THE CHERRY ORCHARD: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

"To start living in the present we have to redeem our past--we have to break with it. "

--Trofimov, The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekhov was born the year before serfdom was finally abolished in his homeland, and one
year after his death brought the abortive 1905 revolution that would soon precipitate the most
monumental change of all in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. His lifetime spanned some of the
most momentous times in the long and storied history of Greater Russia.

Russia at Mid-Century

Tsar Nicholas I succeeded his elder brother Alexander to the imperial Romanov throne in 1825
amidst the confusion attending a revolt known as the Decembrist uprising. Having never received
a monarch's training, he nonetheless ruled with some initial success, within the limitations of his
autocratic mentality and the expectations of his day. Among his first tasks was punishing the
Decembrists, who, brought to trial, gave testimony that amounted to a penetrating criticism of
Russian institutions. Nicholas recruited Michael Speranski, a liberal councilor, to recodify Russian
laws in the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Empire of Russia. Though no startling liberal
interpretation was noticeable in this collection, the new tsar's recognition of the chaotic state of
Russian law was a step toward a more enlightened future.

So disturbing to his peace of mind were the Revolutions of 1848 that Nicholas I attempted to
insulate Russians from revolutionary ideas. Russia's massive peasant population was already
suffering from autocracy as much as from disease, poverty, and malnutrition when Nicholas I and
his advisors adopted three major instruments of repression: censorship, the secret police, and
Siberian prison camps. For thirty years the tsar's policies combatted outward opposition in the
form of frequent peasant uprisings (a total of 712, half of which were suppressed by the police
and the other half by troops). Other social ferment arose from new social and political theories,
which spread through secret societies of the intelligentsia. These focused their energy against the
reaction seeking to freeze society in the mold of 1825, for the suggestion of serf emancipation
and land reform violated centuries of agricultural and social tradition.

Reaction and censorship failed too to curtail a brilliant literary ferment. Above all, the great
Alexander Pushkin employed his literary genius to attack prevailing social standards. Not even
the tsar escaped the sharp satires of this multi-faceted author who, discouraged by the failure of
the Decembrist uprising, criticized the institutions of Russia in the manner of philosophies.
Throughout the 1840s, other writers likewise discarded Romantic frameworks for a more realistic
approach to life. These realists, describing conditions of misery among the people, sought to
arouse public consciousness and the spirit of reform.

Emancipation

At last, reform arrived on a massive scale. The death of Nicholas I in 1855 marked the beginning
of a remarkable era for Russia. The new Tsar, Alexander II (1855-81) was thirty-seven years old
when his father left the throne; his accession was marked with a great relaxation of that police
repression that had chilled the Russian intellect and oppressed the populace at large. He
promptly justified the best hopes of the intelligentsia by relaxing press censorship, opening
universities to enrollment by all classes, and removing nearly all restrictions upon foreign travel.
One major holdover remained: the deeply entrenched system of serfdom that bound the vast
majority of Russia's population in virtual slavery.
By 1856 all the conscience and intelligence of Russia favored the abolition of serfdom. The serfs
in the fields were not actually slaves, as they retained a prescriptive claim to the land which they
and their forebears occupied. "We are the lord's, but the land is ours," ran their saying. But they
were bound absolutely to that land and the will of their overlords, for whom they worked in
conditions of appalling poverty. Serfdom was thus grievous for the serfs; but often enough under
the existing system, it was also proving grievous for the masters. Two-thirds of the estates on
which the serfs were located were mortgaged up to (if not beyond) their full value; roughly the
same number of privately owned serfs were themselves mortgaged by their owners. The Russian
nobility--idle, dissolute, free spending, and economically inefficient, was running itself into the
ground. Thus on March 3, 1861 (two years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation freeing America's slaves), Tsar Alexander II published his edict abolishing serfdom
and emancipating Russia's peasantry.

The peasants became the free subjects of the Tsar. Each ex-serf householder was made the
owner of his cabin and a small garden plot around; but the great reaches of arable land were
divided. One half was turned back to the direct possession of the former serf-owners; the rest
was handed over, not to the peasants individually, but to the local village community, or mir. It
was this communal entity that became responsible for distributing land and maintaining local
order, so individual liberties remained minimal. Further, it was a bitter disappointment to former
serfs to see their former land added to the domains of their ex-masters, while they were
responsible for paying a heavy indemnity for the rest. The released serfs became discouraged
with the difficulty of paying for their farms and flocked into the towns, where they later became
exploited as industrial workers.

As for the landowners, they now found their remaining estates utterly demoralized. Efficient hired
labor was hard to get. Soon there were more mortgages and bankruptcies among the nobility
than ever, as immortalized in The Cherry Orchard. The victims were then ready to attribute all the
troubles wrought by their own prodigality and inefficiency to the Tsar's flirtation with liberalism But
liberals had tasted the success of reform and insisted upon further change. The young men who
now filled the universities in increasing numbers to study science, education, law, and medicine
swelled the group seeking further liberal government reforms.

