Chapter III

"IT IS AS THOUGH I AM SEEING THE END OF A

HIGHLY BORING JOURNEY": UNIVERSITY

YEARS, WAR, AND RETURN TO RUSSIA

In June of 1808 Petr and Mikhail passed the entrance examinations for the University of Moscow. They awaited with excitement and expectation the annual solemn gathering of the university faculty and students, which would be held on June 30, and would mark the formal beginning of their university studies. Because the records of the University were destroyed in the fire of 1812 there is no precise knowledge of Chaadaev's exact course of study or even the faculty in which he was registered and specific details of his university life are almost nonexistent. Since his closest friend of the university years, Ivan Dmitrievich Iakushkin, was registered in the Faculty of Letters, it is probable that Petr Iakovlevich was also registered there. Also it is possible to identify at least four of the professors under whom Chaadaev studied. These were A. F. Merzliakov, F. G. Bauze, J. G. Buhle and Christian Schloezer, some of the most distinguished members of the university faculty.

Aleksei Fedorovich Merzliakov taught "Russian elocution and poetry" or, in more general terms, literature. Born into a merchant family in Perm, Merzliakov had little prospect of gaining more than an elementary education. However, the young student wrote poetry and one of his creations happened to change his life. The governor of the province sent Merzliakov's "Ode on the Conclusion of Peace with the Swedes" to Catherine the Great, who was so impressed by it that she ordered the young student to be sent to St. Petersburg or Moscow to continue his education at public expense. In 1793 Merzliakov came to Moscow where he became a leading participant in the Friendly Literary Society in 1801 and received the master's degree in 1804, and the doctorate in 1805. He was immediately given the chair of Russian Elocution and Poetry and for the first time separated the study of Russian literature from the ancient classics, attaining for it an independent position among the disciplines of the Faculty of Philosophy.

Merzliakov was a forceful speaker who "ignited thought, electrified feelings and put life into the whole auditorium." He believed that literature could not be brought into any strict, single and complete methodological system. "Here is your system," he often said, pointing to his heart. His approach to literary criticism was a subjective one which taught his students to inquire into the author's purpose and define for themselves the underlying principles of his works.

This subjectivity was the result of the outlook that Merzliakov had established in the Friendly Literary Society. There in 1801 he had concluded that the author had a new duty to enlighten and uplift the moral and, by implication, social outlook of his readers. He had emphasized the author's primary function in enabling literature to fulfill a moral role, while Karamzin had emphasized the duty of criticism to point out those authors who in their work did precisely this. Though he did not believe in a "system," Merzliakov was still a classicist in his overall approach to literature. His teaching was not conducive to the formulation of a revolutionary view of society or of literature, but his emphasis on personal awareness of the moralistic potential of literature doubtless increased Chaadaev's awareness of social problems. However, there is no evidence at this point that Petr was prepared to sacrifice his self-centeredness and vanity in order to do something about them. The self-assured child recalled by Zhikharev was becoming a vain and egotistical adolescent, qualities to which Merzliakov's emphasis on a subjective and personalized approach to the arts doubtless appealed.

Under the guidance of Feodor Grigor'evich Bauze, Chaadaev studied law and absorbed new insights into his country's history. Bauze was a Saxon educated at Leipzig University who in 1782, after coming to Russia as a tutor in 1773, had been given the Chair of Law at the University of Moscow. Looking at Russian history, he asserted that culture was not lacking in Russia before Peter the Great, although the country was "weak in book-learning." Any apparent cultural weakness he blamed on Russia's having borrowed too much from the West rather than relying on its own resources.

Christian Schloezer taught political economy and devoted himself to history. Petr Iakolevich already knew him well from his private lessons in 1807. Johann Gottlieb Buhle, the last of Chaadaev's professors mentioned by Longinov, was one of the most renowned members of the faculty of the University. For many years he taught history, archeology, and the history of art, devoting his free time to the study of Russian history. "Students thronged not only to his usual lectures but to the courses privately arranged by him in the German harmony of his home where the separate questions of philosophy, aesthetics, or history--the three sciences which he preferred, were subjected to detailed and serious study."

