Scenarios of Power

by Richard S. Wortman

Release Date: 20 March, 2000

Edition: Hardcover

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Entertaining and amusingly pretentious

Wortman seems to be one of those deeply conservative "leftists" who think that narratives of a ruling class or body are academic narratives - that is, that the history of the Russian monarchy is full of symbols that an upper middle class college prof with *way* too little interest in the suffering of the serfs and *way* too much interest in trying to be taken for a clever reader of historical artifact (academics of this bent mutually praise one another, but readers genuinely interested in the subject matter feel differently, and don't have as much time to waste as the "theorists" do, alas.)

There are many good books on this period, and on this subject. Don't let yourself get cheated.

Welcome to the weird world of Russian monarchism

How to summarize the history of the Romanov dynasty? Well, Peter "the Great" murdered his son, Catherine "the great" murdered her husband, and Alexander "the Blessed" was complicit in the murder of his father. After that the dynasty went into a bit of a decline. For the past two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the world of monarchist ritual. They have looked at how during the nineteenth century these rituals became more, not less, elaborate and they have pondered on the use of these rituals as examples of aristocratic hegemony. Wortman's well written and well documented second volume looks at the Russian version from the ascension of Alexander II in 1855 to the abdication of Nicholas II. We certainly get a lot of information on the elaborate ceremonies of the monarchy. We learn of the elaborate rituals and liturgies of the coronation ceremonies, along with fulsome and increasingly sycophantic paeans from the ranks of Orthodoxy. We are in a world of great popular feasts for the people, "entertained by acrobats, jugglers, stunt riders, and carousel rides," which comes to its horrible climax when at least 1,500 people are trampled to death on the feast festivals of Khodynka at the coronation of Nicholas II, the direct result of tsarist incompetence. We enter the world of elaborate balls, and the exquisite detail of faberge eggs (one designed to look like Assumption Cathedral). We see new strains in royalist propaganda as Alexander III presents a nationalist and orthodox message, while Nicholas II presents a Victorian and domestic picture of his family. Rather revealingly Wortman quotes Tchaikovsky's contempt for the 1812 Overture that he composed for Alexander III's coronation.

But there is a larger point in Wortman's account. Much of the literature on royal power deals with its ability to dazzle the larger population. Increasingly, however, royal ritual only dazzled its monarchs. Alexander II starts off with the "scenario of love." After the (partial) emancipation of the peasantry, Alexander II increasingly emphasized his "loving" and "benevolent" nature, as if his self-professed amiability automatically deserved to be reciprocated. As it happened Alexander II's marriage was visibly crumbling as he carried on with a much younger woman. At the same time Alexander moved away from a western path of development, he also sought to ignore what laws and regulations existed to force the rest of the nobility to accept his paramour as his second empress.

Alexander III's reign saw an emphasis on an increasingly chauvinist vision of Russia and Russian orthodoxy, with a new emphasis on monarchies and cathedrals. There was a weird, increasingly unreal and almost necrophiliac admiration for 17th century Moscow, before the liberal rot had set in under Peter I. There was a new emphasis on miracle as the country moved towards a military dictatorship. Nicholas II believed in all these ideas and more, but whereas Alexander III relied on the army and the dictatorship, Nicholas increasingly deluded himself into believing that he had a direct relationship with the Russian people. In this increasingly mystic view in which the "real" Russian people gave him their complete and unequivocal support, Nicholas II viewed the bureaucracies, the army, the episcopacy, other politicians simply as barriers to the implementation of his own will.

As a result during his rituals Nicholas II never missed an opportunity to demean the Duma, the parliament he had reluctantly allowed after the 1905 revolution and which he was planning to emasculate before war broke out in 1914. Nicholas became obsessed with "holy men" who supposedly represented the Russian people, and he and his wife shamelessly bullied the Orthodox hierarchy in order to declare one of them a saint. Reading reports from his bribed press, easily impressed by the crowds who flocked to the anniversaries and royal tours, Nicholas had deluded himself into believing that he was one with the Russian people. Becoming commander in chief of the army against the advice of almost all his ministers, by the end of his reign Nicholas could no longer count on the army, or the church, or the conservatives in his rigged parliament, or most of his family, indeed on anyone other than his wife and children. And yet he was outraged after his abdication that his brother Michael might speak hesitatingly of a constitutional monarchy. The emphasis on Victorian domestic harmony was an illusion; Wortman clearly shows that any chance Russia had of moving on towards a non-revolutionary modernity was fatally hampered by its monarch with a seventeenth century soul.