“Tragicheskaia erotika”: Obrazy imperatorskoi sem′i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny by Boris Kolonitskii (review)

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant and underappreciated novel The Red Wheel/Knot II, published in the West as November 1916, the hero, Colonel Vorotyntsev, remarks, in response to his soon-to-be mistress and intellectual interlocutor:

“For a republican, of course, devotion to a monarch is a deplorable stupidity. And without such devotion monarchy turns into a sham.”

[Vorontyntsev said,] “Yes, … that’s just what I mean.” Vorotyntsev had difficulty getting his words out. He couldn’t, he hadn’t wanted to tell her in so many words that the Russian monarchy had become a sham. But that was the fact of the matter.

“To have a monarch at all you must love him. Without your love, he doesn’t exist. Love him and be ready to serve him to the end!”¹

Boris Kolonitskii’s book is about love of tsar as a cultural and political phenomenon. As in all human relationships, love can turn into its opposite with unpredictable speed and consequence. For Russia, these consequences were plain to see. How did so many people across the political and social landscape go through the World War I process of being mobilized by monarchical patriotism and come out at best as passive observers of the downfall of their monarch and indeed the dynasty itself?² The book is a major expansion and deepening of themes raised in two earlier books by the same author.³ It is deeply researched and beautifully argued. It is among the most important works I have read on late imperial Russia, including the February Revolution.

The title comes from the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, who wrote of his tragic love for the last tsar and described his relationship to that tsar as “tragic erotic.” This unfulfilled love is central to Kolonitskii’s argument, which subverts earlier explanations of the relationship among war, revolution, and monarchy. He wants to undercut the dichotomies of left- and right-wing ideology, high and low culture, and elite and subordinate social groups that have influenced our understanding of the revolution. He succeeds in this ambitious task. This is not just a simple application of models derived from the study of the French Revolution to Russia but something entirely original, deeply rooted in the peculiarities of Russian monarchy and political culture as revealed in a variety of sources. Rumor is central to the analysis. Russia was clearly a society in which rumor not only flourished but played an inordinate political role. For Kolonitskii, rumor is an essential part of Russian political culture and a form of political activity in the autocratic system. In this model, rumor is linked intimately to image. Kolonitskii argues that rumor contributes a psychological, political, and social dynamic to the historical process. All social groups were simultaneously reacting to the images of the royals, filtering and processing these images through the medium of rumor, which in turn nourished the image makers. For students of the revolution, Kolonitskii argues the necessity of understanding the “personified images of power within the social consciousness of a transformational epoch” (19). This is the story of the sacralization and desacralization of royal power.⁴

One of the sources on which Kolonitskii focuses in order to understand the political culture of the time are cases of insult or oskorblenie of the tsar or members of the royal family. Kolonitskii has charted the available cases in police and Ministry of Justice archives, so one can understand the procedures and see the rise and fall in their numbers in relation to the progression of war and revolution. At the same time, he points out that this material does not lend itself to statistical analysis. Much went unreported. The transfer of case files was disrupted in late 1916 and on into 1917; many files were lost. There was a general decline in the number of these...