstantin. Grandmother Catherine
(the Great) had nurtured Konstantin and Alexander I to high power, but
Konstantin little taste for the job [DIR3:202-3]
*--That left only brother Nicholas, a much hated martinet and barracks hound
*--In this way, without much plan or expressed desire, revolution became the order of the day. A meeting at Kondratyi Ryleev's decided on an uprising
that would take the form of a refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the new
Emperor. If necessary, military force had a place in the plan in order to compel
the Senate to sign their revolutionary proclamation intended for circulation
among the Russian people. The proclamation announced the overthrow of
the Russian monarchy, changes in
serfdom, abolition of conscription, civil rights, convocation of a Constituent
Assembly to settle once and for all the question of constitution and the form of
government in the Empire
*--Sergei Trubetskoi, an experienced military leader, participant in the 1812
campaign, and well known to guards regiments, was designated Dictatorial leader
of the uprising
*1825de13:Trubetskoi's Manifesto of mutiny against the accession of Nicholas I [VSB,2:518
| DIR2:195-6]
<>1825de14:Decembrist uprising occasioned by a
succession crisis as the dreaded martinet Nicholas I ascended the Russian
Imperial throne [DPH:278-81]
*--The
coincidence of December 14, however, had roots in a prior decade
of social activism and political deliberations within several volunteer
organizations that
promoted radical reform, even revolution, in Russia
*--On this fateful day, the long years of organized effort came down to this = About 3000 soldiers under the command of 30 officers
gathered under the banner of revolution on Senate square, boxed between the St.
Isaac’s Cathedral (under construction), the Senate Building, the Admiralty and
the Neva River in Petersburg [pix]. Many soldiers (peasants in uniform) thought the
formula they shouted -- “Konstantin i konstitutsiia!” -- referred to Konstantin
and his wife. This tale should work less to reinforce possible regrettable
disdain for common folk than to underscore the incompetence and disorganization
of the so-called Decembrist leadership. Trubetskoi even failed to show. Brief skirmishes broke out between
loyal and insurrectionary troops. Decembrist P.G. Kakhovskii killed
Governor-General Miloradovich. All too late, prince Obolenskii was selected to
replace Trubetskoi in the role of "leader". Chaos ensued. Units fleeing the scattered struggle broke
through the ice of the Neva, many drowned. But the immediate crisis was over
*--“Decembrist Uprising” (Anatole Mazour unfortunately called it “the first
Russian revolution”) was no more than an abortive armed insurrection, perhaps
only a coup d'état aimed against the despised new Emperor Nicholas I. Events
followed from an unusual and unexpected succession crisis
*1825de20:News of the failed uprising reached the Southern Society, but Pestel was already under arrest
(1825de13 NB!). Military resistance to Nicholas continued =
*1825de29:Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol and M. Bestuzhev-Riumin led the Chernigov regiment
against Nicholas I, and composed a revolutionary proclamation, Katekhizis,
which freed soldiers from military service to Nicholas I and promised a republic
for Russia
*1826ja03:Ukrainian regions where the Southern Society was active were pacified
*1826jy13:Five Decembrists were hanged =
Pavel Pestel,
Sergei Murave'ev-Apostol
Matvei Bestuzhev-Riumin
Kondratyi Ryleev
Kakhovskii
*--One-hundred and twenty one were sent into Siberian exile, hard labor
*--579 persons were questioned in connection with the uprising
*--The common folk were not directly involved in the populist movement. An
educated elite was forming into something like a self-conscious activist leadership for
national political action. They addressed the plight of the folk, and even allowed that
the folk might at some future date play a role in shaping their own better future [WRH3:256-62
| DIR2:174-8 | DPH:278-81]
*--Raeff1
*--First Breath of Freedom [>FBF, an anthology of translated primary documents]
*--Mazour,First:273-9
*--Decembrist memoirs of M.A. Fonvizin, A.E. Rozen, I.I. Gorbachevskii (on Society of
United Slavs) [VSB,2:522-8]
*--Over the next twenty years of Siberian exile, Mikhail Lunin continued to struggle against the tsarist state, and he composed
reflections on the Decembrist epoch that were reprinted and read in later
decades of political activism, "A Look at the Secret Society in Russia (1816-1826)"
[TXT]
\\
*--Saul,1:149-65 describes how Decembrists were influenced
by USA constitutional ideas
*--N. Eidel'man,
Conspiracy Against the Tsar:
A Portrait of the Decembrists
*--Anatole Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution, 1825:The Decembrist Movement; Its
Origins, Development, and Significance
*----------. Women in Exile: Wives of the Decembrists. Tallahassee:1975
*--Patrick O'Meara,
K. F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet
*--M. Zetlin, The Decembrists
<>1825de:On the eve of
the “Decembrist” rebellion, Aleksandr Pushkin finished his “Comedy about Tsar Boris and
Grishka Otrepiev” [The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy]. Pushkin was scheduled to be in SPb on the day of the rebellion, but turned back from the
imperial capital and thus perhaps prevented arrest with other conspirators
*--Pushkin reworked the poetic historical account of Tsar Boris and, six years later, published it as
a “tragedy” [ID]. The project was first a comedy then a tragedy, suggesting a certain historical (rather than simply
literary) sense of human experience as “tragicomic”. Clearly, Pushkin had in mind the need for a Russian
equivalent of Shakespeare’s great English-historical plays
*--On the very day of the rebellion, Pushkin completed his poem “Count Nulin”, a parody of Shakespeare’s
“Rape of Lucrece” (and possibly of history). Pushkin raised a “counter-factual” question, always dangerous
for the historian = What might have happened if Lucrece had slapped the would-be rapist Tarquin, turning
him back. “Lucrece would not have stabbed herself, Publius would not have become enraged, Brutus would not
have driven out the Ceasars.... And so we owe the republic, the consuls, the dictators, the Catos, the Casears,
to a seduction similar to the one that took place recently in our neighborhood”
*--Andrei Siniavskii (Abraham Tertz) [ID] wrote, in Strolls with Pushkin, that the fictional character
“Count Nulin” absorbed energy from three actual historical episodes = the Decembrist rebellion,
Pushkin’s own
escape from arrest, and the rape of Lucrece. As in all complex moments of contingency, said Siniavskii, history
can turn in any direction
\\
*2006je30:TLS:7, Rachel Polonsky review of Uncensored... (above)
<>1825de14:1855;
Russian Emperor Nicholas I reigned for thirty years, an epoch that seemed to some to be
reactionary in the extreme, a panicked retreat from the Decembrist
uprising and all the progressive implications of the era of European revolution
*--Decembrists were transported to distant Siberian exile. Within a few years a stream of
Polish "freedom fighters" followed them into what was to become a combination of
removal, concentration and frontier development = Siberian exile
*--Yet Nicholas and his ministers paid close attention to the voluminous testimony they
gathered in interrogations of Decembrists and associates [VSB,2:528-30]
*--Read through 1827oc:below, then follow "reform" hypertext hops to see how
measures taken in the time of Nicholas I combined "reactionary" and
"progressive" motives
\\
*--Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Army Under Nicholas I, 1825-1855. Durham,
N.C.:1965
*--Lincoln, W. Bruce. Nicholas I
*--Lobanov-Rostovsky, Andrei. Russia and Europe, 1825-1878. Ann Arbor:1954
<>1826:1879; Russian state institutions were supplemented
by a set of "His Majestys Own Chanceries". Nicholas created a
new parallel set of institutions through which he could exert his autocratic
authority, free from the complex ministerial mechanisms
created in the time of Alexander I.
*--The Third Section [secret state
police] was formed out of functions and bureaus that Speranskii
had earlier attached to the Interior Ministry. The Third Section became a symbol of
Nicholas-style unlimited autocracy, and it survived the longest (until 1879) [KRR:257
| VSB,2:533]
*--Read to 1827oc for reform style of Nicholas I
\\
*--Sydney Monas,
The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (1961)
*--Peter S. Squire,
The Third Department
(1968)
<>1826:Kazan University
[W] Professor of Mathematics
Nikolai Lobachevskii [W] published his
path-breaking studies in non-Euclidian geometry. The next twenty years witnessed a
provincial cultural and intellectual renaissance in the Russian/Tatar city Kazan, but
officials soon removed Lobachevskii from his academic posts
<>1826ap22:Russian censorship statute tightened control
over the printed word [VSB,2:533-4]
*1826de12:Admiral A. S. Shishkov sent memo to Nicholas I about censorship [DIR3:235-7]
<>1826my12:au09; Russian manifestos on peasant serf disturbances [VSB,2:541-2
| DIR2:197-8(ap20?)]
<>1827oc:Russian Emperor Nicholas I issued a decree on the education of peasant
serfs [BL&T:120]
*1827de12:Educational opportunities for non-privileged sosloviia were
restricted [DIR3:237]
*--Nicholas I continued the innovations of earlier autocrats, but the
policy of Nicholas I might best be called "frightened absolutism" (rather than
enlightened absolutism). His reforms were "reactionary
reforms"
<>1827:1829:Caucasus Mountain, northern slopes
| Daghestan
Muslim movement arose against Russian imperial control. First Daghestan imam Hazi-Mohamed
[Hazi-Mulla] preached Islamic holy war against Russia
<>1828:Armenian river valley of the middle Kura reached by Russian imperial
forces, carving away from Iranian (Persian) imperial power an old Christian nation south
of the Caucasus. The "Great Game" seemed to go Russia's way,
particularly in the Caucasus Mt. region
\\
*--Gillard, David.
