A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  His Majesty's Own Chancery proved to be more effective than the special committees. Organized originally as a bureau to deal with matters that demanded the sovereign's personal participation and to supervise the execution of the emperor's orders, the Chancery grew rapidly in the reign of Nicholas I. As early as 1826, two new departments were added to it: the Second Department was concerned with the codification of law, and the Third with the administration of the newly created corps of gendarmes. In 1828 the Fourth Department was created for the purpose of managing

  the charitable and educational institutions under the jurisdiction of the Empress Dowager Mary. Eight years later the Fifth Department was created and charged with reforming the condition of the state peasants; after two years of activity it was replaced by the new Ministry of State Domains. Finally, in 1843, the Sixth Department of His Majesty's Own Chancery came into being, a temporary agency assigned the task of drawing up an administrative plan for Transcaucasia. The departments of the Chancery served Nicholas I as a major means of conducting a personal policy which bypassed the regular state channels.

  The Third Department of His Majesty's Own Chancery, the political police - which came to symbolize to many Russians the reign of Nicholas I - acted as the autocrat's main weapon against subversion and revolution and as his principal agency for controlling the behavior of his subjects and for distributing punishments and rewards among them. Its assigned fields of activity ranged from "all orders and all reports in every case belonging to the higher police" to "reports about all occurrences without exception"! The new guardians of the state, dressed in sky-blue uniforms, were incessantly active:

  In their effort to embrace the entire life of the people, they intervened actually in every matter in which it was possible to intervene. Family life, commercial transactions, personal quarrels, projects of inventions, escapes of novices from monasteries - everything interested the secret police. At the same time the Third Department received a tremendous number of petitions, complaints, denunciations, and each one resulted in an investigation, each one became a separate case.

  The Third Department also prepared detailed, interesting, and remarkably candid reports of all sorts for the emperor, supervised literature - an activity ranging from minute control over Pushkin to ordering various "inspired" articles in defense of Russia and the existing system - and fought every trace of revolutionary infection. The two successive heads of the Third Department, Count Alexander Benckendorff and Prince Alexis Orlov, probably spent more time with Nicholas I than any of his other assistants; they accompanied him, for instance, on his repeated trips of inspection throughout Russia. Yet most of the feverish activity of the gendarmes seemed to be to no purpose. Endless investigations of subversion, stimulated by the monarch's own suspiciousness, revealed very little. Even the most important radical group uncovered during the reign, the Petrashevtsy, fell victim not to the gendarmery but to its great rival, the ordinary police, which continued to be part of the Ministry of the Interior. Short on achievements, the Third Department proved to be long on failings. The gendarmes constantly expanded their pointless work to increase their importance, quarreled with other government agencies,

  notably the police, and opened the way to some fantastic adventurers as well as to countless run-of-the-mill informers, who flooded the gendarmery with their reports. The false reports turned out to be so numerous that the Third Department proceeded to punish some of their authors and to stage weekly burnings of the denunciations.

  The desire to control in detail the lives and thoughts of the people and above all to prevent subversion, which constituted the main aims of the Third Department, guided also the policies of the Ministry of Education - which we shall discuss in a later chapter - specifically in censorship; and, indeed, in a sense they guided the policies of Nicholas's entire regime. As in the building of fortresses, the emphasis was defensive: to hold fast against the enemy and to prevent his penetration. The sovereign himself worked indefatigably at shoring up the defenses. He paid the most painstaking attention to the huge and difficult business of government, did his own inspecting of the country, rushed to meet all kinds of emergencies, from cholera epidemics and riots to rebellion in military settlements, and bestowed special care on the army. Beyond all that, and beyond even the needs of defense, he wanted to follow the sacred principle of autocracy, to be a true father of his people concerned with their daily lives, hopes, and fears.

  The Issue of Reform

  However, as already indicated, all the efforts of the emperor and his government bore little fruit, and the limitations of Nicholas's approach to reform revealed themselves with special clarity in the crucial issue of serfdom. Nicholas I personally disapproved of that institution: in the army and in the country at large he saw only too well the misery it produced, and he remained constantly apprehensive of the danger of insurrection; also, the autocrat had no sympathy for aristocratic privilege when it clashed with the interests of the state. Yet, as he explained the matter in 1842 in the State Council: "There is no doubt that serfdom, as it exists at present in our land, is an evil, palpable and obvious to all. But to touch it now would be a still more disastrous evil… The Pugachev rebellion proved how far popular rage can go." In fact throughout his reign the emperor feared, at the same time, two different revolutions. There was the danger that the gentry might bid to obtain a constitution if the government decided to deprive the landlords of their serfs. On the other hand, an elemental, popular uprising might also be unleashed by such a major shock to the established order as the coveted emancipation.

