--Constantine Fitzgibbon
Part One--From Rurik to the Revolution
Chapter 1. 'Come to our Country'
During the last century large numbers of coins were unearthed in Sweden which caused a considerable sensation. They had been buried in an ancient settlement near Uppsala, the country's first royal capital. These coins--there were about 40,000 of them in all--must have travelled a long way one thousand years ago, for they originated in Arabia.
Abu Mohammed Harun Ibn al Mahdi al Rashid, the 'law-giver', whom we call Haroun al Rashid, sat at that time upon the glittering throne of the oriental Caliphate. He was a dangerous enemy to his neighbour in the east, the great Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium-Constantinople, but his relations with the mighty ruler of the West, Charlemagne, were friendly.
As the ninth century dawned upon the glory and rivalries of these three empires, the eastern Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire and the Western Empire of Charlemagne, the whole of Eastern Europe still slumbered in the darkness of prehistory. Yet even then the West had already begun to explore the vast and almost uncharted territories of the East. From the far north northern seamen, warriors and traders and those Swedish Goths known as the Varangians were establishing the first links between Scandinavia and the Orient. It was along their trade routes that the Arabian coins had travelled to southern Sweden.
By the year 800 there were already two of these important international shipping routes. It took a thousand years for the Russians to re-create such a route, linking the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Caspian: indeed, it was only done by Stalin when he built the great canals.
Coming from the Gulf of Finland through the Karelian Isthmus the dragon ships of the Varangians succeeded in reaching the Volga, which is linked by no natural waterway with the north. A land barrier then blocked all access to the great river's headwaters. But the resourceful seamen knew how to master this natural obstacle. They built 'ships' rollers', or roads of logs, along which they pulled and pushed their longboats across mile after mile of dry land until at last they came to the upper reaches of the Volga. Thus did these warrior-merchants from the north establish a nautical trade route over two thousand miles in length, and a very flourishing one at that. Itil, at the mouth of the Volga and not far from the present-day Astrakhan, was then the capital of the Khazar empire; this became the principal transhipment port for the Varangian traders. Arabian writers have described meeting the men from the north in the great Khazar market. 'They are tall as palm-trees, rosy-checked and with red hair. They wear neither blouse nor kaftan, but are dressed in coarse cloaks, which they throw over one shoulder, thus leaving their right hand free. Each man carries an axe, a dagger and a sword. They are never to be seen unarmed . . .'
For a long time this Volga route remained the main trade artery to the distant south, which stretched as far as Baghdad.
A second north-south water-route established by the northerners was to have world-wide political importance. For this was to open a way, for the first time, through the territory where lived the Eastern Slavs.
It, too, relied on 'ships' rollers'. From Lake Ladoga a natural waterway is provided by the River Volkhov to Lake Ilmen and then by the River Lovot to join up with the River Dvina. Thence the ships had to be pulled over dry land, until, at a point north of where Vitebsk now stands, they could be launched upon the upper reaches of the Dniepr.
In the period about the year 800, each summer saw great convoys of Scandinavian boats sailing upon these twelve hundred miles of water. At Zaporozhe they navigated the nine notorious Porogi, those dangerous whirlpools and rapids of the lower Dniepr, and then with oar and sail made their way along the shores of the Black Sea as far as the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora. This Dniepr route was famous throughout the East, and was known as the 'Varangians' Road to Greece', in the Arabic chronicles of the time. Rare and valuable goods from the far north travelled along it: honey, beeswax, splendid furs, the pelts of beaver, otter and sable, black fox and--a popular item--the winter furs of squirrels.
The Imperial City on the Golden Horn--known to the northern peoples as Miklagard ('the shining city')--was then the transhipment centre for goods from all over the world. Like a spider's web, its trade routes spread outwards to all the points of the compass. Through Turkestan caravans brought silks overland from China; up the Red Sea and through Alexandria spica and drugs, ivory, pearls and precious stones came from the India to the Bosphorus. Thus were priceless wares interchanged between two worlds: one, the almost unknown world in the far north, the other the great and famous world of antiquity. And all this trade moving up and down the shallows and rapids of the mighty Dniepr passed through the lands of the Eastern Slavs. Depots were first created, then small trading-posts, finally fortified market towns.
The Eastern Slavs, across whose lands the Varangians travelled, had neither the ability nor the desire to combine politically and thus- to create a state of their own. External teachers had to be called in before this could be achieved.
When one examines the lives and customs of these Slavs, and studies their previous history, it seems as though time for them had stood still. In those centuries they remained, as it were, rooted in prehistory, a strange contrast to the rest of the world.
All that they could produce was honey and wax, skins and furs from the forest. Thus did the fruit-pickers and hunters live, who inhabited all the world in prehistoric times. They also practiced agriculture and kept cattle, but only in the most primitive fashion.
All forms of political organization were unknown to them. 'These people,' the Byzantine chronicler Procopius wrote in the sixth century, 'are not subject to any man, but have lived since earliest times in a state of democracy.'
What Procopius meant by 'democracy' was their social organization. The Eastern Slavs recognized no loyalties, beyond those due to the family and the tribe, and later to the village community and to a loose clan system. It was the family which collectively made all the important decisions; to the family belonged all the arable land tilled by its members; there was no private ownership or occupation of this land, which was common property. There was absolute equality between all members of the family living this tribal life; but personal freedom could not exist in such conditions.
Temples and priests were both unknown. The Slavs worshipped the sea and the waves, the forests, trees and animals. Their principal gods were the sun god, Dashbog, and the god of cattle, Veles; the god of fire, Svarog, and Perun, the god of thunder. The forests and the streams were inhabited by Russalki, that is to say by demons and nymphs, water-spirits and woodland sprites, which still live on in Slav songs today.
The Eastern Slavs are described as courageous and resourceful, as hospitable and--what is characteristic--'uncontrolled and quick to anger'. Should hostilities break out or should they stumble upon an enemy, it never led to open combat; a disciplined battle array was completely unknown to them. Lightning-quick surprise attacks from ambush--such was their method of fighting.
They could neither read nor write, were totally ignorant of astronomy and mathematics, medicine and engineering, were familiar neither with philosophical, moral nor religious teachings, had never seen a stone house, temple or palace. They knew nothing of seamanship nor the casting of iron-- in fact they stepped upon the stage of history with empty hands. As Herder, after many years' study of the Slav people, wrote in the eighteenth century, 'They take up more space on the map than they do in history.'
Like a giant walking in his sleep, his muscles still untested, the Slav masses entered the spotlight of history. After the Slavs no other great race appears upon the world stage--they were the last to emerge from the darkness. This was not an automatic disadvantage to them, though no cultivated nation has had so insignificant a past. In the life of a people late development is not unusual nor is it a disgrace; the Slavs' western neighbours, the Germanic races, came next to last in the long cavalcade of history. And were not all peoples raw, unskilled savages once upon a time, before they took over the heritage of other races, usually by plunder and violence?
Such late development for so young, fresh, gifted and exceptionally strong a race could have meant a great opportunity. For the Slavs appeared at exactly the right moment of history, at a transition period when something completely new was coming to birth. In those centuries, when the Slav hordes first pounded upon the gates of the civilized world and clamoured for admission, the Middle Ages had already begun in the West. The peoples of Europe had laid the stupendous foundation stones upon which humanity was to build. They had begun to pave the great highway which would lead steeply into the new age. Incalculable energy--physical, mental and spiritual--was to be needed for all this, and any who wished to join in the great work of the future were sure to be welcomed with open arms.
Would the Slavs answer this call? Would they understand and join in the struggle up the steep, laborious path that has led from parry feudalism to the twentieth century?
All roads lay open to the Slavs. It was only a question of which they would take; of how they would co-operate among themselves; and of whether they would learn to combine their own gifts with those of other peoples in order to create something positive and new.
The initial process of crystallization was to take place in the north, where the trade routes began. Prom their ancestral home between the Vistula and the Dniepr the Slavs had pushed upstream through the territories inhabited by the Finns and the Lithuanians as far as the Gulf of Finland. This led to friction and endless bloody feuds, not only with the foreigners but between themselves.
Incapable of solving these quarrels themselves, the Slavs called for foreign help.
'We must get ourselves a king,' they said, 'who can rule over us, and lead us properly.' So says the Nestor Chronicle, the most valuable of the old Russian histories, written by the Monk Nestor about A.D. 1100.
What more obvious than to turn to those Nordic warrior-merchants who for so many years had been sailing their ships southwards through the country of the Slavs, who had built trading-posts, with whom they have bartered, and who had even provided bodyguards for their chieftains? So the Slavs sent messengers across the Baltic to the country of the Varangians. They went to see the chieftain of the 'Rus'; for the Varangians were called by the Finns Ruotsi, or oarsmen, which in Slavonic became Rus. In Roslagen, Sweden, they made their request, which Nestor has recorded as follows:
'Our land is large and rich, but we have neither law nor order. Come to us, rule us, and command us.'
The Varangians, as we know, answered the call of the Slavs. Three brothers came, with their warriors, to rule the country, which was henceforth called 'Rus-Land': they were Rurik, Sineus and Truvor--in old Swedish, Hrorekr, Signjotr and Thorvardr. They began by building strong fortified towns as centres of the three territories over which they ruled. The most powerful of these capitals, which they called Holmgard, was Novgorod on the shores of Lake Ilmen. It was the seat of Prince Rurik, and on the death of his brothers he took over their lands as well.
The story of Rurik's call to the throne has been much embellished by myth and legend. One fact, however, is beyond dispute: Varangian overlords brought law and order to the Slavs. The birth of an eastern state coincides with the moment that their rule began.
The Nestor Chronicle gives the date that Rurik was summoned as 862. The Russia of the Romanov Tsars later recognized this as a great historical event, and in 1862 the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the Russian Empire was celebrated with much pomp and splendour. The new empire of the Swedish rulers was rapidly extended towards the alluring south, following the old trade route from the north, by way of the Dniepr down which the Varangians' boats still sailed. The successors of Rurik, Askold and Dir, soon controlled the Kiev region, where Dnaparstadir, the capital of the old Eastern Gothic kingdom, must once have stood. Shortly after Rurik's death, Helge (in Russian, Oleg, who from 879 to 912 reigned as regent for Igor, Rurik's son) consolidated the two areas north and south of the Dniepr into one kingdom which he further extended in victorious campaigns.
Eastwards, he and his men pushed forward as far as the upper reaches of the Volga and the Don, westwards to the Bug and the Dniestr, and southwards to the Ukraine. The fortresses of Tchernigov and Pereyaslavl were built. With a great horde of warriors, known as the Drushina, Oleg made a triumphant entry into the fortress of Kiev.
'This shall be the Mother City of all Russia!' Oleg is quoted by Nestor as pronouncing. And so Kiev became the new capital of the Rus, while Novgorod in the north sank into the background. Thus within a few decades the Ruriki had performed a remarkable feat: they had organized and unified the Slav peoples.
Fortified trading-ports had now bean built from Lake Ladoga in the north to the Lower Dniepr in the south; the nomadic clans had been conquered and compelled to unify: and thus the Slavs, under their Scandinavian rulers, became a state. It is to these invaders from the north that they owe their unification.
Scarcely had the Slavs acquired the status of a major power, scarcely had their political organization, administration and their armed forces begun to take shape, before they embarked, quite characteristically, upon the first of a long series of aggressions against the West.
Kiev was the jumping off place. The tempting target, which beckoned from across the Bosphorus, was the mighty, golden city of Byzantium, the city which was to ordain the fate of Russia.
The attack was powerfully mounted. Without warning, a flotilla of two thousand boats, manned by fighting seamen, appeared of Byzantium in the year 907. The Grand Duke of Kiev, as Oleg now called himself, had an ambitious aim. He wished to compel the Byzantine Emperor to recognize him as a ruler of equal rank with himself. And he pulled it off. In 911 a pact of friendship was signed. Written in purple on two pages of parchment, it stated that 'everlasting peace' should reign between the two states. Furthermore, Byzantium was to open its gates to the Dniepr trade and to give all help and protection to the foreign traders.
Oleg might well be satisfied. Without his having to make the slightest political or military concession, his unexpected attack had produced all the results for which he had hoped. But despite the fine phrases the 'everlasting peace' did not last long. It was broken by the East, after Oleg's death. His successor, Igor, began to prepare a new attack on the Imperial City. This time, however, Slav surprise tactics were destined to misfire.
When in 941 Igor's forty thousand warriors in a thousand rowing and sail boats suddenly appeared in the Bosphorus and began to attack both banks, Byzantium was ready and launched a furious and immediate counterattack. The Imperial Fleet was engaged elsewhere. The Emperor therefore made a quick decision, and ordered fifteen ships which were out of commission to go into action at once.
This meant the end for the men from Kiev. For every Byzantine ship carried on board, disguised as its figurehead, equipment which constituted the first 'super-weapon of the West'. At the bow of each ship there towered a bronze lion's head. Its open jaws concealed a pipe. From a large, hidden metal container at the base of this tube, a fluid was pumped up, and the lion's head began to spew out fire. This was the terrible and terrifying 'Greek Fire'.
This 'super-weapon', invented by the Byzantine shipbuilder Kallinikos, was a carefully guarded state secret: a mixture of petroleum, brimstone, rock-salt, resin, asphalt and calcinated lime, the fluid continued to burn even on the water, and the lion could hurl his flames far across the waves. When the thousand boats of the Kiev fleet met the fifteen ships of the Imperial squadron the outcome was soon decided. Greek fire defeated and in part destroyed the fleet of the Rus.
The pact signed in 945 plainly shows the magnitude of the defeat sustained by Kiev. Freedom to trade in Byzantium was now limited, and it was agreed that Kiev should give military aid to the Emperor, whenever he might demand it.
The immensely superior military skill of the Byzantines had saved the Imperial Capital and forced the Kiev Rus back behind their own boundaries.
The Kiev Rus could not even contemplate any attempt to produce Greek fire themselves, as the Russians, after 1945, were to copy the A-bomb and H-bomb which had been developed in the USA. They were still too uncivilized, technically too backward.
They therefore embarked upon a new policy--and one that is still favoured at such times by their descendants today: the policy of coexistence. The Russian Princess Olga--the Russian version of the name Helga--widow and successor of Igor, made the first official state visit to Byzantium in 956.
All that happened at this important first meeting between 'West' and 'East', all that was displayed before the astonished eyes of the princess from the eastern state, still in the first springtime of its youth, the subtle but powerful administration, the glitter and glory and splendour which so impressed her--all this is symbolic of the great influence that Byzantium was to exercise over the whole of Russia.
In their attacks upon the Imperial Capital on the Golden Horn, the Kiev Russians had learned to know the highly developed equipment and military strength of Byzantium. That, however, was only one aspect. They were now seeing how infinitely superior Byzantium was to Kiev in political, cultural and spiritual matters--not to mention the importance of the city as the second centre of Christendom. All this acted like a magnet upon Olga. She was drawn to copy their administrative techniques, first in the Kiev district, an act of imitation in which all Russia was later to join. What a difference between the Royal Palace at Kiev (built of wood and located in a fortified trading-post amidst the forests that flanked the Dniepr) and the glittering Imperial metropolis upon the Golden Horn!
We can read in a very detailed protocol exactly how, on 9th September of the year 956, the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus received the Princess Olga of Kiev as the first Russian sovereign to set foot inside the Imperial Palace of Byzantium.
On this day the entire Senate--at its head the highest state officials, the Treasurer, the Minister in Charge of Home Affairs throughout the vast Empire, the Postmaster-General, who acted also as Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Commander of the Imperial Bodyguard, the Prefect of the City and the Chief of the Security Police which dealt with foreigners, beggars and vagrants--all repaired to the Magnaura Palace, which stood high upon the Seraglio Peak near Hagia Sophia, the Church of St Sophia. The members of the Senate took their places dressed in the splendid robes which the strictest etiquette demanded. Thus they sat, awaiting their Emperor. Lord Chamberlains and Chamberlains, as well as lictors who, as in a previous age, carried the bundle of fasces with the axe, and guards recruited from foreign countries in glittering armour and magnificent uniforms were meanwhile conducting the emperor into the Church of Christ which adjoined the palace. There candles were lit as an act of worship. After a brief service they all moved on, towards the Triklinon of the Magnaura, the great audience-chamber.
The Imperial choirs and representatives of the Circus factions intoned songs of praise as the monarch entered his palace, The Emperor first went to an ante-room, to await the completion of the preparation for the audience. At a sign from the Kuropalat, the equivalent of the Court Chamberlain, the Emperor entered the great hall. He donned the Imperial robes and the diadem, and while cries of welcome echoed through the hall, and the choirs resumed their chanting, the Emperor walked up the porphyry steps to his throne, which was surmounted by a canopy and draped in soft purple, and sat himself upon it. In front of the throne, on a dais, stood a tree of gilt bronze, in the branches of which were perched golden birds of every sort. As if to guard the Imperial presence, golden lions and chimeras flanked the throne. Soldiers in the white uniform of the Candidi stood to either side, against a background of brilliantly-coloured banners and pennants.
Amid total silence one soft word of command was spoken by the Master of Ceremonies: 'Keleusate!' This summoned the Ostiarii, who entered the hall, their golden, jewel-studded staffs in their hands; they were followed by the courtiers of the highest rank across a mosaic floor strewn with fragrant roses.
Over the rich Persian carpets which muffled every sound the Princess Olga and her entourage at last approached the presence. She was dressed in robes of great splendour, previously presented to her by the Court. The Russians in her train prostrated themselves before the Emperor. The Princess walked up to the throne, and exchanged formal words of greeting with the Postmaster-General. The Emperor meanwhile remained silent upon his throne: it would have been beneath his dignity either to speak or otherwise to greet his guest.
Time seemed to stand still in the breathless silence. Then with a sudden outbreak of deafening sound the curtain rose on a fascinating spectacle presented to the foreigners.
The notes of an organ pealed forth, and the strange animals grouped about the throne began to stir. The tails of the lions lashed the marble floor, their jaws opened, their tongues rolled out and a great roar issued from their throats. The bodies of the chimeras began to twitch, and they made a hissing noise. The birds in the tree beat their wings and from their golden beaks, which opened and shut, there poured forth a loud twittering. When all those present had bowed low three times, the movement of the golden creatures stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the noise with it. And the great monarch, the Emperor himself, had vanished--a hidden mechanism had carried him upwards, out of sight, still seated upon his throne.
The audience was over. The Princess walked away, followed by the courtiers in order of rank. We have a contemporary eye-witness account of such an audience. The ambassador of the German King Otto I, a certain Liutprand who later became Bishop of Cremona, has described it all in detail.
No chronicler tells us what else took place during the visit to Byzantine of Olga of Kiev. Staying in the Imperial guest-rooms which were assigned to her would alone have sufficed to show the Princess what overwhelming splendour prevailed in the glittering metropolis.
The buildings of the Imperial Palace consisted of a single gigantic complex of open courts, galleries and halls, of long flights of stairs and terraces, paved with superb shining marble or gilded or inlaid with fabulous mosaics or covered with gorgeous oriental rugs which shone in the sunlight by day and at night were lit by countless chandeliers, hanging lamps and torches. The central block, the sacred palace of the Emperor, consisted of seven buildings and boasted an unbelievable luxury; in its gardens between the pavilions and the pergolas, fountains of fragrant rose-water played. For the maintenance of the concert halls, art galleries, the audience-chambers and women's quarters, chapels and churches, twenty thousand servants were required.
A wide view, an unequalled panorama, was visible from the Seraglio Peak. Immediately behind the Palace of the Senate towered the mighty domed roof of the Church of St Sophia, the Hagia Sophia built by Constantine the Great. The columns of Constantine rose up, and from the Augusteion, only a few yards away, ran the centuries-old Via Triumphalis of the Byzantine emperors, flanked by splendid buildings hung with tapestries, down to the Golden Gate. Near the cliffs that led down to the Sea of Marmora was the colossal Hippodrome, arena for the great chariot-races which formed part of the state ceremonies. Far below in the harbour of the Golden Horn, protected by iron chains, lay the squadrons of the Imperial Navy. Moored to marble terraces the great purple Dromona ships lay at anchor, built for the Emperor's sea voyages; in their midst lay the Imperial Ship of State, with its gilt wood cawing. When the monarch visited his Water Castle on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus to attend the wine-harvest, he travelled in this vessel, seated on a silver throne, shaded by a purple canopy, while great silken banners fluttered overhead.
Olga of Kiev, after her audience with the Emperor, became the guest of his consort. The Empress Helena had invited the Princess to join her ladies in the Triklinon of Justinian. This reception concluded with an elaborate banquet, at which, according to protocol, spectacles were mounted to accompany each course; these began with music, mime and ancient Greek dances during the first course, and ended with displays by Chinese acrobats and Hindu jugglers during the dessert. Deeply impressed with the pomp and splendour, the power and plenty of Byzantium, and with its high standard of culture, the Russian Princess returned to her own small, drab castle on the banks of the Dniepr. The results of this first encounter with superior Western culture were to be considerable. For shortly after the Russian state visit the first steps were taken upon a path which, for over a millennium, was to be pursued by the eastern state. It was then that a policy was formulated which has not changed to this day, a policy of acquisition from the West in order to assist Russian development, of constant endeavour to 'catch up and overtake'.
A year later Olga visited the Imperial City a second time, to be baptized by the Patriarch. Thus she showed the road her country must take, if it wished ever to emerge from its backwardness. The far-sighted Princess from Kiev had recognized that the key to advancement lay in Christianity, that it was Christianity which opened the way to the possessions and achievements of a progressive world.
Four decades later Olga's grandson forcefully continued her work. In Kherson on the Black Sea in the year 990 the Grand Duke Vladimir and his followers were baptized. The Prince then married the Byzantine Princess Anna, and introduced Christianity as the state religion. He ordered that all idols be destroyed, and issued a decree that all his subjects without exception must be baptized. Any person who refused would be arraigned as an enemy of God and of the Grand Duke. The Slavs gathered in crowds and were baptized in the Dniepr. In place of the overthrown idol representing their god, Perun, a Christian church was built.
Thus the door to the West was opened.
'Saint Vladimir is the beginning, the cause and the motive of everything here in Russia.' This remark was made many years later by Feofan Prokopovich, court theologian to Peter the Great.
With the introduction of Christianity and the arrival of the Imperial bride from Byzantium, both the organization of government and the way of life of the people were radically transformed, and a strong and influential current began to flow through the eastern territories. Within a hundred years this second--and far more significant--assimilation of foreign influences began to affect the Russians.
In 900 the Slavs had adopted with unusual speed all that the Varangians had brought them--a state organization, law and order, an efficient military force. Similarly at the beginning of the next century Imperial Byzantium became the great example, the model to be followed and copied. Christianity provided the first major bridgehead to what was then the 'modern world', and the gates to the West were unlocked. For the under-developed and still uncivilized eastern state this provided a unique opportunity for development and for the acquisition of power and status.
Foreign influence flooded into the country. For the first time the Russians learned to read and write, to build in stone, to paint and to compose music.
In Vladimir's own lifetime the first large stone building was begun, under the supervision of skilled Greek architects. Built on the model of the famous Hagia Sophia, the Cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev arose on the banks of the Dniepr.
'The Church of St. Sophia at Kiev,' according to an authority on ancient Russian art, N. Brunov, 'was the first large building with a central construction in Russian architecture. In order fully to understand the significance of this fact, one should not forget that the central dome remained up till the end of the nineteenth century the only form of church construction practiced in Russia.'
This new, foreign art must have fascinated the Eastern Slavs, for with surprising speed it spread over the length and breadth of the land. From Kiev, Byzantine dome-building and stonemasonry travelled to the far north. On Lake Ilmen the Cathedral of Sophia at Novgorod, built in the years 1045 to 1052, shows this, though it also contains the first evidence of architectural, technical and cultural influences reaching Russia from Central and Northern Europe. The magnificent ornamentation of the Novgorod Cathedral included the wonderful bronze gates attributed to Master Ruffn of Magdeburg and superb church doors executed by Swedish artists.
'It is only the wooden churches in Russia which owe nothing to Byzantine architecture,' the French art historian Louis Reau tells us. 'They are derived directly from peasant huts and are mere enlargements of these. This is the only strictly indigenous style of building; before, and since, all architecture in Russia has been Byzantine and Western-classical in derivation.'
Vladimir's son, Yaroslav, who consecrated the Cathedrals of St Sophia in Kiev and in Novgorod, opened the first schools, with teachers imported from Byzantium. As soon as he had recognized the importance of books, he bought many volumes in the Imperial Capital. He also imported numerous translators and transcribers into the country. The Greek texts were translated into Slavonic, using the Cyrillic script which is derived from the Greek alphabet.
In the Cathedral of St. Sophia, the first library was formed. The earliest chronicles were now written, modelled exactly on those of Byzantium, their pages illuminated with pictures and monograms according to the Greek or Bulgarian pattern. Even the technique of bookbinding was copied in all its splendour.
As with architecture and literature, painting was also imported from Byzantium. The Greek icons, austere at that time, were copied. Vladimir had destroyed, along with the Perun idols, all heathen musical instruments--horns, flutes and drums--but now there was Byzantine choral church music in the land of the Slavs, and the Russians were learning those wonderful cantatas for eight voices which they enjoy so much even to the present day.
The first monasteries were established. Greek masters created the world-famous Lavra monastery at Kiev, which is hollowed out of the rock-face.
Under these powerful influences from the 'West', the eastern territories flourished. South German traders who visited Kiev at this time have recorded their astonishment at such progress. The Russian market suddenly began to deal in the choicest goods from the entire Orient, transported across the Black Sea. There were even Chinese silks, and the rich women of Kiev wore Greek dresses and were adorned with costly jewellery from the Imperial City on the Bosphorus.
A hundred years later, however, the first symptoms of decline were already in evidence. After the death of Vladimir Monomakh (1113-25) the power of the Grand Duchy on the Dniepr started to decline.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Mongol onslaught hit the west, and Kiev was no longer capable of offering any serious resistance to the savage attack. The eastern territories fell to the Khan of the Golden Horde, and vanished for a long time from the eyes and even from the consciousness of Europe.
Chapter 2. The Kremlin's Italian Builders
Three hundred years had passed since the Mongol hurricane had obliterated the Ease from Europe's consciousness. Then, in 1549, a book was published in Vienna, which was to be read with burning interest and discussed at great length in all Europe.
Sigmund, Freiherr von Herberstein was the author of this work: Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii. In it he recounted his own experiences and observations in Moscow. It was illustrated with a number of woodcuts. He had twice visited Russia on behalf of the Archduke Ferdinand, in 1517 and 1526, and he had also acted as ambassador for the Emperor Maximilian at the Kremlin. Few books have ever caused such a sensation as did Herberstein's report about that distant land far away in the east. It sold many copies, and was, indeed, a 'best-seller'. First appearing in Latin, it was later translated into German, French and Italian. Throughout most of Europe in the 1550's people were astonished to learn of the existence of a Muscovite state. Nobody guessed that the first steps of the development of that distant land had begun quietly during the previous century, with the help of European experts.
Where the Russian capital now stands, the wooded banks of the Moskva river describe an arc like the Thames at London. But in the year 1450 a visitor to those banks would have searched in vain for any trace of cathedrals towering to the sky, mighty castles or shining palaces.
A fortified earthwork--which bore the Tartar name of Kremlin, meaning strongpoint or fortress--rose to a height of 120 feet above a collection of primitive log-cabins and unpaved tracks, all encircled by a further wood-and-earth wall as an outer defence. Such was Moscow when the Grand Duke Ivan III became its ruler in 1462.
Compared with the magnificent royal residences of other sovereigns at that time, this fortress was an insignificant blot on the landscape, unknown to the rest of the world. Yet from this seed was to grow the great power that today governs more than one-sixth of the earth's surface. Over five hundred years after the founding of the first principality by the Varangians, long after the springtime of Kiev's flowering under Byzantine influence, there began again under the third Ivan that process of ceaseless, relentless effort to assimilate and appropriate the technical genius of the West, a process which runs like a thread through the whole history of the Russian state.
It was then that the Muscovites opened their doors to men from abroad--'. . . very much earlier,' according to the Italian historian Lo Gatto, 'than is generally supposed, if one recalls the statement that it was Peter the Great who opened the window of Russia to Europe.'
Emulating his predecessors, Ivan Kalita and Ivan II, Ivan III carried on a vigorous policy of incorporating the Eastern Slav principalities into his realm. He won fame as the 'Collector of Russian Soil'. In the south, after more than two hundred years, the kingdom of the Tartars, the old empire of the 'Golden Horde' to whom the Muscovites had had to pay tribute, was in process of disintegration. In the north Ivan set out to conquer all the hitherto independent principalities. The Princes of Tver, of Rostov, and of Yaroslavl were deprived of their rights by Ivan in his capacity of Gosudar or Samoderzhets, 'Supreme Ruler of all the Russias' or 'Autocrat' as he had styled himself since 1478. He subordinated the free Republic of Great Novgorod (a Hansa town hitherto governed according to the so-called Lubeck Laws) to the central government. The German trading offices within its walls were closed down and the great trading area of this once powerful Hansa town, stretching from the White Sea to the Urals, passed under Moscow's control. Novgorod's famous bell, the Viechevoi Kolokol which for centuries had tolled to summon the Assembly of the People together, was silenced by his orders for ever. Novgorod's bronze symbol of freedom and democracy was later removed to Moscow as a victory trophy by Ivan III's grandson, Ivan the Terrible, after he had razed Novgorod to the ground.
In the years that Ivan III was ruthlessly laying the foundations on which the Russian state was to be built, another event occurred which was to be of great importance in its history. This originated from abroad--in the form of a proposal of marriage.
In 1468, just one year after Ivan III had become a widower, a confidential emissary of Cardinal Bessarione arrived from Italy on a special mission to Moscow. He proposed to the Grand Duke that he take the Princess Zoe Paleologa to be his wife. This Princess was a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI. The Emperor had been killed in the defence of Constantinople. When in 1453 the Turks captured the capital on the Bosphorus, Zoe, who was still a child, fled with her parents to Florence. Since then her father, the Emperor's brother, had also died.
The Grand Duke was delighted to accept this proposal, and took all the necessary steps so that the wedding might be solemnized as soon as possible. He ordered the Italian, Gianbattista della Volpe, who was in charge of the Mint in Moscow, to visit Rome on his behalf. And in November 1472, the Princess arrived in Moscow where she was married to Ivan III. Zoe Paleologa became the Grand Duchess Sophia.
St. Vladimir had also wed an emperor's daughter, Anna, and now once again a Byzantine princess had married a Russian Grand Duke. However, the hopes of the Papal Court in arranging this family link between the Byzantine Imperial family ant that of the Muscovite Grand Duke were not to be realized. The cardinal had secretly planned to use the Grand Duchess in order to enrol the Muscovites against the Turks who were advancing into Europe from Constantinople. Exactly the reverse took place.
Everything that has ever gone to Russia from Europe; whether it be technical skills or theoretical ideas, has eventually been used against the West. This was the case with the marriage contrived in Italy. Soon enough Rome itself had to pay the bill.
Ivan III, as husband of a princess from the proud house of the Paleologi, not only took the two-headed eagle for his national emblem, but also adopted the Byzantine court ceremonial and hierarchy, with its strict distinctions of rank. And Sophia called herself Tsarevna of Tsargrad, Empress of the Imperial City (Byzantium). Thus Moscow staked its claim to be the 'rightful heir' of Byzantium, and was henceforth to regard itself as the capital of the 'Holy East Roman Empire of Russia'.
It was a splendid and fascinating idea that the monks had brought with them when the Turkish advance into the Danube basin compelled them to emigrate to Russia; it was the concept of a Third Rome. The idea that after the conquest of Bulgaria (1393) and the sack of Constantinople (1453) by the Turks a new home and seat for the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church must be found elsewhere was born in the ancient cloisters in Bulgaria. It is to be found in the ecclesiastical literature of Bulgaria, written as the Turkish menace drew steadily closer.
Moscow did not hesitate to accept this idea and indeed to make it particularly her own. As early as 1547 Ivan IV, the grandson of the famous marriage, had himself crowned 'Emperor of all the Russias', and consciously adopted as his constitutional role that of the Byzantine absolute monarchs. Henceforth, until 1917, all the Russian rulers bore the title of Tsar.
'He is the only ruler of the Christians in all the world.' Thus did the monk Philotheos of Pleskau (Pskov) in his famous letter to Ivan IV, 'The Terrible', interpret the Bulgarian idea of the leader of the Apostolic Church, who is in the Holy City of Moscow and not in Rome or Constantinople. He alone is the light of the whole world, brighter than the sun. Then know, ye devout one! All the Realms of Christendom are dissolved and reunited in the Realm of our Sovereign, as is laid down in the books of the prophets; such is the Russian Empire. For two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.'
Even folk-songs describe Russia as the 'third Rome'. 'Historical' fairy tales endeavoured to give a 'factual' foundation to the claim. The claim that 'Russia leads the world' was then made theologically, even as for the inventors it was to be made technologically when the 'Wave of Inventions' claim was launched after 1945.
A document entitled The Genealogy of the Russian Grand Dukes, which was widely read, regaled the Russian people in all seriousness with a string of unbelievable historical gibberish. 'The glorious Rurik, and through him all the Russian Grand Dukes,' it says, 'are descendants of the Roman Emperor Augustus. He had a brother called Prus, to whom the dying Augustus gave chat territory which, in honour and memory of Prus, came later to be called Prussia. This Prus, however, was none ocher clan the ancestor of Rurik and therefore also of all the Russian autocrats since Rurik.'
Moscow's dream of becoming the heir and successor of Byzantium remained, however, unfulfilled--inevitably, for the Russians lacked every quality for the role, in particular that of creative endeavour. The parchment rolls bearing the works of the great Greek poets and philosophers, the spirit of which burnt bright in the libraries of the European monasteries until it poured forth into the world in modern times, slumbered unread and dusty in the Orthodox monasteries of the Slav Empire. No one examined them, to no one did they come as a revelation. Spiritual inflexibility was characteristic of Russian monastic life; such immobility of mind had prevailed in the Byzantine monasteries during the period about the year 1000, when Christendom was embraced by the State of Kiev, and thence it spread throughout Russia.
Moscow was remarkably ill-equipped to lay claim to imperial status and to adopt the Byzantine arms. The royal palace was built of wood. There was not a single school. Scarcely one of the nobles could read or write. Yet at that time the Universities of Paris, Bologna and Oxford were already in a position to celebrate their two-hundredth and three-hundredth anniversaries.
Nobody was more aware of the discrepancy between these bombastic claims and the obvious facts of cultural backwardness and kick of civilization than the Princess Sophia. She had spent her youth in Florence, in the city of Dante, that treasure-house of Italian art and culture. It must all have sounded like a fairy-tale to Ivan, when the Greek princess and her noblewomen told him of the great world far away, of the palaces and capitals, of the art schools and universities.
From them the Grand Duke gained, for the first time, real insight into the high technical standard that prevailed abroad in such industries as shipbuilding and mining, of many crafts hitherto unknown in Muscovy--and of the power of modern weapons. Their tales aroused so passionate an interest in Ivan III that he resolved to put out feelers towards Europe. Contact must be established, he decided, so that his people might benefit from the advancement of others. He therefore sent Muscovite ambassadors to Denmark, Italy and Germany, a totally new departure.
Ivan III resolved simultaneously that Moscow must no longer lag so grotesquely far behind foreign capitals, and must be architecturally beautiful. The beginning was to be a magnificent stone church. Two Russians, Peter Kryvtsov and Mishkin, were ordered to build it. But it came to naught. Even the attempt to lay the foundations and to build the base-walls had to be abandoned. Nobody in Moscow, nobody in the whole of Russia (an urgent appeal was carried through Russia by the Tsar's couriers) possessed at this time the necessary knowledge of how to build. In Muscovy there was quite literally no possibility of building in stone, as ordered by Ivan III. Neither experienced architects nor skilled craftsmen were to be found, neither masons nor stone-cutters. There were no building tools, nor even anyone who understood how to mix mortar.
Advised by Sophia, Ivan III decided to engage foreign master builders. The building of a cathedral, and the grandiose reconstruction of Moscow, would have to be done by foreigners. There was no alternative. With instructions to bring back everything necessary for the building of a new and splendid capital, the Grand Duke's emissaries set off for distant Italy.
In the year 1475 the urgently needed help arrived in the form of a team of specially selected master builders, the best available. This was the first large group of Western experts; later they were to pour into Russia in their tens and hundreds of thousands.
At the head of these elegantly-dressed foreigners, whom the Grand Duke had brought to the Kremlin, and at whom the astonished Muscovites gaped with distrust, was 61-year-old Aristotele Fioraventi degli Uberti. He came from Bologna, whose walls shelter the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1119. With him were master builder Pietro Antonio Solari and Alevisio Novi, as well as Antonio Fryazin--as the Russians called him, 'Fryazin', 'the Frank', being a general nickname given to all foreigners at the time. Skilled craftsmen, masons and stone cutters, each a master of his craft, came with them.
With the arrival of Aristotele Fioraventi a true genius of the Western type entered the service of Russia.
Fioraventi's reputation was then at its peak: he was honoured and revered in his own country as a brilliant architect. The Bolognese was--like so many artists and architects of the age--a mechanic and an engineer as well, and, in addition, an expert on metal-casting, copper-engraving and the minting of coins.
The Grand Duke entrusted Fioraventi with the task that had had to be abandoned: the building of a cathedral in stone. This was done, and in the Kremlin the Uspenski Sobor, the Cathedral of the Ascension of the Virgin, is much admired today and is visited by people from all over the world. Before the actual building could start, however, certain important preliminary work had to be done. The great Bolognese architect set up a building school. Its purpose was to instruct the Muscovites in the, to them, completely unknown techniques of stonemasonry. Southern Italian craftsmen began to teach the natives how to carve stone, mix mortar and bake bricks.
At the suggestion of the Grand Duke, the foreign master builders meanwhile went on a tour of the country. They travelled to Vladimir and Suzdal. Ivan III wanted the Italians to study some of the 'original prototypes'. At these places there still existed 'native' stone churches from Russia's earlier period.
To their great surprise the Italians found, in Vladimir and Suzdal, what they had not imagined could exist in Muscovy, exquisite churches and beautiful stone buildings; in Moscow, the capital, there was nothing of that sort. What they now found dated from the twelfth century.
A fact quite unsuspected by Fioraventi and his colleagues was that in addition to the Greek-Byzantine influence, other elements from the West had been at work at this earlier epoch too. About 1200, according to the old chronicles, 'Lombard masters' were working at Vladimir. The famous Cathedral of the Ascension of the Virgin bore witness to their skill. But their knowledge, if the Russians ever acquired it, had been lost in the chaos of the Mongolian invasion.
In five years the Uspenski Cathedral, Fioraventi's masterpiece, rose above the ancient fortifications of the Kremlin. It was to be the Coronation Church of all the Tsars from the sixteenth century onwards. Built in the Lombard-Byzantine style, it forms a square, almost equilateral. In the centre towers a mighty onion tome over one hundred and twenty feet high, and at the four corners are smaller domes. It was consecrated in the year 1479.
What evoked the particular delight of Ivan III, and no less of the Muscovites, were the Italian mouldings and window-frames with their profusion of lavish stone-work carved by the Lombard sculptors. From that time forth these were to be regarded as an essential ingredient of Russian architecture. Ever since then, Lombard mouldings and window-frames have decorated churches, palaces and private houses everywhere throughout the Slav state.
The day came when the colony of Italian craftsmen could have the pleasure of welcoming a fellow-countryman in Moscow. In 1476 an envoy of the Venetian Republic, Ambrogio Contarini, on his way back from an embassy to the court of the Shah of Persia, visited the Kremlin. Ivan III did not, of course, neglect this opportunity of giving a commission to his honoured guest. The Grand Duke was anxious that more artists, and also more engineers, should be persuaded to come to Moscow. The foreigners already in the country were not nearly enough to carry out his ambitious plans. From a report by the Venetian Ambassador, we learn that Contarini met many other Europeans, in addition to his own countrymen, in Moscow. Among the Italians whose services Contarini enlisted for Ivan III, was the architect Marco Ruffo, known as Mark Fryazin, the 'Foreigner', to the Russians.
As the splendid cathedral neared completion, the old fortress of Moscow was also completely changing its appearance thanks to the skilled guidance of the foreigners.
According to the plans and under the supervision of Marco Ruffo auld Pietro Antonio Solari, who came from an old and respected family of Ticino architects, the Granovitaya Palace was built between the years 1487 and 1491. It was modelled on the famous Florentine Palazzi Strozzi and Pitti. The influence of the Bevilacqua Palace at Bologna is also in evidence.
The stones used for the facade were carved by the Italian master builders in the form of diamonds, with facets; thus did the palace get its nickname, 'The Diamond Palace'.
Inside, the Granovitaya Palace contained a vast throne-room, the vaulted roof of which was supported by a single massive central pillar. If those walls could speak, they could tell the names of the countless foreign experts who, throughout the centuries, have there been received by successive Russian rulers since the completion of the palace in the year 1491.
The primitive earth-and-wood enclosing walls of the fortress, which although built quite recently were already almost in ruins, were replaced by strong stone fortifications. Sketches and plans show that the model was. the castle at Milan, and so the familiar picture of the Kremlin as we now know it started to grow. A mighty sixty-foot reinforced wall, almost two miles long, formed an irregular pentagon, broken by only five gates and eighteen splendid turrets. These ramparts and gates with their superstructure of turrets were solidly built by the recently trained Russian workers, using bricks for the first time. On the open ground inside the fortress they built stone barns for the storing of grain, the second-storey rooms being used as winter quarters for the garrison.
The first tower of the new fortifications, the Troinitskaya Bashnya, was built as early as 1485 by Antonio Fryazin, and he too was responsible for the Vodovosnaya Bashnya, the Kremlin's water-tower.
On the Red Square today two main entrances lead into the Kremlin, on either side of the Red Mausoleum. Above one of these, Byzantine arches support a heavy tower, surmounted by the Byzantine double eagle. The Spasskaya Vorota, the Gate of the Redeemer, was built by Pietro Antonio Solari. Only the final belfry was added later, to the design of the English architect Christopher Halloway in 1625.
At the same time Pietro Antonio Solari drew up plans for the second gate-tower leading to the Red Square, the Nicholas Gate. It was later rebuilt, after the French invasion of 1812, by Carlo Rossi, an architect from Lugano. This great architect gave it its present-day form; it was inspired by the beautiful Church of St. Mary, at Stargard in Pomerania.
By the end of the century--before 1500 that is--the grandiose building projects in Moscow had been completed; the talented Italians had created the pride of Russia, the Moscow Kremlin, which was to be the symbol of the strength and greatness of the Slav state. 'Above Moscow,' the saying goes, 'there is only the Kremlin, above the Kremlin only Heaven.' Unfortunately, this saying omits to mention to whom the Russians owe their much-prized Kremlin.
The Italians brought in by Ivan III were succeeded in the following century by other craftsmen in large numbers, who added building after building to the Kremlin. Contrary to the usual custom of the West, there are no memorial plaques in the Kremlin bearing the builders' names. But were the architects and master builders to be honoured in the normal fashion, what about the makers of the Kremlin's contents? In order that the Kremlin might take on its new splendour, furniture and ornaments were imported to make a lavish display of magnificence at the Moscow court. Even today the museums are overflowing with the treasures which poured into the country from all over Europe. In the Kremlin Treasure-house alone--and it contains only a fraction of the foreign objets d'art--are housed objects of immense value of Dutch, Danish and English origin, as well as the most valuable extant collection of work by the German goldsmiths who lived in Nuremberg, Augsburg and Danzig. Stories about the astounding beauty of the Kremlin spread rapidly throughout Russia, and many provincial cities copied the buildings in Moscow. In doing this they were assisted by master builders from the West, and especially from Italy, whose names are often unknown to us.
Despite the admiration evoked by the stone Kremlin beside the River Moskva, the populace continued, for some considerable time, to build as they had always done, that is to say in wood. In 1555 an Englishman, who had recently visited Russia, wrote:
'Moscow is a bigger city than London but it is grey and without any sort of order in its building. All the houses are of wood. . . .' Even rich and noble Russians were to continue for centuries to live in these ancient wooden cabins.
Now that Moscow had been rebuilt with such magnificence, the next project was to transform it into an important centre of trade since the great market at Novgorod had been abolished. Such, at least, was the ambition of Ivan III. But nothing came of it. 'Inns' were built, where the 'guests'--as the Russians called the foreign merchants--could be accommodated when they came to offer their goods for sale. But none came, for what had this remote place to offer them? The journey was both long and wearisome. Fine examples of craftsmanship did not exist, for the Russians could not even carry out skilled leacher-work. 'On the ice on the Moscow river,' a foreigner commented on the winter bazaar, 'the merchants set up their booths with all their different wares displayed. Here each day throughout the winter can be seen grain, meat, pigs, firewood, hay and ocher commodities. At the end of November the country folk slaughter their cows and pigs and bring them into the city to sell. It is a great joke to see these enormous quantities of slaughtered cattle lying skinned on the ice.' Of all the intelligence which Ivan III received from his new envoys, what interested him most were the reports and particularly sketches dealing with technical matters. And he was interested above all else in weapon development as it was being carried out abroad. For in the West a completely new age had begun, a technological revolution which was affecting every field including chat of warfare and of armaments. Gunpowder had been invented in the second half of the fourteenth century, followed almost at once by portable firearms, and by now there was in existence a complete arsenal of cannons and muskets. With these new firearms the last hours of the feudal system had struck.
In contrast to all this, how archaic the Muscovite methods of warfare must have seemed! The army consisted of levies of knights, equipped with bows and arrows, even as they had been in the days of Tartary. Nothing new had been invented, no techniques or weapons evolved in all Russia.
Even before that prestige edifice, the Kremlin, was completed, Ivan III embarked upon a large-scale armaments programme in which Western models he had bought were copied exactly. A number of South German master armourers came to work in the Russian service. From Venice, too, Ivan III imported technical experts, from Sweden metal and foundry workers, and gunsmiths. The Grand Duke sent quantities of mining experts to the Urals, in search of iron ore.
North-west of the Kremlin, on the banks of the Neglinka Stream (nowadays built over), the versatile Fioraventi, who had also put up the first modern bridge in Russia across the Volkhov, and who had minted coins for Ivan III, built the Liteiny Dvor, the first foundry. It was not long before the first cannons were being forged on Russian soil, within sight of the Kremlin battlements, by the skilled hands of master craftsmen from the West.
Chapter 3. Ivan the Terrible and the Beardless Men
That quarter of Moscow which then hummed with activity has nowadays lost its name and has, indeed, been totally forgotten. Here were centred the vital impulses and the technical knowledge without which the development of the Slav state could never have taken place, nor Russia ever have become a great power. These events are therefore of immense importance. Yet no street sign shows this, nor can the facts be found in any Intourist guide.