Chaadaev received from these four men a broad-ranging education in literature, history, law, political economy, aesthetics and art history--the basic foundation from which his slow-maturing critique of Russian culture would emerge two decades later. Among other professors under whom Petr Iakovlevich may have studied was Lev Alekseevich Tsvetaev, professor of legal theory, whose study: The First Principles of Natural Law (Pervyia nachala prava estestvennago) became a handbook for those who later became Decembrists. During 1808, his final year at the University, Petr's future close friend, Nikolai Ivanovich Turgenev, was a student of Tsvetaev and noted in his diary that Tsvetaev's lectures inspired an inclination toward political liberalism and a feeling against serfdom that was equally strong. This was the same outlook which Nikolai Ivanovich would come to see in Chaadaev and for which he would warmly embrace his friend in 1820.

There is very little information available about the specific events of Petr's university years. Zhikharev, however, does recall an event of late 1809 which was an interesting sequel to Chaadaev's anger of the summer of 1807. On July 5-6 of that year Napoleon battled the Austrian army at Essling and emerged "victorious" only at the cost of extremely heavy losses to his own forces. News of the battle was received with great satisfaction by most of the Russian nobility who regarded it as a defeat for Napoleon and a German account of the battle, highly unfavorable to the French, circulated clandestinely in Moscow. Word of the account reached Alexander I who ordered that all copies be seized. The Chaadaev brothers possessed one and evidently had not been discreet about the fact, for the chief of police of Moscow came to their home and demanded the document. Petr is alleged to have surrendered it observing "in a sharp tone of voice that it was unworthy of Russian politics to promote servility in order to cover up the defeats of Napoleon."

While a student at the University, Chaadaev, according to his nephew, gained the reputation of being "one of the most sophisticated and brilliant of all the young people of Moscow." Zhikharev described Chaadaev at age twelve as being "extraordinarily handsome and to the highest degree independent and spoiled". Now at age sixteen and seventeen these qualities had grown stronger and the youth became something of a social dandy who attracted a surprisingly large number of friends. When he was detained by government authorities in August 1826, Petr would tell his investigators that he had become acquainted with Nikolai Ivanovich Turgenev and Ivan Dmitrievich Iakushkin during his years at the University of Moscow. Both Zhikharev and Petr Andreevich Viazemskii attest to Chaadaev's friendship with Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov, the future author of Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma). Ivan Mikhailovich Snegirev, who became a professor and writer, later recalled Petr Iakovlevich as a friend at Moscow University. Finally, it is likely that Chaadaev made the acquaintance at this time of Vasilii Alekseevich Perovskii and Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Obleukhov, both of whom would become close friends in the following years.

It is evident that Petr was determined to make an impression of social grace and intellectual astuteness on all those who surrounded him. The self-centeredness of his childhood, however, soon matured into an adolescent self-indulgence that often could go to extremes.

Chaadaev had the reputation of being the best dancer in Moscow. He knew every dance, but his specialty was the French quadrille . . . . As one might expect from all this, it was very early that he started to live by following his capricious will. He began to come and to go wherever he pleased, giving no account for his actions, and those who were accustomed to all this asked for none . . . . At this time in his development there increased that egotism and that strict and unmerciful self-love which was born within him, and could, of course, become established and blossom only under favorable conditions.

Unusually independent in thought as well as action, Petr was possessed with "a miraculous intuitive ability to grasp extremely accurately with a single glance that which others did not see." He kept his outward appearance continually polished, constantly returning to his tailors, his boot maker and his hat shop where he bought very expensive apparel and, often with no particular need, replenished his wardrobe to suit his latest fancy. Chaadaev may have imitated his Uncle Dmitrii Mikhailovich Shcherbatov, who possessed very similar traits of character, but whereas his uncle's vanity had been a trait of social position and class, Petr's, according to his "nephew", emerged as a more deep seated one of personality and spirit.

Although Petr Iakovlevich was a social dandy, and, perhaps even a Beau Brummell as Zhikharev once calls him, his personality leaned toward intellectual pursuits. Longinov recalls Chaadaev's "love of reading and continuing education, which comprised the greatest joy of his life." For his part Zhikharev asserts that "having hardly emerged from childhood he had already begun to collect books and became well-known to all Moscow secondhand book sellers." Petr began a correspondence with Didot, the editor in Paris, and "at the age of fourteen wrote to Prlnce Sergei Mikhailovich Golitsyn, whom he did not know, about someone in need, and discussed with famous men the subjects of religion, science, and art . . ." Finally, the writer and bookseller Vasilii Stepanovich Sopikov in his Experiment at a Russian Bibliography published in 1813, mentions two rare books, both of which were found in the library of Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev. One of these was Les Actes des Apôtres et les Epîtres, traduits de la version latine appelée Vulgate Dar le Docteur François Skorina de Polotsk, Vilna, 1525. This was such a rare edition that Sopikov was able to identify the existence of only two copies in Russia, one in the library of "Professor Bauze of the University of Moscow and the other in the library of Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev." Sopikov also gave a lengthy description of another book, Actes et Epîtres des Saints Apôtres, which belonged to Chaadaev. The fact that both books centered on a religious theme and one was a translation of a Catholic version of the Scriptures indicates, at a rather early age, the direction of Petr's interest in religion that, during his travels in Europe in the 1820s, would become a major concern of his intellectual pursuits.

