Egor Kholmogorov - Mammoths and Patriots on the Russian Plain
RSS
The conventional view
of nationalism is that it was a product of mass literacy and the modern
state, underpinned by schoolbooks and Tombs of the Unknown Soldier.
Recent years have seen challenges
to this historiographic consensus at
both a general level (e.g. Azar Gat’s Nations), and with respect to
specific peoples (Robert Tomb’s recent The English and Their History
comes to mind).
Our latest translation
of Russian conservative intellectual Egor Kholmogorov is more than just
a Russian contribution to this debate. It makes the much more radical
argument that not only was Russia not a laggard in the process of
nation-building, as European historiography has long claimed, but was at
the very forefront of this process for longer than a millennium, from
Novgorod’s implicit devotion to the Russian commonweal in the 13th
century to Russia’s defense of a “Europe of Fatherlands” against the
globalist tide of national annihilation today.
Mammoths and Patriots on the Russian Plain
A Brief History of Russian National Sentiment
by Egor Kholmogorov
Translated by Fluctuarius Argenteus
Sometimes
I hear that saying “patriotism as a national idea” is akin to saying
that water is wet. However, this argument comes from people with a very
superficial understanding of how difficult it is to be patriot given
that, unlike a comfortable cosmopolitanism, patriotism is the path of
struggle. Also, they fail to realize how important the contribution of
Russia and Russian culture is to shaping the very phenomenon of a
patriotic consciousness in the modern world. The Russians developed
patriotism as a national idea far earlier than most European nations.
And it is Russia that keeps its faith in a “Europe of Fatherlands” or a
“World of Fatherlands” in today’s age of identity erasure.
“Russia
is the Motherland of elephants.” This zinger, coined as a mockery of
Russian patriotism[1], is, however, entirely true, with a slight
correction: Russia is the Motherland of mammoths. It is thanks to the
hunt of those majestic beasts that the first humans on the Russian
Plain, then half-concealed by the Great Glacier, created a culture
highly developed for its time. Nowadays, archaeologists even speak of a
“mammoth hunter civilization.”
Indeed,
even nowadays the remains of long-term housing built out of mammoth
ivory, exhibited at the museum of Kostenki village, Voronezh Oblast, are
no less amazing than some stone ruins from Oriental or European
antiquity. Overall, it seems that the mammoth joke is on the jokers.
With
the same minor correction, one can claim that Russia is the Motherland
of patriotism. Of course, patriotism is a word of Latin roots, also
hearkening back to Greek. Of course, the cult of pride for one’s
country, its history and its heroes, was developed in Greece and Rome,
and new European nations learned this art from the ancients (for
example, Old Rus’ via Byzantium).
But
there are different kinds of patriotism. “The thrust of the Greek
notion of freedom was directed at their closest neighbors: being free
meant not being dependent on them”, as noted by Robert Wipper (1859 –
1954), one of our foremost Classical scholars. Only two or three times
out of the entirety of Hellenic history the Greeks showed a capacity for
working together and for a Pan-Hellenic patriotism, but even 300
Spartans, defending a bottleneck that led to the heart of Greece,
believed they were fighting for “Laconic law.” The Greeks saw Hellas not
as a common home country but as a common space for competing hometowns,
peaceful if possible (at the Olympic Games).
Roman
patriotism was more similar to ours. It was a not solely urban but also
imperial patriotism, that of a city turned superpower. The history of a
city that defended its freedom from foreign invaders and domestic
tyrants, vanquished all of its neighbors, and transformed into a
worldwide Empire formed the archetype of a patriotic myth for future
generations.
The Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg houses a sculpture by Vasily Demut-Malinovsky (1776 – 1846) named The Russian Scaevola. A
very Classical-looking Russian peasant with an axe is chopping off his
arm bearing a brand of the letter N, meaning “Napoleon.” This patriotic
legend was born as an imitation of a celebrated Roman historical myth. A
young Roman patrician named Gaius Mucius, nicknamed Scaevola
(“Left-Handed”), attempted to assassinate Porsenna, the Etruscan king.