Before the First World War, this quarter of the city was not difficult to find. Only a few steps from the Red Square beside the Kremlin a No. 3 horse-tram would take you, for ten kopeks, to a street called the Nyemetskaya Ulitsa or 'German Street'. This street, less than one mile in length, and running due south to the little stream called the Yausa, used to be the centre of the former Nyemetskaya Sloboda or 'German Quarter'. The Germans were indeed not the only foreigners who lived in this much admired part of the city--much admired because it was so clean, well kept and well laid out. But for the Russians, who as yet knew practically nothing of the different nations of the West, every foreigner was simply a Nyemets or German.
The name of the Nyemetsky Rynok or 'German Market' has also vanished, though until quite recently it was the principal market-place in the eastern part of Moscow; similarly the name of the 'German Cemetery', which lay on the far side of the Yausa, has also gone, and the Lutheran Church of St Michael, built in the Gothic style near the southern end of the Sloboda in 1576, today houses a Soviet educational institute.
Ivan IV's father, Vassily III, laid the foundations of this 'Little Europe', outside Moscow's gates, and three miles to the east of the Kremlin. The flood of foreign specialists had so increased during his reign that they could no longer be accommodated in the Kremlin as had been the case with the Italian engineers and architects brought in by Ivan III.
Throughout the reign of Ivan IV--nicknamed Grozny or 'the Terrible' (1534-84)--the woods above the Yausa River were steadily felled as the foreign quarter grew ever larger.
Besides the many Germans, the 'sausage-eaters', there were colonies of Dutchmen, Lithuanians, Italians and Danes--'the beardless men', as the Russians indiscriminately called all foreigners. For foreigners in transit comfortable inns were built, the most famous being the 'Danish Inn'.
So the Nyemetskaya Sloboda grew and flourished, much favoured and supplied with all it needed by the new ruler. Ivan IV continued the policy that his grandfather, Ivan III, had inaugurated, and imported specialists, technical equipment and above all weapons from the West.
In the new lives led by the 'beardless men' in the Yausa quarter, the great receptions at the Kremlin played an important part. Technicians and teachers, merchants, even master craftsmen were more or less regular guests at the Tsar's table. This much annoyed the Boyars, who despised and hated the 'foreign devils', and who were angry that their ruler should sit at table with simple craftsmen, metal-workers and gunsmiths, with whom he was happy to talk for hours on end. Among the natives only the highest and most respected dignitaries of Russia were bidden to this table where the festivities were conducted with all the sumptuous pomp and splendour associated with oriental rulers; Ivan's court was modelled on the old Imperial Byzantine court at Constantinople. The Boyars and the distinguished courtiers may have grumbled, but Ivan IV knew well what he was doing. His talks with the inhabitants of the Nyemetskaya Sloboda were worth a fortune to him. There were countless matters the foreigners could tell him about which were still completely unknown to the Russians. They knew about astronomy and algebra and geometry, they understood something of church building and fortifications, of modern methods of warfare, of metal-casting and the latest firearms. The Tsar listened to them and questioned them about it all.
He gave them his entire attention. A secretary was often employed to make notes of the long conversations, writing down word for word his questions and the answers of the foreign experts. 'After these ,conversations with the foreigners the Tsar would frequency summon his officials to a secret conference,' remarks W. Kostyliov in his book Ivan Grozny.
Among the Tsar's closest advisers was a certain Joachim Krummhausen, from Narva, said to be one of the richest merchants of the age. He was known all over Germany, and was an important figure in the Hanseatic port of Lubeck. He had seen much in his lifetime, had lived long in Moscow, where he had even brought up his children, as had another friend of the Tsar's, the German merchant Hans Pennedos. Through them Ivan IV made many friends among the German merchants and the members of the Hanseatic League: Georg Liebenhauer from Augsburg, Hermann Bisping from Munster, Veit Seng from Nuremberg (whose protector was Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria), and the merchants, Hermann Stahlbruder and Nikolaus Pacher from Prussia. There were many other foreigners in close personal contact with the Tsar.
Johann Schlitte from Goslar played a special role in Moscow as a sort of Man Friday. The Tsar was for ever sending him to the West to fetch specialists. Schlitte was perhaps his best procurer of large-scale traders and his best recruiting officer of technicians.
Ivan IV even begged the German Emperor Charles V to let him have skilled men to help in the development of Russia. The Livonian Ambassador at the Emperor's court implored Charles V to impose his supreme 'veto' against any further 'export' of German technicians and to prevent those already enlisted from leaving the country. He entreated the Emperor to save the Livonians 'from the great and terrible power of Muscovy, which is filled with lust to conquer Livonia and to achieve supremacy about the Baltic, and whose power would lead to the inevitable subjugation of all the peoples living about chat sea--Lithuanians, Poles and Swedes'.
The ambassador begged in vain, and his words of warning passed unheeded. On the contrary, the Emperor even allowed Johann Schlitte to draft an official Imperial decree recommending service in Russia.
The text of the Emperor's announcement shows quite clearly what exactly it was that Russia wanted. There is still in existence the four-page Import List which Schlitte had drafted. It states:
"On the basis of this letter We allow the said Johann Schlitte to travel through Our entire Empire and all Our principalities in order to seek out and enlist the services of
"Doctors, masters of all the free arts, metal-workers, master-miners, goldsmiths, carpenters, stone-masons and particularly such as are skilled in the building of fine churches, master bridge-builders, paper manufacturers and physicians with a view to visiting the Russian Grand Duke without further ado or permission, and of agreeing to work for him.
This is the result of requests to Us from the present Grand Duke and from his father, of blessed memory, the Grand Duke Vassily Ivanovich, to Our predecessor.'
'Metal-workers' meant the specialists of every sort whom Russia then needed most urgently in order to create an armaments industry. In the West the last few years had witnessed tremendous developments in the armaments field. Italians, French and Germans were competing in the production of new weapons. It was extremely hard for Russia to keep up with them, to discover which was the best to copy, or even to obtain the latest prototype quickly enough. Ivan IV was confused by the tremendous tempo of development in Western Europe.
A century ago his grandfather had set up the Liteiny Dvor, his great foundry, with foreign help. These works had in the meantime been enlarged and improved, and Russia was now capable of producing her own armaments. But technically she was still far behind the West. So Ivan IV was delighted to put a skilled and trusted foreigner in charge of the foundry. This was Ole Petersen, a Swede.
Ole Petersen had been taken prisoner by Ivan IV's soldiers and brought to Moscow, where he was immediately put to 'forced labour'. It had been customary in the Tartar period for specialists to be considered as spoils of war. Woe to anyone who hurt a hair of the head of any artist or teacher or craftsman, no matter what his craft, during a foreign campaign! With silken gentleness the eagerly awaited experts and skilled workers were transported eastwards over the steppes; such was the strict command of the two great Khans, Genghis Khan and Kubla Khan. The reason for such gentleness was that every item of intellectual booty was urgently needed in Russia.
'You shall proclaim in Novgorod, and in all the districts thereabouts,' states a command of Ivan the Terrible, dated 24th February 1556, to the Government clerk at Novgorod, 'that the sons of Boyars and others must not sell German prisoners to the Germans in Livonia nor in Lithuania, but only in the cities of Muscovy.'
'Ivan the Terrible,' says the Russian historian Grigor Alexinsky in his La Russie et l'Europe, 'used the enemy soldiers captured in his European wars as teachers in his own lands.' 'Just as this Tsar had used his German-Baltic prisoners of war, so Peter the Great employed his Swedish prisoners to create a Slav culture; they were compelled to teach young Russians the crafts of the smithy. The prisoners included locksmiths, saddlers, swordcutters and others more highly educated,' writes B. Ischchanian.
Ivan IV was often to be seen at the foundry, beside the narrow Neglinka River, among the teeming throng of 'beardless men'. He observed every new sort of casting. He was present, too, when the Swedish master craftsman, Petersen, instructed his Russians in the casting of cannons and cannonballs, and in range calculation. A complete arsenal of captured or imported firearms from the West was at the disposal of the instructors, heavy pieces and mortars, field-guns and muskets. One day after many years of effort, and to the Tsar's great delight, the very newest model from abroad arrived at the foundry--a 'falconet'. This six-foot-long piece, which fired four pounds of iron or lead, had been brought from Italy by Prince Lykov, a close and trusted friend of Ivan IV.
In 1552 Ivan IV ventured for the first time to put the growing production of his foundry to the test. He met with success. In a campaign in the south, Kazan fell, the powerful citadel of the Volga Khanate, the key to the Volga route to the Caspian, and to all the roads to the Urals. The Russians, however, did not owe their victory to their numerical superiority; for the siege only succeeded after 'Kazan, with the help of foreign engineers, was surrounded by a ring of trenches and ditches; movable turrets were rolled up to the walls and the walls themselves undermined'. This is a quotation from the official History of the USSR. The successful campaign in the south encouraged Ivan IV, in the same decade, to move towards the Baltic, which meant an attack on Livonia. Narva and Dorpat fell. Scarcely a soul in Europe could guess what a fateful precedent had been established. For the first time the weapons and technical skill of the West had been used successfully by Russia against the West.
Twenty years later foreign arms enabled the Russians to win another victory against the same enemy they had defeated at Kazan. In 1572 the Tartars suddenly and unexpectedly advanced northwards with the object of capturing Moscow itself. When Ivan IV heard of the approach of the enemy, he immediately left the Kremlin and hid in the forests. Nobody knew where he had gone. Yet despite his absence, Moscow was preserved, though he could claim no credit for the saving of his capital. A German, Colonel von Fahrenbach, who commanded seven thousand mounted soldiers in the Tsar's service, pushed the enemy back and finally routed them some thirty-five miles from the city. The Tsar returned to the Kremlin as soon as he had heard the glad news and celebrated the victory of Lopassnya among his people.
As a memorial to the victory over Kazan the famous Vassily Blashenny Cathedral was built in the Red Square in 1552. The master builders, Barma and Postnik, of whom Barma was certainly no Russian, put up a central edifice, surrounded by seven wooden chapels. This structure does not appear to have pleased the Tsar. The art historian, Tamara Talbot Rice, who was herself Russian-born, has said of this incident:
'It is supposed to have been rebuilt by an Italian architect almost immediately afterwards. In its final form it became an irregular construction, consisting of eleven chapels.'
Ivan IV now realized how correct was the policy he had been following. He redoubled his efforts and concentrated more than ever on his plans to exploit Europe in the interests of Russia.
In the sixteenth century, English trade was flourishing, but the English merchants were competing for new markets with two determined adversaries--the Spanish and the Portuguese. In the age of discovery Spain and Portugal had won all the early triumphs. It was they who had taken all the risks, who had discovered the New World and the route round the Cape of Good Hope to India and who had finally proved, by Magellan's voyage, that the world was round. And what they had, they held. But would it not be possible to discover an alternative sea route to India and China? Perhaps 'over the top', across the Arctic? This idea appealed to the English.
Sebastian Cabot, an Italian navigator and explorer, had first suggested a search for this 'North-East passage'. An expedition was fitted out, and in 1553 three ships put to sea in the direction of North Cape. Two of them, in one of which was the leader of the expedition, Sir Hugh Willoughby, went down in a terrible storm off the coast of Lapland. The third, the Edward Bonaventura, commanded by Richard Chancellor, was driven across the White Sea and made landfall near the mouth of the Dvina. The Englishmen had not, as they hoped, discovered a new direct sea route to India and China, but they had found their way to the state of Muscovy.
As soon as Ivan IV heard of this from his governor in Kholmogory, he ordered Chancellor brought at once to Moscow--some fifteen hundred miles overland. The Englishman was given a princely reception. Then Ivan compelled the navigator to return to England as his envoy, for the Tsar was determined to seize without delay the opportunity that fate had placed in his hands. He saw a chance of breaking the trade monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the Hanseatic League. That was why he wished to open trade with that distant country, England. He commissioned Chancellor to send one hundred and twenty of his compatriots to Moscow to instruct his Russians in 'every sort of craft'.
A year later a large group of English master craftsmen arrived in Moscow.
Regularly, and in ever larger convoys, the keels of English merchant ships ploughed their way through the waves of the Polar Sea. In the god-forsaken town of Kholmogory a flourishing trading-post came into existence. A Londoner, Richard Grey, set up the first hemp factory on the banks of the Dvina. Russia received from England much-needed 'cloth and other woven goods', and, most important of all, 'iron and iron by-products', and 'lead, sulphur, firearms and munitions'. For 'her own industry was still not sufficiently developed'.
For England, the Muscovite kingdom was a new market, and one which depended on the advice of experts. Ivan IV set down his requirements in a letter to Queen Elizabeth herself:
'From Italy and England we need master builders, who can construct for us fortresses, bastions and palaces, also surgeons and apothecaries, also master craftsmen who understand how to prospect for and mine gold and silver. We have sent letters of privilege asking your favour for all those who may wish to come here and serve Us, whether they wish to remain in Our service for a few years only or for ever, that those people, master builders, surgeons and apothecaries may be allowed to come to Us and serve Us. We shall repay you for your great kindness according to your wishes, and as for those who wish to serve Us all their lives, We shall ensure a good living to them, and shall supply them with all that they may need. Those who may later wish to give up their allegiance to Us shall be rewarded for their services; should they desire to return to their mother-land, We shall not retain them, but shall let them go with handsome remuneration, as We have stated in our letters of privilege. Written in Moscow, capital of this Our empire.'
This letter is dated 1566. A little later the Tsar sent a second communication to Elizabeth of England in which he requested that the English Queen permit her merchants to supply him in Narva with cannons, ammunition and all other weapons of war; above all, he requested that she send him shipbuilders.
England fulfilled Russia's demands. With the Queen's reply there arrived in Russia the people so eagerly awaited by Ivan. There were Reynolds the surgeon, Thomas Carver the apothecary, Humphrey Lock the engineer, accompanied by his assistant John Finton, the goldsmith and 'prospector' (that is to say, metallurgist), Thomas Green, and many other skilled masters of their art or craft.
Technicians and scholars continued to arrive in Moscow. Two English doctors were appointed court physicians. The English scientist, Standish, appeared to lead the group. Like many of his compatriots he had permanent apartments in the Kremlin.
The English thus followed the Italians, Germans, Dutchmen and Swedes as a new and valuable source of information to Ivan IV.
From contemporaries we learn: 'For hours on end in the Kremlin the Tsar would discuss such matters as the seas, the nature of water, the stars and firearms with the English scientist, Standish. No matter whom he might be talking with, Ivan Vassilievitch always saw to it that every conversation, no matter how it had started, always ended with the subject of shot, saltpetre and gunpowder.'
Stories of the great careers that were to be made in Russia reached Scotland. A group of experts from that land, led by a certain Johnny Lingelt, set off for Moscow via Sweden. The gaily dressed group were received b y Ivan IV in the Kremlin. He had already learned that they included architects, engineers, gunners and experienced soldiers. He received them with great pomp, and as soon as the introductions were completed and the formalities exchanged, he got down to business. 'He wished to know,' says W. Kostyliov, 'what sort of light field-gun was in use abroad, of the six-or-seven pounder variety with a good range and yet transportable on horseback.' The Tsar talked so fast that the interpreter could scarcely manage to translate, thus incurring the displeasure of the monarch. A second interpreter was summoned, and they both bombarded the Scots with questions. As it turned out, the Scots were experts in this field, and were able to tell the Tsar all about the new guns they had seen in various countries. Ivan was especially interested in those cannons with inner jacket casing such as were made in Sweden; their leather-bound copper barrels were capable of firing two or three rounds simultaneously. At the Tsar's command the Scotsmen took paper and charcoal and drew a blueprint of the cannon in question. The Tsar thanked them and ordered that they be taken into his service.' This 'pumping' of foreigners, even down to the smallest details, was considered by Ivan IV as part of the royal prerogative.
One striking fact is to be found in every report about the Muscovy of Ivan IV, and that is the Tsar's passionate interest in artillery. In order to astound his people Ivan IV organized an annual display of artillery in action. He wished to show what his iron foundry could now do. A long column marched out from the gunsmiths' forge. First came enormous siege-guns on long gun-carriages, pulled by dozens of horses. They were followed by large numbers of cannon, field artillery, double-barrelled pieces, howitzers and shot-cannons, and mortars with gaping muzzles.
This display of gunnery took place before the Kremlin. The Muscovites were agape, the foreign specialists astounded. Such was the purpose of the display, which was therefore an exact equivalent of the May Day Parades of today. Then, as now, the foreigners were able to see exact copies of weapons from foreign countries.
If England supplied goods and manpower, she received in exchange the following very considerable benefits:
'We give you complete freedom and the full right to carry out every kind of trade without let or hindrance, without customs duties, taxes or other restriction.' Thus, in a document signed by the Tsar's own hand, the newly founded Muscovy Company received permission to trade freely as far as Kazan and Astrakhan, in Narva and Dorpat and even in Bulgaria.
In addition to the Muscovy Company, the German Hansa also traded in Moscow. F or both of them this was a profitable business with a distant empire, far removed from the great world.
A very few people realized that the equipping, and hence the arming, of this Eastern Empire, and the help given in its development by the West, might one day be used against the West itself. Among these few were the men who controlled Prussia, Courland and Livonia. This was not surprising, for Muscovite pressure against the Baltic countries was becoming ever stronger and more threatening. Not infrequently the lords of Dorpat would obstruct whole cargoes of goods and men--master craftsmen and technicians--on their way to Moscow. Even Johann Schlitte, on his way to bring yet another group of experts to Russia, was once held prisoner in Lubeck, despite his letter from Charles V. Sweden and Denmark also tried to dam the stream of goods flowing to Russia, and their privateers were active in the Baltic. It availed nothing. Nobody in Europe listened seriously to the warning voices of countries which, being Muscovy's neighbours, obviously knew most about what was going on there. One such neighbour was King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland, the last of the Jagiellos (1548-1572).
This monarch's letters to the Queen of England are filled with dark forebodings. To the Polish king the position was clear.
'We must state plainly that the Muscovite--the hereditary enemy of all free peoples!--has made exceptional progress in the training and arming of his forces as a result of the recent increase in sea-borne traffic, and this is true not only of firearms, munitions, and strategy . . . but also of other matters which can be of great service to him I am here referring to those master craftsmen who are ceaselessly making guns, ammunition and similar products for the enemy, products hitherto unknown in his barbarous land. It is essential that we realize that our intentions--even our most secret ones--are known to him, so that he is fully aware of all we lack, and is in a position to send all our allies to their doom . . .
'Your Most Serene Highness will surely agree that we cannot allow this shipping traffic to Muscovy.... The enemy, thanks to the free trading permitted English merchants--and this is the crux of the matter!--is enabled to learn how to use weapons hitherto unknown in his barbarous land, and of course--and this is the essence!--to learn from its master craftsmen themselves. It is now clear, even if there be no further importations of such persons, that with the help of such persons as already are there and with the continuing freedom of the seas for the importation of the material he needs, he can produce for himself all that is necessary for the waging of war, and which, hitherto, he neither had nor knew how to use.'
Sigismund carefully explained the urgency of the situation in another letter, dealing with this irresponsible sending of men and materials into Russia from the West.
'. . . We have already written, and now write to Your Majesty again. We are informed from reliable sources that the enemy of world freedom, the Muscovite, is daily growing stronger thanks to the valuable cargoes of various materials arriving at Narva; there he receives not only goods, but also weapons hitherto unknown to him, and furthermore masters of all the arts and crafts; this is enabling him to arm himself with the intention of subjugating all other rulers.... Therefore, We, who know this enemy better than others, since our lands abut upon his own, are bounden as a Christian ruler to warn the rulers of all other Christian realms lest they surrender their freedom and dignity and the lives of their subjects to this . . . enemy. For we fear that if other Christian rulers do not heed this warning, the Muscovite, who is already overweening with the materials delivered at Narva, and making use of these to equip himself with weapons and ships of war, will do all in his power to overthrow Christendom, and to enslave and exterminate all close peoples who resist him--from which God protect us all!'
The words of King Sigismund of Poland found no echo. Elizabeth of England ignored his warning. Indeed, she encouraged her English merchants to increase their trade with the Slav Empire. In one letter, marked in her own hand as 'secret' and known only to her Privy Council and herself, she assured Tsar Ivan IV: 'And We promise that We . . . shall observe the agreements described in this letter down to the least details, so long as God grants Us life, and to this We give our royal word.' The outlet to the Baltic and the ports of Narva and Dorpat remained in Russian hands only for a few years. Ivan IV soon had to vacate the area again. The great push westwards to the Baltic was not to take place for a hundred years, when Tsar Peter I had completed the arming and equipping of Russia thanks once again to European skill and materials. But Ivan IV had carried out the policy inaugurated by his grandfather, the third Ivan. He had continued the laying of the foundations of a great Muscovite State on Western lines, and on these others could continue to build. By the time that Ivan the Terrible died in 1584 a steady stream of finished goods and raw materials was flowing into Russia across the Baltic and the Polar Sea, all of which a backward, under-developed country needed urgently in order to 'catch up'.
For many years now thousands of Europeans had been working in the Tsar's service, prospecting for mines or building fortifications, as gunsmiths, architects, armourers or military instructors. The first foreign physicians and apothecaries had arrived. Since the year 1569 English-built ironworks in the Vologda District had been in production, while mines sunk by Englishmen at Perm were yielding precious ore. Industrial undertakings introduced into Russia by Europeans then included the production of potash, soap and hemp-seed oil, as well as the distillation of alcohol. Under Western instruction the goldsmith's craft was now practiced for the first time, and clock-making was introduced by a Serbian monk named Lazarus.
In cultural matters, too, foreign influences were noticeable. According to a Lutheran Pastor, Elias, who lived in the German Quarter, a library of foreign volumes was collected in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Pastor Westermann arranged and catalogued for the first time the totally neglected Library of the Patriarch, which contained over one thousand valuable Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, some dating from the seventh century. He then translated the works of Livy and Suetonius, which he had found in that collection, into Russian.
There were only very few people, of course, who could read or write; Ivan IV had not yet succeeded in setting up a single school. But there was already the Pechatny Dvor, the 'Printing Works', which stood out among Moscow's wooden houses, being one of the very rare two-storied stone buildings. Ivan IV's command ('the Tsar's coffers will meet the cost') that a printing press be built, and his determination to reward lavishly all those who promoted the art of printing in his land, had sufficed to procure even this 'instrument of the devil' (as his subjects called it) from the West. By 1564 the inks, paper and printing presses had arrived from Holland, and under the supervision of Danish, German and Dutch master printers the first printed Russian book was launched upon the world--The Acts of the Apostles.
Chapter 4. Prelude to the Age of Peter
In 1565 the Antwerp merchants, envious of British commercial successes in Moscow, sent an enterprising native of Brussels, one Olivier Brunel, to the White Sea area. In his search for a suitable harbour he explored the Dvina, as far as the River Ob, which flows into the Arctic, east of the Urals, and also made favourable trade agreements with Moscow. As a result Johann Lippen of Alkmaar sailed direct to the Dvina in 1578. The Englishmen had chosen Kholmogory some distance up river as their trading-post, but the Dutchmen settled nearer the mouth of the Dvina. Some thirty miles from the estuary stood the lonely Archangelsky Sobor--the Monastery of the Archangel Michael. Nearby was a log cabin surrounded by a thick palisade, the so-called 'German House', then still the centre of the flourishing trade which the Hanseatic merchants had been carrying on here for centuries.
With the Dutchmen new life came to this ancient and forgotten trading-post. They established a regular, thriving shipping route, in which an important merchant house, Moucheron of Middelburg, played an important part. Huge warehouses were built at the mouth of the Dvina, markets were set up, quays erected for the loading and unloading of ships. The Dutch-built modern dock installations were the first on Russian soil. The foundations were thus laid for the rapid development of the town of Archangel.
Even more than the Dutch imports of lead, iron and tin, copper wire, sulphur and cast-iron, bellows, small bells for use in falconry and so forth, it was the spices and sweet things that they brought which aroused the wonderment of the Russians. In addition to saffron, ginger and raisins, there were--most delectable of all--the first dried plums.
The Dutch now repeated the attempts of the British and adopted Sebastian Cabot's idea of finding a north-easterly sea route to China, to distant Cathay 'with its golden roofs' as described by Marco Polo. The firm of Moucheron were able to interest the provincial towns of Holland and Zeeland in the undertaking.
In 1594 three ships put to sea, in search of the North-East Passage. In June, Willem Barents sailed his ship to the northern latitude of 7225' of the west coast of the island of Noveya Zemlya, which he actually discovered, and skirted its coast as far as the North Cape. Impenetrable ice-floes forced him to turn back on the 1st of August, when he had reached latitude 77 north.
The other two ships of the expedition, under command of Cornelis Nay van Enkhuizen, steered a more southerly course as far as the Kara Sea. He there decided that it was impossible to push farther east before the onset of winter, and therefore turned back.
A second expedition, in which both navigators took part--this time with seven ships--set out again in 1595 for the Kara Sea, but no further results were achieved. The Dutch municipalities henceforth ceased to subsidize these voyages of discovery directly, but did offer a reward of 25,000 guilders to the man who should first discover the northern sea route to China.
In that same year the city of Amsterdam fitted out two ships, commanded by Jan Corneliszoon Rijp and Jakob Hendrikzoon Heemskerk; Barents joined the expedition as chief navigator. It was Rijp's opinion that the route to China lay across the Pole--this was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the first terrestrial globe designed by the Nuremberg geographer, Martin Behaim, and used in Europe since 1492--and he hoped to find an ice-free Polar Sea.
They sailed their ships almost due north, past Norway. They discovered Bear Island and on the 17th of June they saw the snowy peaks of Spitzbergen. Here Heemskerk and Barents separated from Rijp, according to plan, in order to attempt the circumnavigation of Novaya Zemlya. After a hard struggle through the ice they doubled the North Cape for the first time and reached the 'longed-for promontory' (Hock van Begeerte--today, Cape Zhelaniye) and continued as far north as latitude 8010. There, fearsome ice-packs forced them back southwards towards the east coast of the island. At latitude 767' their ship stuck fast in the ice and was crushed. For the first time Europeans spent the winter in a log hut in the Arctic wastes, from the 26th of August 1596 to the 14th of June 1597. On 14th June they were ready to set off. In five open boats the men started in search of the way home via the North Cape. Barents and Heemskerk died while circumnavigating the Cape. The others survived a journey of sixteen hundred nautical miles across the Polar Sea in open boats. When the exhausted men, almost dead from hunger and cold, finally reached the Kola peninsula, a ship sighted them and took them on board--it was the other ship of the expedition, under the command of Rijp.
On the 1st of November 1597 the survivors, who had long been assumed dead, came ashore amid the rejoicings of the burghers of Amsterdam.
The primitive huts made of driftwood and sealskins and used by the Dutch expedition during their winter on Novaya Zemlya were found by the Norwegian explorer, Ellins Carlson, in 1871, untouched and in perfect condition. Inside them were diaries containing entries concerning the Polar night, exact geographical summaries, and descriptions of the Arctic fauna. There was also a tattered book about Cathay, or China. Those 'Barents Huts' are today in the Nautical Museum at The Hague. The distant target at which Barents had aimed was not to be reached until almost three centuries had passed, and then by another man from Western Europe, the Swede Adolf Erik Nordenskjold in 1878-79. For his success in completely circumnavigating Northern Asia from the White Sea by way of the East Cape as far as the Sea of Okhotsk in his ship Vega, Erik Nordenskjold received, in 1879, the prize of twenty-five thousand Dutch guilders first offered in 1595. He was also ennobled by his King.
Many other Westerners--including the famous navigator, Henry Hudson, in 1607, 1608 and 1609, and his compatriots, Abraham Wood and Flawes, in 1676--searched in vain for a North-East Passage. But though their voyages were failures from this point of view, they permitted the charting of the Arctic with ever greater accuracy. German sailors also took part in this, though they were more interested in hunting and fishing than in discovering the route to China. Men from Hamburg and Bremen started whale-fishing--in the four years beginning in 1670 they killed more than ten thousand whales--and also hunted walruses, seals and polar bears as well as other valuable furred beasts. In 1671 the first collection of Arctic flora was brought to Germany by Friedrich Martens, Bader and Feldscher, who had sailed to the far north in the strip Jonah in the Whale; they also brought back descriptions of the local fauna, and particularly of bird-life in the Arctic.
Meanwhile what were the contributions of the Slav Empire to knowledge of this Arctic region upon their very doorstep?
Far away in the east, Siberian Cossacks undertook a series of voyages of discovery, starting in 1633. They sailed along the coast from mouth to mouth of the great rivers, the Lena, the Yana, the Indegirka and the Kolyma. In 1648 the Siberian Cossack, Semyon Ivanov Deshnev, setting off from the Kolyma and hugging the coast eastwards, came to a river at the mouth of which his ship was dashed to pieces. This river is called the Anadyr and flows into the Bering Sea. Deshnev was thus the first man to circumnavigate the East Cape. Neither he nor his contemporaries had any idea of the importance of this perilous undertaking and of the discovery he had made--if, indeed, he did make it, for even today the facts are not quite sure. His report was only published nearly a century later, in 1736, and from his description of the Great Promontory (no exact navigational or geographical data were given) it was reckoned that the Cossack Deshnev had achieved the amazing feat of circumnavigating the outermost cape of Asia.
It is to the Dutchman Barents that the world owes the first accurate charts of those parts of the Polar Sea over which he sailed. He had plotted the geographical latitude of his winter quarters during the dark Polar night, using five astral measurements, with such accuracy that his huts could be found, at 767', three hundred years later. No great progress in this work of discovery in high latitudes took place during the eighteenth century, until a Dane, Vitus Bering, produced the first scientific charts of Polar Siberia and the North-East Passage, a work continued by the great English navigator, James Cook, in the southern part of the Bering Straits.
So much for the facts. In the Russian State publication, History of Modern Times, the student learns something quite different. This book was compiled for the Faculties of History in Soviet universities and educational institutions, and a long list of professors from the USSR Academy of the Sciences have given their names to it. It says:
'As early as the first half of the seventeenth century Russian geographical knowledge had assumed a leading place in international science. The great discoveries of Deshnev, who explored the northern coasts and waters of Russia, found the passage from the Polar Sea to the Pacific and drew the first chart of that region [where is it?]; the journey described by Nicolai Spafari [who was no Russian, being a native of Moldavia] through Siberia and China [since Marco Polo's report of his travels in China and his life in Peking, 1271-95, dozens of Europeans had gone to China both by land and by sea, and during the Mongol Period a French Mission had even flourished in that country, together with an Archbishopric of Peking, 1307-68!], the maps and descriptions of the western [!] and eastern portions of Russia--all this constituted a very major contribution to the geography of the age.'
And millions of Russian schoolchildren are today taught by their History of the USSR (Moscow, 1947) the following fantastic account of Deshnev's 'expedition':
'In the year 1648 a group of Russian merchants and trappers planned to investigate the coast of the Arctic Ocean eastwards from the mouth of the Kolyma. They were after walrus, having realized how valuable their tusks were. The leader of the expedition was the Cossack, Semyon Deshnev, from Yakutsk. The expedition put to sea from the mouth of the Kolyma in seven ships, and sailed along the coast. The ships of this brave seaman had been built very hastily with planks [planks, that is to say sawn wood, were first used in Russia after the compulsory introduction of saws from Europe by Peter I] and soon sank. Only the ship in which Deshnev himself sailed was driven far eastwards by the storm, into the strait which divides Asia from America [the Bering Straits]. At this time nobody in Europe yet knew that Asia was divided from America by a narrow channel. This question was settled by Deshnev's voyage of discovery.'
Nevertheless, the stretch of water that divides America from Asia and the Arctic from the Pacific is called today, as it has always been, not the Deshnev Straits but the Bering Straits, for such was the name of its real discoverer.
The story of the Tsar Peter I, who started with nothing, 'opened his windows on the West', defeated the Swedes, at that time the greatest power on the Continent, raised Russia to the status of a great power, and frightened all Europe, is a legend known to all. Only the proper prologue is lacking to this story. Those historians who fill their books with the dates of reigns and battles have so far neglected to throw any light on the technical and administrative background to the reign of Peter I. Hitherto little has been written about the vast influence which the tremendous cultural and technical developments in other European countries had exercised upon Russia since 1600. This contribution by the West to the development of the East is the key to any real understanding of Russia's apparent leap from nothingness to the status of a great power.
What Peter I, known as 'the Great', had to open was not a 'window' to the West, but a huge door, that stood ready to be swung back, thanks to the policy of his predecessors, the rulers of the Rurik dynasty, the last two Ivans, their Tartar successor; Boris Godunov, and subsequently, since 1613, the Romanovs.
The effects of this process of infiltration from the West, which touched every aspect of Russian life in the seventeenth century, are easily recognizable even today.
It first becomes clearly evident in the setting up of the Prikazi or administrative departments, through which the central government could function. Over forty of these Prikazi were established, with a Boyar at the head of each.
These included the Inozyemny Prikaz, the 'Foreign Department', which handled the foreign technicians and experts resident in Moscow, the Reytarsky Prikaz or 'War Department (Cavalry)' which was responsible for all the musket-equipped cavalry units trained according to foreign models, and the Puskarsky Prikaz, or 'War Department (Gunnery)', which dealt with the making and maintaining of the artillery.
Boris Godunov, the Tartar Tsar (1598-1605), had first decided to employ foreign bodies of troops in the service of Moscow. Mikhail Feodorovich, the first Romanov, who reigned from 1613 to 1645, also strengthened his army with 'foreign' regiments. His basic reorganization of the army began about 1630. The Scottish mercenary leader, Lesley, was able to procure him five thousand men, as well as arms, and also German master armourers and a well-known Dutch gunsmith named Coyet. Russia's own production of weapons was nothing like adequate. Lesley bought, among other items, 10,000 muskets and 5,000 satires. The Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the second Romanov, continued the policy which his father had inaugurated, and brought it to completion. Regiments of Russian recruits and volunteers were formed and in order to train these men on 'foreign lines', large numbers of instructors were brought to the country from abroad. The troops thus trained were formed into horse and foot regiments under foreign officers. The 'Foreign' and 'Cavalry' Prikazi most have had very considerable duties to perform. For by the time Alexei Mikhailovich died there were sixty-three permanent, Western-European-trained regiments in Russia; excluding the Cossacks, they accounted for 60 per cent of all the troops in the country. Under this Tsar, foreign master craftsmen also built the first Russian warship, the Orel.
As far as industry goes, the picture is much the same. Since the end of the Middle Ages new industries had been emerging in the West independent of the old trade guilds. Some factories still used the traditional craft techniques , but owing to the specialization of labour and better organization the guild system was dying. This had happened first in the wool and silk industries, later in glass and iron production and in other industries. This development permitted an important increase in production.
The Inozyemny Prikaz or 'Foreign Department' wasted no time in granting concessions to foreigners experienced in these advanced techniques. In the year 1632 the Dutch merchant, Andreas Winius, was given the iron-ore mining concession at Tula. He began the production of iron and built the first gun factory as well as four ironworks, which were called Gorodishensky. This energetic innovator thus laid the foundations of the Tula ironworks and munitions factories, which were later to become world famous.
The first glassworks was founded by Covit, a Swede, near Moscow. In 1644 a Dutchman, Peter Marselis, was given a concession to build iron foundries on the Volga, the Sheksna and the Kostroma. As early as 1626 the Foreign Department had already enlisted the services of an English engineer, Bulmer, to prospect for and develop iron ore in Russia. Throughout the country glassworks and potash works, gold refineries, cloth and other factories were being built by foreigners. The Foreign Department saw to it that these concessionary industries received the necessary labour force; in each area where such a factory was built a large number of peasant serfs were designated 'factory serfs'.
Clockmakers, stonemasons, metal-workers and hydraulic engineers flocked to the service of the Tsar of Russia. In 1639 Adam Olearius, a Holstein mathematician and librarian, was invited to pass through Russia on his way to Persia where he planned to carry out geographical and astronomical research. We have to thank this highly cultured man for a description of the people of Russia which is well worth reading even today. It is called: A Description of a Journey to Muscovy and Persia (1647). In Russia Olearius was known as 'the magician from the West'.
The large number of instructors from Western Europe is shown by the fact that the Nyemetskaya Sloboda on the Yausa River at Moscow was then flourishing once again, as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, though now the 'German Quarter' outside Moscow's walls was bigger and better than ever before--after having been partly depopulated during the period of confusion before the Romanovs came to power. On the 4th of October 1652, it was officially designated, by special order of the Tsar, as the 'Foreign Quarter'. The bells of many churches were soon tolling throughout the 'Quarter'; there were three Lutheran and two Reformed churches, one Dutch and one English. The streets between the solid stone houses, their front gardens filled with flowers, were paved and kept properly repaired. The foreign quarter had its own school and a theatre, something hitherto unknown in Moscow. The theatre in the Nyemetskaya Sloboda was to be the seed from which all Russian theatres were to grow.
A German clergyman, Magister Gregory, and Rinhuber, a physician, produced religious plays, in which there was also singing; these were immensely popular and so they started a drama school, which Russian children also attended. One day the Tsar Alexei, who had heard tell of this theatre, visited the German quarter. In a wooden building sixty-four young 'foreigners' acted before their distinguished guest. For ten hours they entertained the Tsar with their performance, ant he was delighted and charmed by it all.
Hitherto all chat the sovereign, like his predecessors and the Russian people as a whole, hat ever seen were primitive entertainments with buffoons, jesters, wrestlers and dancing bears. The Tsar was so impresses by what he now saw that he had a proper theatre built in the suburb of Preobrazhenskoye, only a few hundred yards from the Sloboda. The enterprising Lutheran pastor was made director of this, and instructed to produce suitable plays from the West. The Tsar rewarded him with forty priceless sables. Performances started in that same year, the year in which the Tsarevich Peter was born, who later became Tsar Peter the Great. The date was 1672.
On 17th October of that year the first play officially to be produced upon the Russian stage was put on in German. Pastor Gregory, director, producer and author, had written a play which was originally called Esther and Ahasuerus. For the opening performance the author changed the title to The Transformation of Artaxerxes. He hoped that this would please the Tsar, for he thought that the name Artaxerxes would sound better to Russian ears than that of the biblical King Ahasuerus. During the intervals the guests were delighted by the playing of the German musicians whom Gregory had engaged.
On 9th February 1673 the first performance in Russia of Orpheus and Eurydice was also greeted with thunderous applause. The text of this had been written by Professor August Buchner of Wurttemberg. After the prologue, which Gregory had composed as a hymn in praise of the Tsar, the curtain rose to reveal paper pyramids upon the stage. The audience gasped with surprise and delight when these pyramids broke into a dance!
Tsar Alexei proved himself to be one of the Russian rulers most interested in the arts, although he was for a long time under the influence of the strict Patriarch Nikon. When he married for the second time, in 1671, he defied the Church's opposition to 'music-making', and even 'played a German organ, while trumpets were blown and drums beaten', according to court chronicles. In the year after the birth of the Tsarevich Peter, Alexei dispatched Colonel Nikolaus von Staden in great haste to Courland, there to 'procure the best and most popular trumpeters, and other performers who can act in any kind of play'. It is true that Felten, the actor, and the famous singer from Copenhagen, Anna Paulsen, refused to come to Moscow. Colonel von Staden did, however, bring back one trumpeter and four other musicians and they played at the cradle of Peter the Great.
With the Tsar Alexei's death, the story ends; the brief hour of the Muses, scarcely begun, came to a close. His successor, Feodor Alexeyevich (1676-1682), his son by his first marriage, ordered the theatre to be razed.
'Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century,' according to a distorted book by the Soviet professors, Biryukovich, Porshnev and Skazkin, enticed A History of Modern Times, 'was one of the more important centres of European cultural life.... This period was for Russia an age of soaring development in literature, the arts and in architecture.'
It was then five hundred years since the founding of the first universities of Western Europe, in Italy, France, England and Germany. It was a very long time since the great spiritual examination of the heritage of antiquity had begun, first by the monks of the Middle Ages, then by the laymen of the Renaissance. Plato and Aristotle, Archimedes and Euclid, Hippocrates and Galen had long formed part of the intellectual wealth of the West.
Unknown and unread, similar manuscripts from the hands of the great thinkers of the past had meanwhile lain rotting for centuries in the monasteries of Russia. Nobody had ever drought of translating diem into the vernacular, for Russian monasteries were never seedbeds of culture nor were Russian monks' cells ever used for study or learning of any sort. Furthermore, whatever was printed in Russia up to the end of the seventeenth century--exclusively church literature, dealing in the most specialized manner with the church and monastic matters--was written in the ecclesiastical old Slavonic, using the ecclesiastical Cyrillic script.
'At the end of the seventeenth century,' writes Ernst Freiherr von der Brueggen, 'the Slavonic [i.e. Cyrillic] script had already been in use for seven hundred years. Up to the time of Peter I, however, its use was limited to men handling the affairs of Church and State. And even there the knowledge of writing was employed only in the day to day business of essential administration. The limitation of the use of the written word prevented all cultural development not only in the people as a whole but also in the civil and ecclesiastical ruling class. How incredible must have been their intellectual apathy and inertia to make such a state of affairs possible! For hundreds of years this script was used by officials, yet never artistically nor for the purpose of self-expression. This startling phenomenon displays a characteristic intellectual inertia not to be found anywhere else in Europe, and shows in glowing colours the fundamental difference between the way of life of the Russian people before Peter and that of the Western peoples.'
As it happens, the father of the first Romanov Tsar knew Latin owing to the fact that an Englishman, Horsey, had written a Latin-Russian grammar. In 1649, when it was decided that the Bible should be translated, two Greek monks had to be brought to Moscow for this purpose. In 1655 the first Latin school was founded in the Spassky Monastyr, the Abbey of the Redeemer, in Moscow. And in 1681 something resembling a university, but also under ecclesiastical control, was established in Moscow. In 1686 it had two hundred and thirty-three students. This was not precisely an Orthodox theological college, as the Russian historian, O. Klynchevsky, states, but rather an ecclesiastically-disciplined educational establishment founded with the object of preserving Russian Orthodoxy from the inroads of 'Latin', i.e. Roman Catholic, heresies.
Just as knowledge had stagnated, so the plastic arts had petrified. The ancient religious paintings were copied and recopied century after century. The icons remained unchanged in every detail--colour, shape, size and form--from the original designs brought to Kiev from Byzantium. Nothing new had been introduced, nor was there any sign of change or of life, except among the masters of the Great Novgorod school. There something had been attempted, and a start had been made to get away from the lifeless, stereotyped formulas--on Western lines. Almost realistic faces now appeared on the Novgorod icons, portraits of the artists' patrons.
Many difficulties confronted the second Tsar of the House of Romanov, Alexei Mikhailovich, when he wished to have his portrait painted. Oil paintings did hang on the walls of the Kremlin, but these were portraits of Western European sovereigns and their daughters painted in Western Europe. Ivan IV had sent for these when he was toying with the idea of marrying a European princess.
The best-known artists in Russia were summoned to the Tsar's palace to paint the Tsar Alexei. But the results were disappointing, lifeless features in the usual icon style. Therefore, as on so many other occasions, he had recourse to the 'Foreign Department'.
The two best-known Russian painters of that period, Abramov and Stepanov, had received some instruction in their art from the gifted German, Hans Detterson. But now an art school was established for the first time in the Kremlin, under a Dutchman, Daniel Vuchters, assisted by Hans Walter and G. E. Grube from Hamburg, the decorator Peter Engels and the Swedish landscape painter, Gull In the years 1667 to 1694 they collaborated with painters of the Eastern school, including an Arab named Sasha Yakovlev, an Armenian painter by the name of Saltanov and two Greek artists called Yuryev and Salomonov.
A much greater impression, however, was made by the introduction of copper-plate engravings. In 1650 there was published, in Amsterdam, an illustrated edition of the Bible by the Reform Church theologian, Johann Fischer; following the custom of the age, he called himself Johannes Piscator. About three hundred works by the greatest artists of the West were here reproduced as engravings. These engravings opened a new and unknown world to the Muscovites, and showed them all the living beauty of Western painting.
The impression made by the pictures in the Piscator Bible was so strong that traces of their influence were soon to be discerned everywhere. Even in provincial cities, such as Yaroslavl and Kostroma, motifs from the Piscator Bible appeared in church murals. And despite all the opposition from the Orthodox clergy a spark was kindled in the field of icon-painting. The cold, dead, stylized tradition began to break down. A living and hitherto unknown manner of painting was introduced into Russian art by no less a man than Simon Ushakov, the court painter at the Kremlin. He attempted, with great success, to portray biblical incidents realistically. 'The Virgin of Vladimir' (1652), 'Christ' (1657) and 'The Annunciation' (1659) glow with unmistakable passion and humanity. An icon-painter named Josef has left us a document, which he wrote in memory of Ushakov, and which contains a series of discussions on painting between the two of them. In it he accuses the clergy of destroying the inspiration of creative artists, and of encouraging only paid hacks and daubers:
'Do you wish to ensure that only Russians be allowed to paint religious pictures, and that only Russian icons be worshipped? Do you want to see Western painting trampled underfoot and never employed for the greater glory of God? . . . Learn, then, that in foreign lands not only are Christ and the Holy Virgin realistically represented, but such works of art are also cleverly reproduced on paper; and whenever or wherever we icon-painters see engraved or beautifully painted pictures of Christ or the Virgin, whether they be by foreigners or by our fellow-countrymen, we are filled with love and reverence. Thus are we not consumed by envy, nor do we hate the foreigners, when we learn that they possess such finely painted religious pictures. On the contrary, we treasure these blessed works more than all earthly goods and chattels, and are filled with love when we buy them or beg them as gifts beyond price. We accept such representations of Christ, whether printed on paper or painted on wood, with holy awe. Why, then, are we compelled to reproduce all sacred faces as dark-brown and gloomy? Is the whole human race moulded in a single form? Were all the Saints mournful and sickly?'
This was a call for freedom, for fresh air, such as can be heard again today. For just as art, at the time of the icon-painter Josef, was hidebound by Church dogma, so today it is tied hand and foot by the inflexible doctrine of 'Socialist Realism', which portrays a whole people as monotonous, robot-like Stakhanovs, mindless factory hands and tractor-drivers. But what man in power in the East, then or now, has ever been interested in the living development of the individual, in the colossal complexity of each and every human being? All that counted then, all that counts now, is the appropriation and exploitation of technical and materialistic skills. And this acquisition of knowledge is itself merely a means to an end--the strengthening of the power of the State. It was not for true educational and humanitarian reasons that schools were established after the reign of Peter I, and an attempt made to make ten years' school attendance compulsory. The real reason was that it had been realized at last that illiterates are simply incapable of working complicated machines, let alone of building them.