At last, as the winter of 1811-12 approached, Chaadaev could anticipate the end of his university studies. After a period of some uncertainty, he and his brother had decided to go to St. Petersburg and enroll in the Semenovskii regiment. With this goal, he wrote to his cousin, Ivan Dmitrievich Shcherbatov, who had already gone to the capital.

At last we have prepared for the journey and it seems that we will come in a few weeks. I am glad finally to obtain a definite and fundamental existence after almost a whole year in the uncertainty of my fate.--I assure you that it is as though I am seeing the end of a highly boring journey.

But of everything in the present circumstance, it is most of all pleasing to me that I shall soon see you.--However, I do not need to say this because I know that you are assured of my friendship, as I am assured of your goodwill on which I rely. We now both will ask you to oblige us by renting a seven-room house for our arrival--the house should be large and clean, and I ask you, if possible, to rent one with firewood in a pleasant part of town for two months. In the next post you will receive the money--200 rubles. And so, dear brother, we hope that you will not refuse us our request and that, in a short time, we will receive an agreeable answer in which we ask you to give the address of our future living quarters and all other circumstances relating to it.-- Incidentally, I ask you to be assured that this new gesture on your part will always be the most pleasant proof of your friendship for me.

Your sincerely loving brother and friend, Petr Chaadaev

P. S. I ask you not to forget to have our rented dwelling heated before our arrival. By the way, if possible, try to rent it with furniture. This would be most appreciated. Moscow, 1811, December 7.

It seems that Petr had finally tired of Moscow life and, longing for the excitement of St. Petersburg, felt it necessary to hide to some extent his anticipation by looking back on his university years with an extremely blasé attitude. As for spending a whole year "in the uncertainty" of "his fate" it is quite possible that the urbane and sophisticated student had experienced some difficulty in deciding upon a career. Professor Buhle had advised Petr and some of his friends against going to the capital and entering the military service.

Certainly there were other possibilities open to Petr. When his father died, he and Mikhail had found themselves the possessors of eight estates in Novgorod and an adjacent province. Three of these they inherited in common with Vasilii Ivanovich Chaadaev, a cousin on their father's side; however, these were the smallest and included a serf population of only 280 males and 285 females. With the five remaining estates the Chaadaev brothers inherited 1,174 male and 1,189 female serfs. Finally in Moscow they received a house on Tverskaia ulitsa. Thus Petr was a man of considerable wealth and, possessing such means, could have easily retired to Khripunovo to live a very comfortable life. Finally, if this did not suit his pleasure, he could have entered the civil service in Moscow or even in St. Petersburg.

However, political events conspired to facilitate the eventual decision by which, late in 1811, Petr ended what he called his year of "uncertainty." It began to appear even more likely that Napoleon would attack his Russian ally. Thus, faced with the prospective need to defend the fatherland, Chaadaev in the end came to the only decision which offered him the prospect of giving meaning to his past professions of patriotism and adding new excitement to his life: he decided to enter the army. Once his decision was made and his university study completed he could not restrain himself from going at once to taste the excitement of life in the new capital. Thus he asked his cousin to rent a house for what he estimated would be the period of time that would be necessary for his papers to be processed so that he could enter military service in the Semenovskii regiment.

Finally, this letter of Petr Iakovlevich to his cousin shows many of the character traits recalled by Zhikharev. Chaadaev is very demanding and between the lines there is the feeling that he expected his cousin virtually to wait upon him. The request for the house was made in such a way that it really could not be turned down, but one wonders how Ivan Dmitrievich Shcherbatov felt at being requested in effect to "prove" his friendship for Chaadaev.