When he was caught and subjected to torture, he placed his right hand on
a brazier and endured the pain until it became completely charred.
Porcenna, terrified by the Roman’s defiant fortitude, sued for peace
with his city.
However,
it was the city that formed the nucleus of Roman patriotism. If Russia
truly were “Muscovy”, if Moscow had been seen as a creator of a new
world and not as a unifier of Russian lands, then we could have
developed a Roman-styled urban patriotism.
But
Russian patriotism existed long before the rise of Moscow, and had at
its forefront not the City, but the Land. Russian patriotic
consciousness is the oldest national consciousness among European
peoples. There is no France yet, only a “Western Frankia.” There is no
Germany yet, just the Holy Roman Empire, which would only have the “of
the Germanic nation” appended to its name in 1512. England, only
recently under the rule of Danish kings and separated into territories
of Danelaw and Saxon Law, has fallen under the sway of new conquerors,
the haughty Normans marked by both Frankish arrogance and Norse
ruthlessness. Meanwhile, a Russian chronicler is already penning the
title of his work containing the question: “From whence came the Russian
Land?”[2]
150
years before that, Russian envoys already come to Constantinople
bearing the words, “We are of Russian kindred”, and they come, as the
chronicle puts it, “from the great Russian prince, and all other
princes, and all people of the Russian land.” The oldest historical
document mentioning the Russians, the Annales Bertiniani from the year 838, already contains this “Russian kindred” formula (id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant). The
chronicler still remembers the differences between Polans, Drevlians,
and Vyatichi[3], he knows that Russian princes united Varangians and
Slavs, but the unity of this society named “Rus’” seems to him
indisputable and beyond all doubt. The first Russian chronicler
deliberately constructs the image of Russian history as that of a
unified people creating a unified country and subject to a unified
authority. The same is discussed by Hilarion of Kiev (11th century) in
his Sermon on Law and Grace with regards to Prince Vladimir: “For he
was the sole ruler of his land, bringing all neighboring countries
under his sway, some of them by peace, and the unruly ones by the sword.”
Those
three elements – Land, People, Empire – are, in their unity, the true
formula of Russian patriotism, inherited by Russia from the times when
Western European peoples had no patriotic consciousness to speak of.
Only in 1214, when French king Philip II Augustus crushed the joint
forces of the Holy Roman Empire and England near Bouvines, can we
discover a semblance of French national pride. Only three decades later,
an anonymous Russian scribes writes the Lay of the Ruin of the Russian Land, a haunting patriotic manifesto lamenting the destruction of Rus’ in the flames of the Mongol invasion.
Due to the vagaries of history, the tale of the destruction per se
is not extant[4], yet we can still read the preamble, a veritable hymn
to old pre-Mongol Rus’ demonstrating the height of its patriotic
sentiment. The Lay is a love-letter to the Russian Land, a
paean to its beauty and wealth. In my opinion, the text should be
learned by heart as a part of school curriculum.
“Oh Russian Land, bright with brightness and adorned with adornments! Many are thy beauties: thou art adorned by many lakes, rivers and wells famed in thy lands, mountains, steep hills, tall oak woods, clean fields, marvellous beasts, diverse birds, countless great cities, marvellous villages, vineries of monasteries, houses of the Lord and redoubtable princes, honest boyars, noblemen aplenty. The Russian Land is filled with everything, oh true Christian faith!”
