A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  Perhaps the contradictions came from his obsession with reversing the actions of his mother. Though terrified of the French Revolution and convinced that “Jacobinism” was multiplying everywhere in Europe and Russia, he released Radishchev from exile and Novikov from prison. At the same time Paul prohibited the wearing of clothing in the new French style, requiring the old three-cornered hat and knee breeches for men. Enamored of European notions of medieval knighthood and chivalry, he distrusted the self-indulgent and greedy gentry that, he thought, his mother’s reign had created. Thus he decreed a limit of three days per week that serfs could be required to perform labor services. It was typical of Paul’s measures that it was largely useless, for in many parts of the country the new limit was actually higher than the norm. One of the actions of his mother that he did not reverse was the establishment of state censorship, which restricted Russian publications and the importation of Western books. On Paul’s orders even French music fell under suspicion.

  Had Paul reigned in calmer times, he might have lasted for years as an irritating and petty despot who aroused contempt more than fear. The times, however, were anything but calm, even though Russia was far from the center of the drama in Paris. Since the fall of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1794 the Directory had directed the energies of the French nation outward to the conquest of Belgium, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Just as Paul came to the throne, Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first victories against Austria in northern Italy and instantly became a great hero in France. His next project was the conquest of Egypt, which brought Russia into the war. It was not that St. Petersburg had any particular interest in Egypt, but for a few months the Russians thought that he was really going not to Egypt but to Constantinople, which was an obvious threat. Paul was also enraged by Napoleon’s capture of the island of Malta on his way east in 1798. Malta was just as far as Egypt from Russian interests but the rulers of the island, the Knights of Malta, had just sent a mission to the tsar. They appealed to Paul’s ideals of chivalry and his desire to combat the hydra of revolution, so he became the protector of the Order of Malta. With the island in French hands, some of the knights even offered to make Paul the commander of the order. Contrary to papal wishes, the Orthodox tsar now led the exiled Catholic order, but with the French army at his door the pope was in no position to object. The Malta incident and other French actions led Paul to join Austria, Britain, and other powers in a coalition against the French. General Suvorov was called out of forced retirement (Paul had rightly associated him with Potemkin and Catherine) and sent to Italy to command an Austro-Russian army. This he did with such force and energy that he chased the French out in a few months, and stood ready to invade France. Instead, defeats on other fronts and Austrian insistence on invading France from Switzerland forced Suvorov to move north and then retreat through hostile French forces in an alpine winter to safety in southern Germany. Enraged by these events and a botched Russian-British attempt to invade the French-dominated Netherlands, Paul broke off all relations with the coalition and made overtures to France. With Napoleon’s coup d’etat in November 1799, Paul felt that France had a ruler committed to order, not further revolution, and with whom he could talk. By the end of 1800, war with Britain seemed a real possibility. Events dictated otherwise.

  Discontent with Paul had been growing almost since he came to the throne among the court and military elite of St. Petersburg. Paul had several sons, the eldest Alexander, born in 1777, was an agreeable and well-educated young man. Furthermore, Paul had replaced Peter the Great’s succession law with his own in 1797, a law that prohibited women from taking the throne and specified primogeniture in the male line. Thus in the event of Paul’s removal or death, the succession was secure.

  Paul himself was afraid of assassination, and he built an entire new palace – the Castle of St. Michael – on the bank of the Fontanka River and surrounded by newly dug canals to make it inaccessible except by drawbridge. The “castle” was a strange combination of classical style and elements meant to recall a medieval Western castle, a conceit that delighted the tsar. He moved in at the end of 1800. In one sense, his fears were not in vain, for removal of the tsar was exactly what several of the officers of the guards had in mind. Their leader was the Baltic German Count Peter von der Pahlen, whom Paul had earlier exiled for trivial offenses, then forgiven and appointed military governor of St. Petersburg. Paul was too self-centered to realize what others thought of him, and regularly took friends for enemies and vice versa. In this case his mistake was to be literally fatal.