Chapter 5. Peter's Window to the West
Was it coincidence or destiny? Peter Alexeyevich, later known as 'The Great', spent his Russian childhood in the closest personal contact with Europe. His first impressions, which were to influence his whole life, all his knowledge and his very considerable learning derived from Western Europeans.
Between the royal residence in Preobrazhenskoye, the eastern district of Moscow, where Peter lived with his mother, the Tsarina Natalya, and the Kremlin in which, in ~689, Peter Alexeyevich was to be crowned Autocrat lay the Nyemetskaya Sloboda, the German Quarter. The young prince then followed a road which runs geographically from east to west. The small oasis of Westerners was a sample of life in busy, progressive Europe, and it gave to young Peter the idea of turning his backward and undeveloped Russia into a huge Nyemetskaya Sloboda. Peter's knowledge of the Sloboda was to be Russia's destiny.
It was all so strange, so new and unfamiliar. This little town of foreign soldiers and engineers, merchants and craftsmen--the Barbarians, as his countrymen called the Germans, Dutch, English, Scottish and French who lived there--constituted another world. Between the homes of the rich merchants abutting on the only paved streets in Moscow stood the taverns, the houses of officers, doctors, chemists and craftsmen, many in the style that prevailed in their homelands, with ornamented gables, gardens and birdbaths. Fountains splashed among the flowers, and the wind turned the sails of many windmills. A colony of over a thousand families here led lives utterly different from those of the Russians all about them. Nobody here wore the cumbersome, trailing kaftan or long, shapeless, fur garments. The men went about in black knee-breeches, white stockings and buckled shoes, and beneath tight-fitting, snuff-coloured jackets they sported white cravats. The women wore aprons and brightly coloured caps, and did not have to spend their lives in the shuttered terem, as did the wives and daughters of the Boyars.
Peter's visits to the Sloboda were for him voyages of discovery. With astonishment he examined, for the first time in his life, a saw. Later he ordered saws in large quantities from abroad, and it was a great struggle before he could persuade the Russians to use this completely unfamiliar tool, and this despite the fact that they lived in the most richly wooded country of the Old World. Peter was filled with a consuming curiosity and a restless thirst for knowledge, and so he learned something new with each visit. He began to assimilate his knowledge. Foreign craftsmen taught him how to use their saws, planes, gimlets and hatchets. During this period of his life the young Peter also learned the two foreign languages which he was later to put to such good use--German and Dutch.
The superior knowledge of the inhabitants of the Sloboda, compared to that of even the highest classes of Russians, was soon abundantly clear to Peter. Prince Yakov Dologoruky had brought back an astrolabe from abroad. But neither the prince nor the Boyars nor the monks had any idea of how to use the instrument. So Peter asked a Dutch technician, Franz Timmermann. The latter informed him that the astrolabe was an instrument used in astronomy, for calculating the position of the stars, and thus for working out the positions of ships at sea according to those stars. The more detailed explanations of how to use it meant nothing to Peter, for he could not count. His tutor, Nikita Sotov, a clerk employed by the Duma of the Boyars, had taught the young Tsar nothing, except for a hazy knowledge of how to read and write. He was henceforth to learn from the foreigners.
Timmermann instructed the sixteen-year-old boy in mathematics and geometry, taught him how to read maps, and gave him lessons in geography, gunnery and the art of building fortifications. From Menesius (Menzies), a Scot, the Tsar learned European history, and from a Dutchman, Karsten Brant, the elements of shipbuilding and navigation. Foreign officers, of whom many had been living for years in the Sloboda, were ordered to set up a small body of troops for Peter to command in person: since his earliest days he had shown an interest in the art of war. Strict discipline was enforced on European lines; the soldiers were ceaselessly marched and drilled, first with wooden dummy weapons, later with real muskets and cannon. General Simon Sommer trained them in the handling of grenades. The Tsar was known as Bombardier Peter and proudly wore a blue German uniform. At Peter's request a miniature fortress was even built on the bank of the Yausa for what he called his 'martial' exercises. The first troop, which soon grew to two companies, later became the nucleus of the famous Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments--the latter named after a village in the neighbourhood.
During these years of close contact with the Nyemetskaya Sloboda, a seed was sown which was later to flower in the Tsar's ambitious plans to build a navy. Peter had found a dilapidated English sailing-boat, and Karsten Brant and his countryman, Kort, had made it seaworthy. On Lake Pleshtcheyev, one hundred miles north of Moscow, the excited young Tsar had his first sailing trip. He was so delighted by the experience that he ordered a group of Dutchmen to build a shipyard on the shores of this very lake.
Peter not only learned about craftsmanship and military matters in the Foreign Quarter, but also first heard about European trade. Over a thousand foreign merchants, buyers of furs and of caviar, came to the inns on the Yausa each year. It was Dutchmen who first drew his attention to the importance for Russia of East Asia. The Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Nikolaus Witsen, a geographer of high repute, had travelled through Russia at the request of Alexei Mikhailovich, Peter's father, and in 1672 he wrote a widely read work on northern and eastern Tartary (Noord en Oost Tartarye) which Peter studied assiduously. In a letter to the young Tsar dated 1691 Witsen described in detail the possibilities of trade with China and Persia, and offered his services for this purpose. Peter declined his offer. On the basis of Witsen's proposals he organized his own expedition to China, with a German merchant, E. I. Ides, as its leader.
In the Sloboda Peter got to know the Scottish General Patrick Gordon and Colonel Francois Lefort from Geneva, both of whom had been in the Russian service for many years. These two experienced soldiers from Western Europe became his most indispensable advisers. Gordon and Lefort showed Tsar Peter I how to escape from the narrow world of Old Russia, and gave him great understanding and an abundance of facts concerning the modern West. They also helped him to achieve his ambition, growing ever stronger, of importing the technical and cultural achievements of Europe into Russia. It was largely due to the influence exercised upon Peter by the clever Lefort that the Tsar later forced through radical changes in the Russian way of life. He ordered long beards and traditional Russian clothing to be abolished, and insisted that European manners and customs be adopted.
In 1689 Peter became Autocrat. Now was his chance to put into effect all his plans for the modernization of Russia, and to make use of what he had learnt from the foreigners in the Nyemetskaya Sloboda.
As always, what came first was his extraordinary passion for ships.
In the summer of 1693 the young Peter, consumed by curiosity, visited Archangel for the first time and saw the sea. Archangel was then a very different place from what it had been in 1584 when the English built the first stockade there and the Dutch the first docks. Out of what was once a gloomy, uninhabited post on the edge of the Polar Sea a thriving port had developed, the only one in Russia, built by the Dutch and the English and kept going by the enterprise of the Amsterdam merchants.
The Tsar sailed in a frigate for many miles through the Polar Sea. His excitement knew no bounds, and his resolve was reinforced. Russia, too, must possess a navy. Then and there he ordered the building of two ships.
A Dutch shipowner offered to build the first one. The keel was to be laid immediately in his yard in Archangel. Peter agreed, but he wanted something better. He was accurately informed about the most modern and largest ships afloat. But these were built in Amsterdam. The Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Mynheer Witsen, received an urgent order for an ultra-modern frigate, equipped with forty-eight guns.
In the spring of 1694 Peter was back in Archangel filled with joyful anticipation. He was accompanied by Gordon and Lefort, as well as by numerous Boyars, officers and many others, including all the Dutchmen from the Sloboda.
In the harbour a shiny new frigate lay at anchor, with twenty-four guns. The Dutch had built it as a 'rush job', in the course of the winter. It was named the Apostle Paul.
And the frigate from Amsterdam was due in port any day. Peter could not wait. He set sail to meet her in a small sailing-ship, day after day, until one day they were bit by a storm, and he only just escaped death by drowning. As a thanksgiving for his escape, he constructed a cross, which stands by the sea shore and bears the inscription, in Dutch: Dat Kruys maken Kaptein Piter van a Cht. 1694. At last the frigate arrived; Burgomaster Witsen had not let the Tsar down. Slowly, under full sail, the ship entered harbour, the muzzles of its forty-eight guns an ominous threat. Amidst the clamour of bells and the firing of the guns, the new flag was run up aboard the frigate from Amsterdam. One day her guns would be firing shot and in the direction whence she bad come--against the West. Meanwhile a navy was born and Russia possessed the best and latest European warship.
The Tsar thanked the Burgomaster of Amsterdam in a letter written in clumsy Dutch, which ended with the words: Schiper van schip santus profet--Seaman on board the ship The Holy Prophet.
Peter had already appointed the commanders of the new Russian fleet. Prince Romodanovsky was to be Admiral, Buturlin Vice-Admiral, and Gordon, his adviser and friend from Scotland, Admiral-General. He himself remained an 'ordinary seaman', and wore Dutch sailor's clothes.
Up to this time none of the Russians appointed to the new Admiralty had ever set foot on board a ship. No matter, Peter would soon import the experienced sea captains from Europe chat his brand-new navy needed.
In the autumn of this same year, 1694, Peter ordered something which had never before been attempted in Russia, large-scale manoeuvres involving thirty thousand men. Two Western-trained, well-drilled Guards Regiments had been formed, under foreign command, using as cadres the Tsar's small training squad at Preobrazhenskoye. Among the Russian princes the ill-feeling against the 'beardless men' had increased, for none of them approved of Peter's reforms nor of the westernization of the army. The Tsar was determined to show them all what had been achieved.
Gordon and Lefort had been preparing these army manoeuvres for many months. Plans were drafted by General Gordon for a fortress, bristling with guns, to be built on the banks of the Moskva River at Kosukov. When the day came, the troops were drawn up in two bodies, one consisting of the Streltsi--the regiment founded by Ivan the Terrible as his Life Guards--together with the levy of noblemen and of Kremlin servants, while drawn up against them were the numerically much smaller foreign-trained troops. It was East against West.
Old Russia held the fortress, which was to be besieged by the 'New Army'; such was the plan of the exercise. After a bitter struggle, which lasted for days, and cost twenty lives as well as uncounted casualties, both light and serious, the besiegers captured the fortress.
Troops trained according to the rules of modern Western warfare had defeated the numerically superior forces of Old Russia. This was precisely what the Tsar had wished to show his Russians.
Encouraged by the success of the manoeuvres, Peter decided on a real test for his troops. He wished to drive the Turks out of the fortress of Azov, which controlled the south of the Don where it flows into the Sea of Azov. After ninety-six days of fruitless combat, the siege of Azov had to be lifted on 13th October 1695. The Turks were the technically superior soldiers. Russia lacked officers with a knowledge of saps and mines, and of how to blow up strong fortifications. Peter immediately dispatched dozens of letters abroad.
He wrote to the Emperor in Vienna and the Elector of Brandenburg, to England and to Holland: 'Send me specialists . . . engineers, experts on mines, pyrotechnists, gunners . . .!'
The Holy Roman Emperor sent a colonel of artillery, accompanied by experts on mines, explosives, and gunnery; army engineers came from the Elector of Brandenburg, and from Holland there arrived a major of artillery also with some gunners.
Most important of all, Peter also built a navy in the far south. He realized that the failure of 'Operation Azov' was due not only to his lack of sappers and of mine-laying units, but also to the face that the Russians had been unable to blockade the port of Azov. In Voronezh, on the Don, a vast shipyard sprang up with twenty-six thousand workers, and Dutch and English shipbuilders in charge. A Dutch galley had been taken to pieces and transported here to act as the prototype for the mass production of twenty-nine identical galleys. One thousand transport boats were also built in haste. Now the harbour of Azov could be blockaded. In the summer of 1696 Azov fell.
But Peter had no illusions about his real strength. He fully realized that a superior opponent faced him in the north in the form of Sweden, should he decide to force his way into the Baltic--and this was his principal, long-range objective. He was no more capable of defeating Sweden than his predecessors had been, despite all his and their efforts to achieve great power status. He knew what he needed but it was all in Western Europe. Therefore what he must do was to import everything that was best and most up to date from Europe into Russia. It was not enough merely to bring specialists across. It was not enough merely to send the boyars' sons to Western Europe so that they could learn the languages of these superior countries, and anything else that Peter considered necessary such as shipbuilding and navigation, mathematics, gunnery and defence. Such methods would not suffice to satisfy Peter's ambitions; he decided to take matters into his own hands. He would go to Europe himself.
On 10th March 1697 two hundred and seventy people set off on the 'Great Embassy'. The Tsar travelled incognito as an NCO called Pyotr Mikhailov, so that he might observe and study undisturbed. The young noblemen and soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and some of them had been instructed to remain in the West, in order to learn what they could there. The Generals Golovin and Vosnitsyn carried secret instructions to enlist certain specialists--sea captains, sailors and engineers--and to purchase certain items of machinery and equipment and weapons. Wild Cossack horsemen escorted the group, which was also accompanied, absurdly enough, by a troop of dwarfs.
Because of his knowledge of Western Europe Peter had appointed Francois Lefort head of the mission; he was rigged out in the most gorgeous Russian clothes for the part, and wore a long, fabulously rich kaftan, with a great high-crowned sable hat on his head. Though a Western European, a son of the city of Geneva, he had to act this part as head of the Russian mission.
The Europeans were, if anything, amused by this first appearance of Russians in their countries, much as they are today, when Lortzing's popular and harmlessly cheerful Czar und Zimmermann is done on the operatic stage. But the 'Great Embassy' was by no means a pleasure trip, nor even an opera buffa.
Tsar Peter's journey to the West reads like a list of instructions for all future Russian spies in the field of commerce and industry. The incognito member of the 'Embassy' had money and notebooks ready in his pocket at all times. Educated persons who talked to Pyotr Mikhailov noticed his superior intelligence, and the smiths and master carpenters in the Dutch shipyards were astounded at his great skill, his interest in their work, his thirst for reaming and his knowledge of their crafts.
The first stop, and the first European city to be visited, was the port of Riga, the bulwark on Sweden's frontier. Peter's father, Alexei, had besieged it unsuccessfully. This was not the least of the reasons why the son showed interest in its mighty fortifications.
While most of his entourage set off to find lodgings, Peter went at once to examine the bastions, with their trenches, ramparts ant curtain-walls.
Swedish sentries spotted the foreigner 'in shabby clothes' and with a yardstick in his hand, and stopped him. This was in the frontier zone, and espionage was frowned on. Quickly the other Russians dragged Peter away with them for otherwise he would have been held prisoner. Nobody in Riga could then have realized that a few years later Peter was to use this incident as a pretext to declare war on Sweden.
Pyotr Mikhailov was very seasick during the trip across the Baltic from Libau to Konigsberg, where the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III, later to become King Frederick I of Prussia, received the foreigners with pomp and ceremony.
'Bombardier' Peter took advantage of his short stay in his usual manner: he arranged to be given gunnery instruction by Colonel Steitner von Sternfeld. Peter was proud to accept a testimonial at the end of the course which said that he had made a thorough study of artillery techniques, and conferred on him the title of 'Master of Artillery'.
Peter travelled to the fortress of Kolberg by sea, inspected the fortifications and moved on to further fortresses, Spandau on the Havel and Magdeburg. From there he went to Ilsenburg in the Harz to see the ironworks, an I especially attractive place for a man as interested in armaments as was Peter. In Coppenbrugge Peter met Sophia of Hanover, the mother-in-law of the Elector Frederick III. This princess, a cultured woman and a devotee of Leibniz, introduced the Tsar to the works of the great philosopher, and offered to put them in touch. In one of the letters written by the philosopher to the Tsar we read: 'Because your Majesty's kingdom is for the most part a blank sheet of paper as regards cultural matters . . .' Thus did Leibniz write to the Tsar, and this began a comprehensive programme for the future remodelling of Russia according to the dictates of Western European culture. Of the many suggestions advanced by the German philosopher, the one that was to produce the most important results for the Eastern Empire was the founding of a Russian Academy of Sciences. Peter first met the philosopher in 1711 in his camp at Torgau.
Leaving most of his train behind him, Peter hurried to Holland and set to work in Zaandam, in one of the famous yards of the time. He found the perfect job, with a shipbuilder named Rogge. The amount that the energetic Russian prince got done in a day was well-nigh unbelievable. He went everywhere, in the shipyards and docks, examining the ships at anchor and studying minutely every detail of shipbuilding. After work he would I visit the ropemakers, the cloth bleachers or the oil-presses, learn about the running of a paper-mill and even work in the pulp-vats himself. For hours on end he crouched over work benches or demanded explanations of how to operate sextants and telescopes. Late at night, in the dockside taverns, he would go on asking questions over drinks. His notebooks became filled with page after page of the information he had acquired and with his own first-hand observations.
After he had been in Zaandam for about a week, people began to wonder who this alleged carpenter, Pyotr Mikhailov, might really be. To preserve his incognito the Tsar moved to Amsterdam on 26th August 1696.. Burgomaster Nikolaus Witsen, who had been responsible for sending Russia her first warship, and who had also sent to Russia nautical instruments, engineers, metal-workers and shipbuilders, saw to it that every door in that important city was open to his guest. He found Peter a job as carpenter in the shipyards of Holland's famous United East Indies Company. They laid a ship on the stocks one hundred to one hundred and thirty feet long for the 'royal prentice', which would later be the frigate Peter and Paul. Master shipbuilder Gerrit Claas Pool, who designed the big East-Indiamen for the company, was at Peter's disposal for information.
For four whole months and five days--apart from short holidays, which he utilized visiting Utrecht, The Hague and Delft--the Tsar worked and studied in the shipyards, the drawing offices and in the workshops where the ropes and anchors were made. As a tribute to their guest, and for his edification, the Dutch even mounted a naval exercise.
During this period, when he was working in the shipyards, Peter wrote a letter to the Patriarch of Moscow. In this he said: 'I am here . . . to learn seamanship, so that I can bring back the knowledge I shall have acquired and . . . conquer our enemies in the name of Jesus, and set the Christians free.' Reading between the lines, one of his many objectives is thus revealed. The knowledge he was acquiring would be used to conquer the Black Sea. For its shores were then held by the 'enemies of Christendom'--the Turks.
Holland, so small and yet so great and so modern, was the perfect place for Peter to study. Here medicine flourished as did the natural sciences of which even the names were then unknown in Russia. The Dutch builders of fortifications enjoyed a world-wide reputation, and nobody surpassed them in the digging of canals, the construction of sluices, and indeed in every branch of hydraulics.
Besides working extremely hard and studying under Gerrit Claas Pool, Peter arranged an incredibly varied schedule for himself, not least in the matter of purchases. He and his people bought equipment and enlisted specialists of every sort. Shiploads of goods and instruments, regiments of technicians and mechanics, set off by sea for Moscow. In Professor Friedrich Ruysch's famous anatomical laboratory Peter frequency observed the dissection of human cadavers, eventually carrying out autopsies himself; he also spent much time in the laboratories of Doctor Hermann Boerhaave at Leyden. He watched glass being ground, and the world-famous lenses being made. For hours on end he sat huddled over a microscope in Delft; Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who had opened a hitherto invisible world to mankind, explained the microscope and its mysteries to Peter. He made tile acquaintance of the architect, Simon Schynvoet, from whom he learnt about town planning and building. He sought out Van Heyden, the engineer, whose water-pump fire extinguisher had attracted his attention. Fires often raged unchecked through the wooden buildings of Moscow, for there was no machine in all Russia capable of putting them out. Among those who helped satisfy the Russian's thirst for knowledge was Menno van Coehoorn, after Vauban the greatest builder of fortifications of the age. Peter studied the plans and drawings of this engineer officer and listened to his explanations. He would have liked to take this outstanding soldier back to his own country. But Coehoorn declined the most attractive offers, for he wished to remain in Holland. He proposed, however, that Peter engage some of his best pupils. This was done, and thus Russia obtained for her service some of the most talented military engineers available. In years to come the Tsar frequently turned to Coehoorn for advice. The answers he received were of great use to him.
The Dutch shipbuilding industry was founded on many generations of practical experience, as Peter soon learned. His raw and inexperienced Russians could scarcely hope to emulate the Dutchmen. Therefore they needed perfect models. The English, however, had evolved certain simple mathematical formulae--this was the very latest development in the craft of universal application in the building of ships.
It was therefore with keen anticipation chat Peter accepted an invitation from William III to visit London. He crossed the English Channel in January of 1698.
When he visited Kensington Palace, he immediately engaged the King in a long and detailed discussion about seamanship and sea power. Peter had no eyes for the beautiful furniture, nor the long gallery hung with paintings. On the other hand he found his way to the royal workroom at once, eager to see the latest model of a recently invented manometer-cum-tachometer.
Seated behind a window he watched one session of the English parliament, but only briefly, for democratic institutions were of no interest to him. He spent far more time with the clockmakers and in the workshops of skilled mechanics where he studied in detail the operation of ironworks and the principles of bridge-building.
Ever greedy for new knowledge, he hurried to Deptford--to the Royal Shipyards. An engineer was instructed to teach him all about ship construction, and to give him chose formulae which made it possible to calculate accurately and in advance the dimensions of every type of ship. He visited the arsenal at Woolwich, where England's newest guns were housed. Here, however, his barrage of questions about the latest and most secret methods of gun-making were answered only briefly and evasively--much to his annoyance.
In England or in Holland Peter lost no opportunity of enlisting skilled workers from the foundries and the workshops. By chance the names of two sea captains whom he now engaged have survived: John Perry and Kreys. Here, too, he bought goods on a colossal scale. Whole shiploads of his purchases, weapons of every sort, scientific instruments and industrial tools left the Pool of London for Moscow.
In April 1698--after the English king had invited him to watch the great naval manoeuvres of Spithead--the Tsar left England. He took with him a splendid yacht, a present from the King.
The 'Great Embassy' now moved across Germany, through Bielefeld, Halberstadt, Halle, Leipzig and Dresden, observing, ordering, buying, recruiting, stopping to examine and take note of every fresh object of interest. Finally they went to Vienna, which city greatly interested Peter. Thanks to Prince Eugene it had become a sort of military college for all Europe. On 19th July 1698 he hurried back to Moscow--for a mutiny had broken out among the Strelits Guards which brought his travels to a sudden end.
The 'Great Embassy' had been well worth while. Soon Russia was to reap the benefits, but the West was to bear the cost. For under the cloak of an embassy this journey had been nothing more nor less than a well-organized plundering expedition across the length and breadth of Europe. The object of the enormous retinue was 'to seize or buy men, equipment, and anything else which appeared interesting or valuable'. Thus does Arthur W. Just describe it, and he goes on: 'The nine hundred specialists were plunder picked en route, enlisted into the Russian service for every conceivable purpose, and obliged to work for Russia's benefit.'
In 1697 Prince Dimitri Mikhailovich Golitsyn had also gone abroad, in his case to Italy, and he too had systematically looted the West, though of a different sort of treasure. He bought a collection of books, six thousand volumes in all, which was to form the foundation of one of the finest private libraries in Russia, in his castle of Archangelskoye near Moscow. But from the days of Peter I until now Russia has sadly failed to make any use of the great treasures in this library which include the writings of the leading expert on natural law of the age, Samuel Baron v. Pufendorf's famous tract on The Duties of Man and of the Citizen, and the works of the great Hugo Grotius, the father of international law. Such kultura was no use in building a mighty nationalist state.
In 1846 an Englishman who had spent many years in Russia remarked: 'Russian policy is to acquire all those practices of civilized countries which lead to national aggrandizement. It is the usual story, to be seen in all unci&ed countries where the natives hasten to throw their bows and arrows away and quickly learn how to fire European rifles. In all spheres apart from the physical, and above all in intellectual matters, Russian policy has been to instil in her subjects maximum subservience, a superstitious terror of power and a mindless materialism.'
'In the German universities Peter's journey, and the future transformation of Russia along European lines as a result, were constant topics of discussion,' writes the historian, S. F. Platonov. 'The philosopher Leibniz planned the reorganization of Russia on lines in accordance with the principles of European culture. Europe realized clearly that after Peter's tour Russia could not remain as it had been before.'
Then, as now, discussions in the West concerning Russia's future contained much hope and many illusions; meanwhile no sooner had Peter returned to his own land than he issued confidential orders for a 'crash' programme. In the strictest secrecy he set about using his newly acquired knowledge of modern shipbuilding, and his Western specialists, to prepare a shock--what might be called a 'Sputnik shock'--for the Turks.
On the wide banks of the Don a navy was rapidly being built. Its finest vessel was a man-o'-war carrying fifty-eight guns, The Providence. The Tsar ordered that only Englishmen and Dutchmen were to work on this ship. By May of 1699 a fleet of eighty-six ships was being built in the yards at Voronezh by thousands of deportees working overtime under the skilled supervision of the 'Beardless Men'.
Russia possessed neither efficient sea captains, trained navigators, nor experienced seamen, so the fleet was ordered to sea with Westerners on board. All these brand-new ships set off together on their first voyage down the Don and anchored off Azov. Then they sailed across the Sea of Azov to Kerch.
On 18th August 1699 the Turkish commandant of Kerch was horrified by the noise of guns firing at sea. Foreign ships, Russians, were testing their guns in the Black Sea. An even greater shock was sustained at Constantinople on 7th September of the same year. The Russian man-o'-war Providence suddenly dropped anchor off the Golden Horn and all its guns fired a salute. The noise reached the Seraglio, up on the heights, and the Sultan. On board was Yemelyan Ukraintsev, who had been ordered by the Tsar to compel the Turks to sign a peace treaty. This appearance of the Russian warships in the Black Sea was not only completely unexpected, but was regarded as totally impossible, and the surprise achieved did not fail to have the desired effect. A year later the Sultan signed a peace treaty. Danger no longer threatened from the south, from Turkey: the way was now clear for large-scale operations in the north. In this same year, 1700, Peter declared war on Sweden. Three years earlier Peter had ordered six hundred cannon from Sweden, which was then the leading iron-export country. A further three hundred new guns had gone as a present from Charles XI to the Tsar. The Swedish king had protested over and over again his desire to be on good terms with his much-esteemed 'friend and neighbour'. When the young king, Charles XII, came to the throne (1697) Peter sent him, via the Swedish ambassador, a letter bearing the great official seal, in which he promised 'to work for eternal peace, true, secure, indestructible'.
Now the Tsar suddenly seized upon a grotesque excuse to open hostilities. The members of the 'Great Embassy' had been so ill-treated at Riga, in 1697, 'that even the Tsar was distressed thereby'. Swedish sentries had actually dared to prevent the Tsar, disguised in simple clothes, from spying in a Swedish frontier fortress!
The Western-trained Russian troops marched on the fortress of Narva. Under command of a Saxon engineer, Hallart, the first mines were being dug under the walls of the fortress, when Charles XII suddenly appeared at the head of his army, attacked the Russians, and routed them utterly. Peter's entire army was destroyed.
Nine years later, at Poltava, Russia dealt a decisive and annihilating blow to what was then Europe's mightiest military power. Hitherto, as the Soviet professors Biryukovich, Porshnev and Skaskin admit in their History of Modern Times, 'Russia, under Peter I, had learned much from the West.... She had learned the art of war from Sweden, and used that knowledge to defeat her eventually.'
'During his European journey of 1697-98,' remarks the Italian historian Lo Gatto, 'Peter was astounded by the material prosperity of Central Europe in contrast to the conditions prevailing in Russia, by the multitude of factories and workshops and by the abundance of trade.'
An immense increase in the tempo of construction took place after his return from the 'Great Embassy'--a striking parallel to the Bolshevik Five Year Plan in our century--with plans and production quotas laid down to the last detail, under the centralized control of the Tsar himself. 'Every industrial undertaking was tightly planned and controlled,' writes Lo Gatto. Peter introduced the system of a state-controlled economy. Countless plans and instructions were sent out, written in his own hand. Peter was, in fact as well as by analogy, the author of the first Five Year Plan. 'In 1712, he founded cloth factories and then leased them to a group of merchants, with orders that they take over the running of them (whether or not they wished to do so). They were simultaneously compelled to undertake this forced labour on a permanent basis and were ordered so to develop production that they could fulfil all the uniform requirements of the entire army within five years.' V. Gitermann refers to this Five Year Plan in his History of Russia, and adds laconically: 'The aforementioned target was not reached.'
Peter laid down the exact amount of canvas to be used in making sails, and ordered that rowboats should be built narrower in order to save wood. That nothing should be lost, corn was to be cut in the European manner, and the peasants were taught to mow with the scythe. He laid down where new industries and production centres were to be built, and was especially keen in promoting mining enterprises in the Urals and in Siberia. In 1700 Greek engineers sank silver mines on the Siberian-Mongolian border in the Nerchinsk area; peasants were drafted to work in these mines, for Peter made the provision of a labour force part of his royal prerogative.
'Peter's industrialization decrees meant the mass conscription of forced labour,' states M. Pravdin without ambiguity. 'There were massive shifts of population from one end of the country to the other, and whole villages were uprooted so that their serfs could be turned into slave labourers in the factories and mines.'
1702 was the year in which the most important measure for the planned development of Russia was drafted, and one without which the whole ambitious programme could never have been realized. Throughout this year the Tsar's couriers were scouring every country in the West. They issued countless appeals, translations of the Great Ukase, in their attempt to enlist I the large skilled-labour force the country needed. The Tsar's Ukase contained handsome guarantees to all foreigners who would come to Russia, including special privileges, security of employment, good pay and religious freedom, Peter's Ukase of 1702 remained a permanent feature of Russia's development. It served as a model for successive Tsars and for the Bolshevists in our own age. On 23rd November 1920 Lenin issued similar regulations about foreign concessions, and thus, with his 'New Economic Policy' (NEP), launched 'aggressive Communism'. Appeals for help to the West and the promise of 'privileges'--such was the tried method. It opened wide the channels to and from foreign countries and helped Russia to ever greater strength and power. It proved equally successful during periods of expansion and in times of crisis. 'Privileges' under the Tsars, 'concessions' under the Bolshevists, were the bait at which the free world nibbled promptly and regularly whenever it was dangled before them by the Russians.
Tsar Peter's appeal for foreign capital, contractors and specialists did not go unheeded. They would help him make Russia 'self-supporting'. Thousands of men from all the nations of Europe, specialists in every conceivable profession, answered Peter's call and formed the backbone of Russia's vast development programme.
The creation of a textile industry in central Russia dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1720 Tamess, a foreigner, founded a cloth factory at Kochm, near Ivanovo-Vosnessensk, later known as 'dine Manchester of Russia'. Its historian, J. Garelin, says of Tamess's factory: 'Here the textile industry was founded. Tamess's success influenced the local inhabitants, who soon began to build similar factories themselves.' Thus the contractors of what became the factory town of Ivanovo-Vosnessensk followed in Tamess's footsteps, and big factories soon appeared in Moscow and in Yaroslavl as well. 'Tamess had Russians working with him, but he remained in complete control.' At the same time Fiebig, Prank and Lichten were starting textile mills. In Moscow a Frenchman, Montbrion, opened a stocking factory, while his compatriots built linen mills and carpet factories in many parts of the country. The facts prove that 'even before the industrial revolution, it was foreigners who took the lead in the oldest branches of Russian manufacture, and provided the necessary guidance. Western European manufacturing techniques were introduced into the Tsar's empire by the English, the Germans, and, after 1812, by French prisoners-of-war' (B. Ischchanian). It was the same story in other fields. An Englishman, Humphrey, introduced improved methods for treating hides into the tanning industry.
To improve and modernize stock-breeding, bulls were brought from Western Europe, and these developed what became known as the Kholmogory strain. Shepherds arrived in the Ukraine, driving enormous herds from Silesia. This produced a sound and marketable breed of sheep, and made the wool trade and the manufacture of woollen goods possible in Russia.
But the main objective of this planned and forced development of industry was the production of armaments. Russia was to be made strong enough to defeat Sweden and to settle accounts with Turkey. A shortage of military supplies, and not the requirements of the people, was the reason behind all the factory-building. Thus the wool from the Silesian sheep went to the Dutch-run cloth factories, where it was used exclusively for the manufacture of uniforms. Peter later said how proud he was to wear a uniform made of Russian stuff, rough and coarse though it might be. And above all there was tremendous development in the mining industry, of every kind. The leading figures in this field were Lubs, a Dutchman, and a number of Germans, men such as Johann Friedrich Bluer, Vinzent Kaiser and Johann Schlatter. Wilhelm von Hennin was put in charge of all the ironworks in the Government of Olonets, and the Tsar later extended his territory to include the Urals. Hennin also built the first munitions factory at St Petersburg, and also opened an architectural school at Ekaterinburg (the modern Sverdlovsk), of which town he is reported to have been the founder.
The iron-ore deposits discovered by German and English mining engineers and geologists were exploited, and the Tula foundries and ironworks, started and developed by the Dutch, could now be used for the making of munitions. Andrei Winius won especial fame as Inspector of Artillery. At Narva the entire Russian artillery had fallen into the hands of the Swedes.
Within one year A. Winius had forged three hundred new cannon, the bronze for which came from church bells. This Andrei Andreievich Winius, who also played a big part in opening up of new iron-ore deposits in Siberia, was none other than the son of the Dutchman, Andreas Winius, who had founded the Tula ironworks in 1632.
Within twenty years Russia, with a population of some fourteen millions, possessed close on two hundred works and factories thanks to Peter's extreme measures. By 1718, Russian iron production was the largest in the entire world.
In order to establish an urgently needed communications network across this vast country, which had no proper roads, Peter--as the Bolsheviks were also to do--placed great emphasis on the building of canals and waterways. In the far south, Captain John Perry, with a large number of skilled English workmen, supervised the building of the Volga-Don canal. But, despite a colossal outlay in men and materials, this work was suddenly suspended and the canal remained half-finished. Prince Dolgoruky managed to procure the services of another gifted specialist for Russia, the Engineer-General Burkhardt Christoph von Munnich. The completion of the Ladoga Lake canal in the far north, which had been started in 1719, was entrusted to this German. In the most trying circumstances Munnich finished this magnificent waterway. It is close on one hundred miles long, and was regarded at the time as a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering.
Over one thousand foreigners were 'recruited' to develop a modern army and a modern fleet. Under a Dutch captain, Cruys, who was created a Russian Vice-Admiral, twenty-three foreign ships' captains and hundreds of the best-trained seamen were engaged.
In order that Russian specialists should also be available eventually in the shipbuilding trade, the same procedure was adopted as had been in use before the 'Great Embassy'. Russians were sent to Italy, Holland and England. In the introduction to his Fleet Regulations, Peter I himself explained his purpose to his subjects. 'So that the work in progress can continue in the centuries to come, the Sovereign has decided to instruct the entire population in the craft of shipbuilding. For this reason he has dispatched a large number of young noblemen to Holland and other countries. There they shall learn about shipbuilding and navigation. Furthermore, since the Monarch is determined not to lag behind his subjects, he has himself already undertaken such a journey to Holland.'
Peter deliberately continued the military policy of his predecessors, and employed foreign as well as native troops. Under Mikhail Feodorovich, the first Romanov and Peter's grandfather, there were already five regiments in existence, in which six thousand five hundred Russians served beside three thousand foreigners; the number was increased in 1700 to sixty-three 'mixed foreign regiments', with a total strength of ninety thousand. 'As Peter the Great advanced into Europe in his twenty-year war of aggression,' Dieter Friede tells us, 'Germans, Dutchmen, Scots and Scandinavians were working and fighting for Russia--against Europe.'
No man can say today exactly how many thousand Europeans worked in Russia and fought for Russia against Europe--as instructors and officers, experts and specialists, contractors and teachers. Yet the shortage of skilled labour remained enormous. So crowds of Russians were sent abroad for training in the English factories, or to learn seamanship in Venice, or to study medicine in Paris.
'Study, study!' This was the slogan of Peter's reign, as it has been of the Soviets in our time. Young men of the nobility who could neither read nor write nor speak foreign languages were deprived of their birthright. French and German tutors, therefore, taught in the houses of the nobility, while a Frenchman, Rambour, instructed the daughters of the Tsar.
In the first issue of the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti ('News'), dated and January 1703 (Peter edited it single-handed), the following item was proudly printed: 'On the orders of His Majesty, the number of educational establishments in Moscow is to be increased. Forty-five students are reading philosophy, after having finished the course in dialectics. In the faculty of mathematics, there are already three hundred students.'
The new education laws were of the same sort, and had the same objective, as the 'Socialist education' of today. Technical training received priority.
The first technical schools were set up under foreign teaching staffs. In the gloomy Sukharev Tower in Moscow, Englishmen taught mathematics and navigation. The College of Higher Mathematics and Navigation, founded in 1701, formed the nucleus of what later became the Naval Academy. The titular head of this was a Russian, Andrei Matveyev, but his Director of Studies was a Frenchman, Saint-Hilaire. James Bruce--in Russian, Yakov Bryus--founded a naval and artillery school; he was the real founder of Russian engineering. In recognition of his exceptional services, the Tsar conferred an earldom on this highly qualified Scotsman, and later appointed him president of the College of Mining and Manufacture.
This appointment was rather exceptional, in that foreign collaborators, S. F. Platonov tells us, 'were almost never given positions of authority by Peter, these being reserved exclusively for Russians'. A later Russian Vice-Chancellor, Heinrich Johann Friedrich (in Russian, Andrei Ivanovich) Ostermann (1680-1747) and Field-Marshal Burkhardt Christoph von Munnich, who built the Lake Ladoga canal and several important ports, were among the rare exceptions to this rule, which is still applied by the Soviets today. '
In the Moscow Military Hospital Dr. Bidloo established Russia's first college of surgery, and to Peter's especial joy a German pastor, Ernst Gluck (from Marienburg in Livonia), founded a technical college in Moscow. The subjects included mathematics and geography, French and German, and the classical languages; there were also courses in dancing, fencing and riding.
Pastor Gluck became, incidentally, a sort of 'father-in-law' to all modern Russia. For in his house in Marienburg there had lived a peasant's daughter by the name of Martha. When the Russians took Marienburg in 1702, she became the mistress of Prince Menshikov and later of the Tsar Peter. In 1712 Peter married her, and after his death she succeeded to his throne as Catherine I.
Foreigners were entrusted with the important task of making an accurate survey of this vast, conquered--but still to a great extent unknown--land. A Dutchman, Hessel Gerritsz, known as Gerardus, had produced Tabula Russiae ex Autographo (1613-14), but nothing more had been attempted for over a century. Commissioned by Peter, Dr G. Messerschmitt carried out extensive geographical explorations in Siberia. His book on the subject, Northern and Eastern Regions of Europe and Asia, was published in Stockholm in 1730, achieved great fame and was widely read and studied abroad. A map of Siberia was also made, and Karl van Verden produced the first chart of the Caspian Sea in 1720.
The translation of foreign works could not be done quickly enough, for Russia urgently needed the knowledge they contained. European technical books on warfare and seamanship, machinery, mill construction and natural history had first priority. Whole libraries of technical works were bought abroad and collections of minerals for the study of mining problems. During Peter I's reign alone, the Russian language acquired from Europe a vocabulary of foreign words running to over three thousand. The greater part of the technical vocabulary used in Western Europe in the fields of administration, military matters, handicrafts and general technology was taken over into the Russian language, in particular from the French, Swedish and German. A few examples were: burgomistr (burgomaster), magistrat (magistrate), feld-marshal (field marshal), feldfebel (sergeant), feldsher (army surgeon), feldzoigmistr (master of ordinance), soldat (soldier), dragun (dragoon), reytar (mounted trooper), kapitan (captain), gubernator (governor), gildlya (guild), parikmakher (wig-maker or hairdresser).
As the language changed so did the alphabet. The old ecclesiastical Slavonic letters, evolved almost a thousand years ago by the Slavonic apostles, Cyril and Methodius, were redrawn, simplified, and more closely assimilated to the Western alphabet. This was largely done by printing. Holland made the first letters in the new type. It then became possible to print translated works in 'modernized' Russian. The printer, Tessing, was given the concession to start a Russian printing works in Amsterdam; his first order was to supply Moscow with instructional manuals and school books. There were five printing works in Russia already--two in Moscow, one in Novgorod, one in Novgorod-Seversk and one in Techernigov--but they were quite inadequate. The first training manual printed in Moscow was an arithmetic primer; it was followed by a book of etiquette, translated from the German.
The Amsterdam printing works 'for the glory of the Tsar and his empire' had a secondary, secret function. They were used as a camouflaged instrument for Russian propaganda, giving the lie to European publications which described the incredible backwardness and barbaric conditions prevailing in the East. For a German, Neugebauer, after a visit to Moscow, had described the 'contemptible treatment' meted out to foreigners by the Muscovites. And the news of Peter's unprovoked and unsuccessful attack on Narva had severely damaged the Tsar's prestige.
Yet Russia has never had any cause to complain of a shortage of Russophiles in Europe. European literature in Peter's time contained as many panegyrics of the Russian 'experiment' as it was to do in the period after the Bolshevik revolution, and often in identical terms. The Tsarevich Alexei's German tutor, Baron H. v. Huyssen, produced a series of propaganda publications for Peter. He wrote, for instance: The Nation of Tomorrow (1704), The Present State of the Muscovite Empire (1706), The Life and Work's of the Great Czar and Grand Duke of Muscovy, Petri Alexeivich (1710). And there appeared in Amsterdam not only works justifying Russian aggression, but also publications commenting favourably on the murder of the Tsarevich Alexei by his father, Peter.
This hunting in foreign countries for anything that would be useful for the creation of a great Slav state meant that the Tsar needed ever more agents abroad. 'Peter,' writes Harry Schwartz, 'made the embassies throughout Europe virtual employment agencies.' Here is a contemporary report concerning one of the many Europeans, forerunners of Fuchs and Pontecorvo, whom the Russians then used for their own purposes.
'General Hennin has been sent to Germany, France and Italy' to make drawings, plans and models of every new type of useful machinery,' an English eye-witness report of 1723 informs us. 'The Tsar paid all his expenses for this journey, which lasted two years, and the General was ordered to make particularly accurate and detailed notes and plans of foreign mining and industrial installations, and to enlist as many craftsmen and workers as possible for the Tsar's service.'
Tsar Peter not only longed to possess the ability and the knowledge available in Western Europe, in order to make Russia into a great power; he also wished to have a capital city on Western lines.
In the midst of war, when the Swedish warships were actually in sight, the Tsar issued his orders for building the future metropolis, the splendid capital of Tsars as yet unborn. The soil on which it was to rise is not Russian, for here, on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, Finns had lived for many years. The builders and designers of the city were not Russian, and the city itself bore a non-Russian name. Peter christened his new city 'Sankt Peterburg', 'Piterburch', as he pronounced it. In 1914 the German name was Russianized into Petrograd, in 1924 bolshevized into Leningrad.
The mouth of the Neva--the gateway to the Baltic--had been recently captured from Sweden by the Tsar. In October 1702 the Swedish fortress of Noteborg (where the Neva flows out of Lake Ladoga) fell; the Tsar rechristened it Schlusselburg. On 25th March 1703 the small Swedish fort of Nyenschanz, at the mouth of the Ochta, was taken after a short bombardment. This was the site chat Peter chose for the building of his new capital, which was soon to lure a vast concourse of European wares and know-how into the Russian empire.
On 27th May 1703 Peter dug a spadeful of sticky mud from an island in the delta. On this marshy ground building was to begin.
From the very beginning foreign specialists worked on the bleak, deserted stretch of swamp that was the Neva Delta, with their plans, ideas and superior knowledge--dyke-builders, hydraulic engineers and forestry experts from the Sloboda. There was Gonts, a Dutchman, Pirchenstein from Germany, the Englishman Perry.
Foreign help was needed for the laying of the foundations. To make a firm base in such soft, wet ground, sufficient to take the weight of a vast city, was a task requiring years of experience and the highest technical qualifications such as no Russian then possessed. For this special job the ambassador Ismailov had already engaged the foremost expert of the age, an hydraulic engineer and architect named Domenico Trezzini, a native of Tessin, born in Azano, near Lake Lugano. Trezzini was familiar with such problems. He had already earned the gratitude of the people of Copenhagen by transforming the soft and dangerous marshlands on the Danish coast into solid ground.
Using Trezzini's plans and calculations--and with the help of engineers from Italy, Saxony and Holland--the great task was begun. This quaking, bottomless stretch of delta swamp would be turned into firm ground capable of taking the weight of great buildings. Trezzini's work took him ten long years, ten icy winters and ten fly-infested summers.
Like the great Soviet industrial projects, St. Petersburg was built by forced labour, and the work meant heavy sacrifices for the Russian people. 'Peter the Great used similar methods to those of the Bolsheviks in recruiting workers for his great enterprises,' an Englishman, L. E. Hubbard, has said. 'Peter's forced labour camps are reproduced almost exactly in the Bolshevik camps of Northern Russia.'
An English eye-witness, writing in London in 1733, says: 'It is a bottomless pit, in which countless Russians perish and disappear. I am assured by reliable persons that during the building of the Taganrog fortress on the Sea of Azov more than three hundred thousand peasants died from hunger, or from the pestilences bred by the swamps. An even larger number of people perished during the building of St. Petersburg and Kronstadt.'
When whole forests had been felled and had vanished to form a firm base deep in the mud, the first buildings began to appear. They were in most cases utility edifices such as quays and dock installations, shipyards, warehouses and--in its first form made of wood--the Admiralty Building. The first colony, on the right bank of the Neva, consisted of Dutch and Germans. By 1705 Germans were also building on the left bank, near where the Hermitage now stands, and where the spire of the first Protestant church soon rose against the sky. It was here that Peter later had the beautiful Summer Gardens laid out--in pure Franco-Dutch style. His Summer Palace was also built here, and the Winter Palace in Great German Street. On the Vassily-Ostrov (Basil Island) a French colony came into being.
The architect from Tessin not only drew the plans for the city as a whole, but also designed the individual buildings in accordance with the Tsar's preference for the Dutch style of architecture. Among what little remains of Trezzini's work are the magnificent Summer Palace and the cathedral inside the old Peter and Paul Fortress, with the great bell that the Tsar had bought in Amsterdam for forty-five thousand roubles and which was hung to the famous belfry at a later date.
In 1713 two new men of genius appeared on the site by the Neva: Andreas Schluter, who had made a great name for himself as a sculptor and architect in Berlin, and Johann Gottfried Schadel. Outside the city, towards the Baltic, the first country residence was taking shape, Prince Menshikov's Oranienbaum. It was built by Schadel. Its architectural style pleased the Tsar so much that he had it copied for the Peterhof, his own country seat near the city. In Moscow Schadel also built the Annenhof in the Kremlin; in Kiev he was responsible for the belfry of the Pecherska Lavra, the famous monastery hewn out of the rock, and for the ornamental gates of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia.
After Schluter's early death in 1714, the Tsar appointed Francois Leblond, a most brilliant man, Russia's Architect-in-Chief Leblond came to St Petersburg in 1716. His great influence soon made itself felt. The homely and intimate character of the Dutch style of building gave way to ornate baroque. With Leblond the spirit of French architecture made its triumphal entry into the city on the Neva.
