From Russia With Love

In our multicultural age, the most diverse state in the union is singularly unaware of the history of its smallest, but hardly least significant, minority, the Russians. Yet they were present at the creation, so to speak, if largely as a negative force. For it was the mid-18th century advance of Russian fur trappers across the Bering Strait and down the Pacific Coast (in the remote footsteps of the Native Americans) that belatedly prompted the king of Spain to claim California, which for more than two centuries had failed to interest his Mexican viceroy. To meet the “Russian menace” of the day, in 1769 the Spanish launched the famous chain of missions that by 1823 extended as far north as Sonoma, thus giving California its first European identity and its administrative unity. The Russians, of course, never got farther south than Fort Ross, founded in 1812 on the Mendocino coast; a later “outpost” was a cemetery for seamen created on what is now San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Once California became Yankee, however, St. Petersburg abandoned its North American adventure by selling Alaska to Washington in 1867.

Nonetheless, Russia did not give up trying to penetrate the New World by other means. After 1867, the Orthodox Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska remained in place; indeed, in 1872, its headquarters was transferred from Sitka, Alaska, to San Francisco with an eye to missionary expansion throughout North America, using English as the liturgical language. (The graft eventually took; the Russian Orthodox Church in America now numbers around 1.5 million communicants.)

But if the burgeoning American republic beckoned to official Russia, it was even more alluring to the revolutionary opposition. In the same decade that America ended slavery, Russia abolished serfdom and embarked on a series of liberalizing reforms, which, though modest by American standards, were quite audacious for tsarism. Precisely for this reason, Russia immediately fell victim to the principle famously articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself. The Great Reforms of the 1860s, as they are called, only whetted the appetite of the radical student youth for more sweeping, indeed, total change. Called “nihilists” at the time and “populists” by the end of the century, these apprentice revolutionaries soon demanded the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of socialism on the basis of the traditional Russian peasant commune.

By the 1870s, Russia thus had a conspiratorial socialist movement of 2,000 or 3,000 20-somethings ready for a shooting war against tsarism. (Dostoevsky’s mature work is devoted to the psychopathology of their mystic rationalism.) These rebels, moreover, nourished as they were on the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and of California’s Bret Harte, were filled with admiration for the American republic, then the world’s premier radical nation, a land of adventure, opportunity and exoticism. Inevitably, some of these admirers came to participate in the New World’s then-numerous utopian communitarian ventures.

In the late 1880s, these two Russias, in the persons of conservative Bishop Vladimir and radical Nicholas Sudzilovsky (alias Dr. Russel), clashed melodramatically in the shadow of the Golden Gate. The ensuing allegations of sex and the threats of violence have been unearthed from Russian archives and San Francisco newspapers by historian Terence Emmons of Stanford University. The result is what the author suggests could well have been a “minor plot for the discarded first draft of [Dostoevsky’s] ‘The Possessed.’ ”

But Emmons is not just telling a good story. He uses this thoroughly unedifying tale to address central problems of historiography at a time when the discipline, like so much else in the humanities, is caught in a crisis of postmodern relativism. Since such self-doubt precludes the possibility of knowing the past objectively, Emmons’ fascinating essay in petite histoire, or microhistory (presently a cutting edge of the discipline), serves to bring down to earth the master narrative of grand history--a textual abstraction after all--by giving it concrete human meaning. (The story of 16th century miller Menochio in “The Cheese and the Worms” by UCLA’s Carlo Ginzburg offers a prime example of this genre.)

Emmons therefore largely lets the documents tell their story. Yet at the same time, he inserts interludes of authorial comment to narrow the gap between our present perception of the past and its surviving documentary fragments. And so, in the end, history’s traditional function is salvaged; for it turns out, as his epigraph has it, that “history is a true novel.” That is, historical narrative is at one and the same time our structured perception of the past and a real reflection of what actually happened, since reality invariably unfolds in a narrative flow.

Vladimir was the son of a village priest whom higher education had propelled into the elite episcopal hierarchy; he already knew English reasonably well and was ambitious to resume Orthodoxy’s then faltering American missionary work. He arrived with a suite of 22, including eight clergymen and 11 boys who had formerly been under his care in a Russian seminary.

