A History of the World (67 page)

In December 1825 rebel officers, later known as the ‘Decembrists’, launched a revolt in St Petersburg against a new Czar, Nicholas I, after his brother Constantine had refused to accept the throne. After a five-hour confrontation between rebel and loyalist troops in the centre of the city, the Czar ordered his men to begin firing, and the rebellion collapsed. Five conspirators were hanged, and 121 were stripped of their titles and sent into exile in Siberia. There, many were joined by their wives and families and lived not as landowners but as simple farmers. The sons of one were described by their mother as playing with the local peasants, fishing for trout, trapping rabbits, hunting for birds’ nests and ‘camping in the woods with the wild boys’. Their father also went native, growing a long beard, ceasing to wash and working in the fields. His name was Sergei Volkonsky and he was a cousin of Tolstoy’s, who met him when he finally returned from exile; he based one of his central characters in
War and Peace
on the admirable older man.
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These ‘Decembrists’ were in general a great inspiration to the younger generation of Tolstoy’s time. Remorse for his gambling, shame about his position as an owner of serfs, and admiration for the liberal exiles of 1825, all fused in Tolstoy’s mind. It was the same, or similar, for many other liberal landowners and writers. Among the less likely liberals in 1856 was the new Czar Alexander II himself. After the failure in the Crimea he began to work on widespread reforms, including reform of the army, the civil service and the criminal code, and a loosening of censorship. But his most dramatic move related to serfdom. It would go, outright. Even the serfs were suspicious about that. How much land would they get for themselves? Would it really be something for nothing?

Tolstoy got an early glimpse of what might happen when, in 1856, after Alexander’s announcement of forthcoming reform but before the emancipation law had been agreed, he decided to give all his serfs their personal freedom, and to sell them land cheaply over the next thirty years. He called a meeting at Yasnaya Polyana (which translates, roughly, as ‘Bright Meadow’), but found them highly suspicious. A recent biographer of Tolstoy says: ‘The peasants were convinced they would be given their freedom when the new czar was crowned, and so
believed Tolstoy’s offer of a contract was just a cunning ruse to swindle them. After several more meetings they refused all his revised offers.’
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Tolstoy travelled abroad, meeting the former exile Volkonsky, before settling down at Yasnaya Polyana again to write and enjoy a spot of domestic bliss. (Though his wife, producing thirteen children and spending her spare time copying out his near-illegible manuscripts, found life rather less blissful.)

He did eventually manage to free all his serfs to till their own land. He built a school at his own expense for the peasants’ children (a rather high proportion of them, his own illegitimate sons) and taught them himself, by now dressing in peasant clothes. He wrote children’s books to help spread literacy throughout Russia. As a local magistrate he would help the peasantry against his own class, and he told the local children he was determined to become a peasant himself. He was, however, a rotten farmer, managing to starve his pigs to death. After he had dismissed his stewards, the historian Orlando Figes writes, ‘The experiment was a complete failure . . . He did not know how to cure hams, how to make butter, when to plough or hoe the fields, and he soon became fed up and ran away to Moscow.’
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While Tolstoy was struggling with his pigs and his conscience, Alexander’s ministers were struggling with hostile landowners and foot-dragging committees, as the Czar tried to find a way of freeing Russia’s serfs without making the nobles rebel against him. The result was the Emancipation of Serfdom manifesto of March 1861. It was a noble-sounding document, published two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing US slaves, but it would satisfy almost nobody. Tolstoy heard about it while he was abroad, during his only visit to London, where he had just heard Charles Dickens give a public reading, visited some schools, and made use of the library at the new Victoria and Albert Museum. He realized at once that the manifesto’s high-flown language and tone would not be understood by the peasantry.

What he did not know was just how limited emancipation would be. The landowners fought doggedly to keep as much as possible of their status, with the result that for nearly half a century to come, the freed serfs would have to make huge payments to the government for land they regarded as their own. The government, in turn, compensated the landowners. These payments were based on inflated
estimates of the value of the land, while to further compensate the nobility the peasants’ share overall was cut, by up to a quarter. Though freed to marry who they liked, to trade and own property, they would stay under the control of their own local courts, would need passports to travel, and would continue to be subject to corporal punishment.

