Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II - New Abridged One-Volume Edition / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II - New Abridged One-Volume Edition / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0691123748
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691123745
- Pub. Date:
- 03/26/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691123748
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691123745
- Pub. Date:
- 03/26/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II - New Abridged One-Volume Edition / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691123745 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2006 |
| Series: | Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University |
| Edition description: | New Abridged One-Volume Edition |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
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Scenarios of Power
Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas IIBy Richard S. Wortman
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12374-8
Introduction
A glance at the records of past coronations in [Russia] leads to the conclusion that the pomp and circumstance attending them have not diminished with the advance of modern ideas, but rather increased. Not only do the rare coronation ceremonies of other countries pale before the religious inauguration of the Russian Czar, but there are other powerful monarchies at present in Europe, like Germany, for instance, where the reigning sovereign has never yet undergone a coronation and does not appear to require one.In Russia, however, it appears to be indispensable to the Government and the nation. Their great love of display and purely Eastern traditions may also be reckoned among the causes; but the machinery of government is not supposed to get into proper working order until after a new Czar has been crowned, and it is only then, as a general rule, that the personal policy of the imperial autocrat becomes a known quantity both to his own people and to the world at large. New York Times, May 31, 1896
The lead article on page 1 of the May 31, 1896, New York Times opened with a statement that Nicholas II had beencrowned "with the most gorgeous ceremonies the world has ever seen." Further on, an article on past coronations (cited in the epigraph to this chapter) pointed out the continued and even increasing lavishness of these ceremonies. By way of explanation, the author quoted "well-known Russian," who referred to "ten thousand miles of Asiatic frontier." But the magnificent coronation rites and celebrations had their origins in eighteenth-century Western models and sought first of all to impress Russian and European audiences.
Symbolic display served as an essential mechanism of rule in Imperial Russia. Ceremonies and celebrations-the coronation only the foremost among them-demonstrated the character and efficacy of the monarchy in different ways. They showed the emperor? capacity to marshal vast wealth. They revealed the extent of his realm and the variety of nationalities that he and his forbears had conquered and ruled. Elaborately choreographed parades and dignified processions displayed the monarch? powers of control and direction-simulacrum of a state directed by the ruler's will. Crowds lining avenues and filling squares attested to his capacity to maintain "exemplary order" and to win popular support. Altogether these events illustrated what Clifford Geertz described as "the power of grandeur to organize the world."
The coronation and other ceremonies of the autocracy presented a cognitive map of the political order, one of the "particular models or political paradigms of society and how it functions" which, Steven Lukes has argued, distinguish political ritual. Ceremonies and pageantry made clear that the Russian emperor was not bound by the limits of everyday life or subject to mundane judgment. They lifted him into various realms of the sublime free from disagreement and strife, a process I have described as "elevation." The exercise of absolute power and the public presentation of the mythical image of the ruler were reciprocal processes: Absolute rule sustained an image of transcendent monarch, which in turn warranted the untrammeled exercise of his power. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the lifting of the monarch into a higher realm was a ceaseless endeavor, compensating for the fragile legitimacy of monarchical authority in Russia. Poetry, art, and architecture were mobilized to represent an otherworldly universe dominated by the monarch? persona. By the same token, the failure of the ruler to make appearances at ceremonies and festivities or to prevent breakdowns in the organization of public events-as occurred during the reigns of Alexander II and Nicholas II-appeared as derelictions of his symbolic obligations. Such lapses cast doubt on the monarch? superhuman capacities and portended a broader loss of authority and control over the political order.
This two-volume study is an exploration of the role of symbolic representation in elevating and perpetuating Russian monarchy from the reign of Peter the Great until the abdication of Nicholas II. It approaches Russian monarchy as a symbolic system that persisted over time but took different forms to adapt to new demands and exploit new possibilities. It examines the dominant myths and the various ceremonial expressions of the myths that defined the monarchy for its servitors. It argues the importance of image and symbol for the maintenance of absolute monarchy and suggests how they affected the responses of Russian monarchy to the challenges of institutional reform, economic change, and popular participation. It seeks to illuminate the symbolic aspects of rule in a culture where symbolic expressions were pervasive and, I argue, often the decisive ones in determining the destinies of the state. Most important, this work seeks to restore the monarchy as an active, conscious factor to the history of Russia's political evolution before 1917. Examined with the same care as other institutions, Russian monarchy emerges as an institution with its own political culture, dominated by myth, its own specific goals, as an agent creating the scene of struggle and breakdown in the early twentieth century, an agent of its own doom.