But
it is not just the beauty of nature of Rus’ that he relishes; it is
also its might, its dominion over other nations and the prestige of its
rulers:
“From here to Hungarians and Poles and Czechs, from Czechs to Yotvingians[5], from Yotvingians to Lithuanians to Germans, from Germans to Karelians, from Karelians to Ustyug[6], where live the pagan Toymichi[7], and beyond the Breathing Sea[8], from the sea to Bulgars, from Bulgars to Burtasians[9], from Burtasians to Cheremis[10], from Cheremis to Mordva[11] – everything did the Lord bring under the sway of Christian people. The pagan lands submitted to the Grand Prince Vsevolod[12], and his father Yuri, prince of Kiev[13], and his grandfather Vladimir Monomakh[14], with whose name the Polovtsy[15] scared their children in their cradles. And Lithuanians dared not crawl out of their swamps, and Hungarians fortified their stone cities with iron gates so that the great Vladimir would not strike at them, and the Germans rejoiced, living far away beyond the Blue Sea[16]”
This
common national memory, the idea of the Russian Land as a unity was the
force that kept Russia from disintegration and destruction during the
years of the Mongol yoke. Serapion, Bishop of Vladimir (? – 1275),
lamented that “our majesty is brought to the ground, our beauty is
dead, our wealth profits others, our works inherited by pagans, our land
is the legacy of outlanders.” This, by the way, is the best answer
of a contemporary of the Mongol invasion to those that today would
present this incursion from the East as a time of friendship and
cooperation.
“We cannot relish our own bread.”
This formula of Serapion’s is a precise description of centuries-long
Russian woes that intensified in the years of the Horde: we cannot have
the joy of relishing our bread, it is either won with blood and tears,
or stolen by foreign invaders, or the harvest fails. A simple Russian
dream: to relish our own bread.
Nevertheless,
that dream required fighting for. The Russians afforded particular
reverence to those that would fight for Rus’, like Saint Alexander
Nevsky. For Novgorod, he was both protector and hangman when he forced a
rich mercantile city untouched by the Mongol invasion to pay the
tribute imposed by the Horde. This was done to relieve the burden of
other Russian lands, pillaged and impoverished. He chopped heads off,
drowned peolpe, gouged eyes out; he should have been remembered as a
tyrant. Yet here are the words of a Novgorod chronicler in the First
Novgorod Chronicle (oldest recension) regarding the prince’s passing:
“Merciful Lord, reveal Thy Countenance to him in the ages to come, for
he labored much for the sake of Novgorod and the whole of Russian Land.”
“For the whole of Russian Land”,
words written in Novgorod, a city oftentimes presented today as
something of an independent state forcefully subjugated by Muscovy.
However, in spite of all trade ties to the West, Novgorodians gave
priority to a Pan-Russian patriotic sentiment, even judging the prince
that had harshly mistreated them from the viewpoint of an integral
Russian cause, and not just that of their city.
That
is the ideological foundation of the unified Russian state, the great
Russia, which appeared not with a delay compared to Western Europe, but
with a lead. Dmitry Likhachov (1906 – 1999) noted in his book Russian Culture of the Period of Russian Nation-State Formation (1946): “The
origins of national elements of specific cultures are more or less
simultaneous everywhere in Europe, but only in Russia do they receive
support in the form of a proper Russian nation-state. That is why the
national character of 14-15th century culture of Rus’ is more pronounced
than in that of England, France, or Germany of the same period. The
unity of the Russian language is much stronger than that of French,
English, German, Italian national languages. Russian literature is much
more subordinate to the theme of state-building than that of other
nations…”
I cannot agree with Lev Gumilyov’s (1912 – 1992) statement claiming that “they came to the Kulikovo Field[17] as men of Moscow, Serpukhov, Rostov, Beloozero, Smolensk, Murom, etc., but returned as Russians.”
The desire to frame the great battle as a turning point is
understandable, but the warriors came to fight, came as Russians
already, not only those from from the Vladimir Principality and its
vassals, but also from Lithuanian-held Rus’. They realized quite well
that the true Pan-Russian cause was that of Moscow and not Lithuania.
Simeon the Proud, the uncle of Dmitry Donskoy, the victor of Kulikovo,
already claimed the title “of all Russias”[18], and the Byzantine
emperor referred to him in his epistles as riks pasis Rossias, “the king of all Russia.” Therefore, the warriors of Kulikovo were already fighting for Russia and just Moscow.
