On April 18 (OS), 1800, Emperor Paul I of Russia issued a decree to the Senate consisting of a single sentence: “Whereas, from the importation of various books from abroad there results corruption of faith, civil law, and good order, therefore from now on until further notice we order that all importation from abroad of any type of books, in whatever language, without exception, into our State, be forbidden, along with sheet music.”Footnote ¹ Despite its brevity, this was a radical decision. For a century the Russian Empire had funded the importation and translation of foreign books; under Catherine II the relative looseness of its censorship in the European context became a subject of propaganda.Footnote ² Since the French Revolution, the state had tried to clamp down on subversive material, but even then the expectation was that most materials would be permitted. Merchants and litterateurs alike had made careers in the expectation that this would remain the case. At first glance, then, the decree seems to represent a dramatic expansion in the repressive authority of the state, a growth in police power commensurate with the growing revolutionary threat.

In fact, although it undoubtedly resulted in a (short-lived) shrinking of the literary space in the empire, the decree was a capitulation. Censorship implies that the state’s gaze can penetrate into the entirety of the literary space and make granular distinctions between desirable and undesirable work. Paul’s decree was an admission that censorship of foreign books was no longer possible, and that banning all imports wholesale would be easier than trying to sort the good texts from the bad. But why did this suddenly become so urgently necessary a decade after the outbreak of the French Revolution? The answer, I contend, has to do with the dynamics of a very specific place in the empire: the port of Riga, capital of Livland guberniia and commercial entrepôt to many of the surrounding areas. While Riga was, by most measures, the Russian Empire’s second-most-important port until Odessa began to boom in the early nineteenth century, its trade was lower than St. Petersburg’s. Its importance lay in a different factor.

To understand what made Riga distinctive in this context, I submit, we must think in terms of Simon Franklin’s concept of the graphosphere: the “space of the visible word,” or the totality of written words and letters in a given society.Footnote ³ Here I want to link this framework with James Scott’s far better-known concept of “legibility”: the means by which a state can “get a handle on its subjects and their environment.”Footnote ⁴ If the graphosphere is the space occupied by writing in a society, legibility comprehends all of society as something to be read (and hence “edited”) by the state, whether or not it is already symbolically encoded. Thus, while these two terms are linked by means of their core symbolic metaphor, they are only contingently connected in practice. This connection takes place only when the state needs to control processes of symbolic representation that threaten to escape its oversight—a situation that usually did not arise in the context of Russian censorship throughout most of the eighteenth century, when volumes of text subject to censorial intervention remained institutionally restricted and numerically manageable. But such a conjuncture did emerge in 1790s Riga. Here a graphosphere that by Russian standards was unusually dense, extensive, and fast-growing encountered a state with a newfound sense of urgency about the dangers of text and concomitantly growing expectations about its ability to control it. The result was a crisis of censorship that ultimately issued in the totalizing decree of April 18, 1800.

Imperial censorship institutions did not function especially well at the best of times—though they were adequate to handle internally-published books—and with the coming of the French Revolution they entered a period of intense strain. Even before a set of censorship-expanding reforms initiated by Catherine II and continued by Paul in 1796–97, the head censor of Moscow had complained that “for the police to censor books is quite inconvenient. The former ober-politsmeister did not know any foreign languages; the current politsmeister knows French but has never troubled himself with the reading of books … there is barely enough time to read the books and especially with careful attention, because many books are printed here.”Footnote ⁵ The extent of the French Revolution’s influence on symbolic representation vastly increased the scope of suspicious material subject to intervention by police officials who hitherto had confined themselves to books, prints, plays, and the like. Here are some classic examples (some of which have already appeared in the scholarly literature). In 1793 customs officials in the Estland port of Revel (now Tallinn) confiscated a set of playing cards featuring characters such as Hamlet and Henry V from the plays of William Shakespeare, as tending to cast monarchs in a bad light.Footnote ⁶ In 1798 officials in Arkhangelsk destroyed a Dutch shipment of blank paper featuring “symbols of fatal French liberty unnoticeable at first glance” (presumably watermarks featuring Phrygian caps or liberty trees).Footnote ⁷ Any symbolic representation, even a stack of hats left on a table by the rowdy foreign patrons of a Moscow tavern, could be interpreted as an allusion to France (in this case as some sort of combination of the Tower of Babel and liberty tree).Footnote ⁸