Volume 1 described how the presentations of Russian monarchy lifted the ruler and his servitors above the ruled, from Peter the Great through the reign of Nicholas I. Those who participated in the ceremonies and culture surrounding each ruler constituted what I refer to as the elite of Russian monarchy. The presence of the elite at court ceremonies demonstrated the solidarity between the upper ranks of the nobility, military, officialdom, and crown. The elite exemplified the forms of obedience the monarch expected and represented his ideas and tastes to the state administration, the armed forces, and, on occasion, to the population at large.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian emperor ruled what Ernest Gellner has described as a horizontally organized society. The elite comprised noblemen from other national areas, such as the Baltic and Tartar provinces and Georgia, as well as Russian nobility. They shared a common bond of service with the emperor and a common domination over a population bound to the land. Under Nicholas I (1825-55), the imperial court, previously the preserve of the highest officials, officers, aristocrats, and favorites of the tsar, admitted increasing numbers of middle- and lesser-level officials.
The elite joined the monarch in two types of ceremonies: First, social occasions, such as soirées, balls, and receptions, defined the inner circle of the monarchy; second, public presentations-coronations, public processions, trips-displayed the preeminence of the elite and its sharing in the transcendent qualities of the monarch. Whether behind the walls of the palace, or before crowds of people, as Max Weber argued, they performed ceremonies principally for themselves, for it was the performance and its representation in text and image that proved the truth of their preeminence. The ceremonies confirmed the myths, justifying elite domination as the culmination of the heroic history of the monarchy. The common people remained outside these heroic narratives, in a realm of "historylessness," unconsciously complying with the terms of the myth. When they appeared at ceremonies, they made up a human backdrop, at times joining in choruses of acclaim for their ruler.
Myth endowed the monarch with an epic persona, placing him in what Michael Bakhtin describes as an epic world of absolute truths, "a transferral of a represented world onto the past." The presentations were "monologic," banishing doubt and compromise, permitting no responses but admiration and affirmation. The emperor appeared as demiurge, who by a gesture or the printed words of a manifesto accomplished prodigies of conquest or transformation. The principle of "le secret du roi" preserved the sense both of the mystery and the authoritative certainty of rule. Divergent understandings of the myth or of how the heroism of the past should be realized in current circumstances could be voiced only behind closed doors and did not mar the harmonious unity of imperial presentations.
Two overarching myths, a European and a National myth, framed the presentation of political power in Russia from Peter the Great until the abdication of Nicholas II. From the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, the animating myth of Russian monarchy associated the rulers and their elites with foreign models of sovereignty. The source of sacrality was distant from Russia, located in the images of Byzantium, Rome, France, or Germany. By appearing like foreigners, the monarch and the elite affirmed the permanence and inevitability of their domination of subject populations, both Russian and other nationalities. Peter the Great made Europe the referent of foreignness and superiority, and taught his servitors to act like Europeans.
The European myth elaborated a heroic history of godlike figures, either coming from the West or ruling in the West, antecedents and exemplars of Russian rulers and their elites. While many rulers of early modern Europe had emulated foreign models to enhance their authority when consolidating monarchical power, the appropriation of borrowed signs of sovereignty remained a symbolic imperative for Russian rulers long after it had disappeared in Europe. Only with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 did the emperor and his advisers introduce a myth to preserve absolute power that emphasized the monarch? national character.
The European myth expressed the motifs of empire and conquest. Empire provided the model of sovereignty for Russia, as for other early-modern monarchies. Empire connoted supreme power, extensive territories, and diversity of subject peoples. Unity came from acts of conquest and was perpetuated by military rule. The themes of conquest and usurpation, enacted spectacularly in the first years of Peter the Great? reign, underlay authority in Russia, and were constantly reaffirmed in performances of ceremonies displaying the Western character of the elite. First literal reenactments of conquest in the Petrine triumphs, then ceremonial displays of European character, dramatized the supremacy of an elite claiming foreign antecedents or associations. The ceremonies sustained what Ronald Suny has described as the distinguishing principle of empire-"inequitable rule," the dominion of one group over another.
In the West, national monarchies developed their own symbols to replace the early-modern model of empire. In Russia, the European myth perpetuated and reinforced the principle of imperial domination, making it the vital center of the monarch? self-image and the unity of the multinational elite. The expressions of European were displayed by a diverse group composed of noblemen from the various people of the empire but with the Russian nobility predominant. The difference between the Russian ethnic heartland, which gave rise to the unity of the Russian lands, and the Russian empire that succeeded it, was expressed in the words Rus' and Rossiia. Rossiia was greater Russia, which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an imperial state that engulfed Rus'. Rossiia was the multinational empire ruled by a Westernized sovereign, through a Westernized bureaucracy, and dominated by cosmopolitan nobility united by a common European culture.
The European myth identified the emperor with the secular state, the administrative institutions and laws that Peter the Great began to introduce according to Western models. While the rulers' power continued to be sanctified by God, they displayed their sacral qualities most visibly by the progress, expansion, and strengthening of the state. The Russian state never assumed an existence independent from the person of the monarch as it did in France or England. The notion of the state as an impersonal institution, operating according to laws of its own, remained an ideal of enlightened officials through the early twentieth century, but it could not take hold in the highly literal and personalized symbolic world of Russian monarchy.