A whole group of palaces now sprang up in and about St Petersburg. Like some powerful magician, Leblond transformed the Summer Garden, inside the city, into a paradise in the style of Louis XIV, while outside he worked on the palaces of Peterhof and Strelna, with their monumental architecture, exotic parks and fountains. The great palace and pavilion of the Hermitage in the Peterhof were the work of this Frenchman, and he transformed Peter's original, primitive palace into the jewel called Mon Plaisir. Its hundreds of water-jets, its fabulously beautiful fountains and waterfalls, were beyond compare; they were Leblond's masterpiece, a brilliantly executed feat of artistic engineering.
But the Tsar soon lost this brilliant architect, for in 1719 he died of smallpox. An Italian, F. P. Michetti, succeeded him as Chief of the Building Commission. He was responsible for the Palace and Park of Strelna, modelled on Versailles. Michetti and his compatriots, Gaetano, Chiaveri and Cipriani, introduced the jubilant Italian baroque style to St Petersburg, with its magnificent brackets, garlands and pilasters. A German architect with the Italian name of Matarnovi was also at work there at this time, as was Stefan van Zwieten from Holland. Then there was Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli the Elder, from Venice, whose son, another Bartolomeo, later achieved fame as an architect, and who executed the bust of the Tsar which subsequently so pleased the French sculptor, Etienne Maurice Falconet, that he copied the head for his famous equestrian statue of Peter I, commissioned by Catherine.
Amidst all the names of these artists of every kind from Germany, Italy, Holland and France we only encounter one Russian, Mikhail Semzov. He was brought to the colony on the Neva in 1703 to learn Italian, Dutch and German, in order chat he might act as interpreter. Later he was to act as assistant to Trezzini and Michetti. The best known of his works is the small pavilion where the little boat was kept, in which the young Peter had made his first sailing trip. It was called, amusingly enough, the 'Grandfather of the Russian Fleet'.
Marvellous parks and artistically laid out gardens are meaningless without statues. The sculptors for the Summer Gardens came chiefly from the studios of Venice, where the pupils of the great Bernini worked. Such distinguished southern European masters as Pietro Baratta, Giovanni Bonozza, Giovanni Svizoni and Antonio Tasia received commissions from Russia. Whole shiploads of nymphs and muses arrived in the harbour at the mouth of the Neva. Antique statuary was also represented, including a Roman Venus of the second century--a particularly valuable piece--which was placed between the flowerbeds in the Summer Gardens, beneath the grey Baltic sky.
The long story of acquisition thus continues. Determined bargaining and occasional trickery enabled the Tsar to obtain the splendid effects that he desired above all else. Despite the strict law chat forbade the expert of antiques from Rome, Peter's Russians were ordered to smuggle the statue of Venus on board a ship. Cardinal Ottoboni had already guessed at the Tsar's intention and insisted that it be returned. The statue had to be unloaded again. When the Tsar heard of this he was obstinately determined to acquire it despite everyone and everything, and he did not rest until he found a way of doing so.
The Russians had stolen the relics of St. Bridget from Reval Cathedral after the siege. Using this item of loot as bait, Peter intrigued long and obstinately until he had the unhappy cardinal exactly where he wanted him. In return for the restitution of the holy relics, the prelate was to give Peter the antique statue of Venus. One can imagine the feelings of the cardinal when, after faithfully carrying out his part of the agreement, he learned that the Venus had not made the long journey to St. Petersburg alone, for on, board the ship there were ten other pieces of antique sculpture, among them valuable busts o f Lucius Verus and Vitellius, of Marcus Aurelius and of Nero. These carefully selected pieces had been secrecy smuggled on board by the Russians along with the Venus. While the gardens were being decorated with foreign statues and sculptures, the splendid rooms of the country residences, palaces and government buildings, and the houses of rich and aristocratic Russians were being crammed with other European art treasures, Dutch tiles from Delft, French Gobelins, musical boxes and ivory carvings, globes and telescopes, polished mirrors and magnificent lustres and chandeliers, whole libraries and galleries filled with the works of foreign masters. From its foundations deep in the swamp to the gilded tips of its elegant spires, the new St. Petersburg represented the cultural triumph of the foreigners from the West, so hated by the Old Russians. This magnificent product of imported culture was raised to the status of a capital city by Peter I in 1712.
While the new capital was growing out of the swamps on Baltic land captured from Sweden, the crisis of the Northern War occurred deep inside Russia, on 8th July 1709. At Poltava, south-east of Kiev, Sweden's King Charles XII suffered a crushing defeat. Out of 24,500 Swedes who, with only four cannon, met 44,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and the fire of 72 cannon under the command of a Scot, James Bruce, 20,000 were taken prisoner. Only a handful of them ever left Russia again. Peter ordered that the thousands of Swedes be marched through Moscow in a victory procession on New Year's Day, 1710. In the Tsar's eyes the captured soldiers were so many assistants to help develop Russia's potential, or to act as cultural 'fertilizer'. Just as Peter had ordered chat the citizens of Narva and Dorpat and part of the population of the Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Ingermanland be transported, so the prisoners of war taken at Poltava were scattered throughout the country and finally absorbed into the Russian population. They had to establish themselves as craftsmen or teachers, if they were not ordered into the administration. The officers were compelled to instruct the Russian aristocracy in such subjects as dancing and formal etiquette. A use was found for all of them; in the Tsar's words--'they either know how to do things, or they are able to teach.'
As in the time of the Goths, Russia now absorbed a flood of talent from Sweden. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a traveller in Siberia could still find traces of these men compelled, for years on end, to work for the Tsar. 'After the Battle of Poltava Peter had thousands of Swedish prisoners of war transported to Tobolsk, then the capital of Siberia,' writes Alfred Count Keyserling. 'The ground was levelled and a fortress and city built by Swedish engineers and builders. The Swedes taught the people of Siberia brickmaking and stonemasonry. The skilled work done by the Swedes at that time is still in existence.'
Poltava not only marked the end of Sweden as the greatest and most feared military power in Europe, but also suddenly and unexpectedly raised Russia to the rank of a great European power. It was with astonishment and anxiety, reminiscent of the effect on the Western world of the Sputnik, that the courts of Europe learned the news of Poltava. This colossus in the East had emerged so suddenly! The effect must have been all the greater in that nobody then realized what forces and influences had enabled Russia to make this mighty leap forward. An inadequately informed Europe was puzzled, and incapable of forming any clear opinion concerning Russia's emergence as a great power.
Peter himself dropped a hint in his oration on the very night of the victory. On the battlefield at Poltava he toasted the assembled Swedish generals: 'To my great teachers in the art of war!' The Battle of Poltava was won thanks to the European training and arming of Russian troops.
Once more a seed from the West had grown and spread in the East. The 'great teachers' and advisers had worked for years, and this was the reward. But nobody in the West understood this as the Westerners pondered over the Russian enigma, the mystery of the sphinx of Eastern Europe, and its sudden leap to power. If one reads the news reports of the day, they might almost have been written this year.
Poltava effectively put an end to the sneers about the 'rough, drunken ship's carpenter', and nobody now laughed at the 'barbarous Muscovites'. A disconcerted Europe hastened to pay its tribute of 'co-existence' to the new power. Hanover, Prussia and Denmark courted the Tsar and attempted to form alliances with him. In Vienna 'His Muscovite Majesty' was henceforth regarded as a 'considerable'. 'If the Tsar complains that We have despised him,' it was stated in Paris, 'the answer would be that Muscovy first became known to Us only through her present ruler, whose great achievements and personal qualities have won him the esteem of other nations.'
The 'Muscovite Grand Duke' became, overnight, a great emperor, Sovereign ruler of a mighty power. Hitherto the pettiest princelings of Europe had refused to marry their daughters to a Muscovite; only two years earlier a request from the Tsar to the House of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel for a consort for the heir to the throne, Alexei, had been rejected. Now the hands and hearts of Western princes and of their princesses were for the taking. And Peter made full use of it. His nieces, Catharine and Anna, became the Duchesses of Mecklenburg and of Courland. His own daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, were married to the brothers Karl Friedrich and Karl August of Holstein-Gottorp, and thus the Tsars of Russia were soon almost pure Germans by blood. The courts of the German princes became, as Baron vom Stein sarcastically put it, 'breeding establishments for the Russian Imperial family'.
Added to the amazed chorus, as after 1917, were the voices of the 'great figures of culture'. Poltava was the only battle which was constructive rather than destructive, enthused Voltaire, for the continent of Europe had thereby more than doubled its population.
More even than before, Peter set out after Poltava to give Russia a European aspect, to dress the Russians in European clothes--if necessary, enforcing this by law--and to teach them those Western customs which were still so strange to them.
When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russians had first appeared abroad clothed in the French manner and clean-shaven--on Peter's orders--instead of in kaftans and fur caps, it had caused a minor sensation. Lord Paget, the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, had reported back to London, in July, 1701: 'The Muscovite Ambassador and his retinue have appeared here so different from what they always formerly were that ye Turks cannot tell what to make of them. They are all coutred in French habit, with an abundance of gold and silver lace, long peruques and, which the Turks most wonder at, without beards. Last Sunday being at mass in Adrianople, ye Ambassador auld all his company did not only keep all their hats off during ye whole ceremony but at ye elevation, himself all of them pulled off their periwigs. It was much taken notice of and thought an unusual act of devotion.'
These were initial teething troubles, tentative beginnings. Ten years after Poltava the compulsory transformation of the Russians into Europeans was in full swing.
After his travels in the West, Peter had fully accepted the truth of a memorandum which a Croat, Yury Krishanich, a Pan-Slav enthusiast, had sent to Moscow during the second half of the seventeenth century, recommending drastic reforms. 'Foreigners are astonished by our outward appearance. The King of Denmark has said: "If Russian ambassadors should come here again, I shall put them in a pig-sty, for wherever they have lived is always left in so filthy a condition that no one else can sleep there." In another country, the news-sheet reported of our embassy staff: "When the envoys enter a shop to make a purchase, no one will set foot in it for an hour because of the stink. In one town they left a trail of filth behind them at the Golden Ox Inn."'
This memorandum was no exaggeration, as we can learn from many similar contemporary reports. The Governor of Leghorn, Antonio Serriscori, wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Florence, concerning the sojourn of the Russian ambassador Chomdanov and his encourage: 'They are filthy; they sleep in their clothes on the floor . . . At table they do not hesitate to pluck bits of food from their mouths and replace them in the dish . . . They use neither spoons nor forks, and eat everything with their fingers. It is quite amusing to notice that when one of our people is eating with them, they try to emulate him, and to use their forks. They take a piece of food out of the dish with their fingers, stick it on the fork, and then put the fork to their mouths . . . The gentlemen are not clean enough for one to risk putting them in a coach.'
In Moscow and St Petersburg foreign master tailors, and dancing-masters from France now abounded, and were called maitres de plaisir. Swedish officers, prisoners of war, had persuaded Peter to introduce Western-style dancing and etiquette at his court. The police were instructed to see to it that all officials took lessons in etiquette, and that their ladies appeared at all formal assemblies--disobedience being severely punished. Once a week noblemen and courtiers had to dress in foreign, fashionable clothes--the women's very decollete--and were personally inspected by the Tsar. 'Anybody contravening the rules of etiquette was compelled to down a large quantity of strong spirits out of a goblet bearing the imperial eagle' (Gitermann).
Compulsory new fashions and the adoption of foreign manners could not change the people basically. However, the desired object had been achieved. Europe began slowly to lose its mistrust and aversion for those whom it had so long regarded as weird and barbaric Muscovites. Suddenly these people were wearing the latest fashions, with combed wigs--at any rate, the upper classes. On their backs were Hungarian, Saxon or French coats, their hats and shoes were German, and their powdered wigs came from Paris. Similarly, the Soviet Russians of today travel abroad in English shirts, silver-grey ties and 'Anthony Eden' hats.
The cultural historian, Victor Hehn, a native of Dorpat, chief librarian of the Imperial Library in St Petersburg and thus a Russian government official, says: 'He who knows St Petersburg realizes once and for all that Russian culture is a whitewash designed to hide a chaos of conflicting interests and is deliberately applied to impress European critics. All this bowing and scraping and smiling and posturing is done solely for the benefit of the European public. As soon as the official comedy is over, the Russians live their own lives and continue their own activities exactly as before.... The preconditions of a humanistic, European education are lacking, and because of this lack all local culture appears in this form of a masquerade put on in St Petersburg.'
But the masquerade succeeded to an astonishing degree, thanks to the phenomenal imitative talent in born in the Russians and which shrewd foreigners have always observed. 'In every country in the world one finds a greater or lesser degree of original talent,' comments Edward Daniel Clarke in his Journey through Russia and Tartary, 1800-1801, 'but to find a talent for imitation one has to go to Russia. Imitation is the highest pinnacle of Russian culture and the foundation of all their achievements.' When unobserved, the European veneer is dropped--'for it is not merely the outward manifestations of civilization, but its very essence that are appropriated and exhibited solely when foreign observers are present or when the knout is to hand.'
During the erection of this facade, and the compulsory instruction of the Russians in European customs, etiquette and fashions, the Tsar never for a moment lost sight of the objective which for him was the most important of all--the expansion of his empire.
The great Leibniz, with whom he had been in correspondence since his first trip abroad, provided him with an abundance of guiding principles. In his letters Leibniz outlined a great project for the founding of educational institutions through which all Russia could benefit from European science and culture.
On the occasion of his first meeting with the Tsar, at Torgau in 1711, Leibniz persuaded him to found an academy. Leibniz was given a position at the Imperial court, and entrusted with this task. Reading the Leibniz letters today, it is impossible not to feel depressed. For we can see how tragic have been the consequence of the great philosopher's excellent intentions. His general suggestions, all of which were quickly accepted by the Russians, only served to build that massive strength which threatens Europe today.
Leibniz and the Tsar also planned an accurate geographical survey of the Russian empire, its people and its languages. In a memorandum dated 23rd September 1712, Leibniz advised that facts concerning the soil, flora and fauna of the vast empire be collected by organized 'Observatories', this research project to be tied in with the search for raw materials that could be mined and also with the encouragement of commerce and manufacture. His ideas leaped far into the future. Although many of his specific suggestions could not be put into practice, he showed the way, and Peter was enthusiastic. He sent Russians to Asia to learn oriental languages, and he appointed a Dane, Vitus Bering, to organize exploration and research in the Arctic and along the coast of Siberia.
For the people themselves, however, nothing was done. Peter was quite uninterested in raising their standard of living. The Russian masses remained--as they remain today--only a means to political ends. The peasants were robbed of their last rights to freedom. The so-called 'free' peasants were compelled, on penalty of death, to register either with a landowner or with a parish, who had to pay poll-tax for them. The lot of the serfs deteriorated, for Peter frequently ordered that they be sold or 'assigned' to his new factories and mines.
The upper classes, that is to say, the nobility and the negligibly small bourgeoisie, had to obey every decree of the Tsar, and thus the great mass of the population lost their last individual rights.
The Tsar was also busy in the field of entertainment. Among the amenities lifted from Europe was the theatre. Peter, like his father before him, brought drama teachers to the country. In I701 he sent a Hungarian, Splavsky, to Western Europe to engage German actors. A company under Director Kunst arrived. The Tsar built an enormous theatre in the Red Square. Alexander and Darius was often performed, a play chat delighted Peter since it recalled his own struggle against Charles XII. Also in the repertoire were the folk drama, Dr. Faustus, and Le Malade Imaginaire by Moliere. The Muscovites were delighted, and Director Kunst was ordered by the Tsar to start a dramatic school. Russians too must learn this Western art.
Since no students applied for training, the Tsar simply ordered that the students at the new College of Navigation and Higher Mathematics should be taught how to act.
The career of Director Kunst came to a sudden end after only two years. Kunst had invited the Tsar, the court and the people to a surprise performance, the title of the play being kept secret. When the curtain rose the expectant Muscovites faced an empty stage. A single notice replaced the backcloth: 'Today is April the 1st.' The Tsar was so annoyed that Kunst had to flee for his life. His place was soon taken, however, by Otto Furst and another German company.
Peter undertook a second journey to Western Europe. This time it was France which attracted him. Accompanied by an escort of fifty-seven persons, the Tsar landed at Dunkirk on 21st April 1717. He was more interested in the arsenal than in an exchange of courtesies, and insisted on visiting it, as well as the citadel, at once. His method of spying, for which he was now famous, had remained unchanged. On this occasion, too, he measured the sluices and harbour installations with his yard-stick.
Paris had sent splendid coaches for him, but Peter refused to use them. He wished to travel without any official escort--and thus to be free to study everything without let or hindrance. What no one in Russia was ever permitted to do the Tsar regarded as his unquestionable right.
The magnificent coaches evoked Peter's displeasure, among other reasons because they were difficult to see out of, and he was determined to have a good look at everybody and everything. The French officials finally put a phaeton at his disposal, a light, two-wheeled vehicle consisting of very little more than a coachman's box. It pleased the Tsar, and in order that he might see farther and even better, he had the driver's seat strapped on to the backs of the horses. Bumping along on this remarkable perch, an object of curiosity to all, he set off for Paris. Only when passing through a town or a village would Peter transfer to one of the official coaches.
Peter brusquely cancelled all the arrangements that the French had made. The Russian monarch was quite uninterested in ceremonial receptions. He wished to gain information for Russia. After the arsenal, it was the magnificent Gobelins in the Royal Factory, founded by Colbert in 1667, which aroused the Tsar's greatest admiration while in Paris. He had drawings of the patterns made, and took two Gobelins home with him as a gift--as an example and an encouragement to his Russians. At the Mint he tested the machines, and he watched a surgeon perform an eye operation. But he spent most time in the factories. He sought out workers in the St. Antoine district and questioned them about their working hours and wages. He rummaged about in shops, examining everything, cloth and hats and pocket-knives. Versailles impressed him deeply. He decided he must build a palace exactly like it in St Petersburg. He studied in detail the hydraulic engine at Marly with its fourteen water-wheels each thirty-five feet in diameter, and its two hundred and twenty-one pumps. Andre Lenotre's wonderful landscape gardening also appealed to him.
The Tsar returned to St Petersburg after a visit abroad of twenty months, his luggage crammed with plans, drawings, models and books filled with rapidly scribbled notes, his head a-whirl with all the suggestions and ideas he had picked up in Europe which he planned to use in Russia. During this second journey it is astonishing how eager the West was to open all doors to the visitor. Factories and arsenals were shown to him, as indeed was everything that he wanted to see. He was allowed to pry and poke about as he wished. Meanwhile Russia denied free entry and transit to travellers, kept the Ural trade routes between the Far East and the West closed--and still does!
There was once a famous road--the Golden Road from the banks of the Hwang-Ho to Bactria and Samarkand--along which a flourishing exchange of trade took place between China in the east and Rome in the west. There were excellent roads in the Mongol empire under the successors of the mighty Genghis Khan. A very fast mail service, based on hundreds of relay stations, ran from Peking to the Volga and the Don. Merchants and priests, no matter what their nationality or faith, could then travel freely across the endless plains on the northern side of the Central Asian mountains. Embassies wended their way westwards and eastwards. Two trans-continental caravan routes, one through the empire of the Golden Horde, the other across Turkestan and Persia, served for the transportation of goods from China as far as the Venetian and Genoese ports on the Black Sea coast. A book entitled Mercantile Practice, written about 1340 by Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, provided an excellent traveller's guide to China. Tana, then a Genoese port on the Sea of Azov located exactly where Azov which Peter I besieged in 1696 later stood, was the starting-point for a flourishing trade with Tartary, and Pegolotti assures us that 'the road from Tana to Cathay [i.e. China] is absolutely safe, both by night and by day, according to the merchants who use it'.
As soon as the Mongol empire collapsed and Russian Cossacks occupied the area, the iron curtain came down. From the onset of Russian rule the caravan routes across the Urals were cut and the thriving trade link between Europe and the Far East broken. On the rare occasions when Europeans were allowed into these parts at all it was solely to carry out geographical surveys, to study the flora and fauna, and above all to prospect for materials.
Even the modern Peter, who had travelled freely across Western Europe from Dorpat to Amsterdam, measuring fortress walls, and had been allowed to examine everything that interested him, refused to let Europeans travel across his country. His predecessors had done the same.
In 1635 a Russian ambassador visited Peking. This induced a Jesuit priest, Ferdinand Verbiest, a missionary in China, to try to reopen the Ural route linking Europe to China via Siberia. Fathers Louis Barnabe and Philippe Avril were chosen for the task.
They went from Rome through the Levant and Persia and as far as Astrakhan without incident; Astrakhan was then the 'Muscovite capital of Great Tartary'. As soon as they set foot on Russian soil endless difficulties began. After being held up for four months they at last received permission to travel to Moscow. Here they were delayed again on all sorts of pretexts and subjected to protracted interrogation. Month after month passed. Finally the two priests received notice from one of the Tsar's officials that they were to 'leave Russian territory immediately, and to go back to where they came from without further delay'.
Meanwhile Father Verbiest, in his reports from Peking, had referred repeatedly to the great advantages of the overland route from Europe to China. A further attempt to have it reopened was therefore made. Father Phillipe Maria Grimaldi, whom the Chinese Emperor Kang-hsi had appointed his personal envoy in Rome and Moscow, in 1686, was the next man to try to win the Tsar's permission to travel through Siberia to China. This Italian priest had formed a friendship with Leibniz in Europe, but even the recommendation of the German professor, to whom the Tsar owed so much, was of no avail. The Tsar refused to permit travel to China.
When Tsar Peter I died, on 28th January 1725, Russia's credit balance contained the following items:
1. 48 ships of the line, 787 galleys, 28,000 seamen, 25 shipyards.
2. 14 European and 17 Russian generals.
3. An army, trained and equipped on Western lines, of 210,000 men--not including 100,000 Cossacks--with an arsenal of 16,000 guns. (The army and navy swallowed up two-thirds of the national revenue.)
4. St Petersburg with 75,000 inhabitants, and a port visited by 240 ships per annum.
5. The number of factories and installations working metal had risen from 100 to 233.
6. Russia had become the leading iron-producing country in the world.
One item is missing from these statistics, an essential figure when dealing with Russian affairs, and that is an estimate of the number--running into thousands upon thousands--of foreign assistants, advisers, instructors and builders.
The great equestrian statue of Peter I, executed by the French sculptor Falconet, towers over its enormous stone base, brought from Finland. It stands in the Admiralty Square at St Petersburg, now called Leningrad. The Soviet Russians have not moved it. This Tsar, together with the third Ivan and Ivan IV, the Terrible, is recognized as one of the great builders of his country. And rightly so. He paved the road, as almost no other ruler has done, along which the Red Kremlin marches today.
According to Professors Ernest Lavisse and Alfred Rambaud, writing in 1895: 'The indomitable will of one man was sufficient to accelerate a trend which the Tsars Ivan, Boris Godunov, Demetrius, the men who ruled as regents for Alexei, and even the Tsarina Sophia, had initiated, and to revolutionize it. With his passion for work and his indomitable spirit, he imported the West en bloc into ancient Muscovy. His creations all had a Dutch, German, Swedish, or, briefly; a foreign look. Even when the imported objects were "German", he still dreamed of a Russian version.... Basically the old despotism had changed in form, but not in substance. Russia remained as it had been before his reforms, with its customs and ways of thinking inherited from the Byzantine and Mongol civilizations. This Eastern State, with its "German facade", seemed to Europe a monstrous and disturbing enigma.'
And at the same time Professor Otto Kaemmel wrote: 'What he achieved has remained. Using the external aids of European culture he re-shaped his semi-Asiatic people into a mighty power, but he was unable to change the fundamentally oriental character of the Russians. The conflict between European training and the nature of Old Russia has been the decisive factor throughout Russian history, and this profound contrast between Western culture and the traditional character of Russia still exists. While to the south-east the Orient declined steadily after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in the north-east it was drawn inextricably into Europe's affairs and appeared ever more of a menace, in that it combined the colossal material wealth and unexploited potentialities of a young country with the achievement of European technology....
'Without the large numbers of foreigners, mostly Protestants, whom Peter imported from Germany, France, Holland and England--among them the Swedish prisoners-of-war from Poltava--the Tsar would not have been able to carry out his plans. His new Russian state was not so much Russian as Western, a German-Dutch creation, made by a colony of Westerners working under a western-educated Russian ruler.'
Chapter 6. An Academy of Foreigners
The view from the Strelka, an escarpment on the river bank, flanked by red-granite pillars, where the waters of the Great and Little Nevas divide, is one of the finest in all St Petersburg. Across the river on the left the Peter and Paul Fortress soars upwards, while on the right at the water's edge stands a row of palaces. Behind them are silhouetted the Admiralty's golden spire and the dome of the great Isaac Cathedral. Only a few yards away from this magnificent vantage point is a three-storied palace with a round tower, built for the Tsarina Praskovya Feodorovna, wife of Peter's half-brother, Ivan V.
Towards the end of 1725 an inscription Imperatorskaya Akademiya Nauk ('Imperial Academy of Sciences') was placed above the main entrance of that building. Nearly a year after the death of her husband Peter I, the recently crowned Tsarina, Catherine I, carried out one of his last orders. On 27th December the Imperial Russian Academy came into existence.
Peter did not live to open the Academy which he had planned as his crowning achievement, and through which he had hoped to catch up with Europe not only in the military and technical fields, but also in those of the sciences and the arts. After the death of Leibniz in 1716, another German philosopher, Christian Wolff, became adviser to the Tsar; since his visit to Paris, he had been even more enthusiastic about this project than before. Peter's physician-in-ordinary, Dr. Laurentius Blumentrost, who was later himself President of the Academy, had contacted Wolff and persuaded him to collaborate with the Tsar. In 1724 Peter had ordered that preparations for the establishment of the Academy be made at once. But at that time--over five hundred years after the founding of Europe's first universities--no native scholars were available, and once again foreigners had to be called in. Already a number of European scholars, whose co-operation was particularly valued, had received invitations. Then, early in 1725, Peter suddenly died.
All the members of the new Academy, whose work was to be of the greatest importance for the future of Russia, were foreigners. For apart from Mikhail Lomonossov, no eminent Russian scholar emerged until the beginning of the nineteenth century. 'The foundations of the ambitious Imperial Academy at St. Petersburg,' wrote Jacob von Stahlin of Memmingen, Director of its Arts Department after 1738, 'were laid almost entirely by the Swabians and the Swiss.'
Who now recalls the names of these Europeans, who almost monopolized the Imperial Academy throughout the eighteenth century, and whose principal language was German? Yet there were many famous scholars among them.
They included two Swiss members of the Bernoulli family of mathematicians, the brothers Daniel and Nikolaus Bernoulli, and their famous compatriot, the physician and mathematician Leonhard Euler, the French astronomer and cartographer, Joseph Nicolas Delisle, the physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann, a Baltic German from Pernau, well known for his principles of physics, and the Dutch anatomist and physiologist A. Kaan-Boerhaave. Among the German members were the astronomer A. N. Grischow, who had gained fame by his lunar research, and his colleague, G. M. Lowitz, who made a series of important observations of the planet Venus from the Gurev fortress in the Urals; there were also the professor of mechanics and physics, L. E. Zeyher, and the mathematician and physicist Theodor Aepinus, whose theories of electricity and magnetism caused a sensation in their time. Other members of the Academy were Josef Gottlieb Kolreuter from Sulz, whose researches into the fertilization and crossbreeding of plants made him one of the great botanists. and the ethnologist and mineralogist, I. G. Georgi. It is to him that Russia owes an early work on the physical, geographical and botanical aspects of that country.
Gerhard Friedrich Muller, who later became the Russian 'Miller', published reports on the Academy's activities from 1727 (the Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae), and five years later he produced his Comprehensive History of Russia, published simultaneously in German and in Russian. This was followed by his History of Siberia, the fruit of ten years' research. On Muller's initiative the first Russian scientific and literary periodical was produced, in 1755. In 1761 he induced the Empress Elizabeth to invite the Gottingen professor, August Ludwig Schlozer, to St Petersburg. Schlozer was to become the pioneer of true historical writing in Russia.
There are famous botanical collections in St. Petersburg. These also date from this period of fruitful activity on the part of foreign scholars. About fifty thousand plants, particularly Siberian species, were collected and classified, the result of years of research by the German naturalists, Johann Georg Gmelin, Georg Wilhelm Steller and Peter Simon Pallas.
To name only a few of their works, Pallas, a Berliner, who carried out extensive ethnological and natural history research all over Russia, Siberia and Mongolia, wrote: Flora Rossica (Russian Plants), Zoographica Rossiae Asiaticae and Travels through the Various Provinces of the Russian Empire. Georg Gmelin from Tubingen lived in the East from 1727 to 1747, and wrote his Flora Sibirica. His nephew, Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, explorer and botanist, went to Russia in 1768, and died in 1774 as a prisoner of the Khan of Tartary down in the Caucasus. Georg Wilhelm Steller, from Windsheim in Franconia, also died early, worn out by hard work and primitive living conditions. He had gone to Russia in 1737, was a member of Bering's expedition to the north-west coast of America in 1741-2, discovered on Bering Island the giant Steller's sea-cow (Hydrodamalis Stelleri), named after him and soon to be exterminated. He died in 1746, at the early age of thirty-seven, in Siberia. After his death his books, De bestiis marinis, Description of the Kamchatka District and The Diary of a Sea-Voyage . . ., to the West Coast of America, were published.
The learned works of Leonhard Euler, who worked in St. Petersburg from 1727 to 1741 and from 1766 to 1783, constitute a small library on their own. He made contributions of great distinction to mathematics, physics and astronomy. His Complete Guide to Algebra is printed and read today. Euler's collected works are in the process of being reprinted by the Swiss Natural History Research Association; there will be eighty volumes containing over ten thousand essays.
Furthermore, the Academy in its early days organized extensive exploration and research in the Arctic regions, a most important contribution so far as Russia was concerned. The Academy mounted, indeed, the greatest expedition of them all, and in 1725 a Dane, Vitus Bering, captain in the Russian Navy, set out on his exceptionally daring voyage of discovery. This had been ordered by Peter I, in accordance with a suggestion repeatedly made to him by Leibniz. It was to provide the answer to a question which had much preoccupied the Russians: was Asia joined to America? If an ancient tradition did not lie, there ought, somewhere in the distant north-east, to be a channel, the legendary Anian Straits.
With a hand-picked company, Vitus Bering set o on this dangerous voyage into the unknown, on sledges at first across all Siberia, a distance of some six thousand miles, until they reached Kamchatka on the Pacific coast. Then and there he put the craftsmen and shipbuilders whom he had brought with him to building a ship. It was the St. Gabriel, and in her Bering circumnavigated the whole of the East Cape of Asia and thus discovered the straits which bear his name--the Bering Straits.
On his return from this enormous journey, Bering reported his fascinating discoveries to the members of the Academy. The intrepid Dane's expedition was followed by an organized research programme that took many years and led to the complete mapping of the whole Siberian coastline from the North-East passage westwards. The learned members of the Academy of Science carefully prepared an itinerary for this 'Great Northern Expedition'.
In 1734 the expedition set off. The Academy had nominated Bering to command it. A staff of scientists and their assistants went with him, and these were to carry out subsidiary exploration. Long lines of sledges, loaded with enough essential supplies to last for years, and tools, and crates filled with the most up-to-date European survey equipment, set off from St. Petersburg.
Bering set about his colossal task systematically. He divided the Siberian coast, over twenty-five thousand miles long and stretching from the White Sea to the Sea of Japan, into sectors. The mastering of this colossal stretch of unknown territory was done simultaneously from five different camps or headquarters.
Commodore Bering had learned by experience that in coastal exploration it is advisable to build the ships on the spot. At first the native kotchas were used as models--open boats forty feet long, with a twelve-foot beam and drawing eight feet of water. Only later did the expedition change to sixty-foot ships with covered decks. It is astonishing what unforeseen difficulties were overcome in such primitive vessels.
Bering decided that he would personally take charge in the most easterly sector, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific. Accompanied by Steller, he set off from Kamchatka in the Svyatoy Pyotr (St. Peter) into the unknown. He discovered the Aleutian Islands. In 1741 Bering and Steller set foot for the first time on another continent when they landed in Alaska. It was unfortunately not granted to the brave Dane himself to tell of this discovery in St. Petersburg. On the return voyage from Alaska Vitus Bering died of scurvy. His companions buried him on a small island of Kamchatka, which still bears his name--Bering Island.
It was not until our own century that the world learned the details of the scope and importance of the work he did for Russia.
In 1935 an apology by the leader of the 'Great Northern Expedition' was discovered in the archives of the Petersburg Academy. Bering had written it on 18th April 1740, a year before his death. He had been blamed by the Russians for the fact that 'the expedition took far too long'. In fact, to use the contemporary phrase, he was being accused of sabotage.
Point by point the explorer refutes the accusation, which is itself unfortunately lost. In detail he describes the voyages and the tasks completed during his geographical survey. He gives exact accounts of the silver and iron-ore deposits in Siberia discovered by the expedition, refers to the building of an ironworks in remote Okhotsk, and speaks of the immigration of Russians and the transfer of the local population to Okhotsk with the object of cultivating the land and of breeding cattle. His report also mentioned that he had started the first regular postal service between St Petersburg and the remote villages lost in the wastes of Siberia.
Of the many sober facts contained in Bering's reply to the accusation of sabotage, perhaps the most striking is the incredible number and variety of the tasks undertaken by Bering and his associates on Russia's behalf. As a result of the nine years of determined exploration and research, involving many sacrifices, carried out by the 'Great Northern Expedition', the Petersburg Academy was able to establish for the first time the exact shape of the Siberian coastline. An overall map was drawn and nineteen sectional maps, covering the whole empire. The Russians insisted that this atlas should be classified 'secret', as were all the reports of the great scientific research done in surveying the equivalent of a continent. The maps only reached the West thanks to a Frenchman, Joseph Nicolas Delisle, who worked on the atlas in the Petersburg Academy and, strictly against orders, sent copies to Paris. Of the details behind this vast research project Europe knew nothing. A few superficial reports on the discoveries, and observations of animal and plant life, were published, but nothing more.
Why all this secrecy? All the Western Europeans involved, from Vitus Bering down to the most humble draftsman, were under oath to the Russians and were sworn to the strictest secrecy. A specimen of such conditions of employment reached the West quite early.
In the Instructions which an Englishman, Joseph Billings, received as leader of an expedition in 1785, under Catherine II, paragraph 1 reads: '. . . You must ensure that the promise you have made under oath to guard the secrets of the undertaking entrusted to you be not broken, and that you do not violate the Ukase of 1724, concerning secret matters. Under no circumstances will you give any information to anyone in any form concerning the plans and execution of your expedition.' Peter the Great had issued this Ukase 'concerning secret matters' the year before the founding of the Academy and Vitus Bering's first expedition.
Paragraph 25 of these same instructions issued by Catherine II reads:
'Before the end of your main expedition it is your duty to collect, under oath, all log-books or diaries or plans or drawings kept or drawn by members of the expedition during the voyage. These you will keep, under seal, until your return to St. Petersburg, where you will hand them in, complete, together with any similar documents of your own. Such diaries etc. will only be returned, on the orders of Her Imperial Majesty, when they are no longer required. The officers, sailors, soldiers and Cossacks taking part in the expedition are forbidden to communicate, either verbally or in writing, any information of any kind concerning discoveries made or events which occurred during your enterprise.'
Such an order had also silenced the explorers and scientists who took part in the 'Great Northern Expedition'. A Russian curtain of silence was rung down upon the great scientific discoveries of these Europeans; even today the world does not know all their names.
An admission of this slipped past a Soviet censor in 1954, when it was written of the 'Great Northern Expedition': 'The information acquired in the course of this expedition was kept secret for many years.' Thus M. Chernenko of the Arctic Institute of the USSR: 'and was . . . not generally known until 1812.' This secrecy, incidentally, applied both inside and outside Russia.
The silence chat concealed the results achieved by the 'Great Northern Expedition' inaugurated a policy that has been followed by the Russians ever since, a policy of secrecy in all scientific matters, 'an unwillingness on the part of the USSR to co-operate sincerely and honestly' with other nations--as Constantin Krypton, who worked in Soviet Russia for many years, wrote in his book The Northern Sea Route in 1953.
Just as large numbers of machines bought abroad bear a Russian trademark, so the Soviets have missed no opportunity of passing off the scientific achievements of Western Europeans as their own. They have produced long lists of hitherto unknown Russians as 'the great scientific heroes' of Russian expeditions.
'Geography and natural history,' an official textbook used in the High Schools of the USSR informs us, 'made great strides in Russia in the eighteenth century, and enriched immeasurably the store of knowledge throughout all the world. The expeditions of Bering and Chirikov, and the geographical researches of Chelyuskin, Pronchishchev, Chichagov, Krasheninnikov, of Laptev, Pallas, Gmelin, Lepyochin, Osertskovski, Rychkov and many others filled what had hitherto been large white spaces on the maps of Europe and Asia with concrete facts. They not only extended man's knowledge of places, people, beasts and the mineral treasures hidden beneath the earth's surface, but also exploded a vast number of superstitions, medieval myths and legends.'
Who are these nine Russians raised to an eminence equal to that of Bering, Gmelin and Pallas? Alexei Ilyich Chirikov commanded the second ship of the expedition, the Svyatoy Pavel (St. Paul). After a voyage of several weeks' duration through snow, ice and sleet, in which contact was lost with Bering's ship Svyatoy Pyotr (St Peter), he had to return to Kamchatka without having set foot on American soil, and having lost most of his crew off the coast of Alaska.
On board Bering's ship, the St Peter, was a cadet with the typically Dutch name of Sind, who later--1764-68--led a secret Russian expedition to Alaskan waters in the galley Svyataya Ekaterina. The important astronomical observations made during the Bering expedition were the work of a Frenchman, Louis Delisle de la Croyere. A Swedish naval lieutenant, Sven Waxell, who also gets no mention, took part in the voyage of the St. Paul. His book, entitled Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition, was not published, incidentally, until 1940.
There can be no objection to the mention of Captain Chirikov, who held an important command in the expedition. But why no mention of the other three ship's captains who happened to be Westerners, the Englishmen Walton and Shelting, and the German Captain Spanberg? In 1738 and 1739 they set sail with three ships from the expedition's base at Petropavlovsk, surveyed all the Kurile Islands, from Kamchatka as far as Japan in a great arc that encloses the Sea of Okhotsk, and plotted their exact position on new charts.
Of the other Russians mentioned, certain facts are now known. They were naval officers, and as the Russian, G. A. Zarychev, wrote in 1802: 'they carried out a partial survey of the Polar Sea at certain points'. Further, 'in 1735, Lieutenant Pronchishchev sailed westwards from the mouth of the Lena, while Lieutenant Dmitri Laptev sailed eastwards'. The navigator, Chelyuskin, after whom the northernmost point of Asia was named, because he was the first to set foot on it, was one of these 'naval officers who . . . surveyed part of the Polar Sea coast'. They contributed to the Academy's extensive research project as leaders of minor expeditions or as surveyors. The knowledge required for such work was taught to the Russians by Englishmen at the College of Navigation and Higher Mathematics in Moscow, where the principal was a Scotsman, James Bruce, or at the Naval Academy, directed by a Frenchman, St. Hilaire. None of these naval officers, who acted as technical assistants, made any contribution to science worthy of mention, or if they did, their discoveries have been successfully concealed from the non-Russian world ever since.
A mania for secrecy, a ban on the publication of scientific papers, accusations of 'sabotage' against the great Vitus Bering--such was the typically Russian atmosphere into which science and research were born in Russia. The story was the same inside the Academy in St. Petersburg as on the expeditions. One historically authenticated incident illustrates this best of all.
In the year 1741 Leonhard Euler, the famous mathematician, left the St. Petersburg Academy, of which he had been a member for twelve years, and went to the Prussian Academy in Berlin, where the young King Frederick II was collecting the best brains in Europe. At a court reception, the Queen Mother, Sophia Dorothea, drew the great scholar into conversation, and commented on the fact that Euler's speech was very terse and monosyllabic. 'Madame,' replied Euler, 'do not forget that I have just come from a country where any man who speaks freely and openly is liable to be hanged.'
In the same year that Euler left Russia, a Russian scholar much in vogue in the Soviet Union today arrived at the St. Petersburg Academy--Mikhail Vassilyevich Lomonossov. Lomonossov's name has been given to the mammoth building that is Moscow University--'the tallest in the world'--and students in the USSR are told of him: 'It can truthfully be said that among the more important representatives of European science in the eighteenth century . . . the encyclopaedic, learned and versatile innovator Lomonossov occupied an outstanding and honoured place,' and that 'for a true representative of Russian culture, such as the peasant's son Lomonossov, the overtaking of European progress was not a mere question of imitation, but a means of enriching and independently advancing science, literature and the arts, so that these might be raised to a level higher than that prevailing in the West.' According to the latest official textbook, compiled by a group of fourteen professors: 'At that time it is certain that both students and teachers in all our educational establishments' regarded 'Lomonossov as the defender of Russian science against the predominance of insignificant foreigners in the Petersburg Academy, and as a fighter for international science in its progressive aspects.'
A foreign reader, glancing through the pages of this Soviet textbook, would recall quite different names in connection with eighteenth-century science. He would think of Newton and Leibniz, Euler and Linne. Who was this Lomonossov, who fought so boldly 'against the predominance of insignificant foreigners'?
The alleged 'peasant's son', born in 1711, was in fact the talented offspring of an exceptionally able and wealthy wholesale merchant in a village near Archangel. His father, Vassily Lomonossov, as the English Professor C. L. Boltz has established (Discovery, August 1951, p. 251), cannot correctly be portrayed as a serf, worn down by poverty, living and dying in old, threadbare clothes, as the Soviets like to pretend. He was a shrewd merchant who traded in salt-water fish with the Scandinavian countries and with Moscow, the owner of a two-masted ship, in which he used to sail to the Arctic Circle, occasionally accompanied by his son. He was the leading citizen in his village on an island in the White Sea. Lomonossov's father not only dealt in fish, but also in timber and other raw materials. When there was a fire in his home town, he contributed a considerable sum of money towards the rebuilding, which included the construction of a new stone church.
Boltz says: 'This man was himself illiterate and apparently had no sympathy with education. But his son Michael was early able to consume all the books he could lay hands on. He took himself off defiantly when he was twenty, and proceeded to lie himself--he pretended that his father was a noble--into a school run by monks. He later planned to lie himself into the Church to gain further education, but this became unnecessary when the Academy of Science gave him his chance.'
So much for the true facts concerning the origins of the 'peasant's son'. They are unknown to the students at Lomonossov University.
In order to form a nucleus of Russian scientists, twenty Russian students were sent to study at the Academy. Among those chosen was Lomonossov. From 1734 he studied in St Petersburg at the government's expense, and as he proved himself to be extremely gifted, he was very soon sent to Germany--in 1736--with two other students, to 'learn all he could of science and technology'. He went first to Marburg, where he studied philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His name can still be seen in the yellowing pages of the university archives.
An inquiry has produced the following information:
'The Russian scholar Michael Lomonossov, with two other Russi Petersburgenses, Gustav Ulrich Raiser[!] and Demetrius Vinogradov, matriculated at Marburg in November 1736 (in the register his name appears as Michael Lomonosoff). According to a Senate record dated 15th October 1737, concerning the "quarrel of the Muscovite student Lomonosoff with Rosenthal", the former commuted a punishment of detention by paying a fine of three thalers on 24th October that year. At the Senate meeting, Professor Dr. Wolf did not vote "because the Muscovite had been recommended to him". Unfortunately we have no further information concerning his time at Marburg.' We learn, however, from another source that he 'fled from Marburg because of his debts'.
Lomonossov then went to the Freiberg Academy in Saxony, where he studied mining and smelting. Lomonossov spent five years--ten full university terms--absorbing knowledge and technical training in German universities, and returned to St. Petersburg in 1741. A year later he was the first Russian to be appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy. He lectured on rhetoric, poetry (he had written poems, both religious and secular on French classical lines, as well as a very important Russian Grammar), geography, physics, chemistry and mineralogy. Almost immediately he began to quarrel with, and jeer at, his former teachers, the German members of the Academy.
'For all his education and talents Lomonossov remained for some time a country lout, assertive and truculent on occasions, especially when he had taken too much vodka . . . There are reports of his indecent behaviour towards his superiors,' Professor Boltz tells us.
This situation remained unchanged until Lomonossov was restrained--not by detention as at Marburg, but by a severe reprimand.
However, he never got over his virulent dislike of the Germans, and he remained throughout his life an outspoken and aggressive nationalist. This accounts for his veneration by the Soviets.
Lomonossov, who had sworn 'to fight against the enemies of Russian science to the death', launched particularly vicious attacks upon the German academician Gottlieb Siegfried Baier, who had invented the 'Normannic' or 'Scandinavian' theory concerning the origins of the Russian state. Baier had first taught that Goths from Scandinavia gave the state of Kiev not only its dynasty, but also its name, 'Rus'. Lomonossov denied this and produced a 'Slavonic' theory; according to him the Kiev state was not a creation of Normannic foreigners but of the Polyani stock, who were also called 'Rus'. Baier's theory, accepted by August Ludwig Schlozer and Gerhard Friedrich Muller, is acknowledged--with only slight modifications--by reputable Russian scholars today. Nikolai M. Karamzin, Mikhail P. Pogorodin, Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov, Byelaev and Vassily O. Klynchevsky have agreed with his 'Normannic' theory.
Lomonossov attacked the highly respected G. F. Muller. According to the Director of the Arts Department, Jacob von Stahlin, who tried to have Losmonossov removed from the Academy, he 'passes decisive judgment on everything, even on subjects of which he knows nothing, such as history'.
Stahlin also wrote in a letter:
'Do you wish this man to decry good work and praise to the skies things he scarcely understands? If so, well and good. If he were a decent man, he would not attack decent people. He is known for what he is and why should he be allowed to continue such foolishness? The only reason I can see is--fear.'
The account of a conversation at the funeral of Lomonossov, who died on the day after Easter 1765, shows the extent to which he must have terrorized his own countrymen. 'During the funeral the Russian poet (Alexander Vassilyevich) Sumarokov pointed to the body lying in its coffin and said: "There he lies, the blockhead. At least he can storm and rage no more." Stahlin answered: "I shouldn't have advised you to say that while he was still alive!" Stahlin had been reduced to such a state of terror during Lomonossov's lifetime that he had not dared open his mouth.'
In what did Lomonossov's great scientific achievements consist?
'I must do justice to Lomonossov, in that he had a great talent for elucidating physical and chemical phenomena,' commented the finest mind of the Academy, Leonhard Euler, who had returned to St Petersburg. His statement is valid today.