Thanks to Joan of Arc, the French got the idea that Englishmen have no right to claim La Belle France
for themselves. The Hundred Years’ War in general played an enormous
part in developing national awareness in European peoples. It would
suffice to compare two versions of the same chronicle written by the
famous Jean Froissart with a difference of several decades and
describing the same events. The first version is steeped in chivalric
ideas, the second one is inspired by the concept of nationality.
Froissart interprets the same act first as conforming to the concept of
honor, then as typical of English or French character.
In
spite of this dichotomy, it is hard to imagine a 15th or early
16th-century French or English king justifying his claims to a certain
territory with a national principle, not defending his own domain but
demanding to cede a different one “because Frenchmen live there.” At the
same time, barely freed from the yoke of the Horde, Russia begins an
irredentist struggle for Russian lands. The Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and Livonia are seen as thieves of “ancestral lands”
inherited by Russian princes from their forefather, Prince Vladimir.
The
Papal envoys, while attempting to cajole Vasily III into a war with
distant Turkey, got the following reply from the boyars: “The Grand Prince wants his ancestral domain, the Russian Land”
(at that particular moment this claim also included Kiev). Those
demands were invariably followed by lengthy historical justifications of
the rights Russian state that would shock European diplomats.“Russian
diplomats skilfully used their historical learning and created a
complex theory of Muscovite princely power that elevated the prestige of
the Russian monarchy… It was a creative political ideology that
directed the politics of the Russian state towards the defence of
national interests and culture in the complex milieu of European
civilisation”, writes Dmitry Likhachov in National Consciousness of Old Rus’.
At
that time Europe was engulfed in wars of religion. The battle of
Catholics and Protestants almost succeeded in stamping out the sprouts
of nascent national consciousness. Only horror and revulsion at the
atrocities inflicted by kin and kith speaking the same language keeps
national consciousness alive in spite of religious boundaries. European
nations mostly grew out of a rejection of religious schism, and this was
a positive and unifying side of European nationalism. But it was also
marred by a certain Hellenic particularism, all too often national
bigotry was directed at closest neighbors and formed a nation based on
this hostility. What are the French without hating Englishmen, Germans,
or Spaniards?
Russian
national awareness evolved in a different way. It was not directed
against a neighbor. Even the attitude towards Poland-Lithuania, in spite
of incessant hostilities, never developed into an ethnophobia. If
Russophobia is an unfortunate fixture of Polish national awareness, the
Russian side of the conflict limited itself to “I’ll have my revenge and
then forget.” Russian self-awareness was based on a positive
patriotism, on love for one’s own land, people, culture, and ruler. The
rejection of others expressed itself not in hatred but in a good-natured
gibe similar to the manner in which The Lay of the Ruin describes the neighbors of Rus’.
The
“foreign” becomes a threat only if it is injurious and harmful to
Russian identity. It is menacing not as an external but as an internal
threat, as demonstrated by the Time of Troubles. Russia has no
difficulty in repelling invaders but wasted much effort on surpassing
internal conflict that almost wrecked the state itself. Ivan Timofeev
(ca. 1555 – 1631), one of the most acute observers of the Time of
Troubles, saw the root of all evil in an obsession with all things
foreign that had engulfed Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov. He
chastises the first Russian czar for straying from national identity:
“He slew many nobles of his czardom that were loyal to him, others he exiled into lands of heathen faiths, and instead of them he favored those who had come from foreign lands… That is why we are surprised: even people of moderate reason would have understood that one cannot trust one’s enemies forever. And he, a man of such great wisdom, was laid low by his own weak conscience, willingly putting his head into serpent’s jaws. All enemies that came from other lands would have never defeated him if he hadn’t surrendered himself into their hands. Alas! All of his secrets were in the hands of barbarians, and they did what they pleased with him. I will say nothing more – he was a traitor to himself.”
