The Effect of Fear on Literature in Pre- Revolutionary Russia

Being a child in the heady days of the Reagan years, probably didn't help, nor did seeing the Rambo movies, but, for whatever reason, I was raised believing that Russians were coming through the Rhine River Gap and hiding in Typhoon submarines under the polar ice pack. Thus, I have an unnatural fascination with and about the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or the KGB. In an attempt to merge the academic discipline of Russian Studies and this curiosity, I am beginning a series of three papers to analyze and discuss the effect of fear and/or a secret police on the cultural development of a nation. The first of these papers will address the effect of fear on literature. The main premise for this paper, which has become overridingly clear while doing research, is that much of the literature that has come out of Russia has come at great cost to the writers, and that many of the writers were vigorously persecuted. Knowing that, it is my intent to examine if fear had a deleterious effect on some of the literature that has come out of Russia, and perhaps has even destroyed some of the writers who otherwise could have become some of Russias most influential spokespersons.
Before one can get into much detail about the specific literature, there needs to be a brief discussion of the different secret police that have over the years existed in Russia. The first documented secret police was the Oprichniki. It was formed by Ivan IV "The Terrible" in order to control his opponents and destroy all internal opposition. The Oprichniki was in essence a unit of loyal soldiers that operated directly under his personal control (Milner- Guland 62-3). They wore long black cloaks as part of their operational uniform, thus earning the nickname of the "Black Cloaks." They did not simply range over the entire empire looking for sedition and dissention; rather, they operated only in areas designated by the Tsar as Oprichnina, which in Russian means an area apart (Milner-Guland 63). The Tsar would designate these areas as separate, and the Black Cloaks would be given free reign to move in and subjugate the inhabitants (Heyman 102).
The next formal secret police that was created with an official structure and nomenclature was called the Third Section. It was part of the Ministry of the Interior, and its purpose was to monitor the Russian population for revolutionary and progressive ideas that could "endanger" the population. The first leader of the Third Section went so far as to refer to his organization as a "moral physician for the people." The Third Section was created by Tsar Alexandr III and continued until its collapse during the October Revolution. It was a parallel police force to the civil authorities, except that it dealt entirely with political crimes (Warnes 156).
One of Section's most impressive attributes was its ability to convert those who had been arrested into effective moles and agent provocateurs. Another highly effective strategy that served it well was its ability to plant agents in "subversive" organizations and then use these agents to destroy the organization from the inside, using power struggles and other destabilizing techniques. In contrast to the Oprichniki, the Third Section did not use a great deal of force to eliminate its enemies, but rather harried them to the point that they were unable to complete whatever it was they had set out to accomplish.
The most recent secret police, and perhaps the last in the minds of the Russian populace, is the KGB. The KGB acted as the Sword and Shield of the State, the ultimate protector of the Central Committee and of the Secretary-Generals of the CPSU. The KGB was not only in charge of espionage and the external security of the Soviet Union, but also the crushing of internal dissention as well. They acted to quash or suppress any item written, spoken, or otherwise expressed that would have in the slightest way questioned or cast doubt upon the policies of the Soviet State (Freeze 202).
The first secret police organizations were formed in the middle and late 1500's. It is not known if or how much repression of literature there was because there is a lack of material from that era. The first attempt to coerce or control the literary circles seems not to have occurred until the early 1800's. One of the first writers to experience this persecution was Aleksandr Sergeyvich Pushkin. In his poems, Pushkin used his cool ironies and delicate depth of feelings to explore the conflict between the individuality of man and the collective control of the state (Milner-Gulland 152). On the surface, this sounds like an innocent topic, simply attempting to define the relationship of the individual to the government. The Russian Tsars through the workings of the Third Section, the "moral police force", did not approve of the subject because in a circuitous manner it challenged the authority of the monarchy.
For example, in Pushkins lengthy poem, The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin weighs the burdens of the common man versus the machinations of the ruler, Peter the Great, symbolized by the large bronze statue that personified his reincarnation. In the poem, the despair of the common man's anguish was shown when the man's fiancée was swept away by one of the floods that have from time to time ravaged St. Petersburg. It was Peter the Great who had chosen this flood-prone area for his capital city. This veiled criticism that one of the monarchs, who are "pre-ordained by God", could have been somewhat remiss in his judgement was an anathema to the Russian concept of the supremacy of the state. This obviously is what put Pushkin in opposition to the Third Section. Shortly after the formation of the department, Pushkin was placed under surveillance. It is unclear whether or not he was the target of any other efforts to discredit him or whether he was set in opposition to his other dissenters. As a result of his political poems, he was banished from St. Petersburg.