No one who has studied Lomonossov's writings can deny that he was a highly versatile scholar, and that his scientific theories were often very daring for his age. Even as a student in Germany, Lomonossov had once used the phrase 'physico-chemical', although 'physical chemistry', as an independent branch of science, first came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1747 he produced his Remarks on the Causes of Heat and Cold which contained a statement that caused his learned audience to shake their heads: 'Adequate cause for heat must be presumed to lie in movement, and as there is no movement without matter, it follows that the basic cause of heat must be found in the movement of certain matter.' This was only a theory, without foundation, without proof--at best, hypothetical. But he had clearly anticipated our modern concept--heat as a form of energy deriving from the movement of molecular particles. One year later, Lomonossov wrote in a letter to Euler, dated 5th July 1748: 'All natural changes happen in such a way that whatever is removed from one substance is added to another; therefore when matter diminishes in one place, it increases elsewhere.' This, surely, anticipates the law of the conservation of matter.
Lomonossov's was an advanced mind, full of daring concepts. Yet he remained unknown; his impact on the rest of the world was, and is, almost negligible, although the Petersburg Academy enjoyed a high reputation and took part in a lively interchange of ideas with the other academies and universities of Europe. Scientific progress in the West went on in ignorance of Lomonossov, and totally uninfluenced by him.
In 1947-48, when the Soviets suddenly began attributing all important inventions and discoveries to hitherto unknown Russians, and launching their hysterical propaganda on the theme 'Russia leads the world', Lomonossov's varied theses provided excellent source material. He became Russia's trump card. It has, however, been said that Western scientific progress owes him nothing whatsoever, and that his one major work was his Russian Grammar of 1755--a work which was evidently of great importance in Russia.
It is fitting that the new mammoth university on the Moscow River should bear his name, for Lomonossov was certainly Russia's prime scholar and university professor. But the first idea for such a university--contrary to the story put out by the Soviets--did not come from him. It was Voltaire who suggested the idea of creating a university to Count Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, with whom he was in correspondence. It was owing to the initiative of Shuvalov, who enthusiastically accepted Voltaire's suggestion, that Russia's first university opened its doors in 1755. A bust of Shuvalov now adorns the entrance hall of the old university.
In fact, Lomonossov's scientific achievements for Russia were nil. The Petersburg Academy, with its foreign professors, was and remained for many years the solid foundation on which modern Russian research was built. Another seventy-five years had to pass until, in 1800, a second Russian of scientific eminence appears there--the physicist, Vassily Vladimirovich Petrov, to whom the Russians attribute the discovery of electric light and its potentialities for industry and lighting.
The Academy remained a power-house of varied research in such fields as topography, ethnology, zoology and botany, in astronomy and geology, mineralogy and stratification.
There are few branches of the pure or applied sciences in which the West did not lay the first foundations. In the three-storied building opposite the great quay on the Neva was the workroom of the newly appointed court apothecary, a German by birth, Johann Tobias Lowitz. His duties consisted of expanding the herb gardens started by his compatriots and of producing medical drugs (the latest development in medicine) and he also made a number of improvements in chemical laboratory techniques.
A German forestry expert, Fokel, worked in Russia for over thirty years in the mid-eighteenth century. In fact, he devoted the work of a lifetime to that country of endless forests. Fokel even wrote his treatises on forestry in Russian.
Everywhere there were Westerners. Western Europeans were almost entirely responsible for the scientific and navigational calculations that permitted the later voyages of discovery undertaken in Catherine II's time.
In 1776-79 James Cook carried out his third journey around the world, which took him to the northern Pacific and the north-west coast of America. This also led to the charting of the southern part of the Bering Straits. Hearing of the Englishman's voyages of discovery, Russia hurriedly sent an expedition to the area of the unknown American islands', lest she be left behind. The Russians knew who were the best experts for this. They engaged the services of an Englishman, Joseph Billings, who had accompanied his fellow-countryman, Cook, as cartographer, and thus knew at first hand the maritime regions in which the Russians were now so keenly interested.
Four years after Cook's tragic death in Hawaii (in 1779), Billings was resident in St. Petersburg, in the service of Russia, and in 1785 he received the 'Admiralty Fleet Orders for Lieutenant Commander Joseph Billings, Leader of the Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the northeastern territory of Russia,' which included the security Ukase of the Tsarina Catherine already referred to. Billings's instructions were 'to survey the seas and coastal regions to the farthest easterly point of the Empire . . . to plot the coast-line of the great Chukta Cape as far as the East Cape, and to chart the islands of the eastern Pacific as far as the American coast. Finally, and above all, to collate accurately all the information that has been acquired during our reign [Catherine II's] concerning the seas which lie between the mainland of Siberia and the coast of America.'
A German scientist, Dr. Karl Merck, with his assistants, Karl Krebs, Daniel Hauss and John Main, accompanied Billings 'to observe and describe everything relating to the natural sciences'. The ships' doctors chosen for the expedition were the German staff surgeon Michael Robeck and the Italian Pietro Allegretti, with Anton Leiman as junior surgeon. Joseph Edwards, an Englishman, was ship's carpenter. We learn that another British member of the expedition, Captain Robert Hall, possessed an extensive knowledge of shipbuilding. Apart from these the list contains a Lieutenant Krestyan (Christian) Bering, whose date of birth was given as unknown--was he, perhaps, a grandson of Vitus Bering?--and a Russian naval officer, G. A. Zarychev. Another German, Martin Sauer, was Billings's secretary and assistant.
In 1785 Billings left St. Petersburg, which he and his European research team were only to see again after nine long years of adventure and tragedy that had taken them across thousands of miles of icy wastes in eastern Siberia, and after dangerous voyages through the ice and snow between the Polar and the Bering Seas.
In the same year that the expedition set off, another foreign voyage of discovery was being organized. It had the same objective as the Russian one. The man responsible was an American, John Ledyard, well known to Billings, for he too had gone with Cook to the North Pacific, and had been imprisoned by the Russians in Siberia.
What had happened was that Thomas Jefferson had his eye on the west coast of North America. Jefferson was at that time the United States Ambassador in Paris. He there approached John Ledyard, because of his experience with Cook's third South Sea expedition, and spoke to him of his plan to open up trade between North America and East Asia across the Pacific. In order to do this it was essential that the United States should control the west coast of North America. Ledyard's immediate answer was that only an American should explore the American continent and its extremities. As he could not take the sea route, Ledyard decided to travel across Russia to Kamchatka and thence to the American Pacific with the ultimate intention of crossing the American continent from west to east. Jefferson was confident of obtaining permission for him to cross Siberia. The young American Republic had recently informed the Empress that they would be 'proud to number the wise and noble Princess among their friends, and to assign her a place among those great figures of the past and the present, who were interested in furthering the happiness of mankind and in opposing all tyrants in their mischievous ways.'
Catherine refused to grant Jefferson's request. When had any foreigner been permitted to travel through Russia in pursuit of his own interests? Ledyard, who had already set off filled with hope and confidence, was arrested in Siberia. In vain he protested that his expedition was undertaken 'in the interests of all humanity'. The Russians were incapable of grasping such a concept. A military escort brought Ledyard back to the Russe-Polish frontier, and the American plan came to naught. Early in the year 1786 the Billings expedition arrived at the agreed point of embarkation in the Sea of Okhotsk. They were bitterly disappointed to discover that there was no sign either of the ships promised by the Russian Government or of the essential supplies. 'The five ships based in Okhotsk harbour ... could not be used at all.... They were quite rotten. In the holds--if these piles of rotting wood can be so described--the ships' stores and other materials were also almost all in a state of decay and hardly any of them were fit for use.'
The base from which Russia was groping towards new continents, in order to acquire yet more 'Russian soil', was enjoying an extraordinary boom. It was not such an unknown and god-forsaken place as the government, six thousand miles away in St Petersburg, appeared to think. An entry in the expedition's log reads: 'Trade here is mostly in the hands of foreign merchants. They supply foodstuffs and all kinds of other goods to the Russians.... There are also "trading companies", ... In Okhotsk or Kamchatka they build ships and send them to catch fish off the Aleutians and the coast of North America. The sailors come from all parts of the Russian empire.' Thus even in the most remote parts of the Russian-occupied continent there were already foreigners present.
In the summer of 1789 two new ships were ready to put to sea. Their gear, including the guns, the copper kettles for the galleys, anchors and the rest, had to be bought from Irkutsk on Lake Baikal--a distance of fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies. Captain Billings took command of the Slava Rossli--the other ship was dashed to pieces on the rocks at the mouth of the Okhotsk--and sailed across to Kamchatka. His plan was to set sail from the port of Petropavlovsk with destination America. This meant that he started from a point 20 of latitude further south than had the expedition which attempted to reach America from northern Siberia.
In order not to waste his time while waiting for the new ships to be completed, in 1787 Billings tried to sail from the Arctic Ocean, round the East Cape, to the coast of America. He set off in two ships built at the mouth of the Kolyma River. The attempt was abandoned, however, as completely hopeless. Was such a voyage round the East Cape, which the Cossack Semyon Deshnev was supposed to have made, really possible? The men taking part in the expedition were inclined to doubt it.
Their ideas are reflected in the comments of a Russian member, Zarychev: 'Experience has shown that this Polar Sea expedition cannot be undertaken by ship because of the enormous ice-floes from the mouth of the Kolyma onwards (Deshnev is supposed to have started from there). Although we learn from earlier expeditions that the sea is occasionally ice-free the fact remains that of the large numbers of seamen who have set out to discover a route across the Polar Sea to the Eastern Ocean [the Pacific], only the Cossack Deshnev was lucky enough to reach Kotchas. Many people here are very dubious and believe that this voyage of his is a myth, made up by himself in order to gain fame as a discoverer, and that what he said about that coast was in fact based on information concerning Cape Chukta. It is possible that extraordinary natural conditions, such as only occur once a century, existed when he set off. The local Cossacks state quite definitely that there is normally so much floating ice that it is not possible to leave the estuary.'
In the summer months of 1790 and 1791, Billings, in the Slava Rossii, twice set sail from Kamchatka and reached his objective without incident. On the first occasion he sailed northwards through the Bering Sea and crossed the Bering Straits between the East Cape and the North American coast; on the second voyage he took a southerly course, past the Aleutians from the Alaskan Peninsula as far as Kayak Island off the southern coast of Alaska. This island Cook had named Kay Island. Captain Hall, on board the Cherny Orel, carried out surveys in the Bering Sea. The work of the two Englishmen led to excellent maps and charts; those drawn by G. A. Zarychev, in particular, were so accurate that they are still usable today. Billings's report was the first authentic information, and it put Catherine II's mind at rest; Russians had unquestionably landed on the northwest coast of America. This was important, for trappers end seal-hunters from Kamchatka had already begun to hunt the Aleutians. On the advice of a big Russian fur dealer, G. Shekhilov, as early as 1750 they had been planting poles, with the Russian arms on them, in the islands of the coast of Alaska. Billings had been specifically ordered by the Admiralty in St. Petersburg to carry such poles with him.
On Kodiak Billings visited one of the Russian trading settlements. He described it in the expedition log: 'It consists of mud huts, as well as a shed and two huts made of pinewood. In this Russian settlement live a group of trappers and hunters led by a Greek sailor, Delarov.'
Delarov, who had the Russian Christian name and patronymic of Yevstrat Ivanovich, was a Greek seaman from Macedonia. He had carried out a number of successful hunting trips, and had been appointed head trapper by Shekhilov, the merchant.
In Prince William Sound, close to Montague Island--which lies o the Alaskan coast at latitude 60--Billings learned that other foreigners 'had been here before with their ships . . .' and that 'every year two- and three-masted ships arrive, two vessels this year, which set their course for Kenai Bay. I asked them about Commodore Bering.... One of the "Americans" told me that he had heard of his ship from his father; she had sailed as far as an island called Kayak, which lies about a day and a half's journey eastwards from here.'
Close on the heels of Billings's expedition came the usual Russian echo: 'If it had only been possible for foreign seamen to make such voyages of discovery as the Russians did in the eighteenth century!' boasted the Russian navigator, Vassily Mikhailovich Golovnin, in his book, Journey Around the World in the Sloop 'Kamchatka', 1817-19. The Russian naval officer, Sarychev, who had certainly achieved a great deal, was lauded to the skies by the Russian authorities while the achievements of the Englishman Billings were denigrated and he himself insulted. It was said that he had not bothered to make proper charts and surveys--yet this did not stop the Russians from assigning to him further important tasks of exactly the same sort. In 1795 Billings was chosen by the Russian Admiralty to 'survey the northern coastal waters of the Black Sea, from the Straits of Kerch to the Dniepr--Liman inclusive.'
The ethnological and natural researches and the collections of specimens made by the scientists who went on the Billings expedition were dismissed as almost valueless. Yet all their drawings and notes went to St. Petersburg under a 'top secret' seal. Their variety is impressive. Staff-Surgeon Robeck had compiled a Dictionary of the Twelve Dialects of the Primitive Inhabitants. Dr. Merck brought to St. Petersburg detailed notes and diaries, as well as extensive scientific collections, the fruit of nine years' work by himself and his three assistants, Krebs, Hauss and Main; these alone filled long columns of ledgers. The rocks and minerals were put into the Imperial Russian Mineralogical Collection, as the most important of their kind, and the magnificent collection of birds, fish and animals of all sorts went to embellish the Museum of the Science Academy. What the Billings expedition brought to St Petersburg was studied by the great Berlin naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas. The outcome was his book on the fauna of Asiatic Russia, the first zoological work to appear on the subject (Zoographia Rossiae Asiaticae). Dr. Merck wrote a Description of the Chuktas, their manners and customs, the first ethnological study of the people of the Chukta, and the only such book written at that time.
But whatever the contributions of the foreigners to Russian research and however much they wrote about and for Russia--the activities of the Academy evoked no response from the Russian people. It could only be kept going by renewed appeals for foreign scholars. For many years after its foundation there were no Russian academicians--with the exception of Lomonossov--and not a single major idea originated in the Slav empire.
'We shall need Europe for a few more decades, after which we can turn our backs on her.' This remark of Peter the Great's, often quoted with approval by the Soviets, was pure wishful thinking. Even today, more than half-way through the twentieth century, the West is and remains the inexhaustible source of new stimuli and new thought, of all developments and all discoveries--so inexhaustible that Russia has a hard time even keeping up.
The French astronomer and geographer, Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, who was a guest of the Academy in the year 1761 after a journey through Siberia--in Tobolsk he had made observations of the planet Venus passing in front of the sun--experienced the oppressive atmosphere of isolation known to all the foreign scientists who lived, as it were, on an island lost in a sea of Russians. He wrote: 'The Academy of Sciences, founded by Peter the Great, is famous. Bernoulli, Delisle, Hermann and Euler brought here the fame they had garnered in their own countries. The arts, too, add their lustre. But it all fades away at once when the great men from abroad leave Russia or die. The rulers take great trouble to replace them by importing new men from abroad, while they do their best to discover and promote talent at home. In 1761, when I visited it, the Academy had among its members a number of very distinguished foreigners. But after more than sixty years of effort it was impossible to name a single Russian who had made a reputation for himself either in the sciences or the arts. Such a state of affairs in science and the arts shows a deficiency which can only be ascribed to a lack of ability in the nation, to its system of government, or to the national climate.'
Chapter 7. Art and Artists from the West
On the distant coasts of the Arctic and the Pacific Oceans highly skilled Europeans might strive to explore the vast continent conquered by the Russian people: in the Academy of Sciences foreign scholars might be laying the foundations of Russian science and research, tasks scarcely appreciated by the Russian government: but Peter I's basic enterprise was doomed to failure under his successors, Catherine, Anna and Elizabeth. A reaction against his over-hasty development of the country had set in.
Only a few of Peter's faithful collaborators remained. Heinrich Johann Friedrich Ostermann, from Bochum in Westphalia, had been living in Russia since 1704 and had been among Peter I's closest advisers. With Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov he continued to run the 'Supreme Privy Council' after its creation in 1726. It constituted a sort of government, responsible to Peter's widow, Catherine, and the senate was subordinate to it.
When the Tsarina ennobled him and appointed him one of the three ministers of her 'Cabinet', Ostermann really controlled Russia. Loyal to Peter I, he did his utmost to carry out his policy, but in this he failed, for Anna had quite other interests. Engrossed in the splendour and extravagance of her court, she neglected the administration and economy of her realm.
The versatile and gifted Count Burkhardt Christoph von Munnich also carried on Peter's work. He built the Lake Ladoga Canal, the Kronstadt naval base, fortified Riga and was responsible for the naval bases on the Gulf of Finland. In 1731 he was appointed Master General of the Ordnance and a year later (1732) Field Marshal. He reorganized the Russian Army. During the reign of Anna, Count Munnich was made head of the Army Council in recompense for his great services to Russia. In the war against Turkey that ended with the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, he showed his brilliance as a soldier in the field. While the Irish-born General Lacy recaptured the fortress and port of Azov, Russian troops under Munnich's command first conquered the Crimea in 1736. A year later the important Turkish fortress of Otchakov, covering the mouths of the Bug and the Dniepr, was taken, and Russian troops even reached Moldavia.
Only in one respect did the three Tsarinas attempt to emulate the great Peter, for they even surpassed him in the building of luxurious palaces and vast country residences. The greatest artists of the Western world achieved real triumphs in the city on the Neva and in Moscow. St. Petersburg became the largest building-site in Europe, one vast studio filled with Western European architecture. No one else in Europe could thus spend millions as though they were trifles. Hosts of famous architects, sculptors, painters, decorators and landscape gardeners transformed the already beautiful 'Pitersburch' of Peter the Great into the most splendidly homogeneous city in Europe, a gem of eighteenth-century European art.
This was in striking contrast to the rest of that unbelievably primitive and undeveloped country. The vast majority of its population of eighteen millions lived in a state of serfdom, and could be sold like cattle. But the St. Petersburg facade was to deceive visitors in the years to come. Russians of talent had now been going to Europe's most famous academies and studios for several decades. I. Koroboff had studied architecture in Holland, P. E. Ropkin had been trained in Italy and the painters Andrei Matveyev and Ivan Nikitin in Italy and Holland. Feodor Argunov was one of the many Russians who learned under foreign masters in Russia itself, for he was taught by the great Trezzini. But the outcome was paltry; not a single Russian attained the skill of a master, not one became an outstanding painter who created something specifically Russian. K. Golovin, in his memoirs, rightly quotes the author, Feodor Fologub: 'Architecture is the basic art. And architecture is the one subject that we Russians know nothing about. That is to say, we Russians lack creative ability. This is noticeable in our architecture, sculpture and painting, but is also perceptible in the other arts.'
How else explain the fact that since the reign of Ivan III and Ivan IV, foreign artists had always filled the coveted post of court architect and indeed been entrusted with all major artistic undertakings?
It was under the Tsarina Anna (1730-40) that Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-71) began his career. He was the son of the sculptor Carlo Rastrelli, who had worked in Russia in Peter's time. Bartolomeo Rastrelli was--as Tamara Talbot Rice puts it--'decisively to influence the architectonic future of Russia' by his beautiful work.
No better choice could have been made. As an architect Rastrelli surpassed all his contemporaries. Even the famous William Kent, creator of the English Garden, and his British colleagues lacked his imagination and intellectual richness. He excelled the French in splendour and the Germans and Austrians in grace.
The Annenhof, a wooden palace at Lefortovo near Moscow, was the first building constructed according to his plans. The Italian's next assignment brought him to St Petersburg. In the year 1732 he was building the second Winter Palace. Before it was finished, Rastrelli was ordered to construct another palace for the Tsarina's favourite, the Count Ernst Johann Buhren (in Russian, Biron), whom she made Duke of Courland. In this palace at Mitau, Rastrelli first showed the particular style that was to characterize all his later buildings. A suite of brilliant and glittering reception-rooms, opening the one into the other, was the first Russian example of such an interior design. The magnificent vistas thus obtained through a series of saloons and galleries was to be the hallmark of future Russian palaces.
The St. Petersburg Summer Palace, completed by Rastrelli in 1744, was a wooden building in the late baroque style, and was subsequently much imitated throughout Russia. Rastrelli was copied now just as the Italianate Kremlin fortress had been slavishly reconstructed in the old frontier towns. 'Which is why all Russian towns look exactly alike,' says the Baedeker of 1900. John Gunther also refers to this in his book Inside Russia (1955). Rastrelli's buildings started a passion for pillars, which culminated in the early nineteenth century in a veritable mania for colonnades. Owing to Rastrelli pillars are considered an essential part of architectural decoration even today in Soviet Russia and are to be seen on the skyscraper facade of Moscow University as well as on all public and private buildings. They are even to be seen on such strictly non-residential edifices as the quays and lock-gates of the Don-Volga Canal.
It was the same story with Rastrelli's treatment of windows and gables. Since the mid-eighteenth century Rastrelli-type windows and gables have been built everywhere in Russia and the Ukraine, on country houses as well as on official buildings. Similarly, all rooms, small or large, have been built en suite and the mirrors Rastrelli was so fond of are still very popular and are hung exactly where the great Italian used to hang them--between the windows. It would be interesting to study the far-reaching effect of this man's work and the amount of slavish imitation it has produced.
All the more so since his enormously high windows, often the height of two full storeys, were not at all suitable to a country with such long and severe winters. Yet they were much admired. Once Rastrelli had built them into a palace in Moscow, he had to repeat them everywhere. The only way of adequately heating such huge rooms containing so much glass, was the superb Dutch tiled stoves of corresponding dimensions. On the rooftops high above, Rastrelli placed balustrades with gilt figures, and from giddy heights they overlooked the gardens, the orangeries, the gazebos and the tea-pavilions. The manufacture of wrought-iron gates and railings, with beautiful, intricate patterns designed by Rastrelli himself, won St. Petersburg a considerable reputation as a centre of metalwork. Another star from Rastrelli's native land shone brightly beside the Neva: the Italian actress and prima ballerina, Signorina Giannina, mother of a man the whole world would talk about, Casanova. In Florence she had danced in the opera Berenice, composed and there conducted by the Neapolitan, Francesco Araja. As soon as the Tsarina heard of the great success of this opera, she sent a message inviting Francesco Araja to St. Petersburg and offering him an enormous fee. The whole company arrived, together with the ballerina and the set designer, Girolamo Bono. They won the city's heart. 'The first Italian opera'--a member of the Academy, Jacob Baron von Stahlin, writes in his memoirs--'was presented by an Italian company, and Signorina Giannina Casanova enjoyed a triumph.'
This event marked the beginning of the opera in Russia--and of the ballet.
The Russian audiences, used only to the uncouth dancing of Cossacks were so impressed by the performance of Casanova's mother that she also became the mother of the dance in Russia, and thus the grandmother of the famous Russian Ballet. During her first visit a dancing school was founded in St. Petersburg. Twelve girls and twelve boys were selected for training. The teacher of gymnastics at the exclusive Imperial Cadet School, Christian Wellmann, was ordered to instruct the children until such time as famous ballet-teachers from Italy and France could be sent for. The ballet-master Fusano came from Venice, Landet from Paris. Landet created the first corps de ballet in Russia.
The Araja company remained permanently in Russia. The Tsarina saw to it that they were all highly paid. A year later the official gazette announced: 'Director of Imperial Music Francesco Araja's Opera The Power of Love and Hatred will be performed for the first time on and February 1736, at the Court. The text has been brought by the Chevalier F.P. from Rome. The music has been composed by the conductor, Signor Araja, himself and the scenery designed by the painter Hieronymus Bonus, Director of the Court Theatre. A ball has also been organized by the Master of Ceremonies, Signor Antonio Rinaldi.'
The Opera came to Russia with Araja, Bono and Rinaldi. Giuseppe Valeriani, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, instructed Russian set-designers in the art of the theatrical decor. The indefatigable, creative and much-gifted Valeriani has been called the father of the famous Russian 'School of Perspective'. Even today the opera Cefalo e Procri is often incorrectly described as the first Russian opera. But though the libretto was written by a Russian, Sumarokov, Araja wrote the music. A book could be devoted to the influence of the Italians from the time of Elizabeth onwards. All court conductors were Italians.
In 1741 a basic change of policy took place when an unexpected coup d' etat put the Tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna upon the throne. The last remaining supporters of Peter's policy trembled. The foreign, particularly the German, influence had grown so strong under Anna and her successor the regent Anna of Brunswick (mother of the baby Ivan VI), and hatred of the foreigners had increased to such an extent, that a violent reaction now set in. Many German, Dutch and English craftsmen fell victim to the fury of the mob. Ostermann and Munnich were arrested as soon as Elizabeth had come to the throne.
Field Marshal Munnich was condemned to be publicly whipped. Only vigorous intervention by the British Ambassador, whose feelings as a European were deeply outraged, prevented this disgusting spectacle. Ostermann and Munnich were both sentenced to death and led to a public place of execution. At the very last moment the Tsarina granted them a reprieve. Both men, who had done so much for Russia, were exiled to Siberia for life. Ostermann died in 1747 in Siberia, at the age of sixty-one. Munnich was reinstated with full honours by Peter III after Elizabeth's death in 1762.
This outburst of hatred, especially against Germans in high positions, did not however diminish Western influence in Russia. At court, men from other European nations, and particularly Frenchmen, now took the limelight, such as the physician, J. H. Lestocq, and the ambassador, La Chetardie. With a new English trade agreement, trade expanded; St. Petersburg profited from this and the British gained in popularity and prestige.
Not one of the countless foreign artists was expelled nor in any degree molested. They were all needed by Elizabeth, who lavishly and extravagantly continued her predecessors' work of beautifying Russia. Rastrelli worked on, and it is almost impossible to catalogue all that he built in the twenty years of Elizabeth's reign. His works included the Peterhof Palace, the famous castle at Tsarskoye Selo, the Great Palace, many palaces of the nobility on the Neva and Moskva Rivers, and the Smolny Monastery at St Petersburg, said to be one of the most beautiful examples of baroque in all Europe. The Church of St. Andrew that Rastrelli built in Kiev may well be the most beautiful church of his time.
Rastrelli was still working under Catherine II. For her he built the Fourth Winter Palace, which to this day retains its place as Europe's most immense palace. No ocher royal residence equals it; not even Versailles has the splendour, the overwhelming decoration and baroque ornamentation of this vast palace that tile Italian built. The Fourth Winter Palace covers an area of many acres, contains one thousand and fifty halls and rooms, nearly two thousand doors and portals, a similar number of gigantic windows and one hundred and seventeen staircases.
A host of imitators followed in Rastrelli's footsteps and his style remained dominant for many years. Most of his successors simply copied his architectural plans exactly. Only a few are worth mentioning: S. I. Chevakinsky (1713-83), A. V. Kvasov (died in 1772, year of birth unknown), A. F. Kokorinov (1726-72) and Prince D. V. Ukhtomski (1718-80). The architects who rebuilt Moscow after the devastating fire of 1737 were also influenced by Rastrelli.
What about painting? Almost all decorative painting done under Elizabedh was the work of Italians--especially of Valeriani, Perezinotti, Borozzi and Torelli. The Russians remained mere assistants while the enormous murals on walls and ceilings were being executed. As with Peter, Elizabeth ordered many of the designs for these murals from artists resident abroad, who sent them to Russia without ever having visited the country themselves. The ceilings in the Castle of Oranienbaum, painted after Tiepolo's designs, are the most beautiful example of such an importation. Carlo Bibiena Galli designed the lovely painted ceilings, using a special perspective to give the suites of connecting rooms an impression of even greater space.
All the prominent figures at the Russian court in those years were painted by the brothers Grooth, by Lagrenais the Elder and by Stefano Torelli.
In the year 1748 Pompeii was discovered, and hidden beneath the earth, the lava and the ashes lay an entire ancient city capable of reconstruction in detail. As a result a new style of architecture appeared. The classical--as interpreted by Winckelmann and Lessing--began to replace the current style of European architecture. From the West this new creative force travelled to the East. Vallin J. B. de la Mothe was the first to build in the classical style in Russia. Georg Felten followed. Antonio Rinaldi, who came to Russia in 1752, remained faithful to the baroque. The new style finally triumphed in the year 1779 when Charles Cameron, the great Scot, was summoned to Russia by Catherine. He had worked for Pope Clement XIII in the excavation of the Baths of Caracalla. For nine years Cameron worked on the interiors of Rastrelli's great Palace of Tsarskoye Selo for the Tsarina, in purely classical style. He designed Greek rooms and Chinese rooms. Catherine's study was completely in silver, her bedroom in the style of Pompeii. The gardens were laid out in the English manner, as Kent had done in England, with little temples and pavilions and Roman statues and fragments of sculpture imported from Italy dotted among the trees and shrubs. The Temple of Friendship, which he built in 1780, was the first building to sport Doric pillars in Russia. At Pavlovsk, near St. Petersburg, he built colonnades, a temple of the Three Graces--a copy of the Erechtheion-and the aviary in which Gonzago later painted his lovely frescoes. The Greek Hall of the Palace of Pavlovsk was embellished with Corinthian columns of porphyry on huge alabaster bases and classical statues. In 1800 Cameron was appointed architect of the Admiralty.
Four English painters worked in St Petersburg under Catherine: Richard Brompton, John Augustus Atkinson, John Walker and Edward Miles, who painted the Imperial family. Later, about 1800, five other English painters joined the colony of foreign artists: Saxton, Allen, George Dawe, Christina Robertson and Robert Porter, who painted General Suvorov crossing the Alps. Russian artists studied in foreign studios. Feodor Roktov (1735-1808), for instance, was taught by Claude Lorrain and Rotari: Dimitri Levitski (1735-1822) was apprenticed to Lagrenais and Giuseppe Valeriani in St. Petersburg. Levitski, who painted Diderot in Geneva, was judged by his compatriots to be the first Russian painter to compete with the foreigners. Ivan Firsov lived and studied in Paris for ten years before he became known.
Thus did Russia, with foreign help, construct its tremendous architectural facades, St Petersburg and Moscow. But for many years no visitors from abroad came to admire them. Catherine said in her memoirs of the reign of Elizabeth: 'Very few foreigners were then to be seen in St Petersburg.'
The vast palaces and many of the houses of the nobility remained empty shells. 'St Petersburg was a dead city,' Catherine wrote. 'Most of the people living there were obliged to do so, and no one lived there by choice. Whenever the Court returned to St. Petersburg from Moscow, most of the court officials quickly applied for leave for a year, six months, or at least for a few weeks, so as to remain in Moscow. Civil servants and government officials did the same, and when nothing else availed they feigned sickness for their wives, husbands, children, brothers, sisters or parents. At least six months and sometimes more passed before the city and the court regained their former aspect; meanwhile grass grew in the streets of St. Petersburg, because there was no traffic.' The Russians did not like these palaces which were--to complete the resemblance to a facade--not even properly furnished. Catherine, in the year 1755, noted: 'At the end of September we moved into the Winter Palace. The Court at chat time was so deficient in furniture, chat we had to take our mirrors, beds, chairs, tables and chests of drawers from there to the Summer Palace then to Peterhof and even to Moscow. On the way many of the pieces were so badly damaged or broken that we could hardly use them . . . so I resolved to buy, bit by bit, cupboards and other essential pieces for the Summer Palace and for the Winter Palace too out of my own pocket. Then when I moved from one to the other, everything would be ready for use and the dangers of transportation avoided.' Later, when Catherine became Empress, she saw to it that the thousands of rooms were properly furnished.
The furniture came from the West, the best that Europe could produce, brought by land and by sea. As soon as Rastrelli had finished the Fourth Winter Palace, which the Empress called 'her Hermitage', a long list of what was needed went off to Diderot in Paris. Catherine wanted paintings, sculptures and furniture, and in bulk. Voltaire helped choose the best for her regardless of price, and some of the world's most famous pictures moved across Europe: 'St George' by Raphael, 'Judith' by Giorgione, 'The Descent from the Cross' by Paolo Veronese, Titian's 'Danae', the 'Holy Family' of Murillo, two paintings by Moretto da Brescia, several by Sebastiano del Piombo and Fra Bartolomeo. And many canvases of Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt, Jan Steen and what were then the contemporary French masters, Poussin, Le Sueur, Watteau and Largilliere. The prices were astronomical. Wonwermans"Hunting of the Stag' cost 108,000 French livres, the 'Descent from the Cross' 220,000 livres, and Murillo's 'Holy Family' no less than one million.
Let us return to the Empress Elizabeth. In her passion for building, she neglected much: the government of her country, and the economic development which her father, Peter I, had inaugurated with such superhuman effort and at such immense cost. She even ordered that many of the new factories be closed down. When it was proposed to her that Russia should start mining coal, as in the West, she turned down the proposal. She would not even believe that 'stones can burn'. One day her attention was drawn to the use of petroleum: it could feed the lamps in the churches and also possessed medicinal properties. This interested Elizabeth and she ordered that the matter be gone into. The 'Mines Board' and a committee of physicians were to meet. But when the gentlemen could not agree, the Tsarina herself made the decision concerning this new discovery which could have been of immense value to Russia. Elizabeth ordered that the man who had discovered petroleum be imprisoned for life! Meanwhile she did not hesitate to grant special privileges to an Englishman, Bottler, who supplied such unnecessary luxuries as 'tapestries and linen'.
The story was the same in other departments of her government. The fleet decayed, the sailors were not paid or were discharged, and the Admiralty became a morgue. Nevertheless, as previously stated, the first Russian university was founded in 1755, in Moscow, on Voltaire's recommendation and under the direction of the far-sighted Count Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov. Two years later an Academy of Fine Arts was formed on the French model. The painters Le Lorrain and Stefano Torelli, the sculptor N. Gillet and the engraver G. F. Schmidt were engaged as instructors. In the year 1763 the Academy had seventy pupils who were eventually intended to replace the many foreign artists. Russia had had enough, more than enough, of the hated foreigners....
Catherine, the future Tsarina, witnessed an event which was typical of the age in Russia. She has described it in her diary. In the year 1752, 'the Empress [Elizabeth] commanded us to join her at Kronstadt from Oranienbaum, for she was to be present when water was let into the canal which Peter I had begun and which had just been completed. We stayed at Kronstadt for three days. During this time the canal was ceremoniously opened and the water was let into it for the first time. In the afternoon the event was celebrated with an inaugural ball. The Empress wished to remain in Kronstadt to see the canal emptied; but on the third day she left, because it had proved impossible to drain the canal, since its bottom was below sea-level. Nobody had taken this into account.'
A similar disaster occurred to the canal which had been begun by the Tsar's favourite, Menshikov. Menshikov was an ambitious man who wished to show Peter I that he was as good as the German expert, Burkhardt Christoph von Munnich. Munnich was told to construct an artificial waterway from Lake Ladoga to Schlusselburg. Menshikov was officially in charge of the project and, envious of the more efficient German, he completely ignored the precise and detailed plans and drawings made by Munnich. Disaster was thus unavoidable. Menshikov knew nothing about technical hydraulics and ignored the most important point, the variation in the water level of the lake, which Munnich had quite correctly taken into account. When Peter heard of this he lost his temper and told Munnich to finish building the canal on his own. He did the job so well that when the Tsar inspected it, he kissed him, and praised him to the skies. Yet Munnich, to whom Russia owes its canal system, and who also built the naval base at Kronstadt, was exiled to Siberia by Elizabeth. As a result the Peter Canal at Kronstadt had to be built without the help of this superb expert. The sea-water poured in, but its locks could never be emptied, because nobody had calculated the water-levels.
Later, under Catherine, this was put right. After twenty years of exile in Siberia Munnich was reprieved by Peter III and put back to work. He drained the locks with an imported steam-pump!
Chapter 8. Catherine Educates an Empire
With the succession in 1762 of Catherine II, born Princess Sophia Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst, barely forty years after the death of Peter I, a new era began, and new influences poured into the land. Relying on help from the West the German princess began her task of rebuilding the new Russia, which had fallen into decay under her predecessors. During her reign Russia began once again to thrive. However, though her policy concerning the introduction of scientific and technical knowledge succeeded, Catherine II also tried to introduce Western ideas and ideals into her adopted country, and in this she failed. If ever anybody attempted to draw Russia into the world of Western culture, it was Catherine.
Her inheritance had been squandered long before she came to the throne; the national finances were in a hopeless state, the public debt enormous.
'When I came to the throne in 1762,' she wrote, 'two-thirds of the army had not been paid. In the Treasury I found imperial Ukases for payments totalling 17 million roubles, which had not been met. The currency was valueless . . .'
To avoid total bankruptcy, Catherine decided to assess the wealth of the empire through the municipal authorities. Yet when she had summoned the senate not one of the members could even tell her how many towns there were in Russia. The senate did not even possess a map of the country. Catherine began to draft her economic plans and worked out an amazingly complex programme. To her horror she found that the country had never been surveyed, neither the private properties nor the land belonging to the monasteries or to the crown. With energy and sense she began to clear up the mess, and to give her empire a new firm backbone, on the Western model. And again she was helped in this by men from the West. She insisted that schools be built and the general level of education raised. In the autumn of 1763 the foundations for a foundlings' home were laid, a training centre for midwives opened, and a school for young girls of noble family. Three hundred schools for the children of the aristocracy were eventually built, agriculture encouraged and new industries created.
The Empress set about the huge job with amazing thoroughness, energy and foresight. She accepted personal responsibility for the whole country. The Imperial Household and the people themselves were inspired by her example, for she often worked far into the night. Meanwhile the foreign ambassadors at her court have described how much opposition and lack of co-operation she encountered. Even her own councillors often opposed her orders.
The French Ambassador, Breteuil, wrote to Versailles: 'The Empress can rely on no one save Panin to understand her ideas of government.' (Count Nikita Ivanovich Panin was her Foreign Secretary.) 'Nevertheless she still has to listen to her aged Russian advisers who think of nothing save their own privileges. I can well imagine what a strain it all must be for her. She recently told me chat she is most unhappy, having to rule a people whom it is almost impossible to control.' The British Ambassador, Lord Buckingham, wrote in similar terms to London: 'The Empress is far superior to everyone else here by virtue of her education, her talents and her ability.'
Soon after coming to the throne Catherine launched a major plan of resettlement and land cultivation. She received, as usual, assistance from abroad. She sent men to Germany in an attempt to recruit farmers. In a decree dated July 1763 she promised free travel and free land to any farmer who would settle in Russia and set the Russian people an example in cultivation and stock-breeding. For agricultural expansion had come to a halt in that vast country. Many Germans, particularly peasants from Swabia and the Palatinate, resolved to go East. Transport via Lubeck and Danzig was organized and during the next five years over thirty thousand Germans emigrated to Russia. Despite all the promises, they were only given poor steppe land in the Saratov region or on the lower reaches of the Volga. Nevertheless this was the beginning of the flourishing settlements of the so-called Volga Germans. At the beginning of the First World War over six hundred thousand of their descendants were living there.
Among the first-comers was a delegation representing Count Zinzendorf's Moravian United Brethren. They were allotted a huge stretch of barren land on the lower Volga, between Tsaritsyn (now Stalingrad) and Astrakhan, and in the Samara and Sarepta districts.
The settlements of the United Brethren were soon famous. Ten years after the arrival of the first settlers the Governor of Astrakhan reported on their amazing achievements as homesteaders. In the midst of formerly bleak and empty steppes model settlements had sprung up. In Sarepta and near Samara, in the Volga bend, their new factories were producing corduroy, previously unknown in Russia, and also a cotton material called sarpinka which was soon to be renowned as a Russian speciality. These fabrics were as good as the best cloth produced in other countries.
The colonists also built canals, thus diverting the water from the nearby hills to their settlements. They soon had a chandler's works, a pottery, and a stove factory in commission. There were mills and saw-mills. A dam was built to supply the water-power with which to drive the mill-wheels and the flax-flails. They constructed a tannery and a tobacco factory and a dyeworks for dyeing the cloth they made. Hitherto all Russian fabrics had been sent to Holland to be dyed.
The German colonists' settlements--which also existed in the governments of Voronezh and Chernigov as well as to the north of St Petersburg--were set in a landscape of trim and well-tilled fields.
Ten years later a second wave of immigrants from the West responded to Catherine's appeal. Thousands of Swabian peasant families settled the recently (1774) conquered and still quite empty province of Ekaterinoslav. From 1789 on Mennonite families from West Prussia were trekking eastwards.
In Jakob Johann von Sievers, a German Balt, Catherine found the right man to carry out a gargantuan task. His father, Karl von Sievers, had been Court Chamberlain under the Tsarina Elizabeth. Against the opposition of her Russian councillors, Catherine appointed Sievers Governor-General of the province of Novgorod, where there was large-scale pioneer work to be done. This was in 1764. She chose Sievers because none of the Russian candidates was as conversant with modern political economy, nor as experienced as he in the techniques of road and canal building, irrigation and drainage. The decision aroused much ill-feeling, though it was proved right in the end. The province of Novgorod soon blossomed into new prosperity.
Novgorod's most prosperous age had been in the time of the Hanseatic League. When Moscow was only an unimportant earthworks fortress, Novgorod was already a flourishing Hanseatic port, and the most important trading centre in the East. It was from there that trade with the Urals, the Polar Sea and the southern stretches of the Volga was carried out.
Novgorod had been a city of free craftsmen's guilds and rich merchants, ruled according to the so-called Lubeck Laws, until it was destroyed by the Golden Horde. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it had been once again extremely prosperous. Magnificent monasteries, churches and cathedrals, unequalled in Russia, bore witness to its greatness. The lovely icons of the Great Novgorod School were famous. Novgorod, an island of advanced Western culture and civilization, was besieged by Ivan III in 1478 and finally destroyed by Ivan the Terrible. He sacked the town, murdered its Russian citizens--tradition has it that they numbered sixty thousand--and expelled the foreigners.
Another proud republic and important trading centre was the former Pleskau (Pskov), where German merchants had done business. In the year 1510 Vassily III forced the town to accept Muscovite rule. Since then it had declined. Now Sievers was made governor of Pskov as well as of Tver. The capital city of this government, also called Tver, had been destroyed by fire in 1763.
His was a formidable task. In the past two centuries the towns of Novgorod and Tver had declined until they consisted only of a handful of wooden buildings. Pskov had a mere four hundred and fifty inhabitants.
There were no police and only one postal service in the whole vast area, from Novgorod to St. Petersburg. When Sievers assembled the nobles and asked them why the orders issued by Peter I--such as the afforestation of the land--had not been carried out, he was surprised to find that not one of these senior officials could read or write.
For the second time the Novgorod district was again made prosperous, thanks to Western help. The peasants were shown how to grow flax and how to treat it, and they were subsidized to plant potatoes--the first in Russian soil Catherine supported Sievers in all his endeavours.
'Try to induce these people to build on stone foundations,' she wrote to him. 'Any man who builds his house entirely of stone will be exempt from taxes for ten years.'
With the help of foreign engineers Sievers built the first modem transportation system. A new canal system connected the lakes and rivers and thus the raw materials, mainly timber and hemp, which the government produced could be brought to St. Petersburg for export in bulk.
Russia's needs and Catherine's wishes were insatiable. With Voltaire's help the Empress organized the importation of Swiss clocks. She was determined to employ Swiss dairymen and cheese-makers. They were to show the peasants of southern Russia how to breed healthy cattle and to make first-class cheeses. Catherine's wishes went far beyond this, however. On one occasion she asked Sievers how the Russian population could be taught the ideals of honesty, personal freedom, respect for the law and democratic thought. Sievers advised her to transplant the whole of a Swiss canton to Russia as a living example to her people.
The Swiss were promised exact replicas of their own chalets, to be built in the Crimea. Many Swiss farmers settled there and began dairy farming.
Catherine was not solely interested in colonization; she also wanted to build schools and other educational establishments. A German professor, August Ludwig Schlozer of Gottingen, came to Russia in 1761 and drafted a school programme. 'The boys will be taught in three classes, from the age of five to that of fifteen. The first class will include boys from five to nine. Elocution, religion, drawing, arithmetic, reading and writing will be taught. In the second class, for the ages nine to twelve, the following subjects will be added: geometry, history and ethics. The pupils in the third class--up to the age of fifteen--will study higher mathematics, physics, the natural sciences and the principles of architecture.'
A fine programme, but there were no teachers. So Professor Schlozer was told to import them from abroad. Hundreds of scholars and teachers were required, not only for Schlozer's proposed establishments, but also for the three hundred schools reserved for children of the aristocracy. In the next few years many teachers came to Russia, thanks to Schlozer's efforts. Schlozer himself proved indispensable and helped Catherine in many ways.
Following the German example he introduced parish registers, which became the basis for a complete registrar system. The German professor systematically collected Russian historical research material in the libraries of the monasteries, which were now being opened for the first time as a result of his request to the Empress.
Schlozer did not stay in Russia for long. In 1769 he returned to Gottingen to continue his scientific work. He could not tolerate the depressing atmosphere of the country.
Catherine was far in advance of her time. She founded a Public Health and Hygiene Institute. For this she relied on a Russian who had studied at Cambridge, and who could therefore safely be entrusted with the task, Baron Alexander Cherkassov. In 1764 there was a severe smallpox epidemic. Catherine was in favour of immediate inoculation, but Cherkassov hesitated. He agreed that Doctor Dimsdale come over from England. Dimsdale gave Catherine herself an inoculation, and when she saw that it was harmless she ordered that her subjects be inoculated as well.
Although the Academy had now existed for almost forty years, its members were still almost entirely foreigners. Therefore Catherine, who wanted Russians to join the Academy, offered exceptional opportunities to all those willing to study. In 1764 she issued a decree: 'Anyone reaching the required standard may become a member of the Academy, even if he has hitherto been a serf. The members of the Academy, their children and descendants are to be free citizens for all time. Nobody may ever make them serfs again.'
But even such promises as these were not enough. Catherine had to rely on foreign scholars, among whom were the research scientists, Anton Johann von Guldenstadt and Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin--the nephew of Johann Georg Gmelin--and Kaspar Friedrich Wolff from Berlin, who came to St. Petersburg in 1766. It was there that he completed his work Theoria Generationis, begun in 1759, with which he inaugurated a new epoch in the field of embryology.
A violent quarrel between two well-known professors in Berlin gained Catherine another famous member for her Academy in St. Petersburg. At the Berlin Academy differences of opinion between the famous Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, and the philosopher, Johann Georg Sulzer, also from Switzerland, had reached such a pitch that Euler resolved to leave Berlin. He had been to Russia before and had left for sound reasons, but he now accepted Catherine's offer to join her Academy in St. Petersburg. Frederick of Prussia was so annoyed by this coup of Catherine's that it became a diplomatic incident. Although Euler remained in Russia, Catherine had to pay a sort of 'compensation' for the privilege of retaining him--something that had never happened before and is unlikely happen to again. Catherine agreed to an increase in the Prussian postage tariff for letters to Russia from 38 to 44 silver groschen, because Prussia had lost its most famous mathematician. The St. Petersburg Academy, supervised by Russian officials, did not run smoothly. The following incident is characteristic. In the year 1783 Catherine appointed a woman to administer the Academy. This was the Princess Katherina Romanovna Dashkova, a highly-gifted and educated lady, who had lived in Paris for several years, and knew Voltaire and the other leading personalities of the Age of Enlightenment. She was a member of several learned societies abroad and had founded a Russian Language Academy which in 1841 was amalgamated with the other Academy.
