<>1796:1801; Death of Catherine II followed by brief (5-year) and most curious reign of Paul I
*--Paul took strenuous measures to reverse much of his mother's legacy. Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov were pardoned. Radishchev returned to state service, but never ventured again anything as bold as his optimistic writings in the time of Catherine II. Fearing a repeat of his earlier prosecution, he committed suicide in 1802. Novikov lived on to 1818, but never returned to his earlier active professional life
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*--Florinsky,1(24)

<>1796de12:Emperor Paul decreed serfs in southern Russia (Ukraine) could not move freely from village to village [VSB,2:473-4]

<>1797mr24:Russian decree reduced peasant serf work-week [DIR2:126-7]
*--Edict forbad Sunday Labor by serfs [VSB,2:474 | KRR:294-5]
*--Newspaper ads offered serfs for sale [DIR2:127]
*--Serfdom had reached its nadir point and seemed now to slacken its grip on the throat of Russian peasants. Piecemeal measures mounted over the next half century toward emancipation in 1861
*--1797au07:Russia moved to restrict expansion of government owned and administered property in the provinces, followed by move to allot state lands to certain state serfs. More piecemeal reform [VSB,2:474-6]
*--Some of the same tendency toward emancipation can be seen in the evolution of European slavery. In 1794, the revolutionary French National Convention abolished slavery in all French territories, though Napoleon was soon (1802) to repeal that law
*--In the 30 years between 1784-1814, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Argentina, and Columbia all adopted laws providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves. About unfree labor, a global reform attitude intensified
\\
*--Hoch, Stephen L. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov
*--Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
*--Blum:326-44 (on Russian agriculture in the century before serf emancipation)

<>1797ap05:Uchrezhdeniia ob imperatorskoi familii [Institutions of the Imperial Family] Emperor Paul and Empress Maria issued decree on succession to the Imperial Throne [VSB,2:473]
*--Exclusive and heritable udel prerogatives of the royal family were thus certified 700 years after the institutionalization of an early, broader, more feudal definition of udel [ID]
*--Noteworthy statistic = by 1857 the number of udel serfs (serfs "owned" by the royal family) = 838,000

<>1798:Indonesia, a group of islands stretching over 2000 miles west to east, cluttering the sea routes between the Indian and Pacific oceans, came under Dutch (Nederland; the Netherlands) governmental administration when the Dutch East India Company was liquidated and its assets "nationalized" by the Dutch government. This Company and the British East India Company were the two most powerful and classical mercantilist enterprises, combining governmental and insider-private interests in a huge state-managed corporation
*--The Dutch East India Company (1602-1798) managed to defeat the ambitions of the British East India Company in Indonesia, "limiting" the great English international imperialist corporation to the Indian subcontinent. But by the 1780s the Company had rotted away at its core as a result of corruption and unchecked exploitation of the region
*--The Dutch crown took direct imperial control over, and began to colonize Indonesia, what would for over a century and a half be called the Netherlands East Indies, centered in Indonesia. Here at the birth of European liberal reformism, and in one of the nations that so much prospered through international free-market commerce, imperialism came increasingly to seem both contradictory and unavoidable
*--The Russian state moved in the same direction and at about the same time as the Dutch with respect to government control of overseas corporate enterprise
*--The British East India Company held a monarchical charter which guaranteed it a monopoly on trade in the East Indies. By 1740, the Company had control of only three centers of trade in India: Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, but the great imperialist and industrial age was just then about to dawn. The Company proclaimed itself the ruler of Bengal in 1765. The company not only benefited from trade revenue, it was authorized also to impose steep land taxes on all regions it conquered. Bengal territories were reduced to famine and economic collapse as the Company extracted greatest possible wealth from the region. In 1770, famine resulted in the death of about 1/3 of the Bengal population, but the area still produced opium for yet another income-producing project = the Company's international trade with other regions (most notably in China). The British Company was a rival of the Dutch Company when it came to one of the biggest items of early 19th-century overseas commerce = opium
*--The English monarchy replaced the Company's "entrepreneurial" directors with officially appointed state administrators in a "Board of Control" not long after the tragic Bengal famine. The Company thus became a hybrid "free-market" and "bureaucratic" institution, satisfying the interests of a small number of insider "privateers" and the British crown in the earliest years of the great era of steam powered industrialization. By 1815, the East India Company had managed to seize the greater part of India. Its "private" corporate army had grown to 150,000 and was regularly supplemented with detachments of the regular British army and navy.. This was the situation until the Company was abolished [ID]
*--British rule in India, among other things, represented an imperialistic form of "primitive accumulation of capital", the first stage of economic modernization in the industrial era. English behavior in India and China in these decades might be compared with a similar era of "primitive accumulation of capital" in Russian history, Stalinist industrial modernization
*--Modern European ("Western"?) imperialist internationalism or globalism began to show its outlines clearly, even at the dawn of the great industrial age [ID], domestic "free-market" economics [ID] and liberal reformism

<>1798:Etorofu Island, off the eastern shore of Hokkaido at the southern end of the Kuril Islands | Russians landed, planted Orthodox cross, claim stakes with Russian inscriptions, and other indications of possession
*--Shortly thereafter, samurai Kondo Morishige(1757:1815) explored these territories, tore down the Russian crosses and other claim stakes, put up Japanese posts saying Dai-Nippon-Etoru [Etoru is a part of Greater Japan]. Returned to Tokyo [Edo] an urged Ezo [Hokkaido] be put under bugyo reign, direct Bakufu rule. This happened slowly over the next two decades
*1800:Hokkaido and southern Kuril Islands | Japanese surveyor Mamiya Rinzo (1775:1844) at work. In this year Matsumae authority established over whole of Hokkaido Island, after 3 great Ainu rebellions (1643, 1669 & 1789) against the Japanese
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*--KEJ,2:238
*--PH&G:305-6

<>1799:Hokkaido | Takataya Kahei (1769:1827) volunteered as aid to Kondo Juzo, Tokyo's agent there, to explore and survey Etorofu Island and check on Russians
*--Takataya sought to establish for himself a monopoly on regional trade in the north. He was from a poor family but had by now become a wealthy merchant who had founded his own shipping firm, transporting clothing, tobacco, and salt to northeastern Japan. Soon he set up his own headquarters in Hakodate
*--Compare Takataya's relationship to Japanese National Seclusion policy with Shelikhov and Rezanov's relationship to Russian mercantilism
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*--KEJ, 7:319

<>1799my08:Siberia | Irkutsk was the first headquarters of the Russian-America Company
*--Earlier action in Irkutsk connected with merchants Myl'nikov; Golikov and Shelikhov. The Company was founded to build on Shelikhov's grand ambitions, now with a royal monopoly to promote entrepreneurial exploitation of Alaska resources
*--Within a year Russian-America Co. headquarters moved from Irkutsk back to Saint Petersburg. Company gathered under distant state control all private trade ventures in Siberia and Alaska. Russian overseas corporate mercantilism took a lot of the steam out of frontier expansion
*--Serious rivals arose against Russian presence in the northern Pacific Rim. First, England (in the person of Captain Vancouver and eventually the Hudson's Bay Company) and then USA (in the person of John Jacob Astor and his American Fur Company, and other commercial companies often called "Bostonians") began to bring pressure on the Russian-America Co. USA financed Tlingit [Koloshi] indigenous hostility to Russia, supplying native insurgents with arms and ammunition against Russia in Alaska. England, Russia and the fledgling USA now entered into rivalry, via different forms of vast corporate enterprise, for exploitation of the natural resources of the western North American territories and the Pacific shores. Spanish imperial ambitions waned
*--Russia now solidly in the north Pacific, even if it provoked some hostility with other expansionist nations. Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov had been Shelikhov’s main contact with the imperial Russian state in Catherine's time. In Irkutsk, Rezanov fell in love with Shelikhov’s daughter-in-law and they were soon wed. Before long, the fate of the Russian-America Company would be in his hands
*--Documents covering period until sale of Alaska to USA in 1867 [DC&V,3]
\\
*--Saul,1:42-8
*--P. A. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company
*--Howard Irvin Kushner, American-Russian rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867
*--Lensen,Eastward:65-70
*--Clarence Manning, Russian Influence on Early America:27-38
*--SIE,12:207

<>1799:Russian/Ukrainian statesman Prince Bezborodko memo on reform [Raeff2:70-74]

<>1799no09 (NS; 18 Brumaire according to French Revolutionary calendar): Revolutionary France now ruled by Napoleon as First Consul. He soon declared self Emperor and reigned for fifteen years, until 1814, and again briefly in 1815. Historians still argue, was Napoleon the child of the Revolution or the nemesis of it?
*--The French overseas mercantilist empire had so far failed [EG]. Napoleon was prepared to look closer to home, to take Europe as his "colony", and more. His ambitions stretched across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, though France did not have the strength to hold Egypt on its own
*1800je04(NS):[NW Italy] Battle of Marengo pitted 60,000 French and Austrian troops against one another. Compare that with =
*1812je:Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 French and other allied troops, breaking earlier truce with Russian Emperor Alexander I [ID]
*--Napoleon came a cropper on the east-European steppes and was driven back to France and defeat, but on the way back =
*1813oc16:oc19(NS): [Germany] Battle of Leipzig, or "The Battle of the Nations" involved 500,000 troops from a coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia against France
*--The militarist/revolutionist acts of Napoleon represent a big epoch in European history [W]
*--Yet there was another side of Napoleon, one in which he gave some appearance of being, indeed, the "child of the Revolution". As the European revolutionary era opened, the notion of La carrière ouverte aux talents [careers open to talent (rather than privilege)] served to undermine the grip of old European notions of title by inheritance and privilege by birth or establishmentarian assignment [See Pellicani below]
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*--David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It | The argument here is that modern "total war" had its origins in French Revolutionary politics [example] and in the Napoleonic style of warfare (see the statistics on growth in the numbers of troops accounted above). Oddly, the Revolutionary passion for absolute peace and liberty created an exterminationist logic, in domestic as well as international politics. The presumption was that political or military conflict had to be interpreted as a massive clash between absolute principles. Napoleon's 1799 coup d'état was a logical culmination of a gradual militarization of Revolutionary politics. Napoleon's Grande Armée was a great democratic mobilization of the whole nation. Military virtue was becoming the very embodiment of civic virtue. Critics accuse Bell of exaggerating the ruthless militarism of the Revolution. They ask how Bell might explain the curious century of relative peace in Europe that followed the Napoleonic era, 1814-1914, the century that preceded the first mechanized total wars [ID] [2007no23:TLS:13]. The Napoleonic era [beginning in 1797] might not have equaled the qualities of "total war" demonstrated by WW1, but it did hint at the 20th century to come
*--Luciano Pellicani (The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity:84) discovered that the notion of “careers open to talent” dates from the beginning of history and over the long haul has been a prominent presumption in global human culture. The Western Roman Empire (Rome) and its successor states in "The West" were something of an exception to this rule. Twelfth-century historian Giovanni Cinnamo was surprised to discover that birth gave privileged status in the Latin kingdoms of western Europe [EG], while the socially more open Eastern Empire (Byzantium) tended more often to reward merit. Among the many medieval states that were successors to the destroyed Western Roman Empire, feudal privilege and exemption by birth predominated. From the classical through the medieval periods, the social/economic presumption of status by birth distinguished “The West” from eastern Europe. It was always a serious obstacle to modernization or any sort of adaptation to social/economic change. After the French Revolution, that all began to change in "The West"
*--The notion of careers open to talent was not original with the Enlightenment, but it was expressed with special force beginning then (for example, Thomas Paine [ID]). The notion spread far and wide in the French Revolutionary epoch and was carried on by Napoleon and his army.  But by the early 1800s, a powerful and largely successful assault on the notion of privilege by birth was under way [EG]. From this point forward, a shockwave ran through 19th-century establishmentarian Europe. Eventually, the assault on privilege and status by birth became the social/economic cornerstone of modernization there
*--By the 21st century, counter-attacks against the idea of careers open to talent (often given the derisive label “meritocracy”) became more frequent [EG]. The critique of "meritocracy" has often been little more than a thinly disguised assault on the concept of “careers open to talent”, an assault on one of the pillars of European modernization over the past two centuries

