by Alan Palmer
The sudden exhilaration of the capital fascinated foreign observers and it was the Austrian Consul who best caught the spirit of the times. Returning to St Petersburg from Riga at the end of April after an absence of several weeks, he was amazed by the contentment and ‘vivacity’ he found around him and commented on the affection which his subjects felt for the new Tsar: ‘People of every rank, sex and age are delighted … to be living under … a sovereign who is good, just, merciful and worthy of respect for showing the qualities which make a Great Monarch’, he declared in a happy flow of rapturous anticipation.2
The Russians were asking too much from a young man of twenty-three, who had seen little of his Empire and nothing of the world beyond its frontiers. Alexander was fully aware he was expected to do great things, and he found the prospect daunting. In a proclamation issued within a few hours of his father’s death he pledged himself ‘to rule the people entrusted to us by Almighty God in accord with the laws and spirit of our august deceased grandmother, Catherine the Great, whose memory will ever be dear to us and to the entire fatherland.’3 His words were greeted with enthusiasm in the streets of St Petersburg and later in Moscow. But it was easy enough to win cheers by wrapping fine abstractions in exalted language: the difficulty was to translate them into action. The men around Alexander at Court were not reformers at heart but conservative, jealously coveting privileges wrung from his grandmother in moments of weakness for the Crown and subsequently threatened by his father’s arbitrary decrees. They were glad for their new sovereign to pardon those who had been unjustly disgraced in the previous reign and to rescind senseless measures of petty oppression. But Alexander knew well enough that there were limits to what they would accept as desirable for the structure of Tsardom. None of the close friends to whom he had confided his nebulous dreams of constitutional rule were in or near St Petersburg that Easter. However much he might hate Pahlen and the regicide conspirators, it was difficult for him to avoid dependence upon them. Though the people might demonstrate their loyalty and affection each time he rode through the city, Alexander and Elizabeth felt wretchedly isolated in that agonizing week and a half between Paul’s murder and his burial.*
Yet, though the Palace was full of self-seekers, there were still young idealists close to the centre of affairs who believed the only logical policy for an enlightened autocrat was the abolition of autocracy itself. Ten days after Paul’s death Alexander was unexpectedly made aware of their existence. Returning to the Winter Palace that night, he found someone had left upon his desk an anonymous letter, more than 2,500 words in length. He read it with elation, for it echoed sentiments he had often expressed privately to his friends in earlier years. ‘Is it possible’, the letter asked, for the Tsar ‘to set aside the hope of nations in favour of the sheer delight of self rule? … No! He will at last open the book of fate which Catherine merely perceived. He will give us immutable laws. He will establish them for ever by an oath binding him to all his subjects. To Russia he will say, “Here lie the bounds to my autocratic power and to the power of those who will follow me, unalterable and everlasting”.’4
Alexander, his nerves tense with the shock of accession, was deeply moved by this strange burst of rhetoric. Here, he felt, spoke the true voice of the Russian people. He sent at once for Dmitri Troschinsky who, as Procurator of the Senate, was principal administrative official in the Empire and ordered him to discover the identity of the person who had written the letter and to bring him to the Tsar. Since only a limited number of civil servants were permitted to enter the Tsar’s apartments and leave documents on his desk, Troschinsky’s task was relatively straightforward. By the following morning he was able to inform Alexander that the letter had been written by one Vassili Karazin, a twenty-eight-year-old member of the chancery staff who held a civilian rank equivalent to a colonelcy in the army.
There followed an episode which anywhere except Russia would have seemed fantastic. When summoned to the Tsar’s presence, Karazin feared a severe rebuke for his presumption. But Alexander was effusively magnanimous. He embraced Karazin warmly and commended his sense of patriotic duty. Karazin, for his part, knelt in tears at Alexander’s feet, pledging his personal loyalty. Then the two men talked at length about the problems facing the Empire, of the need to safeguard the people from acts of arbitrary tyranny and to educate them so that they could assume in time the responsibilities of government. Finally Karazin swore a solemn oath that he would keep his sovereign informed of what ordinary Russian men and women were thinking. For more than three years after this first encounter, Karazin basked in the Tsar’s favour, although he was never given an official appointment at Court.† He was not a popular figure with members of the nobility or the administration; advancement by means of an anonymous letter was a rare phenomenon, even in St Petersburg.5
Yet, whatever its consequences, the Karazin incident heartened Alexander at a moment when his spirits were low. Cautiously he summoned back the young liberal aristocrats whom Paul had banished and he sent an invitation to La Harpe in Paris to return to Russia. At the same time he took care not to rely exclusively on any particular faction. Barely a month after his accession he established a Permanent Council of state dignitaries, most of them veterans from his grandmother’s reign with Troschinsky at their head. And a few weeks later Alexander announced he was setting up a committee to review the powers of the Senate, a nominated body with administrative and judicial authority originally created by Peter 1 in 1711 but ignored by Catherine in her last years and only partially reinstated by Paul.6 The prospect of increased Senatorial influence pleased the landed nobility and ensured their willingness to accept Alexander’s lead in any administrative reforms he might wish to impose.