The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914: A Study in British and Russian
Imperialism
<>1829se02:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Adrianople
treaty, acknowledging Russian control over the northern 2/3 of the Black Sea coast,
and independence for two Orthodox Christian peoples, Serbs (Yugoslavs) and Greeks [VSB,2:537-8
| DIR2:199-207 | DIR3:239-43]
<>1830fe04:Caucasus Mountains, northern slope, Chechnya
and Daghestan | First significant victory of expanding Muslim holy war against
Russian dominion
*--This was not directly a European imperial conflict, it was local revolutionary
resistance to one great power. Indirectly, other great powers helped the rebels, less in
the interest of local self-determination than in the interest of weakening a competitor,
Russia. Much the same can be said about growing international support of Polish rebellion against Russian power
*--Russia knew this tactic; it had itself earlier taken
steps to help USA rebels against Great Britain
*--Divisions of indigenous warriors were led by imams, one of whom was Shamil

Daghestani resistance to Russian rule was led
in the first half of the 19th century
by Muslim holy warriors, such as the fabled
imam Shamil [Shamyl]
Shamil was gifted spiritual and military leader, trained in Arabic scholarship and
committed to salvation of his native land and customary ways in the face of powerful
Russian armies. Shamil soon became imam.
[pix]
[pix]
*--War of liberation lasted 29 years until 1859ap
[BrE,77:125-32]
*--Russian imperialist expansion bogged down
\\
*--Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (LND:1978) DK511.c3855
*--Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and
Daghestan (LND:1994) DK511.c2 G28
*--Smirnov,Nikolai Aleskandrovich, Miuridizm na Kavkaze (Moscow: 1963) BP189.S5
<>1830:USA NY Fayette | Joseph Smith (1805-1844) founded
the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (most widely known as the
Mormon Church). Born in Vermont, Smith's family migrated westward to NY Palmyra.
Young Smith was always bothered by the multiplicity of religious creeds he saw
around him. Just a teenager, he reported a vision of two angelic figures who
warned him not to join any of these denominations because god was about to
restore the one true faith. In another vision he learned that the second coming
of Christ was imminent. Here he learned also the location of certain plates of
gold recording hitherto hidden sacred truths. Much later, in 1827, Smith
dictated to Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and others his translation of the
unique language and script of the golden plates. In 1829 Smith and Cowdery
announced that an angel appeared to them and ordained them as priests of Aaron
in a renovated faith. They were authorized to baptize one another by immersion.
The translation of the new gospel was published as Book of Mormon (1830).
This was nothing less than a "newest testament", an extension of the word of god
beyond the old and new testaments, building on the Mosaic revelations and the
synoptic gospels. It described how the original native peoples of the New World
were the lost tribe of Israel, dispersed hither at the time of the Tower of
Babel. The original gold plates subsequently disappeared from this earth. A new
church, however, began to set down strong roots in the New World
*1831:1839; USA OH Kirtland | Smith relocated the church. and the religious
community prospered with large business developments. Various complications
forced the congregation to migrate to MO briefly. They were then driven from MO
to IL
*1839:1844; USA IL, on E bank of the Mississippi R | Smith renamed the town
Commerce "Nauvoo", which prospered under Mormon settlement, just as earlier. But
political
embroilment and conflict with surrounding communities led to Smith's downfall.
For one thing, Smith experienced another heavenly revelation in 1843 which
sanctioned plural marriage (polygamy, defined in this community as one husband,
several wives). This did not jibe with the practice of neighboring frontier
settlers who, for the most part, took guidance in these and other matters from
the two previous divine testaments (i.e., the Old and the New testaments). Smith was commander of a city militia, the Navou Legion, which was created to enhance the security of the eccentric Mormon
community but which other Mormon leaders condemned. Smith destroyed the printing
press of the Expositor, through which the opposition expressed itself.
Smith appealed to the Legion to support him, but he and his brother were jailed
in IL Carthage
*1844je:USA IL | Carthage mob murdered Smith and his brother
*1846:A large part of the Mormon community pulled out
of IL Nauvoo (and other locations) and headed for the high desert west, under
the leadership of Brigham Young, President of the Council of Twelve. Not all
Mormons left for the west. They stayed and created a Reorganized Church of Jesus
Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Three years later, the largely abandoned city
Nauvoo was occupied by a French utopian community, the Icarians, led by E'tienne
Cabet. Seven years later, in 1856, the Icarians split up and abandoned the town.
<>1830:Europe-wide revolution
was
felt with special intensity in France. A broad assault was launched on
the remains of the old-regime, this in the name of a new "liberal" order. "The July Revolution" toppled the French king, so
recently restored to his throne after the Congress of Vienna [ID].
A restricted monarchy, known as "The July Monarchy" reigned,
1830-1848, under the authority of what must be called a liberal or moderate
"bourgeois" power, a power based on wealth and financial prominence
rather than older heritable, aristocratic, or royal claims. The last hopes of
restoring the old regime -- of reconstructing "The West" as it was prior to the
1789 French Revolution
[ID] -- were crushed
<>1830se13:French
liberal leader François Guizot (1787-1874) delivered a report to the legislative chambers. A professor of history at the University of
Paris, Guizot was drawn into politics by the hope that a moderately liberal
monarchical government could pass progressive educational reform, so as to
elevate citizens to a level sufficient to sustain representative democracy. Literacy
had reached sufficient levels to sustain a newly emerging profession, vital to
the future of European civilization = journalism
*--Over
the next eighteen years, Guizot thrived as liberal minister and politician, but
as time went on he grew less certain of the natural political alliance of the
well-to-do with the laboring poor. Not all "commoners", not all members of "The
Third Estate", prospered quite like those "bourgeoisie" with whom Guizot
increasingly identified. One of the great contradictions built into the liberal
doctrine -- that between poor commoners and increasingly rich commoners
[ID] -- was about to bring
down Guizot
<>1830:1842; French
socialist theorist and originator of
"sociology" Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy
*--Comte was an acolyte of Saint-Simon and the
systematizer of that powerful trend of European thought called "Positivism"
\\
*--Wagar on Positivism [TXT]
<>1830de20:1832; Polish Revolt declared
independence and worked to strengthen independence of Sejm (or Seim;
Polish parliament) [VSB,2:534 |
DIR3:199]. Struggle for national
independence in Poland lasted almost two years in an era of Europe-wide
insurrection against the vestiges of various "old regimes"
*1832:Russian Emperor Nicholas I revoked the Polish constitution which
dated from the
Alexandrine epoch. Thus an early European experiment in "devolution" came to an
end [ORW:92] Reactionary reform continued
*1835oc:Nicholas I issued statement to representatives of the subdued Polish
nation [DIR3:200]
*--Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz inspired his Polish nation
[KMM:74-83]. Ethno-cultural nationalism was a characteristic feature of the
Romantic era
*--Polish sentiment was inspired by liberalism and
nationalism, but these two inspirations were sometimes contradictory
[ID]
\\
*--Andrzej Walicki,
Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian
and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (1991)
*--Jerzy Jan Lerski,
A Polish chapter in Jacksonian America; the United States and
the Polish exiles of 1831 (1958)
<>1831:1833; USA ambassador to Russia was James Buchanan.
His papers have been published =
James Buchanan's
Mission to Russia, 1831-33
<>1831:Italy |
Giuseppe Mazzini founded "Young
Italy" to struggle for liberal republican national unity among the many divided
and competing political and administrative regions. He sought to bring together
all Italian-speaking peoples who lived along the southern slopes of the Alps,
south of Switzerland, all along the Italian boot, and on the Sicilian island, to
dissolve the old independent feudal authorities and city-states, and to create
one nation-state = Italy [DPH:170-9
|
PWT2:127-9]
*1831oc31:England | Bristol the site of popular disorders in support of reform.
The disorder was put down sharply [pix],
but in the next years the first English reform bill went
through. The winds of liberal change blew even in
Burke's stable and conservative England
[ID]
<>1831:Russias greatest poet,
Aleksandr Pushkin wrote "Boris
Godunov" (tragic historical play) and "Evgenyi Onegin" (poetic drama)
*1827:Orest Kiprenskii portrait of Pushkin in Olga's Gallery
[pix]
*--The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism.