When the Princess set about reorganizing the administration of the Academy, she was surprised at the amount of alcohol being used each year. When she investigated the matter she was shown an order of Peter I's to the effect that two human heads were to be preserved, as he wanted to 'look at them from time to time'. And she found the severed head of a Swedish girl who had once run away from Peter, as well as the head of her lover, both preserved in the cellars of the Academy, in the year 1783! This is reminiscent of a rather more agreeable story Bismarck loved to tell. In the year 1859 the Tsar Alexander II noticed that one guardsman always stood in the middle of the lawn in the Summer Garden of the Paul Palace. When asked why he stood there, the soldier replied: 'Those are my orders!' The Tsar's aide-de-camp was told to look into the matter and received the same answer: a sentry was posted there all the year round, but nobody knew why. The answer was eventually provided by a very old servant. The Empress Catherine had once seen the first snowdrop on this lawn, and had ordered that a guard be posted there to prevent anyone picking it. And the sentry had remained on guard for close on one hundred years.
In the year 1770 Europe was shocked and astonished by an amazing event. A Russian fleet had destroyed the entire Turkish Navy, consisting of twenty-four ships with eight thousand men on board, in the Bay of Chesme, near the island of Chios.
Frederick of Prussia and the Emperor Joseph II met. The Austrian Emperor described Russia as a stream that was overflowing its banks and threatened to submerge Europe. Sweden was alarmed, France angry, and England worried by this new naval power that threatened her supremacy.
A fleet of Russian ships built in the distant shipyards at Kronstadt and St. Petersburg had annihilated the much-feared Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean. This news plunged Europe into alarm. Nobody inquired how this had happened, nor why such an achievement was possible. Nobody mentioned that two Scotsmen, Elphinstone and Greig, had commanded the Russian fleet. They had sailed the ships from the Neva through the Kattegat, the English Channel, around the coasts of Europe, to victory. The Russian Admiral of the Fleet, Alexei G. Orlov, theoretically in command of the Russian force, had watched the entire battle from the comfort and safety of his cabin--as reliable witnesses testified.
Catherine had a special medal struck to commemorate this battle--the Chesme medal--bearing a portrait of the Russian Count who had been officially in command of her fleet and who was described as the 'conqueror and destroyer of the Turkish Navy'. He was given the honorary title of 'Chesmenskoy' although he had been one of the murderers of Peter III.
After the Battle of Chesme, as after Poltava, many Europeans were delighted by the Russian victory. Voltaire wrote a letter to Catherine, expressing his jubilation: 'Your Imperial Majesty has given me a new lease of life by your annihilation of the Turk.... Your victorious sailors must have heard my song: Te Catharinam laudamus--Te dominam confitemur.... Madame, my joy could not be more heartfelt. I am delighted! I thank you!' For the great Voltaire seriously believed that if the Russians could only liberate Greece from Turkish oppression, ancient Athens, city of poets and philosophers, would rise again.
In the hope that he might even live to see this resurrection himself, Voltaire invented a new weapon. He designed a sort of armoured car like the war-chariots of antiquity, and assured Catherine: 'My invention differs completely from the old type of chariot. I am no warrior myself but yesterday I was with two outstanding German soldiers who assured me chat if this "war-chariot" were employed at the beginning of a battle, no military unit could withstand its effect, when the flames spurt from it. For it would take them completely by surprise.'
Catherine and Voltaire wrote to one another frequently. She read Rousseau's Contrat Social and his educational novel Emile. She sent Ivan Betskoi to Paris, the 'metropolis of progress' as she called it, to keep himself posted about all that was new in the world of culture.
The Empress was determined that Russia should catch up with the West, and not only in science, economics and technology. She wished to introduce Europe's liberal ideas into Russia. She herself was an enthusiastic member of the Age of Enlightenment. She had studied Montesquieu, had read his Esprit des Lois, and one sentence in his chapter on The Despotic State had made a deep impression on her: 'Just as a Republic needs virtue and a Monarchy honour and glory--so a Despotism must be ruled by fear.' These words were directed at Russia. And it was Catherine's wish that the sun of enlightenment should also rise over her country.
The leading personalities of this new age were two Frenchmen, Diderot and Jean Lerond d'Alembert. Since 1751 they had been publishing their Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire Raisonne' des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, a work in which all knowledge and all learning were to be classified. When Diderot ran into trouble with the French censorship, Catherine invited him to come to St Petersburg to finish his work. But in Diderot's opinion Russia was a sinister place, and he declined the offer. D'Alembert, who was asked to take charge of the education of Catherine's son Paul, also declined. Diderot, however, did persuade many other people to go to Russia. Young engineers and scientists, artists and architects joined the Academy in St. Petersburg, or were given important appointments. Among them were Etienne Maurice Falconet, who later executed the famous memorial to Peter I, and the astronomer and geographer, Jean Chappe d'Auteroche. Finally Catherine had her way. Diderot came to St. Petersburg, although only for a few months, from the autumn of 1773 to the spring of 1774. He drafted a memorandum for the education of her son and heir, in which he suggested that after becoming acquainted with the administration of his realm, the young prince should travel through Russia, accompanied by a group of scholars and scientists, and then through Europe. '. . . He should visit Germany to learn thoroughness, England to learn wisdom and the ideals of freedom, Italy to acquire its exquisite taste, and France to appreciate elegance and pleasure.'
Whatever Catherine undertook, she required the help of non-Russians. A Swiss professor at the St. Petersburg Academy found her a tutor for her grandson, later the Tsar Alexander I. He was Frederic Cesar Laharpe from the town of Rolle on Lake Geneva. Considerable persuasion was required before the freedom-loving Swiss would agree to come to this land of despotism and serfdom. In 1782 he agreed to educate the future Tsar and to make 'a human being of him'. He remained in Russia for twelve years (until 1794) tutoring Alexander and his brother Constantine, teaching them the ideals of Rousseau, liberty and human dignity. Alexander, when Emperor, once said: 'All that I am, I owe to a Swiss.'
Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau and Laharpe, these are the men from whom Russia was to absorb the spirit of Europe. Diderot had begged the Empress to give freedom to Russia. But Catherine had long ago realized, bitterly, that Russia was not yet ready to receive this precious gift. At the very time that Diderot was visiting her, she had received shattering proof of this. The entire country was brought to the brink of disaster by a violent rebellion led by Emelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, whose hordes advanced from the south, devastating the countryside, destroying and burning. Democratic freedom, self-government on the Greek model, a parliament of the English sort, what use would these be to Russia?
During those weeks, as Pugachev's rebels advanced closer and closer to Moscow, Catherine wrote Sievers a bitter letter: 'Two years ago the plague raged in the heart of the empire. Now We face another plague, a political one, at the borders of Our realm, which is causing Us great anxiety.... With the help of the Almighty We will prevail . . . but it will end in hangings. What a prospect for me, my dear Governor, for I hate hangings. In Europe's opinion we shall have retrogressed to the times of Ivan Vassilyevich.'
In 1787 Catherine, with her entire court and the foreign diplomats, visited New Russia, the southern provinces which had been placed under the authority of Grigor Alexandrovich Potemkin, Catherine's favourite, with instructions chat he develop them. As the Italian historian Lo Gatto observes: 'The famous saying about "Potemkin Villages" dates from this journey, when failure was very skilfully and effectively concealed, while all examples of successful development were well displayed.' And he goes on to say: 'With the help of the foreigners Potemkin had really achieved a great deal, especially where the Germans had built their fruitful settlements.'
A quarter of a century before, Catherine had moved these German settlers to the south. Now she could reap the fruits of this enterprise and proudly show it to her foreign guests--exactly as, one and a half centuries later, the Soviets were to show their tourists the huge industrial plants, erected by the Americans, as typical examples of 'socialist progress'.
It was during the reign of Catherine that Russia was first visited by Americans. In 1783 a ship flying the American flag entered the harbour of Riga. One year later the Light Horse, a ship of three hundred tons, dropped anchor in St. Petersburg. But within a year the first difficulties arose. John Ledyard, who wanted to reconnoitre a possible trade route between Russia and the United States, was arrested in Siberia and deported (see page 116).
In December 1787, the first American commodore, John Paul Jones, entered the Russian service as a naval officer. Catherine appointed him Rear-Admiral, in command of the Black Sea Fleet. Competent officers were needed down there because the Second Russo-Turkish War had broken out a few months before.
In May 1788 the fourteen ships under the command of Jones played the decisive part in annihilating the Turkish fleet. The ambitious Potemkin, however, in his capacity as Supreme Commander, intercepted and retained the American's report of the battle. Angry at the Russians' ingratitude, Jones left Russia in September 1789 for America.
Catherine showed little interest in the United States. She did not attach much importance to this new country with its mere three million inhabitants; her own empire contained more than twenty-seven million subjects, as estimated by the British Ambassador. But already the United States was exporting knowledge to Russia. At Catherine's own request the great George Washington sent her a dictionary of the Indian languages.
This modest dictionary was the first item in the long list of imports from America which are today beyond calculation. At the time of writing the latest items were the newest computers for Sputnik III.
Chapter 9. The Nineteenth Century
The chimes of the Kremlin bells on 24th March 1801, as Alexander I ascended the throne of his murdered father, marked the beginning of a century in which the process, begun under the two Ivans, Peter I, now called 'the Great', and Catherine II, was vastly accelerated. In the nineteenth century Europeans, and now for the first time Americans as well, contributed towards laying the technical, scientific and economic foundations for a great modern Slav power.
A Swiss tutor, Frederic Cesar Laharpe, had striven to make the young Grand Duke Alexander into a progressive, free-thinking man. 'Be a human being, even on the throne,' Laharpe had written to the Tsar from his home in Switzerland. And back in his own country Laharpe preserved a letter in which Alexander promised:
'My country is in a disastrous and unhappy state. The peasants are oppressed, trade is paralysed, the ideal of freedom and the welfare of the people have been destroyed. That is how I see Russia today, and you can well imagine how it saddens me. When my chance comes, it is necessary that I grant my subjects the right to choose their representatives, whose duty it will be to work enthusiastically towards the creation of a liberal constitution. Such, my friend, are my plans. May God help me to give Russia its freedom and to save it for ever from the abuses of tyranny. That is my dearest wish, and I am determined to devote my life to the fulfilment of this task.'
The letter is dated September 1797. Four years later the succession of Alexander provided the great chance to liberate Russia from oppression and bondage.
And, in fact, the young Tsar took various steps in the right direction. He summoned Laharpe back to Russia, selected the youthful Paul Stroganov, who is known to have belonged to a Jacobite club, to work with him, and appointed a liberal Pole, Prince Adam Georg Czartoryski, as his adviser. To another gifted liberal, Michael Speranski, Alexander entrusted the mighty task of planning a modern constitution for Russia.
Alexander cancelled a Ukase of his father Paul's, forbidding Russians to travel abroad. The importation of books and sheet music was again permitted; people who had been incarcerated in the ill-famed Peter and Paul Fortress were released and many exiles in Siberia were set at liberty by Alexander.
But all too soon these high hopes were dashed. Only the good intentions survived. It was to happen again, under Alexander II, the 'Tsar-liberator', and also after Stalin's death in our own century; each time the 'thaw' was of very short duration. Alexander seems to have shrunk from the enormous task which he had set himself to perform. There was also the threat of war, as Napoleon, after having occupied all Europe, cast his eye on Russia. Alexander's ambitious plans broke down. With surprising speed those forces hostile to every kind of free development again prevailed.
Meanwhile the stream of imported goods, of machinery and industrial plant, of technicians and scientists, increased steadily, at Russian instigation, until by the end of the century it had swelled into a mighty flood. This, however, was cleverly concealed by the Russians, and the nations of Europe, occupied with their own wars and struggles, were unaware of their cooperative efforts in the East. Concealment was therefore made easier, and to this day few of the facts are known.
More than seventy-five years had elapsed since the founding of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The number of Russian members had increased since 1800, but only one of these had shown himself to be above the average. Vassily Vladimirovich Petrov displayed considerable ability as an experimental physicist. He was the first to make systematic barometric observations. His greatest contributions, however, were in the field of electricity. Petrov's studies anticipated, without Europe being aware of this, the later work of Sir Humphry Davy on the electric voltaic arc. Certainly Petrov contributed much to our knowledge of electricity. More clan a dozen of his works were published by the Imperial Russian Academy.
The majority of the members remained foreigners, mostly German scientists as in the time of Peter. From their ranks were recruited the leading teachers of the universities of St. Petersburg and Moscow.
The botanist K. A. Trinius was assisted by Franz J. Ruprecht, a native of Prague, who studied the plant life of the Urals and the Caucasus. Isaac Jacob Schmidt from Mecklenburg specialized in the languages, history and literature of the people of Central Asia, Mongolia and Tibet. The Leipzig philologian and archaeologist, L. E. Stephani, was considered in chose days one of the greatest experts on classical Greece.
A German from the Baltic provinces, Baron Paul von Schilling, carried out some important original research. In 1832 he invented an electromagnetic telegraph, which was later installed in England in accordance with his specifications. During his time at the university of St. Petersburg, Professor Emil Lenz of Dorpat succeeded in clarifying for the first time the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction. The Lenz theory, named after him, is to be found in every textbook on electricity. Moritz Hermann von Jacobi of Potsdam was his pupil. He was the inventor of galvano-plastic, and also invented one of the first electric motors which he used for propelling a boat on the Neva in 1838. This 'Nyemets', however, has now been deprived of his nationality, for the Soviets invariably refer to him as 'Boris Semyonovich Yakobi, the Russian inventor of the electric motor'. The German university of Dorpat played an important but long-forgotten role as the link between West and East. In order to train Russian scholars for a university career, the 'Institute of Professors' had been founded at Dorpat in 1802; a staff of teachers had been engaged to instruct Russian scientific students who were needed for the universities of Kazan and Kharkov, founded in 1804.
There were several famous scientists at Dorpat: Karl Ernst von Baer, the father of modern embryology; the pioneers of research into the Russian geography, its flora and fauna, such as the Germans Alexander von Middendorf, Karl Friedrich von Ledebour from Mecklenburg, the Baltic German, Alexander von Bunge; the physicist Hermann Hess from Geneva; Wilhelm von Struve and his son Otto von Struve who then taught at Dorpat, and who helped to train whole generations of Russian astronomers and who built a chain of observatories, starting at Dorpat and extending from the Baltic, from Reval, to Moscow and on to Nikolauev, Kiev and Kazan.
Wilhelm von Struve, whom J. Delisle calls the greatest Russian astronomer, achieved international fame with his discovery of double stars and of a way of measuring the distance of fixed stars. This great scholar's crowning achievement was the building, at Pulkovo near St Petersburg, of the finest observatory in the world, which he equipped with European instruments and telescopes. Important astronomical observations initiated by Struve in Pulkcovo are still valid today.
Scores of young Russians were sent to Europe during the first years of Alexander's reign. They were to be seen in the lecture rooms of every faculty in the universities of Marburg, Gottingen, Jena and Heidelberg as well as at the Sorbonne in Paris. As Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was later to say: 'First go to Europe and learn everything.'
Under the aegis of the Academy in St Petersburg, scientific and ethnological expeditions set out once again. They continued what Bering, the famous Dane, had begun a century before, the exploration of this vast territory which in the intervening hundred years had been steadily enlarged by conquest. To one of these expeditions Russia owes the first sensational scientific discovery which she was able to oer to the rest of the world. In 1806 Adams excavated a mammoth from the perpetually frozen ground near the Lena estuary. It had been found seven years before by a Tungus named Ossip Shumakhov. He collected the 'mutilated' remains of this ice-age elephant, with pieces of its skin to which the long hair still adhered, and brought them to St. Petersburg. When, after a long and difficult journey, the perfectly preserved skeleton was exhibited, scientists from all over the world flocked to inspect this amazing discovery. The first scientific report on the mammoth had, however, been produced by a man from the West, Dr. D. G. Messerschmidt; in 1724 he had described the carcass of a mammoth found, thawed out, on the banks of the Indegirka.
Three hundred years after the discovery of America and Magellan's first journey round the world, Russia belatedly entered the picture. In 1803, under command of a Baltic German, Adam Johann von Krusenstern, the Neva sailed from the port of Kronstadt. In a three-year voyage touching at Japan and Sakhalin, round the Cape of Good Hope, and down the northwestern coast of America, Krusenstern circumnavigated the globe; he thus satisfied, even if belatedly, Russia's urge to 'catch up and overtake'.
In the most southern part of the Russian empire, the Crimea, the land began to flourish. Here a gifted Frenchman, the Duc de Richelieu, had set to work, a man of 'great integrity, unexceptionable morals and devoid of self-interest'.
The Crimea, annexed by the Russians in 1783, was in a pitiable state when Armand Emmanuel Duplessis, Duc de Richelieu, accepted the post of Governor-General of his Majesty's Empire in the three provinces of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav and Tauris. 'The Crimean conquest was an event on which the attention of all Europe was focused,' wrote the Englishman, Edward Daniel Clarke, in his Journey through Russia and Tartary in 1800-1801. 'If one were to ask what the Russians did in the Crimea, there is only one answer: they spoilt the land, felled the trees, destroyed the public buildings and churches and the magnificent canals, and looted the people. Today the once magnificent city of Kaffa (in Russian: Feodosia) consists of no more then fifty families. During our stay there the Russian soldiers were allowed to overthrow the beautiful mosques, or to convert them into magazines, to pull down the minarets, tear up the public fountains, and to destroy all the public aqueducts, for the sake of a small quantity of lead, which they were thereby enabled to obtain.
'The German scholar, Pallas, who had performed innumerable services for the Russians, prevented them by his mere presence from destroying Akt-Metschet (renamed Simferopol) as totally as the other cities.
'None of these incidents has been generally known about until now, because it has always been the policy of the Russian empire to conceal the true history of their own people and the real state of their empire by all the means in their power,' Clarke's report concludes.
Under Governor Richelieu new life arose from the ruins. The Duke, assisted by Count Alexander de Langeron, collected a large French colony for his work of reconstruction.
An educational system was developed by the Abbe Nichol, and schools were opened. French wine-growers, invited there by Richelieu, laid out vineyards, cultivated the native grapes and imported new strains from their own country. They gave the Russians their first Crimean wines, and the 'Shampanskoye', or Crimean champagne, which soon became famous, was solely due to them. Other wine-makers from the Rhine and the Moselle followed, and founded viticultural training establishments in the Crimea. German gardeners competed with their French colleagues in laying out those lovely gardens which transformed the Crimea into a wonderful landscape of parks and flowers, famous throughout the world. Gardeners and landscape-gardeners of the well-known Schmidt family from Erfurt worked for generations in the Crimea.
Richelieu himself founded Odessa in 1802. The French architect, Thomas de Thomon, drew the plans for the city and its more important buildings. A modern seaport arose from nothing to become the great commercial port for the Ukraine. By 1813 there were already 35,000 inhabitants in Odessa; its trade centre was founded by a German, Count Saint-Priest.
Meanwhile an appeal had once again gone out from St Petersburg: 'Come to our country!' Following the policy of his grandmother, Catherine, the Tsar Alexander sent recruiting officers to Germany. Without foreign help the Russian peasants could achieve little, despite the fertility of the Russian soil and the density of the population.
Colonists from all parts of Germany, particularly from Swabia, emigrated eastwards in great treks through Bessarabia as far as the Caucasus. All along the northern coast of the Black Sea, villages were built in the Ukraine, and the pioneer work of the Black Sea Germans began. These pioneers produced a hard-working race; owing to their industry and skill, their excellent standard of farming and modern methods of stock-breeding, these colonies flourished.
A new project of prime importance was introduced from Austria--the cultivation of the sugar-beet. On the Don a huge model farm was built and the sugar-beet harvest was sent to a sugar-beet factory operated by steam-driven machinery and organized on German lines. The cultivation of the sugar-beet was as important in the nineteenth century as the cultivation of Indian corn is today. The Soviet Union has learned about this latter crop from the United States, whence it has imported the seeds of hybrid maize, the modern methods of growing the crop, and the newest machinery for maize cultivation.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century more than 600,000 Germans were living and working around the Black Sea in widely dispersed model villages. Together with the settlers at Saratov on the Volga, and the Germans of Volhynia, they formed the third great island of Western civilization within the Slav empire. Thanks to them the southern districts and the Ukraine became the granary of all Russia.
After twenty-six years in Russia the Duc de Richelieu was suddenly summoned back to his native land, where another great task awaited him. On 14th September 1815, King Louis XVIII appointed the Duke as head of the French Ministry in succession to Talleyrand.
But the foundation was laid. A new impetus had been introduced into the country, and under Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, whom Alexander had chosen as Richelieu's successor, Count Alexander de Langeron's son continued the great work.
Vorontsov added to the development of the Crimea--he brought in the architects. His favourite residence was Alupka, where he built a magnificent castle in the late Gothic style of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. He had acquired his predilection for Tudor architecture during his time in London as Russian Ambassador.
The Crimea was soon filled with every style of architecture. At Yalta, some miles to the east of Alupka, a palace for Grand Duke Constantine Nikolayevich was built according to plans by Schinkel, the famous Berlin architect. Italian craftsmen built classical mansions and villas surrounded by colonnades and pergolas with Greek columns. The sanatoria and hospitals of the Crimea acquired a considerable reputation after 1850; the most famous was at Sudak, belonging to Dr Erhardt. Soviet workers in striped pyjamas nowadays spend their holidays in the lovely parks and palaces.
Industrialization was still insignificant in the Slav empire. In 1804, statistics show that there were only 2,423 factories in the whole of Russia, employing 95,202 workers. Production was on the increase, however, and the curve was rising. But even so it was minute compared with the other countries of Western Europe where rapid industrialization was already under way, and particularly with England. '
Hence the importance of an event which took place at this time. In the autumn of 1810 Leipzig was preparing for its great annual fair--without much enthusiasm, as the goods offered for sale were expected to be rather poor that year, being limited to local products owing to Napoleon's continental blockade which cut Europe off from her overseas imports.
In the course of these preparations strange figures appeared in the city's inns and taverns. They demanded extensive stabling accommodation, rented storehouses, and reserved an astonishingly large number of stalls at the Fair. Rumour spread through the town like wildfire. This would be a sensational Leipzig Fair--and would astonish all Europe. A few days later the people crowded round the city gates, craning their necks to see an endless column enveloped in a cloud of dust, which was approaching the town. Seven hundred carts came rumbling and lurching over the cobbled streets to the fairground, and there was no end to the unloading and storing which went on. There were groceries of a sort which nobody had seen for years, farming equipment and above all cotton, bale after bale of cotton, all from Russia.
Where did all these goods come from all of a sudden? Not, surely, from the backward Slav empire....
Once again Russia had cleverly exploited the quarrels of the Western powers to further her own interest.
At the turn of the century the United States began to compete with Europe, which till then had been the sole supplier and preceptor of the Russians. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson sent Levett Harris as Consul-General to St Petersburg, and the Tsar Alexander received him in the Imperial Palace. 'I should be happy,' the Tsar wrote to Jefferson, 'if our two countries could be eternal friends. We are both equally interested in the freedom of the seas, as the wise policy of my illustrious grandmother, the Empress Catherine, showed.'
This new source of supply was officially recognized in 1809. James Madison, who had just been elected President of the United States in succession to Jefferson, sent John Quincy Adams to St. Petersburg as his ambassador. The corresponding Russian envoy to the United States was not Russian-born but was a German Balt, Count Friedrich von Pahlen. Throughout the nineteenth century almost all the Russian ministers in Washington were from the German or Baltic German aristocracy, e.g. Baron von Stoeckl, Baron von Rosen, Baron von Thyl.
When John Quincy Adams presented his credentials at St Petersburg, the Baltic was closed to American ships by Napoleon's continental blockade. Denmark, allied to Napoleon, had recently seized several freighters, but the Tsar arranged that they be released, and from then on Russia's ports were open to ships from the United States.
Imports from America rose in six years, 1806 to 1811, from a mere $12,000 to more than $6,000,000 a year. Of cotton alone, more than 9-22 million pounds went to Russia in 1811, whereas in 1808 only 0.5 million pounds had been supplied.
In July 1811, Alexander achieved a major triumph. Some two hundred American ships entered Russian ports, during the warm ice-free season. America had a near monopoly of the Baltic trade; trade with Archangel was on the increase; and in 1810 an American cargo ship entered the port of Odessa for the first time.
The young America had given a proof of its ability to produce the goods. Russia was to benefit from this in every sphere of economic activity until the present day.
These imports soon produced a surplus of goods which the internal Russian market could not absorb. So Russia began to re-export the wares it had imported from the United States, just as today the USSR supplies the Far East with valuable medicinal supplies imported from Europe.
Via Brody, in Galicia, American goods went to Vienna and South Germany, even to Paris, Napoleon's own capital. The goods exhibited, as such a surprise, at the Leipzig Fair of 1810 were only a small percentage of the supplies from America that the Russians were exporting.
Napoleon knew quite well that the American ships were also carrying English goods to St Petersburg, for British traders were using the American flag. He realized that his plan for blockading England was therefore likely to fail. He tried in vain to persuade the Tsar that he seize these American ships. Alexander rejected his request and even issued a Ukase on 31st December 1810 permitting neutral ships to enter Russian ports.
This Ukase marked the end of the Russo-French alliance. Three years before, Napoleon and Alexander had met on a raft at Tilsit, and Napoleon's proposal that Europe be divided into French and Russian spheres of influence had been welcomed by the Tsar, and the Treaty of Tilsit concluded. Now that the Ukase interfered with Napoleon's plans, the French tyrant, unable to tolerate an eastern empire that threatened his ambition to rule the world, began arming on a vast scale.
Russia also started to prepare her army and to organize munitions and supplies for the great conflict which was imminent. The Tsar could rely on considerable help from the West in the carrying out of his rearmament programme.
American freighters brought British machinery and munitions to Kronstadt and Archangel, while an enormous number of Europeans hurried to join the Tsar's army--mostly Prussians, but also Frenchmen. Russian troops were once again being trained by experienced foreign officers, as in the time of Peter and the Ivans.
Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich Karl Baron von Tettenborn, an Austrian officer from Baden, took over the training of the Cossack troops. A French general, Count Langeron, a German general, Count von Bennigsen from Hanover, General Barclay de Tolly, member of a Scottish noble family settled in Mecklenburg and Livonia, who became Minister of War in 1810 and Commander-in-Chief of the Western Armies in 1812; a Prussian, Colonel von Boyen, who had helped Scharnhorst reform the Prussian army--they all served in Russia. General Count zu Wittgenstein and his Chief of Staff, Count von Diebitsch, were also Germans, whose fathers had previously served as generals in the Russian Army. It was Diebitsch who in 1812 signed the Convention of Tauroggen with General Yorck, and thus began the War of Independence against Napoleon.
Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein, the great Prussian statesman and reformer, had been exiled by Napoleon. He now went to Russia as adviser to the Tsar Alexander, and summoned the ardent patriot, Ernst Moritz Arndt, to work with him.
The beginning of 1812 was decisive. Prussia joined France in the preparations for the attack on Russia and was compelled to contribute an auxiliary corps of 20,500 men to the Grande Armee. In consequence three hundred Prussian officers left the service and hastened to Russia, among them Major von Clausewitz.
When Clausewitz arrived at Vilna, the headquarters of the Tsar and General Barclay de Tolly, in April 1812, he found a number of Prussian officers already there.
'The Tsar wished to exercise the supreme command,' says Clausewitz. 'He had been instructed in strategy for several years by Lieutenant-General von Phull. Phull had worked out a plan of campaign in St Petersburg. This was now being implemented at Vilna.'
Karl Ludwig August von Phull, once a member of Frederick the Great's general staff and later Chief of Staff to Frederick William III, had been in the Russian service since 1806. 'He had the idea,' says Clausewitz, 'of retreating voluntarily into the Russian interior, thereby drawing nearer to his reinforcements, gaining time, weakening the enemy--who would be forced to split Up his forces--and achieving opportunities for strategic attacks upon the enemy's rear and flanks. This idea appealed to the Emperor; it reminded him of Wellington's campaign in Portugal in 1811.'
The basis of the 'Phull Plan', as it was later called, was to make the most of Russia's natural advantages--its severe climate and its great distances--in order to defeat the Grande Armee. The Russians had no wish to fight a decisive battle. They planned to sidestep Napoleon's attacks and thus lure him into the interior of their country. There he would find himself fighting against a vacuum, while his lines of supply and his communications grew longer, thinner and more vulnerable.
When the Grande Armee crossed the Memel on 24th June 1812, the soldiers found nothing on the far bank save an empty countryside, a veritable desert. All the villages had been burnt. There was no resistance anywhere. Napoleon failed to understand how the Russian Army could abandon Lithuania and Poland without a struggle.
On June 28th the French reached Vilna, but the Russians had retreated to the Dvina and the Dniepr and the two main Russian armies joined forces at Smolensk.
There a violent bloody battle was fought on 17th August, but when darkness fell the Russians once again retreated most skilfully, having first set fire to Smolensk.
However, there was a growing feeling of anger and disgust in Russia at these retreating tactics, particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Alexander gave in to public opinion and was compelled to sacrifice a foreigner; Field Marshal Barclay de Tolly was dismissed and a Russian, Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutozov, was appointed to succeed him.
It made no difference. Only once, at Borodino on 7th September, did Kutuzov fight the Grande Armee. Then he continued to retreat, in accordance with the 'Phull Plan', although he met violent opposition at a Council of War.
On 14th September, leading units of the French van, advancing in open order, climbed the Sparrow hills outside Moscow, where Lomonossov University now stands. The next day Napoleon, from the windows of the Kremlin, watched the blazing fires lit by the Russians. This foreshadowed the approaching end of the Grande Armee.
Napoleon had over-reached himself, and must inevitably retreat, just as Phull had foreseen. 'Napoleon waits in vain,' Pushkin says in his Eugene Onegin. The year 1812 became a heroic legend, extolled by the greatest Russian poets and composers. All Russians rejoiced, though they had hated the idea of the retreat. The world admired the brilliance of the 'Russian' tactics and strategy, and Tolstoy's War and Peace is still read by millions. Certainly this novel is brilliantly written, and in general historically accurate, yet it overlooks one contemporary document of great interest. Tolstoy does not mention the letter which Alexander I wrote on 13th December 1813, when he was in Frankfurt on his way to Paris, to his old friend and adviser, Karl Ludwig August von Phull. The Tsar, who usually spoke of 1812 as the year of the intervention of the 'hand of God', gives considerable credit to Phull:
'I have just come from the banks of the Moskva River to the banks of the Rhine, and I feel that I must write and thank you. If I now have any knowledge of strategy, I owe this to you, who initiated me into its first principles. But I owe you much more. It is you who planned the campaign which, with the help of Providence, saved Russia, and has finally saved Europe too.'
In 1812 the Slav empire once again had the opportunity of using suitable prisoners of war for its own purposes. 'The Russian Government,' Holzhausen tells us, 'wishes to take advantage of this opportunity and to persuade some of the prisoners that they settle in the country and work; it is a unique chance of raising the Russian standard of living.'
The Tsar Alexander's delegation to the Congress at Vienna in 1814 included the ambassador, Count Stackelberg; the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Karl Robert von Nesselrode; a diplomatic plenipotentiary, Johann Protasius Baron von Anstett; a Corsican, Carlo Andrea Count Pozzo di Borgo, later Russian Ambassador in Paris; a Greek, Joannes Anton Count Capo d'Istria; and an expert on Polish questions, himself a Pole, Prince Adam Czartoryski. This impressive group contained only one Russian-born diplomatist, Count Andre Razumovski.
At the end of the Congress of Vienna, on 9th June 1815, Russia put the question to her ally, Prussia: 'How shall we build our peace?' The answer, also supplied by Russia, was that in return for past help in the War of Independence against Napoleon, Prussia should cede Silesia, Further East Prussia and South Prussia--to Russia!
By the continuous acquisition of new lands in the north, east and west, Russia had become the largest country in the world; yet even the four million square miles of Siberia, a district larger by one-third than the entire United States, did not satisfy her lust for land. She looked towards Europe, to the Near and Middle East, and ceaselessly 'acquired more Russian soil', without however bothering to cultivate these vast new territories.
After 1917 the Soviets continued the tradition of annexation begun by the Tsars and nowadays the world is informed that 'Russian Columbuses' will claim the planets for Moscow. 'Our trouble is chat we are incapable of moderation,' Dostoevsky once remarked.
It was not enough that after the Congress of Vienna Alexander I had increased Russian territory, in comparison with the empire of his grandmother, Catherine II, by over a quarter of a million square miles. Russia was now preparing to expand to the Pacific coast and to America.
In 1806 Nikolai Rezanov sailed into San Francisco. He planned to populate California with Russian settlers, and to annex this coast for Russia. That he might learn to know the people, he became engaged to the daughter of the Spanish Governor of San Francisco, Dona Concepcion. When Rezanov died on the return journey to Siberia, a fur merchant named Baranov, from Alaska, continued with the project. A Russian vessel appeared o the Californian coast in 1808, under the command of Ivan Kusskov. Kusskov found a suitable landing-place north of San Francisco, in Bodega Bay, and began the 'collection of Russian soil'. All along the coast of California, they put up large standards bearing the Russian coat of arms and, in Cyrillic, the inscription: 'This is Russian territory.' In 1812 Kusskov built a powerful fortress covering the estuary of the river which is skill called the Russian River. And the fort is still called 'Fort Ross'. The port in Bodega Bay was named, after the Russian Prime Minister, 'Rumyantsev', and on the Farallone Islands o San Francisco a Russian 'hunting-base' was built.
Minister Count Nikolai Petrovich Rumyantsev, who retired from public life in 1812, equipped a ship at his own expense, the brig Rurik, named after Russia's Swedish creator, which was to sail round the world. There was no Russian research scientist on board, but only Adelbert von Chamisso of Berlin, a Frenchman by birth and the author of Peter Schlemihl. In 1816 the Rurik cast anchor in San Francisco. The Commander, Otto von Kotzebue-- the son of the Weimar poet, August von Korzebue--stayed there for two months and, by his overbearing manner, made it plain that Russia, after having annexed Alaska, now considered herself the ruler of California.
When the Russians landed on the west coast of America, they immediately came face to face with the Americans, for the Star-Spangled Banner had been hoisted much earlier--in 1784, one year after the end of the War of Independence--on the Pacific Coast. American ships regularly traded with the west coast. Now these traders began to ship furs to China which had closed the port of Canton to all Russian ships, and thus came into direct opposition with the Russian traders. In 1805 President Jefferson sent the first expedition under Lewis and Clark across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. In 1808 Johann Jacob Astor, a German from Waldorf near Heidelberg, drafted plans for a fur trading company with trading-posts extending to the Pacific. In 1811, two expeditions equipped by Astor entered the area which is now the state of Oregon, one by land, the other by sea, and founded the settlement called Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River.
As soon as the Russians heard of the presence of Americans on the Columbia River, the 'Russian-American Company' took drastic counteraction. They requested that the Tsar should send Russian men-of-war on regular patrol in the Pacific. The Russians were already complaining that the Americans sold firearms to the Indians.
But in 1811 and 1812 American exports were of great value owing to Napoleon's continental blockade, and the Tsar could not accede to the requests of his subjects in America. The Russian invasion of the west coast had already alarmed the Americans; there were rumours that all California was soon to be annexed by the Russians. Looking far into the future, the journal Nile's Weekly Register prophesied: 'We shall soon see this nation--with its vast resources and its energetic government--active in every corner of the world.'
Besides this 'acquisition of land' in the west of North America, the Russians attempted to occupy certain islands in the Pacific. Adam Johann von Krusenstern, dropping anchor o the Hawaiian Islands during the first Russian voyage round the world, intended to use them as bases and supply stations for the fur trade between Alaska and Eastern Asia. In 1809 Captain Hagemeister, another German in the service of Russia, landed on the northern island of Kauai and persuaded the native chief, Kaumualii, to ask for Russian protection. Kaumualii, King of the two islands of Kauai and Niihau, was fighting against King Kamehameha, King of the principal island of Hawaii. The government at St. Petersburg, involved in European events, could not then accept his offer and waited for a more favourable opportunity. This opportunity came when yet another German, Dr. Georg Anton Scheffer, at the instigation of the fur merchant, Baranov, took the matter up. Scheffer, a ship's doctor employed by the 'Russian-American Company', was a clever man. To conceal his real intention he travelled to Hawaii on board an American ship. On Oahu he acquired property with the consent of King Kamehameha. However, two Russian ships had to rescue Scheffer from the other white settlers who had guessed what his real intentions were. He was still unwilling to abandon his plan, and revived the old relationship which Hagemeister had established with the rival King Kaumualii, who placed himself and his two islands under the protection of the Tsar, and granted a trading and colonization monopoly to the Russians.
On the island of Kauai, Scheffer ordered the building of a Russian stone fortress. This project had to be abandoned before it was completed. American settlers intervened and the Russians were driven out. This marked the end of Russian hopes in the Pacific. Nesselrode gives us the true reasons. The Russian government was afraid of political entanglements, for Russia was not yet strong enough to do without American imports and could not afford to jeopardize friendly relations with the United States for the sake of a few South Sea islands. 'What is curious about these enterprises,' the historian, Erwin Holze remarks, 'is that the more successful ones were planned by Germans, and not by Russians.'
After the burning of Moscow in 1812, there was a great deal of rebuilding to be done by Alexander I. Whole quarters of the city lay gutted and in ruins, and the fires had badly damaged the turrets and walls of the Italian-built Kremlin.
The Tsar created a 'Committee for the Reconstruction of Moscow'--with the Italian architect, Giuseppe Bove, as its president. At the same time plans were made for the embellishment of the capital on the Neva. A contemporary writes: 'Having successfully concluded his military campaigns, the Tsar wished to make St. Petersburg more beautiful than any of the other European capitals he had visited. With this end in view, he decided to appoint an architectural committee, with Betancourt as President.'
There were still many foreign artists living in Russia, such as the Italian, Giacomo Quarenghi, whom Catherine II had employed as court architect, and Vincenzo Brenna. Other highly talented architects included the Scot, Charles Cameron, and the Frenchman, Thomas de Thomon. Now that St. Petersburg was to be 'the most beautiful capital in Europe', and Alexander had given the word to 'catch up and overtake' the West in architecture, European artists and craftsmen were sent for. Once again they poured into the Slav empire. Painters, cabinet-makers, stucco-workers and sculptors came from Italy and from Swiss Ticino, followed by others from France. Despite their hatred of the French, inspired by Napoleon, most of the tutors in the rich and aristocratic Russian families were in fact French, though there were many Germans as well.
In 1813 the foreign colony suffered a heavy loss when Thomas de Thomon died in an accident. He was the French genius who gave St Petersburg its Exchange Building and in 1784 rebuilt the Grand Theatre (originally by Tischbein). De Thomon's great Fountain of Neptune is world-famous, and it was he who planned the town of Odessa. He died as the result of a fall from a scaffold while inspecting the damage caused by a fire in the Grand Theatre. Tamara Talbot Rice comments on his death: 'Russia was thus deprived of a great master but she was so rich in architectural genius at the time that the loss was not as deeply felt as it would have been in any less prolific age.' Besides, a new star was in the ascendant. This was the incomparable Carlo Rossi, from Lugano.
Carlo had come to Russia as an eight-year-old boy with his mother, the prima ballerina, Gertrude Rossi, in 1787. The boy was very gifted and he was brought up in the house of Vincenzo Brenna, who was a father to him as well as a teacher. He learned to draw in his master's studio and accompanied Brenna to his building sites. At the age of eighteen he helped with building projects in Pavlovsk, in Gachina and at the castle of St Michael in St Petersburg. In 1802 Brenna took young Rossi on a trip to Florence. In 1809 he began work with a group of architects in Moscow, who were given the task of restoring old houses in danger of collapsing. Then he was engaged as architect by the new Governor-General, brother-in-law to the Tsar, and moved to Tver on the Volga. This was the real beginning of his career. His work in rebuilding the old palace of Tver was so much appreciated that he was made 'commissar' for all building in the province. It was owing to Rossi's talent and steady work over the years that Tver became one of the most charming and attractive provincial towns. Its 'Millionaya', running beside the Volga, has long been considered one of the loveliest streets in the world.
Back in St. Petersburg in 1817 he started on the work of replanning that city which was to bring him world-wide fame. 'Ross)', says the Italian historian Lo Gatto, 'created a new and magnificent St. Petersburg, with fine parks and gardens. He built the square before the Winter Palace, with its superb Triumphal Arch, the square of St. Michael's, the Alexander Theatre and the adjoining Imperial Library, the Chernyshev Square, with the Ministries of the Interior and of Education, and finally the area between the Isaac Cathedral and the Neva, with the Senate House and the buildings of the Ecclesiastical Council.'
It is incredible what Rossi accomplished in only forty years in St. Petersburg. At this period many other Europeans were at work there. In the office of the French Engineer-in-Chief Betancourt--officially in charge of all building--the plans for palaces, mansions, churches, country houses and bridges multiplied.
With a total disregard for expense, hardly justifiable in a completely undeveloped country with millions of poverty-stricken serfs, Alexander approved of more and more new buildings, obsessed as he was by his determination that St. Petersburg should surpass all other cities. Russia was to possess everything that the finest European architecture could produce, everything that the Tsar had seen and admired during his trips abroad, only bigger, better and, of course, more beautiful. He would often order whole rows of houses to be demolished and better, larger and more modern ones put up in their place.
When Lord Cathcart visited Russia in 1819, he wrote home:
'Since his visit to England the Emperor has had foot-pavements of excellent granite made all over the town, which was effected by a single order, that such a thing was to be done and requiring each individual to finish the part in front of his house, in default of which the police would finish it at his expense.'
In his history of St Petersburg, Lo Gatto wrote, without exaggeration:
'St Petersburg, originally planned by an Italian, Domenico Trezzini, would never have become what it was--a truly European capital--without the work of the three Italian architects, Rastrelli, Quarenghi and Rossi, whose names are for ever linked with the city's architectural history.' In 1849 Rossi died of cholera, his splendid work uncompleted. Large parts of the town on the Neva still resembled a building site. Thirty years had passed since Alexander I laid the foundation stone for the Isaac Cathedral, intended to be the most magnificent church in all St Petersburg, but the building, begun according to the plans of the French architect Ricard de Monferrand, was less than half finished. For forty years thousands of serfs were engaged in draining the marshy ground where it was to stand. Even when the foundations seemed firm enough, work had to be interrupted more than once in order to reinforce them, as the ground began to subside.
When in 1858 the cathedral was at last officially consecrated in the presence of Alexander II, it possessed a magnificent tower, over three hundred feet high, built of granite, marble and bronze and filled with European treasures.
Above the magnificent portico, copied from the Pantheon in Rome, were huge bronze reliefs which had taken I. Vitali, Peter Clodt von Jurgensburg and Lemaire many years to make.
The seven huge bronze doors were embossed by Vitali, who also cast the enormous bronze gate, some twenty-five feet tall and half as wide.
The paintings on the ceiling were executed by Karl Pavlovich Brullo and the Frenchman, P. V. Bassin. Brullo--the Russians write it Bryulov and pretend that he was a Russian--was descended from a Huguenot family in Luneburg named Brulleau. The beautiful stained-glass window in the sanctuary, depicting Christ's resurrection, was ordered in Munich and made by Bavarian craftsmen. The firm of Nicholls and Plincke in St. Petersburg supplied the sacred vessels and ornaments, which were made of eighty pounds of gold and approximately one ton of silver. In the square before the cathedral stood the equestrian statue of Tsar Nicholas I, designed by Ricard de Monferrand and executed by the sculptor, Clodt von Jurgensburg.
For many years the Italian architect Domenico Adamini, from Bigogno, was in charge of building the cathedral. He was also responsible for the Catholic church in Tsarskoye Selo, and a number of palaces, villas and barracks.
Russia spent twenty-three million roubles on this one building, the Isaac Cathedral, and the ambition of the East was fulfilled. Western Europeans watched and wondered--just as they do today when the Soviets dazzle them with some 'product of concentrated effort' which is, in fact, a mere copy.
Meanwhile in Moscow, too, the damage had been repaired and the town beside the Moskva River was splendid once again in the new classical style which the Russians liked so much. It was by now traditional that such building was left to Italians, and to a group of builders from Ticino in Switzerland.
Giuseppe Bove, whom Alexander I had made president of the Reconstruction Committee, drew the plans for the large Bolshoi Theatre which was now rebuilt, and reopened in 1824. He also built the first municipal hospital and numerous private houses for the Russian aristocracy. Giovanni Battista Gilardi, from Montagnola near Lugano, and his gifted son, Domenico, created a technical school for the training of master builders, engineers and building contractors. Many French architects collaborated with the men from Ticino. In those years Gilardi built the University, the Defence Ministry, the National Bank and some lovely palaces in the countryside outside the city. Moscow owes to the German architect, Konstantin von Thon, the Cathedral of the Redeemer and the large Imperial Palace within the Kremlin, which cost twelve million roubles.
The Italians, Gonzago, Bibiena, Ferrari and Scotti, as well as Luigi Rusca, from Serocca d'Agno in Ticino, were masters of stucco work and of interior decoration. They ornamented the new buildings with flower designs, cherubs and arabesques.
The uncrowned kings of sculpture were Vitali and Triscorni, who ran a big studio in Moscow. Vitali's best works are the two fountains at Lubyanka and on the theatre square, and his Venus now in the Russian Museum at St Petersburg. Peter Clodt was primarily a sculptor of equestrian statues; the four horses of the quadriga on the Victory Gate, erected in 1838, are his work, as is the Triumphalnaya Vorota, huge equestrian figures on the bridge of the Nevsky Prospekt over the Fontanka. There used to be reproductions of those figures in the Berlin Lustgarten.
A new genius of the so-called 'Russian' school of painting was the Italian, S. Tonci (1756-1844) of Rome, 'a typical representative of that large number of foreigners who, after a long stay in Russia, and having got themselves Russian wives and families, ended by becoming Russians'.
Nobody realizes nowadays thee the Russian romantic painter, Feodor A. Bruni, was an Italian!
It was not only St. Petersburg and Moscow which felt the influence of this huge colony of artists, architects and craftsmen. There were many, whose names have been forgotten, at work in the provincial towns and in the Crimea. In the Caucasus, Giuseppe Bernardinazzi, from Pambio in Ticino, built the town of Pyatigorsk, and the work of his countryman, Luigi Rusca from Serocca d'Agno, can still be seen from the north of Russia right down to the Black Sea.