The Secret Committee and its Enemies
Every person of rank in St Petersburg, whether a native-born Russian or a foreign observer, knew it was essential for Alexander to modernize the institutions of his Empire: how otherwise would it be possible to meet the challenge of the new century? But there were wide differences of opinion over what should be done.7 In 1801 Russia was a land of more than forty-one million people, half of whom were bound in some form of personal serfdom to individuals or to the State. Alexander himself had written of ‘the misery and misfortune’ in which ‘the slave peasants’ of Russia were forced to live: ought this abuse to be swept aisde before any other question was tackled? On the other hand, it could be argued that the problem of serfdom was only the most dramatic aspect of Russia’s social backwardness. With less than seven out of every hundred people living in a town and with trade and commerce still predominantly in foreign hands, economic life in Russia remained primitive: ought Alexander to mobilize the material resources of his Empire and re-shape the day-to-day existence of his subjects, much as Peter the Great had sought to do a century before? But only a gifted and enlightened ruler, sure of himself and of what he wished to achieve, could prescribe so drastic a remedy. There were many in the capital who, like Karazin, believed that the first necessity was a guarantee of constitutional progress, some device by which the Tsar would recognize the political maturity of the aristocracy. For on one point only everyone was agreed: the degree of reform must depend upon Alexander’s courage and foresight, and upon his willingness to break with the established order.
To bring clarity and common sense to the government of Russia had long been Alexander’s cherished ambition. He was not, however, a jurist; nor had he acquired more than a superficial acquaintance with the language of political science. At times, like many of his subjects, he used a fashionable jargon which he could never fully comprehend. Popular sovereignty meant nothing to him and although he had heard of the doctrine of separation of powers he understood it to imply a mere functional division of administrative offices for the sake of convenience. He wrote and spoke of ‘a constitution’ but thought in terms of the rule of law rather than of a new and comprehensive ordering of society.8 Like Bonaparte, he approached all questions of government with t
he mind of a soldier who was accustomed to regimentation within a recognized hierarchical system; but while Napoleon was prepared to take a personal initiative in drafting political and legal codes for France and her dependencies, Alexander lacked the qualities which would have made him a Russian Justinian. Although he buried himself in work during the spring and summer of 1801, he was too inexperienced to have real insight into his country’s problems. He encouraged the discussion of administrative reform; he pleased the merchants by proposing the immediate relaxation of the high protectionist tariff of 1797 and all other trade restrictions imposed by his father; and he showed his concern for the least fortunate of his subjects by publishing a decree ordering the newspapers of St Petersburg and Moscow to abandon the practice of advertising serfs for sale. These measures were, however, only palliative gestures. Since he did not possess the patience and persistence of the enlightened reformer, fulfilment inevitably fell short of expectation. He preferred to leave the detailed mechanics of a project either to members of the Senate or to his circle of liberal-minded friends; and all too frequently their knowledge of what they were seeking to achieve went little deeper than his own.
Within a few weeks of his accession Alexander established an informal council of advisers, the Neglassny Komitet (‘Secret Committee’), complementary to the official Permanent Council of State and to the Senatorial Committee of reform. The first meeting of the Secret Committee was held on 6 July 1801.9 It consisted of only four members, the three friends whom Alexander had mentioned in his letter to La Harpe of October 1797 – Czartoryski, Novosiltsov and Paul Stroganov – together with Victor Kochubey (who had been abroad at that time). When La Harpe himself returned to St Petersburg in the late summer of 1801 he was sometimes consulted by the Committee and so, too, were a number of other prominent figures at Court, but only the four original members and the Tsar took part in the Committee’s deliberations. Basically its meetings remained a gathering of friends. The four men would dine with Alexander and Elizabeth at irregular intervals in these first months of the reign, often twice a week. They then adjourned to a separate room for discussions where, later in the evening, Alexander would join them, occasionally listening and saying little but at other times intervening in the general exchange of ideas and projects. He had high hopes of the Secret Committee: all its members were intimates who understood his point of view and whose experience he respected; it possessed the informality of an eighteenth-century cabinet and yet (apart from Kochubey, who was placed in charge of foreign affairs in October 1801) its members had no particular ministerial responsibilities; and, unlike the Senate, it was not bound to any sectional interest by the memory of past contests for power. In 1801–2, to some extent, the Secret Committee was to Alexander what the Brain Trust became for Franklin Roosevelt a hundred and thirty years later, a body which by some mysterious collective sympathy would provide him with a new deal for the people. At the same time Alexander also expected the Secret Committee to establish guiding principles upon which foreign policy could be based throughout his reign. It was a formidable assignment for ‘the Emperor’s young friends’, as people called them at Court.