  In the end, although the government was almost constantly concerned with serfdom, it achieved very little. New laws either left the change in the serfs' status to the discretion of their landlords, thus merely continuing

  Alexander's well-meaning but ineffectual efforts, or they prohibited only certain extreme abuses connected with serfdom such as selling members of a single family to different buyers. Even the minor concessions granted to the peasants were sometimes nullified. For instance, in 1847, the government permitted serfs to purchase their freedom if their master's estate was sold for debt. In the next few years, however, the permission was made inoperative without being formally rescinded. Following the European revolutions of 1848, the meager and hesitant government solicitude for the serfs came to an end. Only the bonded peasants of Western Russian provinces obtained substantial advantages in the reign of Nicholas I. As we shall see, they received this preferential treatment because the government wanted to use them in its struggle against the Polish influence which was prevalent among the landlords of that area.

  Determined to preserve autocracy, afraid to abolish serfdom, and suspicious of all independent initiative and popular participation, the emperor and his government could not introduce in their country the much-needed fundamental reforms. In practice, as well as in/theory, they looked backward. Important developments did nevertheless take place in certain areas where change would not threaten the fundamental political, social, and economic structure of the Russian Empire. Especially significant proved to be the codification of law and the far-reaching reform in the condition of the state peasants. The new code, produced in the late 1820's and the early 1830's by the immense labor of Speransky and his associates, marked, despite defects, a tremendous achievement and a milestone in Russian jurisprudence. In January 1835 it replaced the ancient Ulozhenie of Tsar Alexis, dating from 1649, and it was destined to last until 1917.

  The reorganization of the state peasants followed several years later after Count Paul Kiselev became head of the new Ministry of State Domains in 1837. Kiselev's reform, which included the shift of taxation from persons to land, additional allotments for poor peasants, some peasant self-government, and the development of financial assistance, schools, and medical care in the villages, has received almost universal praise from pre-revolutionary historians. The leading Soviet specialist on the subject, Druzhinin, however, claimed, on the basis of impressive evidenc
e, that the positive aspects of Kiselev's reform had a narrow scope and application, while fundamentally it placed an extremely heavy burden on the state peasants, made all the more difficult to bear by the exactions and malpractices of local administration. Finance minister Egor Kankrin's policy, and in particular his measures to stabilize the currency - often cited among the progressive developments in Nicholas I's reign - proved to be less effective and important in the long run than Speransky's and Kiselev's work.

  The Last Years

  But even limited reforms became impossible after 1848. Frightened by European revolutions, Nicholas I became completely reactionary. Russians were forbidden to travel abroad, an order which hit teachers and students especially hard. The number of students without government scholarships was limited to three hundred per university, except for the school of medicine. Uvarov had to resign as minister of education in favor of an entirely reactionary and subservient functionary, who on one occasion told an assistant of his: "You should know that I have neither a mind nor a will of my own - I am merely a blind tool of the emperor's will." New restrictions further curtailed university autonomy and academic freedom. Constitutional law and philosophy were eliminated from the curricula; logic and psychology were retained, but were to be taught by professors of theology. In fact, in the opinion of some historians, the universities themselves came close to being eliminated and only the timely intervention of certain high officials prevented this disaster. Censorship reached ridiculous proportions, with new agencies appearing, including "a censorship over the censors." The censors, to cite only a few instances of their activities, deleted "forces of nature" from a textbook in physics, probed the hidden meaning of an ellipsis in an arithmetic book, changed "were killed" to "perished" in an account of Roman emperors, demanded that the author of a fortune-telling book explain why in his opinion stars influence the fate of men, and worried about the possible concealment of secret codes in musical notations. Literature and thought were virtually stifled. Even Michael Pogodin, a Right-wing professor of history and a leading exponent of the doctrine of Official Nationality, was impelled in the very last years of the reign to accuse the government of imposing upon Russia "the quiet of a graveyard, rotting and stinking, both physically and morally." It was in this atmosphere of suffocation that Russia experienced its shattering defeat in the Crimean War.

  Nicholas I's Foreign Policy

  If the Crimean debacle represented, as many scholars insist, the logical termination of Nicholas I's foreign policy and reign, it was a case of historical logic, unique for the occasion and difficult to follow. For, to begin with, the Russian emperor intended least of all to fight other European powers. Indeed, a dedicated supporter of autocracy at home, he became a dauntless champion of legitimism abroad. Nicholas I was determined to maintain and defend the existing order in Europe, just as he considered it

  his sacred duty to preserve the archaic system in his own country. He saw the two closely related as the whole and its part, and he thought both to be threatened by the same enemy: the many-headed hydra of revolution, which had suffered a major blow with the final defeat of Napoleon but refused to die. Indeed it rose again and again, in 1830, in 1848, and on other occasions, attempting to reverse and undo the settlement of 1815. True to his principles, the resolute tsar set out to engage the enemy. In the course of the struggle, this "policeman of Russia" assumed added responsibilities as the "gendarme of Europe." The emperor's assistants in the field of foreign policy, led by Count Karl Nesselrode who served as foreign minister throughout the reign, on the whole shared the views of their monarch and bent to his will.