Radical Politics and Philosophy

Three distinct party groups emerged to agitate for the various reform programs: the Slavophiles,
the Liberals, and the Radicals. The Slavophiles emphasized conservative evolution and stemmed
directly from the philosophic school of the same name, who believed Russia must not look to the
West for models but had a special destiny of her own. Liberals, descended in some part from the
earlier Westernizers, recruited followers from among the lower gentry and the professional men in
the middle class. They hoped to assemble a free constitutional assembly. More extreme
demands came from the Radicals--students, writers, and some professional men who believed in
revolutionary change at all costs. Extremists within this party, who called themselves Nihilists,
attracted considerable attention with their belief that society must be made to conform to the
demands of pure reason and science. At the most extreme reach of political thought were the
Anarchists, who felt violence and terrorism were the only paths to justice and freedom.

Despite the reforms he extended, Alexander II ultimately found that he had failed to satisfy
Liberals and Radicals alike. Riots in the universities, outspoken criticism from the various literary
and revolutionary societies and the press discouraged the tsar, who lived in fear of violent
upheaval. After multiple attempts on his life, the liberal tsar became pessimistic about reform and
returned to repressive measures. In response, liberals demanded a constitution and political
liberty for Russia. Their ultimate goal was a social revolution. Alexander II bent somewhat before
this storm of criticism, but ironically, he was killed by a terrorist bomb while visiting men who had
been wounded in a previous bombing because of his relaxed police restrictions.
Alexander III, who succeeded his father as Tsar in 1881, felt the need to avenge his father's
death and embarked upon a policy of reaction and militant nationalism. He found in his tutor,
Konstantin Pobiedonostev (a grim, puritanical professor of Russian civil law), an apt administrator
for reaction. As Pobiedonostev stated clearly in his Reflections of a Russian Statesman, he felt
parliamentary government was a great hoax. He considered the press evil except as an organ of
state propaganda; trial by jury he saw as a farce; and schools, if they had to exist, must not teach
irreligious science. Autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism were key themes. Secret
police attended university classrooms, press restrictions returned, and citizens were denied the
right of assembly. Opposed to this reactionary tide stood the intelligentsia, strengthened by a
small but growing industrial working class and a vast mass of land-hungry peasants unsatisfied
by the initial conditions of their limited emancipation.

Upon the death of Alexander III his son and successor to the throne, Nicholas II, promised "to
follow his father in everything." The new tsar faced an increasingly difficult situation, and he
lacked the will or ability to deal with it. Tsar and nobility became the common enemy of the
peasantry and the workers. The liberal-socialist opposition revived, as did class conflict. Once
again, a massive exploited underclass lived and worked at odds with a small, elite gentry who
lived off of their labor. An impassable chasm separated the two, who differed in looks, manners,
speech, and attire. Starving peasants without shoes died in their bare wooden huts of typhus,
dysentery, cholera, or simple famine, decorously out of sight of the merchants and nobles who
dined in finely appointed dachas or picnicked at health resorts on champagne, salmon, caviar.

Industrialization

Conditions in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century favored industrial
expansion. A mammoth labor supply of former serfs and their descendants, many of whom had
moved to cities for work, the spread of railroads and factories, and ever-increasing demand
meant that there could finally exist industrial growth. Soon enough, the long hours, low pay, and
poor working conditions crystallized into a labor movement, which hardened into an active, vocal,
organized opposition. Factories, moreover, were ideal breeding grounds for such oppositional
fervor.

As time went on, students joined the strikes, which took on a specifically political nature. Student
demonstrators were liable to especially harsh treatment, often being drafted into the army as
privates. A well-known literary representative of this type of politically active student is Petya
Trofimov, the "eternal student" in The Cherry Orchard. We learn that he has "already been sent
down from the university twice", and "landed in some pretty queer places," presumably as a
budding revolutionary. Certainly his speeches were considered inflammatory enough that the
tsar's censor removed several passages from the play's draft.

The People's Revolution

All grievances found expression one way or another in political parties. Left wing liberals
endorsed a revolution to achieve a constituent assembly which would frame a constitutional
monarchy, grant universal suffrage, and deal with the agrarian problem by dividing the large
estates. Right wing liberals wished to avoid a revolution but desired a constitutional government.
Socialists adhered fundamentally to the principles of Karl Marx, though they divided broadly into
two parties, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin,
demanded a small, tightly organized party and a militant program to seek the dictatorship of the
proletariat at the earliest moment. The Mensheviks, lead by Martov, wished to attain the same
goal through education and evolution. They were willing to work with non-socialist parties to
sweep away autocracy and educate the masses for gradual conversion to socialism.
As World War I erupted in 1914, autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism remained the
touchstones of Russian policy. The tsar's margin of security slowly diminished in the face of the
developing agrarian and industrial conditions, and eroded still further as the country took massive
casualties to no apparent purpose. The war interrupted progress towards higher living standards
for urban and agricultural workers. Before it ended, a militant minority of the Russian people
resolved to change their political, social, and economic problems by any means, and in 1917
Russia exploded in revolution. With the aristocracy discredited and the old ways smashed,
Chekhov's plays were eagerly embraced as manifestos of change.