Timofeev reproaches the common folk as well. “Their tongues grew mute and their mouths were shut with bribery; all of our feelings were weakened by fear”
is his description of Boris Godunov’s rise to power, the ascendancy of a
man who was seen by many as a criminal and a child-murderer. The same
complacence in the face of wickedness at the beginning of the Time of
Trouble is lambasted by Avraamy Palitsyn (? – ca. 1625), who speaks of “a mad silence of the entire people.”
The
restoration of the country begins with a loud patriotic proclamations:
the epistles of Patriarch Hermogenes (ca. 1530 – 1612), calling Russia
to resist brigands and invaders; the letters of the Nizhny Novgorod
volunteer army[19] calling to “stand united against common enemies and
Russian brigands that spill our own blood in the country.” Patriotic
rhetoric and patriotic awareness were the remedy that nursed Russia back
to health in the moment where its statehood was in tatters. The Chronograph (1617)[20] describes the Council of the Land that elected a new dynasty[21] by painting a picture of national unity: “From
the borders to the hinterlands of the Russian land the Orthodox people,
men both meek and powerful, rich and poor, old and young, were granted
the generous gift of life-giving wisdom and illuminated with the light
of virtuously minded concord. Even though they came from different
lands, they spoke with one voice, even though they were dissimilar as
they lived far apart, they were gathered in one council as equals.”
The
Time of Troubles and the heroism of Minin and Pozharsky’s resistance
army are a damning argument against the popular myth that denies the
existence of the Russian nation in that period. On the contrary, Russia,
in the depth of its national and patriotic consciousness, was a step or
two ahead of even the most progressive of neighbouring countries, where
even a century later collusion with foreigners against one’s own nation
was not considered dishonorable and considered a legitimate political
instrument.
In
Russia this was already unthinkable. There, patriotic consciousness was
a hallmark of identity, which enabled the reunification of Ukraine, the
patriotic heroism of the Great Northern War that required a mighty
collective effort of the entire nation to carve out a space among great
European powers, the brilliant achievements of Catherine the Great, the
majestic victory over Napoleon in 1812. The last war is particularly
remarkable: not only ex post facto, but even during the
campaign itself it was seen as, and called, a Patriotic War. All
gestures and words of the actors in this patriotic drama were made for
the cause of the Fatherland.
The
Russian propaganda machine left Napoleon no chance to subjugate the
Russian people or entrench his dominance. The narcissistic conqueror was
opposed not only by soldiers but by artists of rhetoric, from patriotic
admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754 – 1841) who wrote the czar’s
manifestos to populist propaganda virtuoso Count Fyodor Rostopchin (1763
– 1826) and his broadsides[22]. Without understanding the cultural and
symbolic background we can never understand the most important of
historical events, from the Battle of Borodino, fought mainly for
political reasons, where every Russian officer saw death or injury as
the highest honor, to the epic and terrifying fire of Moscow. Russia
opposed Napoleon not only with a superior fighting spirit but also with a
superior, elaborate patriotic ideology.
Even
in Europe, German nationalism was not a predecessor but perhaps a
byproduct of Russian patriotic resistance to Napoleon. Russia created a
vast network of resistance, inspiring many European minds. Alexander
Svechin (1878 – 1938), a prominent military theorist, gives the
following description of the German front of Russian propaganda wars:
Russia organized a German Committee under the de facto leadership of Baron Heinrich von und zu Stein, the political head of the German national movement, who consented to leading the Russian propaganda effort. With a brilliant cadre of German patriotic officers that had resigned Prussian service when Prussia had been strongarmed into an alliance with Napoleon, Stein decided to create a German Legion staffed with German deserters and prisoners of war from La Grande Armée. The Legion was intended as a revolutionary challenge to a Germany enslaved by the French and then the core of an armed insurrection within Germany itself.A fine example of propaganda tracts published in Saint Petersburg in October 1812 at the printers of the Senate, financed by an absolute monarch, is the “Brief Catechism of the German Soldier” written by Ernst Moritz Arndt by special commission. It claimed that German soldiers used to have their own emperor, but then they made a pact with Satan and Hell in the guise of Napoleon. People who were once free became slaves and are being sent to far-flung countries to turn free and happy peoples into slaves just as themselves. A German emperor sends a German soldier to war; must he fight? No, says Arndt; the idea of monarchy is subordinate to that of the nation and Fatherland. If the sovereign forces his soldiers to oppress the innocent and violate their rights, if he conspires against the happiness and freedom of his own subjects, if he colludes with the enemies of his own nation, if he allows his population to be robbed, dishonored, and raped, then following the orders of such a sovereign would be an affront to divine law. German honor commands the German soldier to break the sword that German despots force him to raise for the cause of his nation’s enemies, the French. The soldier must remember that the Fatherland and nation are timeless and deathless, while monarchs and all kinds of superiors will stay in the past with their petty ambitions and disgraceful misdeeds…The success of propaganda among German regiments that defended Napoleon’s operation lines in 1812 was largely instrumental for the Berezina battle plan, an encirclement of the La Grande Armée core that had delved too deep into Moscow.