  Pahlen had long harbored resentment and fear of the tsar since his earlier disgrace, and he had like-minded associates, chief among them Count N. P. Panin, the nephew of Paul’s old tutor. Panin was in disgrace for opposing the rapprochement with Napoleon and Pahlen was afraid not only for himself but for the rest of the imperial family. He believed that Paul was so far alienating the nobility that disorder might ensue, a frightening possibility in the unstable condition of Europe. As the plot thickened, Alexander became aware of it and did nothing to stop it. On the night of March 11, 1801, after an evening of heavy drinking, the conspirators made their way into the Castle of St. Michael. They found Paul after he tried to hide and arrested him: a struggle ensued and one of the officers strangled the tsar. It was the last and most violent palace coup in Russian history. A public announcement asserted that Paul had died of apoplexy and Alexander was now the tsar. The rejoicing was universal throughout St. Petersburg.

  Alexander I ruled Russia for the next quarter of a century, a time full of drama. His personal imprint on the age was considerable, not least because he was the last of Russia’s tsars to display a personal desire to keep Russia in step with the rapidly changing political world to the west. After Alexander, Russia’s rulers opposed any political change or allowed it only under extreme duress. Toward the end of his life Alexander too began to move away from his early liberalism, but until the eve of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 Alexander pursued a distinctly reformist policy.

  Much of Alexander’s liberalism was a matter of attitude rather than institutional reorganization. Censorship was radically relaxed and in 1804 a new statute appeared that established relatively mild rules and gave the task of censorship over to university professors under the Ministry of Education. New publications began to appear, such as the writer Nikolai Karamzin’s journal Messenger of Europe, which was to remain the country’s leading literary and intellectual voice for several decades. A writer of sentimental novellas and an account of his travels in Europe, he used the journal to publish on a wide variety of topics, from the latest in French literature to the revolution in Haiti. It so impressed the tsar that in 1803 he appointed Karamzin the official historian of Russia, charged with composing a history of Russia that was scholarly but in readable prose. Alexander’s initiatives were a major step forward for Russian higher education, for he founded new universities in Kazan’ (1804), Khar’kov (1805), and St. Petersburg (1819), at the side of the older university in Moscow. In largely Polish Wilno the academy was transformed into a university and the German university in Dorpat (Estonia) was revived. The Imperial Lycée founded in Tsarskoe Selo under the eye of the tsars became one of the principal seedgrounds of Russian culture. All of these initiatives flowed from the rather nebulous liberalism taught the young tsar by his former tutor, Frederic LaHarpe of Switzerland. LaHarpe was later execrated by conservatives as the evil genius of Alexander’s reign, but in fact the tutor simply provided his pupil with the standard reading and ideas of the late Enlightenment, ideas that were still championed in the heir’s boyhood by his grandmother Catherine. Alexander’s youth coincided with the French Revolution, but unlike his father he did not see it simply as a threat to be confronted. He took it as part of vast changes sweeping European society and also as a warning to monarchs who failed to move with the times. His response was to try to reform the Russian state in line with the new Europe but keeping the power of the monarchy intact.
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  Alexander’s youthful friendships were with young noblemen who shared these views and they were to play a major role in the early years of the reign. He appointed five of them, Pavel Stroganov, Nikolai Novosil’tsev, the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, and others, to an unofficial committee to advise him on the type of reform that Russia needed. After some initial discussion of constitutions and the evils of serfdom, the talk moved more in the direction of strengthening the administration and legal order. To this end Alexander radically reshaped the Russian government, abolishing the old colleges and other structures left from the time of Catherine and Paul and putting in their place ministries. The new ministries, modeled on those of Napoleonic France, were headed by a single minister, not a committee, and were given a large staff and wide areas of administrative control, if no legislative power. With this new structure Alexander created the bureaucratic state that was to rule Russia under the tsar until 1917. His ministries were supposed to and largely did follow legal guidelines, though the power of the tsar to make law at will introduced a major element of arbitrary power that also lasted until the end of the old regime. The lack of a legal culture was a further obstacle to legal order, but the law faculties of the new universities and the private Demidov law school in Iaroslavl’ were designed to remedy this defect and in time did so, to some extent. The young graduates of these institutions with professional legal education began to replace clerks that operated simply by knowledge of existing practice and the old grandees with their general cultures derived from French literature. Alexander placed the Senate over all these institutions, now that it had been transformed into a place for administrative review and a supreme court.

