Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  After this dissolution two centers of conspiracy were established in Russia. The “Southern Society” was founded in 1821 with Pestel at the head; based in Tulchin in the Ukraine, it had affiliates in five regiments in five different towns. The “Northern Society” was created in St. Petersburg in 1823 and included a branch in Moscow. The two societies stayed in contact with each other and agreed on a certain number of points—political freedom and the ending of serfdom—but they were clearly distinct in their sociopolitical projects, as shown by two documents from them that have survived, a constitution for the Northern Society written by Nikita Muravyov and Russkaja Pravda (Russian Justice) written by Pavel Pestel for the Southern Society.23

  Muravyov’s constitution in its preamble stresses the rights of the Russian people. In the future the Russian people will be free and independent and constitute the source of supreme power. Therefore, serfdom will have to be abolished; freedom of association, thought, expression, and publication to be instituted; and the military colonies to be abolished. Inalienable civil rights will be granted to individuals under the law. Everyone will have the right to vote, but only those citizens owning property will be eligible. Transformed into the “supreme officer of the Russian government,” the emperor would become like the American president. In fact, Muravyov’s constitution was largely inspired by that of the United States. All the privileges of the imperial family would be abolished; the emperor would have an annual income allotted by the state, and like the American president he would have the right to veto legislation. The country would include 13 states, each having its capital, plus two provinces, Moscow and the Don. All 15 would be divided into 368 uezdi and subdivided into volosti of 360 to 1,500 inhabitants. Muravyov was obviously thinking of the Russian Empire as an administrative network on the model of a federation. Legislative power would be given to two chambers: the chamber of representatives of the people, and the supreme duma (much like the U.S. Senate). Members of the duma would be elected for six years, their mandate being renewed every second year. It would include 42 elected members, three per state, plus two from Moscow and one from the Don. The Chamber of Representatives would have 450 members elected for two years. At the level of each of the 13 states, the same structure would exist. Thus Muravyov’s scheme made the people the depository of the law and the emperor their foremost public servant—he planned a constitutional and federal monarchy.

  Pestel’s plan for the Southern Society was much more radical. He abolished the monarchy, and legislative power was given to a “people’s assembly,” Narodnoe Veche, named in honor of the assemblies of the medieval principalities of Novgorod and Pskov. Unicameral and elected for five years, the assembly could not be dissolved. A fifth of its members would be elected every year. Executive power would belong to an executive duma (Derzhavnaja Duma) composed of five members. Elected for five years and renewed at the rate of one member every year, the duma would supervise ministerial activities and would be itself subject to supervision by an assembly of 120 bojary24 charged with making sure all new laws respected the constitution. This meant that the country would be a centralized republic with no concession to federalism; no particular arrangement was made for the other nationalities that composed the empire. On the socioeconomic level, Pestel’s plan promised liberty and equality, abolished serfdom, and guaranteed farming peasants that their land could not be sold, exchanged, or mortgaged against their will, in order to ensure that each peasant family had enough autonomy to survive. Obstacles to free commerce and enterprise were suppressed and merchant guilds dissolved.

  Despite their political differences, the two societies quickly sought to establish contact with each other; in the course of 1823, Pestel sent emissaries to the Northern Society, and in 1824 he himself went to St. Petersburg to present his theses and try to establish close ties between the two organizations. But his plan failed due to opposition from Muravyov, who was hostile to any notion of violence, terror, or, of course, to killing an emperor to advance the cause. However, while the Southern Society could not make a pact with that of the Northern, it did not remain isolated. In 1823, thanks to Muravyov-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Riumin, it approached a quite recently created secret society in Poland, the Polish Patriotic Society.

  Despite the country’s constitutional charter and their special form of government, the Polish elites had not on the whole rallied to Russian authority, and their desire to reconstitute the old kingdom of Poland-Lithuania as an independent state had remained intact. Consequently, the end of the 1810s was marked by a rise in dissent among both students and soldiers. In 1819 Major Lukasinski was behind the founding of a Masonic lodge within the Polish army that formed connections with Poles who had become Prussian subjects in 1815, such as General Uminski. In May 1821 a secret meeting between Lukasinski and Uminski led to the founding in Potock, near Warsaw, of the Polish Patriotic Society, whose goal was to spread its ideas not only in the kingdom of Poland, but also in Vilnius, Cracow, Poznan, and Lvov. However, in October 1820 Lukasinski was denounced to the Russian authorities; after a detailed inquiry conducted by Novosiltsev in Warsaw, he was arrested with seven others in May 1822 and in June 1824 condemned by a military tribunal to imprisonment. The society survived regardless; in Kiev representatives from the Polish and Southern Societies managed to meet in secret. Both sides promised support in case they proceeded to armed struggle; the Russian representatives recognized the independence of Poland, while leaving the question of borders rather vague. But these contacts remained limited, while the danger of police surveillance was large. In 1823 students at Vilnius University plotted vaguely to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine. Discovery of the affair triggered the arrest of several dozen students and the forced resignation of Czartoryski, obliged to leave his post as rector of the university. This shows how much the western provinces of the empire were under strict police surveillance. In this context contacts between these two societies were strained. On the contrary, the ties forged by Pestel with the Society of United Slavs were more substantial.

