Оуэн Мэтьюз - Glorious Misadventures - Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

Just before his twentieth birthday, in the spring of 1784 after five years of peacetime soldiering, Rezanov decided he had had enough and resigned. He was a sergeant in the cadet corps – in fact the highest rank a cadet could reach, but nonetheless humiliating for an adult with years of soldiering experience. Yet promotion proceeded strictly by seniority, and with no enemies to kill off his superiors Rezanov would have to wait till they died of old age. Rather than waste any more of his life, the restless young former Guardsman struck out into the civilian world with few qualifications other than a good pedigree and some decent family connections.

On retirement from the regiment Rezanov was promoted to the rank of captain. It was a kind of consolation prize to get him started in civilian life. A captain was eighth in the table of ranks, the equivalent of a collegiate assessor and entitled to be addressed as ‘Your High Nobleness’. The rank alone, however, carried no salary. Like many young men suffering career setbacks, Rezanov was forced to return to his mother’s house in the country to compose himself for the next stage of his life.

During the summer months, when the court was absent from the capital, the nobility of St Petersburg habitually fled the malodorous, mosquito-filled and malarial city for their country estates. We can assume that the young Nikolai and his three siblings spent their summers among the orchards and hayfields of Demyaninskoye, their mother Alexandra Okuneva’s estate. Demyaninskoye, near Pskov, had been part of her dowry when she married Rezanov’s father.*

Pskov was a backwater in 1784. It remains a backwater today. The Empress, who visited in 1776, deemed it the ultimate in Russian backwardness and decline. ‘Inoculate someone with your talent for development and send him here,’ she wrote to her friend and confidant, the German author Friedrich Melchior Baron von Grimm, from Pskov. ‘Perhaps he will be able to bring on its industry from its present sorry state.’4 The town had enjoyed a heyday in the fifteenth century, when its burghers joined the Hanseatic League and traded amber, pine pitch, furs and lead up and down the Baltic. These merchant princes erected handsome, solidly built cathedrals and squat manor houses with steeply pitched roofs. The city’s thick-walled kremlin withstood twenty-six sieges mounted by Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Teutonic Knights and Russians from Novgorod, all eager to seize its wealth for themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Pskov had been bypassed by the currents of the world. Since Peter the Great had conquered neighbouring Estonia from the Swedes eighty years before Rezanov’s arrival, Pskov’s strategic value had been comprehensively eclipsed. Its commerce had been swallowed by St Petersburg, two hundred miles to the north, and Königsberg to the west. According to parish records the town’s population in the 1780s was around 7,000, less than half of what it had been in the Middle Ages.

After the social whirl of a young guards officer’s life in the fast-growing capital Rezanov must have felt that he had returned to an older, slower Russia. In Petersburg the papers were full of the latest ballet performances at the new Mariinsky Theatre. Literary types were buzzing about Derzhavin’s newly published ‘Ode to Felitsa’, a witty and avant-garde work which addressed the Empress in a bantering tone which made gentle mockery of stilted literary classicism. In Pskov the big news was that work was starting on a new courthouse. Finished in 1790, it still stands today, a mediocre provincial echo of the capital’s elegant neoclassical colonnades.

Everything about Pskov, from the architecture to the society, must have seemed stolid, squat and plain. To the young Rezanov it may have felt like failure. Or perhaps, more rationally, he considered it a necessary provincial apprenticeship before a triumphant return to the capital. Derzhavin, after all, himself recently retired from the guards, had just accepted the governorship of Olonets, a dreary northern province recently won from the Swedes.* Derzhavin would later be moved to the governorship of grain-rich Tambov, earning a steady reputation as an administrator as he bided his time for the wheel of fortune at court to turn in his favour. The young Rezanov must have fervently hoped that the same would apply to his own fledging career.

The Okunevs were, as prominent local landowners, inevitably close to the provincial administration, and a job was quickly found for the young Nikolai. His complete lack of legal training notwithstanding, Rezanov was appointed assessor to Pskov’s recently opened civil court. As a favour to this promising local nobleman, a year of service was added to boost him up the bureaucratic hierarchy, qualifying him for an immediate judicial position. Two weeks before his twentieth birthday Rezanov took his place on the bench of the province’s central court, one of five court officers who sat as judge and jury on the affairs of the thieving, philandering, foul-mouthed and light-fingered citizens of Pskov.

The records of Rezanov’s time as a civil servant show a court roster of mind-boggling provincial tedium. About the time Rezanov joined the bench, some tragic proto-Gogolian clerk made a minute inventory of every piece of furniture in Pskov’s courthouse. Worthy of record, in the clerk’s view, were ‘two brass inkstands, one bell, one sand scatterer, one Dutch stove with iron doors, eight brass candlesticks’ as well as ‘windows and several doors’.5 The court met every day but Sundays and holidays from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. Rezanov dutifully signed his name in the roster almost without fail every working day for four years. The president of the court, his two deputies and two assessors would process into the courtroom wearing their newly designed uniform of light blue kaftans with red trimmings, buff waistcoats and buff breeches. They all wore swords to signify their noble status. All morning they would hear a series of petitions, presented in descending order of social rank of the appellants, concerning extortion, debts, inheritance, the liberation of serfs, family feuds, slander and the complaints of prisoners in the town jail.

Before Catherine the Great the Russian judicial process had been simplified by the routine use of torture, usually branding and racking, which produced either neat confessions or dead suspects. The Empress’s ban on such barbarous practices in 1767 attracted the praise of European liberals like Voltaire but made for messy hearings and interminable cases. Another, more welcome, innovation of Catherine’s was the introduction of salaries for state employees. Previously the state’s servants were expected to exist ‘from their affairs’, as an ukaz of Peter the Great coyly put it, or in plainer terms from the bribes of petitioners.6 It is highly doubtful that Catherine’s newfangled salaries eliminated the deeply ingrained habit of bribery – indeed using their official powers to extract money remains the universal practice of Russian bureaucrats today. Nonetheless, under the new system Rezanov’s pay was 300 rubles a year. It was no fortune, but enough to keep a decent table and a modest household. The parish records of the church of St Sergius Zaluzhia in central Pskov for 1786 record Nikolai Rezanov living with his mother, two younger brothers Dmitry and Alexander and his patriotically named sister Ekaterina with just eighteen servants, rather modest by local standards. A goose at the Pskov market cost twenty-five kopecks, a pike or a pound of flour two kopecks. The court’s watchman, an ex-soldier, got eighteen rubles a year; its president received twelve hundred.

The Hannibal family of Mikhailovskoye made regular appearances at the Pskov court both as defendants and plaintiffs for sword fighting, slander and assault as well as various petty territorial disputes with their neighbours. They were the litigious and unruly descendants of Abram Petrovich Hannibal, born Ibrahim Hannibal in Eritrea and sold as a slave to Constantinople. He was bought and rescued by the Russian ambassador’s deputy, who brought him to St Petersburg in 1704. Peter the Great took a shine to the bright African boy and adopted him; Hannibal married into the Russian aristocracy and rose to the rank of major-general. The family’s most famous son was Alexander Pushkin, Hannibal’s grandson and still noticeably African of feature. Pushkin was to continue the hell-raising tradition by conducting public affairs with other men’s wives and fighting twenty-nine duels, including his last one against Frenchman George D’Anthès over an insult to the honour of Pushkin’s wife, in which the poet was killed.7