  Figure 8. Central St. Petersburg with the Winter Palace from Four Panoramic Views of St. Petersburg, by John Augustus Atkinson, London, 1802.

  The reform process was significantly aided by the appointment of Michael Speranskii to the position of state secretary to the tsar. Speranskii was as a parvenu (his father was a priest, not a nobleman) who had worked his way up by sheer intelligence and hard work. His bland exterior concealed an inner fire, fed by mystical religious beliefs and devotion to the law. He came from a successful career in the new Ministry of Justice to work directly with Alexander at legal reform. In 1809 he compiled a constitution for Russia that included a limited representative legislature and some checks on the tsar’s power. This project never came into existence, but he did manage to establish a Council of State (again on the Napoleonic model) to provide a central locus of power at the side of the tsar. Henceforth new laws were generally discussed in the Council of State before the tsar made a final decision. Speranskii was also instrumental in the granting of a constitution to Russia’s new acquisition, Finland. As a result of fears for Petersburg and foreign policy complications, Russia annexed Finland from Sweden in 1809, in the process giving the country its own government for the first time, if only an autonomous one within the Russian empire. Thus autocratic Russia acquired a constitutional unit within the empire that lasted as such until the empire collapsed. In Finland, the Russian tsar was a constitutional ruler.

  Speranskii and his innovations were not popular with the gentry, who hated him and considered him a plebeian and supporter of “French” political ideas. In fact Speranskii was not nearly as radical as his opponents believed, for he never wished to challenge the power of the tsar, only to continue the process of legalizing the power and regularizing the process of consultation. He was also rather conservative in other ways, a religious mystic who was hardly the rigorous ideologist of the Enlightenment as his critics claimed. The center of the opposition to Speranskii and Alexander’s liberal course was the salon of his younger sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, where the leading mind was Nikolai Karamzin, now hard at work on his history. In 1811 he presented Alexander with a long memorandum criticizing the reforms as alien to the Russian spirit, which consisted in autocracy and loyalty to tradition. For Alexander it was unacceptable, but such ideas would have a greater following in years to come. For the moment, Karamzin was too intellectual for most of the conservative nobility, who had simpler fears that the French might free the serfs and challenge their privileges. Speranskii’s fall came in the spring of 1812, as Napoleon prepared his attack on Russia and Alexander needed the support of conservatives among the gentry in the moment of supreme crisis. Ironically the more modern institutions that Alexander and Speranskii had taken over from the French example gave the state a solidity that stood up to the French onslaught.

  Alexander’s internal reforms took place against the background of the titanic struggle of Napoleon with the rest of Europe. At first the new tsar held back. The assassination of tsar Paul had put an end to the notion of joining France in war against England, and Alexander seized on the opportunity for neutrality – a neutrality that allowed him the space for the first reforms.

  Russia’s relationship to the expanding Napoleonic Empire was necessarily complex, as Russia was far away from the center of French expansion. For almost a century Russia’s own imperial ambitions had been directed to the south, toward the Ottoman Empire and Transcaucasia, areas of secondary interest to the French. At the same time Russia was intimately involved in the politics of Europe, and could not simply ignore Napoleon’s conquest and reorganization of Central Europe. Thus in 1805 Russia joined Britain, Austria, and Sweden in challenging Napoleon’s might. The first result was a disaster, for Napoleon quickly moved into the center of the Austrian Empire. Alexander overrode the advice of his commander Mikhail Kutuzov and, with the Austrians, gave battle at Austerlitz in December 1805. It proved one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. Then Prussia joined the alliance, but Napoleon smashed the supposedly great Prussian army at Jena the next year. Prussia, which unlike Russia had not begun to reform itself, collapsed. As the Prussians retreated east, Russia was left facing the French almost alone, but it managed to defeat them at Preussisch Eylau, one of Napoleon’s rare defeats in these years. He recovered and at Friedland in June 1807, inflicted enough damage on the Russian army that Alexander decided to make peace. He met the French emperor on a raft at Tilsit in East Prussia, making peace and even an alliance with France.

