He prayed fervently for hours, as his doctor Tarasov testified:
The emperor was very religious and a sincere Christian. He said his prayers on his knees morning and night, and prolonged them so long that he formed large calluses on both knees that persisted until his death.10
At the end of his reign, the sovereign tended to detach himself from any material contingency. This penchant grew even more in 1824, due to two tragedies that struck him successively. On June 18 he lost Sophie, his last remaining daughter. Afflicted by tuberculosis, the young woman died at the age of 18, which was devastating for Alexander. This cruelty of fate was witnessed by the Countess of Choiseul-Gouffier, who was staying at Tsarskoye Selo at the time and left a moving account:
He had just lost his daughter, his daughter whom he had never recognized, and who bore her mother’s name. […] This interesting and young person, attacked in her chest,11 was brought from Paris to Petersburg, against the advice of doctors but on a faith in some charlatans and magnetizers who had predicted for her long life, health, and marriage. Already dying, she was engaged to Count S., who had her magnetized according to the orders from the Paris clairvoyants; when the magnificent trousseau ordered in Paris arrived (it had cost 400,000 francs), the lovely child was no longer alive; the ornaments of the funeral procession and a deceased virgin’s crown replaced the brilliant gowns and nuptial veil destined for marriage celebrations. The emperor learned of this cruel event during the parade. His face in an instant went extremely pale; yet he had the courage to not interrupt the exercise, and let slip only these striking words: “I receive punishment for all the errors of my ways.” He often went alone to his daughter’s tomb, and had a monument erected to her in the Church of the Holy Sergey in Petersburg.12
While Elizabeth, who liked the girl very much, tried hard to support Alexander in this terrible ordeal, others preached submission to God, referring him back, somewhat brutally, to his own culpability. In a letter he sent the sovereign in June 1824, Alexander Golitsyn, whose influence over the emperor was immense, made declarations of a psychological and moral violence that make us wonder:
God has miraculously torn you from sin, when You gave yourself to it; humanly you could not know how to deal with the rupture of a tie so solidly established and that produced the happiness (although illegitimate) of Your existence. God is faithful—at present He takes back to Himself the fruit of this tie, which should not, so to speak, have seen the light of day according to the Holy Will of God; by this call He corrects the fault of Your own will, which is sin. He takes back to his bosom this dear child—and in what estate? In the purest innocence and piety, an angel who instead of sinning in this base world and making you responsible before God, will pray for Your sins and those of her mother. This is a new call, Sire, that He is making to you to give him your whole heart. That part from which Sophie is torn, offer the bleeding whole to the Savior, for him to take and fill with his Divine Spirit.13
A few months later, a new catastrophe struck him. A violent flood on the Neva River caused the inundation of St. Petersburg; for four days, starting November 19 at 9:00 a.m., it sowed destruction and panic. Frequent in autumn, these floods had haunted the residents since the founding of St. Petersburg. To try to protect the city, Alexander once had a canal constructed to divert the water, but it was ineffective against the great overflow. The flood of November 1824 was particularly devastating because almost the whole city was affected; at its center the water reached nine feet. Of course, help was quickly organized, and the tsar was very active during the catastrophe; he visited the inhabitants of Vasilevsky Island, ordered money distributed in front of churches, had shelters opened to feed and house those who had lost homes. He called for the solidarity of Moscow, which sent emergency help—15 troikas loaded with clothing and foodstuff were sent from the holy city. But nearly 500 people perished, and more than 300 homes were destroyed. The superstitious tsar could not prevent himself from seeing this plague as a new punishment from God—directed at him.
