Provinces Animated

The appearance of provincial newspapers in Russia represents a pivotal moment in the history of the Russia’s press and life beyond its two capitals. Arising in 42 provinces of European Russia by a decree of June 1837, the new gazettes offered possibilities to invest those territories with content and thus played a critical role in the emergence of provincial consciousness. They also gave provincial inhabitants the opportunity to participate directly in intellectual life, laid the foundations for a civil society on the local level, and created a forum for the exchange of useful information on agriculture and trade. Marrying unity with diversity, newspapers furthermore linked the provinces with one another by granting them a common intellectual experience, even while inducing their inhabitants to explore and celebrate the distinctiveness of each.

Conclusion

Something approximating historical consensus posits a critical shift in Europe and the world around the year 1830, with the next decade or so, by implication, exhibiting attributes of a substantively new era. If the 1830s represent such a threshold, then the year 1837 reveals its significance for Russia with particular clarity. From 1835 to 1840, a whole series of shifts and transformations occurred, with 1837 serving as their center or pivotal point.

Think More About Camels

Russia’s military campaign against the khanate of Khiva in 1839–40 is noteworthy for its disastrous outcome. Planned for the winter months in order to obviate the absence of water in the arid Kazakh steppe, the campaign encountered an uncommonly severe winter, which imposed exceptional hardships and compelled the expedition to return to the outpost of Orenburg. Felled largely by the decimation of its camels in the cold winter, the campaign is enmeshed in larger changes unfolding in Russia’s relationship to Kazakhs, Central Asia, and the wider world. A growing Russian attitude of European superiority and preoccupations with great-power status after the defeat of Napoleon equipped tsarist elites with an enhanced sense of entitlement. The year 1837 proved critical for translating these sentiments into attempted conquest. Russian activity in the region also served as the midwife for an intense British Russophobia.

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour

Recounting the famous duel in January 1837 that killed Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, this chapter identifies this episode as one of the most important events of 1837 and indeed in Russia’s history. In light of censorship and official prohibitions on duelling, the precise circumstances of Pushkin’s death remained a mystery in public discourse for decades. Questions remain even today. But his demise in a duel punctuated with romantic intrigue proved central to his cult, which in turn became a critical resource for defining modern Russia and uniting its population in the late empire and the USSR. The episode helped to produce a cultural mythology that eventually made the poet Russia’s ‘everything’.

Philosophical Madness

Among the stranger literary products of 1837 was an essay called Apology of a Madman. Together with companion Philosophical Letters, this text represents a fundamental moment in the history of Russian thought and makes its author, Peter Chaadaev, a central figure in Russian intellectual history. For these texts not only played a major role in precipitating a grand debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about Russia’s place in the world, but also laid the foundations for all subsequent philosophies of history in Russia. And by positing that Russia constituted a blank slate on which virtually anything could be inscribed, the Apology exerted a powerful influence on anyone contemplating Russia’s future. Chaadaev’s interventions in 1836–7 thus gave birth to a particular way of thinking about Russia’s past and future, and the country would not be the same without them.

Orthodoxy Marches West

On New Year’s Day 1837, what might appear to be an insignificant change in bureaucratic procedure actually signified a major step in effecting one of history’s most striking examples of confessional engineering and in terminating the existence of an entire church within the Russian empire. Formally proclaimed in 1839, the union of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church with Orthodoxy pushed the boundary between Western and Eastern Christianity substantially westward, and played a key role both in consolidating a single Orthodox Russian nation and in binding territories previously acquired from Poland to Russia’s central provinces. The audacious project had begun a decade or so earlier, but 1837 represented a decisive moment in this process.

Introduction

To know Russia, you really have to understand 1837. That is the main message of this intriguing and unusual book. In ten chapters ranging from culture and ideas to empire and industry, it paints a rich and vivid portrait of the world’s largest country at a critical moment, when modern Russia acquired many of its most distinctive and outstanding features. Composers and poets, engineers and imperialists, philosophers and grand princes, peasants and camels, beards and potatoes—all make their appearance, and together they helped to forge the quiet revolution that changed Russia forever. Indeed, Russia is what it is today, in no small measure, because of 1837.

In the Flesh

In order to familiarize his son with the country he would eventually rule, Emperor Nicholas I arranged an extensive tour for him: an excursion of almost 20,000 km that took the heir across vast segments of the world’s largest country. Extensively choreographed and featuring novel forms of publicity and intense emotional expression, the excursion of Alexander Nikolaevich provided critical formative experiences for heir and country alike. Many things made the trip remarkable, but among the most important was that the voyage gave tsarist subjects the opportunity to engage with the monarchy directly and viscerally. Indeed, for many people in diverse parts of Russia, 1837 was unforgettable because they had seen the heir to the throne in the flesh.

A Life for the Tsar, an Opera for the Nation

Performed as A Life for the Tsar (Ivan Susanin in the USSR), composer Mikhail Glinka’s first opera occupies a unique place in both Russian music and Russian history. Contemporaries asserted its importance almost immediately. As one critic wrote ten days after the premiere, ‘Glinka’s opera appeared suddenly, as if from nowhere’, signifying ‘the dawn of a new age in the history of the arts––the age of Russian music’. Premiered in November 1836 and completed the next year, A Life for the Tsar represents a watershed—a major event in the history of Russian musical culture, signalling the country’s arrival as a musical power, the mobilization of opera in Russia’s nation-building, and a process of myth-making about these and other issues.

Northern Phoenix

The year 1837 featured one of Russia’s most spectacular fires, which broke out at the Winter Palace on 17 December. All that was left standing was the hulking skeleton of what had been among the greatest palaces in the world. An unknown number had perished, many in desperate attempt to save articles from the fire and to prevent its transmission to the adjoining Hermitage. The catastrophe created distinct dangers for the regime. Yet it also provided a remarkable opportunity for Russia to demonstrate its resilience and unity of purpose. The emperor, Nicholas I, set an almost impossible deadline for the palace’s reconsecration: the spring of 1839, a mere 15 months after the building’s destruction. Astonishingly, his autocracy managed to achieve that goal, staging a triumphant rededication on Easter night. The whole process featured a curious combination of triumph and anxiety, thus offering insights about the monarchy’s aspirations and apprehensions.