Was Pushkin a representative poet of the Romantic era? This has been much
debated, with the edge going to those who point out Pushkin's clear debt to
neo-classical traditions and his particular "Russian" way of blending the two
great esthetic traditions. As the 19th century reached its middle, the
long Romantic era was on the wain
*--In the 1830s Pushkin went to Orenburg to study the Pugachev rebellion
\\
*--Wagar on the Pushkin era [TXT]
<>1831:USA Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John
Marshall delivered his opinion on the legal cases dealing with indigenous Native
American peoples, the
Cherokee Nation vs. the USA [TXT]
*--Over the next few years, forced removal and concentration of
Native American nations was observed by
French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville and described in his famous book on
Democracy in America [TXT]
\\
[W devoted to Seminole Nation] = In 1832, the Payne's Landing Treaty took away all Florida land claims from the tribe, and
provided for removal to Indian Territory. Ratification of that treaty in 1834 allowed the Seminole three years
before the removal was to take place. But under the U.S. government's interpretation, 1835 (not 1837) ended the
three year period prior to removal. The Seminole disagreed, and their bitter opposition resulted in the second, or Great
Seminole War. Among the worst chapters in the history of Indian Removal, the war lasted almost seven years and cost
thousands of lives. It finally ended in 1842 with the agreement that several hundred members of the tribe could remain
in Florida. They stayed in the Florida swamps but never surrendered. Their descendants are the Seminole in Florida today
<>1831:USA VA | Nat Turner's rebellion
\\
*--Kolchin:251
<>1831:USA inventor Cyrus McCormick (22 years old) successfully
introduced mechanical reaper into the grain production process
[pix]
*1834:John Deere marketed a steel moldboard plow
*1840:USA ports began use of large steam powered shovels to load and unload
grain from large sea-going transports
*--Industrial technology beginning to transform traditional agricultural
economies =
*1837:USA average =
148 man-hours/acre to cultivate, plant and harvest grain
*1890:USA average
= 37 man-hours/acre to cultivate, plant and harvest grain
*--Industrialization caused rise of international trade in grain
<>1831:1864; French-born engineer and entrepreneur Isambard Kingdom Brunel
made his career in England after his family fled from the French Revolution
[W]
*--He
designed and built remarkable
Clifton Bridge [pix]
[pix]
[pix]
[pix]
<>1831fe18:Russian decree limited foreign education for Russian subjects;
counter-reform mounted [VSB,2:543-4]
<>1831de06:Nicholas I refined the structure of the Noble Assembly (created
originally by Catherine II) in another reactionary reform measure [VSB,2:543-4]
<>1832 and 1834:USA trapper and explorer Nathaniel Wyeth kept journals of two expeditions
to Oregon Territory
<>1832:England passed its
first reform bill
which addressed a series of political/institutional problems caused by
industrial modernization. Until this time, only one in sixty "subjects"
of the English throne could participate in Parliamentary electoral politics, as
voters or as members of Parliament (representatives, legislators). Many boroughs
(electoral districts) were under the control of the crown or of insider
aristocratic elites. Many boroughs had almost no population in them ("rotten
boroughs"), yet they sent two members to Parliament. The great industrial cities
Manchester and Birmingham sent no members to Parliament. Certainly the wage-laboring
"people" were excluded from formal political life, but so also were the new
financial elites, earlier simply "commoners", now "bourgeoisie" created by
industrialization. These new elites were ready now to "step up" to political as
well as increasing social and economic dominance in English life
*--Over the next century, four more liberal reform bills were put through
expanding the franchise and gradually democratizing Parliamentary representation
<>1832:German liberal activist Paul Pfizer on
liberalism and nationalism. Here are two related samples [MDF:99-100] =
"Freedom within and independence from without, a personal
liberty and nationality -- these are the two poles toward which all the life of
the century is directed"
"It is, of course, foolish to demand that Germans wholly
forget about freedom within until they have secured independence from without;
but it is just as wrong, if not more so, to wish to sacrifice nationalism to
personal liberty" [emphasis mine]
*--The German political-economist Friedrich List was
aware of this contradiction at the heart of modern European
liberalism
*--Irish movement for national independence showed
another face of this dilemma
<>1832:Russian laws gathered and systematically
indexed. Digest of Russia Law, the first since 1649
*--Only now, in the reign of reactionary Nicholas, was this small portion of Speranskii's
ambitious
reform project complete [VSB,2:534-5 |
WRH3:272-3]
*--The ground-work was being laid for the great
legal reforms of the 1860s
<>1832:USA and Russia sign first treaty of Navigation and
Commerce, in force until 1911
\\
*--Saul,1:111-32
*--Walther Kirchner, Studies in Russian-American Commerce, 1820-1860 (1975)
HF3628.U5k57
*--Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., America, Russia, Hemp and Napoleon: American Trade with
Russia and the Baltic, 1783-1812 (1965)
<>1832:USA MA | Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned as Unitarian minister and founded
Transcendentalist tradition
*1837au31: -----, "The American
Scholar" [TXT]
*1842: ----- , "The Transcendentalist"
[TXT]
\\
*--Wagar on Transcendentalism [TXT]
<>1833mr21:Russian Education Minister Sergei Uvarov
announced doctrine of "Official Nationality". For more than ten
years, Uvarov enforced it as something much like a modern state ideology. The ideology
rested on a three-part foundation: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and narodnost'
[nationalist spirit] [VSB,2:564-6 | BL&T:192]
*1816:Orest Kiprenskii portrait of Uvarov in
Olga's Gallery
*--The Uvarov doctrine seemed to overturn the Enlightenment spirit
of the previous century and the
universalism of Alexander I. It represented a novelty
and was in this sense very much in keeping with the
reactionary reformist reign of Nicholas I
*--Intellectuals resisted this official doctrine and sought to define their very
own "unofficial nationality"
*--Some of these intelligents were called "Slavophiles".
For example = Konstantin Aksakov (heir of Russian family that
settled the Bashkir steppes) and Aleksei Khomiakov
[VSB,2:577-82]
*--Ivan Kireevskii
was possibly the most gifted philosopher and theological historian among them
*--Ivan Aksakov, (Konstantin's brother)
lived a long, active life and experienced the transition of Slavophilism and
panslavism from cultural opposition and dissent to
sympathetic support of Russian imperial expansion
*--The Slavophiles' opponents were called "Westernizers". For example, Moscow University
History Professor Timofei Granovskii was a leading influence on this trend [VSB,2:574-5
|
LDH:168-78]
*--Petr Chaadaev was an extreme "westernizer"
[See his 1829:Letters on the philosophy of history in LDH:67-78
| DIR3:246-52].
More on idea of "The
West"
*--A central bone of contention between Slavophiles and Westernizers was the
question of "native" village culture
*--Alexander Herzen seemed to
reconcile the
views of Westernizers and Slavophiles, but with a radical socialist, extremely "unofficial" brand of nationalism.
[TXT on early chapters of Herzen's memoirs which deal
with the 1830s]
*--Together, Slavophiles and Westernizers were the first significant and
numerous representatives of what would in thirty years be called the
"intelligentsia"
\\
*--Florovsky,5:238-68 describes "Church and State
under Nicholas I", then in vol. 6:1-101 he describes the vibrant new secular culture
that arose in that era
*--Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia,
1825-1855 (1959)
*----------------------,
A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public
in Russia, 1801-1855 (1976)
*----------------------,
Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (1952)
*--E. C. Thaden,
Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia
(1964)
*--Cynthia H. Whittaker,
The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual
Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855 (1984)
*--Edward J. Brown,
Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830-1840 (1966)
*--Peter Christoff,
An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism (4
volumes)
*---------------------. The Third Heart: Some Intellectual-Ideological Currents in Russia,
1800-1830 (1970)
*---------------------,
K. S. Aksakov:
A Study in Ideas (1982) v.3 of Introduction
*--Andrzej Walicki,
The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in
Nineteenth-century Russian Thought (1975)
<>1833je26:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Unkiar-Skelessi
Treaty, creating an alliance and mutual defense arrangement [VSB,2:538
|
DIR2:207-9 | DIR3:243-45]
*--England and other players in the "Great Game"
were as much disturbed by Russian "friendship" with the Sublime Porte as they
were by successful Russian
imperialist expansion
<>1833je28(NS):French Minister of Education François
Guizot passed law reforming primary education [DPH:230-2]
*--The democratization of culture required public education, but it also fed the
growth of journalism and the popular arts, and it raised the problem of
"popularization" of high civilization in the minds of traditional elites
<>1833oc03:Berlin Convention granted Russia special
responsibility for Poland, Hungary, and the
Balkans [VSB,2:535]
<>1834se19:Caucasus (Daghestan) leader Shamil became imam after death
of old imam, and after Shamil killed only competitor for
Avar throne
<>1835:1840; French political theorist
Alexis de
Tocqueville searched for the roots of USA political life, Democracy in
America. [I recommend the concluding chapter to volume one [TXT],
with particular attention to the CONCLUSION which provides a fuller than usual
context for thinking about the famous "prescient" words about Russia and
America] [Full TXT]
<>1835:1842; USA FL | Seminole wars
pitted US army against resolute Native Americans
\\
*--Kolchin:250
<>1835: English economic historian Edward
Baines published his explanation for English preeminence in the development of
the "factory system",
The History of
the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain , with emphasis on the
entrepreneurial energies and skills of figures like Richard Cartwright [Excerpts
= PWT2:136-42]
<>1835:1842; Russian railroad
construction got under way. USA specialists involved
*--Nicholas I decree in 1842 [VSB,2:551]
*--Introduction of the greatest and most advanced industrial technology seemed in stark
contrast to the continued plight of serfs, and yet it was further evidence that
"reform" was possible, even if mainly "reactionary reform"
\\
*--Saul,1:134-47
*--Haywood, Richard Mowbray. The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia and the
Reign of Nicholas I, 1835-1842. Durham NC:1969
*--Westwood, J. N. A History of Russian Railways. London:1964
<>1835jy26:Russian universities came under new restrictive counter-reform
regulations [VSB,2:562-4]
*--In this year, Russian Committee for Investigating Ways and Means of Improving the
Condition of Peasants of Various Classification issued memo of its chairman I.V. Vasil'chikov. The Committee attacked a widespread idea among serfs that, while they might
be property of the gentry, the land belonged to them [VSB,2:544]
*--Yet plans were being laid in secret for significant rural reform,
perhaps not reactionary at all
<>1836:Russian thinker Petr Chaadaev (-1856)
published "Philosophical Letters" [TXT] [Raeff3:160-73
|
KMM:38-46 | Edie,1 | RRC2,2#25
| VSB,2:566]
*--Censors ordered psychiatric treatment and condemned the author, forcing him to publish in
1837 "Apology of a Madman" [KMM:50-7]
*--Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman
*--The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev
\\
*--R. T. McNally, Chaadayev and His Friends: An Intellectual History of Peter Chaadaev and
His Russian Contemporaries (1971) ORBIS
*--Wagar on Chaadaev [TXT]
<>1836fe04:Ireland | Daniel O'Connell, "Justice for Ireland"
[W], attacked
English imperialist rule in the name of national independence
<>1836sp:Texas Republic in
military struggle for independence from Mexico, itself only
a dozen years free from Spanish imperial dominion
[MAP]
<>1836ap:1836jy:Caucasus, the Chechen region | The Russian
Imperial army retreated
*--Rumors of local resistance leader
Shamil’s strength spread all along the northern slopes of the Caucasus
<>1836oc19:Aleksandr
Pushkin
wrote a letter to
Chaadaev about his book Philosophical
Letters., in which he expressed his astonishment that it was published.