•••
Less and less concerned to govern the empire himself, Alexander tended to rely on Arakcheev. This veritable vice emperor, often serving as intermediary between the emperor and his ministers, aggravated the tsar’s isolation ever more. In 1820, in a dispatch to his minister, the French ambassador de la Ferronays severely criticized this isolation, the political dysfunction it was producing, and the harmful consequences for the empire:
The silence that reigns around his throne, at the foot of which no demand or complaint can arrive except through the channel of a minister who is often interested in deception and always disposed to flatter his master, means that the emperor is ignorant of the cost of having his wishes fulfilled. When he rapidly visits his vast empire, everywhere he finds his orders executed. He sees only the governors of his military divisions, and consequently hears only flattering and comforting reports. He takes the results of force and violence for those of wisdom and good administration. He believes he is building, but he is disorganizing, because nowhere are there any institutions.14
In 1822–1823, at the height of his power, Arakcheev went so far as to name ministers and holders of the most important posts. Most faithful servants to the tsar were replaced by new arrivals—Campenhausen in the ministry of the interior, Tatishchev in the ministry of war, Kankrin in finance—who were not always competent but were devoted to Arakcheev, to whom they owed their appointment.15 Meanwhile, some embittered friends of the emperor quit public service—sometimes even first performing an act of servility to the all-powerful minister. In May 1823, for example, Kochubey, who had just willingly given up his portfolio as minister of the interior, solicited financial rewards for the employees of his former administration by begging Arakcheev to intercede in his favor with Alexander:
I have always avoided annoying anybody by solicitations, but, allowing myself to hope for the indulgence of Your Most Illustrious Excellency, I today decide to address one to You. During my direction of almost four years of the Ministry of the Interior, the employees of said ministry have not received a single bonus. They reproach me—and with reason, since comparisons can be made with other ministries. […] My representations on this topic, presented to the Committee of Ministers in 1821, were examined; Your Illustrious Excellency would render me a great service if You could support this affair by obtaining the approval of His Majesty. I feel the need of some consolations in the sad destiny that was decreed for me by Divine Providence and it would be particularly agreeable to become on this occasion obliged to Your Illustrious Excellency.16
That so close a friend of Alexander as Kochubey should now be forced to pass through Count Arakcheev—and with such obsequiousness—in order to reach the emperor clearly demonstrates the drifting away of power after 1822–1823. Some could not bear it. This was the case with Pyotr Volkonsky, who gave up his post as chief of staff in April 1823, quickly replaced by General Dibich. From Paris where he was staying, Volkonsky, a longtime and faithful assistant of Alexander, sent a letter to his friend Zakrevsky, then governor-general of Finland, that was explicit about his motives for leaving:
Adieu, dear friend, write me as often as possible via Bulgakov, every time you have the opportunity to send me a letter via someone, for probably our letters are censored in the post. […] I only feel sorry for the emperor, who will one day learn of the acts of this maniac; an honest man cannot remain a witness to that, and such is the emperor’s inexplicable blindness to this man, that there is no way of opening his eyes. In the meantime, he will lose many honest people, and abuses and disorder will return to what they were in olden times.17
A year later, in May 1824, the outcome of a cabal in which Arakcheev played a key role led to Alexander Golitsyn’s being removed. Powerful and active, the Biblical Society over the years had eaten away at the prestige and prerogatives of the senior prelates in the Orthodox Church, which of course aroused their discontent. Arakcheev, attached to an Orthodoxy that he saw as the keystone
of the regime, decided to profit from this ecclesiastical rebellion to end the “pietist heresy” and to defeat Golitsyn. To do so, he sought the support of the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, and even more so the help of the archimandrite Photius, former Hieronymite of Novgorod.
Then aged about 30, Photius had the reputation of a rigorous (if not fanatic) ascetic. He consumed only bread and water and wore the hair shirt and iron belt under his robe. In May 1822 Golitsyn asked to meet him, and fascinated by the ascetic, he presented him a month later to the emperor. The first meeting in June 1822 lasted two hours, during which Photius, “absorbed” by God, did not even greet the emperor and spent the time in prayer and meditation; in a trance he reproached the tsar for having left the holy path of Orthodoxy to stray away toward Protestantism and Illuminism. Seduced by the strength of his piety, Alexander soon made him a monk and then named him archimandrite of the St. Georgey Monastery, all within two months.
However, the meeting between the tsar and Photius had no direct impact on the status and recognition enjoyed at the time by the Biblical Society. The tsar continued to follow the Society’s works closely, maintained tight links with various preachers who were more or less tolerated by the Church, and remained fully friends with Golitsyn. Thus this first attempt at destabilization by the Orthodox was not successful, but Arakcheev, Seraphim, and Photius decided to resume an offensive against the Pietists, and the “Gossner affair” gave them an opportunity.