Riga posed special challenges for censors because of its dense commercial links to other northern European ports, which ensured its key status as a hub for German products destined for the Russian market, including printed materials. Probably because of these links, Paul made the Riga censorship office responsible for overseeing publishing houses in all three Baltic provinces; printed materials imported through Revel as well as overland via Mitau and Polangen in Courland (present-day Jelgava and Palanga) had to be routed through Riga as well. A special “expedition of three Jews” was charged with overseeing the censorship of Hebrew ritual texts destined for Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement.Footnote ⁹ Together, members of this staff were explicitly responsible for censoring texts in Russian, Greek, Latin, German, English, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Latvian (Lettish), Finnish, French, and Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁰ Not only was this region the most exposed of any to the trade and smuggling routes that led westward to countries already permeated by revolutionary influence—the Baltic lands were also, without a doubt, more literate than any other part of the empire. While reliable geographical measures of literacy for the eighteenth century are not easy to come by, the first empire-wide survey of literacy at the end of the nineteenth found that almost the entire population of the three Baltic provinces was literate, a figure far exceeding any other territory, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.Footnote ¹¹ The more literate people were, the more texts they produced and consumed, and the more work there was for censors to do. Courland, for its part, had only been annexed in 1795 and revolutionary ideas had made an extensive impression there over the course of the 1790s.Footnote ¹²

The most important and notorious censor in Riga was Fedor Tumanskii, who had been born near Glukhov, the administrative center of left-bank Ukraine, in 1757. Tumanskii was a civil servant and for most of his career an active man of letters, the publisher of several important Catherinian-era periodicals. For his scholarly and literary efforts he was named a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and a member of Ekaterina Dashkova’s Russian Academy. Tumanskii’s publishing experience did not make him a gentle overseer. Upon his appointment as civil censor in Riga, Tumanskii quickly garnered a reputation as a fanatic, apparently as a result of having been reprimanded for insufficient censorial diligence early in his career.Footnote ¹³

Despite, or because of, this zeal, the Riga censorship office had a big problem. In December 1798, for instance, the censors reported that 2,957 books had been left uninspected by November 1; 2,821 new books had arrived in November; 2,557 had been inspected and allowed through; 88 had been deemed suspicious and confiscated or left to await a decision; and thus by December 1, 3,133 books remained to be inspected—almost two hundred more than the previous month. The deficit implied by this report was no aberration. By the following March arrears constituted 3,826 books; by December 1799 this figure was 7,429.Footnote ¹⁴ The pileup had significant effects on publishers. As a result of restrictions and delays imposed by Riga censors, the Hartknoch merchant family—which thanks to its close ties to the Imperial Academy of Sciences had been one of the largest book importing and publishing firms in the Russian Empire since the 1770s—was ultimately forced to close up shop and relocate to Leipzig. In 1798 its head, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, was arrested on charges of distributing revolutionary literature as he tried to negotiate a solution. The problem worsened the following year, when Tumanskii obtained an imperial order to the effect that books could only be imported into the Russian Empire through Riga and inspected there.. Less well-connected booksellers, whose impounded product became dead weight and left them without cash flow, had no option but to go bankrupt.Footnote ¹⁵

