The Mind in the Machine
Uniforms are now in green,
The frosts are chillier yet
And shoes are worn on unstockinged feet.^55213This particular example reflects soldiers' sentiments in the immediate post-
Petnne era (hence the reference to green umforms), yet the same metaphors
appear in songs that circulated nearly a century later, with Catherine II rather
than Peter I as the monarch whose shade is invoked. They implore her to come
back to life and witness the sorry condition to which her successors (Paul I is
implied in one version, Alexander I in another) have reduced the Semenovsky
guards regiment.^56 A lament for Alexander I, couched in the same vein, con-
tains a topical (and uncomplimentary!) reference to the Decembrist insurrec-
tion. In this song a sentry plunges his bayonet into the ground and cries:
Yield, dissolve, damp mother earth,
Open up, ye boards that seal the coffin,
Rise up, rise up, right-thinking tsar,
Our pious Alexander Pavlovich!
Our army is no longer as it used to be,
No longer in its former state-
All the Preobrazhentsy have mutinied. 57The Preobrazhensky guards regiment actually remained loyal to Nicholas I in
December 1825; in another version the unit is identified, more accurately, as
the Horse Guards. 58
Interpreting material of this kind is a hazardous enterprise, and it would-cer-
tainly be rash to infer from these songs that the soldiers who sang or spread
them really wanted their ex-monarchs to be resurrected from the dead; by
extension one may doubt whether they were even monarchists in an educated
man's understanding of the term. Like religious doctrines, concepts of
political obligation were given a peculiar twist in the thinking of common people.
They venerated the ruler as a person but were incapable of visualizing the
monarchy as an institution and harboured strong suspicions of whomever or
whatever stood between the monarch and his or her loyal subjects. This view
remained implicit rather than explicit, for it was dangerous to express it too
openly, and its partisans had neither the leisure nor the intellectual gifts
necessary to develop it into a full-blown theory. Nevertheless it emerges quite
plainly in a Cossack song about Peter I and the 'treacherous boyar' Gand-
zherin-although this motif goes back to the sixteenth century-and in the55 Pesni sobr. Kireyevskim, viii. 292; cf. Alekseyeva and Yemel'yanov, /st. pesni XVIII v.,
p. 155.
56 Alekseyeva and Yemel'yanov, /st. pesni XVIII v., p. 287; cf. Domanovsky et al., /st. pesni
XIX v., pp. 111-15. The post-1820 context would suit the theme better..
57 Domanovsky et al., /st. pesni XIX v., p. 127.
58 Pesni sobr. Kireyevskim, x. 201.