This was so far from what the Russian peasantry had hoped for, such a bitter disappointment that there were nearly nineteen hundred outbreaks of disorder in 1861, some involving bloody repression by troops. Landowners bemoaned their new relative poverty, and the loss of their ability to directly punish ‘their’ peasants in the old way. Over time, many peasants left the land and migrated to the cities, where they would become the new factory workers and where their children would one day become the raw proletarian material for Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution.

The Czar continued to try to reform the censorship laws, education, the law, the military and local government. A well informed newspaper reader in Paris or London in the early 1860s might well have compared the terrible civil war tearing the United States apart with the comparatively orderly reform programme being run from St Petersburg, and assumed that Russia would become the stronger power. Czarist Russia had started far behind the USA in its industrial development, but was growing fast by the 1880s. In truth, Russian autocracy had no answer to the growing demands of people who were freed, but freed to be poor, or to those of intellectuals who wanted full democracy. During the later years of Alexander II’s reign, revolutionary and terrorist groups spread. Terrible famines underlined the continuing backwardness and weakness of Russian agriculture and society. When the Czar was blown up by a terrorist bomb in 1881, his successor Alexander III abruptly ended the period of reforms and restored the censors and the secret police.

Tolstoy watched the condition of Russia with mounting despair. He was no enthusiast for urbanization or industrialization. Moscow he found a place of ‘stench, stones, luxury, poverty, debauchery’, in which the displaced peasants ‘wax our floors, rub our bodies in the bath and ply as cabmen’.
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After the huge success of his novels he buried himself in country pursuits – beekeeping, growing orchards, hunting – as well as fathering his huge family and looking after his school, and all interspersed with more writing and some satisfyingly vicious literary
quarrels. By the later 1870s he was talking of becoming a monk. Artists and writers came to pay homage to this apparent secular saint, who advocated Christian rural simplicity and seemed to offer a third way between Czarist repression and socialist revolution.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Tolstoy was a globally famous guru, a lifetime’s journey away from the brash young artillery officer who had lost his home, his villages and his serfs at the card table. He may also have become something of an egomaniac and a bore (gurus mostly are), but his life story still shows a satisfying arc of learning and redemption, which his Russia never managed. His home remains a monument to a lost Eden, with its plain rooms, its library of elevating books, orchards, schoolhouse, granaries and woodland, where Tolstoy lies buried in a simple earth mound. Around the estate, however, the impoverished, ugly Russia of a century of war and political failure is all too close at hand. Had the 1860s seen a convulsion there as dramatic as the American Civil War – to which we now turn – then perhaps the old Russia could have evolved into a country of middle-class business, prosperous cities and democracy. We cannot know.

Liberty’s Victory, by the Skin of Her Teeth

They were days of exhaustion and relief, of sadness and delight. On 4 April 1865, a steamer called the
Malvern
was making her way upriver from Washington, capital of the United States of America, to Richmond, Virginia, former capital of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate, or rebel, states, had been attending church when a cavalry officer arrived with a note from his top general, Robert E. Lee, telling him to flee. As Richmond resounded to the explosions of powder magazines and the noise of hungry crowds looting food stores and slurping whisky – which was also running in the gutters – the town’s bridges were blown up and its governing body, huddled in carts and carriages, disappeared in a haze of dust. The
Malvern
chugged on up the James River, past dead horses, wrecked boats and flotsam, until she ran aground. A twelve-oared boat was lowered and into it clambered a leathery, whiskery man with a buzzard’s nose and a beard like a hearth-brush. Abraham Lincoln had
come to see for himself the capital of the rebellion that had come so close to destroying America’s republican dream.

