At first, they thought that Alexander shared their beliefs and hopes. His postwar pronouncements about a constitution for Russia encouraged this belief, just as the tsar’s conservative advisers had warned him it would. But increasing repression at home, the reform of the universities, Alexander’s opposition to movements for national independence in Greece and elsewhere soon disillusioned those hoping for a continuation of the liberal reform plans of the early reign. When Alexander reinstituted a secret police regime in 1821 following a rebellion in one of the élite regiments of the capital cities, the young dissidents formed secret societies and prepared for revolution. Although the leaders were divided on their ultimate aims—some preferring a federated system, others a unified state; some preferring a constitutional monarchy, others a republic—they held together long enough to attempt a putsch during an interregnum in December 1825 caused by the sudden death of Alexander on a tour of the south of the country. The tsar died childless, and confusion about which of his two brothers was supposed to succeed to the throne gave the insurgents an opportunity to strike. The rebellion had two phases, the first in the capital St Petersburg and the second two weeks later in the Ukraine; both were quickly defeated. Five leaders were hanged, and 284 other participants, many from the most prominent families of the nobility, were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. This insurgency, known to history as the Decembrist Rebellion, exhibited features of both a palace guards coup of the eighteenth century and a modern revolution in the name of popular sovereignty. However, by virtue of a rich legacy of memoirs, poetry, art, and historical reconstruction, the event shed its archaic features and became semioticized into the first act of the Russian Revolution. An important element of its appeal was the role of the wives of the Decembrists, many of whom left comfortable upper-class homes and followed their convicted husbands into Siberian exile. Although women had made such sacrifices earlier, the Decembrists’ wives were the first to be inscribed as a literary model and hence the first to provide a script for Russian women’s selfless devotion to the cause of resistance to autocracy.
Nicholas I: The Early Years
The new tsar, Nicholas I, had not expected to become ruler and had prepared for a military career. Historians have been inclined to interpret his policies and behaviour as those of a militarist martinet. If Alexander has been known for his earnest planning for political and social reform (and even perhaps excused, because of the epic struggle with France, for not having carried it through), Nicholas has usually been described as a ruler lacking in vision, a thoroughgoing conservative who sought only to hold back change. This contrast is misleading. Alexander was ultimately far more committed to the rhetoric of reform than its substance, and Nicholas’s actual accomplishments surpassed those of his older brother. Indeed, both regimes shared central values and goals, including most prominently a dedication to the notion of disciplined administration, legality in governance, and the role of the tsar as benevolent overseer of this legal order (however imperfectly these ideas may have been realized in practice). The misleading contrast in the popular picture of the two regimes may stem from the sharply differing reform methods of the two rulers. Alexander and his ‘friends’ adopted a deductive approach to reform typical of the age of rationalism in which they were nurtured, whereas Nicholas preferred an inductive approach of investigating issues exhaustively before implementing changes. Moreover, having learned from the Decembrist revolt the dangers of encouraging hopes of reform, Nicholas insisted on the strictest secrecy in the consideration and formulation of plans for change. The reforms that he introduced were carefully thought through and implemented under controlled conditions. Though intended to strengthen the given system of authority and property relations, Nicholas’s reforms laid an essential foundation for the momentous social, economic, and legal transformations of the next reign.
The first months of Nicholas’s reign were taken up with the investigation and prosecution of the Decembrist rebels, a task that the new ruler delegated to Mikhail Speranskii, the reformist state secretary of the previous reign who had been exiled to Siberia in 1812. After this, Speranskii and a former member of Alexander I’s ‘committee of friends’, Viktor Kochubei, were put in charge of a commission to look into government operations and recommend changes where needed. The commission’s broad mandate advised it to discover: what is good now, what cannot be left as it stands, and what should replace it. The commission sat for several years and produced a shelf of reports. Its final recommendations proposed incremental improvements in established institutions and policies rather than fundamental reforms. In regard to serfdom, the commissioners advised against allowing the transfer of serfs from field work to the squire’s household (to allay fears caused by an increasing number of landless peasants); it also proposed to improve the situation of state peasants in ways that would create a model for emulation by private landlords. In regard to the upper class, the commission wanted to restrict the flow of new entrants to the nobility through the Table of Ranks and instead to reward deserving non-nobles with privileges not tied to hereditary status. Concern for the preservation of the nobility found expression in a recommendation to establish entail and thereby prevent the fragmentation of noble landed estates. The commission also took up some of Speranskii’s favourite ideas about the division of the Senate into separate administrative and judicial bodies.