  The alliance with France meant joining Napoleon’s boycott of English goods in European harbors as well as supporting Napoleon’s diplomacy. One immediate consequence was war with Sweden, since the Swedish king remained loyal to the anti-French cause, and the conquest of Finland. Russia’s larger foreign policy in these years, however, was a return to imperial conquest in the south, and war with the Turks brought the annexation of Bessarabia in 1812. The earlier annexation of Georgia (1803) gave Russia a firm foot on the south side of the Caucasus range, putting her in immediate rivalry with Iran as well as Turkey.

  Alexander’s alliance with France was unstable from the start. The tsar paid lip service to the boycott of English goods, but American ships began to flock to St. Petersburg carrying the very English colonial wares that Napoleon was trying to keep out. The French emperor complained mightily about this violation of the agreement as well as other issues, trying to browbeat Alexander into obedience. Alexander, however, was a master at this sort of diplomacy, and answered French complaints with unfailing charm and vague promises of friendship. As the French tone grew increasingly threatening, the tsar reminded the French of the size of his army and the extent of his country. He reminded Napoleon’s envoys of the Scythians, the ancient inhabitants of southern Russia who defeated the mighty Persian Empire by retreating into the steppe. They exhausted and harassed the Persians until the invaders realized that they were short of food and had to run for home. The message could not have been clearer, but Napoleon did not heed it.

  Napoleon had good reason to believe that he could conquer Russia in the spring of 1812. While France itself and Russia were about equal in population (about 35–40 million each), France drew on the resources of virtually the whole of Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy had either been annexed to the French Empire
or turned into client states and thus had to provide recruits for its army. Prussia was ordered to join him, and Poland provided an enthusiastic contingent as well, fresh from fighting in Spain. Even with the Spanish war unresolved, Napoleon massed some four hundred thousand men of the French imperial army and more allies on Russia’s western border in June 1812. Russia could muster about the same on paper, but about only half that many in reality. France was also a prosperous country with flourishing military industries, again enhanced by its empire. Russia, as everyone knew, was an industrially backward land dominated by primitive agriculture. Napoleon and most observers were confident of French victory, even those unsympathetic to Napoleonic aggrandizement, like the first American ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams.

  In reality the odds were not so stacked against Russia. The establishment of the Ministry of War and a General Staff meant that Russia’s army had modern organization, logistics, and planning. The chief of those plans was precisely the Scythian strategy alluded to by Tsar Alexander. The minister of war Michael Barclay de Tolly and the principal generals were all aware that this plan was Russia’s only chance. The most important thing was to avoid a decisive battle near the border, where the French would have predominant force. After some hesitation, Alexander stuck to the plan of retreat and also removed himself from day-to-day command of the army. As the French moved into the interior, they had to leave more and more troops behind to guard their communications back to France. They also learned that Russia, with its low population density and poor roads, did not provide enough food along the route of the march to allow the invaders to live off the land. They were confined to a narrow corridor quickly stripped of all resources. None of this would matter if they could destroy the Russian army, but the Russians moved east ahead of them. As the Russians withdrew, Alexander began to feel the political complications of the retreat, which offended the patriotism of the people and particularly the gentry. He decided to sacrifice Barclay and appointed Kutuzov as supreme commander. Kutuzov, the man whose advice at Austerlitz Alexander had rejected to his cost, was a sixty-seven-year-old veteran of Catherine the Great’s Turkish wars as well as of more recent successes against the Ottomans in Bessarabia. Kutuzov stayed with the original plan of retreat, reluctantly giving battle at Borodino on September 7 (August 26 on the Julian calendar) 1812, only a hundred miles or so west of Moscow.