  The Society of United Slavs was born in 1823, in southern Russia, on the initiative of the brothers Andrey and Peter Borisov and Julian Lublinski. Gathering together almost 35 middle-ranking officers, it presented a very different sociological profile than that of the two original Russian societies. Coming from the minor and medium nobility, lacking wealth—if not downright poor—the members of the Slavic Society proclaimed resolutely atheistic and humanitarian convictions. Fervent partisans of abolishing serfdom, favorable to a democratic and republican government, they aspired to end the autocratic regime. Beyond the imperial borders, they wanted to unify the Slavs in a pan-Slavic federation, privileging ethnic and linguistic criteria over religious ones—this kind of thinking was very innovative at the start of the nineteenth century. Unlike the Northern Society, members were ready to resort to revolutionary means, which made them closer to the Southern Society. In 1824 contacts were discreetly established via Muravyov-Apostol, and representatives met in September 1825 to coordinate plans. The force of convictions of the founders of the Southern Society and its higher degree of organization in comparison to the smaller Slavic one led the latter to transform itself into a branch of the former. Yet at the death of Alexander I, this absorption was not complete, perhaps due to the reticence of the Slavs to accept the authority of the larger society, reflecting in turn the minor nobility’s distrust of the greater nobility.

  In the course of the years from 1821 to 1825, the Southern Society sketched several plans for revolutionary activity: it proposed to kidnap the emperor when he was visiting Bobruisk; a year later it envisaged assassinating him during maneuvers in Belaya Tserkov and calling for an armed uprising, first in Kiev and then in Moscow; in 1825, a mutiny was planned when the Guard gathered in Leshchin. But these attempts were all aborted. It was only after Alexander’s death, thanks to the confusion of the transmission of imperial power to Constantine and then to Nicholas, that in December 1825 the plotters made their entr
y into history. Under the name “Decembrists” the conspirators would attempt to overthrow the autocratic regime by force.

  In the face of these subversive intrigues by various secret societies, the police services had not remained inactive. During the winter of 1820–1821, the imperial police managed to detect some of them, including the Union of Salvation, which was kept under surveillance by spies, causing it to dissolve, as we saw. In February the authorities were able to establish a list of the most active members, a list that in May General Vasilchikov, governor-general of St. Petersburg, passed to Alexander. But at the time the tsar had not completely shed his youthful ideals and so refused to punish the “unfortunates”—with whom he confessed sharing views in his youth. He told the general that it was not up to him to punish the conspirators.25 But he did not close his eyes to them, setting up a secret police force designed to keep watch over troops stationed in and around St. Petersburg.

  The following years showed a clear hardening. In August 1822 Alexander sent Kochubey, still minister of the interior, a ukase banning all secret societies and Masonic lodges and requiring all military men and civil servants to declare in writing that they did not adhere to them and promised never to join. In parallel, police surveillance increased. A dense and centralized police network was set up within the army, private correspondence was systematically opened, and denunciations were encouraged. The country was also closing down foreign influences: starting in 1822 Russian students were no longer authorized to attend foreign universities like Heidelberg or Iena, while certain disciplines like natural law and political science were forbidden to be taught on imperial territory. However, despite this strict surveillance and repressive measures, the state proved incapable of preventing new secret societies from emerging or the dissident movement from growing. In July 1825 Alexander was informed by a young subofficer of the Third Uhlans of the Ukraine, Sherwood (British by origin), that officers of several regiments of this province, with the aid of accomplices in St. Petersburg, were preparing a coup designed to overthrow the autocratic regime. Sherwood declared that he did not know any more but that he was ready to pursue his inquiry if so authorized by the tsar. Alexander consented, on condition that Arakcheev was kept personally informed of the result of the investigation. For the emperor, defense of the empire was incumbent on his minister, and without being completely uninterested in his own security or in that of his government, he chose to place his confidence in Arakcheev.

  At the same time, more and more deaf to any criticism, tired of exercising power, and increasingly thirsty for mystical ideals, Alexander I was preparing his succession, while dreaming of a final grand political act, the reunification of the churches of East and West.

