Man or order: the main Russian question 200 years ago

dilemma, however. Answer like this: come out, you’re not a patriot. Answer like this: insincere with the king …

It seems that it was honesty, the depth of the then recall that gave Speransky a reserve of royal trust, respect, so that, having gone through all the intrigues and disgrace, he, the grandson of a provincial deacon, surrounded by princes, counts, still 25 years later, under Nicholas, sat in the State Council , governor-general, headed the trial of the Decembrists.

“Your Majesty,” answered Speransky, “they have better laws, and we have better people.”

When pronouncing the word “laws”, Speransky did not mean specific volumes of codes on the shelves, but more broadly: “orders”. He expressed a certain truth, hovering above Russia above the laws … And I will not just correct it – I will continue, I will develop Speransky’s wording:

With good laws (orders) – can live … and bad people.

We can (you) live good, persistent people.

I am not saying that people there are worse than ours. The consequence of this “theorem”: survival there (in Europe), globally, statistically, is not yet proof of good human qualities. “There” people are also supported by the established Order, the Law. Actually, their legislators, politicians, and sought to organize life, independent of various ephemerality, such as the qualities and impulses of the soul. The law should guide and support people.

In our country, on the contrary, people must somehow support the Law, the Order … something that, on occasion, is unlikely to support them!

Agree, other things being equal, remaining a patriot surrounded by imperfections and injustices requires greater spiritual efforts than … So we will come to the famous conclusion of Burchard Munnich from the other side. Having served Russia for 30 years, having built a lot of things, fought, an outstanding warrior, the engineer decided: “Russia is probably controlled by the Almighty Himself, otherwise it is not at all clear how it exists.”

Like the “Speransky theorem”, we continue Munnich. And how can the Almighty influence, manage, except through the souls of people? Grandiose miracles like stopping the Sun during the battle, the Plagues of Egypt, laying a road through the sea remained in the Old Testament.

Hence the famous “Russian sacrifice”, the general belief that somewhere, sometime, they will figure it out anyway: who supported them to the best of their ability, and who only leaned against Russia.

I repeat: these conclusions are probably valid statistically, “on large numbers.” Abstraction, perhaps, does not inspire (it is difficult to fall in love with a probabilistic value), but the same Erfurt-1808, according to the principle of classicism, “the unity of place, action”, gave an example of a very specific person.

The second in the retinue was Prince Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn: the chief prosecutor of the Synod and a childhood friend of the emperor. His support was very important. Erfurt is a special place even in totally servile Europe. Napoleon made it a gathering place for obedient monarchs and their troops: it was from here in 1812 that they obediently marched on Russia. And besides captivity, like the Bourbons, there was the risk of public humiliation. The Prussians at the Erfurt summit got it in full. Napoleon “within the framework of the cultural program” ordered on the field of the Jena-Auersted battle, where he defeated the Prussian army two years ago, to hunt for … hares! Plus, picturesque stories, also public, like him, the triumphant, left face-to-face with the beautiful Prussian Queen Louise: “Had I stayed longer, I would have had to add a couple of patches of land to Prussia.”

But the diplomatic abilities of the tsar, the support of his friend Golitsyn, allowed them to endure the long Erfurt summit on September 17 – October 14, 1808 without great losses. Moreover, it was then that the head of the Napoleonic Foreign Ministry, Talleyrand, became a secret agent of Russia (as he explained: “I stopped believing in the Napoleonic fairy tale”).

In the ancient Golitsyn family, which gave Russia a governor, dashing generals, field marshals, Prince Alexander was not only an exception, but … Seeing in him a spiritually contemplative, peaceful character, the tsar appointed him head of the Synod.

Here I confess: I am the author of two books, hundreds of articles about the Golitsyns, I have the honor to be friends with the current representatives of this inexhaustible family, to receive their family archives for work. Notes of Prince Alexander Nikolayevich seem to me a suitable, beautiful picture on the topic of the relationship between us and Europeans.

At the play The Death of Caesar, Marshal Lannes, seating the audience, offered Prince Golitsyn a place among the German sovereign princes. “Possessing” means that this is the sovereign of his own, albeit a small principality. Prince Alexander explained: although his title “prince” is translated into French and English – prince, and into German – Fürst, that is, also “prince”, he is still not a sovereign prince …

But Lannes, politely insisting, placed Prince Golitsyn among the sovereigns. The most dashing warrior of the Napoleonic marshals went down in history with the phrase: “If a hussar is alive until thirty years old, this is rubbish, not a hussar!” – and died a year later, in the battle of Aspern, having survived a categorically measured line a little.

The secret of the origin of human sympathy is great: something seen, guessed in another person, suddenly stops the flow of mechanical following the rules. And the dashing grunt Lann was interested not in one of his fellow commanders, but in the “spiritual minister” Prince Golitsyn. Let’s imagine, at least let’s try: they are playing “The Death of Caesar”, in fact an anti-monarchist play by Voltaire – the choice of Napoleon, who brought the Comedy Française to Erfurt in the best composition: Charlotte Talma, the famous Francois-Joseph Talma, in addition, outwardly amazingly similar to Napoleon. In the hall, the euromonarchs, on the stage, they kill Caesar (in whose name, by the way, the German “Kaiser”, the Russian “Tsar”). Absurdity, unprecedented tension. Charlotte Talma in a swoon.

Marshal Lannes, sitting down to Prince Golitsyn, tells, complaining, all his life. And the neighbor on the left in the “monarchist stalls” suddenly asks: “Are you by any chance a relative of Nikolai Sergeevich Golitsyn?” – “Son”.

It turned out: Biron’s grandson. The same one who, under Anna, brutally repressed the Golitsyns. After a series of coups, Bironov was transferred from Siberia to Yaroslavl, where the all-powerful Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, who had previously suffered a lot from their grandfather, was remembered by the exiled family for his incredibly generous treatment. And now the grandson of the “great and terrible Biron” joyfully greets the son of the victim.

A participant in close friendly dinners (Napoleon, Talleyrand, the Tsar), Prince Golitsyn left the most interesting memories. Napoleon praised Peter for abolishing the patriarchate: “All the storms were powerless to subject the clergy of France to the government.” To this ambiguous praise, the prince objected: “Holy was the confidence of the people that the goal of all Peter’s actions was the common good, which animated a strong will concentrated in one person of genius.”

Napoleon (with a sigh): “History has lavished the name of the great on many, but Peter, despite the frequent distortion of the same history, belongs, in my opinion, to the number of the few truly worthy of this name.”

Prince Golitsyn, invulnerable to intrigues, the tsar’s friend, however, suffered more than many from gossips, then “memoirists”. For the liberals, he, the Minister of Public Education, is the “chief reactionary.” And having headed the Russian Bible Society, he decided on a business comparable in risk to the tsar’s Erfurt visit: for the first time he translated and published the Bible in Russian. 800 years in Russia – only the Church Slavonic version. From now on, for the conservatives, Golitsyn is “a cosmopolitan, an agent of the Protestants.” The echo of those accusations resounds today: “he called Church Slavonic an unintelligible dialect.” But one of the 400,000 copies of Golitsyn’s Gospel was saved in hard labor and created, by his own admission, the writer Dostoevsky.

“The good nature of Golitsyn” even got into the encyclopedia (!) of Brockhaus-Efron. Look: an incredible term for an encyclopedic article, but perhaps also a concretization of that general statistical thesis made by his Erfurt colleague Mikhail Speransky.

Our people are good.