Pushkin didnt agree with
all of Chaadaevs ideas. Yes, Schism separated Russia from Europe [e.g., 1054:Great Schism in European Christian
Church, splitting East from West]. But Pushkin asserted that Russians have "our own special mission" [e.g.,
P. supported Russian imperialist expansion]. Russia
absorbed the blow delivered by Mongol conquest; thus Christian civilization was
saved. Byzantine tradition not such a fetid well as Chaadaev suggested. Up to Feofan [Prokopovich]
the Russian clergy was respectable. Pushkin praised the
great moments, even grandeur of the Time of
Troubles. Pushkin conceded that Chaadaev was right about the Russian public
= "absence of public opinion, the
indifference toward all duty, justice, and truth...." [780] [Letters of
P...:778-81,796-8]
*1836:Russian journal Sovremennik
[Contemporary] published article by Aleksandr Pushkin about John Tanner, a USA
white man raised by Native Americans. Pushkin's
grandfather was a black African servant in the court of Peter the Great, so the
poet had a great personal interest in "multi-culturalism"
*--Pushkin
also wrote a critique of Tocquevilles Democracy
in America. He discussed this critique in a letter to Petr Chaadaev [Ibid.:798,
notes 9 and 10]
<>1837:Chaadaev,"Apology of a Madman" [KMM:50-7]
<>1837:Russian historian of peasant serf stock Mikhail Pogodin, "Letter on
Russian History" [KMM:60-8]
<>1837:USA MA | Horace Mann became secretary of the MA State Board of Education
<>1837ja28:Petersburg |
Aleksandr Pushkin died as a consequence of a duel
*--Traumatic event inspired Mikhail Lermontov to a brilliant four years of poetic creation, which
included his 1839 novella A Hero
of Our Time
<>1837je:Caucasus battles as Russia advanced
against Shamils mountain retreats. Russia struck deeper into his high fastness than
ever before, but Shamil eluded capture
<>1837je03:Nicholas I issued instructions on the functions to be performed by
provincial governors, a counter-reform measure [VSB,2:535-6]
CF: reform act of Catherine II
*1837:1841; Russian minister Pavel Kiselev carried out emancipation
of state serfs, working as head of a separate and new Ministry of State Domains.
He sought to center local self-administration in the hands of the village assembly [mirskoi
skhod] on state domains and to promote private farm ownership [VSB,2:544-8,
550-1 (Zablotskii-Desiatovskii memo)]
*--Before 1861 emancipation, Kiselev's measures were the most
sweeping reforms of serfdom ever attempted in Russia.
Kiselev might be said to have revived a reform idea from
a half century earlier
*1842mr30:Russian Emperor Nicholas I in
speech to the State Council acknowledged that the problem of serfdom was far
larger than the scope of the Kiselev reforms. (There were, after all, well over
22 million "privately owned" serfs untouched by the Kiselev reforms.) Nicholas
said, "There is no question that serfdom in its present
state in our country is an evil, palpable and obvious to everyone. However, to attack it
now would be, of course, an even more disastrous evil" [VSB,2:552-3
|
KRR:295-6]
*--A decree did encourage expansion of potato planting among Russian serfs [VSB,2:551-2] And a new category of serf, called "obligated
peasants" was tried as a way to move gently toward reform of village life [VSB,2:553
| see related documents from a few years later:559-62]
*--Counter-reform continued, but it is obvious that some of
Nicholas'
"reactionary reforms"
were indistinguishable from just plain "reform"
*1847:Russian Interior Ministry report on serf disorders [KRR:296]
\\
*--Blum:475-503 (conditions among state serfs and
other categories of non-serf peasants)
*--Blum:536-51 (serf reform in the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I)
*--Steven Hoch,
Serfdom and
Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (1986)
<>1838:England | First Chartist Petition gathered in support of a written
constitution
*--In this same year, England abolished slavery in its colonial possessions,
but stepped up its aggressive imperialist expansion in
China
*--The rising demands of modern imperialism exacerbated the contradiction
between state sovereignty and the rights of citizens which so often slowed the
process of liberal reform
<>1838:USA indigenous Cherokee lands, mainly in NC GA TN,
seized by US Army, under the command of General Winfield Scott,
with the avid support of an associated mob of "settlers". Native Americans of
the Cherokee Nation were then "removed" to OK and western AR. As elders of the
tribe gathered for the last time on their ancestral land, they adopted a
resolution on Native American land =
The title of the Cherokee people to their lands is the most ancient, pure and
absolute known to man; its date is beyond the reach of human record.... The free consent
of the Cherokee people is indispensable to a valid transfer of the Cherokee title. The
Cherokee people have neither by themselves or their representatives given such consent. It
follows that the original title and ownership of lands still rests in the Cherokee Nation,
unimpaired and absolute. The Cherokee people have existed as a distinct national community
for a period extending into antiquity beyond the dates and records and memory of man.
These atributes have never been relinquished by the Cherokee people and cannot be
dissolved by the expulsion of the Nation from its territory by the power of the United
States Government. [Collier,Indians:124-5]
The US Army forcibly transported indigenous American farmers to "Indian
territory" and confined or concentrated them on what were thought to be wastelands,
the sites of the future states Arkansas and Oklahoma. Removal,
reconcentration and frontier development have long combined histories. "Indian
Removal" was the policy of the 1830s:
*--NB! Clash of two concepts of property =: tribal-property and "fee simple"
individual ownership

Artistic rendition of the 1838 "Trail of Tears"
[source blocked]
*--More on Native Americans
<>1839:Alaska | Russian-America Co. agreed on lease
to the Hudsons' Bay Co. giving them access to the sea from inland Canadian
territories down the Stikhine River. In exchange the Russians were promised much
needed supplies for Russian posts further north. For example =
*1838:1846; USA Sauvie Island (12 m. north of current Portland OR)
site of Hudson's Bay Co. dairies, one at old Fort Williams on western side of
the Island on Multnomah Channel of the Willamette River (ran by Laurent Sauvé
whose name became attached to the Island), the other dairy on the eastern
side near the Columbia River. These dairies were contracted to provide eight
tons of butter a year to the Russians up in Sitka, but they never managed more
than 2-3 tons
*1841:Hudson's Bay Co. administrator Sir George Simpson visited the eastern
dairy and reported 100 milk cows producing an average of 60 lbs. of butter/year.
(By the 1950s, the modern minimum norm butter production per cow was 350 lbs.).
Simpson also reported troublesome signs of US citizen incursions into these
territories. (He did not know that Lewis and Clark visited and much admired Sauvie Island on their great excursion). The question
of Oregon Territory had become a serious USA/English struggle. The English
claimed territory down to the Columbia River; USA claimed territory to the
southern limit of Russian Alaska = "54-40 or fight!"
*1841:Fort Ross in California had became less critical to the
Russian-America
Co., in part because of Sauvie Island butter, and was sold to John Sutter. A
few years later, Sutter's saw mill on the old Russian lease was the site of
significant gold discoveries. The gold rush was on, and even though the Russian
presence continued to be important in the San Francisco area (Russians saw to
the construction of the first steamboat on the San Francisco Bay in 1846), they
were sidelined in the unfolding struggle for ascendancy in California
*1846:Oregon Territory issue, after 40 years of
uncertainty, was settled when the current-day borders were accepted by USA
and England
\\
*--Omar Spencer, The Story of Sauvies Island (1950)
<>1839:1842; China took steps to prohibit English
importation of the debilitating drug opium. Opium was produced in India by
the East India Company and
sold in China in order to finance English imperialist expansion. In response to
the Chinese effort to end the opium trade, the English attacked several
Chinese ports. A 3-year Opium War followed. In the end, the English took possession of
the vital Chinese port cities Shanghai and Hong Kong [SWH:289-300]
*1843:John Elliot Bingham,
Narrative of the
Expedition to China
*1842:1859; All major
European states jumped in to impose on China what was called the "Treaty
System", which amounted to "Western" control of all Chinese sea ports. This was China's route to European imperialist domination
[1914:MAP of Asia]
<>1839:1842; Afghanistan | Ceaseless military clash between England and Russia. The
"Great Game" heated up. England checked Russian
imperialist expansion in SE Afghanistan
but suffered massacre in the central city, Kabul
<>1839je05:1839oc22; French aristocrat Astolphe, marquis
de Custine, visited Russia seeking inspiration from what he hoped would be a vibrant
aristocratic monarchy, but recorded his deep disappointment in The Empire of the Czar:
or, Observations of the Social, Political, and Religious State and Prospects of Russia,
made during a Journey through that Empire [Excerpt: VSB,2:548-50]
*--Here
is an example of his account
*--Long celebrated as a brilliant first-hand vision of Imperial Russia which
foretold Soviet Russia, recent scholarship suggests Custine relied as much on
ordinary Parisian newspaper accounts of Russian life and on rumors heard from
his friend Baron de Barante, the French ambassador to Russia [2000:CMR#41,1]
*--Translation of "La Russie en 1839". 3 volumes. LND:1843; reprint, Ann
Arbor:1978 [DK25.C98 1843a]
*--Journey for Our Time: The Russian Journals of the Marquis de Custine. Edited
[abridged] and translated by Phyllis Penn Kohler. Introduction by General Walter Bedell
Smith [thus signaling the Cold War significance of the 19th century critic of
Russia]. Chicago:1951
\\
*--Kennan, George Frost.
