A Generation of Revolutionaries: Nikolai Charushin and Russian Populism from the Great Reforms to Perestroika
412
A Generation of Revolutionaries: Nikolai Charushin and Russian Populism from the Great Reforms to Perestroika
412Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253029812 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 10/19/2017 |
| Pages: | 412 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Beginnings
How to Become a Revolutionary
Life was an unending holiday.
— Nikolai Chaikovskii, "Detskie gody," 1926
When, in 1888, Lev Tikhomirov, once a member of the terrorist organization the People's Will, published his notorious letter "Why I Am No Longer a Revolutionary," it had a profoundly unsettling impact on his former comrades. Decades later, in the early Soviet era, they continued to ask each other if he had ever really been a revolutionary and why they themselves had turned from that path. At this time, Vera Figner was commissioned to do a volume in the Granat Encyclopedia, a collection of autobiographical sketches by participants in the movement that had led to the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. She set about this task with aplomb, and succeeded in putting together forty-four contributions, among which was an entry by Nikolai Charushin.
Figner, an icon of the Populist movement, believed that a revolutionary identity — which she equated with moral principles — was rooted in one of three elements to be found in childhood or adolescence: deep emotionality; a transformative, traumatic event forcing one to re-evaluate one's life; or sustained and purposeful reading. Figner encouraged her contributors to think along these lines when considering their own childhoods and some did. Osip Aptekman, for example, wrote that his father was subjected to a beating because he had refused to take off his cap in homage to an officer being quartered in his home. Aptekman wrote that he relived this experience repeatedly, and that it had left him with an "unshakeable hatred of violence inflicted on people and empathy for the downtrodden and humiliated." Others, however, responded differently. Even a cursory familiarity with the memoirs written by Populists will convince the reader that there was no single scenario defining the pathway to a revolutionary consciousness. Of the thirty autobiographical essays by men contributed to the Granat Encyclopedia, nine make no mention of childhood whatsoever. The remainder follow a variety of scripts. Likewise, a study by Valentin Sergeev of the childhood experiences of the Populist revolutionaries born in Viatka province, from where Nikolai Charushin himself originated, could find no uniform pattern in their upbringings.
Roughly at this time, Figner also began to entreat Charushin to write a full volume of memoirs about his life leading up to and following his participation in the Chaikovskii circle, his incarceration, and then the years in exile. After some reluctance, Charushin complied. These memoirs provide one of the pillars of this narrative and analysis of his life. Yet they, along with the briefer contributions to the Granat volume, were written in response to a script provided by Figner in the context of the "memory wars" ongoing in the early soviet era in a heated political atmosphere, and became part of a collective narrative put together through the joint efforts of an aging group of tightly knit Populists and former conspirators. We will return frequently to the process by which this collective narrative was constructed and consider why these aging Populists insisted on being identified as revolutionaries, despite their reluctance to embrace violence and their subsequent immersion in civil society. Here we examine Charushin's narration of his childhood, and the search for why he and others took the improbable step of becoming revolutionaries.
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Charushin, in contrast to many others writing under Figner's watchful eye, devoted considerable space in his recollections to his childhood. Despite his extensive correspondence with Figner on the subject, however, we find nothing there resembling the "formative triad" or "transformative scenes" that supposedly shape one's identity. Charushin himself found nothing distinctive about his experiences. Why, then, did he become a revolutionary? Consider how, toward the end of a very long life, he related the story of his childhood.
Charushin was born into a large, stable, and respected provincial family in Orlov, a district town in Viatka province, situated on the Viatka River, not far from the provincial capital itself. His father was an employee of the state, rising to the status of titular counselor, seventh on the civil service Table of Ranks, and bestowing on the family the status of hereditary nobility. His mother, Ekaterina L'vovna (née Iufereva) was the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Although this merchant's fortunes had declined, one of his sons (Charushin's uncle on his mother's side, Ivan L'vovich Iuferev) continued, after the untimely death of Charushin's father to provide the family with lodgings in a solid building (today it is a bank). Charushin had six siblings: one brother (Victor) died early; two went on to successful careers. Ivan, a prominent and still-celebrated architect in Viatka, thrived in both the Imperial and Soviet periods; Arkadii was a high-ranking bureaucrat in the important Resettlement Office at a time when the government was concerned with both promoting and regulating peasant migration. His sisters married solid citizens whose lives were entangled with the adult career of our protagonist. Judging by their actions and their correspondence, this was a family characterized by mutual love and respect, support, and involvement in each other's lives, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.