But before reforms could proceed, a number of challenges rocked the regime at the start of the 1830s, a circumstance that strengthened the hand of those who favoured repression over reform. After three decades of the Russian army’s steady, successful penetration of the Caucasus Mountains and subjection of its peoples, a reaction occurred. Native peoples overcame their differences and united in a resistance that threatened to disrupt Russia’s near-eastern policies. Second, the Russian home front was stricken by a devastating cholera epidemic, the first in a series of outbreaks that recurred in the nineteenth century. Initially, the hardest hit was the south-central agricultural province of Tambov, where terrified peasants rioted and in some instances were joined by the soldiers dispatched to bring them under control. When the epidemic spread to the capital cities, disturbances erupted there as well. In one case, Tsar Nicholas himself, no coward, rode on horseback into a panicked and rioting crowd on Haymarket Square in St Petersburg, scolded them, and sent them home. The third and most disturbing event, however, was a national rebellion in Poland towards the end of 1830. Sparked by the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarch Charles X in France earlier that year, which provided a stimulus for rebellion in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, the Polish insurgency lasted through much of 1831 and brought an end to the Poles’ autonomy in internal affairs. The constitution granted Poland by Alexander I was replaced by an Organic Statute, making Poland an integral or ‘organic’ part of the Russian Empire.
In response to these crises and the continuing challenge of liberal ideas and national aspirations, Russian leaders devised a new ideological formula (later dubbed ‘Official Nationality’) that sought to co-opt the spirit of romantic nationalism and put it to the service of fortifying a dynastic, imperialist regime. The new formula, first enunciated in 1832 by the deputy minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, exalted the principles of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. The first implied a rejection of the Voltairian scepticism of the eighteenth-century court and likewise an end to the experiments with biblical fundamentalism sponsored by Alexander I. The principle of Autocracy was meant to reinforce the notion of a personal rule sanctioned by divine right, which was necessarily incompatible with either enlightened absolutism (and its appeal to Reason), conservative constitutionalism (as proposed in the reform projects of Nikita Panin, Alexander Bezborodko, and Mikhail Speranskii), or the radicalism of the Decembrists. The murky principle of Nationality (narodnost) stressed the unique character (samobytnost’) of the Russians as a people and therefore the inappropriateness of foreign political and social institutions for Russia. Thus Uvarov’s new formula sought to rep
lace the universalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment by asserting the distinctive character of Russia and its political and social systems. But, unlike modern cultural relativism, it conferred a higher value on Russian ideas, institutions, and especially on the Russian people, who were celebrated as trusting, faithful, and pure of heart.
Reforms of the Mature Years
However delusory the new ideology of Official Nationality, a number of significant reforms were carried out by the regime that fostered it. One of the most important of these reforms was the creation of a comprehensive law code, the first since 1649. Again, the tsar turned to Mikhail Speranskii and asked him to direct the work. Speranskii departed from the previous generation’s (and his own earlier) method of designing reforms on general principles and borrowing directly from foreign models; in line with the new notions about the organic nature of society, he assembled past law, beginning with the Code of 1649 and including the thousands of statutes enacted in the intervening 180 years (omitting some, such as those related to government crises); the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire was published between 1828 and 1830 in 45 volumes and has been an invaluable tool for historians ever since. He then distilled from this compendium a thematically organized fifteen-volume codex of living, currently applicable law called the Digest of Laws, which went into effect in 1835. Though not systematic and normative, the new code addressed the contradictions and chaos of the accumulated statutes and presented law in a usable form, accessible to courts throughout the land. Yet, as government officials understood, a country without a corps of jurists knowledgeable about and committed to a legal system was a country in which laws remained vulnerable to manipulation in courts influenced by bribery and clientelism. Here, too, Nicholas’s government made a valuable contribution, opening a School of Jurisprudence in 1835 to train sons of élite families in modern legal practice. The graduates of this institution played an indispensable role in the creation and widely acknowledged success of the sweeping juridical reforms of the 1860s, which adopted such key features of Anglo-American practice as justices of the peace, trial by jury, and life tenure for judges.
Important changes were also made in state financial policy. Half a century of war and administrative expansion paid for by increasingly inflated paper money (assignats) had wreaked havoc on state finances. Building on ideas initially sketched by Speranskii during Alexander I’s reign, the Minister of Finance, Egor Kankrin, succeeded in bringing inflation under control by tying the value of assignats to that of the silver rouble and thereby laid a solid foundation for economic growth. The Crimean War at the close of the reign, it is true, undid much of this work and left Russia poorly prepared to manage the costs of the reforms of the 1860s, but matters would have been far worse without Kankrin’s policies.
Nicholas should be given credit for preparing the ground for the reform of serfdom, even if during his reign little change occurred in the actual status of the serfs. At best, a law passed in 1842 allowed landlords to manumit with land serfs who were able to come up with a high buy-out price. But this option, dependent as it was on the acquiescence of the landlord, resulted in few manumissions. The law nevertheless underlined the government’s insistence that freed serfs be provided with land, an ominous sign for noble landlords who hoped that emancipation would recognize their title to all the lands currently in their possession. More significant was a reform of state peasants carried through by the Ministry of State Domains under the leadership of Count P. D. Kiselev. This reform, introduced in the late 1830s and early 1840s, granted state peasants a measure of self-government, village schools, public-health facilities, and agricultural extension services; it also shifted the method of taxation from an assessment on individuals to an assessment on the amount of cultivable soil, a fairer measure because of its link to potential productivity. This reform, though affecting only peasants under state supervision, bore unmistakable implications for the eventual abolition of serfdom. Indeed, during the latter half of Nicholas’s reign secret committees were already at work designing such a reform.