<>1800:Scotland, New Lanark | Robert Owen (1771-1858) came from Manchester, England, to purchase local cotton mills. Owen had worked his way up from laborer to owner of Manchester cotton mills. He was now a wealthy, self-made industrial entrepreneur on his way toward founding modern European social democratic movement, or socialism. He was determined to establish a practical functioning cooperative community of working people. He reorganized his New Lanark enterprise into a model industrial town in which public services were delivered on a cooperative basis -- housing, public sanitation, schools, retail outlets (stores). The fame of New Lanark spread. Often with Owen's support, experimental agricultural/industrial communities were founded
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions of labor in the new factory environment [ID] but they were also inspired in part by Owen
*1825:USA, Indiana, New Harmony utopian community established with direct participation of Robert Owen [pix]
*--Owen created National Equitable Labour Exchange and encouraged organization of wage-labor unions and advised unions to unite with cooperative associations. He fell afoul of English authorities who suppressed wage-labor organizations
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*1994ap01:TLS:29, Ian Harris review of Selected Works of Robert Owen [TXT]

<>1801ja18:Caucasus Mountains southern slopes | Georgia [Gruziia] made a protectorate as Russian frontier and imperialist expansion reached ever more boldly southward, without hindering expansion to the east
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*--D.M. Lang,. A Modern History of Georgia. London:1962

<>1801:1825; Russian Emperor Alexander I reigned for a quarter of a century
*--Twenty-four-year-old Alexander came to the throne as a result of a palace coup d'état. He was not unaware of this conspiracy which led to the murder of his father, Emperor Paul [DIR2:128-39]. At Alexander's coronation, the Austrian Minister described in his report how the new young Emperor marched in the procession "preceded by the murderers of his grandfather [ID], surrounded by the assassins of his father and followed by his own future killers" [that last was a prediction unrealized]
*--Alexander's early letters expressed concern about conditions under his father's rule [VSB,2:477]
*--Polish statesman in Russian service, Adam Czartoryski memoirs about this troubled situation [VSB,2:478-81] See his Memoirs [more excerpts: WRH3:224f]
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*--Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I: Paternalistic Reformer (NYC:1970)
*--Marian Kukiel, Czartoryski and European unity, 1770-1861 (1955) [DK435.5.C83k8]

<>1801ap02:Alexander I manifesto abolished Secret Chancery [rudimentary secret police created even before Catherine's reign] and transferred its authority to the Senate [VSB,2:481-2]

<>1801je05:Alexander I rescript directed a Commission to draft a new reformed code of laws [VSB,2:482-3]

<>1801se27:Alexander I abolished torture in criminal trials as reform spirit mounted [VSB,2:483]

<>1801de12:Alexander I decreed all free persons can purchase and own land, not just aristocrats [VSB,2:483]
*--These first months show how Alexander I hit the ground running with his plans for reform

<>1802jy:USA Delaware | Brandywine powder works constructed by French émigré Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours and his son. The Du Ponts helped consolidate the Hamiltonian vision [ID] of a strong US economy independent of other national economies but closely coordinated with US national goals and supported by governmental acts
*--Pierre had made a name for himself as a leading political-economic theorists of the new era (the "Physiocrats", close cousins to the English-language "classical economists"). The Du Ponts had fled the French Revolution as it became too radical for them. Pierre returned briefly in the more congenial militaristic Napoleonic times, but returned to USA before his death
*--The company thrived on military-industrial contracting during the War of 1812
*1822:Bank of America selected Pierre's son, Eleuthere Du Pont, as its head

<>1802se:Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin (-1826), "The Book Trade and the Love of Reading in Russia" and other essays [Raeff3:107-16 | KRR:412-14]

<>1802se08:Russian statute established Ministries and laid out ambitious plan for Senate [VSB,2:483-5 | KRR:256]
*--In these months Alexander I created, and was much influenced by, the Unofficial Committee made up of Adam Czartoryski, Pavel Stroganov, Viktor Kochubey, and Nikolai Novosil'tsev. These believed in reform, but they meant "reform from above". They were not sympathetic to "grass roots" movements, particularly among the aristocratic elites who sought something like social participation in legislation, perhaps through an augmented Senate. Alexander's greatest reforming statesman, Mikhail Speranskii, made the last effort to elevate the Senate, created by Peter I, into an authentic position of governmental authority. However, statist reformers prevailed in Alexander's councils
*--The old "colleges" of Peter I were juggled and renamed as eight "ministries" = Foreign Affairs, War, Navy, Finance, Interior, Justice, Commerce (soon abolished), and (altogether new) Education
*--Over the next few years five new universities were founded = Vilnius (Polish-language), Dorpat (German), Khar'kov, Kazan and, finally (1819), Saint-Petersburg University
*--The Unofficial Committee submitted several position papers, e.g., "Essay on the System to Be Followed in Restructuring the Administration of the Empire", "On the State of Our Constitution", and "General Plan for Work with the Emperor on Reform" [Raeff2:86-91]
*--In the first year of Alexander's reign, Adam Czartoryski composed a "Project for a Most Graciously Granted Charter to the People of Russia" [Raeff2:76-84]
*1802:The vigorous reformer Mikhail Speranskii submitted a memorandum to Emperor Alexander I in which he targeted imperial institutions and social classes for sharp criticism. Speranskii was himself born into the social class [soslovie] "clergy", worked his way out of that natal category and rose to a high position as close adviser to the crown. His memorandum criticized old and "useless" governmental institutions, but also the much compromised Russian social/service hierarchies [ID] = "let us ask what is the nobility itself, when its person, property, honor, indeed everything, depends not on the law but on a single autocratic will.... I should like someone to point out the difference between the dependence of the peasants on the landlords and the dependence of the nobles on the sovereign. I should like someone to discover whether in fact the sovereign does not have the same right over the landlords as the landlords have over the peasants. Thus, instead of all the splendid divisions of a free Russian people into the very free classes [sosloviia] of nobility, merchants, and the rest, I find in Russia two classes: The slaves of the sovereign and the slaves of the landowners. The first are called free only in relation to the second, but there are no truly free persons in Russia, except beggars and philosophers." Speranskii went on to say that this situation made subordination and harsh exploitation of the peasant a necessity for serf owners, and reliance on absolutist state control over serf owners a necessity for peasants. The mechanisms of the system naturally reinforced one another and compounded their harmful effects
*--Yet Speranskii himself worked to limit the privileges of the aristocracy (skipping ranks) as they sought to advance on the Table of Ranks
*--Much reform followed, but reform plans were grander than reform accomplishments
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*--Raeff, Marc. Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839. The Hague:1957. DK201.R3

<>1803:1808; Martha and Catherine Wilmot give women’s view on travel and everyday life in Russia, in their Russian Journals [Excerpts = WRH3:232f]
*--Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, Days of a Russian noblewoman : The memories of Anna Labzina, 1758-1821 [Excerpts = KRR:370-6]
*--More everyday life in the memoirs of F. F. Vigel' [VSB,2:510-13]

<>1803ja26:Alexander I issued preliminary directive on reform of public education [VSB,2:485-6]

<>1803fe20:Russian law created a new social estate, Free Agriculturists, and seemed to promise easing of serfdom, as well as other social reform [VSB,2:486-7 | DIR2:140-1]

<>1803ap30:USA doubled in size as result of "Louisiana Purchase" [W] from France
*--France had been stumbling in the New World for a half century, since the Seven Years War [ID], and now Napoleon needed cash to finance his grand army of European conquest
*--"Lewis and Clark Expedition" -- formally "The Corps of Discovery" -- was dispatched to explore this territory, which can be described briefly as that territory from the left bank of the Mississippi River to the Rockies, including the watersheds of all the tributaries to the Mississippi flowing from the west [W#1] [W#2] NB! that the Ohio River basin to the east was already within USA jurisdiction, and the Rio Grande and Colorado river basins were still firmly held within Spanish colonial territory
*--Corps of Discovery continued westward beyond the presumed limits of the Louisiana Purchase, over the Rockies, down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean. This might be taken as the beginning of the "Oregon question" since that vast north-western Pacific slope of the great continental divide along the Rockies with its various indigenous inhabitants (current day Oregon, Washington, Idaho and southern British Columbia) were not firmly under the authority of any one sovereign European state. A five-way shuffle for advantage was now under way between Native American, Russian, Spanish (then Mexican), English and USA interests. Another taxonomy of forces at work would show the sovereign empires (as listed above), several great overseas corporations (e.g., Russian-America Co., Hudson's Bay Co., the North West Co.), hitherto independent tribes, and ambitious individuals and groups maneuvering for advantage
*--Oregon Territory was defined as all the territory west of the Rockies, north of Spanish New World colonial possessions (California, Nevada, Utah) and south of Russian America (what is today a coastal panhandle of the state of Alaska, but stretching ambiguously much further south in the days of the Russian-America Co.). Increasingly throughout the region the English mercantilist Hudson's Bay Company was putting down roots, operating often in seeming independence of any governmental control. Soon there would be a new company in Oregon Territory
*--USA citizens, "pioneers", moved in great numbers from east to west in the first half of the 19th century. Notice the western N.American urban enclaves of US settlers in Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Portland, San Francisco, Monterey and Los Angeles  [MAP]