In his own telling, Charushin's early childhood was happy. He describes his boyhood as boisterous and largely carefree. His early years resembled those of Lenin: growing up in a close-knit, comfortable family, with an energetic and resourceful mother and a father who held a respectable position in the provincial bureaucracy, conferring nobility status on the family. Indeed, Charushin's vivid descriptions portray a boy enthusiastically engaged in play, both indoors and outdoors. His depictions of his adventures on the wide Viatka River, which was a hundred yards or so from his home, and its tributary the Vorob'ikha, are positively lyrical:
In the spring when the river flooded, the creek running through our garden also flooded, providing us the opportunity, once we had grown just a bit, to launch our small boats right from our garden and float right out to the Viatka. From there we sometimes boldly set out to cross the river, at that time reaching 5–6 versts in width and flooding the pine grove on the far side. It was terrifying to be out on our little rowboat in the middle of a river with its banks overflowing, but what joy we had when we reached the other side and floated along the shady alleys formed by the rows of flooded pine groves, come alive with the song and din of birds.
But, unlike Lenin, who was also from in the Volga region but whose early years were spent in a highly cultured household, surrounded by books, Charushin had very little exposure to the printed word. There were only two or three books in the house in all, and the houses of neighboring families and friends were also devoid of reading material. Secular books were spurned; the only religious texts were the Gospels and Lives of the Saints. "Even the Bible itself was sometimes frowned upon," he wrote. "People would say, for example, that whoever took to reading it would inevitably lose his sanity." In general, religion played little role in this family. His father was more or less indifferent to Orthodoxy. To be sure, his mother was a devout believer, faithful churchgoer, and observer of Lent who encouraged her children to follow her example. According to Charushin, "[S]he had some impact on the girls in the family, but virtually none on the boys, most likely because the ritualistic practices by which religion was presented held little appeal to us."
The family, and Orlov in general, seemed insulated from the outside world. Although Alexander I had stopped there during his travels in 1824, it seemed that the national dramas of war and political change that were occurring soon after Charushin's birth passed this sleepy district town by. There were no newspapers, and even an event as impactful for the country as the Crimean War "passed us by without affecting anyone." No news of the decisive battles, no word of the siege of Sevastopol circulated by print or word of mouth, "and all of this seemed of little concern ... it was as if we had nothing to do with those events." The town seemed to exist outside the stream of history. The most memorable episode Charushin could recall from his childhood was the fuss surrounding the expectation of seeing a comet and the anticipation of a resulting catastrophe.
The absence of books, newspapers, and connections of any sort with the outside world was of little import. Little did it bother young Nikolai. His life, winter and summer, was too full of activities more pleasing to a rambunctious young boy:
We children were little perturbed since we had not yet acquired a taste for reading. Unhindered by our parents we — and especially the boys — lived a full existence, spending most summers and winters outdoors. In the winters, we so were caught up in sledding downhill that we often returned home suffering from frostbitten hands or toes. Summer was an especially rich time, since we could fish, boat, cross to the other side of the river in search of mushrooms and berries, or carry out pirating raids on neighboring orchards when the cherries had ripened — stolen berries were always much tastier! But the loudest and most fun-filled times were when whole gangs of neighboring children congregated to play games until late in the evening.
Nor — also unlike Lenin, who won a gold medal for his academic achievements — did school put a wrinkle in Charushin's seemingly carefree existence. At the age of seven or eight (he was not sure) he was sent to the town's church parish school, where he boarded with a dozen or so other local boys in a ramshackle and crowded space. He was taught how to read based on the old alphabet method, and like his peers considered the exercise an obligation imposed by parents, which could only be endured.
In fact, his indifference to schooling and attraction to the fun and games offered by the natural world at times got him into trouble:
I had no interest in my studies; during the fall and winter I more or less tolerated school, but as summer approached the natural world exerted an irrepressible pull in contrast to my tedious and burdensome studies. So, heading off for school, I took a detour along my beloved river which, being always in sight, always exerted a pull on me. Forgetting all about my studies, I didn't show my face for two weeks, spending all my time at the river or on the far shore, returning home only after the school day had ended.