At the start of 1824, the German preacher Johann Gossner, then in fashion throughout Europe, published an exegesis of the New Testament, Der Geist des Lebens (The Spirit of Living). The Russian Biblical Society had it translated into Russian, and Golitsyn had obtained from the tsar the sum of 18,000 rubles for the purchase of a building destined to host Gossner’s sermons. But barely published, the work unleashed the anger of Photius; in two epistles sent to the emperor, he condemned the book in violent terms, denouncing this new religion “that is nothing other than the apostasy of the Christian, apostolic, and orthodox faith of our fathers. This new religion is faith in the advent of the Anti-Christ, which leads to bloodthirsty revolution inspired by the Satanic spirit of revolt and hatred. Its false prophets and apostles are Yung-Stilling, Eckartshausen, Madame Guyon, Boehm, Labzin, Gossner, Fessler, plus the Methodists and the Moravian Brothers.”18
Meanwhile, Metropolitan Seraphim fulsomely criticized the book, which led Alexander, in a state of doubt, to ask the Committee of Ministers to look into the affair on April 17, 1824. In a few days, united around Arakcheev—naturally!—the committee pronounced for the expulsion of Gossner, the destruction of his book, and the legal conviction of the censors who had authorized its publication. Skillfully, they avoided attacking Golitsyn directly. It was Photius who delivered the final blow to him; received by the emperor in a tête-à-tête on April 20, he denounced the existing ties between the Biblical Society and European revolutionary movements; he convinced the tsar—whose psychological, moral, and nervous equilibrium appeared more and more fragile—that Golitsyn was to blame in the affair. Three weeks later, the imperial sanction fell; in May 1824 Alexander Golitsyn was reduced to the post of minister of the postal service. The Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education was dissolved; Metropolitan Seraphim became president of the Biblical Society. Photius demanded the dissolution of that society but did not win on this point; nevertheless, this campaign put a definite end to the pious readings and spiritual exercises in which the emperor had previously engaged with Golitsyn and Koshelev. By 1824, then, Arakcheev reigned as master over both the empire and the mind of Alexander I.
However—and this is fundamental—we should not overestimate the role of Arakcheev in the final years of the reign. Of course, as vice emperor and president of the Committee of Ministers, he held practically all power and could impose his tyrannical authority on the military colonies. But as regards the empire’s general affairs, he was deprived of any vision of the whole or of a global strategy and so remained essentially an executor. Poorly educated, narrow-minded, not speaking French, ill at ease with political subtleties that he scarcely understood, incapable of the least abstract thought but wholly devoted to his emperor, Arakcheev had neither the capacity nor even the will to substitute himself for the sovereign. In the absence of directives from Alexander, he contented himself with administering the empire with an iron hand, in the most conservative spirit. The return of Speransky to the forefront—in 1819 he was appointed governor-general of Siberia and in 1821 authorized to come back to St. Petersburg as a member of the law department of the state council—for a while gave credit to the idea that the management of the empire would be improved. But nothing of the sort happened. Faithful to his qualities as an organizer and still of exemplary morality, Speransky did manage to reorganize the administration of a territory that had suffered considerably from the corrupt and arbitrary rule of his predecessor, Ivan Pestel.19 A year later, in 1822, Siberia was endowed with a new administrative structure and a specific status inspired by the new governor. But despite this success, Speransky’s star dwindled, and in those years he recovered neither the ear nor the trust of the tsar. Meanwhile public expectations were rising—as was the discontent of the elites.
Growing Opposition
While displeasure swelled among the elites, neither Alexander, buttressed in his conservatism and his obsession with a revolutionary plot, nor Arakcheev, blinkered by his certitude as a disciplined military man, was able to understand the expectations that were appearing in the country, let alone able to respond to them.