<>1804:1806; Russian Emperor Alexander I correspondence with Thomas Jefferson [TXT letter #1]
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*--Saul,1:38-42

<>1804:Russian thinker Ivan Pnin, "Essay on Enlightenment...." [Raeff3:126-58]. The Enlightenment guttered still against the rising darkness

<>1804oc07:Nagasaki | Rezanov arrived on the ship Nadezhda, captained by Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern [Krusenstern, Adam Johann von] In the previous year, 1803, Alexander I dispatched as official envoy Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764:1807) who sailed from Kronstadt in Gulf of Finland, via Cape Horn of Africa, to Kamchatka in northeastern Siberia. Rezanov planned to take up the permit given years before to Laksman to visit Japan, misinterpreting that permit to allow trade w/Japan. Rezanov was son-in-law of Russian-America Co. founder Shelikhov [PH&G:783] and a majority stockholder in RAC. He believed Japan would become the supplier to Russian outposts on Kurils, Aleutian Islands and in Alaska
*--Rezanov returned Japanese castaways and gave gifts. Japan put them all under close guard
*1805:Sea of Japan and south. Kruzenshtern explored under Russian flag
*1805ap04:Nagasaki. Only now was Rezanov granted meeting w/shogun envoy, who refused gifts and ignored requests for trade. This despite R's careful observation of Japanese etiquette, removing shoes, sitting on tatami mats. Rezanov was personally affronted [KEJ,6:307]
*1806:Kronstadt (island protecting inlet to Saint Petersburg) to Kamchatka-Kurils | Captain Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin sailed aboard the frigate Diana on an around-the-world expedition, a peaceful expedition complicated by the difficulties associated with Rezanov's corporate politics [BBL/Fraerman. Ivashchenko]
*1806:1807; Hokkaido waters, Kurils (Etorofu), and Sakhalin (Karafuto) | On Rezanov's orders, two captains who served the Russian-America Co., Nikolai Aleksandrovich Khvostov and Gavriil Ivanovich Davydov, repeatedly raided Japanese settlements and shipping, drove off Japanese settlers [KEJ,6:341. PH&G:774, 783] and looted, leaving letter on their own corporate authority saying they would return unless Japan came to terms with Russia. Purpose was to force Japan to abandon national seclusion [KEJ,3:45, 6:307] This is an early example of "gun-boat diplomacy" exercised by an overseas corporation and taken up more successfully by USA a half century later
*--Japanese officials stiffened defenses and wrote a defiant reply [SHJ,3:203-4]
*--Mamiya fought Russians and was wounded
*1806ap:Rezanov seemed a "loose cannon" as he acted like a sovereign in the northern Pacific Rim. He left Japan, now on another grand mission to the San Francisco Presidio, the seat of Spanish administrative authority in Alta California. He won the heart and hand of 16-year-old daughter of the Spanish commandant, Concepcíon (Conchita) Argüello. He seemed to think "nuptial diplomacy" might unite the ambitions of Russia (or maybe he thought he represented only his own Russian-America Company) and Spain in the Pacific
*1807:Siberia, Krasnoyarsk | Rezanov died while on his way to Europe seeking Papal permission for a Russian Orthodox widower to marry the young Catholic. Rezanov kept diary and other descriptions of his trip, now in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His exciting eight-year career on the Pacific Rim frontier ended. His Spanish fiancée became first nun in California
*1807:Hirata, a great Shinto scholar (1776:1843) [PH&G:159], wrote Chishima shiranami [White Waves of the Kurils] as a guide on how to restrain barbarians (for example, Rezanov) and a manual of modern coastal defense [Sansom,WWJ:244]
*1808:1809; Sakhalin (Karafuto) explored by Mamiya w/ Matsuda Denjuro. On his own initiative Mamiya followed the west coast of Siberia to discover Tatar Strait, then up Amur River 100 miles or so to Deren (Te-jen), a Manchurian post established for the collection of tribute, a further sign that active international economic relations were maintained despite various mercantilist or statist efforts to control them
*--Mamiya published Kita Ezo zusetsu [an illustrated account of northern Ezo (i.e., Sakhalin)] and Todatsu kiko [Travels in Tatary] which contained significant geographic and ethnographic information
*--Russian/Japanese relations seemed promising over previous decades, when largely limited to "private" commercial ties. Now commerce was in the hands of statist overseas corporate monopoly-holders, and two strutting states seemed ready to square off against one another
*--Events to the west again complicated Russian imperialist expansion
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*--Japanese ruling Bakufu felt they "had no need of foreign goods, to permit trade relations would merely deprive her of useful commodities and risk the entry of foreign religious doctrine" [Sansom,WWJ:244] Serious confusion and error within the Bakufu explained in SHJ,3:202-3. Shinto scholar/statesmen were beginning to see the need for radical modernization, rather than seclusion. Russia played a role in the coming of the "Meiji Restoration"
*--Russian poet Andrei Voznesenskii has written an interesting historical fiction about the remarkable career of Rezanov, Story under Full Sail
*--Chevigny, Lost Empire
*--Voenskii"Russkoe"
*--SIE,11:988
*--BrE,51:475
*--PH&G:776

<>1804de09:Alexander I decree reaffirmed Jewish "Pale of Settlement" created by Catherine II after the annexation of Polish territories and now added other measures, some reformist, some not [VSB,2:487-8]

<>1805de02:Austrian town Austerlitz the site of a great Napoleonic military victory over Russia and Austria
*--Coalition of England, Russia and Austria having little success against Napoleon

<>1806:England imposed "Continental Blockade" on Napoleon's Europe and, step by step, all Napoleon's allies. Wars were becoming "global" because national economies were becoming global

<>1806:Holy Roman Empire (after a 1000 years of stuttered existence) destroyed by Napoleon. His next big target would be the Russian Empire
*--The Holy Roman Empire was later thought of as the first German “Reich” [imperial regime], as in the name of the German-speaking nation-state translated as “Austria” = Osterreich or Eastern Reich
*--Two paths to modernity followed for the German-speaking peoples of Europe, Prussian and Austrian =
(1) In the north the German-speaking territories, most notably Prussia, drifted yet further from the dominance of Vienna. The Protestant Reformation [ID] and the Thirty-Years War [ID] had already destroyed any possibility of unity among the German-speaking peoples of middle-Europe. The Lutheran north and the Catholic south were spiritually at great distance from one another. Prussia began its fretted development toward “nationhood”, many years behind the geo-political units known as France and England
(2) In the south, Austria desperately clung to its notions of grandeur while its actual power eroded. Between 1867 and 1918, it glowed brightly for one last time as the Austro-Hungarian Empire [ID], then expired at the end of WW1
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*--Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West. Volume 1, 1789-1933 and volume 2, 1933-1990| Notice that Winkler presumes that “The Westernization” of Germany is a vital topic. He argues that the old pre-1806 dream of the holy “Reich” [imperial regime] continued to inspire the northern German-speaking peoples. The myth of the Reich postponed German nationhood in the north and squelched evolution of democracy there. Furthermore, Lutheranism promoted authoritarian and “caesoro-papist” tendencies in government. In the era of the Revolution of 1848 [ID] the central contradiction of European liberalism [ID] expressed itself with special sharpness in Prussia = national unity and liberty could not be combined. Two decades later, Bismarck solved this contradiction by creating a “Second Reich”, a parliamentary, authoritarian, statist and militaristic German nation-state
*--At the end of WW1, “democracy” was first tried under circumstances of humiliating defeat and economic collapse [ID]. The Nazi movement inherited this legacy when, in 1933, it created the “Third Reich” [ID] based on broad popular (if not technically democratic) assent. WW2 destroyed the myth of the Reich, and Germany was divided between contending partners, USA at the head of “The West” and the USSR at the head of world-ambitious proletarian internationalism [ID]. Then in the 1990s, the two Germanies were united, not as Reich but as a recognizable democratic state [ID]. In other words, national unity and liberty were now combined. The great modern European contradiction was finally resolved in the German Federal Republic
*--But all that was far in the future. In the meantime Prussia had a perilous half century ahead of itself as a German-speaking monarchy, guided by the interests of a landowning aristocratic elite (Junkers) who in many cases in the eastern regions depended, as from days of yore, on the bound labor of Slavic villagers (Poles). In the German-speaking world, the chances for traditional conservative or new liberal political outcome were slim

<>1807je25:Russian Emperor Alexander I and French Emperor Napoleon signed alliance at Tilsit [VSB,2:488-90 | DIR2:142-52]
*--The two emperors played at the possibility of creating anew the great Roman Empire in West and East. Yet Alexander succeeded in protecting the integrity of the Prussian monarchy and its homelands. Alexander told Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, "Be patient. We will get it all back. He will break his neck."
*--The demands of the great Napoleonic wars now shaped Russian imperialist and frontier expansion
*--As so often in time of war, anytime and anywhere, Emperor Alexander felt it necessary to re-create the national secret police administration he had largely disbanded six years earlier
*1807oc09(NS):Prussia emancipated its serfs, but the remains of the old German-speaking Teutonic and Livonian knights within the Russian Empire at the eastern border of Prussia -- the now Russianized "Baltic Barons" -- clung tightly to their authority over serf labor in the villages

<>1808:+; French political theorist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) published Théorie des quatre mouvements. This and later works made Fourier one of the most influential radical thinkers of his epoch. He was of the bourgeois class (like the English visionary Robert Owen [ID]), and his family did well, but he dreamt of a future far more egalitarian than that produced by the French Revolution. He believed in the liberating but also unifying power of natural human passions. He felt, as did Rousseau, that modern society was to be blamed for most of humanity's woes. He felt that "civilization" hindered the realization of "harmony"
*--Seeking to free humans for a fully emotional and passionate life, he conceived of a highly rational economic unit called the "phalanx". He supplied a very precise number = 1620 people working together equaled one phalanx. He thought of the phalanx as something like the basic cellular unit of his ideal self-sufficient social-economic system. The community that formed the phalanx was called a phalanstery
*--Fourier ran ads in newspapers inviting wealthy financiers to bankroll his transformational organization. No bankers responded, but many followers later made efforts to create such utopian communities, many of them in USA (e.g., Brooks Farm)
*--Fourier and Saint-Simon were very different figures, but together they were thought of as founders of what a later generation (mainly opponents) called "utopian socialism"

<>1808:1832; Weimar Germany |  Writer and cultural impresario Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publish his most famous work, Faust [PWT2:115-17]
*1798:1717; Johann Sebastian Bach had been court organist in Weimar, the capital city of the German Duchy Saxe-Weimar. The city had become the cultural capital of an emerging north German civilization and a European literary mecca during the time of Goethe's residence there (1775:1832)

