On the northern shores of Lake Ilmen, Novgorod once linked the great plain of Northern Rus with Europe, Byzantium and the Muslim East, across a pattern of deep lakes and wide rivers. At the centre of this feudal trading city was the magnificent white and gold Cathedral of St Sophia and, strung loosely around it, a chain of simpler churches and monasteries, visible on every horizon. A unique tradition of religious art developed here between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. And when Mongol horsemen burned their way across Rus in the thirteenth century, nature conspired in Novgorod’s preservation; the surrounding forests and marshes proved impassable to the Khan’s armies, a peace was settled, and the city’s great libraries and churches survived. Unlike other once abandoned churches in the area now being restored to bright perfection and ecclesiastical busyness, the Church of the Trinity in Klopsky still expresses the mystery of its destitution, a destitution whose circumstances are stranger than any of the regional power struggles that its patron saint foresaw.
There are fewer stories and more lies about the process of ruin around Novgorod than about its building and restoration. I sat with my travelling companion on the rubble of the church wall, sheltered from the wind by the branches of a tall sycamore, and read my guide to the Lake Ilmen region. She took out her sketch pad (she is a landscape painter). The guide book was dense and difficult to use, printed on bad paper in the last year of Communist Party rule. Its manic stream of undifferentiated informativeness made it a kind of late Soviet chronicle, gasping in the coils of Communist Russia’s contorted doublethink about culture and value. The guide moved erratically between minutiae of architectural history, morose asides about the squalor of Soviet building, proud tales of military triumph and defeat and random accounts of the achievements of local workers: the annual haul of the men of the Red Fisherman Collective Farm, or the heroic hands of Maria Nikolaeva of the Red Banner, which in 1972 succeeded in extracting 4,300 kilos of milk from the udders of a single cow. After several pages on Klopsky’s construction over the course of three centuries, the guide related in its habitual passive voice that, in 1923, the monastery ‘was handed over to the keeping of the Novgorod Museum, which was not in a position to provide for its maintenance and restoration’, that ‘it was taken apart little by little for its brick’, and that ‘the complex suffered greatly during the years of the Great Patriotic War’.
Though it has only recently been possible to give a precise account of certain categories of knowable fact about Russian history – we may now be told, for example, how many medieval icons were torched by the Bolsheviks of the region in 1927, as well as how many measures of milk its cows yielded in 1972 – more veiled forms of political and moral witness and betrayal have for centuries been inscribed in the study and contemplation of Novgorod. Medieval Novgorod was governed by a local assembly, the veche, which elected its own ruling Council of Lords. From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, the city embodied the aspirations of democratic thinkers, indicating that Russia was not doomed to unyielding autocracy, but rather that a courageous love for ordered forms of freedom lay deep within the traditions of the people. ‘Novgorod had a popular government,’ wrote the Enlightenment thinker Alexander Radishchev, who was exiled to Siberia by Catherine the Great; ‘the people in the assembly at the veche were the true rulers’.
That bell on the veche tower served freedom alone,
Which tolled its destruction
And how many proud souls were lost in its fall!…
the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov wrote. A generation later, the Decembrists elevated Novgorod to a political ideal, using the veche as a model in their draft constitutions. Many of them wrote reverently of Novgorod, and Pavel Pestel, who was hanged after the failed uprising of 1825, made a study of the city. Later in the nineteenth century the anti-tsarist writer Vissarion Belinsky called the city a ‘nest of Russian daring’. Before his arrest in 2003, Putin’s political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky invoked the Novgorod veche as a model of parliamentary democracy for post-Soviet Russia.
Just as the ‘democratic’ history of Novgorod was important for one way of looking at the Russian past and the possibilities for the Russian future, the story of its defeat by Moscow was important for those who valued, above all, the unity of the state, ruled from Moscow. In Molotov’s library there is a book with a picture from one of the ancient Russian chronicles on its cover, showing the battle of the Muscovites with the Novgorodians on the river Shelon. Published the year before Stalin’s death, The External Politics of the Centralised State: Second Half of the Fifteenth Century marks a time when Russian nationalism carried greater weight in official ideology than socialism.
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Alexander Herzen, one of the revolutionary-democratic company in spirit, took a contrary view of Novgorod, which he called a ‘wretched little town with a great historical name’. In one of its more subtle political punishments, Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police exiled the anti-tsarist writer to Novgorod to work as a city councillor. In Past and Thoughts, Herzen remarks how funny it is to think of all the secretaries, assessors and provincial officials petitioning passionately for a post which, for a man of his culture and political sensibility, was imposed as a punishment. Until he walked out ‘sick’ in 1842, Herzen followed orders in the mindless ‘signature factory’ inside the Novgorod Kremlin, from which the Novgorod district was governed. He was ‘fearfully bored’. In quiet, mounting disgust at the apathy, stupidity and cruelty of the provincial officials, he rummaged through files, discovering vivid testimony of the local nobility’s debauchery and violence with house-serfs and peasants, and the brutality and degradation of the ‘military settlements’ near Novgorod, which had led to a murderous popular uprising during a cholera epidemic there in 1831. The ‘military settlements’, agricultural colonies run like army barracks, had been set up by Tsar Alexander I as a social experiment designed to bring rational order to the chaotic Russian countryside after the defeat of Napoleon. To Herzen, these insurrectionary events were ominous for Russia: ‘In halls and maids’ rooms, in villages and the torture-chambers of the police, are buried whole martyrologies of frightful villainies; the memory of them works in the soul and over the course of generations matures into bloody, merciless vengeance which it is easy to prevent, but will hardly be possible to stop once it has begun.’
Dmitri Likhachev revived the dream of medieval Novgorod as an emblem of civic justice in the twentieth century. In simple prose he explained the ‘world significance’ of this ‘lecture-hall city’ to which, he said, one may go to ‘learn Russian history, and how to understand Russian art’. He even sensed the human contact of the past in the constant wind that blows off Lake Ilmen, piercing as a sea wind; he called it the ‘wind of Russian history’, as though the wind carried the sharp thrill of memories of fourteenth-century Novgorod’s links with the Black Sea and the Caspian to the south, and the White Sea and the Baltic to the north and west, trade links that extended from Scandinavia to Byzantium, further than those of Genoa or Venice. The breath of Likhachev’s own longing for freedom and world culture is perceptible in his work on Novgorod, a city he began writing about in Leningrad under siege. In his passages about the space and reach of medieval Novgorod, the very names of foreign places sing of open borders and free exchange: Denmark, Constantinople, the Hanseatic ports, Flanders, France, Persia, Arabia … The material of the city continued to work as the material of dissident political imagination, revealing more and more of its secrets throughout the twentieth century. The architecture and devotional art above the ground, and all the paraphernalia of medieval daily life that its clay soil had kept safe for nine centuries – wooden roadways, water pipes, amber beads, foreign coins and hand-scratched birch-bark documents recording mundane transactions and familiar emotions – bear witness to a past time of democracy, cosmopolitan culture, widespread literacy, civic order and dignified faith.