While the peasantry complained more and more openly about its conscription into the military colonies, the tsar, convinced that a system that governed the hygiene and lodging of the colonists, as well as the education of their children, was bringing undeniable social progress, instead wanted to multiply them on imperial territory. By 1822–1823, a million people were already enrolled in the colonies, but Alexander still demanded establishing more of them in the province of Yaroslavl, which made even Arakcheev hesitate, since he wanted to slow down the pace of these colonies.20
Upon his return from Troppau, the emperor, supported by Arakcheev and Balashov, whom he placed at the head of the state police, ordered (again as a result of the shock of the Semenovsky uprising) the tracking of the secret societies to which he attributed subversive activities. In the intellectual context of the time, it is true, a certain number of them, in revolt against imperial conservatism, were swarming. Several factors explain their appearance: first, we have to recall the crucial role played by the patriotic war of 1812, which enabled young officers from the nobility to get closer to the people and take a full measure of their suffering, then, the role of the campaigns of 1813–1814 that put them in direct contact with the situation in western Europe and suddenly allowed them to perceive the degree of Russia’s political, economic, and social backwardness. The Masonic lodges, authorized in the Russian Empire until they were quashed in 1822, also played an essential role. Some of them, like the Astrée Grand Lodge, founded in 1815, preached respect for the current political order and aimed only at the moral perfecting of its members, but most of them were very influenced by European liberal ideas and advocated the abolition of serfdom and the advent of a liberal political order, thereby nourishing wider contestation of the autocratic regime. Finally, after 1820, the example of the uprisings in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece contributed to popularizing liberal ideals among Russian elites.
At the same time, over the whole imperial territory, reestablishment of strict censorship, which began in 1815 and became more systematic in 1820, curbed the free diffusion of these ideas within civil society. Hence, small secret societies were emerging inside the army, whose structure and functioning were reminiscent of the Masonic lodges. A great similarity between these secret societies and the insurrectional groups of Spain and Portugal can be observed; in all these cases it was indeed the army that became the driving force of liberal ideas and the sp
okesmen for a muzzled society.
The first Soiuz Spasenia (“Society of Salvation”) was created in St. Petersburg in February 1816, on the initiative of Nikita Muravyov, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, Yakushkin, and brothers Matvei and Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, who all belonged to old and illustrious aristocratic families. These officers of the Guard had superior education and were open to western European culture; most of them had fought alongside the tsar in the French campaign of 1814, and some were part of the occupation troops stationed in France after the fighting. Later, these founding members would recruit other adepts, among whom were General Orlov, Mikhail Fonvizin, and Pavel Pestel, son of the Siberian governor and a valorous soldier during the Napoleonic wars, who had been promoted to colonel in 1821. He came back from western Europe firmly decided to struggle against the autocratic regime. Most of the members of this society aspired to the establishment of a constitutional regime and the abolition of serfdom. Some demanded that “foreigners” (meaning German-speaking subjects, who were judged to be overly docile to power) be removed from any administrative post. Finally, a minority of them were indeed more radical and envisaged an actual revolution—or even tsaricide—to bring down the autocracy by force. The last point should be stressed: it was through these few extremist members that collective violence, conceived as a political weapon that might even extend to killing the emperor, made its entry into Russian culture, a prelude to the emergence of the nihilistic revolutionary movements of the 1870s and 1880s.
In any case, these movements were heterogeneous in their political aspirations. In January 1817 the Society of Salvation took the name Union of Salvation (or “Union of the Authentic and Faithful Sons of the Homeland”) in homage to the soldiers who had fought in 1812; a month later, it adopted relatively elaborate organizational rules that, like the Masonic lodges, set up different degrees of initiation. That same year, when the Imperial Guard received the order to accompany the emperor to Moscow, the secret society moved there. In the holy city it reorganized itself, accepted new members, and took the name Sojuz Blagodenstvija (Union of the Public Good). More structured than the previous society and larger (200 members), it adopted statutes known as the “green book,” inspired largely by the Prussian Tugenbund,21 yet without proclaiming its loyalty (as did the German organization) to the current government.22 Directed by six members, the society’s essential tasks were philanthropic activities: the creation of hospitals, assistance for the poor, and advocacy of penitentiary reform. At first sight its horizon seemed more social than political, but actually, by advocating progress in education and justice, the society did indeed encroach on politics. In parallel, in 1820 some of its members started to demand the establishment of a government that was not just constitutional, but republican. This radicalization—and police surveillance—pushed it to dissolve at the end of that year.
Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon Page 47