Sex, Lies and Career. Piquant Motifs of the Lives of Russian Dignitaries

Abstract

On the eve of the World War I, the western peripheries of the Russian Empire were home to diasporas of Russian officials, military men and their families. Being isolated from local communities but at the same time highly hierarchically organised, they functioned solely within their own circle. Everyone knew one another to the most intimate detail. Nevertheless, their private lives often failed to meet the requirements imposed on the Russian officials residing in the borderland, which was reflected in the reports of the gendarmerie and memoirs, but silenced in the official documents of the institutions. Every once in a while, a lucky historian happens to stumble upon an opportunity to look at the same event from different angles through various types of sources. By presenting various cases of informal relations of Russian dignitaries (governors and vice-governors) with women in the Kingdom of Poland, the article analyses their impact on life and career. The author introduces the reader to characters of three Russian officials, of middle ranking on the scale of empire and dignitaries in the local hierarchy. The first, Mikhail Viktorovich Seletsky, the vice-governor of Lublin, despite his very good education and qualifications, committed suicide as a result of unhappy love for the governor’s daughter. The second, Ivan Dmitrievich Zaushkevich, the vice-governor of Sedlets, was ruined by a scandal with his mistresses, Jewish sisters, by whom he had children. In contrast, the third, Semyon Nikolaevich Korf, governor of Lomzhа and then Warsaw, despite his rather licentious behavior, made a relatively good career, which was only temporarily stopped by his stay in German captivity. The presented examples show the discrepancy between the official image of a representative of power with a rather conservative ideology and their everyday life, especially their sexual life. So, on the one hand, their way of life did not differ from the social norms of the time, which were already quite free at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on the western edge of the Empire. On the other hand, they were criticized by their superiors and the political police.