Lest there be any doubt about the government’s willingness to infringe on the nobility’s rights and privileges, Nicholas also enacted a reform of the nobility itself, a remarkable and revealing act in European affairs, demonstrating that the Russian upper class was not a self-governing social estate of the European type that had evolved ahead of or in tandem with the monarchy but rather a creation of the monarchy, its place and privileges subject to definition by the ruler. The reform was occasioned by a growing division in the nobility between those who built their economic livelihood and status on the management of their serf estates and those who did so primarily on positions in the state administration. Many of the second group had acquired patents of nobility by education and advancement through the Table of Ranks, and these new arrivals did not share the values of the established landed nobility. In response to pressure from the hereditary landed nobility to restrict entry to the class, Nicholas’s reform commission proposed to create new status designations to reward persons who advanced through merit to high government office. But Nicholas, no doubt rightly, feared that such a change would impede the government’s efforts to recruit capable men for government service; he did not agree to end ennoblement through the Table of Ranks but only to stiffen requirements for attaining personal nobility and hereditary nobility (qualification for individual nobility for life being raised from the 14th to the 9th rank, that for hereditary from the 8th to the 5th rank). The principal effect of this change was to speed up promotion through the ranks.
At the same time, Nicholas made other changes in the status of the nobles. He raised property qualifications for voting in local assemblies of the nobility, reduced the length of legal foreign residence for nobles from five years to three, pressured nobles to serve in provincial government before applying for posts at the centre, and limited their rights of buying and selling serfs. Given the division within the noble estate, these measures might be opposed or favoured by one or the other constituency. The important point is that they all violated the Charter to the Nobility granted by Catherine II in 1785 and demonstrated the ruler’s determination not to be bound by fundamental rights supposedly adhering to the nobility. The reform of the nobility prefigured the far-reaching assault on noble privilege that occurred in the following reign.
Intellectual and Cultural Life
The intellectual life of Nicholas I’s Russia developed in the shadow of the Decembrist revolt and was therefore constrained in its public expression by tough, if flexible, government censorship. Many accounts of this era, especially those by Western visitors and critics such as the Marquis de Custine, describe Nicholas’s Russia as a night-time of repression. It needs to be kept in mind that most educated Russians, including the brilliant and much-admired Alexander Pushkin, agreed on the necessity of censorship, however much they may have chafed at its limits. It is also important to recall that this was a period of extraordinary cultural creativity, the golden age of Russian letters. Not only was it the era of Pushkin, perhaps the greatest poet in all of Russian history (and whose government censor was, interestingly, Tsar Nicholas himself!), but it was also the time when Russian high culture broke free of its former imitation of Western arts and produced works that themselves reshaped the contours of world culture. In the novels and verse of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov appeared the ‘superfluous man’, the hero turned antihero. The work of Nikolai Gogol contained at once biting satires on the human failings of his own time and fantastical characters and plot turns that anticipated the post-modernist writings of our own age. These writers and the novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose Sportsman’s Sketches for the first time portrayed Russian serfs as fully formed human actors, paved the way from Romanticism to realism in European literature.
The usual picture of the intellectual life of this time derives from the narrative constructed by the victorious revolutionary leaders of our own century and focuses on the few oppositional figure
s whom later revolutionaries counted as their inspiration. The story begins with Peter Chaadaev, a thoughtful and conscience-stricken military officer who left the army after Alexander I’s brutal repression of the Semenovskii guards regiment. His writings criticized the idealism of the Decembrists and their futile attempt to impose foreign political institutions on Russia, but he is best known for his ringing indictment of government propagandists and the self-congratulatory stance of Official Nationality. The only one of his ‘philosophical letters’ to be published during Nicholas’s reign inveighed against the sterility and backwardness of every aspect of Russian life, beginning with the empty ritualism of the Orthodox religion and continuing on to the country’s intellectual poverty and useless veneer of Western institutions devoid of the true spirit of the Western political order. The outburst—the later revolutionary Alexander Herzen called it ‘a shot resounding through a dark night’—was so unimaginable in the highly censored press of the era that when it appeared in a prominent magazine in 1836, Nicholas pronounced its author a madman and subjected him to regular medical examinations. The unfortunate publisher suffered a worse fate—exile to Siberia. Chaadaev was aberrant, however, only in having the courage to speak out. Others were writing and saying similar things in private. Educated Russians had no wish to leave the definition of Russia’s proper purpose and destiny to government propagandists.
Russia A History Page 22