The old commercial city of Nijni Novgorod (now called Gorki) at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga had flourished in the sixteenth century. But for many years it had suffered from floods, which each spring submerged the ground reserved for the booths and stalls of the great annual fair. Within sight of the eleven turrets of the Novgorod Kremlin, erected by the Italian architect, Pietro Frasiano, in the years 1508 to 1511, Betancourt, the architect-engineer, had the whole ground surface of the fairground raised artificially. He laid out a whole network of subterranean canals through which all the refuse and dirt could be sucked away by means of a steam-pump. Water for extinguishing fires was also laid on. sixty stone warehouses and over two and a half thousand booths and stands were erected on this vast fairground, the most modern then in existence. The mania for enormous cathedrals and vast palaces, and for the acquisition of valuable art collections, was in sharp contrast to the unbelievably old-fashioned cultural and economic conditions prevalent in the country. Russia preened herself in borrowed plumes; but this was simultaneously the country of Gogol's Dead Souls, the country of which Pushkin said: 'O God, how sad our Russia is!'
Suspicion and distrust of Europe did not prevent Nicholas I (1825-55), the younger brother and reactionary successor of Alexander I, from employing all the talents of the West--in art, science or technology--in so far as these were available to, and exploitable by, Russia. Thus one day the Tsar called upon Alexander von Humboldt, the famous geographer and explorer of South and Central America. The Tsar wished him to lead an expedition across Russia, and was prepared to put all available means at his disposal.
On 29th April 1829, after a magnificent gala dinner given by the Tsar, the German guest was honoured with a reception at the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. Here, as at the university in Moscow, Humboldt met many old friends and acquaintances from Germany. He talked to Professor Gotthelf Fischer, a former fellow-student from the College of Mining Engineering at Freiberg, who because of his services as Curator of the Natural History Museum in Moscow had been ennobled and had acquired the name of 'von Waldheim'. He also met his old teacher from Jena, Justus Christian Loder, under whom he and Goethe had once learnt to dissect human bodies. From Moscow they set out on a most unusual expedition. Humboldt covered over fifteen thousand versts in twenty-three weeks--that is to say, some sixty miles a day--and went right across the whole vast country to the distant Fort Krasnye Tsarkie on the Chinese border. Couriers on horseback rode in advance of the German scientists, and for the whole journey every detail was prepared in advance, so that nothing should go wrong. More than twelve thousand horses were held ready at five hundred stages, and it was the same story with the ferry-boats and ships. For five hundred miles were covered by water and they had to cross rivers fifty-three times--the Volga alone ten times, the Kama twice, the Irtysh three times and the Ob twice.
The inexhaustible Humboldt and his companions travelled by day and by night, through the northern and central Urals, measuring the altitude above sea-level, taking compass bearings and collecting specimens of minerals.
From the Urals he wrote a few lines to the Russian Minister of Finance, Kankrin: 'The Ural district is a veritable El Dorado and I predict--for similar experiences in Brazil make it seem likely--that during your term of office diamonds will be found there.'
'Kankrin', incidentally, was another name for the German lawyer, Georg Franz Krebs, from Hanau on the Main. The name had been latinized, as was the fashion of the time: the Latin cancrinus ('Krebs' or 'crab') became Kankrin. The father of Finance Minister Kankrin had already been employed in Russia. From 1784 onwards he had set up and run the great salt-mines of Staraya Russa in the province of Novgorod, having been appointed to this job by Catherine's Governor, Sievers. The truth of Humboldt's prediction was soon established. The Russians followed the advice of the German scientist, and found diamonds in the district he had indicated in the Urals.
In Kazan Humboldt met the mathematician, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, and the astronomer, Simonov, and together they made observations of the sky and of the magnetic field. In the mathematician Lobachevsky, Humboldt found a congenial partner as he was a truly great Russian scientist. He had invented--in collaboration with Bolyai, the Hungarian--nonEuclidean geometry which was to be so important in modern physics. However, he owed the inspiration for his mathematical discoveries to the 'Prince of Mathematicians', Karl Friedrich Gauss, from Gottingen, who dared not publish his research work because he feared the usual violent outcry of the philistines against anything that their minds cannot grasp. Lobachevsky wrote in German and French.
When Humboldt returned to Germany in December 1829 he immediately wrote down the results of his spectacular journey across an entire continent. Three works were published: Fragments de Ge'ologie et de Climatologie Asiatiques in two volumes (1832), Asie Centrale in three volumes (1843) end Journey to the Urals, Altai and the Caspian Sea in two volumes (1837-1842). They were made full use of in Russia the moment they appeared.
Russia was generous to Humboldt, and his expedition more than repaid that generosity. For the rest the spiritual horizon had darkened since Nicholas I succeeded to the throne. Fearing liberal ideas from the West, Nicholas tried to resist Western influence whenever and wherever he could.
One of his first acts was to forbid young Russians from studying abroad. A special Imperial permit was only granted in exceptional cases. The principal subjects taught in Russia were Russian language and literature, history and folklore, Russian geography--and statistics. The police were empowered to investigate the education being given to children in the private houses of the nobility and rich bourgeois families, as well as the curriculum in all private schools, and thus to ensure that the Imperial decree was carried out.
This was a step backwards. The importation of culture from the West, however, continued even under this Tsar. The cultural forces active in Europe were too powerful to be resisted and their pressure against the cultural vacuum in the East was overpowering.
It is one of the ironies of kite that nineteenth-century Europe furnished Russia with a number of ideas which were enthusiastically accepted at the time, were developed and distorted, and finally misused in the fanatical attack of East upon West.
The seed of German romanticism, planted by Herder at the end of the previous century, became aggressive pan-Slavism. Every nation, Herder had taught in Germany, is one instrument in the symphonic orchestra that is entrusted with the fugue of human history. This led to an enthusiastic nationalism in Germany, where the romantic poets collected the stories and fairy tales, legends and folklore, and traditional beliefs of the multiform German race. But they did not merely delve into their own past; they also investigated that of Russia.
Herder uttered these prophetic words, addressing the people of Russia 'who have suffered so much'. 'The wheel of time keeps turning, and your people, who are now so oppressed, and who were yet once hard-working and happy, will be awakened again from their long sleep and freed from the chains of slavery.... They will delight in their fair countryside, celebrate their traditional festivals, and enjoy once again the fruits of their peaceful labour.'
Despite the censorship, the ideas of Herder and of the romantic school, their discovery of the 'Slav soul', found their way to the East. With what result? As soon as Russia had grasped its significance it transformed the romantic notion of Slav individualism into a weapon for use against the countries where this idea had originated. Pan-Slavism, a creed of hatred, was born; it became the mainspring of a Russian nationalism whose principal feature was to be xenophobia.
In the reign of Nicholas I the slogan about the 'corrupt west' became current. It is still being used in Soviet propaganda today.
Nevertheless the number of factories equipped with foreign machinery and run by foreign engineers increased very considerably. There were 4,578 factories in 1820, whereas in 1850 the total was 9,843, or more than double.
Western European manufacturing techniques were introduced into the Empire of the Tsar by the English, the Germans, and--after the so-called 'Patriotic War' of 1812--by French prisoners. B. Ischchanian has stated in an economic treatise: 'During the period of mechanization they were the forerunners of the technical revolution in manufacturing methods.'
Two Germans, Emil Zundel and Albert Huhner, introduced the first machines for printing cotton goods in Russia. They founded factories in Moscow. There a French subject, Steinbach, from Alsace, started a cotton factory in 1825. In St. Petersburg three Englishmen, Hubbard and the brothers John and Joseph Shaw, built spinning and weaving mills, while James Thornton created a cloth factory.
A Russian saying proves the importance of one major foreign innovator in the textile industry better than any statistics. It runs: 'Where there is a church there is a priest, and where there is a factory there is a Knoop.' (Gde tserkov--tam pop, a gde fabrika--tam Knop.)
Ludwig Knoop from Bremen came to Moscow as a representative of the firm of Jersey, and immediately started to import spinning machines from England. But as nobody in Russia could operate them, he engaged 'a whole colony of English masters and craftsmen, especially from Lancashire, the centre of the textile industry at that time'. In the 1840's and '50's he built a chain of spinning mills which he operated 'with English personnel, mechanics, foremen and experienced artisans'. He did the same for weaving. Several such English-run factories were soon under Knoop's control. He ordered all his spinning machines from the well-known firm of Platt Brothers, the steam engines from Hick Hargreaves, and later from John Musgrave and Sons. His factory on the island of Kranholm near St. Petersburg became famous, and his mechanized spinning works on an island at Narva were 'one of the biggest enterprises not only in Russia. but in the whole of Europe' (B. Ischchanian). Ludwig Knoop built one hundred and twenty-two spinning mills in Russia.
Imports from America--primarily cotton--had been arriving for some thirty years, when the first wave of technicians from the New World followed the cargo ships across the Atlantic. The year 1842 marked the beginning of the enormous technical development work which the United States later carried out in Russia. In that year the American, Major George Washington Whistler, the father of the famous painter, arrived at St. Petersburg. He was to build Russia's first big railway, with the help of a large number of his countrymen. The plans had been drafted ten years before by an Austrian.
At the beginning of the 1830's, Franz Anton von Gerstner, Professor of Applied Geometry at the Polytechnic Institute in Vienna, came to Russia. During his visits to the mines and factories, he realized how incredibly backward Russian communications were. He therefore drafted a very farsighted plan. At an audience which he contrived to secure with Nicholas I, he showed the Tsar his project for a widespread rail network covering the whole of Western Russia, connecting Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Taganrog, and linking the Baltic with the Volga and the Black Sea. This would not only serve the interests of trade but also ensure the rapid movement of troops. The Tsar was enthusiastic about the project, but the Minister of Finance, Kankrin, objected strongly to the enormous expense involved. Nicholas I finally consented to a 'specimen railway'--fifteen miles of line from St Petersburg to Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk.
Gerstner could not begin his work until the end of 1835, when British capital was made available for the project. On 7th October, the first train on Russian soil steamed out of St. Petersburg to the favourite residence of the Imperial court at Tsarskoye Selo, over tracks laid by Gerstner. He had meanwhile solved the problem of snowdrifts by digging ditches on either side of the track. This track was extended to Pavlovsk. The engines, trucks and rolling-stock came from England.
Soon after this Gerstner visited the United States on Russia's behalf and a few months after his death--he died there on 12th April 1840--a Russian commission arrived in America, as a result of his enthusiastic reports. Kraft and Melnikov looked at the new double tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway and followed Gerstner's advice. They engaged Major George Washington Whistler, one of the men who had built the American railway system from the Atlantic to the interior of the continent. It was Whistler who then built the first important railway in Russia, the line between St. Petersburg and Moscow. His chief assistant was Thomas Winans, the son of the famous American railroad engineer, Ross Winans.
The American engineer carried out his task with masterly skill. He rode a horse along the proposed line of the track for 405 miles and drew up detailed plans for the Tsar based on Gerstner's original ideas. In order to save money he suggested that all the materials needed for laying the track be made in Russia itself.
All attempts, however, to produce sufficient materials on their own account failed, and the government was obliged to accept another suggestion of Whistler's. The 'Alexandrovsk' factory, founded in St. Petersburg in 1844, was entrusted to two American engineers, Harrison and Weyness, for the production of the materials for the new railway. A second factory, which was to be of vital importance to Russian industry, was established in Kolpino, also by Whistler's people. Americans were detailed to instruct Russian railway personnel in technical and administrative duties.
The 'Russian broad gauge' is due to the American, Whistler. It differs from the European in that the width of the Russian track is 1.5 metres, while the European (Spain and Portugal excepted) is 1.435 metres. When Whistler first explained his idea of a broad gauge to the Russians they were so enthusiastic that it was difficult to restrain them. His employers immediately decided they must have an even broader gauge, 'because', they said, 'such a broad country needs a broad gauge.'
Part of the line from St Petersburg to Kolpino, some seventeen miles, was finished in 1847. In that year Whistler was awarded the order of St. Anne by the Tsar himself. For this indefatigable engineer had also built new docks in Kronstadt, had put up stone and iron bridges over the Neva, had drafted a plan for canalizing the Dvina, and had constructed the huge iron roof of the National Riding Academy. In 1851 the rails reached Moscow. Some four hundred miles were now ready for use, with 2,000 carriages and trucks built in Russia by American engineers, and 164 locomotives. On 31st March 1851 the line was officially opened. It now took only twenty-two hours to cover a distance that previously took four days and four nights.
The line was called the 'Nicholas Railway'. Whistler did not live to see this day, for Asiatic cholera had carried him off in 1849. With the 'Nicholas Railway'--built by the United States--a new and vital element came into existence, the economic importance of which was soon apparent. For the first time great quantities of the agricultural goods exported by Russia, such as cereals and hemp, could be transported quickly and cheaply from the interior to a seaport.
This commission given to Whistler was not the only one the United States received. 'The success of Major Whistler created an atmosphere very favourable to an extension of commerce between the United States and Tsarist Russia,' said Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, describing his special mission to Soviet Asia and China in 1943. 'American steam excavators and pile-drivers were imported for use on public works. Tsar Nicholas I later sent to America for bridge builders and millwrights, much as Peter the Great had sent to Holland for blacksmiths and carpenters. Almost every steamer brought some enterprising son of New England, and one Yankee was even elected an honorary member of the Imperial Society for his work in improving Russian agriculture.'
New freighters, steamers and corvettes were ordered in the United States. The American Minister, Charles S. Todd, reported that of fourteen liners sailing the Black Sea almost all were built in the Eckford and Rhoades yards in New York.
During the years 1840 to 1860 American inventors, engineers, contractors and speculators bombarded the American Embassy at St. Petersburg and the Imperial Government offices with letters and specimen implements, particularly ploughs and other farming tools, despite the fact that the Tsar had issued a Ukase forbidding 'unknown persons to send presents to members of the Imperial Government'.
But Nicholas himself could not resist the tempting American products. When he heard that the yacht America had won the prize in a regatta against the whole English Royal Yacht Squadron, he immediately ordered a model of the America built for himself. And when Cornelius Vanderbilt visited St. Petersburg in his yacht North Star, Nicholas I ordered his naval engineers to make drawings of the yacht in secret. An American dentist, Dr. Edward Maynard, the inventor of gold fillings, was awarded a medal for treating the Tsar's teeth and giving him gold inlays.
Betancourt, the 'Engineer in charge of Reconstruction' in St. Petersburg, built his much-admired suspension bridge on the Champs de Mars and the so-called Egyptian suspension bridge over the Fontanka near the Trinity Church. The senior engineer, Kerbeds, built the Nicholas Bridge, of granite and iron, with a movable opening to allow the passage of ships. The iron for the construction work was supplied by Kolpino, the huge ironworks built by Whistler on the left bank of the Neva, which was managed by two Englishmen after the Americans left. Fine metal and iron products, railings j for gates, chains for bridges or candelabra--not to mention the heavy iron grilles for the Nicholas Bridge--all bore the name of 'Baird', after the owner of an ironworks which is still mentioned in the Baedeker of 1900 as worthy of notice. A contemporary report of the time of Nicholas I says of Baird that this Englishman 'produced nine-tenths of all the work which the government commissioned'.
During this period of very heavy 'foreign production' the attempts made under Catherine II by General Baier to supply the Old Palace on the Moskva River with fresh drinking water were at last realized thanks to the magnificent new Moscow Waterworks. With the help of two steam engines imported from England, '550,000 buckets of water' were pumped into the Moscow water-tower for distribution to the city.
Under the supervision of the great Munich master builder, Leo von Klenze, assisted by the Russian court architect, Andreas Stakenschneider, a complete rebuilding of the vast Hermitage at St. Petersburg began in 1840. The Winter Palace, heavily damaged by fire in 1837, was also rebuilt. And how did the Russian populace react to all this?
A Russian nobleman named Yuri Samarin visited the Baltic provinces and then wrote a book which was distributed illegally. In this Letter from Riga he demanded that the German builders be dismissed. Tsar Nicholas, who read the pamphlet and was afraid it might lead to trouble, had Samarin arrested on 5th March 1849 and imprisoned him in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Twelve days later he ordered that he be brought to the Winter Palace. During the interrogation to which the Tsar now subjected Samarin, Nicholas said to him: 'You exaggerate when you say that from the time of Peter I to my own we have all been surrounded by Germans and have thus become Germans ourselves. You have openly incited hatred of the Germans by pointing out the difference between Russians and Germans instead of promoting friendly relations. You damn whole classes who have loyally served Russia. Starting with Count Pahlen, I could name some one hundred and fifty devoted German generals. I have sent you to the fortress that you may reflect on what you have done.'
Although Russia was not yet in a position fully to exploit the latest achievements of foreign countries, she had her spies everywhere. 'We should be on our guard against Russian agents, who are at work among us, for purposes of their own,' wrote Frederic Lacroix in 1845, in Paris. 'They have orders to observe all new discoveries in the arts and in industry and to obtain the secrets behind such discoveries in the interest of Russia. Their leader styles himself "Representative of the Imperial Ministry of Finance". These agents appear to patronize the arts and industry, so as to make the manufacturers believe that the Russians appreciate-merit and genius more than any other people, that they encourage progress, that they reward useful service, and that they cherish all men of talent who trust the Russians.
'The real object behind all this is that Russia wants to compete with our industry. She is therefore interested in stealing our newest patents. Their agents lavish promises on our manufacturers and flatter them, tempting them with high-sounding but meaningless titles. They seek their confidence and sometimes manage to wheedle their secrets out of them, thus depriving them of their best source of income. Quite a number of our countrymen personally known to me have fallen victim to these scandalous tricks. They have given away the most detailed explanations of their projects, and have thus thrown away the basis of their prosperity. They have only realized later that Russia has exploited their indiscretions for her own purposes.'
Such warnings remained unheeded, then as now. Russia put out feelers in every direction, seeking contacts. The apparatus worked very skilfully, and an inclination to conceal nothing from Russia was apparent long before the activities of Klaus Fuchs.
On the night of 11th October 1843, the Munich historian, Professor Jakob Phillipp Fallmerayer, invited the Russian poet, Feodor Ivanovich Tyuchev, an enthusiastic pan-Slavist, to his house. The two had been acquainted for many years, but now there was a definite purpose behind the Russian's visit. Tyuchev, who had been a member of the Russian Embassy at the court of the King of Bavaria from 1822 to 1837, had returned on a political mission, In 'a lengthy secret discussion' he let the cat out of the bag. He asked the Bavarian scholar whether he would be willing to propagate Russian interests in Europe in return for a 'regular income from the Tsar'. Fallmerayer firmly rejected the offer. A similar proposal had been previously made to the Munich philosopher, Franz von Baader, who had accepted it. 'It seems as though whole generations have been stricken by blindness,' wrote Leopold von Ranke from Berlin at this time. 'They are paving the way for the common enemy.' And Friedrich List repeatedly pointed out in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung from 1827 to 1846 that Russia was a menace, particularly in economic matters, because of the gigantic potential of the Russian empire. Who heeded him?
Russia's attitude, once she believed herself to be sufficiently powerful, became apparent after the middle of the century. Russian ambition was directed at Constantinople, which had been coveted by the Russians ever since the days of the Kiev State a thousand years before. Aware of his influence and power, Nicholas I was determined to solve the 'Eastern question', as it was called in diplomatic circles. He made up his mind to give the 'sick man of the Bosphorus' his death-blow.
With no declaration of war a Russian army suddenly crossed the Pruth on 2nd July 1853, and occupied Moldavia and Wallachia. The pretext was that Russia was holding this territory as a pledge for her just demands-- namely to ensure the protection of the orthodox Christians in Turkey. The Turks requested that the Russians retire, and when no notice was taken of this they too mobilized. On 1st November Nicholas declared war on Turkey.
England and France attempted to intervene. They proposed a cease-fire and urged the Tsar to evacuate the Danubian principalities and the Black Sea. The Russians refused. An alliance was made between the Western powers and Turkey, and on 25th March 1854 war was declared, 'to protect Europe from the dominance of power which violates treaties and defies the civilized world'. The conflict thus became a European one--the Crimean War.
Under the command of the French General Canrobert and the British General Lord Raglan, Allied troops, reinforced by a contingent of Sardinians, captured the Crimean fortress of Sevastopol, which had been bravely defended by the Russian general Edward von Totleben, a Baltic German by birth.
A few months before the fall of Sevastopol, Nicholas I died. His son and successor, Alexander II, was obliged to accept the conditions laid down in the Treaty of Paris of 1856. Russia ceded the estuary of the Danube to the principality of Moldavia. She also abandoned her claim to be the sole protector of the Christians in Turkey, and the Black Sea was neutralized.
For the rebuilding of Sevastopol the Russians managed to engage a foreign expert who carried out a technically brilliant job. To block the passage to enemy vessels during the siege, the Russians had sunk eighty ships in the harbour entrance, among them the Vladimir and the Turk. There appeared to be no other way of removing these obstacles save blowing them up. Nobody in Russia was capable of refloating the sunken vessels. It was again shown how well the Russian Embassies functioned as sources of information. The finest expert on the salvaging of ships at that time was soon found. The Imperial Ambassador in Washington, Baron von Stoeckl, engaged an American engineer, Colonel John E. Gowen, who, as von Stoeckl knew, had managed to refloat the American man-of-war Missouri, sunk at Gibraltar.
Gowen had huge caissons built at Sevastopol, ordered 700 h.p. steam engines and began with the raising of the smaller ships of 1,000 tons. While working on the 5,000-tonners, the chains broke again and again, but Gowen solved the problem. He ordered from the British firm of Brown, Lennox and Co. the strongest chains which had ever been made, each single link weighing a hundred pounds. Thus he managed to refloat even the largest ships.
A whole fleet of eighty ships was once more operational and a vast fortune had been recovered. But the Russians treated the American very badly. He fought in vain to get his well-earned pay.
'I have been waiting for years, hoping that the Russian government would pay me, and show some fairness in this matter. I have sacrificed six years of my life and my whole fortune,' Gowen wrote in a letter dated 14th March 1876, from New York. Apart from a small sum on account Gowen was never paid.
The Russian defeat as a result of the rapid and unexpected Western counter-attack had shown the true weakness of the vast state. The saying that Russia was a colossus with feet of clay became a European commonplace. It may have been true in the last century but it is now a dangerous illusion. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia has become a very great power, due largely to the enormous industrial and scientific assistance received from the West. The 'colossus with feet of clay' delusion had fatal results for Germany in the Second World War.
The Crimean War opened Russian eyes. The rapid defeat was a lesson. They realized how backward their enormous country still was, for they had seen how the well-equipped and properly trained divisions of Western Europe could check their plans of further conquest. But a modern army, as they also realized, requires modern industry.
While the Tsar had been having magnificent palaces built by foreign architects, Russian production lagged far behind that of other countries. In 1800 Russia had produced about the same quantity of pig iron as England. In 1850 twice as much was produced in Russia as at the earlier date, but English production had meanwhile increased tenfold. Russia had dropped to eighth place among the iron-producing countries of the world and by 1860 was lagging behind Austria and even the comparatively small state of Prussia.
Now that the reactionary Tsar Nicholas was dead, the Russians realized the true reasons for their defeat. The country was still backward technically, economically, and above all in the education of its vast population. It was impossible to create modern industries with illiterates and serfs in the factories, for such men were only capable of unskilled labour. As early as 1837, the owners of factories in the Moscow district had complained to the Minister of Finance that the serfs were almost useless for any sort of work which required brains and judgment. Under the new Tsar, Alexander II, the Slav empire therefore adopted a new policy. Reforms were introduced according to the old principle, 'Copy the West, and catch up!'
In 1861 serfdom was abolished. Numerous new colleges and schools were opened and the universities were granted their autonomy. Henceforth students and teachers were once again allowed to travel in foreign countries and thousands availed themselves of this.
The gates to the 'corrupt West' were opened wide. Tempting offers were made with a view to enticing foreign capital, foreign engineers and foreign manufacturers. The Eastern State was determined to make up for lost time.
Prince Kropotkin, in his recollections of his youth, describes how decent organization now led for progress in every field, and how the best instructors in Europe were brought to Russia. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which he published as an emigre in London in 1906, he gives us a very instructive account of that period of history.
His country was just awakening 'from her deep slumbers and the nightmare of the reign of Nicholas I', when the fifteen-year-old Kropotkin and his two brothers joined the Corps of Pages at St. Petersburg. This was in the year 1857. The first college for girls had also just been opened in the city on the Neva.
The government had engaged a Frenchman to take charge of the Corps of Pages, housed in a magnificent building designed by Rastrelli, and the director of studies was a highly qualified colonel of artillery, Winkler, whom Kropotkin describes as a 'brilliant mathematician and a liberal-minded man'. Instruction in science was given by Professor Roulier, who taught zoology for a time at Moscow University. Before Darwin's famous Origin of Species was published, the pupils of the St Petersburg Corps of Pages were told about the theory of evolution, or 'transformations' to use Kropotkin's word, by the French professor, Roulier. The teaching was extraordinarily up-to-date.
The latest theories from the West were included in the curriculum. The pupils were familiar with the ideas of the chemist, Karl Friedrich Gerhardt, and the physicist, Amedeo Avogadro. They learned about molecules and atoms. Kropotkin also mentions the great discovery which was to excite all scientists ten years later: the Periodic Law of chemical elements, a theory which was advanced simultaneously but independently by the Russian, Mendeleyev, and the German, Lothar Meyer. Kropotkin names these two scientists as the discoverers of the new Law, based on early work by the British scientist, Newlands. Today, however, Russian censorship has removed the name of Meyer, but they acknowledge the fact that Mendeleyev owed his skill in research to his years of study under two Heidelberg professors--Kirchhoff the physicist and Bunsen the chemist. Since the Soviet 'wave of inventors' set out to transform all the more important European discoveries into Russian ones, Russian textbooks and the lectures given by Soviet academicians mention only the name of Mendeleyev.
In the Corps of Pages, not only were there very efficient foreign teachers but the latest school-books from abroad were also used. 'Large numbers of books on special subjects were published at chat time, in Russian translations,' Kropotkin tells us. He describes with enthusiasm how they 'stocked the laboratory with the instruments recommended by the excellent textbook for beginners written by Stockhardt: Lessons in Chemistry, published in Chemnitz in 1846. With the help of this book we systematically carried out all our experiments . . .' Obviously an institution like the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg, which was reserved exclusively for four hundred high-ranking officers' sons, was far ahead of its time. Not until Sergei Yulievich, Count Witte (also of German origin, as his name suggests) was appointed Minister at the end of the century under the last Tsar, were technical schools built in large numbers.
Under the 'Reformer Tsar', Alexander II, Russia absorbed the technical and scientific progress of the West. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the seeds grew which European teachers and scholars had sown throughout a century and more. By 1900 a few Russians had already achieved international renown.
'By 1890, or thereabouts, Russian scientists were nearly on the same footing as chose in countries like Great Britain and Germany. Nearly but not quite--for Russia was technically and industrially a long way behind the Western nations,' writes Professor C. L. Boltz. And he adds: '...it is only in her contact with the West that Russia has ever produced scientists of note and scientific work chat is read outside her borders.'
Indeed, not one of the great scientists of the Slav empire could achieve anything without first studying at the famous European universities. There was not one who did not work, at least for a time, with one of the great Europeans.
The gifted mathematician, Sophia W. Kovalevskaya, the first woman professor of mathematics in the world, studied at Heidelberg, Berlin and Gottingen, and later lectured in Paris, Berlin and Stockholm. Her husband, Vladimir Kovalevsky, a very competent palaeontologist and popular lecturer, studied in London, Heidelberg, Jena and Munich. Her brother-in-law, Alexander, well known for his work on the natural history of fishes, studied at Heidelberg and Tubingen.
The chemist, Alexander M. Butlerov--a great favourite with the Soviets-- worked in 1857 with Karl Adolf Wurtz in Paris, before producing his theory of organic compounds. The biologist, Kliment A. Timiryasev, whose mother was English, and who is now cited by the Soviets as a brilliant example of Russian scholarship, lived for many years in Western Europe. It was there that he finished his education, which had begun in St Petersburg and was continued from 1866 to 1870 under French and English scholars--Boussingault and Berthelot in Paris and, like Mendeleyev, under Kirchhoff and Bunsen in Heidelberg. There he laid the foundation for his later work in spectral analysis, biophysics and biochemistry. Pyotr N. Lebedev, Russia's experimental physicist, worked in the West for nearly fifteen years. In 1886, at the age of twenty, he emigrated to Strasbourg, where he worked with the physicist, August Kundt. With his teacher, who had discovered a way of measuring aerial waves with 'dust particles', Lebedev went to Berlin University, where he attended Helmholtz's lectures on theoretical physics. When he returned to Russia in 1900 he published the result of his researches, which ranks among the classical works on physics, experiments which established a theory already advanced by Maxwell--that radiation pressure is exercised by light (and other) rays upon matter.
Nor would the achievements of the 'Father of Russian Physiology', Ivan M. Sechenov (1829-1905), have been possible without intellectual stimulus from the West and years of study in Europe. He had no sooner passed his examinations as a medical student at Moscow University than he went abroad. Johannes Muller, du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz and Bunsen were his teachers. For two years after the completion of his studies in Europe, Sechenov lectured in Moscow. Then he resumed to Paris. In the course of his research work there, while dissecting the brain of a frog, he discovered the nerve centre which controls the reflexes of the nervous system. These are named, after him, 'Sechenov cells'.
Sechenov's successor, Russia's greatest physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) also worked in Western Europe. From 1884 to 1886 he studied blood circulation at German universities, first in the laboratory of Karl Ludwig in Leipzig, later on with Rudolf Heidenhain in Breslau. His work on the physiology of the digestive system made Pavlov the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology. His great achievement was his theory of 'conditioned reflexes'. This theory was intended to explain not only nervous reactions but also the conscious behaviour of human beings. Four years after Pavlov, the name of a Russian again appeared on the list of candidates for the Nobel Prize. This time the supreme scientific accolade was conferred upon a biologist, Ilya Mechnikov, who had then been working in the West for twenty years. Mechnikov had left Russia in 1888, at the age of forty-three, and had joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he had been co-director since 1904.
'Scratch a distinguished Russian'--to misquote Mme. de Stael's famous epigram--'and you will find a product of the European universities.'
Yet there were ample facilities for research inside Russia. Ln the institutes and laboratories all the European technical literature as well as all the latest scientific apparatus were available to the students. True, 'the old Russia had practically no precision instrument industry, so essential for research work, and therefore had to import foreign apparatus,' as Dr. Alexander Papkov, who worked at the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Heidelberg, has said. 'Therefore many German instruments were in use in the physics laboratories of the universities, made by Max Kohl and Leybold, electrical measuring apparatus from Siemens-Halske, von Hartmann and von Braun, scales from Sartorius and Bunge, barometers from Fuess, microscopes from Zeiss, Leitz and Reichert, monochrometers from Hilger, etc.'
With Western-made instruments on their laboratory benches and Western technical books in their libraries, the Russians achieved a great deal, often after long years of study under foreign teachers. Some surpassed the average in their contribution to the vast accretion of scientific knowledge. But no Russian has as yet risen to those solitary heights where all new ideas and truly revolutionary concepts have their origin.
While the Russians, in close contact with the West and particularly with Germany and France, were producing a certain amount of high-class scientific work, it was left to the Europeans and Americans to pioneer a different field, and one which was to be of vital importance to the future of Russia, namely the exploration of the Arctic regions.
The fact that the Russian empire failed to produce those 'Columbuses' which Lomonossov had prophesied, and thus could not even explore the regions 'on their own doorstep', is a fact unknown to the Soviet people of today. As usual in this field, as in that of scientific invention, the achievements and discoveries of other nations are misrepresented as being Russian in origin. The true facts about this perilous geographical enterprise are shrouded in mystery or simply falsified.
The official records in the USSR state that the 'first and most honoured place in the geographical exploration of the Arctic regions is held by Russian explorers'. Thus is it presented to the millions by Spirin in his book, The Conquest of the North Pole. 'For more than three hundred years men had been fascinated by the mysterious "top of the world". The foreign expeditions, however, were not interested in carrying out scientific exploration of the central Polar region. Such explorers were motivated by personal ambition and the hope of financial gain. The northern sea route was discovered and opened to navigation through the efforts of Soviet patriots.
The exact opposite is true. Western Europeans and Americans found the northern passage, and 'Russian' contributions to the exploration of the high latitudes were made without exception by non-Russians, chiefly by Baltic Germans who provided the Eastern Empire with so many of its scholars, officers and officials.
In the nineteenth century, Baron von Wrangel, a lieutenant in the Russian Navy, initiated the exploration of the Siberian coast of the Arctic Ocean. Between 1820 and 1824 he made three expeditions, with sledges drawn by huskies, across the ice-packs of the Polar Sea as far as latitude 72N, accompanied by a Frenchman, P. T. Anjou. They were looking for the mythical North Polar continent. On one occasion he sighted for the first time the island which bears his name. On these dangerous expeditions he covered some three and a half thousand miles, once travelling fifteen hundred miles in seventy-eight days. He got as far east as the Gulf of Kolyuchin. Wrangel was later promoted Admiral and Governor-General of 'Russian-America', i.e. Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1876 against Wrangel's own bitter opposition.
In addition to Wrangel there were other 'Russian' explorers in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Otto von Kotzebue, Feodor Count Lutke, Adam Johann von Krusenstern, G. von Maydell and Alexander Theodor von Middendorf.
In August 1849 a further expedition was made to the most distant part of the Arctic Ocean, where Wrangel had had such success. A British captain, Henry Kellett, sailing northwards from the Bering Straits, sighted an island which he called Herald Island after the name of his ship. To the west of this island he saw land, which he thought--as had Wrangel--must be part of the Arctic continent. An American, the whale-hunter Long, reached this place in 1867. Using astronomical calculations he established the location of its western coast, wrote a detailed description of its southern parts, and entered it on the chart under the name of the well-known explorer as 'Wrangel Land'. In the summer of 1881 one of Long's countrymen, Captain C. Hooper, landed there and annexed the territory for the United States under the name of Columbia. In the same year Captain R. Berry, of the United States Navy, discovered that Wrangel Land was an island. Thirty years after its annexation by America, in 1911, the Russians built a lighthouse on it. In 1921 Canadians arrived there, looking for a flying route over the Pole. They were followed in 1923 by a group of Eskimos, led by a trapper from Alaska. This did not prevent the Soviets, in the summer of 1924, from deporting all the inhabitants of Wrangel Island, using icebreakers for the purpose. The flag with the Soviet star was hoisted, and the island declared Russian territory. In 1926 the Soviets colonized the island. A party of six Russians, with fifty-four Eskimos and Chuktas, disembarked there.
In 1872 an Austrian expedition sailed from Bremerhaven on board the Tegetthoff, and provided the East with yet another 'Russian island'. Their ship attempted to force a passage through the ice to the east of Spitzbergen, but was caught in drifting ice north of Novaya Zemlya at 7630', and drifted to 80 latitude, where one whole year after land was sighted. Using dogs and sledges, the leaders of the expedition, Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht, explored the rocky, ice-covered coasts of this group of islands, which they called Franz Josef Land. Payer reached a point 825'N. These islands were later occupied by the Soviets, and renamed Lomonossov Land. It became the site of the most important Arctic airfield for Russian transport flights. But the greatest problem confronting Russia in the Arctic regions was the North-East Passage, that 'northern sea route' for which the Dane, Vitus Bering, had searched in vain.
From 1870 onwards this search drew closer to its objective, though this was not due to any Russian explorer. In 1870, a Norwegian, Captain Johannesen, circumnavigated the island of Novaya Zemlya, and in 1874 an Englishman, Wiggins, sailed through the Kara Sea as far as the mouth of the Yenisei. In the following year a Swede, Erik Nordenskjold, in his sail-boat Proven, also went from the Kara Sea to the Yenisei. He repeated this journey in 1876 in the steamship Ymer, and sailed up the river to 71, thus opening the Yenisei to shipping. Then Nordenskjold set out on his last expedition.
With two ships, the Vega and the Lena, he sailed through the Kara Sea to the Yenisei in July and August of 1878 and thence, without trouble, to Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of Asia, where he made landfall on 19th August. Nine days later both ships reaches the mouth of the Lena. Here the Lena separated from the Vega and steamed up-river to Yakutsk. Thus the Lena River was also opened to shipping. At the end of September, when only one hundred and twenty miles from the Bering Straits and the Pacific, the Vega was caught in the ice. During the next ten winter months Nordensklold and his colleagues carried out extensive research, paying particular attention to the almost unknown tribe of the Chukta.
By the middle of July 1879, the sea route was free of ice, and the Vega, braving the constant danger of being crushed by pack-ice, reached the Bering Straits in two days, arriving there on 20th July 1879. The North-East Passage had been found.
During the years that followed, the history of Arctic exploration contains many achievements by men of all the European nations and of the United States, but no Russian national is numbered among them.
In the same year of 1879, while Nordenskjold was discovering the northern sea route, the first International Polar Conference met at Hamburg. This was due to the Austrian Weyprecht, and its work was continued by the International Polar Commission, presided over by Georg Neumayer, head of the German Marine Observatory. A third conference was held in St. Petersburg in 1881. The Swiss meteorologist, Henrich Wild, now presided. He had been appointed head of the Russian Central Physical Observatory in St. Petersburg, and had been carrying out a total reorganization of the Russian meteorological service since 1868; he had founded the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory at Pavlovsk in 1876. At this 1881 conference a programme was drawn up for the International Polar Year of 1882-83. Russia was to be responsible for two of the twelve scientific stations in the Arctic region. The head of one of these was a lieutenant with the not very Russian name of Jurgens.
Ten years later the long series of German, Austrian and English expeditions culminated in the most daring one of all. In the years 1893-96, Fridtjof Nansen in the Fram drifted westwards in the pack-ice. From the newly discovered Siberian islands the ship drifted past the Pole to 85N. With his companion, Johansen, Nansen reached 8613'6", where all further progress became impossible owing to impenetrable ice barriers. This expedition confirmed the fact that the area immediately surrounding the North Pole was deep ocean, covered by a layer of ice only ten or twelve feet thick. Nansen's voyage in the Fram gave a strong new impetus to further Arctic exploration, and a Russian expedition was organized, the so-called Murman Expedition. It had a very obvious practical purpose--to investigate the possibilities of fishing and seal-hunting in the Bering Sea, using Kola Bay as a base. Its leader was a Baltic German, Leonid Breitfuss, one of the greatest experts on Arctic conditions.
That was all Russia could achieve, but the West went on Numerous expeditions followed one another, notably those of the American, Jackson (1888, 1893, 1894-97), of the Swede, Andree, whose baboon flight to the Pole ended in disaster in 1897, of the Italian, Cagni (1899-1900), of the Norwegian, Amundsen, who traversed the North-West Passage in the years 1903 to 1910, and of the American, Wellman, who tried to reach the Pole by airship in 1906, 1907 and 1909. The years 1908 and 1909 brought the climax of all these courageous Western European enterprises, when two Americans, Frederick Cook (possibly) and Robert E. Peary (certainly), set foot on the Pole.
In 1904 the Russo-Japanese War brought home to the Tsar the imperative necessity of opening a sea route to the Far East, out of reach of any enemy. The Russians now recalled that the Siberian North-East Passage provided such a natural sea route on their very doorstep. Professor Breitfuss, the expert on Arctic questions, gave a lecture to a group of scientists and naval officers at the Imperial Navigation Society, which was enthusiastically received. Looking far ahead, Breitfuss produced so extensive a programme that to this day the Soviet government has been unable to carry it out in full. Breitfuss went into great detail, touching on such matters as the establishment of polar stations and a shuttle service of ice-breakers for convoys. He intended to render the Siberian rivers, Ob and Yenisei, navigable. He also planned to build a canal across the Chelyuskin Peninsula, making use of the existing rivers. Thus ships would be protected from the danger of ice. As a preliminary to all military and economic plans for the North-East Passage, Breitfuss presupposed thorough scientific exploration of the coastal regions.
The Tsar's government immediately began to put Breitfuss's plans into effect. Sixteen polar stations were set up for systematic meteorological observations. Two new ice-breakers were ordered. Since 1899 this vast country had only one such vessel at its disposal, the Yermak. On Breitfuss's advice, an 'Expedition for hydrographic research in the Arctic Ocean' set sail with the two new ice-breakers. In 1914 the Permanent Polar Commission at the St. Petersburg Academy took over the planning. Breitfuss set up the first wireless stations, two on Novaya Zemlya, one on the Yamal Peninsula and one on Dickson Island.
Thanks to Professor Breitfuss, the Soviet government later had at their disposal not only several wireless and meteorological stations and icebreakers, but also many trained scientists and research workers and, furthermore, a schedule planned for many years ahead. The Soviets also profited by the systematic exploration of the Arctic regions which was continued by men from all civilized countries, once 'the rush to the Pole' had ended. When we hear of Lenin's 'brilliant' idea of opening up the North-East Passage, we might recall that he derived this idea from Leonid Breitfuss.
'Till' the age of fifteen, I worked as a shepherd boy,' Khrushchev told an American audience in Los Angeles on 19th September 1959. 'Then I worked in a factory owned by a German, after that in a coal mine that was the property of a Frenchman, and in a chemical factory belonging to Belgians.'
This list of Khrushchev's employers gives a good insight into the development process which had begun long before the turn of the century. The rapid industrialization of the country was mostly carried out by Western Europeans. After the Crimean War, according to Schwartz, 'a consistent policy of encouraging and facilitating foreign capital investment, the import of technicians and technology from abroad, brought rich returns'.
Up to the First World War the West built, for the Tsar, all those economic and industrial bases which enabled the Soviets to carry out their policy of 'socialist development', after having seized, without compensation, the billions invested in Russia by the foreigners.
Economic development of the vast country was unthinkable without modern means of communication. Russia had almost no good roads, and in the year 1855 the total railway track was a mere 646 miles. It was therefore of vital importance to build more railways; there was at that time not so much as a link between Moscow and the south.
But where was the money to be found for this? After the Crimean War Russian finances were in a chaotic state. It was now that foreign countries came to the rescue, particularly France. A 'Russian Main Railway Company' was founded in 1857, for which the Paris firm, Credit Mobilier Pereyre Freres, provided the greater part of the capital. As a result work could be started on two and a half thousand miles of new track.
'The government had realized the inadequacy and inefficiency of the nation's industrialists and therefore preferred to leave the construction and management of the railways to Western Europeans who had gained experience in building thousands of miles of track,' a Russian, A. A. Golovachov, wrote at the time. 'So the actual management of the Company was centralized in a committee which operated in Paris. To administer the railways a board with twenty members was set up in Russia, only half of whom were Russian subjects. A French engineer named Collinonne was appointed Director General. All the important posts--and many minor ones--were given to French technicians and engineers, who received enormous salaries.'
In 1901, when the Imperial Government had taken over most of the railways from the private companies and nationalized them, the extent of foreign loans used for the construction of railways amounted to 72 per cent of the national external debt--213m., or $1,039m.
The whole Russian railway network cost 6-2 billion roubles (656m., or 3.2 billion dollars at the value of the times), the Minister, Count Witte, announced. One-third of this enormous sum was raised in Western countries.
New impetus was also given to the mining and metallurgical industries as more and more foreign contractors poured into the country. In southern Russia an important new industrial centre developed when large coal deposits were found in the Donets Basin and iron ore was discovered in the Central Ukraine, near Krivoy Rog.
For seventy years, from 1797 to I 869, the Russian government had totally failed to exploit even the rich Donets Basin, where the coal deposits extended over an area of nearly 4,000 square miles and the iron ore contained 67 per cent pure iron. Here too it was all left to the ability and initiative of Western Europeans.
In the north, Germans and Dutch, and in Russian Poland Germans, laid the foundations of a heavily capitalized iron industry. The English, and later the French and Belgians, did the same in the south on an even larger scale.
In most countries one man wins the reputation of 'king' in each major industry. The 'iron king' in Russia was an English entrepreneur, John Hughes.
'The Hughes factories', we read in a letter of acknowledgment from the Russian government, 'were the first organizations in South Russia to undertake coal mining and metallurgy, and became firmly established at once. The credit belongs to Hughes who started the first iron foundry in South Russia using mineral fuel, where he introduced the manufacture of rails. He had no fear of the formidable, and often unexpected, obstacles which he encountered. For example, he had to import all his tools and equipment from England, via the port of Taganrog, over hundreds of miles of bad roads. He had to engage Russian workmen, as well as those who came from England, and to provide dwellings for them in the desolate and uninhabited steppes. But Hughes mastered all these problems, and thus inaugurated the production of railway tracks in the South of the Empire, using exclusively locally-produced raw materials.'
The significance of Hughes's achievements is apparent when it is recalled that up to 1870 all equipment for the Russian railways had been imported--duty-free--from foreign countries.
In the period 1836-65 deliveries from abroad amounted to 352,000 tons of rails, 485 locomotives, 1,140 passenger carriages and 4,788 goods wagons. Only when the men from the West had done their work in South Russia were the Russians able to use their own iron.
The flourishing town of Yuzovka is a memorial to the great English industrialist. Thanks to him the districts of 'Donbas' and of Krivoy Rog were linked industrially after 1870, and became a vastly important coal, iron- and steel-producing region. His name has been eliminated. Yuzovka (Hughesovka) has been renamed Stalino.
After Hughes, ironworks seemed to 'shoot up like mushrooms' in the south, according to Tugan-Baranovsky. However, of the seventeen steel mills in this district at the turn of the century, only two were genuinely Russian factories. The others belonged to the foreigners--English, French or Belgians--or had been built by foreigners in co-operation with Russians.
Not content with obliterating the Western past by renaming Yuzovka Stalino, the Soviets have also suppressed the record of what the foreigners achieved in South Russia. The figures are impressive:
In the years 1886-98, which was the period of the revolutionary transformation in South Russia, iron production increased fourfold. It rose from 1,191 million lb. in 1886 to 4,148 million lb. in 1898, an increase unequalled by any other country in so short a time. The iron industry in South Russia increased its production figures in the years 1875-98 by 9,448 per cent. Western initiative in Russia led to an increase in productivity far surpassing anything that the Soviets had ever achieved.
In addition to their industrial revolution, the social and political innovations introduced by the foreigners were of great importance.
'During our journey through South Russia,' B. Brandt, a knowledgeable witness, wrote in 1900 from St Petersburg, 'we got the impression that in the coal-mines belonging to the foreigners, the Russian workmen were much better paid (with the exception of one or two of the older factories) and that the welfare--both mental and physical--of the workers was better cared for than in the Russian concerns, where the workers still lived in the most miserable and primitive conditions.'
Describing workmen's dwellings in the industrial districts of South Russia, Brandt says: 'An official in St Petersburg might well envy the workmen their houses provided by the foreign factories.'