<>1808:USA and Russia initiated formal diplomatic relations
*--In that same year, German-born but now USA citizen and NYC resident John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) formed American Fur Company, including a Great Lakes subsidiary and a Pacific Fur Company with its provincial headquarters in the Oregon Territory city named after him, Astoria
*--By the 1820s, Astor's companies exercised a virtual monopoly on the fur trade in USA territories. At his death he was the wealthiest individual in the USA. This "capitalist" corporation was an active rival to the old mercantilist overseas corporations in North America and the Pacific region. While not a mercantilist enterprise, the Astor companies worked to exclude "foreign" companies and develop the middle and western regions of North America under USA dominance. The company was active in the development of Mississippi riverboat transportation. As an early example of a "trust" corporation, it also worked to crush all competition, whether "foreign" or not
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*--Saul,1:27-55 & 64-69

<>1809mr23:Finland fully absorbed into Imperial Russia [VSB,2:490]
*--Finland was granted its own constitution, suggesting that the Emperor might be open to the thought of constitutional reform in Russia itself
*--Frontier and imperialist expansion was now mainly shaped by Napoleonic contingencies

<>1809oc:Russian minister Mikhail Speranskii issued his bold project [Raeff2:93-109 | VSB,2:490-3 | DIR2:153-7]
*--Over the next year, the State Council [Gosudarstvennyi sovet] was established and the ministries reorganized [VSB,2:493-4 | KRR:256-7] The State Council was appointed from among old and experienced statesmen, and its role was to consult with the Emperor, at his pleasure
*--This was the greatest period of Alexandrine reform

<>1810:USA CA Fort Ross founded by 95 Russian colonists who were expected to help supply the Russian Pacific-rim enterprises of the Russian-America Company
*1812:Russian-America Co. signed an agreement with Spanish officials to lease territory around Bodega Bay, not far north of San Francisco Bay
*--USA-Russian economic relations intensified in the heat of the Napoleon wars [Saul,1:25-27, 111-32] US vessels carried 20% of all exports out of Saint-Petersburg

<>1811:Nikolai M. Karamzin published Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis [Excerpts: RRC2,2#23 | VSB,2:495-7]
*--Russian TXT
*--Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790: An Account of a Young Russian Gentleman's Tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and England
\\
*--J. L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the 19th Century (1975)

<>1811:1815; Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) occupied by English, one of many examples of how Napoleonic wars were not unlike the "world wars" of the 20th century

<>1811jy11:Japan, Kunashiri Island | Vasilii Golovnin landed to make amends for 1807:raids [Golovnin memoirs excerpted in Lensen,Eastward:61-5]
*--Japanese lured, then captured Lieutenant Commander Golovnin and crew who were surveying Kurils. G had put a man ashore further out to sea, on Etorofu Island, and had gone ashore himself to join conversations with Japanese officers who gathered there. Then Golovnin anchored for night off Kunashiri near "strongly garrisoned fortress". Went ashore again w/some men, was surrounded, bound, rough handled and packed off to Hakodate for two years [SHJ, 3:204] Tradition says this was in retaliation for Khvostov attacks on Japanese territories. Golovnin later published his memoirs of his time in Japan, quickly published and republished in English to satisfy deepening European curiosity about the fabulous Asian Island civilization = Narrative of My Captivity...
*1812:Kuril Islands | In retaliation for Golovnin kidnap, Lieut. Commander Petr Ivanovich Rikord seized the powerful frontier merchant Takataya and took him to Kamchatka
*1813:Takataya persuaded Russians to let him return to Japan. Okhotsk commandant gave written assurance that Khvostov raids were without the authorization or knowledge of tsarist authorities. [Beasley,MHJ:40 said written assurance from Irkutsk provincial governor]
*--Yet Golovnin managed to repair Japanese-Russian relations
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*--KEJ,3:45

<>1812jy06:Russian Emperor Alexander I issued proclamation of war with French Emperor Napoleon [DIR2:158-9 | WRH3:249-56]
*--MAP = Napoleon's central European empire on eve of war with Russia

<>1812au26:Russians defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino. Russian retreat left Moscow open for French occupation [Eye:278-80]
*1812se04:Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov reported to Alexander I about retreat from Borodino in the face of the French invasion [VSB,2:497-8] Napoleon occupied Moscow which burned for over two weeks. Napoleon awaited for Alexander I to capitulate, but he did not
*--Borodino Battle museum
*--Borodino "virtual battlefield"
*--MAP = Napoleon's Russian attack and retreat
*1812no03:Alexander I issued a manifesto on the retreat of Napoleon from Russia [VSB,2:498-9]
*1813ja01:Moscow scene [DIR2:160]
*1813de25:Alexander's orders to the advancing Russian armies: "Your courage and valor have brought you from the Oka River to the Rhine" [VSB,2:499]
*1813:1814; Russian-led military campaign drove the French out of middle Europe and pursued Napoleon into the heart of France
*1836:Nadezhda Durova’s memoirs described how, during the Napoleonic wars, she, a woman, masqueraded as a man so that she could join the cavalry [KRR:376-9]
*--Russian imperial expansion had now taken a dramatic step westward, but only very briefly
\\
*--Saul,1:55-91
*--Kutuzov vs. Napoleon at Borodino featured in St.Petersburg Hermitage Museum [W]
*--Jane Hartley article on invasion [TXT]
*--J. David Markham essay on novelist Stendhal in the Napoleonic army that invaded Russia. FIND "Russia" and read to end here = [W]
*--E. V. Tarle, Napoleon's Invasion of Russia in 1812
*--Michael Adams, Napoleon and Russia offers a good military history of the campaign that drove Napoleon out Russia and all the way to Paris  (though readers should be wary of Adams' weak grasp of the larger historical issues)
*--Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America is especially good on the international context of the north American episode

<>1813se:Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada during the War of 1812. Tecumseh [W], a brilliant Shawnee Indian chief, orator, and warrior at the Battle of Tippecanoe, shown above being fatally shot by Colonel Johnson


Death of Tecumseh
[Rotunda Frieze of the US Capitol, Washington DC]

<>1813:Japan | Golovnin released with help of Takataya. Much mutual information exchanged in this tense but salutary confrontation [KEJ,6:341]. Takataya regained monopoly in Hokkaido trade which he had managed for nearly 15 years [KEJ,7:319, 3:45] Golovnin cooperated with Japanese interrogators, but exaggerated Russian strength, contributing to Japanese fears of Russian threat
*--Mamiya, already an accomplished explorer over the previous decade and a half, exchanged surveying and astronomical navigation findings with Golovnin [KEJ, 5:88]
*--Adachi Sannai(1769:1845) conversed with Golovnin about math
*--Baba Sajuro (1787:1822) revised Russian-Japanese dictionary w/G's help
*--"Golovnin had gained the esteem and affection of his captors, and when he left there was a festive farewell gathering in which Russians and Japanese took part in great harmony. The Japanese crowded round their one-time prisoners with gifts and kind words, and some were on the verge of tears at partying. As the Diana was towed out, the Japanese and Russians exchanged thunderous cheers. Such behavior was typical of the intercourse between Japanese and Russians, which combined fear and attraction. Golovnin's was the last important attempt to establish good relations with the Japanese in the Kurils. This intercourse, like a love affair with its quarrels and embraces, played an important part in revealing to the Japanese their own weakness and in opening a breach in the policy of seclusion." [SHJ,3:204]
*1816:Saint Petersburg | Golovnin published memoirs of his adventure in Japan. "Remarkably objective and sympathetic, Golovnin praised the high level of Japanese education, the concern of the Japanese government for its subjects, the sensibility, astuteness, honesty, hospitality, and cleanliness of the Japanese people. He portrayed the Japanese as fiery patriots, conscious not only of the harm that foreign actions had brought in years past, but confident of their own superiority. He felt that the Japanese lagged behind Europe in many respects, but he noted that their capabilities were tremendous and predicted that they would catch up with the Europeans and become potential rivals in the future." [KEJ,3:45] Golovnin did much to encourage positive relations, BUT =
*--By 1821, Ezo [Hokkaido] came under direct reign of Japanese shogun for the first time, as a counter to Russian pressures there and as a restraint on the evolution of independent relations between Japanese and Russian frontier agents and adventurers

<>1813:Azerbaijan territories partitioned by Russia and Iran (Persia)
*--Baku, an important Azery port city on the western shores of the land-locked Caspian Sea, later a world-significant oil depot, came under Russian authority [W]

<>1814mr30 (NS):Paris | Russia led allied forces into the French capital. Emperor Alexander astride his white stallion signified his key role in the liberation of Europe from Napoleon
*--Which of the two Napoleons did Alexander liberate Europe from: "The child of the French Revolution" or "the nemesis of the French Revolution"?
*--And another question arose about whether the previous decade of war was simply about the French Revolution and Napoleon or perhaps about a whole lot more here in the early years of the 19th century =
*1814au24(NS):English burned Washington DC as the Napoleonic wars expanded onto the global stage even after Napoleon was defeated. In the New World, that expansion was called the "War of 1812". Note that both Moscow [above] and WDC burned in this era
*--The "European Revolution" slackened only briefly as statesmen in the various nations who claimed victory over Napoleon prepared to meet in Vienna with the conservative and sometimes reactionary goal to restore the old pre-Napoleonic Europe and, wherever possible, to restore the pre-revolutionary old regime ("ancient regime") =

<>1814no01:1815je09 (NS); Austria | The Congress of Vienna met for over six months in an attempt to set Europe straight after the disruptions caused by French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic imperialism within Europe itself. All European powers of any considerable size were invited to participate, including "defeated" France. Mercurial French statesman Talleyrand, ex-priest, ex-revolutionary, ex-official under Napoleon, and in all regards a powerful representative of the French nation, was allowed a serious role in this Congress. [Contrast this generous-minded moment in European diplomacy with a moment of equal profound impact on the fate of Europe one century later, the far less generous-minded Paris Peace Conference]
*1815mr01:je18(NS); Even as the great Congress met, Napoleon escaped captivity on the island Elba and gathered a small armed force in a futile three-month effort to retake France. Allied troops commanded by Prussian and English officers apprehended Napoleon this second time at Waterloo
*--Back in Vienna, Austrian minister Prince Clemens von Metternich played the key role. His conservative actions and views (perhaps better to say reactionary actions and views [ID]) made him the most powerful European continental spokesmen of post-French Revolutionary "far-right" conservatism
*--Irishman and British parliamentary figure Edmund Burke was the chief representative of English conservatism in this epoch.  Edmund Burke's views can be contrasted every bit as much as they can be compared with the ideas of the continental conservative Metternich
*--Among other things, the Congress of Vienna sought to ease European imperialist competition in Europe itself. On the whole the Congress approached its tasks with a very practical and sober-minded set of expectations. However =
*--Russian Emperor Alexander I inspired a universalistic or pan-European Christian reconciliation. His lofty pietistic pan-Europeanism seemed quaint in an era of emerging nationalistic divisiveness
*--For Alexander, visionary global schemes gradually replaced domestic reform back in Russia. Alexander had fallen to some degree under the political influence of the reactionary French émigré Joseph de Maistre.  However visionary and however global Alexander's scheming, actual Russian frontier and imperial expansion slackened in the last decade of his reign
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*--Florovsky,5:162-238 surveys Russian spiritual life in the Alexandrine era of the "Bible Society"