By January of 1812 Petr had settled in St. Petersburg. Between January and May, when he entered the Semenovskii regiment, the only information about Chaadaev's Petersburg life is found in a note written to his friend Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Obleukhov, who had remained in Moscow and asked Chaadaev to buy certain books that he could not obtain in Moscow. Petr replied:

It was as agreeable for me to receive the commission from you as it is now lamentable to me that I cannot fulfill it. A surprising thing! In Petersburg where so many people think that they understand Kant, I could not find his major works. However, do not despair my dear friend, I was entrusted to search until my departure and hope that in not too long a time you will receive your books. For me it will be highly agreeable if I can facilitate something toward obtaining them.

Impossible to find the major works of Kant in St. Petersburg! It is tempting to speculate about the extent of Chaadaev's displeasure when he was denied the "ultimate" sophistication of finding the works of Kant in a secondhand book shop. Perhaps the city displeased him in other ways as well. In any case he knew that the time before the departure of the Semenovskii regiment would not be long, and he awaited his military career with anticipation .

Finally on May 12, 1812 Petr was enrolled in the Semenovskii as a sub ensign (Podpraporshchik). Mikhail also enrolled there at this time. During his training Chaadaev became acquainted with Prince Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoi, the brothers Sergei and Matvei Ivanovich Murav'ev-Apostol, and their relative Nikita Mikhailovich Murav'ev--all future activists in the Decembrist movement. He also continued his friendship with Ivan Iakushkin.

The heroic moment of defending the fatherland was not long delayed. Chaadaev saw his first action "in the Russian ranks in the decisive battle of August 24-26 at the village of Borodino." Then, on September 20 when the forces of Napoleon had occupied Moscow and the Russian army was encamped south of the city, Petr was promoted to the rank of Praporshchik (ensign-- the lowest officer's rank in the Russian army). During the night of October sixth he took part in an action against the enemy corps at the village of Tarutino and on the eleventh he was in the battle of Malo-Iaroslavets.

Toward the end of 1812, as Kutuzov's army approached the borders of the Russian empire, Petr Iakovlevich fell ill with "some terrible kind of fever" in a small town in Poland and stayed "in the apartment of some Jew. However, he recovered ; in time for the beginning of military action in 1813" and on January 1 crossed the Niemen River with the Russian army as it left the borders of the fatherland and began to pursue Napoleon into Western Europe.

On April 20, 1813 Chaadaev participated in the battle of Lützen and on the same day his request for transfer as lieutenant to the regiment of the Akhtyrskii Hussars was approved. Apparently Petr had not found in the Semenovskii all the excitement and glory that he had hoped for and had decided to search for it in the cavalry. It is also a significant indication of the way in which his character was developing that he would break with two generations of family tradition and leave the regiment in which his grandfather and many other relatives had served merely, as M. I. Murav'ev-Apostol suggested, "to wear the full dress coat of the hussars." The young officer who would one day so strongly lament the lack of tradition among Russians now showed complete indifference to it and searched instead for ways to increase his social status.

May 9, 1813 found Petr at Bautzen in the reserves. On May 23, when the armistice of Pleiswitz began, his regiment was encamped in the Silesian village of Lang Bilau. This stay produced a profound impression on Petr Iakovlevich. "There for the first time he experienced the abstraction of European life in one of its most charming and seductive forms. To the end of his life Chaadaev could not recall the village of Lang Bilau with anything but exhilaration." Petr had seen there the contradiction between the prosperous, productive life of the proprietor or farmer who was tied to his trade or his land by the traditions established by many generations of his family, and the empty, often poverty-stricken life of the Russian peasant who was rooted to nothing more than the capricious whims of his master. He had come to doubt a fundamental quality of Russian life.

Napoleon had hoped that the Armistice of Pleiswitz would give him much needed time to reposition and resupply his forces. It did, but it turned out to be more advantageous for the allies, allowing Austria to complete its mobilization and giving England time to negotiate, with Prussia and Russia, pledges not to sign a separate peace with Napoleon. Hostilities began again on August 7, less than three months after the Armistice had taken effect.

Chaadaev entered Bohemia with the Russian army and marched with it through Giesshügel and Golenburg in Saxony. At Kulm on August 17 he took part in the surrounding Or the French corps commanded by General Vandamme for which he was "awarded the order of St. Anne fourth class." Petr fought at the battle of Leipzig in early October. In Alsace on February 2, 1814, however, he found time to write a brief note to Obleukhov.

Finally, on March 18, 1814, Chaadaev rode in the honor guard of Alexander I as the Russian army entered Paris. This was the most supremely exciting moment of the campaign for the young officer. Decades later he would recall his impression of this moment:

One fine day we reached Paris and they gave us the welcome that you recall, forgetting for the moment that we were really only young parvenus and that we had added nothing to the common stock of nations, not even a poor little solar system like the Poles, our subjects, or some miserable algebra like the Arabs . . . . They treated us well because they found that we had the manners of decently brought up people, because we were polite and modest, as was fitting for newcomers with no other title to public esteem but the advantages of their stature.