This
fact seems like a veritable mockery of the popular Western “time zones
of nationalism” theory formulated by Ernest Gellner. Allegedly, national
consciousness in Europe develops from West to East. The further to the
West, the more developed the national sentiment, the stronger its civic
nature. Conversely, the further you look to the East, the more tardy and
ethnocentric the national sentiment there.
As
we can see, this is patently untrue. Russian national sentiment is not
younger but older than German, or even the French and English. It is the
oldest among the modern peoples of Europe, based on an identity of the
Russian Land already pronounced in 10-11th centuries. There is no reason
for assigning the Russians a more recent birth date. At the same time,
the Russian self-awareness is perhaps not the most but the least
ethnocentric, sometimes overly so, causing certain inconveniences for
the Russians themselves.
The
object of this sentiment is not the place of a particular ethnic group
among others but the Fatherland, the Russian Land, its beauty and
grandeur among other lands.
The
Russians were indeed late in realising the ethnic aspect of
nationalism, not due to an alleged backwardness, but because they were
late in encountering ethnic nationalism directed against them, mostly in
the western borderlands of the Russian Empire. A certain part was
played by the German nationalism in the Baltic region; having clashed
with it, Yuri Samarin (1819 – 1876) formulated his idea of Russians as a
nation that needs equal rights within its own empire in his Letters from Riga (1849)[23].
In
spite of the “time zone” theory, German nationalism – in the form of a
Pan-German, unifying, state-driven national sentiment – was not a
predecessor but a product of Russian patriotism that manifested in the
anti-Napoleonic struggle. Russia stimulated German nationalism as an
opposition to a Pan-European empire, not imitated it. Russia became a
protector of identity and national diversity in Europe in spite of all
attempts to forge it into some faceless union.
Nowadays, Russian patriotism preserves the same importance. As justly reminded by Vladimir Putin:
“For Russia, for a Russian person […] the patriotic sentiment is very
important, the sense of national belonging that is now, to their
chagrin, being eroded in certain European countries.” In today’s
Europe, the eyes of those who seek to preserve their national identity,
those who are patriots and nationalists in the best sense of the word,
are fixed upon Moscow. Conversely, those who yell the loudest about a
“Russian menace” and a “European unity in the face of Russian
aggression” are mostly partisans of a complete erasure of European faces
and borders, oriented towards the EU Quarter of Brussels and the White
House.
As
I have attempted to demonstrate, this is really old news. Russia is
still the Motherland of patriotism in Europe, and now, in defiance of an
artificial denationalisation imposed by Communism, we are returning to
our old mission – keeping the flame of nationality in Europe, preserving
it as a Europe of Fatherlands and not a public thoroughfare.
Notes
[1]
The origins of this memetic phrase are in the so-called
Anti-Cosmopolitan campaign enacted in the final years of Stalinism
(1948-53); one of its prominent traits was the “discovery” Russian
“firsts” in science, invention, the arts, etc.; many of such
“discoveries” were based on dubious or outright falsified data. The
“Motherland of elephants” joke was born as a parody of this propaganda
blitz.