<>1814:1825de14; Russian activists, many of them ex-officers in Alexander's armies that occupied Paris, took inspiration from the role of "liberator" that Russia had just played and, on the other side of the ledger, grew increasingly alarmed as Alexander I and his government lost its reforming zeal. They dreamt of European-style liberalization or even revolutionary change in Russia and set about mobilizing themselves and others within a surprising network of voluntary action societies that culminated eleven years later in an ill-fated insurrection against Emperor Nicholas I at the moment he prepared to ascend the throne
*--This long decade of diverse and complex activism has been conventionally packaged in the all-too-simple phrase "Decembrist movement". The calendrical phrase is abrupt, singular and misleading but mainly artificial. The phrase was never used prior to December, 1825. That coincidental month in which the final futile act took place has been fastened onto a long-term, complex, original and dramatic epoch in the history of modern Russian political culture
*1813:1814; Almost all leading figures participated in the campaign through the western provinces of war-ravaged Russia and into western Europe, all the way to Paris. Life in occupied Paris was a "school in politics" [SIE]. Schooling touched on more than politics, it also taught a good deal about the public culture of an emerging general European civil society
*1816:1819; Mikhail Lunin (1787-1845), lived in Paris, grew close to Saint-Simon and left a powerful impression on him. Lunin was a person of unusual integrity and reckless daring, traits that appealed to Saint-Simon. Lunin was a dashing and wealthy gentry landowner who served as an officer in the Russian army of liberation and was preparing to devote his life to public service. Soon Lunin drew close to other "Decembrists"
*1814:Two original organizations formed = The Order of Russian Knights [Orden russkikh rytsarei] [NDD,1:132-9] and Sacred Workshop [Sviashchennaia artel’] [NDD,1:124-30]. The Workshop existed until 1817
*1816:1817; Union of Salvation [Soiuz spaseniia] or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland [Obshchestvo istinnykh i vernykh synov otechestva] lasted one year and had thirty members, including =
  Aleksandr Murav'ev, a Lieut.colonel in the Imperial General Staff was the founder
  S. Trubetskoi
  I.D. Yakushkin
  Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol
  Matvei Murav’ev-Apostol
  Nikita Murav'ev
  Pavel Pestel' and others soon became active
*--Eventually four substantial societies -- Union of Salvation, Union of Welfare, Northern Society and Southern Society -- represented the beginnings of organized political opposition (as opposed to great uprisings or smaller conspiracies or isolated dissent) [SIO:11]
*--Let's bow to convention and designate these years as "the Decembrist Movement"

<>1815:Nikolai Karamzin, History of the Russian State (12 vols.) began to appear [Raeff3:117-24]
*--Karamzin had been a dominant figure in Russian cultural life for more than a decade, but his influence was being superseded by a more radical form of progressive patriotism as represented by "Decembrists", a love of Russia that insisted on moving "forward" rather than venerating the past
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*--Wagar on Karamzin [TXT]

<>1815ja:1817my08; Hawaii, Kauai Island, Waimea River | Russian Fort Elizabeth established. Hawaiian King Kamehameha refused cooperation with Russian-America Co. and demanded it leave; which it did
*--Russian expansion to the east, into the Pacific Basin and the New World, which began over two centuries earlier, was winding down as new difficulties and complexities arose in the south =
*--A century-long epoch opened often called "The Eastern Question" or, more broadly and more playfully, "The Great Game", a largely English-Russian competitive struggle for imperialist expansion, first in Central Asia and eventually on a global scale

<>1815se14(26):Paris | Austrian Emperor Francis, Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, and Russian Emperor Alexander I signed agreement creating the "Holy Alliance" [VSB,2:499-500 | DIR2:161-2 | ORW:66-7]
*--Inspired mainly by Emperor Alexander's Bible-centered piety, the three monarchies committed themselves -- "sincerely" or with mendacity of forethought -- to guide their "nations" in harmony with time-honored Christian principles. They felt the need to augment the very hard-headed or practical-minded or solidly diplomatic Vienna settlements [ID] with spiritual verities, to add "values" to politics. The Quadruple Alliance (England, Russia, Austria and Prussia -- later erstwhile enemy France was admitted) seemed to these righteous monarchs too purely political, too Machiavellian [ID], and thus lacking in moral substance
*--Not wanting to seem sacrilegious, all the great princes of Europe eventually signed on, except for three = English King George IV (spared the embarrassment by laws barring the king from any significant political acts), the Pope in Rome (whose religious obligation was to shun secular acts of this sort), and the Turkish Sultan (he simply was not a Christian -- no room was provided for an Islamic presence within the alliance here called "holy")
*--The "Holy Alliance" became an instrument in the hands of reactionary Prince Metternich of Austria and stirred revulsion, even direct opposition, within the British Foreign Office. The US Monroe Doctrine [ID] was in part inspired as a check against the aggressive reactionary policies supposedly justified by Christian virtues
*1820:Austrian minister Metternich, "Confession of Faith" [TXT]. Over the next two years he offered views on Russia and the Greek revolt against Turkey [VSB,2:508-10]

<>1815no15:Poland received constitution from Russia (i.e., those territories of old Poland taken by Russia in the three partitions) [VSB,2:500-2 | DIR2:164-73 | ORW:70-1]
*--Poland was thus the scene an early experiment in "devolution" of political power, in which political authority over domestic affairs moved downward from the imperialist metropol to the regional periphery
*--Russia sought to ease imperialist tensions in the westward direction, to avoid the dangers of direct European imperialist competition in Europe itself
*--As he did this, Alexander I again inspired hopes among many of his subjects that a constitution  might be possible in Russia itself. But it is hard to escape the impression that Alexander's fifteen years of zealous reform were largely at an end
*--Arakcheev replaced Speranskii as the symbol of Alexander I's political programs =

<>1816:1821; Russian military leader and loyalist General Aleksei Arakcheev administered "military settlements" [voennye poseleniia] in the Russian countryside. Created in 1810 as a way of integrating the military with productive work, particularly agricultural, these settlements also made peasant life like barracks life, agriculture like a military mission. Settlements grew to about 400,000 members in 1825 and constituted 1/4 of the Russian army [VSB,2:503-4]
*--There is a sense in which these measures can be seen as a part of a larger effort to extend state tutelage over society. Village agricultural life was not recognized in the Petrine Table of Ranks, but military ranks were. Military settlements opened the possibility that peasant plowmen could be organized in rational rank and file (just like peasant "soldaty")
*--These settlements also served to extend the reach of state authority into distant rural districts where the authority of gentry landowners needed to be checked and balanced. Thus the settlements can be viewed as a statist move to undermine that independent gentry authority implied in Catherine II's Charter 30 years earlier
*--So far as peasant disorder in the French Revolution inspired dread in every European monarchical heart, the settlements can also be thought of as early examples of change introduced as a restraint on change, or "change vs. change"
*--Military settlements represent an end of an epoch of "progressive" reform and the beginning of an epoch of "reactionary" reform
*--The settlements were not abolished until 1857 at the beginning of the "Era of Great Reforms"
*--"Decembrist" I.D. Yakushkin identified "military settlements" as one source of social opposition to autocracy [VSB,2:522]
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*--Jenkins, Michael. Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire

<>1816:English Parliament formed a committee to look into the national scandal of child labor and related social abuses caused by rapid industrialization. An era of English reform opened
*1815:Eyewitness accounts of working conditions in English factories [Eye:295-8 | PWT2:142-50]
*--Scene from the English mines illustrated need for reforms [pix]
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions of wage-labor in the new factory environment. Robert Owen [ID] inspired some part of this progressive movement, though results produced by a less reform-oriented Parliament disappointed some English liberals

<>1817:England | James Mill published The History of British India which gained him a permanent appointment with the India House, the managerial headquarters of the East India Company. Mill held that position until the company and its authority in India were abolished and replaced by direct English imperialist rule [ID]
*--Much influenced by the Utilitiarian social critic Jeremy Bentham [ID] and the philosopher David Hume, Mill went on to write many influential studies [ID] in philosophy, government and political economy. He contributed to the growing influence of what has come to be called "political economy". He was a central figure in a movement called "classical economists", "liberal economic theorists" or "philosophical radicals", which amounted to an advocacy of "progressive" reforms in England, better to rid the land of medieval obstacles to industrialization and promote economic, social and institutional changes better to accommodate modernization
*--James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, extended that legacy into even more radical scholarly and political positions
\\
*--Joseph Hamburger, James Mill and the Art of Revolution
*---------------------, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophical Radicals

<>1817:1832; Alaska | Colonial Russian America: Kyrill T. Khlebnikov's Reports
*--These were the years of increasing hardship for the Russian colonies and the Russian-America Company

<>1817:1819; USA FL | Seminole wars
*--Major documents relating to USA foreign affairs prior to 1898, including many treaties signed between USA and Native Americans peoples [W]