These were the words of a mature man tempered by the hardships of a long life. For Chaadaev the immediate reality of Paris in March of 1814 was one of pleasure and excitement in the noise and gaiety of the city. While in Paris, according to M. I. Murav'ev-Apostol, he lived with Petr Andreevich Frederiks so that he could adopt "a foppish style" and show off his full dress coat "to best advantage." Frederiks, some eight years older than Petr Iakovlevich, was, if the testimony of Murav'ev-Apostol is to be believed, a sophisticated dandy whom the 20-year-old Chaadaev desired to emulate.

However, the experience of Paris in 1814 undoubtedly also left the young Chaadaev with a more sober view of reality. It could only offer him

tangible and visible forms for his personal comparison of Russian society with that other society which, in what is called Europe, had been created after centuries of labor by the church, the castle and the school, that is, by the friendly cooperative work of religious beliefs, natural power, and knowledge handed down over a period of hundreds of years.

He sensed in Europe a stable, uninterrupted development of the traditions of society and its ruling powers which was lacking in the arbitrary nature of Russian power that had developed out of the bitter upheavals of Russian experience with the Mongols and later the Poles.

The experience of Europe in 1814 strongly affected the entire Russian officer corps. Zhikharev aptly compared it

to the first Journey to enlightened Europe of the eternal wanderer-sovereign who, in full possession of his limitless power, and untamed wrath, proceeded from there to attain a new civic order and a new state of life for his people. And later there came another wandering analogous to it . . . that miraculous, eternally memorable, almost legendary campaign in which it was as though the nation itself undertook a pilgrimage to foreign lands from which the best sons of the Russian fatherland brought back with them in their knapsacks so many new thoughts and so many unrealizable dreams. Before the avid awareness of Chaadaev's eyes there began to sparkle a new and unprecedented view of the course of Russian life.

The summer of 1814 witnessed this homeward journey of the Russian army. Chaadaev went from Paris to Cracow where he stayed for some time, joining a Masonic lodge there and receiving in it the first two degrees. From Cracow he returned to Petersburg by way of Kiev, making several stops on both sides of the Austro-Russian frontier.

While the successful campaign against Napoleon had raised the hopes of Chaadaev and many other Russian officers, the return of the Russian armies to St. Petersburg brought disillusionment for many of these lofty expectations. Nikolai Turgenev characterized the general atmosphere of the time: "It is from that date of the return of the Russian armies to Russia that liberal ideas began to propagate themselves" there. "It seemed that a new era was about to dawn in Russia." On his return to the capital, he later recalled that he saw

people who entered St. Petersburg having left several years before, express the greatest astonishment to see the changes that had occurred in the manner of being, of speaking and of acting of the young people of this capital; it seemed to be awakened to live a new life, to be inspired by everything that was noble and pure in the moral and political atmosphere.

This awakening demanded an outlet for some sort of definitive, constructive action. The government, however, was not disposed to grant any such oppor-tunity.

Chaadaev's close friend Ivan Dmitrievich Iakushkin, who had remained with the Semenovskii regiment, expressed the frustration that he and his associates experienced.

In 1814 life for the young people in St. Petersburg was boring. For the previous two years we had witnessed before our eyes great events which decided the fate of nations and in which we, in some ways, had participated. Now it was unbearable to look upon the emptiness of Petersburg life and to listen to the jabbering of old men who praised everything old and prevented any forward movement. We had left them behind by a hundred years.

The officers of the Guards Corps had found a most meaningful social role in service to the fatherland during the struggle against Napoleon, but when they returned victorious to St. Petersburg, they experienced a sudden and traumatic transition to a humdrum peacetime existence. In this situation the return of the young officers to Russian life was accompanied by a new critical awareness of the capriciousness of the power of the Tsar. A dichotomy also arose between their thinking and that of the elder leaders of the Russian state, who longed only for immediate social stability. Iakushkin gave clear expression to this new frame of mind in describing a Thanksgiving service held to celebrate the return of the First Guards division to Oranienbaum late in 1814.

