Authors

Alison Smith¹;  ¹ University of Toronto, Canada

Discussion

The arch-conservative Russian statesman Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostev, Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, reportedly said to the last tsar, Nicholas II, "I realize that the continuation of the regime depends on our ability to keep Russia in a frozen state. The slightest warm breath of life would be certain to cause the whole thing to rot." In Russia, the cold was not simply a climatological reality but also often acted as a metaphor for the current state of society and politics or for the very nature of "Russia" or "Russianness" itself. Whether cold was the force that defined the plight of the lower bureaucracy in Gogol's "The Overcoat," a metaphor for a certain kind of reactionary stability in Pobedonostsev's statement above, or in the kind of "climatological determinism" that assumed that the Russian state and the Russian people had to act in certain ways due to climate, cold appears and reappears. In this paper, the metaphor of cold therefore serves as a way of thinking about both the nature of the Russian state (primarily the Russian Empire) and about how it has been interpreted -- and perhaps also how it has so often been gotten wrong.