The bishop’s adversary, Russel, was the son of a minor noble and government official in western Russia (now Belarus) who had attended Kiev University where he became involved in “nihilist” activity. One aim of this group had been to found a commune in America. This attempt earned Sudzilovsky his first forged American passport and the basis of a new identity as a doctor. In 1875, because of his subversive politics, he had to flee Russia to Romania, where he finished his medical degree before moving on through revolutionary Bulgaria to seek a new life and fortune in America.

The bishop and Russel collided after the Russian church in San Francisco burned down in 1889, apparently accidentally. Soon, however, charges of episcopal negligence, even arson, were heard, for Vladimir’s imperious manner had alienated many in the small Russian community. Unfazed, the bishop countered by blaming “nihilist hooligans.” Thereupon a group of “Orthodox parishioners,” led by the free-thinking Russel, petitioned the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg to have Vladimir recalled, and the Synod’s procurator-general (lay superintendent of the church) was none other than the tsar’s ultra-reactionary eminence grise, Konstantin Pobedonostsev.

This appeal to what was in fact a governmental body with a layman at its head provoked the bishop to wield the supreme ecclesiastical weapon: a formal anathema against Russel for disobedience to the church, as well as for adultery and bigamy, charges founded on one plausible reading of his tangled marital history. Russel answered by throwing his support to claims of immoral behavior brought against the bishop in an American court by some of his retinue of boys. Vladimir then threatened a lawsuit for libel and slander, and the doctor sued the bishop for defamation, leading to the ruin of his medical practice. The San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner, hardly favorably predisposed to autocratic Russia, reported copiously on the escalating scandal, hinting at as many of the salacious details as the public mores of the day permitted. And imperial St. Petersburg, mobilized to the top by the damage to Russia’s reputation, though primarily blaming Russel, concluded Vladimir was too compromised to remain in his post.

But the bishop refused to submit to Pobedonostsev’s order of recall, claiming he had to remain in America until Russel’s suit had been defeated in court. To further that outcome, he took on a new adversary: the San Francisco-based Alaska Commercial Co., which had inherited the lucrative Russian seal-fur monopoly in the northern territory and one of whose officers, an Americanized Finn, was Russia’s acting consul in San Francisco.

Vladimir publicly accused the company’s directors of conspiring with Russel and local Jewish businessmen, inveterate “enemies” of Russia, to destroy his reputation. The doctor, for his part, had become disillusioned with his erstwhile American utopia: Its inhabitants, he now discovered, were simply money-grubbing and bourgeois. As Russel’s prospects of fortune evaporated, his temper frayed still more; he eventually challenged the new consul, an aristocrat just arrived from Russia, to a duel--a gesture as anachronistic as Vladimir’s anathema. Through four years of passion and vitriol, Vladimir and Russel between them offered the farcical face of old Russia’s looming terminal tragedy.

What, then, do their stories contribute to grand history? Vladimir’s successful defiance of imperial authority points up how loosely governed old-regime Russia in fact was under its supposedly iron autocracy. Conversely, Russel’s disillusion with middle-class legalistic America highlights why so many Russian revolutionaries, in the footsteps of Mikhail Bakunin, could easily be tempted by dreams of autocratic populism as a quick fix for Russia’s intractable problems.

So how did the pair’s micronovel finish? In real history, of course, there is rarely a neat closure to any narrative, as with Anna Karenina ending her story under a train. Instead, things usually trail off into new chapters. Thus, Pobedonostsev in due course had Vladimir returned to Russia and a less sensitive episcopal see, only for him to be submerged along with the entire church by Soviet power. Russel at last made some money in Hawaii before moving on to the Orient. Still faithful to his nihilist convictions, however, during the Russo-Japanese War he sought to sell Tokyo a quixotic plan to organize Russian prisoners of war for attacking Vladivostok. He lived long enough to see his cause defeated, when the revolution was stolen away by a regime far more autocratic than that of the tsars.

As Pushkin commented on reading Gogol’s earliest tales (which already looked forward to his “Dead Souls”), “God, how sad our Russia is”--even in golden California.