During the thanksgiving the police mercilessly beat anyone who tried to approach our forces. This produced for us the first unpleasant impression of our return to the fatherland. I received permission to return to St. Petersburg and await the regiment there. Having stopped at Tolstoi's . . . . I set out with him . . . to watch the First Guards division as it entered the capital . . . . Tolstoi and I stood not far from the golden carriage in which sat the Empress Maria Fedorovna and the Grand Princess Anna Pavlovna. The Emperor came into sight leading the guards division on a glorious brown horse . . . . We admired him, but at that very moment, almost directly before his horse, several peasants ran across the street. The Emperor spurred on his horse and went at the peasants with bared sword. The police took the peasants and beat them. We did not believe our eyes and turned away, ashamed of our admiration for the Tsar.

Another officer, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bestuzhev, later one of the leading Decembrist literary critics, recalled how the early part of the reign of Alexander I had been filled with the hopes of everyone that Russia's future potential prosperity would soon be realized. He reacted just as sharply as Iakushkin had to the discouraging drabness of Russian reality that confronted these young officers who found themselves suddenly deprived of those "great events" that had given such vivid meaning to their service for the fatherland.

Napoleon invaded Russia and . . . only then did there awaken in all our hearts a feeling of independence, at first political and finally national. That was the beginning of free thinking in Russia. The government itself spoke such words as "Freedom, Emancipation!" It had itself sown the idea of abuses resulting from the unlimited power of Napoleon, and the appeal of the Russian Monarch [for the end of these abuses] resounded on the banks of the Rhine and the Seine. The war was still being fought when soldiers, returning home, for the first time spread grumbling among the masses. "We shed our blood,' they would say, "and then we are again forced to sweat under the corvée. We freed our native land from the tyrant, and now we ourselves are tyrannized over by the ruling lords." The army, from generals to its soldiers, upon its return did nothing but discuss how good lt had been ir, foreign lands. A comparison with their own country naturally brought up the question: Why should it not also be so in our land? At first, as long as they talked without being hindered, their ideas were lost in the wind, for thought is like gunpowder,--only dangerous when compressed.

For a while such "free speech" did go unhindered, and especially with regard to Poland, Alexander continued to give expression to liberal sentiments. It was in Paris in 1814 that Alexander had done much to give impetus to this movement of free ideas. He had played a major role in securing generous terms for the peace that was imposed on the French, and had declared himself in favor of many political and civil liberties, hinting during a visit to the famous literary critic Madame de Staël that serfdom in Russia should eventually be abolished. These actions certainly gave encouragement to the liberal inclinations of many of those aides and advisors. One such man was General Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov, an officer who, having risen from the rank of captain to lieutenant general during the campaign against Napoleon, eventually became a close friend of Chaadaev. In March of 1814 Orlov had signed for Russia the declaration of the surrender of Paris and took part with Count Caulaincourt in the final negotiations that arranged Napoleon's exile to Elba in April. During his stay in Paris, Orlov became interested in the Tugendbund, which had been founded in Königsburg in 1808 and dissolved in 1809. This secret organization, influenced by freemasonry and by the ideas of Herder and Fichte, had sprung into existence in reaction to Napoleon's domination of Prussia. Its principal aim was "to educate the masses and stimulate patriotic sentiment." Orlov later asserted:

I was occupied with thoughts about the significance which the Tugendbund had acquired in politics. It is from this point of view that I interpreted the words of Emperor Alexander when he said in Paris: Our external enemies are beaten forever, now we shall join battle against our internal enemies. With such thoughts I returned to Russia. I wanted to change its life . . . [to do battle against] the Napoleons who nested like marauders [in various parts of the state hierarchy].

Consequently, when Orlov returned to Russia in 1815, he began to work for the establishment of a secret society similar to the Tugendbund. His efforts were unsuccessful but the ideas which inspired him remained very much alive.

After the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna, despite certain signs to the contrary, most expected that the Tsar's liberal outlook would continue to shape Russian policy. The major cause of this expectation was the policy toward Poland adopted by the Tsar. For, early in 1815 he instructed his old friend and advisor Prince Adam Czartoryski to prepare a Polish constitution. Then, in November 1815, on his way back to St. Petersburg, Alexander stopped in Warsaw, where he signed a proclamation granting the Polish constitution. In the words of Nikolai Turgenev: "the creation of the kingdom of Poland produced a sensation in Russia. There were people who . . . rejoiced at the intentions of the Emperor," believing that a constitution for Russia would soon follow. These people were angered by the implication of Alexander's action that Russia was somehow less mature than Poland, but, in the expectation of better things to come, they generally supported the Tsar. However, "others . . . did not see the action of Alexander as anything but an insult hurled at Russia." Thus, General Orlov, in the belief that a constitution should be given first to Russia, raised a protest against the Polish constitution. The effort of Orlov had no effect, but the Polish question in general quickly became a divisive issue in Russian internal politics.