The effects of the banishment on Pushkin are quite remarkable. The purpose of the banishment was to demoralize and break his spirit of opposition and compel him to stop the writings. But in contradistinction to the theory behind the banishment, the years directly following the expulsion were some of Pushkins most productive years (Kelly 145). Therefore, it would seem to suggest that the atmosphere of fear that surrounded Pushkin did not deter him from continuing to compose the political poetry that had precipitated his fall into disfavor with the government.
There are, of course, many other writers who wrote politically questionable materials and were put under surveillance and/or some kind of more direct pressure, such as threats, literature embargoes, and exile. In order to limit the scope of this paper, I will refrain from addressing all of them and explore only two other of the most well known writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksey Tolstoy. While both are widely recognized in Western literary circles, the more problematic of the two was Dostoyevsky. He is described as a cantankerous, unstable personality and a compulsive gambler (Milner-Guland 154). Further, he angered the government to the point that his execution was ordered, and only a last minute stay commuted it to penal servitude. His major offense was again writing books that were to a great degree political satire. The best known of these political writings is The Devils, which is sometimes published under the title The Possessed.
The death sentence and last minute pardon were profound motivators for Dostoyevsky while he was in Siberia from 1849 until 1856. Shortly after the author returned from his exile, he began writing the first of his four major works, Crime and Punishment. He drew on his experiences from the possible execution and from what he had seen in Siberia to weave complex stories that combined threads of psychology, sociology, and religion into, "a rich tapestry of ideas that leaves one thread to have the last say" (Miller-Gulland 133). It was his radical ideas that almost cost him his life, but it was his books that rated him one of the most complete surveillance packages that had been assembled to this point (Warnes 126).
Dostoyevsky was kept under complete, overt surveillance, meaning that there was no attempt to hide the fact that the police were watching, which is a method of projecting power and enforcing compliance. This attempted suppression and harassment again must be judged to have failed because there was no decrease in the volume of Dostoyevsky's writings, nor was there a change in the style or subject of his of writing. His writings actually became more critical of the government as his publications progressed. The Devils, when it was published, was highly critical of the current regime. Conventional thought would lead one to believe that the fear and the surveillance would stop or prevent most writers from publishing works which the state considered subversive. But, for whatever reason, the fear inspired Dostoyevsky to new levels of literary accomplishment, including even more criticisms of the government.
The other major writer who was a serious "threat" to the monarchy in the middle and later 19^th Century was Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Tolstoy was not a typical revolutionary. Most revolutionaries are anti-establishment when they are younger, became more conservative with age and, eventually view the government in a more favorable light. In his younger days, Tolstoy was an officer, an aristocrat, and served in Russia's civil service. As he aged, he began to become very critical and denunciatory of the current political situation. While his two greatest writings, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are not overtly anti-monarchy because they focus on family themes, they were viewed as subversive because a good portion of the books was spent either devaluating "great men" or recounting the struggles of the rural class. These messages were of concern to the government because they did not expressly support the government and, in particular, the Tsar (Warnes 154).
The Third Section, which was the political police at the time, was concerned with Tolstoy's writings, but since he was a former member of the government, he was somewhat off limits in terms of active measures. Active measures are direct actions that were taken to either stop or discredit the person in question. Perhaps part of the reason that no real substantive actions were taken against Tolstoy was that he lived in a remote area of rural Russia with the peasantry. Also, outside of a small circle of intelligencia, his writings were not widely read, and thus his ideas did not incite many to anti-government actions. Like Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy seemed to not be influenced by the police surveillance or presence.
Given my original premise, I fully expected that the suppression and punishment of the authors by the secret police would have led to prose that was more conformist and less anti-monarchist. But the exact opposite seemed to have happened; the writers appeared to have been emboldened with knowing that they had in some way offended the sensibilities of the monarch. Therefore, the idea can be advanced that perhaps the supposed repression of the writers actually galvanized them to crystallize their resolve and add conviction to their writings.

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