<>1818:1872; Pacific deeps now crossed by USA whalers sailing out of New Bedford CN and Nantucket MA, around the southern tip of the South American continent, and out into the great South Sea. This was the third and grandest phase of the global US whaling industry, lasting 54 years
*1823oc07:Nantucket newspaper, The Inquirer, reported = “there are employed in the Southern Whale Fishery from the port of Nantucket alone nearly twice as many ships as are engaged in that fishery from all the ports of France and England, and that most of the whaling ships belonging to both these countries are commanded by persons from Nantucket and New Bedford” [Stackpole:382]
*--Early in this half-century phase, the Pacific Rim came under USA influence in a new way, and this some decades before over-land frontier expansion reached westward beyond the Ohio Valley. The efforts of William Rotch, Sr., the vision of John Ledyard, the far-western extension of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the enterprise of Astor’s American Fur Co. leapt over the vast North American interior. US “Manifest Destiny” was guaranteed by the east-coast/west-coast sea embrace of the North American mainland, and the whalers played a central role
*--Melville wrote in ch. 111 of Moby Dick: “To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham, while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the whole world’s bulk about, makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.”
*1823:ships in the hunt=203
*1835:ships in the hunt=421
*1846:ships in the hunt=736
*1847:USA sent out individual whaling ventures from 34 ports. New Bedford sent out three times as many ships as the second busiest whaling port, Nantucket. By now San Francisco CA was engaged in the international whaling industry and was soon the principle importing point for whale products
*1840:USA | Socially conscious lawyer and pundit Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. This fictional but realistic account, based on personal experience, exposed maltreatment of sailors and promoted labor reform in the whale fisheries
*1840s:US whalers pushed through the Kuril Island chain which suspends like a necklace south from the Kamchatka Peninsula. They entered the icy northern waters of the Sea of Okhotsk [G]. They also fished the Bering Sea and passed through the Bering Strait, past the Diomede islands and Russian Alaska to the east, into the Arctic Sea, hunting northern Siberian coastal waters. In these years, US whalers frequently dropped anchor in Russian ports and met with Siberian Russian commanders and officials on friendly terms. The Russians never thought in these years to enter the whaling business in any serious way
*--Whaling was a USA frontier experience fundamentally unknown to Eurasia

<>1818:English writer Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. The fantasy can be taken as the original work of “science fiction”. The growth in the numbers of cheap penny-press publishers, magazines and other forms of popular entertainment created just the right market for these “fables of a technological age” [a phrase from Brian Aldiss’ introduction to his anthology, A Science Fiction Ominbus]
*1826:Shelley further contributed to the genre, and helped launch the pop-arts era, when she published The Last Man, which portrayed the suffering of the only surviving representative of human kind after a global pandemic
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*2008fe01:TLS:19 | Dinah Birch emphasized the dominant tone of solitude in science fiction, as in all varieties of Romantic literature [ID]. “Loneliness shadows science faction.” It allows “subtle ways of exploring cultural anxiety and desire”

<>1818mr15:Warsaw meeting of the Polish Sejm heard Russian Emperor Alexander I suggest that the whole Russian Empire might soon be ruled by constitutional law, perhaps on the model of the constitution he had granted Poland three years earlier
*1818:1820; Russian political thinker and state servitor, earlier a member of the Unofficial Committee, Nikolai Novosil'tsev, composed a constitutional Charter of the Russian Empire. He suggested true federalist relationships between the Russian metropol and the imperial peripheries [Raeff2:111-20 | VSB,2:504-6]
*--Mikhail Lunin remembered that the newly mobilized but narrow and elite "public" close to "Decembrists" circles welcomed Alexander's speech as a "political pledge" to the nation. They presumed Alexander I intended to encourage them; perhaps he was "blessing" them and their aims. "The Society gathered and intensified its forces to ensure that this promise should be independent of the temporary will of an individual, and taught the nation to understand and appreciate the benefits of liberty and merit them" [FBF:14]
*1818:1821; Russian voluntary society, Union of Welfare [or Union of Prosperity = Soiuz blagodenstviia] (Decembrists) formed with about 200 members when the Union of Salvation disbanded. Pavel Pestel wrote that the central directorate [Korenaia uprava] unanimously voted to work for a Russian republic in harmony with general European political trends, several degrees more "radical" than Alexander's promise or Novosil'tsev's constitutional project (above)
*--Union of Welfare bylaws [Raeff3:117-24] Rules and constitution [Raeff1:69-99]
*1818:Society of United Slavs [Obshchestvo soedinennykh slavian] formed independently and went through many changes. Petr Borisov was an active member [Raeff1:157-61]. A very moralistic society, it required on "Oath" of all its members [MFR:282-3] Life on the SW borders of the Russian Empire showed members how they were all harmed by needless divisions among "Slavic brothers" (religious, linguistic, ethnic, etc.) [Georges Luciani, La société des Slaves Unis 1823-1825 (Bordeaux:1963)]
*1818:1826; Free Society of Amateurs of Russian Letters [Vol'noe obx liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti]
*1819:Free Society to Found Schools of Mutual Instruction [Vol'noe obshchestvo uchrezhdeniia uchilishch vzaimnogo obucheniia]
 *1820:A spontaneous military mutiny, involving the elite Semevsky Regiment [Semevskii polk], convinced certain Decembrists that the military was ripe for revolt.  They positioned themselves within the military establishment in order to avoid the horrors of destructive and uncoordinated disorder among the people, and to assure their own rightful and prominent place in the event of an uprising
*--"Decembrists" were gaining momentum and seemed at first in some harmony with larger state-sponsored trends. But with time the societies became more oppositional

<>1819:French "public intellectual" Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825),"First Extract from the 'Organizer'"
*--Saint-Simon was the original "socialist" theorist. He fought with French forces against England during the USA colonial wars. Back in France he surrendered his noble title ("derogated" his title) and supported the French Revolution. Through various speculations he amassed a fortune, but contributed it all to the support of scientific and scholarly research. Until his death he lived in extreme poverty, supported only by his servant
*--He developed a view of the future which placed great responsibilities on what he called "savants", trained specialists, an intellectual and technocratic elite from all realms of business, productive, scientific, artistic and professional life. These would be the leaders of the peaceful and productive industrial future, supplanting the old destructive and war-like feudal elites -- priests, warriors, kings and seigneurs -- and abolishing the medieval legacy of privilege or position by birth, rather than merit and contributions to modernizing society. Saint-Simon's socialism shared much with the liberalism of the industrializing, modernizing, rationalistic bourgeoisie, but went a stop beyond standard European liberalism
*--Saint-Simon's legacy became entangled with that of Charles Fourier [ID]. Together they exerted considerable influence as European politics evolved so energetically in the years after the French Revolution
*--Saint-Simon's life and legacy fit the experience of the emerging elite Russian civil society especially closely, for example, Mikhail Lunin, Alexander Herzen and the Petrashevtsy
*--Auguste Comte served as assistant to Saint-Simon in his later years
*--By the 1830s, the followers of Saint-Simon had evolved into something like a cult, adopting habits and outlook that could be called "religious", though one might argue that was the last thing he would have wanted to be his legacy

<>1819:German Carlsbad Decrees, inspired by Metternich-style conservative/reactionary attitudes, sought to censor all expressions liberal and nationalistic dissent and to crush all spontaneous social organizations, particularly student organizations [the Burschenschaften] [Stearns:472-3]
*--German liberal Ernst Moritz Arndt described how the Napoleonic wars in northern Germany had set loose a powerful nationalistic and liberal political movement [PWT2:124-5; more on this era, 125-7]

<>1820:USA New York State political boss and future President Martin Van Buren (1837-41) created "the Albany Regency", something new in politics: a political party machine sustained by the "spoils system" and control over nominations and, thus, selection of officeholders in an otherwise democratic electoral system. This sort of "political machine" has been called a "cadre" party within which large numbers of relatively passive adherents are guided by a minority of professional party activists

<>1821:Central America | Wide-spread revolt against Spanish imperial power and colonial authority
*--Separate states formed out of the old colonial departments: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica. These tried a "Republic of United States of Central America" or "Central American Union" but fragmented as the decades wore on
*1823:Mexico achieved independence from Spain, after more than a decade of revolutionary struggle against European imperialist dominion, but soon began to disintegrate under internal and external pressure

<>1821:Ezo [Hokkaido] now no longer under direct shogun rule

<>1821:French reactionary political philosopher and advisor to Russian Emperor Alexander I, Joseph de Maistre wrote The Pope
*1810:de Maistre wrote "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions" [W]
*1822:de Maistre wrote "On the Spanish Inquisition" [W]

<>1821:Moscow meetings of the Union of Welfare [Soiuz blagodenstviia] spawned two new and more politically oriented societies =  
(1) Southern Society [Yuzhnoe obshchestvo] formed in Ukrainian regions where the Second Army was quartered. Pavel Pestel' organized the society on the basis of ideas he formulated in a document that later came to be known as "Russkaia pravda" [TXT]
(2) Northern Society [Severnoe obshchestvo] formed in Petersburg
  Nikita Murav'ev was the founder [G/BBL]
  Nikolai Turgenev
  Mikhail Lunin
  Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoi
  Evgenii Obolenskii
*--The society grew significantly.  It favored constitutional rule, but felt that only a Constituent Assembly had the authority to formulate a constitution.  Nikita Murav'ev offered his "Konstitutsiia" as one that might serve as a model [TXT]
*--The following Northern Society members strengthened its republican tendencies =

Kondratii Ryleev
Obolenskii
Nikolai Bestuzhev (baron)
Aleksandr Bestuzhev
Mikhail Bestuzhev
*1822au01:Russian Decree prohibited Masonic lodges and all secret societies (the definition of which was "societies not formally approved by the tsarist state"). The decree was provoked, in part, by the growing intensity of the "Decembrist movement" [VSB,2:508]
*1823:Moscow | Despite decree, the Society of Wisdom-Lovers flourished with V. F. Odoevskii at its head and future Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevskii and radical "westernizer" Petr Chaadaev as members
\\
*--Wagar on Odoevskii [TXT]

<>1822:Russia introduced elaborate protectionist and tariff regulations that remained in force for nearly a quarter of a century
*--German economist Friedrich List praised this act [TXT], but market economists generally criticized it

<>1822:1831; German philosopher of eventual world influence George W. F. Hegel [W#1] [W#2], Lectures on the Philosophy of History
*1821:Philosophy of Right [TXT#1] [TXT#2]

<>1822jy22:Speranskii, now maneuvered from the center of power, crafted a Statute for the administrative organization of Siberia, to make it more systematically a part of Russia and to promote entrepreneurial freedom, thus reforming old mercantilist practices [VSB,2:506-8]
\\
*--Raeff4:65-7

<>1823:1832; Russia suffered cholera epidemics
\\
*--McGrew, R. E. Russia and the Cholera, 1823-1832. Madison WI:1965

<>1823au16:Alexander I issued secret order concerning succession to the throne [VSB,2:510]