The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839
(1971). The great American diplomat of the early Cold War period was struck by the
profound similarities in Custines 19th century impressions and his own 20th
century impressions
<>1839au:Caucasus | Another horrible siege finally
succeeded against Shamil, but he again fled
<>1840:French anarchist theorist and political
activist, Pierre Proudhon, published What is Property? His answer,
"THEFT", made him famous. He wrote many later influential pieces [JANUS]=
*1846:System of Economic Contradictions, or, the Philosophy of Poverty
*1848:Proudon was elected to the French National Assembly in the midst of the
Revolution of 1848, fighting for establishment of national
banks to support the economic interests of the common folk
*1858:De la justice dans la révolution et dans
l'église [On justice in the revolution
and in the Church]
*--Proudhon was not an extreme anarchist in the sense that he was in favor of
government, even participated in it. But he thought governmental institutions
should always be adjusted downward to the lowest level. Bring those who govern
as physically (geographically) close as possible to the people governed. He
believed in checks and balances within a federated political structure and
social security within an egalitarian economic structure. His moral belief was
that individuals with time will evolve toward personal responsibility for their
own behavior, thus reducing external authority to near nothing
*1865:Proudhon died, but his followers, called "federalists", continued to play
a role in opposition to the "statist" Marx and his followers within the
First International
<>1841:1844; German political economist Friedrich List
published his National System of Political Economy (NYC: 1904). See
also Lists Natural System of Political Economy, 1837
[TXT of chapters 8-10, dealing with Russia, USA and
general historical significance of his system]
*--List was Saxon by birth, but had been deported to USA after becoming involved in
liberal politics. He returned as US Ambassador to the Saxon court in Leipzig. He was one
of the most powerful European voices for protective measures, tariffs, for example, as in
the Zollverein [a customs union, one of the early efforts at German unification]
*--His macro-economics argued against "laissez-faire" policies in late-blooming
industrializing or marketizing economies. In his view, "laissez-faire"
significantly advantaged foreign economic interests in competition with the
home-grown enterprise. "Emerging" nations must be protectionist so long as they
are threatened by foreign incursions. Perhaps among equally developed economies,
free trade might work. Here are List's central
paragraphs on that matter
*--Yet he insisted that the political or
institutional liberalization
had to precede economic modernization. He did not confuse political
freedom and democracy with market economic prosperity, and he insisted that the
former created the latter, rather than the other way around
*--Consider how these two paragraphs
of List [TXT] might be thought to describe "the
Westernization" of England
*--Critics pointed out that List's brand of liberalism accepted laissez faire
"within" (in domestic life), even as it caused the owning class to rise above
and exploit the working class. He was ready to abandon laissez faire "from
without" (in international relations) in order to protect the domestic owning
class from superior owning classes abroad. Nationalism gave rise to
contradictions [ID] in European
liberalism
*--List influenced Russian Finance Minister Sergei
Witte
*--Cf. 1765
*--GO 1861:Turkey
<>1841:England, France, Russia,
Prussia, and
Austria agree to use force to terminate the slave trade on the high seas
<>1842:Hawaiian Islands coveted by England. USA warned England off.
<>1842:Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809:1852) [W] published his magnum opus,
Dead Souls [TXT],
marking the beginning of what Pavel Annenkov called
The Extraordinary Decade: Literary
Memoirs [cf. KRR:414-17]
*--Gogol earlier (1836) published a famous satirical play "Inspector General"
[TXT]
which was taken as a sharp critique of Tsarist officialdom and the backwardness of
provincial life
*--Belinskii wrote a critique of Gogol that shocked Russian
culture
<>1842:Paris became home of first modern political/cultural émigré from Russian
imperial power, Ivan Golovin, who soon wrote a scathing expose of
Russia Under the
Autocrat Nicholas the First (LND:1846)
<>1843:1844; Prussian [German] conservative landowner
August, Baron von Haxthausen-Abbenburg traveled to Russia; published
Studies on the
Russian Interior, translated under several different titles [Excerpts: VSB,2:554-8
|
WRH3:273-86]
*--Haxthausen was appalled by
modernizing trends in "The West", especially in his native Prussia. He went to
Russia seeking confirmation of his firm faith in European old-regime tradition.
He resented governmental intrusion into established relations among rural
aristocratic elites and village laborers. He was therefore an inspiration to many
traditionalist Russians. Like Haxthausen, these Russians were resentful of
post-Petrine statist reforms [ID], which they considered artificial and "foreign".
All these traditionalist Europeans sought support for nativist, non-statist
visions of the good life. Such ideas about Russian rural life had been discussed in Russia before Haxthausen,
and they grew from the same anxiety about how modern market economics and
post-French Revolutionary politics were undermining traditional values and
social relations. These discussions could not be broadcast as widely in Russia as in the German-language press. For
example, Kiselev and his reform associates [ID] were compelled to work in secret
*--Haxthausen's insights intensified the Russian debate on the virtues (or lack
thereof) of village life, a debate that had as its broader quest the discovery
of essentially what it meant to be "Russian". Slavophiles and Westernizers [ID]
explored the implications of an unexpectedly independent village assembly [mirskoi
skhod] and the curious survival among many peasants of periodic land
redistribution and other community-centered concepts of property in land and "mutual assurance" [krugovaia
poruka]. These
issues arose again with a new political
urgency thirty years later
<>1843:Russian Emperor Nicholas I reacted to English
efforts to undermine the 1689:Nerchinsk and
1727:Kiakhta treaty privileges of Russia in China
*--Nicholas I wanted to send Admiral Efimii Vasilevich Putiatin
(1803-1884) on mission to Japan and China, but Russian Finance Minister and Chancellor
opposed, thus delaying for over a decade the establishment of official relations with Japan
*--By the time Russia re-engaged with China, the possibility of reinforcing the
long amiable relations between the two countries was overwhelmed by the
possibility that Russia might best strive to carve out of the hide of
China some modern imperialist advantages, as the other
"Western" states were doing
*--The
"Great Game" phase of European imperialist
expansion spread
into Asia. Russian imperialist expansion looked eastward again
\\
*--Mark Bassin, Imperial visions: Nationalist imagination and geographical expansion in
the Russian Far East, 1840-1865
<>1843au28:Caucasus Mountains | Shamil delivered RUS solid
defeat, forcing RUS temporarily out of Daghestan. For two or three years, Shamils
power reigned over large areas of CAU. By years end, Shamil
in full control of Chechnya and Daghestan
<>1844:USA, Boston to New York City | Margaret Fuller, author of the pioneer feminist essay
“Women in the Nineteenth Century”, moved from the old northeastern USA cultural center, Boston,
to the big city, New York, where she built on her commitment to
women's issues outward into a wider public sphere. She
represented a further expansion on the pioneer career of Mary Wollstonecraft
[ID]. She became an editor of Horace Greeley’s
liberal newspaper, New York Tribune. She had been
relatively happy in Boston, but now sought a wider audience for her favorite literary/cultural activity =
conversation. She sought to break out of the narrow salon culture of Boston and set about on a quest for a
vast “American” landscape of meaning. She believed that “newspaper writing is next door to conversation,
and should be conducted on the same principles”. Those principles derived from a high ethical sense of what
it meant when people talked with one another. Talking was the most refined of all human interactions, one in
which “souls” touched. In the young democracy, everyone should be brought into contact with quality communication.
Her embracement of conversation also derived from a rare dialectic sense of truth. In her view, truth was revealed
only in discourse. Truth was not simply discovered out there somewhere; it was not even the special realm of experts;
truth was forged and re-forged in the furnace of direct verbal interaction among people
*1845:1848; Fuller began to change her views on USA, under the impact of the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico
[ID].