This divisiveness was strengthened by a rumor that Alexander I intended to detach from Russia several provinces which had once been under Polish control and return them to Poland. The rumor grew stronger in the following months, but, eventually "all the whims of Alexander to reunite to the kingdom of Poland all the old provinces had no result other than the formation of a new army corps of soldiers who came from those provinces. If everything abroad ended in a song, in Russia everything seemed to end in soldiers."

Certainly the military was continually on the mind of Alexander. In 1815, according to Iakushkin, "in Russia, more than anything else he concerned himself with the strengthening of the military. The Tsar was everyday at the trooping of the colors; they began exercises (ucheniia) in all regiments and parading was carried on with new force." This new discipline soon began to produce strains. On the day of the first major military review since Alexander's return a certain Colonel Taube reported to the Tsar that some of the officers in his brigade had been insolent. As a result of Taube's allegation seven highly popular officers were dismissed from military service, producing "an unpleasant impression on the entire army."

If the attitude of Alexander had begun to undergo a change, the same was true for many of the officers of the Guards. Iakushkin recalled a major example in the development of a new outlook among his associates.

In the Semenovskii regiment a cooperative group formed: fifteen to twenty officers agreed to have dinner together each day . . . . After dinner some played chess and others read aloud from foreign newspapers, watching for events in Europe--such a way of passing time was certainly an innovation. (In 1811 when I joined the Semenovskii regiment, officers gathered among themselves and played cards, swindling each other without a twinge of conscience, or drank and debauched recklessly.) The Commander of the Semenovskii, General Potemkin, patronized our artel and sometimes dined with us, but after several months, Alexander ordered Potemkin to put a stop to the artel of the Semenovskii regiment, having said that he did not like such a gathering of officers.

The Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich and Count Arakcheev had come to dislike Potemkin, whom they considered too soft-hearted, and, from the time in 1815 when Potemkin abolished corporal punishment in the regiment, they became determined to have him relieved of his command.

Finally, the most ominous indication of the direction of events in 1815 was given by the rapid rise in the power of Count Aleksei Andreevich Arakcheev. Again it is Iakushkin who best summarized the situation. "In 1815 on his return the Emperor asked his minister to take a month's rest and then transferred almost the entire direction of the state to Count Arakcheev." The year before on his way to the Congress of Vienna, Alexander had given Arakcheev tacit consent to pursue again his plan to create a system of military colonies, a plan on which he had been working in 1810 when the increasing threat of Napoleon had forced abandonment of the scheme. Arakcheev worked rapidly and by 1816 every peasant village in several large "trial" areas had been converted into a military camp or colony. While the entire society of these colonies was inducted into a system of military organization and discipline, there smoldered behind the scrupulously cleaned streets and well scrubbed cottages of the colonists a feeling of outrage against the callousness of the government that allowed their lives to be disrupted in such a way.

Opposition to Arakcheev's increased influence was immediate. Matvei Murav'ev-Apostol recalled that "in 1815 on our return to St. Petersburg some kind of subscription under the patronage of Count Arakcheev was distributed to the Guard's regiments. The officers of the Semenovskii . . . agreed . . . not to sacrifice a kopeck for the pleasure of the all-powerful favorite." Finally the memoirs of Karamzin's close friend Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev offer another interesting example of the extent of the power wielded by the man whom Chaadaev would later call "a scoundrel." Alexander had ordered that a commission be created for the purpose of aiding the citizens of Moscow who had suffered in any way from the invasion of Napoleon. According to Dmitriev, it was Count Arakcheev, the holder of no formal position within the government, who offered him the chairmanship of the commission and later acted as his sole means of communication with the Tsar.

Such was the volatile atmosphere of social and political aspirations and stresses that Chaadaev found on his return to Petersburg in 1815 with the Akhtyrskii Hussars. Unfortunately there is virtually no information available regarding the influence on Chaadaev of these events to which his friends reacted so strongly. Many years later he recalled the time of his friendship with Pushkin, whom he first met in 1816, as "the best years of my life, that happy time when every thinking man tried to act in keeping with everything good . . . ." This recollection is permeated by such a feeling of idealism that one might easily assume that Chaadaev's reaction to the events regarding Poland and to the increased power of Arakcheev was much the same as that of Iakushkin, Turgenev, and his other friends.