Where industry was in Russian hands, as in Moscow and the north, the workers still lived in great gloomy barracks, even after 1900, while the non-Russian factory owners in Poland, South Russia and elsewhere provided their men with bright, clean houses each of two rooms, parlour, kitchen, cellar and lavatory, at a negligible rent of two to four roubles per month, or sometimes even rent-free. The 'capitalists from the corrupt West' looked after their workers in other ways as well. Schools and hospitals were built, and health-insurance and pension schemes introduced.
The miserable barracks surrounding the Russian factories in the north became the forcing-beds of revolutionary anger. The Revolution was to break out in the north, not in South Russia where Western Europeans had created decent living and working conditions.
Russia also owed to the West the exploitation of its most valuable raw material: oil.
Some time after 1870, huge wooden structures began to rise towards the sky where the spurs of the Caucasus mountains fall away to the Caspian Sea. Where Marco Polo en route to China had seen the field of 'flames which are never quenched', at Baku, a group of Swedes directed and administered the first exploitation of the oilfields. The Nobel brothers, and particularly Ludwig, produced capital, machines and technicians. They sank borings and brought into being the Baku oilfields, then the most modern in the entire world. The shores of the Caspian almost belonged to the 'Nobel Brothers Naphtha Company'.
Before the arrival of the Nobel brothers, conditions were extremely backward on the Apsheron peninsula. All the oil wells combined had a yearly output of a mere eight thousand tons of petroleum, which was transported in the most primitive Asiatic manner, using skin bags or wooden barrels, loaded on a two-wheeled cart or arba.
All this was changed by the Nobel brothers, and Alexander II sent Professor Mendeleyev to America in 1876 to 'collect ideas' concerning the vast oilfields of Pennsylvania which had been producing since 1859. The Nobels built the first pipeline on Russian soil, a pipe some seven miles long.
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prize, developed a new method for the continuous distillation of oil. His brothers, Robert and Ludwig, had iron 'tanker wagons' built for transport of the oil by rail, and the first iron-built tanker, the Zoroaster, for sea-borne transport.
In 1886 another very large foreign company was floated, under the auspices of the Paris banking house of Rothschild, 'The Caspian Black Sea Industrial and Trading Company'. Just as naphtha production had become a major technical industry thanks to Nobel, so the Russian naphtha industry was now developed into an international export trade by Rothschild's. Dr. Ischchanian says: 'A historian, writing of production and trade development within the oil industry on the Apsheron peninsula, can correctly describe these two European companies as the "apostles of the Russian naphtha industry".'
There is overwhelming statistical evidence of what the foreigners achieved here. In 1860 the United States produced 70,000 tons of petroleum, the Russians a mere 1,300 tons; twenty-five years later the total production of the United States was 3.12 million tons, while that of Russia was already 2 million tons and in 1901 Russian production was 12.17 million tons, which exceeded the American total of 9.92 million tons. Russia, in fact, had jumped to first place among the oil-producing countries of the world.
Accepting in good faith the 'guarantees' given by the Russian government, Western Europe now invested more and more capital in the country. In 1887 France raised a sum of 500 million francs for Russia, and further large loans followed in 1889 and 1891, liberally subscribed to by the French public.
Millions were also invested by Belgium, England and Germany. In 1900 half of the enormous capital of all the Russian joint stock companies came from Europe, a fortune which the Soviets wiped out with one stroke of the pen in 1917.
Thanks to assistance from the West, Russia was able to contemplate another great project, the linking of the vast, trackless wastes of Siberia with European Russia by means of a railway running across the whole country as far as the Pacific. On 17th March 1891, Alexander III ordered that this gigantic enterprise be begun. In May the Crown Prince, who was later to be the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, presided at the ceremonial inauguration of the project, in distant Vladivostok, the designated terminus of the railway.
In this same year of 1891 a terrible disaster occurred. St. Petersburg informed the world that twenty million people were threatened with famine. The previous year's harvest had been exported, down to the last sack. The granaries of this huge agricultural country--where 85 per cent of the population worked the land--were completely bare.
In order to raise the capital needed for the ever-growing imports of machinery and technical equipment, and to pay the interest on previous loans, Russia had drastically increased the taxation levels. The peasants were being forced to hand over more and more of their crops' which Russia then dumped into the world market. 'We may be hungry but we must export,' were the words of the Minister of Finance, Vyshnegradsky, half a century before Stalin let the Ukrainian people starve while exporting grain to buy American machines. Then, as later under the Soviets, Russia could rely on help and salvation from the West, whenever a cruel and inhuman policy resulted in disaster. Only a few weeks after the famine broke out, help from the West was on the way. From all Europe gifts of food and money poured in, and the United States sent shipload after shipload of flour to the Russian ports.
Massive assistance from the West was apparent everywhere in Russia at the end of the century. Harry Schwartz has provided some statistics:
'The average annual rate of growth of industrial output in Russia between 1885 and 1889, and again between 1907 and 1913, substantially exceeded the corresponding rates of growth during the same period in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. In roughly two out of every three years between 1868 and 1919, 1,000 kilometres or more of railroad lines were completed: in 1899, 5,257 kilometres; in 1900 and 1901, over 3,000 kilometres each year; in 1908, 8,390 kilometres were finished.'
By the outbreak of the First World War, Western Russia was covered with a relatively dense network of railways, which served the interior, handled foreign trade, and last but not least was of great strategic value. The Trans-Siberian Railway was also completed. 'Rapid development was a characteristic feature of the whole period from 1861 to 1914.'
Travellers who visited Russia at the turn of the century were astonished at the progress they saw on every side.
'In the twenty years that have passed since last I travelled along the Volga, much has changed,' Baron Korff wrote in 1900. 'Villages that then consisted of a few cabins are now towns with 40,000 inhabitants and well-paved streets. National costumes have been replaced by Russian workmen's clothes. There is electric light everywhere....'
'It is quite incredible,' Korff tells us, 'to what extent traffic and trade have developed upon the Volga. The river boats are huge, with two or three decks, like Mississippi steamers. Samara, Kasan and Nijni-Novgorod resemble the port of Hamburg.'
The Baedeker of the period recommends the 'A. A. Sevecke Steamship Company' for trips down the Volga and also the 'Kavkas and Merkur Company', remarking: 'The steamers of these two companies, equipped in the American fashion, are by far the best and the most comfortable.'
Korff tells us much about the tremendous rate of progress throughout the vast empire of the Tsar. He saw 'English agricultural machinery on many of the railway stations.' He watched a regiment of soldiers firing on the range, 'the targets being manufactured by Gustav Kuhn of Ruppin.' He noticed that the rifles of the Russian infantry were sometimes the products of Tula, Isborsk and Okhotsk, but that many were from Krupps. He observed 'a dozen Bechstein pianos, or a complete set of apothecary's instruments, or perhaps the contents of a music shop', being loaded on to Volga ships.
Korff also visited Baku: 'Here one can smell the petroleum. From far away one sees a forest of 80 ft. wooden towers which hold the drills for boring oil wells. Twenty thousand metal tanks or wagons transport the oil to the huge reservoirs.... The crude petroleum is purified in the refineries and becomes petrol, benzine, kerosene, fuel oil, machine oil, etc. The Nobel Company produces daily 818.5 tons of kerosene and dispatches three trainloads per day, each of thirty 10-ton tank wagons. Twenty of Nobel's ships ply the Caspian Sea, twelve sail up the Volga.... The existing wells produce more petroleum than can be used. Over one and a half million tons are produced, refined and sold.... Three-quarters of all petroleum production is in the hands of Nobel. '
At that time oil and its by-products were among the most important exports. In 1900 oil brought in 46 million roubles of foreign currency, and was second only to wheat, which brought in more than double, 104 million roubles. The import figures of 1900 show machinery as coming first, to a value of 76.703 million roubles. 'Certain classes of heavy machinery, such as Russia could not yet construct, were admitted on easy terms,' says Bernard Pares; 'also agricultural implements.' Henry A. Wallace writes: 'In 1901 an American made a study of how farm machinery manufactured in the United States was being used in Russian agriculture. He reported seeing in Siberia millions of dollars' worth of American-made machinery.' Many of these were probably still in use in 1920 when, under the Soviets, the latest combine harvesters from the United States were being imported. The increasing number of workers reflected the tremendous growth of mining and industry. In 1860 they numbered 800,000 but by 1913 there were three million--an increase of nearly 400 per cent. Furthermore, in 1910 there were one million men in the Russian building trade, and the railways employed 400,000 men by 1900. 'In total, therefore, over 4,500,000 Russians were engaged in the major branches of the non-agricultural economy before World War I' (Schwartz).
The future ideology of the Slav State was born in the West during the nineteenth century. German philosophers drafted the 'World Programme', that is still inscribed upon the banners of the Soviet Union. For, as everyone knows, the progenitors of Communism, men still worshipped by the Bolsheviks, were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Despite the great numerical increase of the 'industrial proletariat' in Russia during the second half of the last century, the importation of Western ideologies intended for consumption by this proletariat was not particularly successful at first. The first volume of Marx's Das Kapital was translated into Russian a year after its original publication in German. This translation, the first into a foreign language, was done by Mikhail Bakunin, 'the professional revolutionary', in 1868. He had listened to Schelling at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1841, and had studied Hegel's philosophy. Karl Marx, with whom Bakunin was on friendly terms at the time, may have been rather astonished that his book was translated first into Russian. He had certainly not had the Slav State in mind when he wrote it, and doubtless recalled the words of his teacher, Hegel, who had said about Russia: 'These great masses are irrelevant to the problem, in that they have not yet emerged as an independent force in the formation of ideas.'
A group of Russians wished to know Marx's own views on Russia, for they were quite unable to apply to their own country the Marxist concept of the transition from feudalism, through capitalism, to socialism. The Slav Empire in the nineteenth century had a capitalist economy far less developed than in any West European country; and furthermore a German by the name of August Baron von Haxthausen had described the common ownership of the land (the mir system, peculiar to the Russian peasants) as unique. In view of these two factors peculiar to Russia, the lack of a capitalism ripe for 'expropriation' and the fact that communal property already existed, the Marxist theory could obviously be of no practical interest to Russia.
A socialist, Vera Sassulich, asked Marx for his solution to this problem. Marx found it a difficult question. After five false starts, he wrote: 'The inevitability of this transition [from capitalism to socialism] is limited to the countries of western Europe.'
This was a negative reply. The fact that his doctrine has nevertheless conquered the East so totally is explained by the Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyayev, as follows: 'It appeals to the Russian desire for a Messiah, for it is a sort of secular religion.'
Das Kapital in the Russian edition was not widely read in the Tsar's empire. Because of the strict censorship it remained known only to a very small circle within the Russian intelligentsia.
Nevertheless it was the West which created and fostered the movement that later raised the Bolsheviks to power. Russian Marxism was born outside Russia, in a foreign country. At Geneva, in a liberal and a democratic country, in the year 1883, Georgi Plekhanov--together with other Russian emigrants such as Pavel Axelrod, Vera Sassulich and L. G. Deutsch--was allowed freely to found the first Russian Socialist Party. He was soon giving instruction to his Russian compatriots, who found their way to Switzerland in ever-increasing numbers. Inspired by Plekhanov, the first propagandists for Marxist socialism returned to Russia.
It was not until 1885 that a Social-Democratic Party was founded in Russia, in St Petersburg. It remained largely inactive until 1890. Then the influence of Lenin began to make itself felt. In 1895 he organized the 'League for the Liberation of the Working Class' in St. Petersburg. But progress was still very slow. Only nine Russians attended the first Socialist Congress in 1896. In 1898 the first Party Congress of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party was held at Minsk, a very modest affair. The second congress of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Russia was held in London in the year 1903. At this congress Lenin and his supporters won the majority, and from that moment they called themselves 'Bolsheviks', which simply means 'the majority'. This congress was to have incalculable effects in the future. Fourteen years later the Germans transported Lenin and several of his supporters from Switzerland to Finland at Germany's expense, and thus the Bolshevik world reformers finally entered the Empire of the Tsar.
In 1900, when Lenin published in Munich the first number of his illegal propagandist newspaper, Iskra ('The Spark'), the West was pouring money and talent into Russia.
On 1st January 1900, 265 foreign joint stock companies were functioning in Russia, 162 Belgian, 54 French, 30 German and 19 English. A further 40 more were registered in the same year, 25 Belgian, 6 English, 4 French, 3 German, one Swiss and one Swedish.
Foreign capital investments and financial assets in Russia, later expropriated by the Soviets, amounted to the enormous sum of 7I4,000,000,000, or 3,480 billion dollars.
From 1907 to 1913 the increase in the industrial productivity rate in Russia exceeded that of the United States, England or Germany. At that time 2,049,871 Europeans, among them 1,782,946 Germans and 266,450 Swedes to name only the two largest groups--lived and worked in the Slav state.
'The Russian revolution of 1917,' Schwartz says, 'came not at the end of a long period of stagnation and decay, but rather after more than a half-century of the most rapid and comprehensive economic progress'--progress for which the West alone had provided the whole driving force.
Part Two--From Lenin to Gagarin
Chapter 10. Germany Finances Lenin
The creation and development of the first Russian state, the kingdom of Kiev, was due to foreign help on the part of the Swedish Goths. It was swept away by the Mongolian invasion.
Five hundred years later Russia rose again, and again thanks to help of every sort from every Western land. As a result it proved possible to create, within a period of some four hundred years, a mighty Slav empire out of a Muscovy hitherto almost unknown to Europe. The revolution of 1917 marked the end of this phase.
In retrospect, these first two periods of Russian development appear mere dress-rehearsals for what started forty years ago.
For foreign, that is to say, Western, help has provided the basis for the third upsurge of power in the East--the might of the USSR. It has enabled them to create the second strongest industrial potential in the world.
The history of the USSR provides a unique example of the rise and development of a great power. It took its declared mortal enemy as a model, and legally or illegally adopted all the technical, industrial and scientific achievements from the whole of Western Europe and America for its own use, claiming them as its own.
The documents of the German Foreign Office, only recently published, reveal in letters and memoranda, papers and receipts the first squalid financial transactions. Help was given from abroad towards the birth of a new Eastern power. Lenin was 'imported' into Russia, and the Bolshevik revolution was financed by Imperial Germany.
In January 1915 the German Ambassador in Copenhagen, Ulrich Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, reported to the Foreign Office in Berlin that he was in contact with a 'Russian expert' by the name of Dr Parvus. Parvus was, in fact, a Russian socialist called Alexander Helphand, one of the leaders of the 1905 Revolution. The Ambassador requested the appropriate authorities to listen to Parvus's proposals.
Shortly afterwards Parvus, or Helphand, presented Berlin with confidential memorandum on the tense situation in Russia, and recommended that financial support be given to the Bolsheviks in Switzerland--that is to say, Lenin and his circle of emigres--and that contact be established with the revolutionary groups active in Petrograd and in the Ukrainian towns.
In the strictest secrecy feelers were put out, and the first moves made.
In August 1915 Brockdorff-Rantzau was able to report to Berlin that 'Dr. P's organization' was functioning. This was the Research Institute for the Study of Russo-German Industrial Problems, a cover organization set up by Parvus in Copenhagen. Parvus had eight men working for him in Copenhagen, and ten in Russia. 'Up to now our security has been so good that not one of the men in the organization has any idea that our Government is behind it all. Parvus has heard that Lenin wishes to travel from Switzerland to Stockholm. He is unable to do so, however, because Lenin has no money.'
A few months later Brockdorff-Rantzau reported that according to Parvus's estimates the cost of financing a 'total revolution in Russia' would amount to twenty million roubles. And on 29th December 1915 Parvus signed the following receipt: 'Received from the German Ambassador in Copenhagen the sum of one million roubles in notes, for the purpose of promoting the revolutionary movement in Russia.'
Meanwhile the German legation in Berne had made contact with the Bolsheviks in Switzerland with the intention of approaching Lenin. The Secretary of the Swiss Social Democrat Party, Fritz Platten, was in Lenin's confidence, and also in that of the German Minister, von Romberg. Lenin himself took great care to avoid all direct contact with the Germans. Platten arranged the financing of Lenin's party by Imperial Germany. Later he became a declared Bolshevik. He died in a slave labour camp near Archangel in 1939.
On 30th April 1917 Romberg sent a report to the Foreign Office in Berlin of a discussion with Fritz Platten. 'From what Platten tells me it is clear that the emigres have very little money for propaganda, while their enemies naturally have unlimited means. The funds collected for the emigres are mostly in the hands of socialist patriots. I am taking steps to arrange that a contact man solve the very ticklish question of how to give them money in such a way that they will not be offended....' One day Lenin, through his contact man, requested of the German legation that he be permitted to travel through Germany to Sweden, with ultimate destination Russia. Permission was given by the German government and the Army High Command. The Army High Command only stipulated that the journey must be made in a special train with reliable guards. The Bolsheviks themselves had to promise not to reveal their names, nor give their opinions on the progress of the war, nor indeed talk to any Germans during the transit.
Despite all precautions the plan was not kept quite secret. As the special train pulled out of Zurich station, a number of socialists shouted after Lenin, 'German spies! Paid agents of the Kaiser!' Guarded by an army officer and with curtains drawn, the train carrying Lenin and thirty-three other Russians passed through Germany to Sweden.
In Stockholm Lenin deliberately gave the impression that he and his group were without funds. He applied to the Emigres' Committee for financial assistance. He was given the amount he asked for.
Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 16th April 1917, exactly one month after the revolutionaries had dethroned the Tsar.
With this 'importation' of Lenin an unhealthy seed was planted whose growth no man could then foresee. The vast sums of money placed at his disposal by the German government were of decisive importance. When Lenin first set foot once again on Russian soil, in April of 1917, his small party played only a minor role on the periphery of events. By the end of that year the German Foreign Office had paid him--through various secret channels--at least twenty-two million marks. For it was believed in Berlin that only the Bolsheviks could arrange a separate peace.
Thanks to German money, within a few weeks Pravda was appearing in editions of 300,000 copies per day, and Bolshevik newspapers were springing up in the provinces like mushrooms after rain. Lenin was thus in a position to build a large and effective propaganda machine, and his Bolsheviks were enabled to act on a great scale. With the dictatorship of the proletariat and the immediate realization of socialism as his slogans, Lenin overthrew the democratic regime of his country so recently freed from the Tsars. In November of that same year, Bolshevism was an accomplished fact.
From this period dates the famous telegram which the German Foreign Secretary, Richard von Kuhlmann, sent to Kaiser Wilhelm II: 'Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the chain of our enemies. Our task was to further weaken this link and, if possible, to break it..This was the object of the revolutionary activity organized by us behind the enemy lines: the promoting of separatist tendencies, and the support of Bolshevism. Only when the Bolsheviks had received money from us were they able to create their main mouthpiece, Pravda, to produce an effective propaganda, and significantly to extend the originally narrow bases of their party. The Bolsheviks are now in power. But how long they will remain in power no man can predict.... It is in our interest to exploit their period of power, which may be brief, by arranging a cease-fire, and, if possible, a peace treaty . . . There can be no question of supporting the Bolsheviks in the future....'
Lenin, urgency in need of a respite, signed a peace treaty with Germany, despite Ludendorff's harsh terms, on 3rd March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk. The idea behind the signing of the treaty which made it tolerable to the Soviets was the firm conviction that it was a purely temporary measure. The men who had so recently moved into the Kremlin were convinced that Marx and Engels had prophesied correctly, and that the 'proletarian masses' in the great German industrial centres were ripe for revolution and would, in the immediate future, become the first true representatives of the Communist world revolution. The revolution could only really succeed in Germany. Despite all the industrialization of the last fifty years, Russia remained predominantly agricultural. It was Germany chat counted. Revolutionary agitation on a large scale began in Germany, with Russian support.
For the German government the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk meant that the financial support given to Bolshevik leaders and Lenin's 'importation' were justified. 'The Bolsheviks have fulfilled their obligations to Imperial Germany.' This was the view taken by the German Social Democrat, Eduard Bernstein.
But this was not the end of the story. Dispatches from the new German Ambassador in Moscow, where the Soviet government had moved in 1918, described the desperate plight of the Bolsheviks. Count Mirbach believed that it was still imperative to support the Bolsheviks if the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were to remain valid.
'It is not in our interests,' Secretary of State von Kuhlmann informed him, 'to support any group of monarchists who would only reunite Russia. On the contrary, we must try to prevent, as far as possible, any reconstitution of Russia. Therefore we must support the parties of the extreme Left.'
Trotsky watched every move of the German Embassy officials in Moscow, for he feared lest they might also be in touch with the opposition. But the German government did not favour the overthrow of the Bolsheviks. In June, 'because of strong competition on the part of the Allies', Mirbach asked for the sum of three million marks per month earmarked for continued support of the Bolshevik propaganda apparatus. In the same month he was given a fund of some forty million marks to be used in Russia. Four weeks later he was assassinated, the murderer being a left-wing anti-Bolshevik socialist.
What no member of the Imperial German Government then realized was that some of this German money was already secretly coming home, that it was being used to finance revolution inside Germany. Moscow foresaw a Communist Germany as her ally, and acted accordingly. The men in the Kremlin prepared for a general strike in Germany, for street fighting, and for civil war. On Soviet maps, Germany was already divided into six military districts. Hundreds of Red Army officers were secretly smuggled across the borders, as were countless Soviet agents and agitators, and specialists in the art of civil war. Germany collapsed in November 1918, 1919 was to be the year of destiny.
It was no mere chance that at this time German was the language of international communism. And Russia's leaders, Trotsky, Lenin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, all spoke in German at the meetings of the Communist (Third) International, the Comintern, founded in 1919. Banners then fluttered above the Moscow streets proclaiming in enormous letters 'Germany's October is due!' The 'Victory of the Great Socialist October Revolution' took place, according to the Russian or Julian calendar, on 25th October 1917, and according to the Western or Gregorian calendar, on 7th November.)
When the Spartacists' (Communists') attempt to carry the German revolution of 1918 one stage further misfired, Moscow waited for the next chance while continuing to carry out violent subversive activities.
Hope was not definitely abandoned until 1925. In October of that year the carefully prepared strikes and uprisings failed, the revolution shrank to a riot in Hamburg, and Germany remained loyal to the Weimar Republic. The Soviet advisers returned to Russia. The plans for world revolution were shelved. Instead of Germany, the great hope now was the Far East--China.
Even while the Soviets were attempting to make Germany ripe for the Communist revolution, and street fighting, strikes, and rioting followed one another in almost unbroken succession, the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) concluded the famous Treaty of Rapallo with the German Reich on 16th April 1922. This treaty offered Germany a possible means of escape from the apparently hopeless situation in which she had been placed by the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. The Paris Conference of January 1921 had fixed the amount that Germany must pay in reparations at two hundred and sixty-nine billion gold marks, to be paid in forty-two annual instalments, and a duty of 12 per cent to be levied on German exports. A French occupation of the Ruhr was threatened, which could mean a further splitting of the Reich. Disaster appeared inevitable. In such circumstances the Russian offer seemed highly attractive, with commissions for the German factories and jobs for the German technicians and craftsmen. The Treaty of Rapallo was signed. It was obviously of the greatest importance to Russia as well. It opened the door for them to a land of immense industrial capacity. They needed both German goods and German brains for the development and expansion of Communism. Article Five of the Treaty stated that each government would meet the industrial requirements of the other country on a basis of mutual good-will.
The Treaty of Rapallo enabled Russia to exploit Germany's industrial potential. In March of 1921, Russia had already concluded a Trade Agreement with Great Britain, and in the same year similar agreements were made with Norway, Austria and Italy.
Russia was ready to receive the flood of industrial materials from the West which she needed to keep the Soviet state alive. She was to get them, in abundance.
Chapter 11. Concessions for Capitalists
Three years after the revolution nobody in the free world considered thee the Bolshevik state had a chance of survival.
When H. G. Wells travelled by train through Russia in 1920, he saw from his compartment window a miserable landscape of untilled fields and idle factories. All was chaos in Russia.
'Russia in 1920,' he wrote, 'presented an unparalleled example of civilization in a state of complete collapse; the railway tracks were rusting and becoming gradually unusable, the cities were falling into ruin.'
After three years of Bolshevik rule, the situation had become hopeless. Industry was completely disorganized, production had been reduced to one-seventh of the pre-war level. Most of the factories stood deserted, and the mine-shafts were flooded. The condition of the metal industry was catastrophic, with the output of pig iron down to a mere 3 per cent of pre-war. Stocks of metal and industrial products were exhausted, and there was an acute shortage of consumer goods, of heating fuel, and of foodstuffs.
Such, then, was the result of radical socialization; thus had Lenin faithfully carried out Marx's doctrine of the 'expropriation of the expropriators'.
'We feel as though we were in prison . . . As human beings we are lost and have become slaves!' This was said in a resolution by the Petrograd workers in 1920.
'For democracy, against the Bolshevik dictatorship!' That was the slogan of the workers and sailors who rose at Kronstadt in March 1921.
'Our programme was right in theory, but impracticable,' Lenin was forced to admit. Marx and Engels had never worked out a programme for the actual creation of a Communist state.
'Marx himself,' Lenin complained, 'never considered this problem nor wrote a word on the subject.' The Soviet regime faced disaster. The press of the free world awaited its imminent collapse. Lenin behaved in typically Russian fashion and ordered a complete about-face. Without the hated capitalists, as he now clearly saw, there was little or no prospect of rebuilding the national economy. Therefore the Red rulers did exactly what their predecessors had always done. They followed in the footsteps of the two Ivans and of Peter I, trusting to the old-established and tested policy: 'Come to our country . . .!'
In 1921 Lenin announced his 'New Economic Policy', known as NEP. Once more the cry came from Russia, now uttered by the new Red despots: 'Our country is rich, but we have no order. Come to us . . .' In present-day language this meant: 'Concessions'. Lenin called upon the mighty industrial powers of the West, with their engineers, research scientists and technologists; they must come to Russia so that 'Bolshevik Progress' might begin.
On 23rd November 1920, Definitions of the Economic and Legal Conditions Governing Concessions appeared. These underlined 'the urgent need of absorbing technical personnel and materials from the more advanced countries, so that Russia might regain her importance as one of the main sources of raw materials for world industry, and also develop her own rate of productivity, which had declined as a result of the War'.
Moscow set about luring foreigners by means of these concessions, which Lenin cynically described as 'industrial co-habitation with the capitalists'. For the Soviets this was merely a means to an end. The final objective remained the same. Lenin was in no doubt about this: 'Instead of using guns and tanks, we shall wage an industrial war,' the Red dictator announced in 1920. 'I am convinced that Soviet might will catch up with capitalism and will overtake it, and that we shall not only win economically.... This is a new sort of war, an economic struggle between two systems, the communist and the capitalist. We shall prove that we are the stronger.... And as soon as we are strong enough to overthrow capitalism, we shall immediately seize it by the throat.'
What was intended was achieved. The Westerners took the Russian bait. They accepted the 'concessions' and began to rebuild the Russian economy, the whole power of which was later to be used against them. They saved the Bolshevik experiment; their plans, their engineers, their machines, their equipment and their skills made Communism viable.
In 1921 famine once again swept the country. Since the revolution five millions had already starved to death. Even before the West took a hand in Russia's industrial development, famine relief was being organized on a grand scale. A future President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, set up an international organization.
The first cargoes of foodstuffs began to arrive in St Petersburg. The Quakers had collected money, and the great Norwegian Arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, had also organized large-scale relief. The figures are lost, and it is no longer possible to say how much foreign help was given to the millions of under-nourished or starving Russians. It is known, however, that the United States alone sent 700,000 tons of foodstuffs.
While food from abroad was arriving in the Russian ports, while hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian prisoners-of-war were put to building the Murmansk railway, sixty-eight concessionary agreements were signed with the purpose of reviving Russian industry.
The first of these concessions were for 'the exploitation of hitherto undeveloped industrial fields' and the creation of 'new industries'--the production of metal alloys, the manufacture of machine tools and heavy machinery, of motor-cars, synthetic fabrics, etc. Every foreign concessionnaire was obliged to 'maintain his particular branch of industry at the highest possible technical level, in accordance with the most modern developments'. (Trud, No. II, 13th January 1929.)
Next came 'technical aid', and a new group of concessions were agreed. Here the concessionnaire acted as adviser in the organization of the new enterprise. He was obliged to make available all technical knowledge already in his possession, as well as any which might come his way in the future.
Such 'technical aid' from foreign companies, required by the Communists to get their industries going and to set standards, increased greatly in later years. By 1929 there were seventy such concessions, of which thirty were with world-famous German firms. (Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn of 29th September 1929.)
'If the concession policy is successful,' Lenin had said, 'we shall, thanks to it, be able to create new, model, industrial enterprises, comparable with those of the most modern capitalist states.'
Lenin was right, for the West took the bait. It began to create an ultramodern industry, for which everything needed was made available--from drawings and blueprints for the installations to the supplying of all machinery and plant, and even the training of the Russian personnel. It was the same story in agriculture, in forestry, in mining, even in the fisheries and in the breeding and trapping of animals for their furs. There were thirty-nine principal concessions for the development of agriculture and fisheries, and for fur-trapping.
The modern Nyemetskaya Sloboda, where the industries of all Europe and of the United States were represented, did a magnificent job. It was to Russia's-advantage that the post-war years had created serious economic problems in many Western European countries. Not a few well-known firms were glad to accept money from Moscow in exchange for production secrets, the newest patents, or essential technical knowledge. Moscow was later to use all such acquisitions from the West to compete in world markets against the West.
The state of crisis of the European economy meant that the great hope, often the only hope, for the many unemployed engineers was the USSR. Here was a virgin country, where every sort of technical skill and every new idea was welcome.
A British engineer, Arnold Tustin, Chief Engineer at the Metro-Vickers Works in Sheffield, and their leading engineer in the locomotive section of the Soviet Kirov-Dynamo Works, made an entry in his diary which expressed the views of many such technicians: 'For an engineer, working in a Soviet factory affords enormous satisfaction . . . Here the various jobs are integrated into the development of the industry. So each engineer knows for sure that a use will be found for the work he does. Every single useful idea is tried out in practice.'
His compatriot, the chemist G. C. Eltenton, describes the lack of interest with which his experiments with carbon were received in England, whereas in the Soviet Union he received every encouragement. 'I have worked for three years in the Soviet Union, and experimented with the influence of ions on chemical reactions . . . I put in a lot of hard work and I am proud to have earned the tide of the best shock worker in the Institute....'
The USSR profited. Large numbers of technicians volunteered for work in Russia.
The economic situation in Germany grew ever more catastrophic. It became increasingly difficult for German firms to deal with their equivalents in Western Europe. From the early twenties the more enterprising German firms therefore began dealing with Russia.
'We are scarcely in a position to discontinue the policy of better relations with Russia,' the German Foreign Minister, Walter Simons, declared in the Reichstag in March 1921, when referring to warnings received against supplying the Eastern power. 'And the reason we cannot is that every other country will also, sooner or later, enter into trade relations with Russia.'
Krupp, the AEG, the 'Steel King' Otto Wolff of Cologne, the Linke-Hofmann Works (leading manufacturers of rails and rolling stock), all these concerns were able to maintain their position principally by exporting industrial plant and equipment to the Soviet Union. Engineers, constructors and technicians went to the USSR. Technicians from Krupp's taught the Russians how to produce special types of steel. Diesel engines were made in Russia under German supervision. America also supplied help. There were still no diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington. Even after the creation of NEP, Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, who knew about Communist propaganda, brusquely rebuffed the overtures of Georgi V. Chicherin, the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. But America's system of free enterprise enabled the American industrialists to make private agreements with the Soviet Union. Thus United States firms acquired the 'gold-prospecting rights' on the Amur, the Standard Oil Company won an oil-boring concession, and other American firms set about diminishing Russia's very considerable export trade credit balance. The International General Electric Company sold Moscow electrical equipment to the value of over twenty million dollars. From 1921 to 1925 alone, thirty-seven million dollars' worth of machinery and equipment was pumped into the USSR by American industry.
Triumphantly Izvestia of 6th November 1928 wrote: 'We only permit such concessions as are calculated to hasten our economic development!'
Lena Goldfields Ltd. was the name of a large capitalistic island deep in the Communist ocean. This English company invested 18,129,000 roubles in a mammoth task--the building of ultra-modem gold-mining installations in a huge area around Vitimsk, on the River Lena. (Izvestia, 26th March 1919, No. 69)
This was in fact the renewal, on an even larger scale, of a project which another British firm had already begun under the Tsar, in 1908. Everything that this other firm had built had been destroyed in the revolution. The original plant had rotted away and many pits were waterlogged. The new project involved the creation of a shipping route along the Lena and its tributaries, the building of a railway network, the equipping and administration of copper and iron-ore mines in Lysert and Revdinsk in the Urals, and forestry in the Altai Mountains.
A staff of geologists, chemists and engineers employed by Lena Goldfields set about their various tasks. Expeditions were organized, to survey the whole district systematically, using the most up-to-date prospecting and boring equipment; samples of ore and soil were collected and subjected to thorough analysis. Every sort of machinery, dredgers, sifters and conveyor-belts, were brought from England. The new gold-mines came into being.
The end of this great concession has been forgotten. It was typical.
When Lena Goldfields Ltd. had completed its valuable pioneer work, when everything was at last ready, the modern equipment installed, and the huge undertaking with all its ramifications had at last begun to produce--what happened? Without any sort of warning, the Soviets arrested many of the leading technicians. The foreigners were accused of 'industrial espionage'.
But why? Of what use to experienced technologists were the industrial secrets of a country still in a state of medieval backwardness?
The accusation was merely a threadbare pretext. The company was soon forced to discontinue production as a result of the imprisonment of its principal engineers and technicians. Then the order came from Moscow: Lena Goldfields Ltd. was to leave the country--the company was guilty of 'sabotage'.
In August 1930, in London, a court of arbitration retried the case and established without a shadow of doubt that the Soviets had prevented the functioning of the English enterprise. Pravda and Izvestia with one voice described the London inquiry as a 'legal farce'. Lena Goldfields Ltd., they said, 'consisted solely of capitalist pirates'.
It was the same story with the big American industrialist, Averell Harriman, who built mines to work the richest manganese ore deposits in the world, at Tchiaturi in the southern Caucasus. As soon as the mines had been equipped with American machinery and were in working order, Harriman was deprived of his concession. The work was thenceforth carried on as a 'progressive Soviet enterprise'.
There was scarcely a Western country that did not help 'Communist development' during the NEP period. Not only big companies in Germany, England and the United States, but also leading firms from Sweden, Denmark and Austria contributed to the rebuilding of Russia, while even Fascist Italy sent electrical equipment and machinery for the manufacture of cars. Professor Lomonossov bought locomotives, wholesale, in Sweden, while other Swedish firms supplied machinery and plant, and the world famous SKF ball-bearing works provided the Soviet Union with a pilot factory. The Danes' most important concession was Trans-Siberian Cables, a subsidiary of the Great Northern Telegraph Company.
There was at that time no telegraphic network embracing all Russia. So the Danes, who had laid the cables during the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway under the Tsar, accepted a monopoly from the Bolshevik rules of all communications with the Far East. Communications were so important that Lenin was ready to award so vast a concession. He laid down that the Danish personnel at the relay stations were to be granted more or less extra-territorial rights, for Russia had no trained communications personnel of her own. This situation soon changed, however, when Lenin, after reading a report from London in Izvestia of 19th March 1922, decided to introduce wireless telegraphy into the USSR.
'An engineer has discovered a procedure,' the London report stated, 'which makes it possible to keep telegrams secret, even when transmitted by wireless. Successful experiments have been carried out between London and Birmingham. The telegrams reached their destination undistorted and secret.'
This new discovery, and the fact that it was secret, greatly excited Lenin. 'If we could buy this invention, then communication by radio telephone and radio telegraphy would be of the greatest possible advantage to us from a military point of view,' Lenin wrote to Stalin.
So the Soviet Union acquired the new invention, and the Danish concessionnaires were soon expelled from the country--after they had instructed the Russians sufficiently for them to carry on. Not only in industry and in the technique of communications was 'Bolshevik development' entirely dependent on the West. It was the same with agriculture. The Soviet Union owed its first large, completely mechanized agricultural scheme to the firm of Krupp. North of the Caucasus, in the Salsk area, there was a model development area covering some 125,000 acres, the result of a concession made in 1923. What the Soviets attempted with their Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes, that is to say, completely mechanized agricultural projects, was first demonstrated by German farmers and technicians.
When this Krupp concession started, Russian agriculture was in a desperate plight. An agricultural country, almost 80 per cent of whose population lived on the land, and which, in the 'black earth country', possessed the most fertile soil in the world, produced the poorest harvests. Russian acres yielded only one-third of the English and German equivalent, only a quarter of that of Denmark.
On the model Krupp estate the latest agricultural machinery was installed, for ploughing and harrowing, manuring, sowing and harvesting. There were even some of the famous tractors, which were later to become a sort of Russian symbol. There was a model herd of Merino sheep. In September 1928, when Moscow ordered the complete collectivization of the Russian peasants, the Krupp development scheme became the 'Russo-German Agricultural Group of Manych-Krupp'.
And this is now all forgotten. In Western Europe and America each firm kept its own records, and so it is impossible to give any total figure for the vast quantity of supplies which came to Russia. As for the Russian records, they are definitely not available . . .
Included in the 'concessions', a very special project was started in Russia in 1922, which was to be the beginning of the Soviet aircraft industry. The firm of Junkers began to operate in the East. The story behind this was that the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germany to carry out any further development in certain branches of modern industry and technology, including the construction of military aircraft. This prohibition was extended to include civil aircraft by the 'London Ultimatum' of 4th May 1921. All aircraft already in existence were to be handed over, those under construction to be destroyed. For Germany this had only one meaning--the complete discontinuation of a development process which had hardly begun.
Early in 1919, the first transport aircraft in the world was under construction at the Junkers works at Dessau. This was the F-13, an all-metal low-wing monoplane with cantilever wings, known as the 'tin donkey' in the history of the aircraft industry. Professor Hugo Junkers had realized, before the end of the war, the great future that aircraft must have in the transport of freight and passengers. His F-13 was a brilliant original design, and the F-13 was soon flying over every continent. By 1925 forty per cent of the world's air transport network was to be served by the F-13. Furthermore, Junkers had already started to build a four-engined aircraft, when the ban on aircraft construction imposed by the 'London Ultimatum' threatened to destroy all his work and all his hopes. The German aircraft manufacturers felt compelled to accept the only alternative rather than discontinue their work. They moved abroad.
Rohrbach founded a new company in Denmark and leased his patents in England. Dornier went to Switzerland and also built a factory in Italy. Junkers moved to Russia.
In 1922 Professor Junkers was granted a concession to build a factory for the Soviets, to meet the future aircraft requirements of the USSR. He, in return, gave the Russians the blueprints as well as the fruits of all his aeronautical, practical and technical experience. His most highly skilled workers were to go to Russia with him, and there build an industry for the Russians. Junkers's other great assignment was to lay the foundations for a Russian air transport network, using Junkers machines.
He had to function in what was virtually a vacuum. Since 1917, when the Russian aeronautical engineer, Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, had emigrated, Russia had had, for all intents and purposes, no aircraft engineers and therefore no aircraft industry.
So the best men from the Junkers factory at Dessau set off for Moscow. In the next few years there were more German aeronautical engineers and technicians in Russia than in Germany.
At Fiji, near Moscow, the Russian Junkers Works came into being, in very difficult conditions. They were given the premises of a former automobile factory. The complement of German specialists and trained Russians soon rose to one thousand three hundred and fifty men.
On Soviet instructions, priority at Fili was given to the building of special military aircraft. This was a difficult job, both technically and constructionally, for the new types--among them the two-seater low-wing model Ju-20 and the two-seater high-wing model Ju-21--had to be built without benefit of the testing installations previously available at Dessau, and the test flights of the prototypes were carried out in primitive conditions. Despite all obstacles, the Junkers works at Fili produced one hundred and seventy aircraft of the new types. Dessau, where the Junkers-Motorenbau GmbH (the Junkers Engine Company) now functioned, supplied the engines.
Thus was Soviet air power born.
Thanks to Fili the first air transport network in the Soviet Union came into existence. Airfield after airfield was built, civil aircraft flew ever greater distances in all directions, cries-crossing the vast land mass of Russia. For Junkers, Russia became the great testing-ground for future world airlines. In view of the date there were already a very large number of aircraft. Apart from the machines built by Junkers in Russia, Dessau had supplied fifty of the famous F-13 models. In the summer of 1922 Junkers opened the first Russian airline from Moscow to Nijni-Novgorod (now called Gorki). Air communications with the Ukraine, the Crimea and the Baku oilfields followed. New airfields were quickly made operational in the Urals, on the Kirghiz steppes, beside the Caspian, Lake Baikal, and as far as the distant borders of China. Junkers aircraft were first wed for aerial surveys of this vast territory, parts of which had scarcely been trodden by the foot of man. Aerial surveys of the polar seas were also begun.
Arctic flights were carried out by the international Aeroarctic Company, founded in Berlin in 1924 by the airship constructor, Walter Bruns. Both airships and planes were to help in a geographical and meteorological survey of the Arctic regions, in which all nations would take part. Particular attention was to be paid to the possibilities of an eventual air route over the Pole. Naturally the Soviet Union immediately sent representatives to Aeroarctic. 'Their task', says Constantin Krypton, then employed in a Soviet Institute, 'was to get all information possible from the capitalist countries and at the same time to conceal Soviet data, even of a purely theoretical or scientific character. Written instructions to follow this practice were issued to Soviet personnel at the Arctic Institute.'
For three years, starting in 1922, Junkers and his staff were engaged upon a gigantic undertaking. The foundations for a modern aircraft industry were laid by these experts from Dessau. Large numbers of Soviet engineers and workers were trained, many hundreds of Russian pilots thoroughly instructed by German test pilots, and the first great airline network created. All that the Junkers experts knew, their methods of testing, their models, their still secret plans and blueprints, were given to the Soviet Union. The Russians even had free access to the works and to all that might interest them in the parent factory at Dessau, as well as Junkers's Swedish factory at Limhamn, where the first twin-engined fighter plane, the S-36, and the first dive-bomber, the K-47, were built. Then the Soviets began to cold-shoulder the Junkers people, exactly as they had done in the case of the other concessionnaires. The foreigners from the 'corrupt West' had fulfilled their function. It was time they went.
After 1925 the USSR was withdrawing one concession after another and breaking the agreements made in the original contracts. Junkers lost their concession, which had been guaranteed to last for thirty years.
It was not only the Germans who were treated in this way. Other foreign firms and organizations were told to quit. The projects had been started, the plans and models delivered, and the foreigners were not needed any more. The Russian learns very quickly for he is a past-master at mimicry, and adept at imitation. In the same year, 1925, that dunkers were kicked out, the Kremlin's policy in these matters changed. The era of the Spets, or specialists, began. Brains were now required for large-scale planning of the whole industrial development plan. A year later Colonel Hugh Cooper arrived from the United States with a staff of assistants. It was he, an organizer of genius, who was to be one of the essential creators of the future Five Year Plans.
Only one foreign 'concession' was permitted by the Soviet Union to continued unmolested. It was of a very special sort and shrouded in mystery. In the greatest secrecy the German Army, in 1920, had put out feelers towards Russia--naturally this had not been publicized in Germany--and had later made a significant contribution towards the modernization of the Soviet Army and the creation of a modern armament industry in the USSR.
By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forbidden to make arms of any sort, and the small German Army was not even allowed to possess armoured fighting vehicles or military aircraft. On manoeuvres cardboard dummies built upon motor-cars had to substitute for tanks. Training in the use of modern weapons, essential to any army, was as impossible as was the development of new weapons and equipment. The Allied Control Commissions saw to it that the ban was strictly enforced.
Communist Russia offered Germany a unique chance of avoiding total stagnation. And the Bolsheviks well knew what they were doing when they allowed military activities in their country which in Germany would have been immediately stopped by the Control Commissions. It was of the greatest possible advantage to them to learn from the German Army. At that time the Red Army was new and its equipment out of date.
Moscow willingly made suitable training areas available to the German Army so that its training might continue undisturbed behind the Iron Curtain and its weapons be improved and tested on manoeuvres.
Three German specialist training schools were created after 1923, the Lipetsk Flying School near Voronezh, the Armoured Vehicles School at Kazan, and a Chemical Warfare Research Institute at Saratov. Year after year the German Defence Ministry sent secret military missions to Russia. Serving officers were ordered to Lipetsk and Kazan.
Large-scale production of the new tanks and military aircraft developed by the Germans in Russian factories was agreed. The German Defence Ministry had already given Russia over a hundred million marks, from secret funds, for the building of aircraft and armament factories. In 1923 an agreement was concluded with the Soviet Union aimed at the development of a larger armaments industry. But it came to nothing. The Soviets refused to give preference to German industry in the development of their own armaments industry and also refused to exclude all other foreigners from projects in which German firms and German specialists were engaged.
As Karl Radek explained to the German Ambassador in Moscow, Ulrich Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau: 'You cannot expect us to bind our policy exclusively to yourselves in exchange for the few wretched millions you are giving us. As for the monopoly for German industry you ask for, we have no intention of giving you any such thing. Quite the contrary, we take whatever our army needs, wherever we happen to find it. We have bought aircraft in Prance, and we shall also accept supplies from England.'
There was, in fact, already a French military mission in Moscow. The Allies, who had originally supported the various anti-Bolshevik counterrevolutionary armies, now began to supply the Soviets with munitions. They too helped develop the armaments industry which must provide the backbone for the Red Army. Meanwhile the camouflaged German General Staff the so-called 'Army Office', filled the gaps in their knowledge of military tactics and strategy. German officers secrecy trained and taught the Red Army. It is forgotten today that many of Russia's best senior officers were taught for years by officers of the German Army.
Not only Marshal Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov's deputy as Defence Commissar from 1931 until his execution in dune 1937, but also many other Russian generals attended the staff courses organized by the German Army. Among these were Uborevich, Kork and Eidemann, all of whom were later executed during the Great Purge. Others survived to use the knowledge they had acquired from German teachers in the war against Germany. Perhaps the most gifted of these was the man who later became the military commander of Russian-occupied Germany, Grigory Konstantinovich Zhukov.
In 1936 the Kremlin appointed him to command the Red Army units fighting in the Spanish Civil War. On 21st October 1941, when the German armoured spearheads were outside Moscow, Stalin entrusted him with the defence of the Red capital, where he won the first Russian victory of the war. In 1942 Zhukov was given the command at Stalingrad. In 1943 he commanded in the summer offensive the Army Group that recaptured Kharkov, Kursk, Orel and Smolensk. In March 1944 he became Supreme Commander of the 'First Ukrainian Front'. He then took over Supreme Command on the 'First White Russian Front', broke through the German positions on the Oder, and led the Red Army to Berlin, entering that city as its conqueror on 2nd May 1945.
(Lenin's most publicized concept, which has been described repeatedly as the cornerstone of 'Bolshevik development', dates from the NEP period.)
On 22nd December 1920