To blame this on Tumanskii’s overreach alone would be to miss the structural dimensions of the crisis. Before the French Revolution, Riga’s lively graphosphere had remained outside the state’s field of view. But when counterrevolutionary politics made it visible as a potential space of subversion, the logic of legibility meant that it had to be policed and controlled. This became apparent in a lengthy dispute over office space between Tumanskii and his nemesis, Livland governor-general Ludwig von Nagel. According to Nagel, Tumanskii’s office was not excessively zealous but the opposite: “in examining texts it does not apply the necessary diligence, such that it leaves disallowed and prejudicial compositions without proper attention and allows them to be released among the public.” Later Nagel accused Tumanskii of allowing inappropriate materials to be performed in a theater, to which the censor objected that he had so little free time he did not even know where the Riga theater was; in response Nagel offered examples of two plays that bore the censorial seal of approval but appeared to be clearly seditious.Footnote ¹⁶ These accusations formed his justification for denying the censor additional space in the Riga citadel.Footnote ¹⁷

In his own defense, Tumanskii drew attention to the specificity of Riga’s book market. He pointed out that so many books were accumulating in his office because of the extensive book trade in Riga and the surrounding provinces, an area that contained “up to a hundred times more readers” than elsewhere in the empire; that those readers ordered books at random such that there was hardly a book that would not be imported there; and that many of the books sold were “bad, contrary to true enlightenment,” or consisted of “so-called novels composed by ignoramuses and evil people.” As a result, knigoprosveshchenie (book enlightenment) had been made into a “harmful branch of trade” by “so-called speculators,” “as shown by registers not only here but in other well-ordered countries that seek the good of humanity.” Catherine’s vision of the literary public sphere as a vehicle for societal improvement had become a nightmare of uncontrollable circulation. Tumanskii’s work as a censor had soured his commitment to books as a vehicle for enlightenment: he had never imagined, he wrote, that so many people could be “buying so much greedily and without discrimination.”Footnote ¹⁸

St. Petersburg’s attempt to mediate between the parties ultimately failed. Paul’s April 1800 decree represented his final effort to cut the Gordian knot of the Riga censorship office; it rendered censorship of imports superfluous, although texts published locally by official publishers still had to pass the censors. The decree did not long outlast its promulgator. After his ascension to the throne, Alexander I re-legalized importation and private printing (which had been banned by Catherine in the last year of her reign) and in 1804 proclaimed a new and supposedly more liberal censorship model partially modeled on the Danish censorship code. At the same time, the new code vastly expanded and professionalized the censorship apparatus, and the growing influence of the Ministry of Police in the latter half of Alexander’s reign proved much more effective at controlling the press than Paul’s institutions ever had been. Both the Ministry of Police and Enlightenment competed to facilitate the rightward turn in cultural policy after 1812. Gradually these institutional policies coalesced into the rigid and all-permeating censorship apparatus formally proclaimed under Nicholas I in 1826. While, as Franklin points out, manuscript circulation remained mostly outside of the censors’ purview, the space of the printed word was finally becoming reliably legible to the state.Footnote ¹⁹

Tumanskii’s attempt to improve his position in the feud after Paul’s death by appealing to the new sovereign, Alexander I, was unsuccessful. According to another of the censor’s enemies, the playwright August von Kotzebue (there seems to be no independent verification of this story), Tumanskii sent the tsar a denunciation of a Jacobin conspiracy at Riga, “containing the names not only of the principal burghers and public functionaries of the city but even that of the old governor Nagel, whom he had the audacity to place at their head.” Alexander was not impressed. In 1801 the censor was declared insane and forced into retirement. The same people he had accused of being Jacobins collected money on his behalf, now that he had found himself penniless.Footnote ²⁰ Erratic as his behavior was, Tumanskii could never have gotten as far as he did had it not been for the unique circumstances of the 1790s. The censorship apparatus he found himself commanding was created by the appetite of a state that had suddenly discovered the graphosphere as a much less orderly and more threatening environment than it had previously believed. Riga, with its expansive commercial connections and multilingual, cross-estate culture of literacy, was uniquely well-suited to become the ground zero for this farcical confrontation. It was one that the imperial state would eventually lose.