  Shortly after Nicholas I's accession to the throne, Russia fought a war against Persia that lasted from June 1826 to February 1828. The hostilities, which represented another round in the struggle for Georgia, resulted in the defeat of Persia, General Ivan Paskevich emerging as the hero of the campaigns. While the Treaty of Turkmanchai gave Russia part of Armenia with the city of Erivan, exclusive rights to have a navy on the Caspian sea, commercial concessions, and a large indemnity, Nicholas I characteristically refused to press his victory. In particular, he would not support a native movement to overthrow the shah and destroy his rule.

  A few weeks after making peace with Persia, Russia declared war on Turkey. This conflict marked the culmination of an international crisis which had begun with the rebellion of the Greeks against their Turkish masters in 1821, the so-called Greek War of Independence. The Russian government vacillated in its attitude toward the Greek revolution for, on one hand, the Russians sympathized with the Orthodox Greeks and were traditionally hostile to the Turks, while, on the other hand, Russia was committed to the support of the status quo in Europe. Moreover, the Greek crisis had unusually complicated diplomatic ramifications and possibilities. Other European powers also found it difficult to maintain a consistent policy toward the struggle of the Greeks against the Turks. Acting more firmly than his brother, Nicholas I tried, first with Great Britain and France, and then on his own, to restrain Turkey and settle the Balkan conflict. On October 20, 1827, in the battle of Navarino, the joint British, French, and Russian squadrons destroyed the Egyptian fleet that had been summoned to help its Turkish overlord. But it was not until April 1828 that the Russo-Turkish hostilities officially began. Although the Porte proved to be more difficult to defeat than the Russian emperor had expected, the second major campaign of the war brought decisive, if costly, victory to the Russian army and forced the Ottoman state to agree to the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829.

  That settlement gave Russia the mouth of the Danube as well as con-

  siderable territory in the Caucasus; promised autonomous existence, under a Russian protectorate, to the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia; imposed a heavy indemnity on Turkey; guaranteed the passage of Russian merchant ships through the Straits; and, incidentally, assured the success of the Greek revolution, which the tsar continued to detest. But in spite of these and other Russian gains embodied in the treaty, it has often and justly been considered an example of moderation in international affairs. The Russian emperor did not try to destroy his former opponent, regarding Turkey as an important and desirable element in the European balance of power. In fact, the decision to preserve the Ottoman state represented the considered judgment of a special committee appointed by Nicholas I in 1829 to deal with the numerous problems raised by the defeat of Turkey and the changing situation in the Balkans. And the committee's report to the effect that "the advantages offered by the preservation of the Ottoman Empire in Europe exceed the inconveniences which it presents," received the Russian sovereign's full endorsement.

  The revolution in Paris in July 1830 came as a great shock to the tsar, and its impact was heightened by the Belgian uprising in September and by unrest in Italy and Germany. Nicholas I sent a special emissary to Berlin to co-ordinate action with Prussia and, although the mission failed, assembled an army in Poland prepared to march west. When the regime of Louis-Philippe was promptly accepted by other European governments, the Russian emperor still withheld official recognition for four months and then treated the new French ruler in a grudging and discourteous manner. The revolution of the Belgians against the Dutch similarly provoked the anger of the Russian autocrat who regarded it as another assault on the sacred principle of legitimacy and, in addition, as a clear violation of the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Vienna. Once again failing to obtain diplomatic support from other powers, Nicholas I had to subscribe to the international settlement of the issue, which favored the rebels, although he delayed the ratification of the Treaty of London for several months and did not establish regular diplomatic relations with the new state until 1852. It should be added that the early plans for a Russian military intervention in western Europe might well have been realized, except for the Polish revolution, which broke out late in November 1830, and which took the Russian government approximately a year to suppress.

  Patriotic Poles had never accep
ted the settlement of 1815, which represented to them not a re-establishment of their historic state but the "Fourth Partition of Poland." They resented any link with Russia. And they hoped to regain the vast Lithuanian, White Russian, and Ukrainian lands that Poland had ruled before it was partitioned. Although Nicholas I observed the Polish constitution much better than Alexander I had, tension increased in Warsaw and elsewhere in the kingdom. Finally in 1830, as revolutions

  spread in Europe, Warsaw rose against the Russians in late November. The commander-in-chief in the kingdom, Grand Duke Constantine, failed in the moment of crisis, and before long Russia lost all control of Poland. Poland, therefore, had to be reconquered in what amounted to a full-fledged war, because the Poles had a standing army of their own that rallied to the national cause. Still, although Paskevich's Russian troops first entered Warsaw nine months later and although more time was required to destroy patriotic detachments and bands in dense Polish forests, the outcome was never in doubt. In addition to their weakness in comparison to the Russians, the Polish nationalists did not keep the strong support of the Polish peasants, and they rashly tried to carry the struggle beyond their ethnic borders where the population would not support them.