Eventually, he was caught and suffered an exemplary punishment. He finally completed his stay at the parish school in 1861 ("by the skin of his teeth"), only to be enrolled next in the local district elementary school, to which he went even more reluctantly, since the inspector there was dreaded because of his frequent resort to the rod. But his stay there was short. Responding (in his description) to the currents of the Great Reforms era emphasizing the importance of a meaningful education, his parents pulled him out of that school and began preparing him instead to take the entrance exams to the gymnasium in Viatka. At this tender age, his feelings about making this step were naturally ambivalent: on the one hand, the thought of going to "the big city" was exciting; on the other hand, it scared him: "I had to say goodbye to the people I love and to everything that was dear to my heart, to all that had made my childhood such a rich experience."
On the eve of his departure, as he himself noted, this young fellow was little different from who he had been when he had begun his schooling three years earlier completely free of any intellectual strivings. School, he insisted, had not stimulated his curiosity in any way. As he put it, if someone had asked him at the time what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would mostly likely have answered, "the police chief!" It was the imposing uniform, and the fact that he was at the top on the town's ladder of power, that impressed him most. So far, we have a rather delightful portrait of an untrammeled childhood, of a youth whose first years were unmarked by the deep emotional experiences or the signature episodes that, according to Vera Figner, resulted in a moral awakening that eventually led to a revolutionary consciousness. Instead, we seem to have a Russian Tom Sawyer: carefree, mischievous, viewing books and schooling as interfering with his education in the great outdoors. It does seem likely that living in a close-knit family that maintained healthy, lifelong, emotional ties did give Charushin good reason to look back at his early childhood with fond nostalgia.
UNTRAMMELED CHILDHOODS?
We find a similar description of an untrammeled and carefree childhood in the memoirs of Nikolai Chaikovskii, a seminal figure in the Populist movement, whose colorful life was intermittently connected with Charushin's. Chaikovskii also grew up in Viatka and remembered a cloudless childhood: a well-kept, sunlit home, time spent playing in the yard, strolling the streets, trips with his father on the Viatka River, an attentive and loving mother. He even describes his father's loss of employment and forced departure from Viatka to a village in a distant district as an adventure rather than a catastrophe. "Looking back at the entire course of my early years, two things can't be denied: their incomparable joy and luminosity as well as a warm and special love for my surroundings; and secondly, the feeling that life was an unending holiday."
The Populist Alexander Pribylev wrote of his childhood in the small provincial town Kamyshlov in similar tones. Despite the early death of his mother, those years "were spent in the "cradle of Nature, unrestricted by any limitations or pedantry, and leaving us with the memory of a gentle, beautiful and dreamy period." Mikhail Sazhin (who would later marry one of Vera Figner's sisters) wrote, "My thirteenth year passed by without any reading except for the textbooks required in school. Summers and winters, we spent on the streets, in the courtyards, in the orchard, playing ball or card games ... flying kites or whatever with the neighborhood gang."
Gender considerations must also be addressed when examining the autobiographical texts. Research published decades ago identified a distinct tradition of women's autobiographical works and specified the gendered aspects of the genre as a whole. Yet, of the many such gendered aspects of content, style, and temporal structure that have been pointed out by scholars such as Estelle Jelinek and Hilde Hoogenboom, the only one readily identifiable in the most prominent memoir by a Populist woman, Vera Figner, is a distinctive emotionality. Even that observation must be qualified — for it pertained only to her early years, which were in fact not unlike Charushin's. Her autobiography offers a similarly vivid portrait of a childhood spent in Kazan province. She describes her first impressions, her relations with her parents, and the family situation in general. Despite the task she had set for herself of uncovering revolutionary beginnings, her descriptions of her childhood are vibrant and emotionally resonant, in contrast to the later accounts of her activities as a member of the People's Will; these become a political chronicle devoid of any subjective experience, in which her internal world completely vanishes from the narrative. Writing to Figner, in 1922, after having read her memoirs, Ekaterina Kuskova calls attention to just this:
Your childhood, your father and mother, your school — all that is new. I was familiar with the superficial facts but your own interpretation of this interval was an eye-opener. And for that reason, these chapters are full of life. You see before you, almost as in life, the surrounding forest, the stern father, all those schoolmarms and you, the captious prankster — the girl who lived through all this. Then, around age twenty-four, the onset of a new stage. The style of your writing and the underlying spirit changes abruptly. The texture of life is covered over by a shroud/cloak made up of programs, decisions, all these external developments, however important they may have been, lacking subjectivity, the psychological. The human being, the ordinary things that make up the person, feelings — love, friendship, attachments, all of that which was so evident in the atmosphere of nannies and family, somehow gets buried, disappears. Was this on purpose or did it just turn out that way? To put it another way, did revolutionary activity really bring an end to daily life?
(Continues…)
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