A Rhetorical War of Fire: The Middle Volga Arson Panic of 1839 as Contested Legitimacy in Prereform Russia

Abstract

Violent peasant resistance to the demands of the tsarist state oscillated, reaching extraordinary peaks during the Pugachev rebellion of the late eighteenth century and again with the 1905 Revolution. In between these apexes peasants usually utilized complex, but far less tumultuous, methods of resisting the authority and often the legitimacy of their overlords, methods simultaneously asserting the peasants' rights to live their lives within their own framework of meaning.1 These so called weapons of the weak represented a fundamental struggle between peasant and elite society over what Chinua Achebe has described as that which is and natural.2 However, periodically during the nineteenth century peasants substituted more lethal weapons passive ones. In examining these violent outbursts, recent scholarship has postulated the peasants' belief that the Old Regime was weak as the primary reason, a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century and primarily one associated with a perceived breakdown of the state's coercive power.3 That interpretation of late-nineteenth-century Russian history is not in question here; however, other forms of delegitimization of tsarist power were at work earlier in the century, processes that significantly undermined state authority well before 1905. This paper looks at one of those forces, the desanctification of the image of the during periods of significant social stress, in particular in 1839 during the height of an arson panic and chiliastic movement that swept the Middle Volga region.4 Arson, to be sure, has a long history in Russia. Examining its functionality, V.I. Semevskii, the foremost nineteenth-century Russian historian of the peasantry, noted that peasant petitions seldom led to any amelioration of conditions, and thus peasants were forced to resort to other forms of protest oppression. Chief among these, he argued, was arson.5 But Semevskii also contended that the peasants would use arson as a method to ruin their lords in hopes thereby of achieving a means to purchase their freedom. Therefore, he reasoned, arson should be viewed as either an explosion of peasant irrational frustration or evidence of their proverbial extraordinary craftiness [khitrost]. But there is significantly more at work here than prerational, primitive behavior. These fires became a contest definitional space, providing a focus a violent struggle to determine what view of the world as it should be would prevail. Elite society sought to justify the world as it presently existed, whereas the peasantry called into question not merely the gentry's right to exploit its labor but also the image of the tsar. In the process the arson panic of 1839 occasioned conflict over the meaning of the fires, with all who were caught up in the events submerging the fires into preexisting frameworks of thought and meaning.6 Through petitions and reports, a rhetorical struggle unfolded with gentry and officialdom attempting to preserve their hegemony during a moment of crisis, and the peasantry of the Middle Volga invoking alternative images as a mechanism to challenge authority. The gentry particularly desired to delegitimatize peasant disturbances by refusing to see them as forms of rebellion and instead conflating all peasant challenges to authority with crime.7 The peasants took the occasion of the fires as an opportunity transference, justifying an assault not merely on a suspected arsonist but on any who could be defined as an enemy.8 But more was disputed than simply gentry dominance or even membership in the community; in 1839 it was the very definition of tsar that was ultimately contested. Consequently our approach to the question of peasant naive monarchism requires rethinking, particularly the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather than being a question of whether the peasants were for or against the tsar, this study proposes that at this point in Russia's history several competing images of the were available to the peasantry in pursuit of their interests. …