She had been for years an ardent American (US) patriot, one who disdained “bankrupt Europe”. She wrote once that
a great artist like Titian could never “float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on
our Western Prairie”. But her patriotism for the “country”, for the “land”, did not carry over into an acceptance of
US expansionism. To her, the American Eagle was beginning to look like a vulture = “her eyes fixed, not on the stars,
but on the possession of other men”. So, she left USA and sailed for Europe and settled in Rome, one of the great
capitals of cultural emigration, a haven for those fleeing many different homelands, a most wide arena for her
philosophically defined "truth in conversation"
*1848:1849; Fuller deplored the violence and destruction of the Revolution of 1848
[ID], but she accepted the need
for her new homeland Italy to become “modern”. Unlike the growing number of tourists who flocked with their simple
guidebooks to stare at Roman antiquities, she mastered the Italian language, immersed herself in Italian life and
championed a new Italy. She understood and acquiesced to the radical intent of Italian nationalistic leaders
like Giuseppe Mazzini [ID]
*1850:Fuller, her partner, Count Ossoli (perhaps they were married), and their 2-year-old son, Angelino, sailed for
USA. Smallpox broke out on board. Angelino fell ill. The captain died. But that was not the end of misery. The
ship ran aground only 300 yards from shore, where crowds gathered but would not or could not do anything. “For
nearly twelve hours the passengers and crew were left hanging on to the rapidly disintegrating ship. Eventually,
one of the crew attempted to swim to shore with little Angelino -- and they were both drowned. A few minutes later Ossoli was washed off the ship by a wave.” A survivor wrote, “Margaret sat with her back braced against the
fallen foremast, still in her white nightdress, her hair loose on her shoulders and her hands on her knees”. Then
she too was swept off the ship and drowned. [*2007de21 & de28:TLS:12, article by Clare Pettit]
\\
*--Charles Capper,
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life
<>1845je11:Nicholas I issued manifesto which took the edge
off the Petrine Table of Ranks by making it more difficult for commoners to become
aristocrats on the basis of successful state service, an example of social counter-reform
[VSB,2:5558-9]
<>1845au15:Russia issued new Criminal Law Code [VSB,2:536-7]
*--As waves of European unrest spread to Russia, officials reacted
with more vigorous reactionary reform
<>1846:1848; Mexican-American War [W] brought USA firm title to TX and
territories that would become the states AZ CA NV NM and UT
*1845wi:USA annexed recently independent Texas
*1845no:USA President James Polk offered Mexico $5 million for New Mexico and
$25,000,000 for California. Mexico refused
*1846my09:USA learned that Mexican forces had attacked USA troops and declared war. USA
forces commanded by Zachary Taylor
*1847mr27:USA General Winfield Scott laid siege of Vera Cruz
after commanding first large-scale amphibious operation when he landed near Vera Cruz,
Mexico. Within days he moved toward Mexico City
*1848fe02:USA and Mexico signed Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the
Mexican-American War. TX became part of the USA, plus over 500,000 square miles of territory (including
seven
future western states CA, NV, and UT, almost all of NM and AZ, and parts of CO and WY)
*--Twenty-seven years of Mexican independence
from Spain were now to be followed by growing subordination to expanding USA power
\\
*1996sp:WWQ:96ff, Robert W. Johannsen, "Americas Forgotten War"
*--Gary Clayton Anderson,
The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875
<>1846:Russia | Cyril-Methodios Society formulated bylaws [DIR2:229-32] Ukrainian intellectuals formed the group, influenced
by USA federalist political ideas and Russian Decembrist constitutional ideas [see also DIR3:261-6]
*--Manning, Clarence A.
Europes Freedom Fighter: Taras Shevchenko, 1814-1861: A
Documentary Biography of Ukraines Poet Laureate and National Hero
(1960)
\\
*--Luckyj, George S. N.
Young Ukraine: The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in
Kiev, 1845-1847 (1991)
<>1846:Czechoslovakia | Karel Havlícek "Panslavistic"
editorial in his newspaper, Prague News [KMM:83-90]
<>1846:English Corn Laws repealed. These laws restricted import and export of
cereal grain to the advantage of certain landowners and to the disadvantage of
the "consuming public". As the old land-owning aristocratic elite
fought to protect its economic foundations it supported tariff measures that
allowed them a near monopoly to sell their agricultural product at prices higher
than world-trade prices
*--Finally the liberal "Anti-Corn-Law League" prevailed [pix]. Old
feudal/agrarian England was now nearly completely transformed into modern industrial England.
The old agricultural economy and all the social-economic relations that grew up
to support it were being absorbed into the general market economy.
Nothing more dramatically illustrates the reason technical innovations in
machine manufacturing caused a broad revolutionary change in human life.
Traditional agrarian ways withered away, greatly traumatizing some and greatly
benefiting others. Should we be tempted to say that England was being "westernized"?
*--This dramatic, long-term struggle underscored one of the most profound
changes caused by industrialization = most urbanized manufacturing economies
with burgeoning new populations clustered around factory workplaces could no
longer feed themselves from within national borders. World trade in grain was
becoming a necessity like never before
*1845:+; Ireland
suffered years of failed harvests as a result of fungal growth on potato crops.
The Irish suffered deadly famine. About a million died, and another million set
sail for the new world. Liberals in parliament did very little to aid Ireland,
in harmony with the same "hands-off" or free-market principles that had guided
them in the struggle against the corn laws
<>1847jy15:Russian journalist, critic and all-round
pundit, Vissarion Belinskii published Letter to Gogol [Edie,1:312-320
| Excerpts: Raeff3:253-61
| KMM:135-7 | DIR2:221-8 | DIR3:252-61
| RRC2,2#26], a scathing critique of Nikolai
Gogols emotional and religious
Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. See also Gogols
Selected Letters...
*--More Belinskii [VSB,2:567-]
*--More Gogol
<>1848fe:France felt the first shocks of what
quickly became a Europe-wide "1848 Revolution", spreading from Paris, to Berlin,
etc [DPH:81-131] (All "1848" events are here dated NS)
[DPH:81-131]
*1848fe22:+; Paris gripped by rioting citizens, many discontented
representatives of the growing wage-labor force. Republican Provisional
Government tried to take control of events
*--The events of 1848 shared one distinct tendency, they often expressed a
democratic egalitarianism that went significantly beyond what European liberals
had grown comfortable with over the previous half century. The
liberal era was in transition toward the
social-democratic era
*1848ja:fe; Italy | Sicilian revolt spread to
Naples, leading to
constitution. Other regions of Italy were up in arms [DPH:179-86]
*1848mr12:mr15; Vienna revolts spread after university student uprising.
Powerful Austrian minister Metternich was forced to resign and flee into English exile,
ending his long and fateful career
*1848mr15:Budapest | Hungary declared itself independent but under the
monarchical authority of the Austrian Emperor
*1848mr17:+; Berlin in revolt.
Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV agreed to grant
constitution. Carl Schurz described [PWT2:131-5]
*1848mr18:mr22; Milan revolt against Austrian imperial control. Austrians
driven out until late summer
*1848fe:London | German theorist Karl Marx
and wealthy German industrialist (his holdings largely in England) Friedrich
Engels published The Communist Manifesto, originally in German but within a few
years in all major European languages
[TXT]. After a few lines of revolutionary
flourish about the specter of communism haunting all Europe, the first extended
section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", laid out a surprisingly vigorous account
of the progressive revolutionary accomplishments of the capitalist bourgeoisie
in the age of industrial revolution. Then the Manifesto called for yet
further progressive change in the direction of what was coming to be called "socialism",
an economic egalitarianism that went far beyond the social and political
egalitarianism supported by liberals
*--Because of involvement in events of the German
1848 Revolution, Karl Marx was expelled from Prussia to Paris, from which he was soon expelled
in the last days of the liberal-monarchist regime of Guizot. After a while Marx
found his way to liberal England. He withdrew from active politics to immerse himself
in
the library of the British Museum in London for ten years
*1848mr31:ap04; Frankfurt | German Pre-parliament [Vorparlement]
lasted only four days
*1848ap10:London, Kennington Commons | The "Chartist Movement"
gathered in a massive demonstration in support of their "People's Charter".
After more than a decade of feeble attempts to create a progressive British
written constitution ("charter"), the movement had now collected thousands of
signatures in their support. But the movement broke apart and became -- fairly
or not -- the object of establishmentarian ridicule. One of the world's first
"news-photos" captured the demonstration [pix]
*1848ap25:my15; Austria under a constitution for three weeks
*1848my04:Paris | French National Assembly came to order with a moderate
liberal majority
*1848my17:Vienna mass uprising forced Emperor Ferdinand I to flee to
Innsbruck
*1848my18:1849ap; Germany | For almost a year, the Frankfurt Assembly
[parliament] worked unsuccessfully to unite Germany under constitutional rule
*1848je17:Prague | Austrian troops, provoked in
part by the bold meeting in Prague of the First Slav Congress [ID], crushed Czech independence
movement
*1848je23:+; Paris | "June Days" a time of military suppression of mass
political mobilization with thousands killed. French "July Monarchy"
toppled (the last Bourbon king Louis Philippe abdicated). Liberal Guizot
also fell from power. Tocqueville description [PWT2:129-31].
Briefly thereafter Tocqueville served as French Foreign Minister, but soon fell
from power. Tocqueville had one more gift for European
political culture
*1848:France abolished slavery in its colonial possessions,
but progressive politics of France were declining, slipping toward the rule of
Louis Napoleon
*1848jy:Ottoman Turkey invited Russia to intervene in Danubian
provinces [Moldova] to quell disorders
*1848jy22:+; Vienna | Austrian Reichstag [elected representative
parliament] met
*1848se24:Budapest | Louis Kossuth proclaimed president of Hungarian committee
for national defense. The Austrian Empire seemed to be coming apart
*1849mr:Frankfurt Assembly issued a Federal Constitution of the
German States (excluding Austria). Prussian and Austrian jealousies
[ID] combined to
prevent either union of all German-speaking peoples or union just of northern
German-speaking peoples. The March constitution failed, and soon there was no
parliament at all
*1849my:Dresden experienced a late
and brief eruption of 1848 revolutionary disorders [ID].
