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A time of Tsars

To understand Estonia’s history in the lead up to the first independence, I took an interest in Russia’s Tsars, also a key to understanding Vladimir Putin.


When not fighting wars, three Alexanders and two Nicholases experimented with, or resisted long overdue farming reform while retaining an ultimately obsolete nobility, trying various methods, and meeting with varying success. The consequences were lasting, and for two of the Tsars, fatal.


Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) lived through much most of this time, an aristocrat who was successively a military officer, a family man, one of the world’s most famous novelists, a recluse disillusioned with Russian autocracy, and who ended his days living a peasant life.

War and Peace appeared in 1869, a heady time. Three years earlier Tsar Alexander II survived an assassination attempt, which curbed his enthusiasm for peasant reforms and other progressive policies. In 1867 he sold Alaska to the US to refill an ailing treasury following the economically disastrous Crimean War (1855-1856).


As his uncle Alexander I did before him, Alexander II realised that serfdom – farm workers and their families who were bought and sold with land – made for a supremely wasteful use of land. A few people lived lives of luxury for little effort, Tolstoy included, while farm workers endured little better than poverty.


In 1861 the Tsar emancipated Russia’s serfs, to a degree; freed peasants could own land, or gain an education, thereby acquiring social mobility. This followed earlier reforms of Alexander I, piloted in northern Estonia (1816), Livonia (southern Estonia and northern Latvia, in 1819), and Courland (southern Latvia and Lithuania, in 1817).


Tsar Alexander I, "the blessed"


Alexander I died of typhoid while visiting southern Russia in 1825, and the succession passed to his younger brother, Nicholas I. This monarch had different ideas about the peasantry, and halted reform, focusing instead on running an autocracy. He died during the Crimean War where Tolstoy served, arming him to write on Napoleon’s doomed winter campaign of 1812.


All of this history had an impact on our Estonian forebears. Our grandfather Johannes Napp’s grandparents were Russian Orthodox; we know that because Johannes’ father was Anton, an Orthodox name, and more particularly because the National Archive in Tartu told us so. The significance is that Orthodox believers could gain access to land.


What little we know of the Napps is that they were based in Otepää and had a use for land of their own. The 1860s onwards clearly propelled the Napps to relative freedom (and, of course, many others), as the national awakening gained force in Estonia, and as Tolstoy was writing his novels.


Next came Alexander III, a heavy-drinking colossus, known, incongruously, as the Peacemaker, who reigned from 1881 on his father’s death (a successful assassination this time). The third Alexander snapped packs of cards in two to impress his children, bent a fork at a formal dinner to make a point, though was also a skilled diplomat with France, and a newly unified Germany. He died aged less than 50 in 1894, leaving the double-headed eagle empire to Nicholas II, an unlikely emperor and one also cut short in his life.


Unfortunately for the new Tsar, his father had previously arranged the murder of a politically active older brother of Vladimir Lenin. Those who live by the sword die by it. Revenge arrived in 1918 in an unlikely form – drunken soldiers carrying out a spontaneous and clumsy butchering of the royal family.


The legacy of violence continues. Is the grandson of Lenin’s and Stalin’s personal cook (Putin) a phoenix reborn as tsar and emperor of all the Russias?          

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