It is apparent that on his return to St. Petersburg, Petr maintained a strong interest in the freemasonry in which he had begun to participate in Cracow in 1814. However, the record of his specific activity at this time is confusing. According to the "affidavit" which Chaadaev completed in August 1826 during his detention at Brest-Litovsk, he "belonged from 1815 to the Russian East (k rossiiskomu Vostoku) and received there the next six degrees." The same documents of August 1826 also indicated that Chaadaev possessed a certificate attesting to the achievement of the eighth degree of masonry and the title "secret white brother" from the lodge of "secret white brothers," (tainykh belykh brat'ev).

Semevskii points out that Swedish masonry had an eighth degree with a very similar title--a title and degree which were not normally found in Russian masonry. It is not possible to identify any specific lodge of "secret white brothers." Conceivably, when Chaadaev spoke of receiving the next six degrees in the Russian East he was referring to the second through eighth degrees of the secret white brothers. What is certain is the fact that Chaadaev spent much of 1815 deeply involved in the rites and ceremonies of masonry and that at some point in 1815 he joined that Lodge of the Reunited Friends to which also belonged his old university friend Griboedov, the future Decembrist, Pestel', and the future head of the Third Section, Count Aleksandr Benkendorf. Here both Chaadaev and Pestel' achieved the fifth degree.

When Petr was not occupied by masonry or his military duties he immersed himself in reading and study. He apparently was strongly interested in Roman literature, for on March 1, 1815 he wrote his friend Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Obleukhov:

I forgot to tell you that I do not have Titus Livius. I do not know what has happened to it--and I am in despair due to the fact that I could not oblige you with anything. In my last letter I wrote to you about my books; how stupid to forget that your estate had burned; forgive me for this, dear friend.

Again Chaadaev's self-centeredness comes to light and this time by his own admission.

Soon after this Obleukhov informed Petr of his intention to retire from the state service. In a rapid response, dated March 31, Chaadaev rebuked Obleukhov for depriving the state of an excellent servant:

As for your fate which you say is perverse to you all the time, I can only say that our fate is in ourselves alone and that our failures are the results of our insufficient will to achieve what we desire . . . and with your abilities and knowledge not to serve the fatherland . . .! Now it only remains for me to hope that I will see you somewhere in Petersburg, that is at a time when you overcome this character weakness which I have very little faith in and which I like still less.

These are not exactly radical views. Petr evidently did not yet feel the frustration of service in an insensitive and unresponsive bureaucratic apparatus that would drive first his brother to retire in 1820 and then himself in 1821. Later in 1815 Chaadaev advised his friend not to come to St. Petersburg but to travel about Europe instead, hoping that despite "unusual difficulties" his journey would take place.

Whatever Chaadaev's specific activities were at this time, certain general conclusions about him were drawn by those with whom he came into contact. Among the officers he was called "le beau Tchaadaef." Perhaps this title came in part from his cultivation of the friendship of the brothers of the Emperor, the Grand Dukes Constantine, Mlkhail and Nicholas. Finally, Zhikharev recalls that Ekaterina Nikolaevna Orlova, the wife of General Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov, later told him that at this time "Chaadaev by his reputation, successes, acquaintances, intelligence, books, fashionable surroundings, his library, his erudite participation in freemasonry, was undoubtedly, positively and beyond any comparison the most notable, distinguished and brilliant of all the young people in Petersburg."

Petr's ego basked in the attention that it received. He had carried the social traits, developed at the University of Moscow to the highest levels of Russian society and he had done all this with considerable success. But in leaving the Semenovskii regiment he had cut himself adrift from Iakushkin, his cousin Ivan Shcherbatov and many other close friends. Now he floated at random amidst the sea of strange faces which made up Petersburg high society. Perhaps after some time he began to feel the emptiness and superficiality of a life of social climbing. However, it is more likely that, by the-beginning of 1816, the novelty of life in the capital had again worn off, and, motivated by the desire to find new worlds to conquer, Chaadaev applied for a transfer to the Life Guards hussars stationed at Tsarskoe Selo. His application was approved on April 20, 1816, and with the new rank of cornet (or officer in the light cavalry) he set out to the south on the twenty-mile journey across the flat and barren marshland surrounding Petersburg, arriving in a few hours amidst the lush greenery of the well-manicured parks and fields that surrounded the magnificent baroque palace built by Catherine the Great.