Mikhail Bakunin was fresh from the excitement of the Slav Congress
[ID] held in Prague and now played a visible and
dramatic role on the barricades. The young composer Richard Wagner
[ID] saw Bakunin there and carried the
inspiration of titanic operatic struggle into his later musical career. Until
this time, Bakunin's "political experience" was largely intellectual and
confined to the famous Russian intellectual kruzhok [discussion circle]. The
Slav Congress and now action in Dresden gave him a taste of real-life
revolutionary politics, but it led immediately to his arrest, condemnation to
death, commutation eventually, after transfer to Russian authorities, into
Siberian exile and imprisonment. Bakunin made a deep impression on another
creative artist, Ivan Turgenev [ID]. In
1861, Bakunin escaped and fled to west Europe where
he struggled to revive himself as a
dominant force in European (including Russian) revolutionary politics
*1849au01:Hungary surrendered to invading Russian army which had been invited in
May to come to the aid of the crumbling Austrian
Empire
*--For the Russian experience in this time of European-wide political turmoil, GO 1849
\\
*--Jonathan Sperber,
The European
Revolutions, 1848-1851
<>1848:1896; Persia(Iran) ruled for 48 years by Naser-e-Din Shah
[ID]
*--In these years European science, technology, and educational methods were
introduced and economic modernization got under way, but this potentially great
era suffered from internal irresolution but mainly from constant intervention by
Russia and England. An early period of self-sustained modernization in
Iran (Persia) quickly passed<>1848:England | John Stuart Mill published
Principles of
Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy
*--The son of James Mill and heir to the traditions of the "classical
economists" [ID], John Stuart Mill
pushed the boundaries of English (and European) political-economic thought in
the direction of what was coming to be known as "socialism". He came under the
influence of the widely held "positivist" views of Auguste Comte
[ID] and tempered the harsh and static utilitarianism
of earlier figures [EG] with a
progress-based humanitarianism and egalitarianism.
John Stuart Mill placed individual liberty
at the center of his world view
<>1848je:Prague | First Slav Congress, chaired
by František Palacký, was a central moment
in the history of Panslavism as a cultural doctrine.
Provoked suppression by Austrian imperial authorities
\\
*--Lawrence D. Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (Boulder:1978) [d377.3.o7]
*--Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric, Panslavism and National Identify in Russia and in the
Balkans, 1830-1880: Images of the self and others (Boulder:1994) [d377.3.m54]
<>1848jy:Caucasus Mountains in grip of Russian
counter attack against Shamil
<>1848jy19:USA, NY, Seneca Falls | Elizabeth Cady Stanton composed early womens rights pamphlet, modeled on the
"Declaration of Independence" and titled "The Seneca Falls
Declaration" [TXT]
[W]
*--Feminism was becoming a world-wide phenomenon [SWH:315-39]
<>1848:USA offered to buy Cuba from Spanish Monarchy
<>1849:1899; The half century in which six dominant
trans-national or global grain-trade corporations came into their own
*1849:1877; CA attracted Isaac Friedlander on the
fabulous gold rush, then he turned to international trade in grain, arranging
shipment to ENG (14,000 mile haul). Finally he went bankrupt
*1850:Belgium | Antwerp became headquarters of the
Bunge family grain-trade business. Business family formed up in the 1600s and
branches went in different directions, one to Russia, one to Prussia, and one to
the Netherlands. Now concentrated, they put out feelers to the New World =
Argentina
*1850:Switzerland, Basel | Leopold Louis-Dreyfus began grain trade, making flour in Hungarian mills, at that time
the world’s best
*1860s:MN Minneapolis | Pillsbury & Washburn families
established milling and grain trade
*--Louis Dreyfus opened business
in Odessa, and over the next decade created the Odessa-Marseilles (France) grain
trade route
*--Global grain trade continued to
expand
\\
*--Morgan, ch2:53-74, presents the early
history of world grain trade
<>1849:Hawaiian Islands coveted by France. USA warned France off
<>1849:Paris | Fedor Tiutchev, tsarist diplomat
and poet, wrote article "La Russie et la Révolution" [KMM:94-103] Tiutchev
equated opposition to Russian imperialist expansion with an
insidious global revolutionary movement, and he elevated the struggle to the highest
spiritual level. In eastern Europe, the 1848 Revolution had
inspired Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and many others against all forms of
imperial dominion, including Russian. Tiutchev sensed "progressive politics"
anywhere of being in essence "anti-Russian". Russia was in the world as a servant of God. All who contested
Russian power were agents of a diabolical power threatening all that was holy in
European civilization
*--Website containing
translations of Tiutchev's poetry
*--Poems & political letters of F. I. Tyutchev
\\
*--Roger Conant,
The Political Poetry and Ideology of F. I. Tiutchev
<>1849:Russian political debating society, known as
the Petrashevskii circle, arrested and exiled to Siberia [VSB,2:571-3]
*--Now all reform, reactionary or otherwise, waned, and the combined policy of removal and Siberian frontier development waxed
*--The most famous Petrashevets was the novelist
Fedor Dostoevsky. See
Dostoevsky as Reformer: The Petrashevsky Case. Here we read the official conclusion of the case:
The Military Court finds the defendant Dostoevskii guilty of, upon receiving in March
of this year from Moscow, from the nobleman Pleshcheev (a defendant), a copy of the
criminal letter by Belinskii, having read this letter at meetings: first, at the home of
the defendant Durov and then at the home of the defendant Petrashevskii, eventually giving
it to the defendant Mombelli to be copied. Dostoevskii was at the home of the defendant
Speshnev when the subversive work by the lieutenant Grigor'ev entitled "Soldiers'
Conversation" was read. Hence the Military Court has sentenced him, the retired
engineer-lieutenant Dostoevskii, for the failure to report the dissemination of the
litterateur Belinskii's letter that constitutes criminal offense against church and
government and of the pernicious work of the lieutenant Grigor'ev--to be deprived, on the
basis of the Code of Military Decrees, Pt. V, Bk. 1, art. 142, 144, 169, 170, 172, 174,
176, 177 and 178, of ranks, of all rights concomitant to his social estate and to be
subjected to the death penalty by shooting.
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Who Were the Petrashevtsy?" [TXT]
*--John L. Evans,
The Petrasevskij Circle, 1845-1849
(1974)
*--Franco Venturi,
Roots of
Revolution (1960) ch.3
<>1849my26(NS):Germany |
Prussia, Saxony and Hanover signed Erfurt Union Treaty [DPH:133-5]
<>1850:1864; China
| Taiping [great peace] Rebellion carried out by native insurgents who sought to
overthrow the feeble Manchu dynasty under the thumb of European imperial powers.
"The West" reacted with alarm to see the compliant Manchu threatened by a
mobilized native political force. English armies were "invited" in to crush revolt and preserve the
dynasty until 1912
*--The era
of Russian frontier and imperialist expansion
that began
with the victory over the Kazan Tatars and the opening of Siberia was coming
to a close
*--A new, half-century era of mounting imperialist conflict among European
states opened at mid-century. The Great Game
intensified, ending catastrophically in World War One
*--In this era, Russian ambitions concentrated on two directions of possible
expansion =
Expansion eastward (particularly growing
hostility with Japan)
Expansion southward (vs. Ottoman power in various
Islamic regions of the "Near East", the main arena in the Great Game)
<>1850:USA | Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
<>1850ja31(NS):Germany |
Prussian Constitution [DPH:136-9]
<>1850mr15(NS):French progressive laws on education, passed
by Guizot in the years prior to his 1848 fall from power
[ID],
suffered reactionary setback. Now the Falloux law put church schools on an equal
footing with secular educational institutions and gave the Catholic church
hierarchy greater control over what was taught, even in public schools [DPH:232-3]
*--The modern European liberal cause required broadly democratic and secular
education of the whole population, including
wage-laborers. Reactionary reform of education predicted the
future of French politics. Guizot-style civilian liberalism, which dominated French politics since the revolutionary
events of 1830 [ID], was about to be replaced by a swift transition from liberalism to imperialist statism
[ID] under Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III)
*--Domestic politics in France, as in Russia, were falling under the grip of
innovative reactionary reform. Against optimistic liberal expectations,
industrialization and economic modernization rendered reactionary reform far more practical than
earlier reactionary policies (e.g., Congress of Vienna [ID]).
Thus we might observe that at mid-century, the liberal era was giving way to the
social-democratic era in Europe, but also that the earliest beginnings of
20th-century statism [ID] appeared on the scene. This modern statism represented a
negation of earlier conservative and liberal trends, and it took aim at the
newly emerging social-democratic trends
*--We see here in France more clearly than anywhere else, quite yet, the central role of
militarist-imperialist-nationalism or "Chauvinism" (named after the zealous French politician and Napoleonic veteran,
Nicholas Chauvin) in contradiction to the previous half-century of
liberal ascendancy. France was dominated for
the next two decades by "the man on horseback", Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III
\\
*--Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, Dictatorship in History and Theory:
Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (2004) [SUMMIT]
<>1851:London Great Exhibition (first world's fair
or exposition) was housed in the stunning Crystal Palace, a massive structure of
decorative steel girders which were surprisingly visible from inside or out and bearing walls, ceilings
and roofs of glass. Joseph Paxton designed the structure [pix~]. The structure was
moved after the fair. It burned in 1936, and in 1941 it was fully demolished
because it served as a navigational landmark for yet a later demonstration of
industrial power, German Luftwaffe aerial bombing
[ID]
*--In anticipation of an unprecedented number of visitors to an urban event of
this vast proportion, 10,000 extra troops were stationed around London.
One-thousand new men were added to the urban police force. [*1828:English Police
Act created this novel modern institution] Six million visitors
were counted through the turnstiles, but only 25 offenses were charged in
connection with misbehavior at the fair. For the first time, public toilets were
provided. A special office was charged with the dispensation of the profits from
the fair, in the amount of 186,000 pounds sterling, in support of scientific and
artistic education
*--The Great Exhibition was the "coming out" or public debut of the fast
expanding industrial revolution. It was a celebration of the startling and
altogether novel distinctions arising between modernized political economies and
traditional agrarian civilizations. It was an apologia for imperialism.