  From the Desire to Abdicate to the Messianic Dream

  As of 1820 Alexander I was making more mention of his possible retirement from the imperial throne; as we saw, he had begun to prepare his succession by removing his brother Constantine from the line, with his full agreement. But at the time knowledge of these preparations remained closely restricted to the family circle, and no written document was prepared. On the contrary, starting in 1822, at the emperor’s specific request, the situation became more official. In a letter to the tsar on January 26, 1822, Constantine, who was in St. Petersburg to explain his position to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and his sister Maria, confirmed his renunciation of the throne:

  Not finding in myself either the genius or talents or strength necessary to be elevated forever to the sovereign dignity in which I would have had right by my birth, I beg Your Imperial Majesty to transfer this right to the one to whom it belongs after me, and to thereby ensure forever the stability of the empire. As for me, I add by this renunciation a new guarantee and new strength to the commitment to which I spontaneously and voluntarily contracted, on the occasion of my divorce from my first wife. All these circumstances of my current situation bring me even more to this measure, which will prove to the Empire and to the whole world the sincerity of my sentiments.26

  In his response of February 14, Alexander took note of his brother’s renunciation:

  Beloved brother, I read your letter with all the attention due to it. Always appreciating the elevated sentiments of your fine soul, I was not surprised. It gave me new evidence of your sincere love for the Homeland and of your solicitude for its unshakeable peace. According to your desire, I submitted it to the attention of our dear mother. She read it with the same feeling of gratitude for the honorable sentiments that had guided you. It remains to us both only to take into consideration the reasons you explained, giving you full freedom to follow your firm decision, and praying All-Powerful God to bless the consequences of your pure and noble plan.27

  Having taken Arakcheev and Golitsyn into his confidence, he entrusted to Metropolitan Philaret the task of preparing an official act establishing jointly Constantine’s renunciation and the passing of power to Nicholas. At the start of 1823, Philaret sent his text to the emperor, and the final version, written and signed in Alexander’s hand, was ratified on September 4.28 The preamble explains why the emperor had delayed designating his successor.

  We could not, like our predecessors, appoint him immediately, in the expectation we had that it did not please divine Providence to grant us an heir in direct line to the throne. But the more our years increase, the more we believe we ought to hasten to place our throne in a position so that it will not remain vacant, even for a moment.

  Then, recalling Constantine’s “sacrifice” because he felt unworthy to reign and had chosen to renounce the throne, he declared Nicholas heir of the Empire of All the Russias.

  The spontaneous act by which our younger brother, the Tsarevich and Grand Duke Constantine, renounces his right to the throne of All the Russias, is and remains fixed and invariable. For knowledge of it to be ensured, said act of renunciation will be preserved in the Great Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, and in the three high administrations of Our Empire: in the Holy Synod, the Council of the Empire, and the governing Senate.

  As a consequence of these provisions, and in conformity with the strict tenor of the act of succession to the throne, Our heir is to be recognized as Our second brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas.29

  This document was placed in a sealed envelope on which the tsar took care to write “Preserve in the Cathedral of the Assumption, with the acts of State, until I require it; or in the case of my death, to be unsealed by the Archbishop of Moscow, before any other action, in the same Cathedral.”30 This done, the envelope was deposited by Philaret in the coffer of acts of the Cathedral of the Assumption. But even though Philaret, Golitsyn, Arakcheev, Maria Feodorovna, Constantine, and Grand Duchess Maria were all informed of the process, Grand Duke Nicholas himself was not told of the decision taken in his favor. Why did Alexander choose to leave his brother in ignorance? The answer is not easy. At least we should consider that in 1823 the question of his death appeared neither opportune nor imminent since he was only 46 years old and in good health. Hence, Alexander might have wanted to avoid his younger brother’s31 having to carry a heavy secret. But, in fact, this position would prove disastrous because it was precisely during the cacophonic interregnum that followed the announcement of the tsar’s death that Nicholas, not having any assurance of Constantine’s renunciation, would hesitate for several days to mount the throne in place of his brother, allowing the Decembrist plot to take place, threatening for several hours the foundations of the empire.

  In 1825, ignorant of the intrigues within the Imperial Guard and considering his position assured by the act deposited in the cathedral, Alexander resumed his voyages at the start of the year. During his stops he regularly sent Elizabeth very short notes full of tenderness, which are evidence of a rapprochement between the spouses, as well as of his limited interest in political matters. Only the future of the military colonies and the Polish question still interested him. From Warsaw, where he came to witness the work of the Polish diet, he wrote on April 27:<
br />
  It is to tell you that I have happily arrived here, my dear, that I send you these lines. Thanks be to God, my trip was fine, and since Niesvige I have found a true summer. I tell you no more, not having a moment to myself. May God assist you and guide you in everything!32

  A month later, still in Warsaw, he sent her a letter where he notes his satisfaction at the development of “his” Poland:

  I was very satisfied with my little trip. As I did not take the major roads, making many zigzags to see better all that has been newly established in manufacturing, I had a real satisfaction in finding how much the country has gained in agriculture and in factories. Here are whole new towns that have been created, and the country presents a happy aspect that is a pleasure to see. Other ancient towns like Kalisch and Plotz have become very beautiful.33