<>1823de02:USA President Monroe sent to Congress a message which declared opposition to any new European colonies in the Americas (the western hemisphere) and warned against any further interference in the affairs of the hemisphere. The message (composed mainly by John Quincy Adams) came to be called the Monroe Doctrine [TXT]
*--This "Doctrine" aimed in part to check Russian imperialist ambitions along NE shores of the Pacific down to California. [MAP] Some of the background to this is shown in the following =
*1818, Oregon Territory was taken under "joint occupancy" by treaty agreement between England and USA
*1821, Russia decreed that its New World territories stretched southward to the 51st parallel (at the northern tip of Vancouver Island). The New World Pacific Coast was in a state of flux. The fall of Spanish rule and the establishment of new but weak Mexican rule in the northern reaches of the old Spanish imperialist domains, "El Norte", opened a new set of possibilities. The Monroe Doctrine was designed to help limit those possibilities
*--There was in this connection an imaginary threat from the Holy Alliance which seemed ready to support New World Spanish imperialism, eroding each day. USA was flexing its young muscle for the edification of the Old World European imperialists. It turned a cold shoulder to England, refusing to issue the document as a joint USA/English resolution
*--By 1825, Russia, USA and England were able to agree that 54 degrees, 40 minutes latitude would mark the southern border of Russian power (and thus the northern border of Oregon Territory)
*--As the century wore on, the Doctrine came explicitly to imply a "corollary" right of the USA to intervene in hemispheric affairs in reaction to the fear of possible European intervention -- or, as first in the case of Mexico, to correct perceived self-mismanagement on the part of western hemispheric neighbors -- or simply to further US national interests
*--Opponents of growing US power were quick to say that the Monroe Doctrine had in a sense reversed itself by the time of Teddy Roosevelt. It now seemed, especially in Latin America, to justify and protect USA imperialism rather than hemispheric independence
\\
*--Saul,1:92-110, 126-34
*--Russell Bartley, Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence, 1808-1828

<>1824:USA PA Beaver Co., Ambridge, north of Pittsburgh in the upper Ohio R. valley | The Harmonists, religious refugees from Germany, finally settled
*--George Rapp (1757-1847), a young weaver, was their leader, so the group was also known as Rappists. In 1804, the Harmonists originally migrated to America from Iptingen (near Stuttgart) in southwest Germany. They came seeking religious and economic freedom. Nearly 800 farmers and craftsmen followed Rapp, first to Butler County, Pennsylvania, and then to Posey County, Indiana. They stayed 10 years in each state, building and naming their towns Harmony. The towns were designed by Frederick Rapp (1775-1834), the adopted son of the Founder. The son would have to be adopted because the commune was a celibate society. Still, the Harmonists were one of America's most successful Christian communal groups. And Oekonomie was its third and final home in USA
*--The "utopian" and pacifist community built Old Economy [Oekonomie] Village on their 3,000 acres in Ambridge. Excellent carpenters and craftsmen, they built beautiful shops, homes, and a house of worship. They cultivated well-planned herb, vegetable and flower gardens, and managed grape vines [pix]. The Society gained worldwide recognition for its religious devotion and economic prosperity [W]
*--Despite the Society's economic success, time and certain events brought its decline. In 1832, one third of the members left Economy under the leadership of Count de Leon, a self-proclaimed prophet. [How often are prophets not self-proclaimed?] And, in 1847, Father Rapp died. By the end of the century only a few Harmonists remained. In 1905 the Society was dissolved

<>1824:Penza described in official report [BL&T:23f]

<>1824:"Decembrist" Southern Society joined with United Slavs. It now planned for a huge Slavic federation, including Russian, Poles, Czechs, Moravians, Transylvanians, Serbs, Moldavians, Walachians, Dalmatians, Croats. Hungarians were considered Slavs for this purpose
*--Ambitions of post-Napoleonic political thinking was as obvious here as at the Congress of Vienna, except these “Decembrists” were planning "from the bottom up" rather than from on high in the manner of the Vienna diplomats. The United Slavs were in favor of mass revolution directed against domestic economic and political oppressors and national revolution against foreign or imperialist oppressors. [NB! Pavel Pestel’s Russian nationalistic reluctance to consider federalist independence for peripheral regions of the Russian Empire, for example, in the Caucasus and Central Asia.]
*1824:Saint Petersburg | Something like a unity congress of these various societies gathered. Northern Society met in HQ of the Russian-America Co. The congress received the full version of Pavel Pestel's Russia Truth [Russkaia prava] which projected a future, more decisive meeting of various related societies in 1826. Then differences would be worked out and a general constitution agreed upon. Circumstances, as we will see, prevented this great convocation of  Decembrist societies
\\
*--SIE,12:209 says Decembrists were closely associated with "incipient Russian bourgeoisie" who wanted to shift the Russian America Co. to capitalist methods and therefore were sympathetic to the Decembrists’ "antifeudal" outlook

<>1825:USA NY | Erie Canal completed connecting Hudson R. with Lake Erie. The Canal ran west from above Albany, through Lake Oneida, past Rochester, and into the waterway above Niagara Falls, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Its significance was that Atlantic seagoing transport now extended deeply into the N. American continent via the Great Lakes
*--The Erie Canal project was financed entirely by NY State tax revenues, then sustained in part by tolls. The people paid, and business thrived
*--The Canal guaranteed that NYC would become the principle US financial center, the American "metropol", but it also contributed to the rise of the great inland metropolis Chicago. The growth of regional metropols represented a variation on the traditional European relationship between the domestic metropol and its peripheries. In the US tradition of federated union, several US metropols grew in economic power in 19th and into the middle of the 20th century. After the US Civil War and especially after WW2 a process of metropolitan centralization gained headway

<>1825no:Siberia | Alexander I died unexpectedly, even mysteriously. Popular legend had it that he lost interest in being Emperor and chose instead to become a simple itinerant monk, Fedor Kuzmich, begging and blessing the folk in villages throughout the Russian eastern frontier [pix]
*--The previously established line of succession had already excluded brother Konstantin, nurtured to high power, as was Alexander, by grandmother Catherine (the Great), but with little taste for the job
*--That left only brother Nicholas, a much hated martinet and barracks hound
*--In this way, without anyone's plan or express desire, revolution became the order of the day. A meeting at Kondratyi Ryleev's decided on an uprising that would take the form of a refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the new Emperor. If necessary, military force had a place in the plan in order to compel the Senate to sign their revolutionary proclamation intended for circulation among the Russian people. The proclamation announced the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, changes in serfdom, abolition of conscription, civil rights, convocation of a Constituent Assembly to settle once and for all the question of constitution and the form of government in the Empire
*--Sergei Trubetskoi, an experienced military leader, participant in the 1812 campaign, and well known to guards regiments, was designated Dictatorial leader of the uprising
*1825de13:Trubetskoi's Manifesto of mutiny against the accession of Nicholas I [VSB,2:518 | DIR2:195-6]

<>1825de14:Decembrist uprising occasioned by a succession crisis as the dreaded martinet Nicholas I ascended the Russian Imperial throne  [DPH:278-81]
*--The coincidence of December 14, however, had roots in a prior decade of social activism and political deliberations within several volunteer organizations that promoted radical reform, even revolution, in Russia
*--On this fateful day, the long years of organized effort came down to this = About 3000 soldiers under the command of 30 officers gathered under the banner of revolution on Senate square, boxed between the St. Isaac’s Cathedral (under construction), the Senate Building, the Admiralty and the Neva River in Petersburg [pix]. Many soldiers (peasants in uniform) thought the formula they shouted -- “Konstantin i konstitutsiia!” -- referred to Konstantin and his wife. This tale should work less to reinforce possible regrettable disdain for common folk than to underscore the incompetence and disorganization of the so-called Decembrist leadership. Trubetskoi even failed to show. Brief skirmishes broke out between loyal and insurrectionary troops.  Decembrist P.G. Kakhovskii killed Governor-General Miloradovich.  All too late, prince Obolenskii was selected to replace Trubetskoi in the role of "leader". Chaos ensued. Units fleeing the scattered struggle broke through the ice of the Neva, many drowned. But the immediate crisis was over
*--“Decembrist Uprising” (Anatole Mazour unfortunately called it “the first Russian revolution”) was no more than an abortive armed insurrection, perhaps only a coup d'état aimed against the despised new Emperor Nicholas I. Events followed from an unusual and unexpected succession crisis
*1825de20:News of the failed uprising reached the Southern Society, but Pestel was already under arrest (1825de13 NB!). Military resistance to Nicholas continued =
*1825de29:Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol and M. Bestuzhev-Riumin led the Chernigov regiment against Nicholas I, and composed a revolutionary proclamation, Katekhizis, which freed soldiers from military service to Nicholas I and promised a republic for Russia
*1826ja03:Ukrainian regions where the Southern Society was active were pacified
*1826jy13:Five Decembrists were hanged =
  Pavel Pestel,
  Sergei Murave'ev-Apostol
  Matvei Bestuzhev-Riumin
  Kondratyi Ryleev
  Kakhovskii
*--One-hundred and twenty one were sent into Siberian exile, hard labor
*--579 persons were questioned in connection with the uprising
*--The common folk were not directly involved in the populist movement. An educated elite was forming into something like a self-conscious activist leadership for national political action. They addressed the plight of the folk, and even allowed that the folk might at some future date play a role in shaping their ownf better future [WRH3:256-62 | DIR2:174-8 | DPH:278-81]
*--Raeff1
*--First Breath of Freedom [>FBF, an anthology of translated primary documents]
*--Mazour,First:273-9
*--Decembrist memoirs of M.A. Fonvizin, A.E. Rozen, I.I. Gorbachevskii (on Society of United Slavs) [VSB,2:522-8]
*--Over the next twenty years of Siberian exile, Mikhail Lunin continued to struggle against the tsarist state, and he composed reflections on the Decembrist epoch that were reprinted and read in later decades of political activism, "A Look at the Secret Society in Russia (1816-1826)" [TXT]
\\
*--Saul,1:149-65 describes how Decembrists were influenced by USA constitutional ideas
*--N. Eidel'man, Conspiracy Against the Tsar: A Portrait of the Decembrists
*--Anatole Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825:The Decembrist Movement; Its Origins, Development, and Significance
*----------. Women in Exile: Wives of the Decembrists. Tallahassee:1975
*--Patrick O'Meara, K. F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet
*--M. Zetlin, The Decembrists

<>1825de:On the eve of the “Decembrist” rebellion, Aleksandr Pushkin finished his “Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepiev” [The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy]. Pushkin was scheduled to be in SPb on the day of the rebellion, but turned back from the imperial capital and thus perhaps prevented arrest with other conspirators
*--Pushkin reworked the poetic historical account of Tsar Boris and, six years later, published it as a “tragedy” [ID]. The project was first a comedy then a tragedy, suggesting a certain historical (rather than simply literary) sense of human experience as “tragicomic”. Clearly, Pushkin had in mind the need for a Russian equivalent of Shakespeare’s great English-historical plays
*--On the very day of the rebellion, Pushkin completed his poem “Count Nulin”, a parody of Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece” (and possibly of history). Pushkin raised a “counter-factual” question, always dangerous for the historian = What might have happened if Lucrece had slapped the would-be rapist Tarquin, turning him back. “Lucrece would not have stabbed herself, Publius would not have become enraged, Brutus would not have driven out the Ceasars.... And so we owe the republic, the consuls, the dictators, the Catos, the Casears, to a seduction similar to the one that took place recently in our neighborhood”
*--Andrei Siniavskii (Abraham Tertz) [ID] wrote, in Strolls with Pushkin, that the fictional character “Count Nulin” absorbed energy from three actual historical episodes = the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin’s own escape from arrest, and the rape of Lucrece. As in all complex moments of contingency, said Siniavskii, history can turn in any direction
\\
*2006je30:TLS:7, Rachel Polonsky review of Uncensored... (above)