After Peter, Russian monarchs appeared not only as the rulers but as symbolic exemplifications of the secular state. The result was an image of secular transcendence expressed in terms of illustrious heroes or pagan gods. Neither religious sanction nor force of tradition was sufficient to justify the monarch? secular pretensions. The emperor and his family faithfully performed the rituals of the church, but his plenitude of power required him to display godlike attributes that were demonstrated in an ongoing ceremonial drama of efficacy and omnipotence.
Although the European myth canonized and perpetuated the existing system of absolute monarchy based on a serf-holding elite, it also expressed a dynamic of change. The epic image of ruler that consecrated his unlimited domination, together with the principle of conquest, dramatized his power and intention to transform Russia. The goals of reform and transformation were symbolically inscribed in Peter the Great? succession law, which made utility along with heredity a justification of monarchical power. Thereafter, each ruler came to the throne posing as the heroic defender of the general welfare-the deliverer of Russia who would inaugurate an era of renovation.
Myth could and did accommodate new policies when they were understood to enhance the resources and power of the monarchy. But it could not accommodate dissent or politics in the public sphere. The antithesis of the monologic world of myth was the modern politics of organized groups, a world of bitter contestation over important policies and compromises that were incompatible with an absolute, superordinate truth. It was the failure of the European myth in the reign of Alexander II to preserve the ideals and practice of absolute power in parts that led Alexander III to ground his authority on national symbols and imagery.
* * *
The performance of the governing myth was a symbolic obligation of each Russian emperor when he ascended the throne. In the first decade of his reign, the new sovereign revealed his version of the myth, which displayed how he would embody the office of emperor and how he would exemplify the dominant political and cultural ideals of his era. I call these individual realizations of the myth "scenarios of power." The scenarios cast the new emperor as a mythical hero in a historically sensitive narrative that claimed to preserve the timeless verities underlaying the myth. It is in the scenarios of successive reigns that one observes both the transformations and the persistence of myth as it interacts with personality and history.
Ceremonies were episodes in the current scenario, and they received their meaning from the scenario. A ceremony as fundamental as the crowning of each emperor could emphasize a humble acceptance of divinely conferred authority, as in the seventeenth century; the affirmation of supreme moral and political authority, as in the eighteenth century; the identification of the emperor with nation and state as at Nicholas I? coronation in 1826. The coronations of Alexander II in 1856, Alexander III in 1883, and Nicholas II in 1896 presented a changing relationship between the monarch and the Russian people. A trip by the emperor or the heir through the empire could appear as a ceremonial conquest of the land by evoking love and approbation, as in the trips of Catherine the Great and Alexander II, or as an intimidating tour of inspection, as under Paul I and Nicholas I. Parades remained a dominant form of imperial presentation through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The discipline and symmetry of military reviews could be taken as proof of the personal power of the emperor, as with Paul I; of the loyalty and beauty of the elite, as with Alexander I; of the power and organization of the autocratic state, as in the displays of Nicholas I. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parades would reflect the elegance and sympathy of Alexander II, the national aspirations of Alexander III, and Nicholas II's needs for cameraderie and political support. After 1881 religious ceremonies, particularly processions of the cross, assumed a new prominence in the representation of monarchy, demonstrating the national role of the Orthodox Church. Under Nicholas II, new ceremonies, informal meetings of the tsar with the common people and mass historical celebrations, showed the tsar's bonds with the people and his claim as leader of the nation to the heritage of Russia's heroic past.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS vii
ABBREVIATIONS ix
PREFATORY NOTE xi
INTRODUCTION: Scenarios of Power 1
PART ONE: THE EUROPEAN MYTH 7
CHAPTER ONE: Signs of Empire 9
CHAPTER TWO: Peter the Great 21
CHAPTER THREE: Olympian Scenarios 40
CHAPTER FOUR: The Education of Princes and the Dilemma of Neoclassicism 73
CHAPTER FIVE: The Emperor Paul I 85
CHAPTER SIX: The Angel on the Throne 98
CHAPTER SEVEN: Nicholas I 120
CHAPTER EIGHT: Epitomes of the Nation 142
CHAPTER NINE: Parents and Son 166
CHAPTER TEN: Alexander II and the Scenario of Love 189
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Tsar-Emancipator 205
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Crisis of Autocracy 219
PART TWO: A NATIONAL MYTH 243
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Making of a Russian Tsar 245
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Inauguration of a National Myth 263
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Resurrection of Muscovy 282
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Life and Death of a Russian Tsar 303
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Nicholas II as Heir and Husband 317
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Accession and Coronation of Nicholas II 334
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Demonstrations of Godliness 347
CHAPTER TWENTY: Nicholas II and the Revolution of 1905 361
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Historical Celebrations 377
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Nicholas II and World War I 397
CONCLUSION 411
NOTES 415
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 449
INDEX 453