[2] An allusion to the Primary Chronicle, a.k.a. The Tale of Past Years
(ca. 1110), Russia’s oldest surviving historical chronicle
traditionally attributed to Nestor (ca. 1056 – 1114), a monk of the Kiev
Monastery of the Caves. Its first words, often interpreted as the
work’s title, are “These are the tales of past years, of where the
Russian Land comes from, of who reigned the first in Kiev, and of how
the Russian Land came to be.”
[3] Early East Slavic tribal groups.
[4] The anonymous 13th-century work only survives in fragments and quotations, most of them limited to its poetic preamble.
[5] Baltic tribal group.
[6] Modern-day Velikiy Ustyug, a city in the far Russian North.
[7] An obscure Finno-Ugric tribe.
[8] The White Sea or the Arctic Ocean.
[9] A defunct Volga ethnic group of unknown origin.
[10] An ancient name for the Mari ethnic group, in the modern-day Mariy El Republic of Russia.
[11] A Finno-Ugric ethnic group, in the modern-day Mordovia Republic of Russia.
[12] Vsevolod the Big Nest (1154 – 1212), Grand Prince of Vladimir.
[13] Yuri Dolgorukiy (ca. 1099 – 1157), Grand Prince of Suzdal and Kiev, founder of Moscow.
[14]
Vladimir Monomakh (1053 – 1125), Grand Prince of Kiev. Famous, among
other things, for organizing successful collective Russians expeditions
against steppe nomads.
[15] Russian name for Cumans, nomads of Turkic origin.
[16] The Baltic.
[17]
The battle of Kulikovo (1380) was fought by a Muscovy-led coalition of
Russian principalities and was the first major Russian victory over
Mongols in decades.
[18]
This traditional English translation of title is something of a
misnomer, a more precise one would be “of the whole of Rus’” or “of the
united Rus’.”
[19]
A popular resistance force organized in 1611 in the Volga city of
Nizhny Novgorod by the merchant Kuzma Minin and the nobleman Dmitry
Pozharsky with the goal of suppressing roving bands of brigands,
expelling Polish invaders, and preventing the complete collapse of the
Russian state. It was instrumental in defeating the Polish garrison in
Moscow in 1612 and restoring an independent Russian monarchy in 1613.
[20] Compendium of Russian and world history from Biblical events to recent times, including the events of the Time of Troubles.
[21]
An irregularly convened assembly of delegates from all estates of
Russian feudal society (sometimes including peasantry) that discussed
and voted on the affairs of the state, active ca. 1549 – ca. 1683. The
Council of 1613 was particularly important for electing a new dynasty
(the Romanovs) to take the vacant Russian throne.
[22]
As governor of Moscow during the Napoleonic invasion, Rostopchin became
famous for the mass printing and distribution of colorful broadsides
with grotesque caricatures and easy-to-grasp text, written in a
deliberately folksy style, that satirized the enemy and called for a
mass popular resistance.
[23]
In 1846, as a government inspector, Samarin travelled through what now
is Latvia, documenting many facts of abusive and arrogant attitude
towards Russia and the Russians by privileged Baltic German nobility
amid the tacit or open support of Russian government officials. Drawing
from those experiences, he published a pamphlet titled Letters from Riga
(1849), considered one of the first Slavophile manifestos and a seminal
document of modern Russian nationalism. The publication caused a
scandal that led to Samarin’s brief imprisonment and exile for
“fomenting anti-government dissent.”
Translator’s Notes
- Several abridgements were made in accordance with the author’s wishes.
- The translator took the liberty of making the text more accesible to readers not possessing an in-depth knowledge of Russian history. All names were rendered in their full form, and mentions of most Russian historical figures come with birth and death years for easier reference.
- Only names, events, etc. that cannot be identified with a quick Google or Wikipedia search were annotated. So were several allusions to historical events known to every educated Russian but obscure in the West.
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