Lincoln strode ashore at a place called Rockett’s Landing and found a crowd waiting for him, without a white face to be seen. He had not intended the Civil War to be a liberation struggle for America’s slaves; but as it had worsened and his position had grown more desperate, he had issued his famous Declaration of Emancipation. Now he was greeted by shouting black Americans calling him ‘the great Messiah’ and ‘Jesus Christ’. As a sixty-year-old man went down on his knees in front of him, Lincoln said: ‘Don’t kneel to me. You must kneel only to God and thank him for your freedom.’ The man replied that after so many years in the desert without water, he was looking ‘on our spring of life’. Surrounded by former slaves, Lincoln shook their hands and, with just a dozen sailors as protection, began the two-mile walk to the centre of the hungry, burning city.

Lincoln was soon at the middle of a larger, mixed crowd. The Southern whites, his recent enemies, simply stared. One of those walking with Lincoln remembered: ‘Every window was crowded with heads. Men were hanging from tree-boxes and telegraph-poles. But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers without a sound, either of welcome or hatred. I think we would have welcomed a yell of defiance. I stole a look sideways at Mr Lincoln. His face was set.’
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But nobody fired.

In this Holy Week, on 9 April, an immaculately dressed Lee would surrender his famous Army of Northern Virginia to the grimy figure of General Ulysses Grant. Lee had calculated that further bloodshed, whether on the battlefield or by guerrilla bands, would be futile. The war was over. The North went wild with joy and the beaten Confederacy mourned. Five days later, on 14 April, Good Friday 1865, Lincoln, back in Washington, was receiving congratulations from a seemingly endless stream of well-wishers who told him they had never doubted he would win. Less than a year earlier he had thought he was finished, that he would lose both presidency and war. Still, this was a good day.

Lincoln enjoyed the theatre, a rare relaxation. He had been warned by friends in Washington that showing himself, with no guards, in public, was dangerous. Seated in his box, he and his friends would be unable – in the words of one protesting friend a year earlier
– to defend themselves ‘from any able-bodied woman in this city’.
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But Lincoln had just walked right through the rebel capital. He was not inclined to heed warnings in his own.

He was not much inclined to go to the particular play being offered, either. Called
Our American Cousin
and playing at Ford’s Theater, it was a weak comic offering spattered with puns, by an English dramatist called Tom Taylor, though it did have a popular actress, Laura Keene, as its star. Lincoln’s wife begged him to come. He agreed. General Grant and his wife were supposed to accompany them, but cried off – Grant detested social occasions – and the President’s intention to attend was advertised in that afternoon’s papers. He spent the intervening time working on his cabinet papers and meeting an aggrieved black woman whose husband had been refused his army pay. He promised to take up her case. He told his wife he had never felt happier. Yet Lincoln may have had some presentiment of disaster. For the first time he raised the possibility that sometime he would be assassinated, and said he did not really want to go to the theatre – he would go, but only so as not to disappoint the public.

Sitting in his flag-bedecked presidential box, hidden from most of the audience, Lincoln was being guarded – just not very well. His assassin had bored a peep-hole from the neighbouring box and, having barred the door, was able to slip in behind him. Carrying a dagger in one hand and a single-shot Derringer pistol in the other, he shot the President from less than five feet away. The bullet passed diagonally from the left side of his skull through his brain, lodging behind his right eye. A young major who was sitting with the Lincolns was stabbed but tried to grab the assassin, who leapt onto the stage, becoming entangled with the Stars and Stripes. Despite breaking his ankle, he managed to get away before the audience had any idea of what was happening. Lincoln’s unconscious body was carried to a house opposite the theatre. There he died at 7.22 the following morning, surrounded by weeping members of his family and cabinet. There had also been an attempt to kill William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, and plans to kill the vice-President too.

The presidential killer was John Wilkes Booth, one of the ten children of an actor who had been named after Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, and who had named his John Wilkes after the radical English writer. The boy grew up bookish and wanting to act. A fervent
defender of the Confederate cause, he had watched the public hanging of the violently anti-slavery rebel John Brown. Booth’s father had been a good actor, though an alcoholic prone to bouts of insanity (which is very common among actors). The son was a less good actor who had once nearly killed himself on stage in an accident with his dagger. In fact, he was something of a buffoon. He loathed Lincoln, but was also consumed with guilt for not taking up arms in the Confederate army himself. He wanted to strike a blow for the doomed South. But the motives of assassins are rarely surprising or even interesting.