<>1825de14:1855; Russian Emperor Nicholas I reigned for thirty years, an epoch that seemed to some to be reactionary in the extreme, a panicked retreat from the Decembrist uprising and all the progressive implications of the era of European revolution
*--Decembrists were transported to distant Siberian exile. Within a few years a stream of Polish "freedom fighters" followed them into what was to become a combination of removal, concentration and frontier development = Siberian exile
*--Yet Nicholas and his ministers paid close attention to the voluminous testimony they gathered in interrogations of Decembrists and associates [VSB,2:528-30]
*--Read through 1827oc:below, then follow "reform" hypertext hops to see how measures taken in the time of Nicholas I combined "reactionary" and "progressive" motives
\\
*--Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Army Under Nicholas I, 1825-1855. Durham, N.C.:1965
*--Lincoln, W. Bruce. Nicholas I
*--Lobanov-Rostovsky, Andrei. Russia and Europe, 1825-1878. Ann Arbor:1954

<>1826:1879; Russian state institutions were supplemented by a set of "His Majesty’s Own Chanceries". Nicholas created a new parallel set of institutions through which he could exert his autocratic authority, free from the complex ministerial mechanisms created in the time of Alexander I.
*--The Third Section [secret state police] was formed out of functions and bureaus that Speranskii had earlier attached to the Interior Ministry. The Third Section became a symbol of Nicholas-style unlimited autocracy, and it survived the longest (until 1879) [KRR:257 | VSB,2:533]
*--Read to 1827oc for reform style of Nicholas I
\\
*--Sydney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (1961)
*--Peter S. Squire, The Third Department (1968)

<>1826:Kazan University [W] Professor of Mathematics Nikolai Lobachevskii [W] published his path-breaking studies in non-Euclidian geometry. The next twenty years witnessed a provincial cultural and intellectual renaissance in the Russian/Tatar city Kazan, but officials soon removed Lobachevskii from his academic posts

<>1826ap22:Russian censorship statute tightened control over the printed word [VSB,2:533-4]

<>1826my12:au09; Russian manifestos on peasant serf disturbances [VSB,2:541-2 | DIR2:197-8(ap20?)]

<>1827oc:Russian Emperor Nicholas I issued a decree on the education of peasant serfs [BL&T:120]
*--Nicholas I continued the innovations of earlier autocrats, but the policy of Nicholas I might best be called "frightened absolutism" (rather than enlightened absolutism). His reforms were "reactionary reforms"

<>1827:1829:Caucasus Mountain, northern slopes | Daghestan Muslim movement arose against Russian imperial control. First Daghestan imam Hazi-Mohamed [Hazi-Mulla] preached Islamic holy war against Russia

<>1828:Armenian river valley of the middle Kura reached by Russian imperial forces, carving away from Iranian (Persian) imperial power an old Christian nation south of the Caucasus. The "Great Game" seemed to go Russia's way
\\
*--Gillard, David. The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914:A Study in British and Russian Imperialism. London:1977

<>1829se02:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Adrianople treaty, acknowledging Russian control over the northern 2/3 of the Black Sea coast, and independence for two Orthodox Christian peoples, Serbs (Yugoslavs) and Greeks [VSB,2:537-8 | DIR2:199-207]

<>1830fe04:Caucasus Mountains, northern slope, Chechnya and Daghestan | First significant victory of expanding Muslim holy war against Russian dominion
*--This was not directly a European imperial conflict, it was local revolutionary resistance to one great power. Indirectly, other great powers helped the rebels, less in the interest of local self-determination than in the interest of weakening a competitor, Russia. Much the same can be said about growing international support of Polish rebellion against Russian power
*--Russia knew this tactic; it had itself earlier taken steps to help USA rebels against Great Britain
*--Divisions of indigenous warriors were led by imams, one of whom was Shamil

Daghestani resistance to Russian rule was led
in the first half of the 19th century
by Muslim holy warriors, such as the fabled
imam Shamil [Shamyl]

Shamil was gifted spiritual and military leader, trained in Arabic scholarship and committed to salvation of his native land and customary ways in the face of powerful Russian armies. Shamil soon became imam. [pix] [pix]
*--War of liberation lasted 29 years until 1859ap [BrE,77:125-32]
*--Russian imperialist expansion bogged down
\\
*--Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (LND:1978) DK511.c3855
*--Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (LND:1994) DK511.c2 G28
*--Smirnov,Nikolai Aleskandrovich, Miuridizm na Kavkaze (Moscow: 1963) BP189.S5

<>1830:USA NY Fayette | Joseph Smith (1805-1844) founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (most widely known as the Mormon Church). Born in Vermont, Smith's family migrated westward to NY Palmyra. Young Smith was always bothered by the multiplicity of religious creeds he saw around him. Just a teenager, he reported a vision of two angelic figures who warned him not to join any of these denominations because god was about to restore the one true faith. In another vision he learned that the second coming of Christ was imminent. Here he learned also the location of certain plates of gold recording hitherto hidden sacred truths. Much later, in 1827, Smith dictated  to Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and others his translation of the unique language and script of the golden plates. In 1829 Smith and Cowdery announced that an angel appeared to them and ordained them as priests of Aaron in a renovated faith. They were authorized to baptize one another by immersion. The translation of the new gospel was published as Book of Mormon (1830). This was nothing less than a "newest testament", an extension of the word of god beyond the old and new testaments, building on the Mosaic revelations and the synoptic gospels. It described how the original native peoples of the New World were the lost tribe of Israel, dispersed hither at the time of the Tower of Babel.  The original gold plates subsequently disappeared from this earth. A new church, however, began to set down strong roots in the New World
*1831:1839; USA OH Kirtland | Smith relocated the church. and the religious community prospered with large business developments. Various complications forced the congregation to migrate to MO briefly. They were then driven from MO to IL
*1839:1844; USA IL, on E bank of the Mississippi R | Smith renamed the town Commerce "Nauvoo", which prospered under Mormon settlement, just as earlier. But political embroilment and conflict with surrounding communities led to Smith's downfall. For one thing, Smith experienced another heavenly revelation in 1843 which sanctioned plural marriage (polygamy, defined in this community as one husband, several wives). This did not jibe with the practice of neighboring frontier settlers who, for the most part, took guidance in these and other matters from the two previous divine testaments (i.e., the Old and the New testaments). Smith was commander of a city militia, the Navou Legion, which was created to enhance the security of the eccentric Mormon community but which other Mormon leaders condemned. Smith destroyed the printing press of the Expositor, through which the opposition expressed itself. Smith appealed to the Legion to support him, but he and his brother were jailed in IL Carthage
*1844je:USA IL | Carthage mob murdered Smith and his brother
*1846:A large part of the Mormon community pulled out of IL Nauvoo (and other locations) and headed for the high desert west, under the leadership of Brigham Young, President of the Council of Twelve. Not all Mormons left for the west. They stayed and created a Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Three years later, the largely abandoned city Nauvoo was occupied by a French utopian community, the Icarians, led by E'tienne Cabet. Seven years later, in 1856, the Icarians split up and abandoned the town.

<>1830:Europe-wide revolution was felt with special intensity in France. A broad assault was launched on the remains of the old-regime, this in the name of a new "liberal" order. "The July Revolution" toppled the French king, so recently restored to his throne after the Congress of Vienna [ID]. A restricted monarchy, known as "The July Monarchy" reigned, 1830-1848, under the authority of what must be called a liberal or moderate "bourgeois" power, a power based on wealth and financial prominence rather than older heritable, aristocratic, or royal claims. The last hopes of restoring the old regime -- of reconstructing "The West" as it was prior to the 1789 French Revolution [ID] -- were crushed

<>1830:1842; French socialist theorist and originator of "sociology" Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy
*--Comte was an acolyte of Saint-Simon and the systematizer of that powerful trend of European thought called "Positivism"
\\
*--Wagar on Positivism [TXT]

<>1830se13:French legislative chambers heard report delivered by liberal leader François Guizot (1787-1874). A professor of history at the University of Paris, Guizot was drawn into politics by the hope that a moderately liberal monarchical government could pass progressive educational reform, so as to elevate citizens to a level sufficient to sustain representative democracy. Literacy had reach sufficient levels to sustain a newly emerging profession = journalism
*--Over the next eighteen years, Guizot thrived as liberal minister and politician, but as time went on he grew less certain of the natural political alliance of the well-to-do with the laboring poor. Not all "commoners", not all members of "The Third Estate", prospered quite like those with whom Guizot increasingly identified

<>1830de20:1832; Polish Revolt declared independence and worked to strengthen independence of Sejm (or Seim; Polish parliament) [VSB,2:534]. Struggle for national independence in Poland lasted almost two years in an era of Europe-wide insurrection against the vestiges of various "old regimes"
*1832:Russian Emperor Nicholas I revoked the Polish constitution which dated from the Alexandrine epoch. Thus an early European experiment in "devolution" came to an end [ORW:92] Reactionary reform continued
*--Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz inspired his Polish nation [KMM:74-83]. Ethno-cultural nationalism was a characteristic feature of the Romantic era
*--Polish sentiment was inspired by liberalism and nationalism, but these two inspirations were sometimes contradictory [ID]
\\
*--Andrzej Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (1991)
*--Jerzy Jan Lerski, A Polish chapter in Jacksonian America; the United States and the Polish exiles of 1831 (1958)

<>1831:1833; USA ambassador to Russia was James Buchanan. His papers have been published = James Buchanan's Mission to Russia, 1831-33

<>1831:Italy | Giuseppe Mazzini founded "Young Italy" to struggle for liberal republican national unity among the many divided and competing political and administrative regions. He sought to bring together all Italian-speaking peoples who lived along the southern slopes of the Alps, south of Switzerland, all along the Italian boot, and on the Sicilian island, to dissolve the old independent feudal authorities and city-states, and to create one nation-state = Italy [DPH:170-9 | PWT2:127-9]
*1831oc31:England | Bristol the site of popular disorders in support of reform. The disorder was put down sharply [pix], but in the next years the first English reform bill