It was a score-card for The Great Game
*--Fourteen "world's fairs" followed over the
next decades, into the time of WW1 =
*1855:Paris
*1862:London
*1867:Paris
*1871:London
*1873:Vienna
*1876:Philadelphia "Centennial Exposition"
*1878:Paris
*1884:New Orleans "Cotton Exposition"
*1889:Paris
*1900:Paris
*1893:Chicago "World's Columbian
Exposition"
*1901:Buffalo "Pan-American Exposition"
*1904:St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase
Exposition"
*1915:San Francisco "Panama-Pacific Exposition"
*--It wasn't until after WW1 that a "world's" fair was held anywhere but in west
Europe or N.America
<>1851:Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railroad opened
<>1851:USA.Herman
Melville published his "great American novel" Moby Dick, an
adventure of the open seas, while in the same year a great adventure of the
wide-open US West was under way =
*1851:Salt Lake City | Brigham Young
summoned all Mormons still in IL and MO to the new
"stake of Zion"
in the shadow of the Wasatch Mts.
Mormons had some intention to create an independent and theocratic "State of
Deseret". At
the end of the Mexican War,
USA Federal action forestalled that when it assumed administrative authority in
a newly designated Territory of Utah. Still, the limits of church and secular
authority were blurred like nowhere else in USA since colonial days. In 1852,
Brigham Young further distinguished Utah Territory from others when he declared
polygamy a church doctrine. Continued controversy within the church and beyond,
including constant federal governmental effort to outlaw the practice, led
church President Woodruff in 1890 to issued a manifesto asking Latter-day Saints
to respect standard USA marriage law
*--The Mormon Church grew in size and financial strength as a result of
world-wide missionary activities and a strict policy of tithing among believers
(gift of 10% of income to the church)
<>1851ja23:Russian universities fell under tighter
restriction [VSB,2:573-4]
*--In the Russia of Nicholas I,
reaction, pure and simple, came to replace reactionary reform
spirit of the previous 26 years
*--Nicholas I was not the only European leader for whom "reactionary reform"
worked = G/51de02 below
<>1851de02(NS):French National Assembly
dissolved by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's Decree, followed immediately by his
Proclamation and Decree on a Plebiscite. "Plebiscite" is a variation on mass
participation in government, a variation designed to reduce functioning
democracy or republican rule to a minimum. Plebiscite asks for a simple "yes/no"
response to a proposal crafted by authorities and presented to the whole people
for up or down vote (bypassing open debate among the many factions and within
regular institutions of representative government). As time wore on,
authoritarian governments that felt the need to appear "democratic" -- and from
the middle of the 19th century on, the need to at least appear democratic became
almost universal in Europe -- resorted increasingly to such plebiscite or sham
forms of "representative government"
*--A Resolution in protest by members of the
National Assembly against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's
Decree on a Plebiscite had no effect [DPH:158-62]
<>1852:Petersburg | Nicholas I got news of USA plan
to force Japan out of its official "national seclusion". The tsar now moved
finally to send Putiatin on that same mission
*--Nikolai Nikolaevich
Murav'ev had for years emphasized the necessity for Russia to control the Amur
River basin [DIR3:334-6]
*--Murav'ev warned that USA and England threatened Russias good standing in Asia.
Russia must
establish strong ties with Japan as well as with
China [BBL/Putiatin]
\\
*--George Lensen,
Russia's Japan expedition of 1852 to 1855
(1955)
*--R. C. Ashton, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Muraviev-Amurskii...", M.A. Thesis,
University of Oregon, September, 1971
*--KEJ,6:341
<>1852:Russian Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii
(-1856),"On...European Culture..." [Raeff3:175-207
| excerpt TXT]
*1856:Kireevskii died, leaving "On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles
in Philosophy" [Edie,1:180-213]
*--Other writings [VSB,2:576-7 |
LDH:79-88]
\\
Peter Christoff,
Introduction
<>1852:USA and Russia | Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
or Life Among the Lowly, esp. chs.
30 & 31, consider also chs. 1, 4, 14
[TXT]
*--Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches occupied a
similar place in Russian literary/social history. F/serf in
[TXT]. On
peasant life, see
especially "The Singers"
*--Stowe's and Turgenev's works were fiction, but they were not examples of
"art for art's sake", nor can they properly be called "propaganda". Their
fictional worlds influenced the actual worlds of their readers. They struggled
against the deplorable conditions of bound labor in their countries, Stowe against slavery
and Turgenev against serfdom
*--In 1860, Russian officials reacted with alarm when a publicly supported elementary
school (a "Sunday School") had its pupils read Uncle Tom's Cabin
[BXO/Obolenskii,D]
<>1852ja14(NS):France given new constitution, prefaced
with along proclamation written by Louis Napoleon defending this
action [DPH:162-5]
<>1852fa:Caucasus Mountain bands of Shamil forced into guerilla warfare tactics
against Russian imperial troops
<>1852oc09:French Emperor Napoleon III delivered address at Bordeaux
[Stearns:553-4]
<>1852no:1870se; France fashioned into a Napoleonic Empire
for second time [DPH:165-6] Louis Napoleon reigned as Napoleon III for 18 years
*--This episode in 19th century statism
more nearly predicted the 20th century than it imitated either the Roman or
great Napoleonic
empires. Some call the Second Empire in France Europes first fascist-style rule. Karl Marx said,
"History does indeed repeat itself -- first as tragedy, second as farce."
*--1856:Alexis de Tocqueville wrote L'Ancien Régime et la révolution
[The Old Regime and
the Revolution], ostensibly about the Great French Revolution
[ID] but very much inspired by the
author's great distress over the direction of French political life under
Napoleon III. Tocqueville's 20-year career as political
observer, pundit and activist was at an end
*--Napoleon III's reign was not without
recognizable European-style liberal moments [DPH:166-9]
<>1853jy08:Tokyo harbor | USA Commodore Matthew Perry anchored and threatened
bombardment if Japan did not abandon its "national seclusion"
*1853au21:Nagasaki (the harbor sanctioned by national
seclusion policy) = Russian ambassador Putiatin arrived aboard his flagship Pallada,
plus 4 other vessels, for diplomatic parley
*--Perry declined Putiatin offer to join forces to open Japan, but Russian squadron helped persuade shogun to drop policy of
national seclusion
*--In these months, the Siberian far east
was coming under more ambitious Russia control. Russian authorities occupied Sakhalin Island and Korean Peninsula
\\
*--KEJ,6:341
*--Sansom,WWJ:245, seems on the mark when he wrote, "American
and English historians sometimes overlook the important part played by Russia in
bringing about the opening of Japan by revealing to the Japanese their own
weaknesses". Therefore =
*--Beasley,MHJ:61, seems off the mark when he wrote that Putiatin was sent from Russia "to keep an eye on American
activities" and to say he was not "interested primarily in trade" because
"immediate preoccupation" was Crimean War. That war came later =
<>1853oc20:Crimean War
erupted (and dragged on for 2 1/2 years) when Russia declared war on Ottoman
Turkey in response to a Turkish declaration of war on Russia [Various documents
= DIR3:286-93]
*--Russia demanded better
treatment of Orthodox subjects (mainly in Greece), but it also sought control
over Moldavia and Wallachia [VSB,2:538-9]
*--Eventually France,
England and their allies entered the war on the side of the Turks
*--Russian declaration of war with England, and English Parliamentary debates [VSB,2:539-41]
*--English nurse Florence Nightingale observed inhumanity of modern war first hand, and
did what she could to treat it
[W#1]
*1856 treaty that ended the war
*--The writings of Karl Marx about
the Russian and Ottoman empires revealed his deep antagonism toward Russia =
*----------.
The Eastern
Question:...Letters Written 1853-1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War
*----------. Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and the Story of the
Life of Lord Palmerston
*--USA became involved in "Eastern Question" (i.e., Russian-English rivalry in Central Asia, the Caucasus Mountains, and
north-western frontiers of the Ottoman Empire)
*--Closeness between Russia and USA continued
through the 1861:1865; USA Civil War,
perhaps complicated by the issue of Alaska,
but the relationship reached an
apex with the selling of Alaska, and continued
into the 1877:1878; Russo-Turkish War
*--The Crimean War signaled the beginning of a half-century decline of the
Ottoman Empire, often called the "Sublime Porte" or "the sick man of Europe",
and the beginning of the final and tragic half-century
of "Great Game" imperialism, leading to WW1
\\
*--Saul,1:166-267
*--Saul,2:92-131
*--John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham NC:1979)
<>1854:1867; Ezo [Hokkaido] under direct
shogun rule for the second and last time, for 13 years, in order to protect the
large northern island from Russia
<>1854:USA | Henry David Thoreau,
Walden, or Life in the Woods
\\
*--Wagar on Thoreau [TXT]
<>1854au10:Japan, Nagasaki then Shimoda on Izu Peninsula
| Russian Admiral Putiatin met with Kawaji Toshiakira (1801:1867) and Tsutsui Masanori
(1778:1859). Kawaji was a major influence on the Japanese decision to end the
200-plus-year Seclusion policy. He was influenced by his teacher Sato Issai
[PH&G:547-8. Hayashi school related to the disputes between Confucian and emerging
Shinto schools] and associated with Fujita Toko, Egawa Tarozaemon, and Watanabe Kazan [KEJ]
and other learned specialists on international relations
<>1854se:Japan, Nagasaki | English Rear-Admiral Stirling had been
pursuing Putiatin and his small diplomatic squadron through Japanese waters
(fighting the Crimean War [ID] on its natural Pacific
front). He now made port in order to persuade Japan not to give harbor to
Putiatin.
Japan however
refused to cooperate with England in this European fray
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Russia and Japan Expand to Their Pacific Frontiers..." [TXT part
three]
*--Beasley,MHJ:61
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