Ultimately, of course, the task was beyond them. Most of their decisions were negative ones. They resolved that conditions in Russia were too varied for the introduction of a formal constitutional law binding in all regions, that the nobility was too selfish to be entrusted with executive power, and that serfdom was too fundamental to the Russian economy for it to be abolished in a massive social revolution, even though it was a wasteful and unproductive system. They discussed, and rejected, the idea of a unified government with a prime minister at its head; they turned down proposals from a Senatorial Commission that the Senate should become a legislative assembly and that some Senators should be elected;10 for they knew that Alexander would never allow his autocratic prerogatives to be trimmed in order to benefit any one class or faction among his subjects. At times they found Alexander a difficult master to please. Kochubey once complained that the Tsar followed no systematic plan of action, that ‘he kept knocking at every door’;11 and, after a particularly trying conference in the second week of September 1801, Paul Stroganov noted that since it was impossible to persuade Alexander by logical argument, the only way of overcoming stubborn objections to a policy was to introduce the subject in a different form on a later occasion and trust that his mood had changed.12 Even so, they found him obstinately reluctant to authorize any major innovations. It was difficult for him to reconcile an avowed faith in constitutionalism and reform with his instinctive respect for hierarchy and order. As Czartoryski early perceived he was happiest when absorbed in the minutiae of military ceremonial: for, though he might invoke the ‘dear memory’ of his grandmother, he was also a son of Paul.
But these long evenings spent in discussion with his friends on the Secret Committee did more to train Alexander’s mind than he acknowledged or appreciated. From the very beginning of their meetings, the four members of the Committee realized the opportunity awaiting them. In correspondence with each other – and, indeed, with Alexander himself – they maintained that their principal task was to help him discover what was the wisest policy for an enlightened autocrat to pursue. This was no fictitious convention on their part. Marginal comments each made on the others’ written memoranda, together with the unofficial minutes kept by Paul Stroganov, show the extent to which they examined alternative panacea for Russia’s ills.13 They proposed remedies, but did not seek to impose them. Nor were they in a hurry to settle delicate questions: consultations over codification of the laws, for which a commission was established in the summer of 1801, were still in progress in January 1809;14 and it was not until 1832 that the laws of Russia were at last codified. But, for Alexander, speed of decision did not matter. The Committee sessions provided him with an opportunity to think aloud: hence the need for secrecy and informality. He was not bound to act upon what he said when seated in private with his friends at the Palace.
Unfortunately not all the consequences of the Committee’s meetings were of benefit to Alexander’s character, nor to his method of government. Increasingly he showed an emotional and personal response to problems with which he was confronted, as though he were acting out a role for the sake of his friends. He tended, moreover, to acquire the habit of examining, at considerable length, matters great or small rather than delegate to subordinates, who could have settled affairs with less delay. As Alexander gradually grew accustomed to exercising his autocratic powers, these traits became more and more marked: they provided a poor basis for rational administration.
However some important reforms were initiated in the first years of Alexander’s reign: a major change in the administrative machinery of the State; a project for a system of public education; amelioration of conditions for the serfs; and definition of the rights and duties of Senators.15 All these developments owed much to the discussions of the Secret Committee, but their final form was shaped by others. The Tsar rejected proposals from Stroganov for partial emancipation of the serfs and from Kochubey and Czartoryski for a ban on the sale of serfs without a corresponding transfer of land to support them. On the other hand, he accepted a measure first put forward by Count Peter Rumiantsev by which landowners might voluntarily free their serfs, if they so desired; but Rumiantsev was head of a family long distinguished at Court and he was never a member of the Secret Committee. Alexander was also reluctant to put into practice the Committee’s recommendations for a central executive body, an embryonic cabinet in which governmental ministers would share joint responsibility with their sovereign for a common course of action.16 He still preferred to entrust office to men of conflicting sympathies and temperaments rather than to the representatives of any one party or faction in the capital. No doubt there was good sense in seeking a balanced administration, but at times it seemed as if Alexander favoured the conservative ‘Senatorial’ party. In the last resort Alexander did not dare to take the reins of government away
from the old oligarchic families who had welcomed his accession as a return to the normal pattern of political life.
To see the politics of 1801–2 as an internal power game between the Secret Committee and the Senators is, however, an over-simplification. Some of the Senatorial party were as reformist in spirit as the Tsar’s ‘young friends’, notably the Vorontsov brothers who corresponded regularly with Kochubey and Stroganov. Moreover, both groups were conscious of a threat from two opposing extremes at Court, the circle around the Dowager-Empress Marie Feodorovna, and the regicide conspirators who looked for a lead to Count von Pahlen. Ultimately, as Kochubey noted early in the reign, the more serious danger came from Marie Feodorovna whose powerful personality for a time over-shadowed Alexander, playing ominously with his doubts and hesitations.17 But the Tsar himself was more troubled by Pahlen, for Alexander perceived easily enough that he could never keep the confidence of his subjects if they once began to see him as the mere puppet of a regicide oligarchy.